CogitatedMind

The Wishing Shrine

Posted on February 6, 2022February 7, 2022 by CogitatedMind

In my hometown of Tucson, Arizona there is a small shrine in one of the oldest sections of town that dates back to the 1870’s. The story of this shrine is somewhat debatable since there appears to be many variations on the story behind it. One popular story is of a young ranch hand who despite being recently married, fell in love with his mother-in-law. During one of their trysts the father-in-law caught the couple in the act and butchered the young 18-year-old man with an axe in a fit of rage. Because of the nature of the young man’s acts that led to his death, the Catholic Church refused to allow the young man to be buried on consecrated ground in the church’s cemetery. The distraught mother-in-law/lover’s only option was to bury him where he was slain, and the shine nestled in the Barrio Viejo district of South Tucson began.

I became aquainted with El Tiradito (the castaway in spanish) when I was volunteering for victim/witness with the Tucson Police. On my volunteer nights we would wait for the police to call us to a scene to assist victims of crime or witnesses to crimes who were in need of mental health support. One night I had a new partner and the moment we got in the car he told me that he has a tradition to pray before heading out and we needed to make a stop before we did anything else. He then proceeded to tell me of this little shrine that is in the heart of the city and the story behind it. While I lived in Tucson most of my life, I was not aware of this Culturally important place right in my backyard.

It has been a place where believers go to pay homage, offer prayers, and make wishes in the hopes that these will be answered by God. Because it’s existence is owed to a person experiencing extreme heartache, any matters relating to the heart are enough to make a trip to El Tiradito. The faithful believers will often bring offerings (food, pictures of loved ones, flowers, beer/liquor), write a wish on a piece of paper, stick that wish in small crevices of the brick wall, and light a candle. Folklore has it that if your candle stays burning through the night and just past sunrise your wish or prayer will come true. It is also said that what you energetically bring to the shrine has a huge impact on what happens. If your heart is open to love and forgiveness, your wish has more of a chance of success. If you come with anything other than that, you could be dooming yourself to a repeat of history (because obviously you haven’t learned your lesson). El Tiradito is also known as the Curse of the Wishing Shrine since it can go in either direction.

Wishes and prayers contained in the shrine’s wall

When we pulled up next to the shrine there must have been 15 to 20 people crowded in this small, recessed area off the street. Forty to fifty candles were already burning. I never asked whom my partner was praying for, but it was apparent that everyone there had experienced some emotional wound they wanted help with. He lit a candle, and we began our evening. He told me another story. This was a memory of a victim he helped. Her son had been shot and killed and he somehow learned that every night his mother would come and light a candle while praying for his soul to ascend to heaven. Because the life he led was full of crime, she was concerned it wouldn’t happen.

After that night it became a ritual to pray for those people we came across and helped. After we helped them on most likely the worst night of their life, we would never see them again, but often they were on our minds and weighing heavily in our hearts. Praying for their healing was all we had left at our disposal to further help them.

But this time, my visit to the shrine was for me and not any of the victims or witnesses to crime I had often prayed to recieve the healing they needed to become whole.

Prayer candle nestled in a corner to keep away from the wind

The last few years have filled with heartbreak and loss in a what appears to be a procession of sorts. I never knew I could cry so much or feel so deeply. It is almost as if one loss would create an opening in my soul and another, following close behind, would not allow the previous hole to close, only growing bigger and bigger with each passing loss. The magnitude of this procession of loss has permanently altered how I view love and loss and what it means to be having this human experience we call life.

Overall, I feel my changed perspective is expanding me to become a more whole and authentic person, but I’ve also reached a crescendo where my capacity to cope is overwhelmed. Asking for a little heavenly assistance felt necessary to help with healing and closure.

I pulled up in the car with my family before nightfall, so the shrine’s nightly activity hadn’t yet begun. The remnants of past believer’s foray to the shrine were still visible though with many candles completely burned and several candles at the very end of their life, still burning brightly. I internally smiled at this sight. Prayers were received for the people the previous night.

I passed out candles and paper for each of us to write our prayers. My father closed his eyes for a moment to take in the energy of the shrine before writing his prayer. Once my little family began their process, I took a moment to clear everything heavy on my heart. I was trying to find that calm clarity that resides within, containing my deepest desires. When I got here, I only knew what I didn’t want. It’s easy to identify the unwanted things in our life. These mind disturbances happen constantly and ceaselessly. It’s human nature to identify all sorts of threats to our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. I don’t want this or that. I don’t like this or that. For me, I don’t want to be heartbroken anymore. I don’t want to experience the loss of love anymore. I don’t want to be betrayed anymore. I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want. Etcetera, etcetera. Ad nauseum. Infinitum.

