Sometime last summer, I had an experience that led me to believe it is possible to live free of one’s ego. That summer, I’d been trying to study meditation (failing), doing some yoga, listening to the likes of Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer. I – my ego – was aching to clear my mind. To experience even thirty seconds of a mind free of chaos and clutter, free of voices and warnings and worries, shoulds and regrets. I began taking a yoga class with a woman named Sudha at the local YMCA where I had a gym membership. One night, after I’d spent the day feeling wholly unsatisfied with nearly everything in my life – after I’d spent months running the gamut talking to astrologers and psychics, therapists and chiropractors – and some small part of me was testing out “giving up” (whatever that meant – surrender, perhaps), I sat in Sudha’s class. It was my first. Her asanas were held way too long for my liking – at one point, I even stared at her angrily and in disbelief. (“C’mon,” I thought, “This is the hillsboro YMCA. Give me a break.”) After yoga, we had savasana, and Sudha directed us through it, telling us to relax our bodies, our minds, to clear our heads and then she said, simply, slowly, and matter-of-factly, “Don’t feel guilt about the past. Don’t worry about the future. Just be in this moment. This moment is a gift. This moment is all we got.” And with that, while I’d heard variations of it a hundred times before, something shifted. My heart sped and I stopped listening. It made sense. This was logical. This wasn’t some woo-woo concept I had to try to wrap my stubborn mind around. What had I been thinking all along? I really only did have this moment. Not the one before. Not the one after.
Whether or not Sudha’s words led me to it, I don’t know for sure, but within the next few weeks, I had a quick and clear break – totally unexpectedly and one-hundred percent spontaneously – from my mind (what I had begun to regularly equate with my ego). I had been sitting on the same couch where I worked in front of a large window that looked out onto an acre of land – trees, a stream, a fence, deer – and suddenly it were as if the two straps of a slip came off from around my shoulders and the garment dropped to the floor.
Later that week, at dinner with a friend, she said, “You look different.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, wondering if somehow I looked serene – if maybe I’d taken on that look of a someone living a bit outside the demands of the immediate world. (I’d been hoping.)
But my friend couldn’t really describe it. I told her about my experience.
“Everything just got quiet,” I explained. “Totally still.”
She knew I’d had some recent drama in my life and that I’d suspected I kept the drama in place to avoid just what I’d been trying hard to achieve – that stillness. I was able to see, in retrospect, that I went about finding that stillness as if it were a goal – something to be worked toward.
“Oh,” said my friend. “How did that feel?”
“I dunno. I guess like … nothing.”
“Ooph. I’d hate that,” she reported, shaking her head (guilty herself of maintaining unnecessary drama in her life) – as if turning away any possibility of it – “No. I definitely wouldn’t like that.”
The rest of that summer, I went back to Sudha’s class and listened to her words. I tried other classes, and I began studying Reiki. I did Japa meditations and watched and waited, but the experience never returned. Later that fall, I became pregnant with my first child. My pregnancy is a work in progress. I’d say it’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing that stillness. And all the while the shoulds and worries and chaos continue to clutter my mind; it’s a strange paradox – at once a raging ego flaring up, acting as though it can control any of this. This other part of me – a part I’m only just discovering – slowly surrendering, quietly amused by my “other half.”
I’d read once the answer to a question someone had asked online. “What does the fetus do in there? Dream? Think about stuff?” And the answer – from whatever source, I can’t recall – “The fetus is just being.”
This is a blog-entry style story of my encounters with the mysteries of pregnancy and my journey toward motherhood …
