The Burn Zone

by Renee Linnell

  “No,” I responded.

  “Well,” he said, “Let’s see if we can dance together.” We set a two-hour window for us to practice the following day. It went really well, we were the right size for each other, and I learned very quickly. He was impressed and we were both thrilled to have found each other; plus, I loved the way I felt in that studio.

  We practiced together daily, with him teaching me the fundamentals of Latin-ballroom dance. Shortly after our first practice, he told me who owned the studio. I had no idea who she was.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  He stopped dancing and looked at me, incredulously.

  “The world champion in Latin-ballroom dance,” he replied.

  It was my turn to be incredulous. I had been in California for less than a week, and not only did I find a studio and a partner, but the studio I found was owned by the world champion at exactly what I wanted to learn. The best dancers in the world came there to practice and teach when they were in California. That’s why the energy in there felt so good.

  Before long, I was taking lessons with the owner of the studio. I had a small part in her holiday show. I wore a French Maid costume and strutted across the stage holding a tray with empty plastic martini glasses, but—still—I was onstage with some of the best ballroom dancers in the world. Ultimately, I began helping her business partner, Sara, teach evening group classes in return for ballroom dance training. I was also offered free coaching once a week by two other US Champions who used the studio. I had found my people. I had found my next step in life. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had fallen into place.

  I helped Sara teach salsa on Monday nights, West Coast swing on Tuesday nights, and Argentine tango on Wednesday nights. Tango was my favorite. I knew the leader’s part better than the follower’s for most of the dances, because the majority of students in the evening group classes were women. One day, Sara told me a professional Argentine tango dancer from the Middle East was coming to the studio for a week to teach a workshop and give private lessons; she suggested I sign up for a private lesson, which I did immediately.

  Halfway through the lesson, the instructor stopped dancing and said, “We are going to do a tango show tonight.”

  “Oh good,” I said. “I have never seen a tango show! With whom will you be dancing?”

  “You.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You are good enough. You follow well. You are a nice dancer. I will be dancing with you.” He started to lead me through the basics again.

  That night, at the milonga (tango dance party), he and I performed. I realized later that this was his thing: to perform with a brand-new dancer, to show off how well he could lead “anybody.” But, at the time, I felt extremely flattered that he had picked me. At the end of the weekend workshop, I had fallen in love with Argentine tango.

  There is a saying: “You don’t find tango; tango finds you.” Tango had found me and wound me around its little finger. I had to learn more.

  As all the students were saying good-byes and gathering their things, the instructor and I were sitting side by side on a step outside the back door of the dance studio. He inhaled the smoke from his cigarette deeply, held it in his lungs, exhaled, and said, “Renee, you must go to Argentina. There is no one in the States who can teach you.”

  I turned to look at him.

  “I am serious,” he said. “If you really want to learn Argentine tango, you must go to Argentina.”

  Shortly after the workshop, I flew out to Colorado to visit my mother. I told her about tango. I told her about Argentina. She smiled. She had always encouraged my dancing. That afternoon, she drove me into Aspen to meet a man she knew named Jimmy, who had started a tango night at his restaurant. Jimmy was a tall man, probably twelve years older than I was. He had a deep baritone voice and a very kind smile. I liked him instantly. I went back to his restaurant for tango night and danced with him. We danced well together. Even though I was still so new to tango, I could follow him. He told me he had been asked to cater a tango workshop the following week in Steamboat Springs and suggested I go, which I did. Daniel Trenner, the man credited with bringing Argentine tango to the United States, was running the workshop. I loved every second of it. I fell deeper in love with tango. I had to go to Argentina.

  At the end of the workshop, Daniel and Jimmy told me they were going to be in Argentina at the same time, and they suggested I meet them there.

  I booked my flight for the following month.

  After eighteen hours of travel, I landed in Buenos Aires, exhausted. The man sitting next to me on the plane discovered I was travelling alone, that my Spanish was not great, and that it was my first time in Argentina. He said the hotel I had booked was crap and that his wife was going to pick him up at the airport. He insisted that they give me a ride to a hotel that was better, one owned by a friend of theirs.

