Chapter Four: The Vibrating Island

November–December 2012
Kerala, India
(Photo: Soma Kerala Palace Website)

Sure, I had traveled a lot before but never in search of answers to questions that I could not yet articulate. It was mid-November 2012, six months after my father’s death and six months before I filed for divorce. I had quit working at the Lance Armstrong Foundation about two months earlier and was still detoxing from the Blackberry addiction it had created. My human self was a hot mess. Sar’h was beside herself with excitement. Together we were on the verge of something so grand, my human self could not have imagined it.
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Before my journey to India, I realized I was not in connection with my soul the way I had been as a child. It was going to take years to get back. I needed to relearn Mortimer and Merlyn’s universal picture language and Sar’h’s way of communicating in energetic sensations. All those years in university classrooms, newsrooms, capitol buildings, and office cubicles beat my soul’s voice to a pulp. Human thoughts and emotions are like muscles, gaining strength the more you use them. After the last fifteen years, it was near impossible to silence the beasts. As a child, it had been as simple as turning a light switch off and on.

Despite my efforts, I couldn’t remember shit about communicating in images and sensations. The amnesia created by human thoughts and emotions created a situation in which my soul experiences felt like a thousand-piece puzzle I must put back together. It certainly wouldn’t be boring, I reasoned. Besides, there was no going back. If I tried to stay in the singular human experience, I would die like a houseplant no one watered. My human self panicked and tried to understand what was occurring. Yet the more it tried to comprehend through limited human thoughts and emotions, the more internal knots it created.

The only thing to do was relax—to allow—but true relaxation is not the human forte. The human brain wants goals, plans, security, answers, and rigid categories to keep messy things like emotions organized. Experiences of the soul? Forget it. Total brain malfunction. The soul, the master senses, the I EXIST—all of it is beyond comprehension of a human brain’s local linear thought patterns.

On a human level, the most pressing matter I had to decide was if I was going to stay in my marriage or not. The thing is, I knew deep down, at the soul level, that I was going to leave. Yet my human thoughts—the kind that skip like broken records and keep you awake at night—and my husband’s incessant yelling and crying were so loud, it was near impossible to hear the inner voice. At the time, all I knew was that I had to get out of my current hurricane of a situation to be able to view it from an expanded perspective.

Then the opportunity arose. A friend of mine and another yoga teacher were hosting yoga teacher training on a tiny island in the Vembanad backwaters of Kerala, India. Please note that the irony of two white American women hosting yoga teacher training—in India of all places—was not lost on me. However, it was, at the time, a husband-approved and socially acceptable way for me to find peace for a month, get sober, and hopefully dig some more clues out of my soul and reconnect to the experiences of expanded awareness I had had as a child and a teenager.

The Rumi poem about the lost camel came to mind: “You have lost your camel, my friend. And all around you people are full of advice. You don’t know where your camel is. But you do know that these casual directions are wrong.” I was off to look for my camel, and somehow I knew the compass was inside me and that these people who showed up in the chaos to point me in the so-called right direction seemed more lost than me.

Yoga had come barreling into my life in 2006. I was a total stress ball, attending graduate school and teaching indoor-cycling and weight lifting classes at 24 Hour Fitness on the side. I was completely and totally body obsessed. I tallied how many calories I expended and ingested the way an OCD person washes his or her hands and checks to make sure a door is locked. Injured and overexercised, I found myself in the yoga studio by my home. The instructor talked me into pigeon pose, which was no fun for me at the time. Yet something strange happened as I eased my body forward into the deep hip-opening stretch. I began to cry, not from pain but from an almost orgasmic emotional release. It was if I had stored a giant emotional knot in there decades, if not lifetimes, ago, and I finally let whatever it was go. After the experience, I was hooked, reading everything I could get my hands on and practicing as much as possible.

***

“Welcome aboard Emirates flight 1304 Dallas to Dubai. The estimated flight time is fifteen hours and twenty-five minutes,” the captain said. His voice boomed from the overhead speaker as he read the flight message in English, Arabic, and something I did not recognize.