It’s a lot more challenging to stop the energetic push away of the unwanted things than to feel the inward pull of the wanted things. They need to be sorted and sifted, separated. That’s what I feel a prayer should be about. Asking from a place of love for the Universe, God, Spirit, or whomever One believes in for help in the path to the good things, to what will heal and make whole, to the intended nature of wholeness within ourselves while also incorporating love for others on our path. It took me a little while because I had been so focused on what I didn’t want and what was weighing heavily on my mind and in my body.

I eventually wrote my prayer asking for obstacles to be removed and the path to be clear in matters of the heart (among some more specific things) on a piece of paper and gingerly stuck it into the shrine wall before lighting a candle.

Once we were done at the shrine I reveled in the moment. Bringing my family here and sharing my experiences with the shrine and the story of El Tiradito made coming here one last time very special. I was surrounded by people I love and who love me. While it may not be the type of love I am asking for guidance on, it was a beautiful reminder of what I do have in front of me.

As the plane took off and I left the desert one last time, I thought about our prayers and candles we left burning. I wondered if they carried our prayers to the place where they would be heard. And I wondered if they burned through the night and past the sun’s ascent in the sky to be answered and fulfilled.

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On Practicing Asteya

Posted on January 9, 2022February 7, 2022 by CogitatedMind

When most people think of yoga they most often visualize people doing all sorts of physical shapes with their body. While this is true, this is only one of the eight limbs, also known as the 8-fold path, of yoga which was codified by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. Patanjali was the first to classify a framework for yoga, but all corpus of works on yoga philosophy span over 8000 years. Each limb offers a path to travel and each connects to the others until the practitioner achieves a state of absorption and embodies their true self, Atman. The entire path of yoga is to remember our wholeness and return to our origins. To do this though, one must clear the lenses of our perception by working with our own hurts and obstacles to achieve discernment and clarity, Samadhi.

Adapted from: https://yogamoha.com/8-limbs-of-yoga-ashtanga-yoga/

A practitioner can be said to be practicing Yoga by working with just one limb on the path. The bendy person practicing Asana, the physical portion of yoga, is practicing yoga just as much as the practitioner who is following the limb of the yamas or niyamas.

Yamas are the guiding principles for building relationships to the external world while the Niyamas are for building relationships to the internal world. Both these limbs together are the foundation of all yogic thought. The Yamas are the first limb of yoga, the Sanskrit word means “restraints, or things to avoid while on the spiritual path. There are 5 of them, they are:

Ahimsa: practice nonviolence in thought, word and deed; practice self-love, cultivate compassion
Satya: tell the truth; opt for silence if your words may harm others
Asteya: non-stealing, even in non-material ways, such as withholding information or time
Brahmacharya: use your energy wisely and with intention; avoid excess or overindulgence
Aparigraha: you are enough and you have everything you need already, Non-accumulation, Non-possessiveness

Adapted from: https://yongtiencin.medium.com/the-importance-of-asteya-nonstealing-3e6f4fe3594a

Asteya, or non-stealing, calls us to live with integrity and reciprocity. If we are living in fears and lies, our dissatisfaction with ourselves and our lives leads us to look outward, with a tendency to steal what is not rightfully ours. We steal from the earth, we steal from our future, and we steal from ourselves. We steal from our own opportunity to grow ourselves into a person who has a right to have the life they want.
~Deborah Adele, “The Yamas and Niyamas”

The below text is my foray into practicing Asteya for a period of 3 months in the earlier part of 2020. What was intended as an experiment into focusing on one Yama and my day-to-day interactions in my relationships with people in my life, became a soul-searching of my past upbringing, my past relationships, and a deepening of my understanding of how I move through the world. What’s most interesting to me is how often I need to revisit this Yama, how often I falter on my practice and adherence to not steal from myself, and how often when I get stuck in a “fear” loop, I inadvertently steal from others.

