After the initial intense discomfort of leaving a marriage that was throttling me emotionally, and blocking my spiritual and creative progress, I was once again enjoying the richness of life. Soon I began to feel an exhilarating sense of freedom.
Now Manhattan is the perfect place for a single person to taste every flavor of liberation—a fabulous city that never sleeps and has something for everybody. (This was before the World Trade Center bombing). Brimming with exciting things to do, not just in the way of entertainment, Manhattan catered to the spiritual seeker as well as to the artist and could be a whole lot of fun.
Folks I knew at work were mostly workaholics; they put in long hours, but from Friday evening through Sunday, they generally partied a lot. There were many times, I confess, that the constant pressure got a bit too much and I felt like a monkey pedaling furiously on a wheel just to stay upright. But still, I relished my new life and would not have exchanged it for another. Continue reading
A friend who once worked as a psychiatrist in a posh town in California once said to me that he saw the act of suicide as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Ironically, his own crazily hedonistic lifestyle militated against his innate wisdom and he himself later tried to commit suicide. But I never forgot his words, especially since I lost a few friends in this manner; every single time I heard someone had offed themselves the shock was great. The worst news was the suicide of a lovely woman I knew in New York. One fine day in fall, she had gone home and shot herself with a gun she had just bought, and that too before her beloved cat. Since she lived alone on the top floor of a condo, her body was not found for several days, and that poor cat had to be a witness to the gradual decomposition of the body of his beloved mistress. I was in a restaurant enjoying brunch with a friend when I heard the news; I literally screamed—because I had once been close to her. She had been a strong Zen practitioner, calm, quiet and loving, and also the last person in the world I would have thought would have killed herself. Later I heard she left a note saying she was going over to the other side to see what it was like, or something asinine in that vein, which just goes to show that we should never go by a façade.
It was a gorgeous fall morning and I woke up deliriously happy in my new apartment. The past couple of months had been crazy with all sorts of pressures, but finally the move from Carroll Gardens to Brooklyn Heights came; since this was post-divorce and I was on my own, the task of moving, then settling in, took up every bit of my remaining energy.
It was twilight by the time the entire group had assembled in my Brooklyn Heights apartment. We sat in a circle on the floor of my candle-lit living room and held hands in silence in order to create the perfect atmosphere for sharing. Then Melissa produced her Talking Stick and a mantle of awe fell upon us—for the polished wooden rod really did seem to exude a magical aura all of its own.
Flavor #5: Transforming Problems. If a great chef and a lousy cook are given the exact same ingredients and asked to prepare a meal, chances are the chef would produce a feast, while the novice would offer up a mess. Well, Mahamudra says that the circumstances of our own life are like those ingredients — what we have on our plates is the result of our own past karma; what we do with them depends on our skill as chefs.
Peak of summer, Manhattan 1995….life was on the upswing, what with an admin gig at a top law firm a hop, skip and jump from Grand Central, and my very own co-op apartment in picturesque Brooklyn Heights, whose major attraction happened to be a fabulous roof garden with a scintillating nocturnal view of New York’s other three boroughs (Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island), and glimpses of the cool blue profile of the Lady of Liberty towering majestically over the horizon.
mira prabhu 