The Burn Zone Read online

  THE BURN ZONE

  Copyright © 2018 by Pink Skeleton Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published October 9, 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-487-5

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-488-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940453

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1563 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”

  —St. Catherine of Siena

  I dedicate this book

  to the weird girl/boy inside all of us,

  the one who never fit in, the child inside of us who knows

  we were born to set the world on fire.

  When we learn to listen to her/him,

  we find our Way.

  “What is to give light must endure burning.”

  —Viktor Frankl

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Part 1: Seeking

  Chapter 1: Lakshmi

  Chapter 2: Childhood

  Chapter 3: University of Mysticism

  Chapter 4: Rage

  Chapter 5: Vishnu

  Chapter 6: Renegade

  Chapter 7: Chosen

  Chapter 8: Hawaii

  Chapter 9: Arizona

  Chapter 10: Tango

  Chapter 11: Detachment

  Chapter 12: Gone

  Part 2: Tantra

  Chapter 13: Australia

  Chapter 14: Consort

  Chapter 15: Family

  Chapter 16: The Decision

  Chapter 17: Threesome

  Chapter 18: Flip Flops

  Chapter 19: How It Happens

  Chapter 20: Outcast

  Chapter 21: Karate

  Part 3: Crucible

  Chapter 22: The Task

  Chapter 23: Determined

  Chapter 24: Hiroto

  Chapter 25: Bodhisattva

  Chapter 26: Spirit Guides

  Chapter 27: Monster

  Chapter 28: Shattered

  Chapter 29: Oatmeal

  Chapter 30: Opt Out

  Part 4: Alone

  Chapter 31: Colorado

  Chapter 32: Mirrors

  Chapter 33: Surprise

  Part 5: Into the Light

  Chapter 34: Tango Lesson

  Chapter 35: Awakening

  Chapter 36: Warrior

  Part 6: Whole

  Chapter 37: Wild Monk

  Chapter 38: Graduation

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Every one of us beats ourselves up in the privacy of our own minds. We think that we are supposed to be better in some way: wealthier, stronger, more successful, thinner, smarter, a better parent—you name it. We cannot stand the fact that we are flawed, imperfect, human, so we spend our entire lives hiding our shortcomings, apologizing for them, blaming others for creating them, and hating ourselves for having them. By the time we hit adulthood, most of us have created such a false sense of self in an effort to cover up our inadequacies that we cannot even remember who we naturally are.

  The only way to true joy, to true bliss, to true freedom, is to begin the work of uncovering our real selves—to chip away at the parts of us that are false, the façade we created to please our parents, the mask we built so the world would approve of us. Only when we are willing to stand tall in our own uniqueness, with our own idiosyncrasies, will we be able to do the work we came to do, to build the life we always dreamed of, to excel beyond our wildest dreams, and to live in true joy and abundance. When we finally tap into what we naturally are, we discover we already have the exact right skill set to become everything we have always secretly wanted to be.

  Every saint—of all the religions—tells us that our differences are beautiful and are given to us for a reason. Every fairy tale and superhero movie shows us how our flaws make us unique and special, that owning our perceived defects makes us powerful, that our difference is our destiny. Yet somehow, we still live in a world that yells at us constantly to be like everyone else, to be “perfect,” to blend in.

  It is our work to not blend in, our work to stay true to ourselves, and our work to unravel and eventually understand the Divine purpose in the parts of ourselves that are not “the norm,” to discover the incredible power and wisdom that lies hidden in the owning and forgiving and healing of our wounds. The following Chinese folktale depicts this beautifully. Each one of us is designed differently—and perfectly; each one of us is damaged differently—and perfectly—in order to fulfill our own unique destiny:

  An elderly woman had two large pots. Each hung on the ends of a pole, which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the whole pot delivered a full portion of water, while the cracked pot arrived only half-full. For a full two years, this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water.

  The perfect pot was proud of itself and its accomplishments. The cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do. Finally, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.”

  The old woman smiled. “Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years, I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

  If we ever want real peace inside our minds (and subsequently in the world), we must understand that each one of us is unique, that there is no carbon copy. Only then will we stop expecting other people to see and do things the way we would. Only then will we stop expecting ourselves to be further along than we are, to be somehow “better.” Only when we can truly accept and embrace our own flaws will we be able to accept and embrace each other’s.

