Hummingbird

Hummingbird – The North

Hummingbird, you who fly to hundreds of flowers, but only drink from the ones that truly nourish you, teach me how to move away from familiar patterns that don’t ultimately serve me, toward love. North Winds, ancestors, those who have come before and are yet to come, show me the way to walk and guide me from the other side.

Lalita Tripura Sundari is perpetually young, benevolent, erotic, and red. There’s a whole lineage of tantra called Shri Vidya presided over by Lalita. The hugging saint, Amma, is a part of this tradition. Her devotees sing a hymn called the Lalita Sahasranama, the 1000 names of the goddess. Lalita is a goddess emanation of the Divine Play (the word for the divine play is Lila). She holds within her 15 lunar nityas, aspects of her play, associated with phases of the moon. The phases of the moon relate to the creative cycle within you – your inherent Life-Death-Life nature.

Shortly after the death of my brother, I moved in with a roommate on Maui who had suddenly lost her brother too. One morning, on or near the anniversary of his death, I came out to find her seated in the living room. “I dreamed about my brother,” she said. “He told me, ‘it is all play.’ Even his death. ‘It’s ALL play,’ he said.”

In the dream, her brother was revealing something that was like pushing the fast forward button on a somatic grief process in a hereditarily burdened-by-old-beliefs body. Much like Ram Dass saying, “is he suffering now?” to me when I came to him for relief from the shock and trauma of the circumstances of my brother Andrew’s life and death, it was skipping a couple of steps in the embodiment. Maybe the ideas were true. Maybe also we should save them for later, and get on with the humanness. Possibly, we can learn to hold both together: the truth of oneness and the mess of separation.

You know what I mean? It’s like living in the head forever. “I believe this is true.” But how do you know? Have you asked your belly, your spleen, your genitals? Literally. If you don’t consult your body, you are not able to perform the essence of this path: merging two ends of a binary spectrum: the ephemeral and the eternal.

Your body may be impermanent but it’s your home right now, with an astonishing intelligence and inherent wisdom. Your body is also where the trauma is held, and the whole point of yoga, as far as I can tell, is to get in there with it. Dive into the mud, wrestle some roots, split open and grow new a few times. Lalita is like that. She leaves nothing out, the erotic, the perceived spiritual, what doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the sacred. She’s a blazing empress and she’s humble. She accepts guidance from teachers of all types along the way, but ultimately returns to personal sovereignty, which means checking into the body and surfing waves of emotion to uncover her own specific insight, clarity, and impulse toward wholeness.

So now, I’m going to share some personal details about my brother’s death (he shot himself) and my grieving process. I feel that it is important to share because it has the potential to reveal some deeper meaning. For years, I’ve been uncovering seemingly endless layers of grief. Sorrow about the natural world and its creatures, all forms of suffering. Occasionally, someone tapped in will tell me, “you don’t need to carry that. It is not yours.” This will result in relief until the waves start to get pretty high again.

When I first learned on facebook that my brother Andrew had died (I tell more of this story in the first post) my mind’s first thought was “I didn’t save him.” Where did that thought come from? Guilt about a loved one’s death is one of the primary forms of suffering associated with grief. For me, sorrow flooded several years with memories of his struggles and the ways I didn’t show up better.

Lalita is all the forms of play. She’ll do whatever is required to tease our soul-identification loose from our self-identification. Sometimes the play is fierce play. Trauma is a form of the Divine Play that is shaking us loose. The soul came here with intention, and she will honor that impulse. Truth before comfort. Lalita is also the impulse to rest, drink cool water, sing, wear something soft, introduce gentleness and childlike play after a time of harsh struggle.

Our soul friends are part of that gentle medicine; they are the human equivalent of a cashmere onesie. Last week, I visited such a friend, driving over the winding oceanside cliff road that leads from my isolated jungle to the populated end of the island. Knowing how challenging emotionally that drive can be, she greeted me with tea and homemade chili. After weeks of solitude, I began to chat, and suddenly a story was emerging, one that I’d never told anyone, about my brother’s wedding to a Punjabi woman who shared the same yoga lineage as me.

“Did I ever tell you that something opened for me when my mother died?” my friend asked. “That I’m a medium now?”

“Not totally,” I said.

“Was Andrew silly?” she asked. And then it began. He was palpably in the room with us. He brought my grandfather, who my friend could see, his bright blue eyes and military bearing.

“He wants you to know that his silliness was just as much a part of his life as any other.”

I’d forgotten how much fun he was, how much fun he had.

“He wants me to hold your shoulders.” She shifts behind me and puts her hands on my back. “Andrew wants you to know that this is how your grandfather caught him the second he crossed over. He knows you’ve been worried he was alone and confused. They both, Andrew and your grandfather, want to take back what you are carrying. It’s theirs to carry, they want you to know.”

“He wishes he could help you more. He’s so proud of you; he sees so clearly what you’ve overcome to be what you are now.”

I’d only remembered his anger and bitterness. I’d forgotten his generosity, how he was always out of money because he gave away everything he had. I’d forgotten the last few times we saw each other and how many times he told me that he’d not meant his habitual harshness and that he loved me.

The goddess has at least 1,000 ways to play. She is fierce and gentle; this form of Lalita is a maiden, a return to innocence, a reprieve at last from harshness, a resonance again with the good. No matter what has been taken from you, what you have endured, there is a loving truth at the core. It doesn’t matter whether you can see it or not. It only matters that you can keep loving your own truth, as it is revealed, helped along the way by wise guides and friends who feel like cashmere onesies.

Another thing my friend told me: in death as in life, Andrew is open. His soul is learning in profound, quick and lasting ways. In death, his soul is learning lessons that will help him make life-affirming choices in future (whether that future includes more births or not). Yogis believe that souls cycle through birth and death until they become entirely free. This means, on a soul level, my brother is thriving.

Lalita serves the soul’s unfoldment. She wants to leave nothing of the self left. When there is no self, there is only the divine play. There is a process where we live in the lie, because it is revealing within us a truth. The lotus is uncoiling from the seed under the mud, and for a while no sign of its unfoldment is evident. Eventually, love surfaces and blooms from the draining stories that leach life and belief in goodness from us. Our minds tell us stories, unrelentingly. We believe the stories for a while. That’s the way, improbably, unbelievably at first: we expose it - love at the core.