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Labyrinthine
We start young: An 11-year-old girl once thought a peck on John Eichner’s pillowy lips at her spin-the-bottle birthday party was the key to a mystery others knew about, a whispered secret and side glance.
She was me—smart, mature for my age, but 11-years-young emotionally.
But John never said a word to me afterward. He looked away as I walked past his house at the end of the street, he and his brother tossing a football, seemingly oblivious to my existence and yearning, my pounding, beaten heart of tremulous hummingbird fragility shattered. I sought boys’ attention by some mystical impulse I much later identified as hormones and societal framing.
A gate in the maze is a blockade forcing a turn-back, retreat, retracing, and restart—blind to the next turn.
The urge to know fueled many dead ends: a job at a factory hand-turning screws into the four corners of picture frames, a data entry boiler room full of college kids and computers yelling the same four questions to merchants into telephones from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., and a Montgomery Ward warehouse sales ticket verification center, where I worked the labeling machine during the 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift until the phones went live. Food service and cocktails in a smoke-filled Mexican food restaurant bar felt like a promotion.
I collected paychecks that paid for schoolbooks, gas, insurance, food, and rent, while I collected college degrees and one-night stands. I fell in love with gay men and bad boys reeking of leather jackets, Camel cigarettes, and yellowed poetry pages. I recreated. My roommates and I, the girls in apartment 3G, drank, smoked, and hallucinated, skinny-dipping in the complex pool at 2 a.m.
Throughout the whirlwind, I sought enlightenment, read books, craved a higher plane and found it in nature from the top of a mountain or gazing up at a black sky peppered with glimmering lights and constellations, prone on the grass atop a sleeping bag, holding my breath.
Buddhism, Evangelical Christianity, Judaism, Confucius, Islam, Transcendental meditation, Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Carlos Castaneda found me.
Then, grad school—twice—law school, and kids.
Life spun. It was speed and light.
The Season
The longest day of light was fast approaching. The summer solstice reminds me that the earth is round, seasons expand and contract light, and the calendar year is peaking; the climb to the descent—year’s end—mere months away, in experiential time, anyhow.
It was also International Yoga Day, a salute to the sun and the centuries long science of cultivating tools to uncover the secret of the universe: how to be true, honest, and authentic.
Measured in a human lifetime, the longest days of light not only mark the physical season, but also the metaphoric life season. The light-filled day, the longest, is the one at or near the end, when realization hits—who you are, what your life has meant, and what it means to have lived a life. Before that, you are a becoming, a springtime of new beginnings anticipating autumn.
A more accurate symbol of journeying toward the light—true knowledge of the self—is the labyrinth.
Fire and Light
Where was the light?
At home, in my daughters’ almond eyes, the sweet, milky-sweet smell of their newborn skulls’ pulsing, the parting lick of my beloved Aussie’s gratitude before eternal sleep, and my father’s last “I love you” lit me up.
But only flickers. Where was the blaze of the blinding beam that would light the way out of the maze?
The fire grew from embers. Motherhood taught me ambition could be local, central—not somewhere out there—in the daily doings of nurturing and chores. Yes, mind-numbing, but an endurance test of dedication and marathon care.
I learned to muster up courage to untangle the web of impossible physics, like how to be in two places at once at either end of the country, teach patience when I was out of it, and model what I wanted to see in my children, an exposure that never ends, like living in a spotlight that never dims let alone dies out.
Burnishing
Then, a conflagration burnt most everything down.
My mother’s diagnosis, a crumbling law career, one wrong decision at a time, the Great Recession, an arrest, a newspaper headline: Fugitive Lawyer…Indictment… and the glee of a prosecutor high on a promised judgeship eclipsed the sun. Then, the sound of a mirror shattering, the jangle of keys and boot thuds, and the thunderous clang of the opening, then closing, of a jail cell door.
In jail, terror is control. A middle aged woman gets dragged from the “tank,” a jail cell to 40 cots, with her arm wrenched behind her back. She returns the next morning in a sling. An older bunk mate’s cries punctuating her sleep, moaning about who will feed her dogs, and another woman’s fear her dog who lived with her in her car would be incinerated in a shelter are the terror of losing love, sacred joy.
Another woman, middle class suburban housewife like me, her husband did not post bail because he thought she should dry out in jail.
This was a holding cell for people who had not been tried yet for crimes of theft, fraud, alcohol, and drugs, mostly, all the poor and addicted. The aim was to dehumanize us, make us pay for crimes before we were proven guilty: shouting hate between grimaces of disdain as we lined up in our state-issued, sack-cloth pajamas shed for body searches.
Survival was reading, closing my eyes whenever possible, meditating, avoiding the angry key-holders, listening to my fellow inmates’ stories—and yoga.
I lamented the lost “house” I built over decades, the presumed end-goal of the labyrinth: career, family, “friends,” and community.
