Healing Abuse...Amen

sometimes the wounds run so deep, so deep
it is hard to see how some of us have a fair chance at life

when i teach on tantra and sexuality, so much time i spend crying with students about abuse, molestation, sexual violence. the longer i practice and teach tantra, the better i have gotten in just sharing the moment instead of trying to have an answer. i sit in the opened wound with this student, this friend, this fellow human finding a way to move through the glory and pain of life. we are all fumbling for grace. for forgiveness, for love. oh god we crawl on our knees in a pilgrimage towards grace and love.

and sometimes, like in one of these tantra workshops, some word sets off the memories, a story is shared in the safe container of the group. the ground beneath opens and swallows us up. and in this place of feeling, the past and future disappear and we are just in feeling. in this naked moment.

i do not have the answers. i could blow some spiritual sunshine up their ass, about non-attachment and such. but i choose silence and sharing. i choose to look in the eyes of the one telling the story and to see myself reflected. i choose to breath a little deeper to stay, to train myself to stay and not run away.

because this pain is also my pain. i also come from a history of sexual abuse. i can relate, i can be triggered into my own wounds and pain. i have myself wrestled with the unfairness of life and questioned any reason to go on living in a world with so much unfairness.

somehow, the yoga helped heal me, to make me feel that life was good.

brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and lovers, i feel you deeply. this is all of our story. the love, the longing. the pleasure the pain. there is no way out but to learn to accept and love what is. this human life is full of messy human interactions. there's no self-help book, no perfect meditation that can make you immune to that.

In tantra, we worship God as Mother. Mother is the giver of life. From the body we have all been born, even Jesus came out of his mothers body. So this tantra is an accepting of God as Life, as it is here and now. Not God in heaven only. God as Life here and now. And she is a bitch sometimes. Sometimes it feels like the laughing mother is playing with our lives. Or it feels there is no God to intervene on our behalf, to intervene to stop suffering and violence.

And still this Life comes with another breath. I breath in. I breath out.

I cry for you brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and lovers, as I cry for myself. I also laugh, eat and make love. I do yoga and tantra and pray and pray. I pray for the Universal soul as I pray for my own soul.

I may not deserve some of the pain i was given and I may not deserve some of the stupefying beauty that i have experienced, but I am here anyways.

I had someone tell me that the sexual abuse was my lesson to become as powerful as I am. Perhaps. But I have grown tired of needing reasons, of making meaning. It simply happened, it simply is. And I wake up every morning, and i make a life for myself everyday, cobbling it together out of scraps of velvet, silk and leather. When I stand back I see beauty.

amen