“Hi, I’m Mark,” said the man in the window seat. “This is Bill, my father-in-law.”

He gestured to the man who sat between us.

“I’m Lauren. Where are you headed?” I asked to be polite. He clearly wanted to tell me.

“To Mumbai for a mission trip,” Mark said.

“Good luck with that,” I thought.

“We’re all from Oklahoma City,” he said.

Bill gestured to five men who sat in the middle section one row up and named their mutual church. I couldn’t tell if it was Baptist or Church of Christ, but I didn’t care enough to ask.

“Where are you going?” Mark asked.

“To an island in Kerala to practice yoga for a month.”

“By yourself?”

“Well, I’m meeting some friends there, but yes.”

Then it occurred to me that their group included no women. They must have stayed home to tend to the children back in Oklahoma, where morality was safe.

When the plane leveled in the air, the attendant made her rounds. Her crimson pillbox hat and tailored suit were a far cry from the sweatshop uniforms American attendants wear. She was young, beautiful, and appeared to be from the entire continent of Asia.

“Ma’am, what would you like to drink?”

“Two Bloody Marys, please.”

I needed one for each Ambien. I wanted the wheels of the plane hitting Dubai concrete to wake me up. I certainly did not want to spend fifteen hours brooding over the mess I had left in Austin, Texas.

“Also, please don’t wake me up for food. I just ate a huge meal and will be fine.”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

The two men looked at me in horror as I opened the tiny vodka bottles and dumped the entire contents into the bland tomato juice. I downed them back-to-back for the sake of show. I was snoring and drooling in about twenty minutes and only remembered waking up to go to the bathroom once. When I got off the plane, Mark and Bill confessed that they hadn’t slept at all. I felt like a spring daisy. God would have wanted it that way.

After passing through several security lines, I wound through a labyrinth lined with women covered head to toe in fabric, who tended to children and pushed carts stacked high with all their worldly belongings. They walked behind their husbands, whose hands remained free. I located food and wine and watched movies on my computer to pass the time between flights. An hour before takeoff, I parked my backpack and single rolling suitcase at the gate, keeping my eye out for the friends who would accompany me on the next leg of the journey.

It wasn’t hard to spot my friend Liz, the lead yoga instructor at the one-month training. Her wild, curly hair seemed bigger than normal, and I wondered how the good people of Dubai felt about a braless woman in a tank top with unshaven armpits. She introduced her boyfriend, the one she had left her husband for, whom I had heard a lot about but had never actually met. Robby looked like a juggler without clubs. His floppy hat and pirate smile were friendly, and his harem pants completed the look. They both gave me hugs, and I felt myself exhale for the first time in what seemed like months. It wasn’t so much their company that relaxed me as much as the reality of finding peace for one month setting in. I was a long way from home and the life I’d been living, one of Neiman Marcus suits, Prada heels, and lobby strategy meetings. Somehow, the funny Polaroid picture the three of us would have made told me I was going in the right direction. I had found a pause between the sets of breaking waves. I had time to breathe.

The four-hour connecting flight from Dubai to Port Cochin was uneventful until we landed, when the passengers emptied the plane in order of who could shove harder. I put my elbows up and shoved. Never fuck with a Texan woman. It was surprisingly easy to get through customs and retrieve our luggage, which wasn’t much for a thirty-day stay. You don’t need much for practicing yoga in triple-digit temperatures; and with no audience for hair, makeup, and high heels, I was down a suitcase.

An older Indian man with a sign that read Soma Kerala Palace waited as we walked outside. A damp heat slapped us hard on both cheeks, and it felt good to me compared to Austin’s November chill. This man was not the cabdriver. His role was simply to point at the car we should get in, while the driver, who appeared to be no older than fourteen or fifteen, strapped our luggage to the top.

The teenager drove us through the empty streets of the dark city, veering from lane to lane wildly. Hello, India! Liz sat in the front seat, hand over her stomach, attempting not to get carsick, while Robby told me about his sun sign, Capricorn. I rolled down the window, allowing the thick, humid breeze in. I sensed the energetic feel of the country. It was the first Eastern country I had been to, yet it felt unexpectedly familiar.