  Life dealt me some pretty heavy blows early on. I was introduced to death at a young age. Overly sensitive and very small, I never fit in with other kids and I was constantly teased and beat up until I became mean. I was raised by an unbalanced mother and was told continuously that virtually everything about me was “wrong.” I began searching for the meaning of life before I finished high school and was always desperate to find someone—anyone—who understood and appreciated me. I spent almost all of my young adulthood lost and searching. From the outside, my life looked perfect: I travelled the world as a model and professional dancer, but inside I was soul-sick. I felt incredibly alone.

  After a lifetime of trying to be perfect, after subjecting myself to emotional and psychological abuse in an effort to become Enlightened, and after paying a
small fortune for therapy, I have finally accepted that being flawed is part of the deal of being human and that getting damaged is an integral part of the journey—that when we expect ourselves to be somehow “further along” or “more successful” or in any way different than we are now, we cause ourselves unbearable suffering. After allowing myself to be brainwashed in extreme and seemingly unhealable ways, I have discovered that life wounds us in order to break us open so that our hearts may finally be exposed to the sun, so that we soften, so that the Divine seed within gets awakened and begins its true journey towards its full magnificent bloom.

  Dr. Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I believe she is right. I wrote my story as a catharsis—a way to get it out of me so that I could heal and move on. It is my sincere desire that somewhere in the depths of my story you see your own and that my journey into, through, and out of the dark may help shine light on your own rocky path. If you have been struggling to forgive others, maybe my story will help you recognize that everything that has happened to you has happened for you. And if you have been struggling to forgive yourself, maybe, just maybe, my story will let you give yourself permission to love all parts of you and all parts of your history.

  Embrace your skeletons in the closet. Pull them out and paint them pink. Celebrate them. Your skeletons are probably the most interesting part about you. Your difference is your destiny.

  “You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.”

  —Isadora Duncan

  Introduction

  All my life I had been searching. For what exactly, I did not know. And then, one evening in June 2006, I walked into a meditation seminar in California. I arrived late, to a crowded room filled with chatter and nervous energy. Fifty banquet chairs faced a low stage, upon which sat a small round table draped in black cloth and a single beautifully upholstered chair. An elegant arrangement of flowers stood in the center of the table. There was one empty chair in the front row on the right. I sat in it just seconds before a woman walked onto the stage.

  I had been expecting the speaker to be an older woman with long, gray hair, wearing sandals and a white robe with mala beads around her neck. Instead, she was a young woman, a pretty woman. She was dressed in an expensive black business suit with sexy, sophisticated black stilettos. With grace she walked to the middle of the stage, faced the audience, and then slowly looked from her right to her left, scanning the eyes of every single member of the gathering. She oozed confidence. She radiated power. Her look was piercing. The room went quiet. When she had finished meeting every single pair of eyes, she smiled, placed her palms together in front of her heart, bowed slightly, and said, “Hello, I’m Lakshmi. Let’s meditate.”

  She sat down, connected an iPod to a cable on the table, put on dark sunglasses, and hit play. Her posture was perfectly straight. Her feet rested side by side on the floor. She turned her head to face the audience and folded her hands in her lap, a large gold ring glittering on the third finger of her left hand. Music started. It was loud, and the sound echoing off the walls startled me. I had been expecting spa music, but the song she chose was Navras, from one of the final fight scenes in the second Matrix movie. Wearing the dark sunglasses in the dark suit, this woman looked like Trinity from the movie. Damn, she was intense. Suddenly, I envied her.

  I pushed my thoughts aside, inhaled deeply, closed my eyes, and settled in to meditate. Instantly I felt energy uncoil at the base of my spine and shoot up through the top of my head. Then everything went white and I disappeared; the room disappeared, and I was being held in the hands of God. I had left my body and expanded into Eternity. The peace, the silence, the warmth, the love. This was what I’d been searching for my entire life. This was it. I was Home. I had never felt anything so glorious in all my life. I felt ripped apart and filled up with love and energy and white light and pure joy. I felt utter ecstasy. I slammed open my eyes, my heart beating wildly, and I clutched the bottom of the chair to keep from fainting. I didn’t know who this woman was. I didn’t care. I was Home. My search was over.

  Part 1 Seeking

  “Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.”

  —Bonnie Raitt

  Chapter 1 Lakshmi

  “I am not going to sit on cushions on the floor in the dark with a bunch of stinky, patchouli-oil-smelling hippies chanting ‘Om’,” I said adamantly. It was spring of 2006, and Kate, one of my closest girlfriends, was insisting I go with her to a free meditation class on Tuesday night. She had been suggesting I go for a long time because she loved it and she knew I had been searching and she thought that I would love it, too. But I had no interest in going; it sounded terrible. For a while, I had an excuse: I was teaching a tango class on Tuesday nights. But the series was only six weeks long and the last class ended. So, after weeks of refusing, I went. Begrudgingly. And it was weird. And I didn’t love it. But they weren’t hippies. And they sat in chairs. And they didn’t stink. And there was no patchouli. And it wasn’t dark. And I survived. But I was definitely not going back.