  I agreed and secretly decided that if his wife was not his wife or did not show up, I would take a taxi to the “crap” hotel I booked. His wife did show up, and they helped me check in, got me a great deal and a great room, and insisted I call them to go to dinner while I was there, or if I had any problems. I thanked them profusely, and they drove away. When I got to the room, I immediately fell asleep.

  I met Daniel, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s new girlfriend, Heather, at a milonga the following night. We arrived after 1:00 a.m. at an obscure building on the outskirts of town. A few taxicabs sat in front, the drivers standing nearby, smoking cigarettes and talking with each other. There were no streetlights. We entered through a small unmarked door, and a heavily made-up woman seated in front of a fold-up card table took our money and gave us paper tickets. We continued down some stairs to a large rectangular basement that was half-empty. Tables sat around the edges of the concrete floor, and a few couples were dancing in the middle. Daniel led us toward the bar in the back, stopping to greet people along the way. Apparently, he was a big deal in the Buenos Aires tango scene and always had a prime table reserved close to the dance floor. He walked us to his table and sat down just as a server arrived with a bottle of champagne.

  As the night progressed, more and more dancers arrived. By 2:30 a.m., the place was packed with people of all ages, locals and tourists alike. I learned that night that the “good” dancers arrive around 1:30 or 2:00 a.m., rarely before—unless they were legends like Daniel, in which case they arrived to a reserved table whenever they pleased. As the crowd filed in, Daniel introduced me to some of the masters of tango, and they all invited me to dance. I wasn’t great, but I was young and pretty and had potential, so I was in. I did not realize it at the time, but it was an amazingly rare opportunity for me: it set me up to be trained by the best tango dancers in the world.

  I stayed in Argentina for two weeks, going out with Jimmy, Daniel, and Heather every night. The milongas were scattered all over the city, but were usually in the poorest neighborhoods. They were loud, sweaty, hot, smoky affairs, and I loved every second of them. The music was fantastic, the outfits outrageous, the rooms and dance floors packed. I continued to dance with the masters of tango, often taking lessons with them during the day in Daniel’s apartment. Tango music played everywhere.

  Often Daniel or Jimmy, and sometimes even Heather, would invite me to dance while walking down a cobblestone street or while waiting for a meal in a café. Bystanders would watch and applaud, but our random dancing was not out of the ordinary. This was the Land of Tango. I left Argentina in love—with tango, with Buenos Aires, and with Argentine men.

  I flew back to California and began focusing on Argentine tango. I still helped teach the group classes, but I had switched my career aspirations from professional competitive Latin-ballroom dancer to professional Argentine tango dancer. There were still not many people teaching Argentine tango in the US, and I saw it as my niche. I learned as much as I could from tango dancers in California and started acquiring students.

  I had done it: I had found my next step in life. I
was dancing with some of the best dancers in the world and was still surfing great waves. I was speaking Spanish and traveling to Argentina. I had found a way to combine traveling, speaking Spanish, dance, and surfing. For the first time in my adult life, I felt content and happy. I felt at peace. I felt like I had found my way. And then I got a horrible phone call from my mother.

  Chapter 11 Detachment

  “Oh shit!” I said, as my brand-new leather Armani jacket sailed through the air in a perfect arc, landing exactly in the middle of the fire. That was not supposed to be in the pile.

  Detachment, I reminded myself. I’m learning detachment. Out with the old, in with the new. But, shit, that jacket rocked.

  Lakshmi had told us to get rid of everything old, everything from our past.

  “Anything you wear that you do not feel beautiful in,” she had said, “get rid of. Anything you would not wear on a first date, get rid of. Anything that reminds you of your past, get rid of.

  “We do not donate our used clothing and furniture, because it is covered in our energetic lines. Instead, we burn it or cut it up. If you want to donate, you can donate money.