The door eventually opened again at 3 a.m. I walked out into the empty night, waiting for a ride home.
“Home” again, directionless, peering up, searching for the final gate and seeing only a beheaded future, I was lost in a mental-emotional-spiritual catacomb of fear and shame.
My hair was gray, frazzled from hard chlorinated shower water, my skin sallow, and I was a shadow of my former self—15 pounds lighter, frail, hollow, demoralized, and unemployed.
Getting up and performing daily tasks was like walking through hip-high grass trudging through unfamiliar terrain. After all the climbing according to the received societal lore of what is supposed to be success—a continual seeking, mastering, and rising—I was in limbo, suspended aimlessly above the tangled masses.
The Return of Yoga
Sometimes doing comes before knowing.
When I was young, I turned to my body’s wisdom instinctively, as I burned. I ran, kicked soccer balls, jumped, danced, and hit tennis balls to exorcise the demons—heartbreak, betrayal, and deceit (self and others). My body grew older, and at 49, I returned in earnest to yoga, a practice I began as a teenager.
Before then, yoga kept returning, snaking through my life when I needed to recalibrate, quieten, and repair. The practice then and now helps me ask the right questions: Who am I? What is my purpose? Does this relationship lift me up, help me reach my higher self?
The answers come in morsels, like nourishing bites, a part of me becoming me.
Facets of Light
Light is electromagnetic radiation along a spectrum, gamma to radio; it is uniquely both particulate photon and anchorless wave, the length of which determines color. It is energy. We are energy.
In scripture, it is divine essence, exposure, and truth. It is awakening. Imprisoned in concrete behind metal bars, there is only dirty, fluorescent light hiding the grim impenetrable walls of institution gray. Inmates awaken to clanking pots and pans and screaming deputies.
Not all light arrives by epiphany, but sometimes it does, facing a wall, resistance, and then shifting the source of light in unexpected ways. I saw my enemies, career cops who would harm me if they could in this jungle enclosure, and felt fury, revenge, and then compassion once I closed my eyes tightly and located the light within: I would leave here; this was their job.
I left broken but with the promise of healing.
Light is a soul transformation, learning what is right and wrong, not from lore, recycled wisdom, or sacred words, but from the wisdom culled from one’s own body-mind. It can be as simple as breaking a destructive habit: foregoing the spicy foods you love because they don’t love your digestive and nervous systems.
I remember, in the middle of the night or early morning (time was lost and irrelevant in jail), I rose and fell in sun salutations with my eyes closed. Once or twice, I could sense another body near, following my movements—she, sensing the body’s unfolding mystery, touched something sacred—and then moving on into the darkness.
Self-care starts with seeing the light, knowing what you owe yourself and that you are both worthy of incurring the debt and repaying it with interest. The light also starts out dim but grows steadily, until strong enough to resist the winds and tides of change—the gates, turn-arounds, and reversals.
Sometimes a path forward is a reversal and 30-year return. My first job on the outside was at my cousin’s frozen yogurt store. It took four years to find my footing.
Life often seems confusing, a muddled morass of hidden tunnels that branch at crossroads, one leading up, one down, one straight ahead, and all continuing an unknown distance. It can feel tenuous, even dark.
Through the night, atop the barbed wire roof, and in my routinized days, I did yoga.
Yoga can feel like light; it slowly transforms the body most noticeably with daily practice. It strengthens, defines, and lengthens the muscles through sequenced postures fluidly danced to synchronized breath. It stills the mind in pockets of time concentrating on moving the body along all its spinal axes.
In its spell, you notice the minute, the breath barely breathing, and the fearless plunge in and out of gravity’s hold. It’s a study and life expression in motion; it is luminescence, guiding you through and to the light.
The Ancient Roots
The Yoga Sutras teaches us to witness how we move on the mat and in the world, a perspective shift that guides us to a radiant inner light (Purusha), the one connected to an immortal consciousness—the energy that permeates everything. It takes separating us from what we see to that we see: the Seer distinct from the Seen.
I saw my labels—mother, daughter, lawyer, teacher, wife—what others saw, not the true voice that narrates the distance, what I observe as the performing-a-role me and who I am to only me and my higher self, the one that is light.
Through our practice, we learn to pull in everything from the five-pointed star we are: breath, body, personhood, and mind, wrapped in anima—life-force. We learn to let go, give up control, for a moment or longer, and die; we practice death, knowing we are energy, which, under the First Law of Thermodynamics, never begins or ends.
The death we practice is the cessation of desires and aversions to the Seen—the maze of seeking, wanting, and craving, the labyrinth of hatred, repulsion, and avoidance. In the final chapter, Kaivalya Pada, we are pure light.
At the center of every labyrinth is not an exit. It is a still point. I found mine on a concrete floor, eyes closed, breathing.
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