A memory surfaced like the one I’d experienced holding the book of King Arthur and Merlyn in my thirteen-year-old hands. I saw a figure I knew was my dad. I was a small child, and he was telling me stories about studying in India. He described the long journey he took to get there from his home miles and miles away. I realized it was Sar’h’s memory of another lifetime, not Lauren’s. Or were they one and the same? Past lives were beginning to run simultaneously, one leaking into the other. It made sense at the soul level. If time were not linear, how else would they run but concurrently? It confused my human self beyond its limits of comprehension, creating another emotional knot inside of me.

About an hour later, we came to a tall iron gate, and two guards opened each side enough to allow the tiny car to pull through. The gate shut immediately with a thud that felt like the nail on the coffin of my self-induced, month-long sobriety. The dark curtain of the night began to lift, but the sun was not yet visible. We climbed aboard a small boat, and yet another Indian man loaded our luggage. A thatched roof covered one side of the boat, which was made of wood and featured a basic motor slapped on the back. Another Indian man drove the boat, and yet another guided at the front with a flashlight. He used a long spear to move the copious lily pads covering the surface out of the way, and I noticed he was careful not to damage them.

As we approached the island, the hum of the tiny engine combined with the chorus of what must have been thousands and thousands of birds. Daylight approached, and I stood awestruck as the thick, tangled, flower-blooming lily pads coating the lake moved in unison with the current. The sun broke with the coconut tree line into the curried sky. If I had not known it was the same sun, I would have sworn it was different. I looked at Liz and Robby to confirm that I was there and that this was not a dream. I could see them memorizing the colors and lines of the horizon like me, perhaps to tuck the image away for future gray days.

The entire staff of Soma Kerala Palace, which at one time had served as a hospital and now served as a refuge for the overworked and untreatable by Western medicine, seemed to be waiting on our arrival. Gold, merengue, and saffron flower petals covered the grand entrance where we stepped off the boat. I reached for my luggage, but a young Indian man beat me to it. Another man who looked to be about forty years old introduced himself as Babu, and you could tell he was in charge because he was the only one in Western clothing. His lilac button-down shirt was tucked into heavily starched eggplant slacks, belt drawn tightly around his thick middle. The women wore saris in various jewel tones, and the men wore loose, white linen pants and kurtas made of the same material on top.

Babu rattled over the basics, and his head bobbled when we asked questions. I was unable to tell if the head bobble meant yes or no, and later I would learn it meant both or neither and that a question was just a way to declare what you wanted and they would try to make it happen, God willing. It was the Indian version of the Arab world’s inshallah and was just as reliable.

A skinny, attractive young man named Salu struggled with my luggage as he led the way to my room. On the way, we passed a hissing fountain with three blooming white lotus flowers. It was the first time I had seen them in person, and I noticed they appeared to be growing from a pond of muck, which smelled strongly of shit. The combination of the birds, insects, and chanting from a neighboring village made the island feel as if it were vibrating under my feet, like the vibration kept it afloat—and if it were to stop the whole island, perhaps the whole country of India would sink into oblivion, maybe taking the rest of the world with it.

I drug my jet-lagged, somewhat drunk, and somewhat hungover body up a spiral, narrow iron staircase. Behind me, Salu panted while dragging my forty-eight-pound suitcase, two pounds below the airline limit. There was a bed with stark white sheets, an antique armoire the same color of the rich wood floors, and a bathroom covered in tiny sea-foam-green tiles. I handed him a five-dollar bill, and he smiled so big, he showed the bottom row of his white teeth. His head bobbled furiously, and it occurred to me I’d likely just paid him a month’s salary. I witnessed a thought form through the look in his eyes, and he autocorrected to Western speak and manner. He worked to hold his head steady and said slowly, “Thank you, ma’am. Please let me know if you need anything.”

“Please call me Lauren,” I said and smiled. He seemed to loosen up a bit.