Re-Adapted from: https://www.pinterest.com/bdyoga2014/asteya-uh-st-ai-ya/

(originally written May 9, 2020)

“Keep your cards close to your chest” is a mantra I’ve lived with all my life. I was explicitly taught, if they don’t know how you feel or how deeply you feel, they can’t hurt you. There is a lot of truth to this, but it is also incredibly limiting. To experience intimacy there has to be a level of vulnerability born by being open in feelings and expression. For years I experienced a life with someone who keeps his cards closer than I do and I realize now how it feels on the other side.

Marriage is not easy. Without communication it feels like a small piece of the soul being slowly stripped away day by day. I gained a partner in finances, dinner plans, and occupying space. Reflecting back to the beginning and my thoughts on the future I realized early that what I thought, well, this wasn’t it at all. I began a journey of inviting him to come along. I dropped my cards in hopes he would drop some of his. I invited him to everything, in the hopes he would find himself along the road. He wouldn’t budge. Every card I dropped he accused me of trying to get in his mind. Every invite declined for unknown reasons. Being constantly rejected by the person you wanted to be a partner in life is devastating. Each day just a little worse. Around the sixth year I knew something needed to change because I couldn’t sustain rowing the lifeboat with the both of us in it. My staying as long as I did is because I am incredibly stubborn but the price for that was energy drain and more. I was in a period of endarkenment that felt very much like Alex Grey’s painting with the same name.

https://www.alexgrey.com/art/shadow-works/endarkenment

There was a dichotomy between who I made myself to be in order to carry someone else through and another person that I rarely let out anymore but felt warm, comforting, and inviting. I realized I didn’t know myself anymore. I had stolen from myself the last 9 years by being with someone who didn’t want the same things in life as I wanted and wasn’t even willing to meet me half way. The whole time, this feeling of two separate selves, it was still me. The person who bore the weight of the family and carried them through, this very strong person, I intensely disliked her. I was strong and willful. I was also angry, stubborn, controlling, critical, cynical, and too definitive. This other side was compassionate, thoughtful, considerate, loving, and lost somewhere.

When I read “I woke up one morning to realize I no longer had access to the experience of my life…I no longer could remember any experiences of where I had been or what I had done….I was on overload and my system shut down. I had taken no time…for reflection or integration; it was just on to the next thing, full speed ahead,” in Deborah Adele’s book “The Yamas and Niyamas: Exploring Yoga’s Ethical Practice”, I realized that was me. And, I was doing it to myself. Because I chose the carry the weight of someone along for the ride but without the effort to sustain it by myself. This meant my calendar was always full, my time always accounted for, and my downtime spent crossing errands off the to-do list. I don’t remember much of the last 9 years. But I look back and see that every day I stayed, I was stripping away my soul, I stubbornly refused to let go, I was devastating myself. What’s worse, I was putting my child through this and he had no choice.

By the time I decided to ask him to leave, I was already on a path of getting back to myself. But when he left I wasn’t anticipating the crushing depression that was about to follow. Depression and the lethargy that comes with it helped me feel all the feelings I had pushed away. The feelings of anger, worthlessness, suppression, regret, and remorse all came washing over me.

Through the whole journey I found that side of myself I loved. In an effort to protect her, I pushed that part of myself away. The road I followed for years was no place for someone so weak. Compassion isn’t weak though nor is thoughtfulness and consideration. This is how I felt at the time, so I built up walls and boxed in that part of myself. We do all sorts of things to protect ourselves and this was mine. Once unchained I looked back once more and instead of feeling angry and unkind towards my ex, I saw an adult with deep afflictions who inherited very unhealthy coping mechanisms from his childhood. I saw the various memories I did retain as a movie reel that had striking resemblances to his own parents’ dysfunctional relationship. There was a part I was supposed to play and I fought against that role, but it was never going to be allowed by him to go any other way. It was like he was repeating a pattern for himself unconsciously and my refusal to play along but stay was the cause of the struggle.

There is a lot of wasted energy in swimming against the current all the time. There are times to swim upstream, just like some fish do to get to mating grounds. I let go though and let the current carry me. I became an observer to what was around me and allowed myself the space to just be, no striving or struggling. That’s about the time I realized I was practicing Ahisma and Satya through my journey.

Because I let go, the fear of loss released the tight hold. The part of me I didn’t like who was externally so strong was a shield with fear hiding behind it. While I was trying to get my husband to come along and build a more intimate life with me, he wasn’t ready to come out of his suffering. I was trying to carry him somewhere he didn’t want to go because he simply wasn’t ready. Any pull from me to be more intimate was stealing from where he was on his own path. While this may have been out of a desire for more intimacy, it was creating a space where there was less intimacy.

