Om

Everyone should have a mentor.

I have had the same mentor now for ten years. She is just a few years older than I am, and her words come from a celestial place of knowing that leaves me in awe every time I speak with her. What's more, her wisdom is shaped by the fact that she understands viscerally how to speak to and with me. She has excavated the landscape of my mind, and she takes great care in forming her words. I can hear her own efforts to do so, and she rarely fails to reach me.

Moreover, she knows that much of my language is Yoga. And, thus, we speak it to help me to understand the universe more easily.

The other night we were discussing beauty, and how to find acceptance of the girls/women we once were, even when we have evolved so significantly. Of late, I have had nightmares of events long past, and I have felt an inner bloom fading. Many reasons: panic at the body's androgynous behavior and hormonal lapses (seemingly the opposite of conception), an impending birthday, the wearing thin of the softness of freedom in the day (or the perception thereof), the revelations of my own memories in my daughter's development. All the makings of the mind.

The past haunts me, I told her.

I remember: when I was nursing my daughter, bizarre, tormented images of past events would come to me in the wee hours as I rocked. I remember trying to keep my heart calm so that the panic wouldn't seep into the milk I was giving her. My mentor told me then that nursing was burning away old fat. And that memories were stored in fat. And that if the memories came up, there was nothing to fear.

Later she asked me to imagine that the memories were Dementors, and she asked me to call forth a patronus. My patronus, as it turned out, was a koi...it just appeared like that.

My mentor is awfully good at softening the worry. And so the other night, after she recognized, explained me back to me, and validated the normalcy and the ephemerality of all of it, she asked me to think about what I could let go of. Imagine! I told her that I couldn't let go of any of it — it's all still here, I said. And to get underneath the answer to the question — not easily answered — she asked me to examine where I might see beauty in myself. And to get underneath that answer, she assured me that neither the body, nor the past, nor the present define what is. And she pointed me to the stream of energy that runs back and forth between my daughter and me. I can imagine, she said, that there is a purity and a beauty in that.

And I suddenly remembered the moment my water broke. I was at the shala in Downward Dog, and I slowly made my way to the bathroom to try and contain the waters and gather myself. And I remember being astounded by how pure the waters were. The purest substance on Earth. I felt a wave of relief as I explained to her that I was mystified by the source of my mothering, that it was an untainted channel that I couldn't trace back to my past at all. In my mothering I do not see anyone I know, anything that has haunted me. I don't know where my mothering comes from, I told her. But it is as pure as the water she was born in.

And she reminded me that there is a universal truth that we all share: unending love. We do not all tap into it. But it is there.

And I felt beautiful instantly. In a split second. And the inner bloom opened. Wait for it: yes, one thousand petals.

That is Om, I told her.

Yes, she said.