I quickly traded my travel clothes for my yoga clothes and joined the eleven people who were already deep into their morning practice just below my balcony. The yoga shala was a concrete slab with a thatched roof. Bamboo blinds hung from three sides of the rectangle and served as a playground for the many lizards that flipped and twisted up and down the rungs. I unrolled my mat and joined in the middle of the practice. I exhaled through chaturanga dandasana, inhaled into urdhva mukha svanasana (upward-facing dog), and exhaled into adho mukha svanasana (downward-facing dog), completing my first vinyasa. On the last and seventy-second vinyasa in the practice, I surrendered to where I was and made peace with what I was here to experience. I lay in savasana, the ending relaxation pose, raw and unguarded. The critical human brain flexed its well-developed muscles. I wondered if I’d be able to make the thirty days.

I didn’t have to worry much about anything. It was all laid out for me. Wake up at 5:45 a.m. and silently make my way to the yoga mat in the moonlight. Practice the ashtanga primary series, an ancient Indian asana (physical yoga practice), which takes about ninety minutes to complete. Follow it up with a thirty-minute pranayama, or breathing, practice. Finally, meditate. Make my way silently back to my room to shower, and hand-wash the yoga clothes now drenched in sweat. Dress in loose-fitting yoga clothes, braid my hair, and slide into the flip-flops resting outside my door.

Finally, at 9:00 a.m. there was breakfast—a major event. I started off with freshly squeezed mango juice and two eggs from the neighboring village. A buffet was set up with pancake-like breads, stewed okra with indescribable spices, and a freshly baked fruitcake that was nothing like the Christmas variety back home. I finished it off with a pot of coffee and hot lemon ginger water for digestion over conversation with the eleven other students who represented six different countries.

Next, the twelve of us would move back to the outdoor practice area and pull up a chair for theory. In these sessions, we voraciously memorized everything we could so we could regurgitate it in a written exam, which would be graded along with our ability to teach a yoga class at the month’s end. Yes, it felt a bit ridiculous, but it was actually lovely to give my brain something to do while my soul began to seep back into my body.

Because I had denied the soul for so long, basically operating as a human shell by walking around with no inner guidance and governed completely by external expectations and societal norms, it felt foreign as the soul began to return. It could be painful at times, creating a dull cringe-worthy ache over my entire body. My feet hurt especially. The nerve endings felt like live wires. As it was occurring, I began to witness that almost everyone denied the existence of his or her soul too. I could see their souls hovering outside their bodies on many occasions.

An Episcopalian priest named John A. Sanford said it quite well in his book The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus’ Sayings. In it, Sanford states,

"The soul today is an orphan. Her ancient parents have abandoned her; she languishes alone and forsaken in a rationalistic world that no longer believes in her. Philosophy, her father, long decided she did not exist and cast her aside. He hardly noticed that in doing so he turned himself away from the pursuit of wisdom…The church, her mother, fell unwittingly into the clutches of the extraverted, rationalistic materialism of our times and so she also abandoned the soul; she did not notice that in losing the soul she lost her ability to relate the individual to God." (118)

I’d argue that the soul is also missing from modern-day spirituality. In all my three hundred hours of yoga teacher training, two hundred in India and another one hundred in Peru a year later, I never heard the mention of soul even once. Instead, I learned why eating tamasic foods like mushrooms, onions, and meat was bad for your spirituality. Every single bit of information on the chakras was covered. Yet when living in alignment with the soul, all the chakras align into one. There is no separation. There is but one chakra—the I EXIST.

Like everyone around me, I had read all the books on mindfulness, brain-focused meditation techniques, the law of attraction, and heart-centered living, but again, the soul remained the orphan. Everyone else could sit around trying to make their limited human brain work better, to control their emotions and perfect their bodies. I, on the other hand, was headed to the orphanage to pick my soul up—bust her out of that joint. I knew better than to share that bit of information with anyone around me. I found myself back in Mrs. Banks’s third-grade classroom, angry as ever, but I would not make the mistake of oversharing again.

