Soulmates (5 page)

The whole book was page after page of these notions. That rich, powerful people (or crocodiles or lions or bears) merely had to be honest about their intentions in order to be spiritually
rewarded, and the poorer and weaker would willingly go along with whatever their betters suggested. It was social Darwinism at its most unctuous, under a gloss of fake Buddha-speak. I figured that the beautiful surroundings at the Zuni Retreat were somehow funded by some crocodiles or lions that Yoni had managed to attract by flattering their spiritual vanity.

What was fascinating, and confusing, was that alongside the social Darwinism was a strain of radical egalitarianism that wouldn't be out of place in a freshman gender studies class. Yoni said that men should take their wives' names in order to dismantle centuries of the patriarchy, and he said that no spouse of any gender should control the other spouse's sexual life. “We don't own each other,” Yoni wrote. He described how our sexual lives should be as open as our spiritual ones.

I put the book down and wondered if Ethan had read this pamphlet in the months before he left, and I wondered if it had permanently altered his views on our monogamous commitment. I searched my brain for any time we had discussed monogamy, but our marriage wasn't really something we talked much about in the abstract. At the time, I thought that was healthy—we weren't rehashing every single thing that happened, but rather were constantly moving forward with vitality, like sharks. Except in the end Ethan had surged away from me and toward Amaya, leaving chum in his wake.

I did remember one conversation we had during our senior year of college. We were living in our first apartment together, the one where Ethan dragged in that plaid monstrosity. He and I had been sitting on the green futon in our living room that we had inherited from the guys who lived in the apartment
before us. No matter how many times I Febrezed it, the futon still smelled faintly of their mutt, Mary Jane, and of, well, Mary Jane. The sense memory was so strong that I could almost smell it now, in this clean, spare bed.

I was trying to gossip with Ethan about his best friend, Jason. Jason had been dating my friend Becca, and Becca had recently discovered that Jason was cheating on her with a sophomore. “Can you believe he did that?” I asked Ethan. “What a sleaze.”

“Don't be so judgmental,” Ethan said gently. “We don't really know what went on between any of them.”

At the time, I liked that he said that. One of the things I had always appreciated about Ethan was that he wasn't ever bitchy. He accepted people as they were and didn't try to change them. I thought he made me a better woman, because he inspired me to be less knee-jerk. My instincts leaned toward moralizing, and he helped me think through situations before deciding those involved were somehow in the wrong.

But now that conversation took on a different meaning. Had Ethan had a flexible attitude toward faithfulness throughout our entire relationship? Would I have known that, had I ever bothered to ask?

I fell asleep before Sylvia returned to our room. I dreamed of grizzly bears baring their sharp teeth at me.

Sylvia was gone by the time I woke up. I figured she had slept in her bed because the batik throw had moved from the foot of her comforter to a chair in the corner of the room. I didn't know what time it was—there were no clocks anywhere, which I assumed was intentional—but my stomach burbled with hunger.
I checked my phone and it was seven thirty, which seemed like it should be breakfast time. I decided to walk over to the dining hall in the hopes of finding some food. I didn't want to waste time showering so I threw on black leggings, an old Twins T-shirt, and the sweater Beth had given me. Mornings were always cold in the desert, right?

I hustled across the cobbled path and opened the door to the dining hall to find it filled with people, some of whom were still lingering at the buffet table. The chafing dishes were filled with different kinds of what looked like gruel, so I chose one at random and slopped some onto my plate. There were also huge glass bowls of extremely fresh fruit, and I helped myself to a big portion, in case the gruel was inedible.

I looked around for someplace to sit and located Sylvia at one of the tables. I knew I wanted nothing more to do with the lemonites, and it was comforting to see a kind, familiar face. I sidled up next to her with my tray and said as I sat down, “I'm sorry I missed you last night!”

Instead of a kind reply, Sylvia shook her head gently and mouthed
No
. Then she pointed to a sign at the center of the table, which read
PLEASE OBSERVE SILENCE DURING THE MORNING MEAL
.

My face burned with embarrassment. I pantomimed zipping my lips, drawing my fingers across my face exaggeratedly, like a fool. As I dug into my gruel, which actually wasn't half bad, I vowed that I wouldn't make any more mistakes at the retreat. I had always been excellent at playing by the rules, a straight-A, type-A obsessive. I could learn the rules of this place like I had learned my torts, through hard work.