  “We do not display photos of people in our homes. When you display a photo of somebody, you allow that person’s energy and state of mind to enter your home and your attention through the photograph. We display photos of beautiful places in nature instead. Get rid of old photos. You do not need them; they weigh you down. They trap you in the past.”

  I went home that night and hit “select all” and then “delete”; I deleted every single photo I had in my computer. I piled up all the photo albums I owned and dumped them into cardboard boxes. I went through my closet and pulled out almost everything in it. I went through all my files. I went through my entire house. And then I loaded all of it into my SUV.

  By this stage in the University of Mysticism, Lakshmi had raised our tuition to $500 per month and changed our dress code to “business professional.” Tonal, she explained, is our energetic presentation of our Self to the universe. We were told it is proper etiquette to always have a “tight tonal,” which meant dressing well, with neat hair and nails and great personal hygiene, at all times. Lakshmi had insisted we upgrade our wardrobes to more expensive labels. She even gave us a task to try on a suit at JC Penney and feel the vibration of the suit and the dressing room and the store, then go try on a suit at Armani and feel the difference.

  “Everything is energy,” she said. “Everything vibrates. There is a huge difference between the vibration of a suit made by someone who is not paid enough to feed his or her family and one made by someone who, with immense pride, gives total attention to every detail.”

  She told us it was our duty to wear highly vibrating clothing, that it would help our light shine out into the world. It was amazing to watch the change come over the students. Many of them were misfits and hippies and had shown up to the public events in old jeans and old T-shirts, with long straggly hair. As the months rolled by, these same people started to slowly and magically change into suit-wearing, well-groomed versions of themselves. They carried themselves straighter; they walked and talked with more confidence. You could see that they began believing anything was possible for them, that they had pride in their appearance and in themselves. Paying the higher tuition created more dedication and commitment in the students. So, when Lakshmi told us to get rid of everything old, we were more than happy to oblige. In a sense, we were burning and tearing up and purging these older, outdated versions of ourselves.

  Lakshmi also told us to stop smoking pot. “Pot,” she said, “breaks down the structures in the mind, making it very hard to have a tight attention. In meditation, we are building structures in the mind, structures that make our minds sharp and focused and strong. Pot makes the mind loose and wobbly. Your mind cannot soar in meditation if your attention is loose, just like a kite cannot soar with a loose string. If you want to sharpen your mind, if you want to build your personal power, if you want to have magical meditations, you must stop smoking pot.”

  Matt, my hippie surfer ex-boyfriend who had relocated from Hawaii to join the sangha, when asked by a friend if his life was improving, said, “Hell yeah, my life is improving. I used to sit around on my sofa all day smoking pot if the surf was flat. I was barely making my rent waiting tables. I watched a ton of TV. Now I’m in grad school getting my Masters in architecture. I stopped smoking weed, and I never watch TV. I’m on fire, man.”

  This shit was working; we were changing. And we were changing in magnificent ways.

  I asked Jessica to help me take everything to a fire pit at the beach. We filled up her SUV with the rest of my old stuff and she followed me. We brought logs and fire-starters and loads of paper from my file boxes to use as tinder. We even brought lighter fluid to keep the flames revved to maximum force.

  The clothing went first. Sweaters and jackets melted into toxic puddles and made the flames turn blue. Next came the boxes of childhood memories. I grabbed the largest one, walked to the side of the fire, and lifted it.

  “Don’t you want to see if Gary . . .” Jessica started as I tipped the box over and let the contents dump all at once into the flames. “That’s a negative, Houston,” she finished. We stood there and watched it burn. Baby bracelets, baby photos, baby blankets, my parents’ wedding album. Box after box, bag after bag, photos, clothes, furniture went up in a massive blaze. The smoke reached over forty feet into the sky.

  A man walked over, an old surfer. “What are you two doing?” he asked, incredulously. I had just thrown into the fire a beautiful framed wall hanging of two photos of me surfing a huge wave in Santa Catalina, Panama—photos taken by a professional photographer.

  “That’s a huge wave,” the guy said as the three of us stood there and watched it burn, first the corners, then the loud “pop” of the glass as it cracked from the heat, and finally the beautiful glossy photos of me in the middle.