In the training, we learned that ashtanga translated directly from Sanskrit to mean “eight limbs,” which served as guidelines for living. Patanjali, a sage who lived sometime between 200 and 500 BCE, laid out these tenants in a text called the Yoga Sutras. The eight limbs run in order of accomplishment. They started with the yamas, which are universal practices that deal with one’s ethical standards and sense of integrity, such as nonharming and nonstealing. Basically, it’s the Ten Commandments—Patanjali style. Niyama, the second limb, covers self-discipline and spiritual observances, much like saying grace before meals or taking contemplative walks alone. I’ve never been the biggest fan of goals or disciplining the human aspect of SELF. The third limb, asana, includes the physical postures practiced in what Westerners call yoga. The fourth limb, pranayama, covers techniques designed to master breath control with the recognition of the connection between the breath, mind, and emotions. Again, no mention of soul is included anywhere.

The first four limbs cover awareness of the human part of the SELF, which I’ll admit is a great place to start. My problems lay in the rules to control the human self, rather than the simple awareness of it. I wasn’t really interested in improving my human self. The human was and is, by definition, imperfect. It ate cheeseburgers and drank too much wine. Why could we not simply let the human be human? I understood living a perfect human life was not a requirement of the self-realization process. In fact, I thought it probably wasn’t possible to perfect the human. If it were possible, it would be awfully boring.
I wanted to stand up, stamp my feet, and yell, “It’s the soul, stupid!”

And then I wondered why I had such strong thoughts about it. I realized my condemnation of those around me was really a condemnation of myself. I was mad at myself for taking so long to recognize the soul voice, the God within me. I realized that everyone around me was going through a soul evolution too, but the words were not spoken out loud. I knew I wouldn’t be ready to share or teach anything before I moved beyond the desire to condemn. My human self, what some call ego, was still playing too much of a role in everything in my life. Keeping silent was the best choice. Because I could not ask the question aloud, I asked Sar’h internally, “What is the soul, anyway?”

When I sensed into it, I received my answer—the soul is the part of us that does not change from lifetime to lifetime or in between lives. It is the wise master within our human physical form that retains information from any and all experiences from the beginning and throughout the soul’s existence. The knowledge the soul retained from all lifetimes and in between lives was available to the current human expression of SELF at any time.

“That’s how you know the language of images and sensations,” Sar’h said to me energetically. “You learned it well before coming into this life. To remember you only need to connect with that understanding.”

I flashed back to the long conversations I’d had with Mortimer in the backyard garden of my childhood home. In that moment of openness, it became overwhelmingly clear to me. It was not some external God or the Universe we were seeking, but the God living within all of us—what lay beneath our “turtle shells.” Every human, myself included, wanted to grab at something external for answers. Yet the intense craving for external answers and support from above was really a deep desire to get to know the God inside all of us—the soul—a desire to experience our inner divinity, to know that at the soul level we are God too. It’s what Yeshua, or Jesus, meant when he said that the kingdom is within; he was here to show us how to find the Christ within ourselves, not be worshipped as a guru or worse, a twisted religious icon. Later I realized Yeshua was not a souled being but instead held a consciousness—the Christ consciousness. It’s something I will explore in depth in the next book.

Because of my Catholic upbringing I understood why the notion of a God or master self living within all of us was blasphemous in religious communities—that was a given—but wondered how it had become taboo in spiritual, New Age, and yogic communities. How could one be awake without seeing, sensing, and knowing their inner divinity? Didn’t namaste mean the God in me recognizes the God in you? It seemed to me that namaste was about honoring one another at the soul level; it was the recognition of the master selves living within all of us. And if they did recognize the soul’s true creator nature, why did they continue to deny it by constantly referencing this Universe character as the creator or cocreator of their reality? It seemed to me the Universe had replaced the religious God in the modern spiritual conversation. It held the same status as a wiser, external being, which existed to guide you from outside yourself. Anytime someone said “the Universe,” I realized it could be replaced with “God,” holding the same concept. The people around me were looking from signs from the Universe (God). They prayed to the Universe (God) and yelled at the Universe (God) when their lives did not go according to their human plans.

In my realizations, I teetered on the tip of awareness that my soul, my spirit, could completely embody human form, which I sensed was a form of mastery in and of itself, before quickly falling back into the limits of my human awareness. The moments of clarity tended to quickly fade, giving way to the heavy human thoughts and emotions consuming me at the time. Like the lotus flowers in the hissing fountain, the shelf life of the bloom was short, and then I closed back up again, returning to the muck from which my human self came.

