The Healing Read online

  My friends didn’t care; they still tried to pressure me, but I stood my ground. I told them I had grown up in a bar (this was true) and had tasted plenty of alcohol and had even smoked cigarettes from age five. My smoking buddy, Tee, who was two years older than I was, had even singed her ponytails one day when the wind was blowing and the matches we were using set her locks on fire. I explained to my friends that I was not going to drink and smoke, and I realized two things. One, not drinking made me feel superior. And two, not drinking kept me from perhaps becoming a high school drunk.

  I continued to move through this yoga class one posture at a time, new memories surfacing with each posture. While this was happening, the teacher-training students were busy preparing the evening meal. It surprised me that the sound of running water and clanging pots seemed like music to me. Sounds from another room usually caused me to jump, but in this case the commotion and aromas from the kitchen adjacent to the yoga studio settled and focused my mind.

  The unknown bodies around me were colorful silhouettes, balls of energy moving right, left, up, and down. We all responded to the melodious accent of the teacher, who was South African. He was the first big-bellied yoga teacher I ever had. I thought all yogis were skinny, especially those living in an ashram. He challenged me. His big body stood in front of the class between the pictures of Swami Sivananda and Swami Vishnudevananda, the men I had seen in the car from the airport, demonstrating so many graceful yet strong yoga postures. I realized that I could simply be with these yoga experiences and my memories more and more and not be retraumatized like I was when I was detoxing from sugar. I could now easily watch the memories float by.

  * * *

  I peed in a cup for my friend Maggie, who was seventeen years old. She had gotten herself pregnant, again, by her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend Jerry. Jerry already had a son and a wife. This was Maggie’s third or fourth abortion. She had been dating Jerry for three years.

  Maggie’s relationship to Jerry needed to be a secret for two obvious reasons, his wife and her own mother. Maggie’s mom didn’t really know about Jerry, but suspected some kind of trouble. So her mom started keeping track of her daughter’s period cycles. Maggie was pregnant and had already made an appointment for another abortion. She didn’t want her mother to find out that she was already pregnant. Her mother, on the other hand, made a different kind of appointment. Her mother was taking Maggie in for a pregnancy test. Here’s where I came in. Maggie asked me to pee in a cup for her because everyone knew that I had never had sex. In fact, she used to tease me about being a virgin.

  Maggie teased me relentlessly about being a virgin, but I never teased her about the abortions.

  * * *

  I watched my fourteen-year-old cousin with a 4.0 GPA have one abortion after another, even though she was taking the pill. But the pill didn’t really work for her. This was also a very sad situation, and one that I didn’t really understand. My cousin, now eighteen years old and pregnant again, decided to keep the baby. I will never forget her words when she told me that she was going to have a baby. She said, “Well, I just got tired of killing them.” She sighed and then our gazes locked, and our eyes filled with tears.

  * * *

  When I was sixteen, there was a boy I really did desire. He was one of the smartest boys I knew, and he seemed to like me, too. We tried to have protected sex, but he couldn’t get hard.

  “Whew. Lucky me,” I thought afterward. For some peculiar reason, I felt protected, powerful, beautiful, and relieved. I felt maybe someone out there or up there was trying to protect me. After that, I decided to wait to have sex, maybe in college, or maybe after college.

  * * *

  At the end of yoga class, we all set ourselves up for the twenty-minute relaxation pose of Savasana. During this time, the alchemy of my intimate relationship with each person who had appeared as a memory during the class no longer seemed to scare me, unlike in my very first yoga class. In contrast, it seemed to bring up questions: What were we all trying to accomplish in middle school and then in high school? We were all sent to school for an education, but no one taught us how to socially interact with one another, how to give and get love safely and honestly. I lay there in Savasana feeling as vulnerable as I had in high school, but Savasana was safer than high school. I sank further down into that mysterious space of relaxation and realized that we all struggled for love and acceptance. No one was exempt; the pretty ones, the unattractive ones, the rich ones, the poor ones, the smart ones, the slow ones, the skinny ones, and the fat ones—all casualties at one point or another—but we all tried to get what was essential for our own individual growth, basic affection and affirmation. Strangely enough, it usually ended up in one big mess. We all deserved better.

  * * *

  During my four-day yoga retreat, I had lots of time to think about the events of my life.

  The first day, I followed the schedule and kept to myself. I was surprised that I didn’t really talk too much to the other guests or teacher-training students, which was odd because I can yap on with the best of them.

  During brunch time on my second day, I became acquainted with one guy that I thought was an anomaly. He was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from college with a degree in engineering. He was dressed in traditional swami orange. I was a bit confused.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re going to be a swami, not a yoga teacher?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he responded.

  I tilted my head like a dog that had just heard a high-pitched sound, and before I could ask another question he continued with, “I went to the Sivananda center in Chicago and realized that I was being called to live this life. My family, basic Midwesterners, thought that I was being possessed by the devil.”

