The woo-woo factor or Maria and the Jewish girl (a work in progress)

 The first time I had an experience of this – this woo-woo factor – was in the south of Spain. We were a gang of ex-pats, most of us living on the cheap, me earning my way singing in the local bars and clubs that lined the coast between Malaga and Nerja. Mia and some of the others by giving massage or teaching Yoga. There we were up high in a white hilltop village just above the coast that on a clear day you could see to Africa, with Mia at the helm. She was a registered Shaman, this well before that and the word mindful became overly-common. Michelle actually lived this way of life in everything she (consciously) did and thought and ate and dreamt.

Mia had come from a rather established well-heeled family, and could have lived a comfortable life with everything she wanted, but what she wanted, however, was not the material-based life of her youth, but to find a way to live simply and in harmony with the earth. Her plan was to give Indian head massages at a restaurant by the coast but was concerned about the cats, the numerous mewling, feral, hungry cats who made it impossible to create a calm meditative atmosphere. So she decided to have a talk with them, the cats. Not directly and definitely not one by one. She closed her eyes and talked to all of them. She told them that she loved them, that she would help them find food – but not there, and not while she worked. I was with her when she did this. I couldn't hear what she said, though she told me afterwards, her communication was meditative with eyes closed, similar to how she’d talk to the dead (a thing she would also teach me). But I saw her face change. She was blonde and fair and quite wrinkled from the sun. Yet while she conferred with the cat's higher beings her skin smoothed out and her face seemed to open.

“Let's go and see,” Mia said later that afternoon. “Let's go see if the cats have heard my wish.”  

I was already quite a fan of hers, the whole gang of us living there were. But still I was skeptical. Yet there was definitely something, as I followed her down to the restaurant, something (the woo-woo factor?) making the hairs along my lower arm rise up. If someone had told me what we’d find, I’d not have believed it. I was never the kind, growing up in New York, who went to EST, or a Moonie’s talk; never once entered the halls of Scientology. I called myself a secular, political ‘radical’ Jew, not at all religious or fundamental. I had once stretched myself to live several months in an Ashram in Ann Arbor where I learned a lot there about chanting and meditating, but in terms of woo-woo, of talking to the higher souls of cats, or communing with the dead, I had no experience with any of that until meeting Mia.

And when I saw it with my own eyes, when we walked out to the patio of the restaurant, and there wasn't a cat in sight, I was so taken aback I could hardly breathe. Michelle, on the other hand, seemed not at all surprised. “Okay good,” she said. “I'll be able to give my massages now.”  

My encounters in the land of Woo-woo continued, albeit not consciously (though the ones more familiar with that enchanted world say there are no coincidences), in the form of my dear friend David with whom I co-taught tango and the Alexander Technique. He'd fought off cancer five years longer than any doctor thought he’d live. When I held him in my arms shortly before he died, I knew somehow he wasn’t ready to go.

I’ve always been mostly shy, though I perform, act, lead workshops, but unscripted I often get tongue-tied. Never with David ­– I felt completely at ease with him while he lived and even more so after he died. At times I feel David’s presence so strongly, it’s as if he’s contacting me – like when a person happens to phone just seconds after they’ve popped into your head – so it doesn’t seem odd to talk to him silently in my head. I don’t have to speak out loud; he hears me. I’ve never had occasion to talk to animals, only time to time hiking the woods when a stray angry dog comes my way. I really do ask that dog not to bite me. And so far they haven’t. But mostly it’s with the dead – David and my grandfather ­– that I’ve gotten more comfortable contacting. And this, I’ve just discovered in looking up the meaning of this term, is intrinsic in Woo-woo. Having the belief in talking to the dead, and in all things with little ability to prove evidence of.

Last year in La Gomera (one of the smaller Canary Islands) I had a fall while hiking in the mountains. There was no way down the treacherous slope but to continue on, so completely terrified after my fall (people have died on that slope), I clutched my walking poles as if my life depended on it. Oh to have had David alive then, his marvelous healing hands, guiding me down. But he wasn’t there. About a week later, a strange pain began first in my right hand and then my left. It turned out that my desperate clutching of poles, something I was not used to, had damaged the nerve and blood vessels around my shoulders on both sides, inhibiting blood flow to my hands.

