The Lamb's Book of Life

Mom and Little Adam

Today is Thurday, March 8, 2012.  It has been 3 years, 3 months and 22 days since my mother died.   I was with her when her life on this earth ended.  My siblings were not present.  I took care of my mom for a year and a half.  Our relationship suffered as a result of that experience and the animosity I felt towards my siblings who refused to pitch in.  It seemed only right that they weren't there when my mother's spirit left her body.  It was personal and it was something that only my mom and I shared.  Nobody can take that away from me.  I was the last face my mom saw and I was the last hand that she held.  Perhaps I will go deeper into that experience another day. Right now, I just can't.

Lately, I have been meditating on my third eye.  Prior to this I had been meditating intermittently and focusing mostly on my 7 chakras.  I used a CD called Chakra Dhyana.  Each track focuses on a chakra starting with the mooladhara which is Sanskrit for the root chakra.  While I wanted to do this daily, I found that it started to feel like a chore and I would do it only occasionally on the weekend.  I started to feel tempted by the wine country culture and found myself preferring to relax on the couch and watch Netflix while sipping a glass of good red wine instead of sitting in the lotus position focusing on my chakras.

I read a lot about each chakra before stumbling on the Chakra Dhynana CD.  I concluded that my root chakra was clogged.  I tend to daydream a lot.  I am not grounded.  When I do yoga, it is quite challenging to do the tree pose.  Apparently the chakras can either be clogged or too active.  My heart chakra was (and probably still is) overactive.  I tend to get incredibly emotional and hypersensitive.  I am melodramatic and always have been which is what attracted me to theatre.


I won't say that I am currently unhappy because I do feel somewhat content. After my mom died, I had months of financial hardship and no place to call home.  I crashed from place to place... friends of mine, friends of my mom.  My plan was to go back to California. Only this time, I would move North.  I dropped my beloved kitty of 14 years with a friend of mine in LA, stayed with a somewhat sadistic friend of my mom's just south of San Francisco and eventually got a job working in wine country which is where I now live.

The job is not ideal.  In fact, at times I really hate it.  Nobody in that office gets me and I don't get them.  At work, I am a rock. I am an island.  I've made friends in that office but they never last because that environment isn't for them either.  Next month it will be 3 years since I started that job.  And I've been looking like crazy for a better job.  Everyday, though, I need to remind myself just how lucky I am to have a job.

I live on 5 acres of land.  While my space is tiny, it's very picturesque out here.  The moon is fantastic.  I particularly love those mornings when the sun is peaking over the horizon and the moon is lighting up the vineyards on the other side of the valley.  This is a magical place. I really love my neighbors who live in the main house.  They have become like family to me and that means a lot considering I don't really have much of a family.

Sade, my cat of 14 years died shortly after I picked her up from that friend's in LA.  It turned out she had lymphoma and was probably sick for a while but I was too consumed with my mom's cancer that i didn't notice how much weight she had been losing.  I had to euthanize her less than a year after my mom died.  I was so devastated.  Sade knew me better than anyone.  I adopted her in NYC, she lived in LA with me for 10 years, moved to Florida with me and then back to California.  She was my compadre.  Losing her so soon after losing my mom was unbearable.  I immediately went out and adopted a kitten because the thought of being alone scared me. 

I adopted a cute little medium haired black and white kitten named Boo.  Two months later I found out that Boo had this terminal kitten disease called Feline Infectious Peritonitis.  He more than likely contracted it at the shelter.  That was hard but what was to follow was even worse.  The same day I put Boo to sleep, I got a call from my long lost brother.

His attitude hadn't changed.  Still obnoxious and rude.  He told me that my nephew, Adam, had disappeared the day before.  Apparently, both my sister and a friend of his had received strange calls from him... calls thanking them for being there.  Calls that almost sounded like goodbye.

There was a search party out for Adam because they found his bike on the pier near St. Pete Beach.  I received a call that night from my brother's partner.  He was calling from St. Pete Beach....and he was crying.  I immediately knew.

Adam's body had washed up on the shore.  They said that it looked like suicide.  He had taken some sort of sedative and swam out to sea.  I will never forget being on the phone and hearing Adam's brother, Ryan, screaming in the background.  I vowed to never go back to Florida but that night, I charge what little credit i had left on my Master Card and bought a ticket to go to Florida.

