The Comedown
April 2024
“I am not the doer, the singer of the song. It is being sung through me, that voice and wisdom is what transforms. Me and the Beloved merge when her song enters me.” Parvathy Baul Mā
Mā first appeared in my life sometime in 2022, when I started seeing people share about her almost otherworldly music. With one hand she would strum this strange little instrument, spinning all the while, creating a tornado with her cascading locs. Chiming bells as she stomped her feet, carrying tricky rhythms with every part of her body. Her voice though, is what stopped me in my tracks. When Mā begins to sing, you can feel the divine presence enter the room. It is almost haunting, to witness a channel so clear and uninhibited.
That October I was incredibly fortunate to spend about a week with her, following her from retreat to retreat. To say I was changed in those days is an understatement- her presence literally snapped me out of my agony. To sit near a master, I remembered why, what is possible, and that devotion can be an utterly transformative device if I allow it to be. I had a similar experience meeting Ram Dass at the end of his life, where his presence alone was the transmission, the words a cherry on top.
I’m now on the comedown from another short retreat with Mā, hosted in a tiny home temple tucked in a devotee’s backyard in Neptune, New Jersey. Alongside some dear friends and new faces, we gather to imbibe love. When she arrived we greeted her singing the Maha Mantra, Shivanesh offering her fire at the threshold. We welcome her as the divine entering the space, and you can feel that shakti, making an ordinary place extraordinary.
Mā has this way about her that for me has flipped all the old ideas about what a “holy person” is right on it’s head- nothing like an intense man seated rigidly upright in lotus position, telling disciples to turn away from the world. She is juicy, vibrant, playful, and alive! She laughs when we make a mess of the mantra, she isn’t afraid to playfully scold the ones of us who forgot the songs of her last visit, and holds each and every one of us in love. As my friend Vasudeva said, “she is the most equal person I have ever met.”
On this retreat I had a few moments that felt like real breakthroughs for me, things said that felt like the very first time, and guidance that has struck me at a time when I am ready to take hold of it. These things are my own, for now mine to contemplate and put into action in my life. Perhaps I’ll share in the future, but for now they will sit within me silently.
But what I will share, is that retreat, like all things, is temporary. Eventually we have to go back to our lives, the responsibilities call and I have to clean the dog poop in the back yard. I remember in 2022 I basically faceplanted as soon as I got home, bitch slapped by all of my judgements and things I felt were problems and all my dissatisfaction. It was startling, to say the least. On the comedown now, I’m reflecting on how we can learn to sustain the openings. Where the lines between retreat and normal life might start to thin, and we can come and go from these experiences full, and with less tumult.
There is no coincidence in the impact my SRY practice has had on my ability to sustain the bliss. If you’ve practiced with me, maybe you’ve experienced this, where when you first begin you get these wonderful openings and decompression, you leave the room feeling fabulous, and at some point later in the day you’re exhausted or picking a fight with your beloved. What has opened, will naturally go back to being closed. That is, unless we are so regularly opening, that our body can learn to sustain it. Daily practice is what over time enables us to live from that place of openness, and reach into the deepest layers of our being- our karma, subconscious, and that divine within.
If we do something once, or every blue moon, it can be a novelty or fun in the moment, but it doesn’t really have any traction to change us. Imagine if we only brushed our teeth once a month! I have witnessed myself in relationships try to hint at some honesty and vulnerability, only to self implode and backpedal. We practice so that we can sustain the gifts that yoga gives us, so that we can sit with a master and fully receive the gift they are giving to us. A gift that becomes part of you, that is alive within you in the choices you make, the things you do, the things you choose not to do.
These days I have been hearing in my head, like a mantra, a teaching from the Bhagavad Gita, to “do what is mine to do.” Some days I see responsibilities pile and without thinking, this sense of dread sets in, how am I going to manage all this, I don’t actually feel like doing that. Before I know it I’m trudging through weeks and months of my life, entrenched in a seriousness that can be infectious. I don’t know who decided having an opinion about everything made you smart, because I’m finding the more opinions I have about things, the more I suffer. The lamentation of how I feel about something multiplies the discomfort of just doing it. Miraculously, most of the time it’s a lighter load than I imagined.
The openness I’m getting at here isn’t one of hiding away, sequestering yourself in a mountaintop or an ashram. It is for us householding people who have responsibilities to come home to, and things that we’re here in this life to participate in. I notice my judgement and opinion making is always connecting to a feeling of tension, rigidity, and feeling closed off. When I constrict my heart, I can only relate to the world through my limited means of perception, so I try to make sense of it in who’s right and who’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad, what is desirable and what is undesirable. But real love, real openness, is beyond that binary perception. It is the joining force, where we gain a vision that acknowledges and celebrates variety, and knows that they are all related, whole.
What I do with my body equally impacts my mind, the state of my mind flavors my actions, and my actions create my life. So to again and again lovingly let my body open, release, decompress, directly correlates to everything else I do. It makes me available for the life I want, and able to drink fully from the blessings sent my way. The whole of me is thankful to Mā and the undivided presence and love she gave so freely to all of us. I hold in my heart immense gratitude for my teacher Kaya, who has been showing me over these last 5 years how to open, and how to sustain. I am reminded that spiritual life can be the juice of our life, sweetening karmas so we can give them our all. Time with Mā and teachers like her is like rasāyana, live giving and beautifying medicine.