I started imagining sleeping with him. I started imagining loving him. One day, I boldly asked him—I had to know, and I was finally willing to jeopardize my position and our “relationship” by asking—“Aren’t you with Lakshmi? I thought you were her consort.”
His reply was, “There is a field beyond right and wrong. Meet me there.”
What the fuck was this man talking about? I was sinking fast into something—into what? Was it love? Was it grace? Or was it something dark and sticky? I couldn’t tell. I loved him, didn’t I? I was attracted to him, wasn’t I? I truly and honestly had no idea. My friends were gone. My dance career was gone. My sense of the world was rapidly disappearing. They taught that tantric monks lived in the world, yet slowly and surely, they were teaching me to leave the world, to hide, to stay inside, to stop going out. Everything and everyone was going to drain my energy and interfere with my meditation.
I began spending almost every day with Vishnu. When I wasn’t with him, I was usually on the phone with him. We started having lunches and dinners together.
And then it happened. After a particularly trying day, I complimented him on a job well done and he grabbed me and kissed me—a wet, slobbery, brutal kiss. We were standing by the sink in his kitchen. He took a breath, opened his mouth wide, and jammed his tongue as far down my throat as it would go.
I was shocked. I stood there, my head cocked back, my neck arched until it nearly broke, with this man’s rough tongue jammed down my throat, and I thought, How on earth can a man his age kiss this badly? Later, he would tell me it was the best kiss of his life.
The next stage entailed a lot of kissing—no sleeping over, no sex, no clothing off, just kissing. Wiping-your-entire-face-with-the-back-of-your-hand kissing, for weeks. And I just assumed this was part of the tantric practice. I didn’t know if tantric monks slept over each other’s houses or went down on each other or even had sex. I assumed they must, but still was just so unsure of it all. I didn’t know if I even liked him in that way. I honestly could not tell.
Meanwhile, I thought Lakshmi knew all about this, and I felt so honored to be so close to her in this way, taking care of her best friend and closest student so she wouldn’t worry about him and could keep meditating. He presented himself as there only to serve her. I figured someone had to help him. Someone had to take care of him. I assumed she was thrilled about it, and I felt honored to be the woman she trusted with her best friend.
Vishnu drank an entire bottle of Veuve Clicquot every night, and he wanted to see me every day. They taught “moderation.” They taught us to “touch the world lightly.” Lakshmi had explained to us, numerous times, that the human tendency is to find something we love and indulge until we hate it—especially with people.
“You suck the magic out of your relationships,” she would say. “You insist on seeing each other every day until you are utterly bored with each other. You turn the magical into the mundane with everything: food, music, booze, people. You must learn to touch everything lightly.”
She assigned for us to read more Carlos Castaneda books, making sure to point out how his teacher, Don Juan, repeatedly teaches Carlos to “touch the world lightly.” Vishnu had been at all of the events. He had done the reading. He knew about “touching it lightly,” but still he insisted on seeing me all the time.
So now my “job” included doing his errands, buying his groceries, tidying up around his house, cooking for him, and making out with him for hours. After over a month of making out, we still had not slept together. Kissing was as far as we were “allowed” to go. I’m not sure who was doing the “allowing.” I assumed it was Shiva, but maybe it was Lakshmi. I did not know. Vishnu just seemed like a tortured man who had to take his orders from higher up.
One night, he came over to my house to watch a movie. We made out on the sofa for a bit, and then he walked outside. He was gone a long time, so I went to look for him. I found him leaning against the wall on the side of my house, crying. When I asked him if he was okay, he quickly stopped and said, “My job is hard, Lady.”
I hated being called “Lady.”
“One day, I will tell you all about it,” he said and walked back into my house.
I started to ask a few more questions, and he shifted back into Teacher mode and told me he was under occult attack. He gave me a list of groceries to buy for him and left.
As I look back on this, I wonder how all of this was okay with me. I wonder how I let it even get this far. But the answer comes quickly and easily: I was in love with God. I was in love with the idea of nirvana and Enlightenment and I was sure this was the path and these were the guides. Raised Catholic, I had been repelled by the fear and rigidness of that practice, but this tantric Buddhist mysticism, on the other hand, seemed real, like something I could do. It seemed like it was filled with life and love and hope and gratitude, rather than fear and hate and judgment and restrictions. I never doubted for a second that Lakshmi would lead me to my own Enlightenment, my own understanding of the Truth, by helping me finally merge my mind with God in an experience of nirvana that all the saints talked about.
Meanwhile, Lakshmi seemed to be getting brighter and more powerful with each passing month. She would have us do open-eye meditations during her events, and many of us could see gold light and colors shooting out of her hands as she performed mudras. I saw her shape-shift into Jesus and Padmasambhava and Saint Clare of Assisi and Mary Magdalene. I began to believe she had either been these people in past lives or studied with them. My ability to meditate was improving, so I would be blasted into seemingly higher realms of light when I was around her, which filled my mind with the most exquisite silence and peace, as if I had been carrying two thousand pounds my entire life and was relieved of the load each time I was with her. I became even more willing to do whatever she suggested.