In our lessons, I was told the fifth through eighth limb dealt with attaining a higher state of consciousness, and my ears perked up. Yes, this is what called to me in this yogic experience, not all these rules governing the human, the quest for a perfect handstand, and especially not the perfect yogi diet. Instead, the teachers, who had no direct experience climbing those tree limbs, glossed over textbook definitions we were expected to memorize for the test. I was read the following.
Pratyahara, the fifth limb, is an effort to draw awareness away from the external world and direct attention internally. OK, now we’re talking. Internal, that’s where my soul voice resided. The sixth limb, dharana, is the ability to concentrate on a single point, and the seventh limb, dhyana, is meditation or being keenly aware without focus. Aware without focus—that sounds and feels a lot like consciousness, which can only be done when we move beyond the limits of the human mind and its emotions. It was getting better. Finally, samadhi, the eighth limb, is the ultimate goal. Patanjali describes this final stage of ashtanga as a state of ecstasy. At this stage, the meditator transcends the self completely and comes to realize a profound interconnectedness with all living things.

More so than interconnectedness, which I had felt so deeply as a child, in India I was sensing my sovereignty, the self-governing nature of the soul, the soul’s ability to solely create its reality without the interference of an external God or the Universe—or as the boy King Arthur learns, authority over SELF. I understood that deeply recognizing the sovereign nature of the soul was synonymous with recognizing that we are the creators of our reality, not God or the Universe character everyone around me was so intent to reference.

We spent about ten minutes tops on this, and as a greater reflection of the American yogic community, it was implied that these stages were limited to holy men who sat in caves in Nepal and mountains in Tibet. Bullshit. It was the same limits I had hit in The 21 Lessons of Merlyn book. I realized the teachers had lost their camels too, so I went inside for answers.

The whisper was faint, but it didn’t waver. It said once again that mastery over SELF was available to me in this lifetime, to hundreds—maybe even thousands—of others who were coming to the end of their human experiences as well. I wouldn’t dare say it out loud because it would be enough to have me completely kicked out of the figurative yogi village, and at the time my human still cared about appearances. Yet as the seed of my soul began to sprout through the cracks the grief had created, I knew one thing for sure—if I chose to experience it, self-realization was available to me in this lifetime. I had not made it up as a teen. I was not a faker or a pretender. It was not some crazy childhood dream. I knew that this life, if I chose it, held potentials for grandness if I could move beyond all the noise and distractions.

I thought of Mortimer and what he’d told me. Was I really here on Earth to share some sort of truths? If so, I knew there were others too. Where were they? Could I allow my human self to believe him? Was that completely insane? Sar’h’s voice was buried deep, and her language of images and sensations were still hard for me to decipher, but I found if I became really still and deeply allowed myself to open to it, the voice would come through clearly.

“Sar’h, was Mortimer right?” I asked. “Do I contain these truths?”

“Only if you have the will and the courage needed to peel back all the layers that buried them,” she replied. I didn’t know my answer. Was I willing to change my relationship with the human experience to experience the path of the soul in human form? I realized I stood at the crossroads once again. At age eight and again at age sixteen, I had chosen to drop the soul off at the orphanage, trading her for a normal human life. Would I do it again? Staying in my marriage was saying good-bye to my soul for as long as it lasted; leaving would allow her to return. It was a decision I did not take lightly.
As quickly as the conversation of clarity occurred within me, my human self shoved it back down into the depths where uncomfortable things are hidden. My human yelled, “Focus! Our security is being threatened! What are you going to do? Get a divorce? Stay married and suffer for the sake of security and propriety? How are you going to make money? Don’t you know that’s just ego talking about all this enlightenment stuff? Give me a break.” Wah-wah. Wah-wah. My brain was beginning to sound like the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

Post–theory lessons, we’d break for a dip in the pool and have lunch, which was equally as spectacular as breakfast. Then we’d try to keep our eyes open in the afternoon heat while we learned to teach each posture in the ashtanga primary series. I’ll admit it: I loved this part. Being in a human body can be a killer experience. Feeling it twist and turn into yoga postures was and is a real joy for me, and for Sar’h too. Next we’d practice teaching and adjusting postures on our fellow students and finish up just in time for meditation, which was followed by dinner, the grand food finale for the day. It often left the group clapping and cheering for the kitchen staff. Finally, we’d chant, meditate, sing kirtan, or watch a video before drifting off to sleep in our private bungalows to the vibration of the night’s nocturnal birds, including a large owl family.