An outward focus leads us to…send our energy into their lives in unhealthy ways.
Deborah Adele, “The Yamas and Niyamas”

There is an energetic dance between two people in a relationship that requires both people honoring each other while simultaneously honoring the self. I’m still trying to find the delicate balance of honoring myself while simultaneously honoring others. As with everything in life, sometimes I falter and hurt others with careless actions or words, just as others hurt me. In these moments I go back to the foundation from which everything revolves, Ahisma. Compassion.

Adapted from: https://www.alexgrey.com/art/progress-of-the-soul/ocean-of-love-bliss

Relationship gives us access to Divinity through the portal of love. God is love, the attraction that brings us together. Oneness is the realization of our intrinsic continuity with all of existence and the source of existence. The recognition of our oneness is an expansion of the “self-system” into a holy context, to be a Godself in relationship with infinite Godselves, the entire evolving chain of being beheld in your lover as a reflection in a Sacred Mirror.”
~Alex Grey, “Net of Being”

First graphic adapted from: https://harlemyogastudio.com/asteya-non-stealing-you-have-enough-and-you-are-enough/

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Stories Are Everywhere

Posted on January 9, 2022February 7, 2022 by CogitatedMind

(Originally posted via Tumblr, April 29, 2010: https://beorthogonal-blog.tumblr.com/post/557923277/stories-are-everywhere)

About a month ago my mother glances at me and says, “You know what your problem is?”

“Uh, no. What is my problem?” As a 33-year-old with a small child, I can honestly tell you how little I appreciate being lectured in any form or fashion by my mother. I could hear the litany of complaints and failures in the back of my mind, before she even uttered another word. But, that’s not what happened; instead she said something I wasn’t expecting.

“You don’t talk enough. Even as a kid, I’d ask you how your day went and you would answer in one word. That’s a problem.” I had a quick running slideshow in my head playing of all the times I barely replied to “How did your day go, honey?” and “What did you learn today in school, sweetheart?” Now fast-forward to the conversations with bosses I should have had but didn’t and the boyfriends who would eventually say “I never know where I stand with you, you don’t tell me.” That last one happened more times than I care to admit.

It came as a shocking realization, this not talking “problem.” Because, you see, I am ALWAYS talking. I just don’t verbalize what I am thinking like some people do. But since I am not verbalizing as much as others that puts me in great form to listen to others.

I’ve had people come up to me in stores and enrapture me with their life story for thirty or more minutes. Some people would be annoyed by this type of behavior from a perfect stranger, but I usually become so engrossed in what people have to say that I listen and will often learn something from them. One thing that I’ve learned from these experiences, and it’s fairly consistent throughout, is everyone has a story. Everyone. While people think they have nothing interesting to say, or nothing new to add to the collective stream of stories already out there; your story is unique and it’s unique because your perspective is wholly your own.

Here’s a quick inconsequential story for illustration.

When I was in my teens I sat next to a homeless man and offered him my French fries. He held one in-between his thumb and pointer finger and said, “French fries tease and taunt people. I don’t understand them. Eating one at a time, it is so slow and hardly worth the effort.”

Every time I eat a French fry I think of that man. My perspective of a French fry is so vastly different from his. I have been fortunate enough to never know what it is like to be poverty-stricken and extremely hungry, and therefore, don’t have the same viewpoint on snack food items. For him, snack foods have no meaning. He desires sustenance that will quickly assuage his appetite, thus alleviating his hunger pains. To me, French fries are fun and yummy. To him, not so much.

Before I left French fry guy said, “I’ve seen you around, with your dog, jogging on the street.” At first I was alarmed and fingered the can of Mace in my purse like it was my lifeline. Then, because of his demeanor, I came to realize he was simply respectfully acknowledging my presence, albeit in a socially awkward way. Just as I acknowledged his presence by sitting down to eat with him.

Now when I see homeless people I think twice before committing to turn away from them. If I have food with me, I offer it, and I am grateful I have a home and food in the refrigerator. More importantly, when you acknowledge someone’s presence in the world you open doorways into views on life and living which would be otherwise unheard and lost. I’ve taken that encounter’s lesson with me everywhere I go. I believe the most important lesson in life is to learn and understand.