My sister was destroyed.  I heard she had held his body on that beach for hours.  She didn't want to let him go.  I tried to be there for her but her house turned into an open houses for judgmental Christians.  You see, my sister had gone from dancing with demons while watching Three's Company to becoming quite the religious fanatic herself.  She was struggling with the fact that her own son took his life.  After all, Jesus would not approve.  She insisted that Adam started becoming depressed when he moved away from Jesus at about the age of 10.

It was even harder for her to accept what soonafter erupted.  According to those close to Adam, he had been struggling with his sexuality.  I wasn't surprised.  My mom even considered that Adam might be gay.  He was a handsome guy who never had any girlfriends.  Additionally, when he was a teenager, he said some pretty scathing things about gay people.  That sort of anger usually stems from something deeper and that's when I started to suspect that Adam had a demon he was battling.  I felt sad for him.  He was raised in a household where gay people were referred to as "fudgepackers".  My brother was constantly ridiculed for being gay.  My mom suggested I try to talk to Adam.  So, one night we took Adam out for dinner and I tried to get him to open up but he didn't really.  I could tell he was depressed.  I just never knew how bad it was.

When my mom was in the hospital and then later in Hospice, Adam was there everyday.  In fact, he was there more than his mom.  He didn't make much of an effort to be close to my mom when she was alive so I was surprised at how devoted he was to being near her at the end of her life.  He seemed so deeply effected by it all. Eleven months later, he was gone too.

In less than a year, I lost my mom, 2 cats and my nephew.  I really didn't know how much more I could take but they say that the universe only gives you as much as you can handle.  That year was an eye opening experience because I survived it.  I didn't die.  I kept living.  I was so much stronger than I had ever given myself credit for.

Now I just strive to find some meaning in all this.  It seems that whenever things are bad, I turn to meditation.  Whenever I need some hope, some guidance, something to take away that awful feeling that we are all alone in this world, there is always that universe that I can tap into by closing my eyes and blocking out all the noise.

Lately, with all the stress surrounding my job, I started looking for other forms of meditation which is when I stumbled across Awakening The Third Eye by Samuel Sagan.  I read much of the book and decided to start using Sagan's meditation technique which is largely about using the larynx to connect to the chakras--mainly the third eye.

There is a chapter on the larynx and it's connection to spirituality. The power of the voice is often regarded as the power of manifestation.  There is an entire chapter devoted to the mysteries of the Larynx including one man's theory, Rudolf Steiner, that in the beginning, there were no genders.  Man was a hermaphrodite and was capable of bearing offspring without fertilization.  Then in the middle of cataclysmic changes in the planet, mankind lost half of its sexual force and procreative energy.  This is when two genders were born and woman needed man to procreate.  What become of the lost half was the ego or the higher self.   According to Steiner's theory, prior to the creation of genders, there was no ego and after the creation of genders, certain organs were born in the human body.  The larynx was one of them.  The point in the book is that the Larynx is a direct result of the creation of the ego and connecting with it will help one reach a higher state of consciousness.

I don't know if I believe all this.  It's one man's theory.  But historically, the voice has been used in many forms of meditation and also in yoga.  The particular technique that Sagan covers in his book has to do with creating friction in the throat.  It's almost like ocean breath only the mouth is slightly open.  Imagine you are fogging up a mirror with your breath.  You breathe like this and focus on the larynx.  Then your focus gradually moves to the third eye.  Then you connect the two.  Then you just become aware.

Sagan is very clear that one is to not force anything.  Don't encourage the imagination.  Just be aware and let what happens happen.

I have been using this method for six consecutive days.  It has inspired me to resume my daily meditation practice.  While I had some pretty intense experiences over the last few years, I often wonder how much of it was a product of my imagination and how much of it was real.  I like the fact that this technique is all about awareness and breathing and being.

I haven't had any crazy experiences where I've seen doors opening and light pouring into my brain;   but I've found that I can deal with the stress of my job much better.  And, I've come back to the state of being where meditating for a half hour a day is more productive than drinking a half bottle of wine while watching Nip Tuck episodes.