I had a lot of gigs lined up there in La Gomera. We were a trio, me on guitar and voice, a violinist who played wooden flute, and a lively Spanish percussionist. Before the accident, I went often with my guitar to the little church in the old town to practice. The priest had given me permission to be there between four and six when the church was hardly in use. After the accident, I wasn’t sure I could (or should) play, it hurt so much. So I went to the church, without guitar, more to pray than practice. The little church was a place to be alone: to cry, to think and hopefully heal.

           

Though I grew up pretty Jewish, I've always felt comfortable in little churches jutted along the hillside, especially with no one there. The ancient acoustics, for the few times I’ve sung acapella, and perhaps the strange comfort from the suffering Jesus and Mary, who they call Maria in Spain. That time, after the accident in that empty church in La Gomera, looking into Maria’s eyes, an enormous voice poured out of me. I felt frightened, something like that had never happened before. I don't sing badly, but mine is not a big voice. Yet there in that darkening church (there were no lights and the sun set early behind the mountains), a voice poured out so huge and full that it couldn’t be just mine. But it felt so good, and healing, and wonderful that I went every day to sing, or rather to be sung.

One day, my eyes closed, the voice gushing out like some miraculous angel borrowing my body, I sensed someone in the church. I opened my eyes a crack, and in the darkness saw a form kneeling in prayer. I suppose she had been there a while and must have heard me. I wanted so much to keep singing but now aware of her presence, I asked in Spanish if I disturbed her, if I should stop. “Please no,” she said, coming in closer to me. In the whisper of light, I saw her eyes were moist, her face wide open and smooth, similar to Mia’s face in the state of communion. “Please continue.”

I’m not sure how long we sat in this state of bliss. Time to time I heard her voice joining mine, or the spirits, or the woo-woo encircling us. When at last the river of sound calmed, I turned and looked gratefully at her. She smiled back at me, thanking me.

            “Are you Catholic?” she asked.

            “I suppose I am now,” I said.

            And with one last gracias, she left.

Food – Demon or Goddess?

Food – Demon or Goddess?

“Are you hungry?” my mother asked, gathering us four kids, each about a year apart, into her arms. I was eleven then and my youngest brother six, but I don’t remember being scared. More surprised. She already had her jacket on, her purse and stack of books in her arms. She was always busy, our mother, but never this busy. She wanted to be a full-time teacher, not just a sub, and had just started a master’s degree. We stood there, her four little rabbits in our rubber-soled pajamas, nodding hungrily. “Yes,” we said as one.

            “Then you’d better learn to cook.”

And then she was gone. We looked at each other. I do recall that – the moment of stunned looking. I suppose my brothers looked more to me, the only girl, the mother sex, the Wendy to this lost clan of boys. I shrugged knowing not that much more only that we’d probably need a pan to start. I thought of the times I stood by my mother watching her cook, helping her. Wishing I had, like my best friend who lived across the street, a mother who didn’t worked, who wore an apron, who had blond hair and looked like the mother on ‘Father Knows Best.’

            My mother was so dark that they’d written on her college ID that she was Negro. I remember reading that word and wondering if we were also Negroes. I wouldn't have minded. In that way my mom was cool. She gave everybody a fair chance. Even before my parents officially divorced, she started hanging around this wonderful bear of a boyfriend who was definitely Black. She was also really good with gays when that word first came out. She was open-minded, but there was a lot she wanted to do with her life. Okay so she wasn’t around much, but still I'm grateful to her and do in many ways take after her. She didn't pamper us or stop us from our own explorations and she certainly helped her four kids from that day forward to not only learn how but to love to cook. Even if our first tries at grilled cheese sandwiches stuck to the pan, or the scrambled eggs were either too runny or too dry, or the flipped pancakes and Sunnyside eggs ended up on the floor before getting the knack of catching the return flight into the pan, we all learned how.

It's tricky to know if that was why I ended up with an eating disorder, being in a sense abandoned and made responsible so awfully young. But I think most of us girls back then were obsessed with being thin. It had already started with Twiggy and the pictures of models and actresses in our faces and the link between showing our mothers we loved them (plus the starving children in China and Africa) by finishing everything on your plates and the fear the world wouldn’t love us if we got too fat.