One day, on the phone, she told me I still had “too much time on my hands” and assigned The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna—over a thousand pages of tiny font. It taught me that one should view one’s guru as God. That step for me, at this stage, was not too large to take. I became convinced that Lakshmi was an incarnation of God. I became even more willing to serve her in any way she needed.
“When you travel, you should fly in first class and stay in only very expensive hotels,” she told us. “Everything is energy, everything is vibration. Even the scientists will tell you so. If you fly in first class and stay in nice hotels you will be less energetically drained, leaving you in higher mind states, with more energy to meditate and to apply to your job.”
She also told us that as we meditate more and more, we become more open and will be able to feel much more, including all the people who have slept in a hotel bed. I believed her. I put my head on a hotel pillow and saw thousands of faces flash through my mind. I felt unbearable psychic pain in the mattresses. It wasn’t very long before I couldn’t sleep in a hotel bed. I had to pull the bedding off and sleep on the floor. Meditation was making me so sensitive that the only people I wanted to be around were Lakshmi and Vishnu.
And I have to admit: I liked the nice hotels. I liked flying first class. I liked wearing designer business suits and running a company. I really liked this new version of me, and even though she was so drastically different from the old version of me—maybe because she was so drastically different—I believed I was headed exactly where I wanted to go: freedom, nirvana, Enlightenment.
Valentine’s Day approached, and Vishnu told me I would be spending it with him. I wondered if it meant we would finally have sex. I spent the day getting ready—manicure, pedicure, and a bikini wax. I shopped for a new outfit and sexy lingerie. I got my hair cut, colored, and blow-dried. I arrived at his door, nervous and insecure, a bit frazzled from running around town all day. In my mind, I had prepared for him the most sacred gift I could: my body.
He looked incredibly handsome when he answered the door. He was barefoot, wearing dark jeans and a black Italian dress shirt open to the middle of
his chest, framing a beautiful turquoise and silver ankh that Lakshmi had bought him in Egypt. In the time we had been “dating,” he had whitened his teeth and switched from glasses to contacts. He had gotten a much more flattering haircut. Since he had started teaching karate to the sangha, he had gotten back into fitness, and his body had gone from lumpy, pasty, and white to muscular, lean, and tan. His open shirt showed off his strong chest, and the necklace glistened against his brown skin. His thick, dark hair was styled and combed back. The sight of him took my breath away.
He had made me dinner. It was very romantic. The dinner was quite good, and so was the wine; I allowed myself to become tipsy for the first time around him. After dinner, he took me up to the deck. He poured us each a glass of champagne and raised his glass to the sky, saying, “Here’s to Robert Linnell, a wonderful man and a wonderful father. Happy birthday.”
I started to cry. He had remembered that my father’s birthday was Valentine’s Day. I felt loved. I felt supported. I felt safe. Truly, for the first time with this man, I felt safe. And I felt incredibly attracted to him. He was not treating me like a student, like an employee, like a peon. He was finally and for the first time treating me like an equal, like a woman.
We went back downstairs and started making out. He sat on the sofa, and I climbed on top of him, facing him, with my legs wrapped around his waist, my arms wrapped around his neck.
He said, “One day I would like to show you what tantric sex is.”
Well, there I had it. We definitely weren’t going to have sex that night. After what felt like an hour of kissing, I went home.
He called the next morning and said, “You made a mistake last night.”
My heart dropped. “What did I do?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s your task to figure that out.”
I hung up the phone and cried. I thought about it all day long. What could I have possibly done wrong? What mistake could I have made? I had purchased all the groceries and the wine and dropped them off earlier in the day. It’s not like I had not contributed to the meal. Plus, I had been willing and even planning to sleep with him. At the end of the day, I called him.
“I can’t figure it out,” I said. “I truly have no idea what I could have done wrong.”
“Keep thinking about it,” he replied and hung up.
I cried again. Oh my God I was so confused. The night before had been so lovely. I finally felt attracted to him—truly attracted to him. For the first time with him, I finally felt safe—truly safe. And then this. I had no one to talk to about it, of course. I couldn’t tell anyone in the sangha, and I had no other friends left. I wished I could ask Lakshmi. I wished I could talk to my parents.
That night he called me. “So,” he said. “Did you figure it out?”
“No,” I replied.
“Drive over here, and I’ll tell you.”
I did. When he opened the door, I felt sick. I couldn’t bear the sight of him.
“Come in,” he said. We sat down. He was very serious.
“You brought no offering,” he said. “I am your Teacher, and you brought no offering. You should have brought flowers.”
Instantly, he reminded me of my mother. As soon as she allowed herself to open up and love me, as soon as I let my guard down and loved her back, she would close herself off and shoo me away. I hated this feeling. I hated him for making me feel this way.
First of all, he was not my Teacher! Lakshmi was my Teacher. Second, I had spent the entire day preparing the most precious and sacred offering I could for him: my body! I had no response.
I started to cry.
He hugged me and said, “You’re a new student, so you don’t know. It’s my job to teach you.”