I ate slowly so that I wouldn't be finished before Sylvia was.
After she spooned her last bit of kiwi into her mouth, she put her spoon back into her bowl and bused her tray to a bin near the buffet table. Shit. Had I bused my dinner tray last night? I couldn't remember. Two demerits for Dana.

I waited a few beats after Sylvia had left, so she didn't think I was following her, and bused my empty bowl the way she had. When I got back to our room, Sylvia was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her eyes closed, chanting quietly to herself. I crept toward my bed and sat there pretending to reread Yoni's book while I waited for Sylvia to address me.

Several minutes went by before she turned to me. “I'm sorry about breakfast,” she said.

“What's there to be sorry about?” I'd expected to get harangued, which was what I was used to my mother doing when I made a mistake.

“I should have told you about our morning silence last night. That's my fault.” She looked down at her feet as she said this, and her voice quavered slightly. She seemed to care—maybe a little too much—about her role as my guide at Zuni.

“It's really okay. I learned my lesson.” I didn't want to have to comfort her over such a non-issue.

“It's not okay. The morning silence is a sacred time, and it's my fault that it was sullied.” Sylvia looked like she might start crying. Her warm face crinkled up around the edges, so that it seemed like her eyes might disappear into the folds of her skin.

I didn't know how to respond. Sylvia wasn't like the lemonites, who seemed in it for the ego and for the hippie glamour of it. This was a deeply spiritual place for Sylvia, and I wanted to respect that, even though I knew that it was complete quackery.

“Why don't you tell me what we're doing next,” I said to Sylvia, sitting down next to her and patting her hand. “That way this kind of thing won't happen again.”

Sylvia brightened. “Of course,” she said. “Midmornings are for our yoga practice. Classes start an hour after breakfast, and there are signs on each classroom door that tell you what kind of yoga is practiced in that room. If you want to take classes from the popular visiting instructors, you have to get there right after breakfast. But I like to take classes from the regular staff instructors here.”

“Do you mind if I tag along with you this morning?” I asked. I figured “regular staff instructors” were the kinds who would have known Ethan and Amaya intimately.

“I would love it,” Sylvia said, patting my hand as I had patted hers.

Sylvia's yoga class of choice was taught by Janus, who was encouraging without being annoying. After each instruction, he would let out some kind of exclamation, like “Right on!” or “This one will really release those chakras!” I found this charming, which surprised me. I didn't do much yoga, and I tended to prefer classes that focused exclusively on anatomy, not woo-woo about chakras. But there was something about hearing it in this place that felt right to me. And it wasn't like Janus ignored anatomy. In addition to his woo-speak, he did help me and other new students with our form. I noticed that he always asked for consent before touching someone. “I'm going to place my hands on your lower back, is that okay?” Janus inquired before adjusting my dolphin pose.

I felt refreshed after class, despite everything going on. On the way to lunch with Sylvia, I could feel my back unclench, releasing some of the physical tension that had built up over the past few days.

I followed Sylvia's lead walking into the dining hall this time. I sat with her and her table of middle-aged women, who talked about their experiences with different instructors at Zuni. “I don't like that Marcos character at all,” said one woman, whose body was lithe like a teenager's but who, judging by her face and neck waddle, was probably seventy. “All those little girlies follow him around, but he doesn't know his asanas from his elbow!” The whole table erupted in huge laughs and I pretended to get the joke. I hoped someone would say something about Ethan without my having to figure out a way to casually bring him up, but no one mentioned anything. So instead I stayed silent and listened, studying the way these women interacted with one another, and tried to pick up what spiritual needs were being met by their repeated visits to the retreat. Maybe that could help me understand what Ethan had gotten from all this.

We went back to our room after lunch, and I checked my phone in the bathroom. There were a few texts from Beth, asking how I was, which I ignored. I was surprised that Sheriff Lewis hadn't responded to my phone call yet. I couldn't imagine he had much more pressing business than investigating a potential murder-suicide. I debated calling him again, but decided to hold off. I didn't want Sylvia to overhear my conversation and start asking questions.