I live now in Europe and many of my friends (especially in the rooms) say the best thing that’s ever come out of the US is the 12-step program. I had already started OA (overeaters anonymous) way before leaving for Europe, when I was in my twenties, and was slowly, painfully slowly, learning to eat mindfully. To not think calories were only the enemy; that I needed to eat, not starve myself and to find the more in less. Before OA, I slathered butter and mayonnaise on everything. Just learning to taste a cucumber, a carrot, a tomato with maybe a squeeze of lemon took some getting used to. The actual taste of fruit without being smothered in whip cream and sweet-n-low. To understand the relationship and difference between the good or empty calories; the nourishment of food into energy, into life, the gift of life. And to find things to do between means. (In OA we joked: I only ate one more a day – all day!) To find sustenance, in the spiritual. Not even sure in the beginning if I knew what that meant.

Step 10 of the 12-steps is about prayer and meditation. For me, all jumpy and restless meditation has always been crazy hard. You’ll probably think it’s crazy that I moved into an ashram! Gosh, there's so much I want to tell you. Maybe if you knew everything about me you’d understand why I did what I did. Maybe you’d even like me, and be able to help me learn to like myself, or at least understand myself. The Swami sure tried. He was a great man and every time, still, when I cut vegetables I can’t help but miss him.

This all happened in Ann Arbor, where I moved for the music, and to get away from my family, still believing that I could find a geographical cure. I had rented a room from a woman I met in a writing group. I knew she was gay, but that wasn’t a problem, well not at first. She was gone most of the day which was good for my music and writing, to be alone, but I kept eating her food. Every day before she got home I’d rush out to replenish the shelves so she wouldn't know. But of course she knew: her shelves were constantly supplied with unopened boxes of cereal, crackers, cookies, and trail mix (that was my killer, pretending trail mix was healthy, boy did I binge on that). After a few weeks she started crawling into bed with me, like five in the morning, when she came home drunk from the bars. She thought my secret binge eating was because I secretly loved her, was afraid to come out of the closet. (Which may have been true, but still.) So I moved into the ashram.

I was terrified at first, terrified to binge in an even bigger kitchen. I told the Swami about my eating thing. “Don't worry,” he said in a way I could believe him. And I said: “Just don't ever leave me alone in the kitchen. Ever. I can vacuum and dust, I can answer phones, but if you leave me in the kitchen, I’ll eat until I puke” “Don't worry,” he said again. He really did back up those words.

            Seva is the selfless work you’re meant to do some four hours a day at an ashram. Meditation and Seva, and no sex. Those were the requirements. The swami was clever, he knew my vital statistics, Knew I was a struggling musician who wrote songs and was trying to write stories and had two jobs to pay the rent, waitressing and teaching music. So my Seva he decided, would be to sit 2 to 3 hours every afternoon writing. After dinner I was to play the guitar for the group evening chants. Nothing I had to do would be alone except the writing; and there was never any food in our rooms. And before dinner, I was to chop vegetables with the team preparing the meal. I cried with happiness at this lucky break. Part of a friendly team in a kitchen (of other lost and confused souls like me), meditative music coming from the tape deck. We’d chant and slice and cut and simmer, all hands moving in symmetry like some mystical octopus or like the pictures hung all over the ashram, of the gods and goddesses, of their hands and arms rising gloriously into the air, all connecting to love.

I was able to stop bingeing, as there really was no food around, except at the meals. (I guess I wasn’t the only one who might steal food as the cupboards and all storage places were locked in between.) I was still going to OA meetings, still trying as we say: to walk the lion around the cage three times a day, not more. No eating between meals, no grazing, no sitting with a book and zoning out, and no picking the food off the plates before placing them in the bus-tray at the diner I worked at.

I was finally learning – and really have been able to retain that learning, especially in the later years when I recovered from the eating disorder – to let eating be a more mindful, meditative activity. One that brought nourishment and sustenance, not the race against time, or the vacuuming in of food before the next activity as in my childhood. Or the sense that it wouldn’t be enough. When I ate slowly – the lentil dahl, and spinach saag, the Basmati rice and yoghurt – it was more about feeling and tasting the food, slowly, each morsel slowly, and I slowly learned the weird sensation of being full. As if we were eating love and just like those gods and goddesses with their multiple arms, there was plenty of love.

(This theme is further developed in the (published book, available on Amazon), Pandora Learns To Sing.)