I stayed as long as I felt I had to and then went home, where I continued sobbing. Why was I doing this? How could I let someone treat me like this? I cried all night long and woke up the next day ready to forgive. My self-doubt had kicked in, my clarity gone. I had been wrong. I should have brought an offering. I went back to work for him, back to running his errands, back to tidying up his house, back to making out with him as if nothing had happened. And I shoved my intuition and my power and my true sense of self just a little bit deeper into a very dark hole.
Chapter 12 Gone
In a child psychology class I took in college, I learned about intermittent reinforcement. In an experiment, chickens were taught to push a button with their beaks. In one group, each time the chicken pushed the button, a food pellet appeared. The chickens would peck at the button until they were full, then they would stop. In the second group, the chickens got rewarded with food at first but then consistently got nothing when they pushed the button. These chickens pushed the button a few times after the food stopped but soon grew bored and quit. In the third group, the chickens sometimes got a food pellet and sometimes did not. It was random. These chickens pecked the button until their beaks bled . . . and kept on pecking, never knowing if just one more push of the button would reward them with food. The result of the experiment: To strengthen behavior of any kind, use intermittent reinforcement.
Seeking love from an addict or a narcissist is an example of this. Sometimes you get the reward: love, warmth, acceptance, encouragement. Most of the time, you do not. The fleeting moments in which the person is loving and kind are random and unpredictable, and the desire for reward becomes unquenchable because you constantly believe it could come again with the very next attempt. You peck until your beak bleeds, and then you peck some more.
My mother was an alcoholic and a pill addict. In her dealings with me, she alternated between emotional abuse and absolute neglect, with a little bit of love and fun doled out in between. Our relationship scarred me deeply; it set me up to mold my romantic relationships on a toxic model, to seek emotionally unavailable men who loved me intermittently. But scattered among the bad times, she and I had a lot of good times together—laughing until we both peed in our pants. In those times, I felt she truly did love me, and I loved her. I was as codependent as a child could get; I always forgave her. I had to; she was my mother. And as a teenager, I went out of my way to antagonize her, to get the attention I knew it brought.
One of my favorite memories is when she came to visit me in California and we laughed ourselves to exhaustion trying to wrestle a very old queen-sized futon out of my apartment and down multiple flights of stairs to the dumpster because she wanted to buy me a “real” bed. That thing was so heavy. She kept talking to it, as if it were alive, “Come on, Futon. You can do this. Work with us, Futon. Just a little bit further, Futon.” We had to keep stopping not because we were exhausted but because we were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.
Another happy memory is of when I dragged her to the Amazon River for an adventure. She hated every second of it but tried so hard to pretend she was having fun, showering in cold water and schlepping through the jungle, getting attacked by mosquitos. At times like that, she was adorable. And so kind to so many people. And so giving to so many people. She was everything, really. Everything that we all are—all the dark and all the light. She had so much fear and pain inside her, and bless her little heart for overcoming it as well as she did in order to raise Gary and me. She was terribly abused by her own mother. She and her brother both were. Her brother couldn’t take it, killing himself when I was a kid. To get away from her, my mother married young to a man who also abused her. He pushed her down a flight of stairs when she was pregnant with his child. She miscarried, and then he abandoned her at a train station in Europe. Her mother would not let her return to the family home, saying she had disgraced the family, so she moved in with her aunt and put herself through school. Eventually, she got a job working for my father. She came a long way, from utter poverty and total abuse. In so many ways, she was incredibly strong.
A few weeks after planes flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I got a very strange call from my mother. She was in Colorado. I could har
dly understand her. It sounded like she had a mouth full of marbles.
“I’ve had a stroke, Honey,” she managed to say. “But don’t worry. I’m fine.”
Fine? She sure as shit did not sound fine. “I’m flying out there today.”
“No,” she responded slowly, the word straining out of her mouth. “Don’t. Bill arrives tomorrow, and I want to be alone with him.”
Bill was some Australian man my mother had met online. He was scheduled to arrive the next day to meet her for the first time. There was no way my mother was meeting anyone for the first time sounding the way she sounded. I demanded to speak to a doctor. She refused and hung up the phone. I called the hospital. I explained the situation and asked for someone to please tell me what was going on.
“Your mother had a massive stroke,” the nurse said. “In fact, it’s a miracle she survived. You need to get here immediately.”
I hung up the phone, quickly packed a bag, and drove to the airport.
It turned out my mother’s brain had started hemorrhaging the night before, but she didn’t know it. She got out of bed and fell, twisting her ankle and badly hurting her foot. She then waited until the morning, her brain hemorrhaging the entire time, and drove herself to the hospital, where she walked into the emergency room and said there was a problem with her foot. The triage nurse instantly noticed the stroke and got her to the proper doctor.
I arrived at the hospital to see my mother next to the registration desk, slumped over in a wheelchair. Apparently, she was on her way to the shower but had been left near reception by a nurse. Her hair was crazy, long and stringy and wild. She was wearing a faded, worn hospital gown. Her chin was resting on her chest. Her left arm hung limply in her lap, with her hand dangling between her knees.
The Burn Zone Page 11