When I emerged from the bathroom, Sylvia was waiting for
me. “In the afternoons, our time is less structured,” she told me. “I usually take a workshop, but as you saw yesterday, many students go out to the meditation pod. You can also go back to the library, which you might want to do today.” She winked. I figured she meant I should return Yoni's book before I got in trouble for taking it out.

“The library sounds like a perfect place for me this afternoon,” I said with a conspiratorial smile. I slipped Yoni's book back into the green reusable grocery bag and set out for the other building.

The library was almost deserted when I got there. One fortyish guy with a long ponytail was sitting on one of the pillows near the bookshelves, engrossed in a huge hardcover book that he balanced on his knees. A few feet away from him was a young woman with wiry hair pulled back into a messy bun, looking at photographs of Indian men doing yoga poses. But otherwise it was empty.

As I slipped Yoni's book back onto the red shelf, I glanced at the titles of the books and pamphlets around it. They all seemed to have some combination of the words
spiritual, enlightenment, centered,
and
blissful
. They were also all covered in dust. It looked like the “enlightened” visitors to the Zuni Retreat weren't much into book reading. Then I saw a volume that stood out because it had none of those vague terms. It was called
The End Is the Beginning: A Guide to Peaceful Separation
. I slipped it off the shelf and looked at the author's name: Kai Powell—Ethan's yogic name. I staggered back into the closest pillow and started reading.

DAILY AFFIRMATION
:
Different flowers thrive in different environments. What makes a sunflower bloom is not what makes a crocus blossom.

I'm writing this book to help other people recover from the pain of leaving a loved one. Sometimes we must acknowledge that our earthly bonds are holding us back from the deepest spiritual growth. The severing of these bonds is never easy or happy. But in the words of the writer Haruki Murakami, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

The End Is the Beginning
will cover the last several months of my relationship with my former partner, Dana. By hearing my story, I hope you, the reader, will take solace and come to a deeper understanding of why your relationship has naturally concluded. I want you to learn that one kind of demise can also be a different kind of renewal. It is natural, like the yearly progression from fall to winter to spring.

While my relationship with Dana was coming to a close, I began my spiritual nourishment with a guru named Lama Yoni.
You will hear more about his enlightened self as the story unfolds. My flower was also watered with loving kindness by a soul sister named Amaya. You will hear about her as well.

I want to start off on New Year's Day, which is a natural time of renewal. New Year's Day, 2007, was also when I started realizing my soul connection with Dana had begun to fray.

Dana slept in on New Year's. She was recovering from a blowout party at her sister's apartment. Beth's place in Brooklyn was full of some wonderful graduate students that Beth had met in her first year of school. I spent most of the night talking to a very kind bearded gentleman named Nikolai, who was studying loyalty review boards during the McCarthy era. We had a rousing discussion about neo-McCarthyism that lasted until after the ball dropped.

The party was pretty big, so I lost track of Dana while Nikolai and I were chatting. I found her after midnight, curled up in an easy chair while people swirled around her. The party was just starting to clear out by then, and she was sitting on a bunch of coats. Every time someone would come to retrieve his or her belongings, Dana would lean forward only slightly, so that the partygoer would have to yank his down jacket or her purse from underneath her.

Dana's face was blank, and she was clutching a red Solo cup of some unidentified liquid. She was taking huge sips of it and wincing slightly as the noxious brew went down.

“You're wasted,” I said, in a way that I thought was nonjudgmental and accepting.

“I'm fine,” Dana said. But I knew her. She held her liquor, in general, but she had certain tells: her eyelids droop, and her
voice drops half an octave. “Did you have fun talking to your comrade, Nikolai?”

“He's a very insightful guy. I think you would have enjoyed some of his musings on today's Republican party.”

Dana snorted. “Please. That guy is such a phony. He told everyone his name was Nikolai and that he was descended from some of America's real proletariat but Beth told me his real name is Nick Sampson and he grew up in La Jolla.”

I sighed. “You don't have to be so judgmental. He was perfectly nice.”

“Ooooookay,” Dana said, drawing the word out in the way she did to signal that the conversation was over.

Instead of responding to Dana, I started practicing the deep cleansing breaths my Lama taught me to utilize during times of emotional stress. I tried to clear my mind of bad thoughts toward the outside world and focused on the sound of my own body.

