My Way Back To Practice After A Long Hiatus

My college roommate was a resident of New Orleans and evacuated ahead of Katrina. She was watching the news on television when she saw her car float away. She had a first floor apartment which flooded to the top shelf in the closet, so she lost everything. She has an MBA and was a VP of Bank of America before moving to New Orleans from San Francisco. She was in Candlestick Park when the earthquake hit there last century. When she arrived in New Orleans and saw cracks in the sidewalks, she thought, Oh my god. I just moved to another city which has earthquakes. It slowly dawned on her that the cracks came from flooding.

For the sake of the storyline, she is off the charts in verbal and math ~ not so much in geography.

She never really recovered from Katrina and is more or less homeless. She is currently in a suburb of Atlanta working at the Election Commission. She is so smart, she survived all the layoffs after the election. She hasn’t been hired by the Election Commission, so much as she is employed through a temp agency that keeps her hours just under full time so she has no benefits and no insurance. She has a cell phone, a laptop, a portable CD player we sent her (to play Peter’s CDs he makes for her) and a television, which I think comes with the residential motel.

We were having a telephone conversation when she said she was thinking of taking up yoga to help her work with the vicissitudes of her life. My knee-jerk response was (it was not pre-meditated; it just came out of my mouth): Yoga is all well and good, but my experience is that meditation practice gets to the heart of the matter and is thus more powerful.

To which she replied How can I meditate?

So I gave her telephone meditation instruction with her sitting in a chair (instruction on a cushion doesn’t work via telephone). We practiced together for 5 minutes or so.  After I rang off, I realized Oh, my god, I cannot give instruction if I am not practicing. I have to practice to guide her or even talk to her about the practice.

That was 19 September 2012, and I have been able to practice ever since. It is not the practice I was doing in 2005 when I finished the Four Karmas Fire Puja (at KCL) the day Peter fell and tore three arteries. When the stroke lowered the blade that severed me from practice, I floundered. I acted out, I grieved, and I could not find any minutes to practice. I was overwhelmed, suffocating in my own neurosis and the lay of the land at the time.

But she fixed all that. She needs me to call so we can do telephone practice and I need her to make sure I practice. The telephone practice has grown more sophisticated since September. I tried introducing the gong to mark the beginning and end, but abandoned that after one session when I understood she was holding her cell phone to her ear the whole time so she could hear the gong.

Mostly we don’t do telephone practice now. She likes to practice in the morning, and my gap in time is early evening when Peter has to nap after therapy and before dinner. I just call out to her and leave a message and say I have practiced, and it serves as a reminder to her. On occasion, we get to practice together. Like I said, it’s more sophisticated now. Now we ring off and I dial back to say it’s the end of practice.

by Vivi Spicer