  “Shame,” he mumbled as he walked away.

  Next was my bed. Jessica had helped me take it apart and load it into the car. We piled the headboard onto the fire, followed by the frame and the wooden slats. The sheets and pillows and duvet got dumped on top. The pillows melted. The fumes were toxic.

  “Is this even legal?” we asked each other at the same time.

  It burned so fast, all of it gone so quickly—my entire past, my entire life. We did this multiple times as the months rolled by. I burned carloads of my belongings. Each time I thought I had gotten rid of everything old, I discovered even more stuff that was possibly “trapping me in the past.” I was so desperate to get rid of old versions of myself, so sure they were wrong and holding me back from Enlightenment.

  I gathered all of my mother’s jewelry, gifts my father had given her, beautiful antique rings, bracelets, and necklaces that she had inherited from her mother and aunt—items I loved—and stuffed them into my wetsuit. I paddled out on my surfboard as far as I could into a stormy winter ocean and let all of it fall into the water.

  I was so proud of myself. It was so liberating: detachment, total detachment. I had burned and chopped and hacked and dumped my entire history, almost everything I loved—gone.

  I had a dream one night that I drove up my street, and my house was on fire. “My cat!” I screamed. “Where is my cat?” As I got to my driveway, I saw her safely curled up on a tree branch. She was all I cared about. “Let it all burn,” I said in my dream, as I grabbed my cat and walked away. I was on my way to total liberation. I was hacking through the chains that bound me to this world. I was doing everything that Lakshmi suggested. And I was sure it would lead me to freedom and nirvana.

  I began my new job, working closely with Vishnu, learning to manage his Excel spreadsheets, answering hundreds of e-mails from students, planning Lakshmi’s events, managing her company, and doing her errands when she was in town. My life was now consumed with meditation practice and working for her. Over the fifteen months I had been Lakshmi’s student, I had sl
owly disengaged from most of my friends outside the group.

  “They will hold you back,” Lakshmi said. “You are changing, evolving, growing into the true you, and they will peg you into the mold of the old you and not allow you to change. In fact, they will get angry at you for changing.”

  So I gradually abandoned them. I stopped returning phone calls. I stopped going out to dinners. I took meditation, finding God, this path to Enlightenment so seriously that I was not going to jeopardize it in any way. I saw the light coming out of my Teacher, and I wanted to be like that. She seemed so free—free from doubt, free from fear, so connected to God and her own Divinity, so knowledgeable. I wanted all of that and was willing to do anything. In fact, I fantasized about radiating peace and love and light and God the way saints did. That was my goal in life. I figured if I could do that, I would finally be happy.

  So I clipped my friends. And then I changed my phone number and my e-mail address. I wiped myself off the Internet. To most of them, I offered no explanation, simply disappeared. To the closest ones I explained a bit: “I’m trying to find God, studying meditation seriously, and am going to drop off the map for a while in order to do this.” Reluctantly, they agreed; they had no choice. A few of them cried. God bless them for loving me enough to cry.

  For a while, I had my new friends, my sangha mates, to hang out with. I couldn’t tell them anything about the work I did for Vishnu and Lakshmi, but when we were together, we spoke about meditation and walking a spiritual path and about the books and movies Lakshmi assigned. Vishnu repeatedly suggested that I spend less time with the other members of the sangha now that I was working so closely with him. So, gradually, I disengaged from them as well.

  It all happened so subtly. Slowly, I left my life to be consumed by Lakshmi’s and Vishnu’s. Slowly and without knowing it, over sixteen months, I erased my entire foundation, my whole support system, everything that I loved, everything that made me me. And just around that time, Vishnu asked me again if I was interested in seeing more of him. I was alone, lonely, lost, with no life besides the one I had built around him and her, but she was never there. I was always dealing with him. She still lived in Arizona; he had moved to California. She still only flew to California one weekend a month, so I barely saw her. I worked with him every day, saw him every day. And I was becoming attracted to him.