“What are you doing? Trying to fall asleep standing up?” Dana asked sharply. My eyes must have closed without my noticing it.

“Nothing. I think we should go home.”

“No, I want to stay,” Dana said.

Part of me wanted to stay to make sure she got home okay. I didn't want my drunk wife wandering the streets of far Brooklyn by herself. But I wasn't in the mood to fight with her that night. I knew that the longer I stayed at the party, the greater chance there was that we'd get into some dumb argument. She was in no mood to compromise; she almost never was, but even less so when she was drinking.

My New Year's resolution, made just an hour before, was to leave behind the petty squabbles that had started ticking up
in frequency. The year of the pig would be a new epoch for the Powells. Instead of insisting that Dana return home with me, I let her be. “Okay. I'm going to head out. I'll miss you in bed when I am falling asleep.”

At first Dana scowled. But then her face brightened a little. “That's sweet,” she said. Then she stood up to kiss me good night. Her kiss had more tenderness in it than most of her kisses had the year before. As cranky as she seemed, at the time, I took it as a good omen.

I'd been thinking a lot about omens at this point. I never talked to Dana about this—I knew she would snort derisively about it if I did—but I checked our astrological charts every day and compared them. She's a Taurus, but her moon is in Cancer, which means that she is both highly sensitive and excessively stubborn. I'm a Libra, and my moon is in Leo. I'm sensitive, too, but more malleable. I tried to look at our horoscopes to figure out which events in our marriage had been fated, and which ones we could control.

One of my coworkers had been instrumental in encouraging me to look more deeply into our lives and figure out how I could make positive changes. I worked the third shift at an ad agency doing copyediting. The agency was so big and there were so many pages of copy touting the benefits of the latest miracle
weight-loss supplements and deliciously chemical energy drinks that they needed copy editors working around the clock to keep up with the volume.

I started this job in early 2006. I had been a bartender when Dana and I first moved to New York after college so Dana could go to a fancy law school. I was supposed to be making money at night so I could work on my playwriting during the day. I wrote a couple of short, semi-autobiographical plays that were produced in small theaters downtown. All my plays took place in Montana and involved a dead mother and a distant dad.

After three years I'd hit a wall, both with the writing and the tending bar. I realized I was just spewing the same small, sad story over and over again. And serving endless Jack Daniel's shots to depressed old guys who were avoiding their wives was sucking my soul. Dana was just finishing law school and since she would be making enough money to support both of us, she encouraged me to take a break from the bar and focus on my writing full-time.

At the time I didn't know it, but Dana's unyielding support had a time limit. When we turned twenty-seven, I'd been writing full-time for a year and hadn't produced a single play. The pressure to write was paralyzing. Then Dana started dropping hints.

“Both partners in a relationship should pull their own weight,” she'd say.

Or, more pointedly, “Why don't you take a graphic design class? You've always been so artistically oriented and it's something you could do for work to supplement your playwriting.”

And finally, after she came home one too many nights to find me sitting in my plaid easy chair, drinking a beer and
reading Howard Zinn or Robert Pirsig, Dana said, “You need to get a real job.”

I can't remember what I said to her in response. Probably just “Okay.” I have never been into big blowups; I'm nonviolent to the core. But I was deeply wounded by her pressuring me about work. I do remember that I slept on the couch that night, totting up all the stray comments Dana had made over the past couple of months. They weren't addressed to me, but the subtext was glaring. Comments like, “Everyone in a household needs to make his own money.” Or “I can't imagine sponging off someone else.”

That was the first time I realized there was a fundamental misunderstanding between us. When we were in college, I thought Dana understood me, that she respected my art as an extension of myself. But it seemed like she couldn't comprehend that all of my studying was part of my process. Everything I read tilled the ground of my brain so that I could have a fallow space for deeper thought.

After that first entreaty for me to get a job, Dana didn't let up. She left the house before I was awake most days, and when I got out of bed I would find job listings already queued up on my computer. I didn't say anything, though I wish I'd had the inner courage to tell her to back off and let me do it in my own time. I just started setting up interviews.