Meals were not only for sharing food but also for sharing stories, and I love a good story. What Texan doesn’t? I learned early on that I was not the only one on the vibrating island in major conflict or experiencing tidal wave–level grief. One of the teachers was also painstakingly deciding whether to work on or walk out of a marriage. Another’s boyfriend had recently died from cancer in his late twenties. That woman and I shared the pain that someone can only comprehend when his or her best friend in the world has left a physical body. A young man’s lover had been married off in an arranged Muslim marriage, where she was miserable and plotting her escape. A Scandinavian actress had just lost a baby, and the father of that child had disappeared.

These stories weighed so heavily upon me that I remember waking up one morning and writing down in my journal in big, bold letters—TO SUFFER IS HUMAN—and I felt it all so intensely. Suddenly, I was back in junior high, absorbing the energies around me, but somehow it was starting to feel different. I realized if I expanded from the I EXIST, the fixed point within my body of consciousness, and made my energetic field larger in every direction, I would not absorb others’ emotions and experiences at such a rate. In this expanded state, I realized I could choose to observe rather than engage. Conversely, I realized that instead of receiving input from my environment, I could radiate from the I EXIST and affect my reality instead.

At this time, the realizations would come in quick moments of clarity, which were often followed by the muddled and muted experience of the human. I was starting to notice a pattern. As soon as I would have a soul realization, my human brain would jump in to discredit it with logic and reason almost immediately. As my human voice came in, it would twist the soul experience into a story, often strangling the soul’s truth beyond recognition. It was a confusing time, and with all this internal dialogue, I probably appeared a little bizarre to my new friends.

But it wasn’t all suffering. My new friends knew how to laugh and celebrate too. On the evening of November 27, 2012, my thirty-second birthday and the first since losing my father, I was surprised with an American-style chocolate cake that read Happy Birthday in pink icing. As the Indian kitchen crew presented it, the candles lining the tables beneath the coconut grove illuminated their bright white teeth, which formed giant goofy grins in genuine celebration of me. Their head bobbles of joy seemed to vibrate in unison with the island, and I knew they’d gone to great lengths to get this cake to our tiny, remote island.

My new friends sang happy birthday to me as Salu lit the single candle on the cake. A plastic lotus flower began to spin, opening its petals. Once it stopped, I made my wish for clarity and blew the candle out. Tears of gratitude for the overwhelming love and support poured down my face. I was happy to receive and absorb all the energies of the moment.

It was a birthday I will never forget. In so much pain and suffering there is always a silver lining, and for me, the most treasured experience in all of my human existence is that of friendship. I don’t think there is any more pure form of human love than that of a good friend.

I pulled the plastic lotus from the cake, and in true vibrating-island fashion, we all stuffed our faces so much, it took ten pots of lemon ginger tea to digest it. I went to bed that night with a full belly and a full heart. I would wake up to a husband screaming at me on Skype the next morning, but tonight, I was thirty-two, and the world was full of love and possibilities.

***

When we make major decisions in life, we often search for a voice from above, for clear direction from God, a sign from the Universe, from anywhere outside ourselves. The real answer is but a steady whisper from deep within that we can only hear if we are still enough to listen. Sometimes it takes a friend to translate or reflect back to us what we already know at the soul level but can’t see yet. For me, that friend was a tall, thin Indian man who no longer inhabited a physical body and no one else but me could see. My merlin. Mentioning him brings tears of gratitude to my eyes.