  I laughed.

  “Now they see that I am okay. But they still think this is weird,” he added.

  As we talked some more, I wondered, but didn’t ask him, if he’d also heard a voice like I had in my first yoga class.

  Later that afternoon, during the last hour of a four-hour break, I asked him to teach me what some of the chants and prayers meant. I also wanted to learn how to break down the pronunciations so I could sing them better. The chants soothed me. The young swami’s conversation comforted me.

  That night, I went to bed bundled up and glad that I had come to this incense burning Hare Krishna–like place.

  On the third day I sat by the pond, feeling the heat on my face and arms, and remembering the most joyous day of my life. It was when my parents finally separated. I was ten years old. When the news came to me that the separation was true, the song “Optimistic Voices” from The Wizard of Oz played in my head.

  I felt like I was finally out of the woods and into the light. I felt like there was hope in my heart. No more unpredictable fighting would happen in the middle of the night.

  When my parents separated, there weren’t any set rules about how often my dad could or could not see us. However, I do remember always waiting for him to show up. Most of the time he never came. When he did finally come to spend time with us, I always hoped to get fatherly affection, knowledge, and maybe even some cash. I wanted to love him, and my psyche needed his love even more. But I loathed him because I knew he had the potential to be an amazing dad and man, yet chose his hedonistic lifestyle—which didn’t include me—every time. It was a warm summer day and I hadn’t seen my dad in a while—two, three, or four months. I got out of my mother’s car in front of the bar my father owned, which used to be our home, a smile on my face, and happily gave my dad a hug. I must have been twelve at the most. He and I started to have a conversation, probably about school, and after a few exchanges he said, “You sound like a little white girl.” I was crestfallen. I don’t remember what the rest of the visit was like. I just remember not being acceptable to my dad.

  After the visit, my mom picked my brother and m
e up from my dad’s house.

  Later I told my mother and my aunt Clair about this incident. They both saw red. “Don’t ever feel bad about speaking English properly.” Then the two of them launched into a rant about their ex-husbands.

  “He tried to pull that kind of shit with me, too,” my mom said.

  “Casey tried some mind control bullshit, too,” Aunt Clair added, referring to her own ex.

  “Those motherfuckers are crazy,” my mom said somewhere in the middle of the rant to Aunt Clair. I started to tune them out.

  Caught in the tug-of-war between my new world and my father’s world, I decided that I was better than his world, where folks talk slick, drink lots of alcohol, and abuse women. I was mad; I needed and wanted a father. If my dad wanted me to sound more like him, why didn’t he spend more time with me? I was available. Why didn’t he have more conversations with me?

  * * *

  On my last day at the ashram, there was a yoga teacher-training graduation. The yoga vacationers were invited to watch the students graduate. Each student was anointed with traditional marks on his or her forehead, and then they bowed down to the various teachers and the photos of the Indian men I had seen in the station wagon: one bald man called Sivananda and one graying man called Vishnudevananda. There were a lot of anandas around this place. It did seem like some kind of cult. But somewhat surprisingly, I’d bought into the spiritual nature of yoga and loved that it came from a culture of brown people. I did find it strange that so many white folks accepted it.

  Each teacher-training student was called to the front. They, too, had been given some Hindu god’s name. I stared at the only black girl there getting her certificate. The name she was given by the swami was “Kali.”

  Kali was a dark-skinned Hindu goddess. I guess that was fitting, since she was the only black girl in the teacher-training class. I watched her go up to get her certificate. Her Afro was short like mine, and I said to myself, “That’s going to be me in a few years.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I boarded the plane back to Pittsburgh, unsure how I was going to continue my life at the bank after experiencing this alternative way of living. I felt like a different kind of life was calling for me, but I didn’t know what it looked like.

  Wednesday morning came and I went to work. I finished out the week as usual, but often thought about my time at the ashram.

  On Saturday night I got another call from George, asking me to go out to a bar. I said no.

  On Sunday I got up early to go to yoga and was very excited to show my teacher my headstand achievement. Arriving very early to practice, I was the only one in the room. I moved slowly into the headstand. I stood on my head upside down, staring in the mirror. No one could see me. No one was watching. I closed my eyes and started to see my headstand differently.

  The headstand is known as the king of yoga poses, and on that day at the ashram, I had learned that it is a humble and fragile king. Accomplishing this posture can make you feel superior to others, and the longer you hold it, the bigger the opportunity there is for the ego to grow. But there is a deeper meaning to being able to hold a headstand: the posture will ask you to look at the world from an upside-down point of view. I learned that day that the headstand was not asking the world to look at me, and it was not asking others to see me as better, but it was asking that I see the world around me from different angles. I practiced with the intention of seeing life from a kaleidoscopic lens.

  Yoga was starting to shine more light on my strengths as well as my weaknesses. I left class feeling that I still had so much to learn. I challenged myself to learn more about my friends, my family, my life, and who it was that I wanted to be in the midst of it all.

