Be Here Now

It’s been two months since my last post–in the time since then, I’ve gotten married, and my reasoning about letting the blog languish was the phrase “I’ll get back to it after the wedding,” and it then it became “after the honeymoon” and then I realized I just  wasn’t writing and there was no helpful phrase to rationalize it. My old friend perfectionism had clamped its jaws down on me and I couldn’t write because “it had to be really good.” Then I was very grateful to myself of 4 months ago, who had the foresight to predict this would happen, and so named the blog “Practice” to release me from that particular prison.

Perfectionism takes us out of process–and this is a problem for me because life is a process, and when we set artificial goals of perfection, and deny the reality of process, much hysteria and bewilderment ensues when life continues to remain flawed. Case in point: my wedding.

My wedding, actually, from my perspective was perfect. It was so perfect, in fact, that I started to feel panicky as it was going on, because I could feel that in a few hours it would be over. Already I was resisting the reality of process. As we sat down to dinner, I reached for my wine glass and said dramatically, “I need to start drinking really fast!” (My reasoning was, if I was tipsy, I would be immune to these feelings of sadness, or feelings of being overwhelmed at how deeply I was feeling my life at that moment.) But my sister, sitting next to me, put her hand on my glass and said with equal intensity, “No. You need to be here now.”  It’s not like my sister and I are always speaking to each other like enlightened sages. We started laughing actually at the way she had said “Be Here Now” with such preposterous drama . But her point was made (this is the nice thing about sisters: we rarely have to explain to each other what we mean, shorthand almost always suffices). “Look at the flowers” she said, pointing to the blue hydrangeas and wine-colored roses on the table. Though much of my wedding is a blur in my memory (that’s why you should always get a wedding video) this exchange is vivid in my mind: the colors of the flowers on the table,the crisp white of the tablecloth, the glow of candles, the pink of my sister’s dress, and my awareness of my new husband on my right, chatting with his brother. I’m so grateful to Beth that I have one very clear memory of being present at my wedding.

Wonderful things can happen when we engage in process–such as being in the present moment. But sometimes, for whatever reason (usually pain or fear of pain) we resist process and want to go straight to perfection. In my last post, I wrote about transformative fire. In no way did I exaggerate AT ALL the pain of transformative fire! I think I was just unsure how long transformative fire lasts. In my imagination, Randy and I passed through a ring of fire on our wedding day that changed us forever. And of course, the change took place in the 20 minutes of our wedding ceremony. After that, we would feel no pain–already transformed! But as my friend Fred pointed out, people who are actually in the pain of transformative fire, don’t usually write about it so lucidly.

Transformation, my transformation from one stage of life to the next, is taking a lot longer than 20 minutes. Maybe this is why I haven’t written in two months–the lucidity thing. My experience in getting married is that it required something of my old attachments to identity and to fantasy to die–and this process is not so rapid in my case and not so pleasant.

Bo Forbes, in his article “The Awakening” in the Sept. issue of Yoga Journal discusses different situations that can cause a spiritual awakening and the five “kieshas” or afflictions that can attend awakening. The fourth kiesha, “Abhinivesha” is the fear of death and clinging to life, which stalls an awakening or transformation. Abhinivesha is my particular bugaboo at the moment–I find myself longing for the past. I’ve always been compulsively nostalgic, but now I want to stop the video of my life at the moment of my wedding, and then rewind it and live it all over again up to that point. I am clinging, and it feels good to cling, the way it sometimes feels good to pick at scabs or bite your nails or other little habits that are actually not helpful.

I can remember my past, and cherish it, but I can’t lug around my old identity anymore. Process means that we keep the video of our lives running, cast off abhinivesha, and move towards rebirth. Acoording to yogic philosophy, this awakening happens over and over again in our life time as we continually are given the chance to engage in process and uncurl our fingers from the tight grip on the feelings, identities, pleasures, or even pain, that we want to take with us.

Who will I be, now that I’m Alison Rogers Napoleon? The question still causes ripples of real fear through my being. Fortunately, I have a friend here in the dark: my husband. Being present, living in the process, means that I will have a living marriage—an imperfect, but authentic partnership that will change me. Here goes.

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