I would trudge into various Midtown offices in the suit that Dana bought me and pretend to be eager about travel guides, or business websites, or pharmaceutical copy. After years as an unsuccessful playwright with an English degree from a liberal arts school, proofreading and copyediting were the only marginally
lucrative jobs that I was remotely qualified for. I chose the job at the ad agency because it offered graveyard-shift work, and I thought that working at night gave me the best chance of playwriting during the day. It was also the only place that offered me any kind of job at all, but I tried to look at the positives of the situation and not the negatives.

Sometimes I want to go back to that moment and tell 2006 Ethan that he should fight back against complacency. That he should not take that job, because proofreading sentences like “Side effects may include clay-colored stools, decrease in urine output or decrease in urine-concentrating ability, and unpleasant breath odor” is soul-deadening work. But part of my current practice is about radical acceptance of circumstances beyond my control, so I have tried not to let myself wallow in regret.

And besides, if I hadn't taken the job at Green Wave, I would never have met Amaya, who has introduced me to Lama Yoni and a new way of living.

I met Amaya on 6/6/06, which in the Judeo-Christian universe has dark connotations. But in numerology, six is the most harmonious of all single-digit numbers. It can symbolize perfect balance, which now makes complete sense both physically and psychically. I believe that my meeting Amaya was in some sense preordained. She started work at Green Wave about a month after I did, and she told me later she was drawn to me immediately. She sensed that I would be open to Lama Yoni's instruction, and she was so right. Lama Yoni's yogic teachings have given me better balance in soul and body.

That's the only change Dana noticed in me when I started studying with Lama Yoni during the day—my body. She was
working so hard she didn't get home until eight, at which point I was at Green Wave. She knew I'd started going to the occasional yoga class during the day when she was at work, but she didn't know how much of my life was consumed with my practice. Dana was happier assuming that I was plugging away on my latest play. She was also happier when my beer gut had been replaced with a burgeoning six-pack, and she was happiest about our athletic weekend sex. She wasn't able to see that our physical connection was fast becoming the only thing we had in common.

Last year it was sixes that held significance for my fate. This year it's sevens: a number of creation, of generation. It was the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month of my practice when Lama Yoni took me into his inner sanctum for the first time.

I had been dutifully attending classes—usually Amaya's—at Yoni's Urban Ashram. I went to early-morning meditations, midday yoga, and afternoon indigenous culture study. But I'd never been allowed to see what went on in the back of the ashram, behind a wooden accordion door that stretched from one end of the front studio to the other.

But on the twenty-seventh day, after the meditations, I was sitting with Amaya, drinking cashew-apple-mint juice to recharge, when Lama Yoni approached us. He had never spoken to me directly before, but on that day he knelt down in front of
my chair and looked me right in the eyes. There's no other way to describe my reaction in that silent moment: I melted.

The only other time I've had such a reaction to another man was when my mother took me to a town hall meeting in Bozeman that Bill Clinton held when he was president. He talked about protecting federal employees, like my dad, and about health care. Afterwards, I went up to shake his hand, and he gave me the same look Yoni did—one that said,
I understand, and I want to help
.

Without saying anything, Lama Yoni got up from his knees and walked toward the accordion door. Amaya gestured for me to follow Lama Yoni, and I did.

We stood in silence in the center of the inner sanctum on a small, circular purple rug. The room was all white—the exposed brick walls were even painted white. The only other color besides purple came from a small shrine with a golden goddess perched near a window. Lama Yoni stood five feet away from me and met my gaze. We stared at each other so long without speaking that I kept ascribing different motivations to Lama Yoni's actions. My thought process was something like:
Does he want to slap me? Kiss me? Is he trying to telepathically transfer some knowledge? Is this a test? What if I have to go to the bathroom? Oh god, I think I have to go to the bathroom
.

All this is to say: don't quickly dismiss a spiritual opportunity. After what must have been twenty minutes of this staring contest, my brain went to another plane. I felt like I was accessing some unused space that I could only find through true connection with a spiritual leader. I don't know how long we ultimately stood there, but I remained in prayer pose until Lama
Yoni broke eye contact. He bowed toward me so slightly he may just have been nodding his head. Then he walked slowly away, in large, deliberate steps, and sat down in front of his altar. Once his back was toward me I assumed it was my cue to leave.