  CHAPTER 4

  Ben and Frederick and the Shadow Side

  WHEN CHANGING LANES IN LIFE, you’d better turn your head and look out of the corner of your eye to see if there is something or someone there that you might crash into. Otherwise, you won’t see what’s in your blind spot. About eighteen months after I started incorporating my new practices into my daily life, I hit a metaphysical blind spot during a one-on-one session with Gia.

  “Look up,” she told me while examining my eyes. “There is a little spot on your right eyeball. It looks like a gray pencil mark on the white of your eye. This mark might indicate a cyst on your ovary.”

  I pursed my lips, not quite sure what she was telling me. She noticed my concerned gaze, and continued explaining that cysts can come from too much animal food. She told me that eating more plant-based whole foods and less animal food in the prescribed way can reverse cysts naturally, and that I should check with my OB/GYN to confirm whether or not a cyst was there.

  “Metaphysically, sometimes these things can indicate there’s a need to look into your sexuality and what you believe about relationships,” Gia said with authority.

  “Are you saying that what I believe about my body and men can affect my sexual health?”

  She nodded. She went on to say, “In holistic health, we believe that diseases”—Gia pronounced the word “diseases” as dis-eases—“can be expressed in the body for numerous reasons, not just because of what you eat or don’t eat. Everything in our environment can affect us, even our thoughts and belief systems.”

  “Wow. This stuff gets to be more and more tricky,” I observed. “It’s fascinating, but tricky. What else can I do besides go to the OB/GYN?”

  Gia gave me homework. She asked me to journal about my relationship beliefs. Did I believe that I deserved a relationship? She indicated that the more we understand who we are and want to be, the more we can improve our health.

  I left Gia’s office feeling that true sickness and true healing are mysterious. This caused me to think deeply about the one major relationship in my past.

  I met Ben on the porch of the Alpha Tao Omega (ATO) fraternity house at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1985. I had just finished my first year of college at Temple University and was doing my summer banking internship. I was sitting on a brick wall with some friends from high school. My friends and I thought there was going to be a big party at the frat house, but instead there were only a few guys there that summer, taking summer classes to catch up or to get course work done in advance. Carnegie Mellon was full of people who didn’t mind putting extra effort into their classes and yet could still find a party. I liked that these students knew how to have a good time and still make the grade, so I hung out at CMU quite a bit. I wanted what they had.

  Ben walked out of the frat house through the double glass doors and approached us. He stood six feet tall, with his wavy brown hair parted on the side to make it swoop down across his forehead. He wore taped eyeglasses, which at first glance seemed a bit dorky, but he had a swagger that made me think he owned the place. I really hadn’t seen confidence like that anywhere, not even in the movies. He sat down next to me. I stared at his face, and behind those taped glasses was a lazy eye. That eye looked at me as if I was the prettiest girl ever. He looked weird to me, but I liked his conversation and his self-assurance. We talked for a long time. It was getting late, and my friends offered me a ride home. But he jumped in with his offer to take me; and, just as fast, I agreed to let him.

  We got into an old silvery-blue Subaru. I didn’t know what a Subaru was, but he said something like, “My cousin owns a Subaru dealership and I can get cars cheap there.” His driving was comfortable and well-paced.

  He parked the car, and then he walked me to my front door. He leaned in slow, and then barely brushed his lips against mine. He leaned back and softly said, “Good night.”

  After that kiss, I knew that I could spend the rest of my life with him.

  * * *

  On my way home from Gia’s office, my pace quickened, thinking about Ben. I thought about how he and I were inseparable that summer going into sophomore year. I was eighteen
and he was twenty. He took me to dinner dates three to five times a week, and I made him dinner sometimes. We went to foreign films, walked in the park, and took long city drives. He helped me discover architecture and a different point of view on history and introduced me to unfamiliar foods.

  He took me to restaurants that I considered fancy. I remember ordering duck for the very first time at Jimmy Chang’s, one of Pittsburgh’s popular Chinese restaurants. I had never had duck before. Duck meat was rich and succulent, and the skin was crunchy and sweet. Ben felt like that to me—rich, succulent, and sweet. He also added a strange kind of crunch to my life.

  This was the first time I felt cared for by a man. Along with all of his kindness, I never felt pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t. It was hard to not be with him because every time I was near him I felt intoxicated. My skin felt hot and I would lose all track of time.

  One summer night while I was staying on the CMU campus at the Spirit House, the central house phone rang. I was already asleep. I went to bed early, since I had to get up early for my Pittsburgh Bank internship. I liked getting my eight hours—even nine or ten.

  Knock. Knock. I rolled over, and then someone whispered through the cracked door, “Saeeda, someone is on the phone for you. He said his name is Ben.” I jumped up and went to the central house phone.

  “Sy, meet me downstairs. Let’s go for a walk,” he said.