My Indian friend appeared to me in my third-eye space during mediation one steamy afternoon toward the end of the month. As I lay there in stillness, open to receive whatever he had to share, my right hand lit up. I was told to write through energetic sensations and images. It was the same picture language I had been fluent in as a child; it was coming back to me. My soul found this soothing; my human protested.

“Write what? What the fuck do you want me to write?”

“Your story. Write your story,” the Indian whispered calmly.

“Oh, sorry.”

I wouldn’t know his name until October of the following year, but I sensed his presence daily. He wasn’t there to give me answers. He wasn’t there to give me advice. He was simply there. It’s not so much that he was holding space for me; rather, he was honoring my soul’s journey. His presence was a reminder of why I was really here on Earth. It was not to be a wife, a mother, or a lobbyist—all great human experiences, but they were not what I really wanted at the soul level. Instead, they were expectations that came from outside me. That I knew. But beyond it, I could not form words. I only felt a sensation telling me more information would be revealed around the corner. What I must do became undeniably clear. To see what was around the corner, I was going to have to untangle myself from the human life I had built in its entirety, even if it meant hurting a man I loved but could no longer live with.

“Start to come back into your body,” I heard the teacher instruct at the end of the meditation. The Indian vanished, and I made my way back to my physical reality. Before I had the chance to sit up, Sar’h’s voice came in clearly. She said through images and sensations that my father’s death was the loose thread in the sweater that was my human life, and he had timed it perfectly before there was a child brought into this world. Instead of sewing it back into repair—and my human wanted to do that so badly—the voice of the master within said pull it. Pull the thread hard, and let the whole sweater unravel.

I had already walked out of my job at the Lance Armstrong Foundation. In India I was offered another position lobbying for the March of Dimes. It felt like a test. If I were going to leave my husband, this job would provide financial security. Was I really ready to be who I was, or did I want to play the human game a little bit more? I turned it down, realizing choice was a master’s sense of its own, like imagination or dreaming. Each choice we make, no matter how small, determines our reality. Choices direct us toward our mastery or to another limited human experience, yet there is no right or wrong answer. I quite liked all my past human experiences, but now I was ready to go grand.

I was going home and moving through the motions over Christmas and New Year’s Day. I would honor Brian, who had been a major part of my life and whose mother was now dying. We would spend our last Christmas as a family, and I would figure out how to leave somehow. I was going to appear insane and evil to everyone around me, and I had to let that go as well.

When my thirty days of sobriety, yoga, and friendship on the vibrating island were up, I hesitantly packed my bags to make the long journey home. The human part of me did not want to leave the comfort of the island’s vibration, the glorious colors, the stifling heat cooled only by the milk of a machete-cut coconut, the song of the birds, and the dance of the lizards. My soul assured me that what was around the corner would be so amazing, my human imagination could not even fathom it. I shuddered to think I would never again see Salu’s bright white smile greeting me each morning as he handed me the newspaper and my coffee.

I boarded the plane and ordered a beer. Funny, it didn’t taste as good as I remembered. Maybe a month of yoga and meditation did not answer my questions, but it sure as hell allowed the space for me to reconnect with my soul. Maybe I was a bit disappointed in the limits I’d hit in the yogic community, but the experienced paved the way for what lay ahead. I was grateful for the experiences the teachers had created and for the new friends I had made as well.

As I drifted off to sleep on the red-eye flight home, a vision of my fellow students and a teacher I had bonded with entered my dream state. We all bore wings featuring swirls of neon paint, our faces unchanged. Like butterflies, we spun and spiraled through the darkness. Then everyone began to glow from within, burning bright and illuminating the surrounding darkness. The vision was so real and so beautiful. I realized I was awake, not dreaming. I felt a deep love for my friends but also an honoring of each of their unique soul journeys, something I was beginning to see so clearly not only in myself but in everyone around me. The soul expansion was setting in, and I felt wonderfully whole.

It all came to a screeching halt when I landed back on American soil. Somehow being back in Austin sent me back into that familiar state of amnesia, in which my human self forgot all the soul clarity we had experienced on the vibrating island. My human sank back into the drama. It took me another six months to summon the courage needed to leave my marriage and return to the path of the soul—once again.