  The next week rolled around, and there I was again, sitting in the circle of chairs with the non-hippie meditators. Meditating. Or trying to. And it was still all a little weird. And I vowed never to go back.

  And the next week rolled around, and there I was, back again. I couldn’t believe it. This time I had arrived before all of the other students. Only one pair of shoes lay beside the door. Prada, they said on the instep—the instructor’s shoes.

  That’s interesting, I thought to myself and entered the room. Definitely not a hippie.

  After my fourth class, I lingered as the other students packed up their belongings. I had just finished reading a book about a man’s evolution to his highest Self, guided by his spiritual teacher. I had never heard of a spiritual teacher and after reading the book decided that maybe I needed one. I had always been so different from everyone else; I had always been searching. Maybe a spiritual teacher could help answer some of my many questions, and maybe this meditation teacher knew where I could find one. Tentatively, I approached the instructor and asked her about finding a spiritual teacher.

  She smiled, her eyes kind. She told me that her mentor happened to be in town from Arizona, teaching a three-day public seminar on meditation. In fact, she was teaching the following night.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to a poster on the wall:

  University of Mysticism

  More Difficult. More Intense. More Outrageous.

  No More Switchbacks, This Path is Straight Up The Mountain

  As someone who had spent much of her adolescence dressed in Doc Martin boots, diving off the stage at punk-rock concerts and drag-racing her Mustang, I thought this sounded right up my alley.

  Even though I had been to four meditation classes, I had never really meditated. I had no idea what to expect. I imagined a relaxing evening spent with an older woman listening to the same type of spa music we listened to in the Tuesday night classes. The seminar was nothing like that.

  When I opened my eyes, Lakshmi was still on stage, wearing sunglasses, meditating. She had a huge smile on her face. She was utterly motionless. I looked around. The other people in the room still had their eyes closed. My life had just been shaken to the core, and everyone else appeared unfazed. I had no idea what to do, so I sat clutching the chair, trembling, eyes open, heart pounding, staring at the stage . . . waiting for the song to end.

  Finally, Lakshmi reached over to stop her iPod, returning her hands to her lap afterward. The tension in the room had dissolved. The peace was tangible. The air felt as if it were filled with white light and tiny little champagne bubbles. We stared at Lakshmi in the silence. She sat as still as a statue, face pointed straight ahead, sunglasses on, hands folded, slight smile on her lips, feet planted on the floor.

  Suddenly, as if returning to her body, she inhaled deeply, placed her hands togethe
r in front of her heart, and bowed slightly. Most of us bowed with her. She removed her sunglasses, placed them on the table, blinked her eyes a few times, and said quietly, “It’s nice to bow in gratitude after a meditation. It’s a way of showing thanks for the opportunity to sit in pristine stillness. If bowing makes you uncomfortable, you can simply say ‘thank you’ inside your mind.”

  More silence.

  More stillness.

  She looked around the room and asked, “How was that?” Hands shot up into the air, mine one of them. Lakshmi looked at me and said, “Yes?”

  Timidly, I asked, “What just happened to me?”

  She smiled at me, with so much love in her eyes, and when she spoke, I felt a tangible current of love flow from her to me. “You are in The Burn Zone,” she said. “You may just want to move back a few rows. If it happens again, just open your eyes and look at these flowers.” She nodded to the white orchids someone had placed on the stairs leading up to the stage; they happened to be directly between her and me.

  I had not described to her what I had just experienced; she seemed to intuitively know. For the next hour I sat pinned to the chair, feeling as though I could not move. It wasn’t a heaviness. It was as if my body was made of light. My mind felt so expanded it would not have been possible to think or worry if I had wanted to. Waves of bliss hit me from all angles, pulsing through my skin. I could barely hear what Lakshmi was saying. It didn’t matter; I wanted to sit in that chair, in front of her, for the rest of my life.

  After an hour, Lakshmi got up and left the stage. Once she was gone, we were ushered to the foyer. One of her volunteers saw me standing against a wall in the corner and approached me with a concerned look on his face. I recognized him from the Tuesday-night meditation classes. He was tall, with dark brown hair. His name was Jake.