My One Precious Life, I Would Do Something Of Value With It

It is 3 a.m. on a cold October morning in Lenox, Massachusetts. We are tumbling out of our dorm rooms onto the wide grassy hill below the main building. It is too dark to see clearly and it is cold for me even though my blood is warm and my belly taut and round.

I am holding her like a ball inside me and she has been through every pose and every practice this last month and in a few hours she will be graduating with me. Her first training.

Together this last month we have been very vegan. Seven days in I found egg and watercress sandwiches in a town twenty minutes away and by the end of the month I have graduated to a juicy beef burger.

She is not a vegetarian.

I am physically strong and my body has worked every day, singing, dancing, moving, stretching. I have breathed and chanted and sat in silence. At night I am spent and my dreams are sad and haunting filled with displaced bodies, people trying to find their way home.

I also feel a bit nervous. I think it is excitement and trepidation and the fear of responsibility. I have flown here across the Canadian border on a small plane two weeks after buildings fell and the world changed. I am also seven months pregnant and to be fair I may have said six.

I am here honouring a promise I made in Bali several months before. I would do something worthwhile with my life.

My one precious life, I would do something of value with it.

This is the first place, here at Kripalu that I discover Mary Oliver and learn about ‘the soft animal of my body’. It is the first time I consider what repentance means and if I have been walking through my life on my hands and knees.

There is a woman here who has lost her whole family. Another recovering from breast cancer. Each one here to make something from their life. From their suffering. I feel in awe of their bravery.

For my part I feel mostly silly honouring a silent vow on the floor of a basement temple in Denpasar. Dragging my little one here inside me to sleep in a bunk bed in a crowded room of strangers, to leave behind my other little babies and their dad who is still recovering from the weeks and weeks that I have been away sitting by a hospital bed on the other side of the world.

On this night we cuddle close to one another, Mexican blankets spread across the earth. Over time we have forgotten each other’s names but their is a whole heartedness to our gathering close.

I put my hands on my belly as the sky fills over and over again to watch the tails of light, the returning celebration of an ancient star gently kissing our atmosphere. It is so beautiful that we cry softly together, taking in this much can make you feel like you can’t hold space for anything else. It burns you from the inside.

The sky is mossy green and dark and alive in a way that makes me feel small and also wonderful and whole. I am in the right place for the journey ahead.

The next morning, after I have walked the sacred line and honoured my teachers, they gather us all. Sixty happy calm beings place hands on my belly, my head, my arms, on each other. They make the sound of OM and over and over again they bless my beautiful baby.

In a last and parting message I am reminded that this is not it. Go and find someone to study with, someone you can learn from, someone who will keep you growing.

And I do.

Gratitude

Tarika Diane Damelio and Ron Naresh were the teachers who led our yoga teacher training at Kripalu in the fall of 2001. Sixty of us turned up right after the world witnessed the 9/11 tragedies to be together. We all came not knowing what life would look like or how things might get worse. It was Tarika who suggested that our search for teachers did not end with our training, embedding a sweet piece of wisdom that there is no end to what we can learn when we listen.