The Burn Zone

by Renee Linnell

  I had read about Enlightened Masters tormenting their students to test their commitment: The Tibetan saint Milarepa built a house stone by stone for his Teacher Marpa and was told to collapse it halfway through and rebuild it just a few feet away, three different times, as a way to erase his past karma. I figured I was erasing my past karma, and I simply refused to quit.

  The next event rolled around, and the women in the sangha were noticeably frumpier. Many had gained weight. Almost all of us wore draping, loose clothing. I had bought a whole new wardrobe, my tiny body hidden under a tent of fabric. Lakshmi singled me out again while talking about past lives.

  “You have had many past lives as royalty,” she said to a student sitting in front of me. “Not you, Renee. You were a prostitute,” she spit at me, then turned back to the student in front of me and continued.

  I made excuses for this behavior. It’s the occult, I said to myself. The occult is really hammering her to get her to stop teaching us. Or, She is so pure, and she simply can’t take the pressure of being in this world. She needs Vishnu by her side 24/7 to protect her.

  “We have to stop seeing each other,” I would tell Vishnu. “We have to stop sleeping together.” I would wail, “It’s killing Lakshmi.”

  Finally, he agreed. We went back to the way it was before we started having sex. I spent much less time at the house, and Lakshmi pretended Vishnu still loved her. I only saw her during class weekends, and each time I did, there was so much light coming out of her that I reaffirmed to myself, It has to be the occult. There is no other explanation. There is no way she can spread this much light and not be Enlightened.

  And then Shiva died. His two consorts called the house one night. I had just finished serving Lakshmi and Vishnu dinner. I had no place on that call. They had known Shiva for over ten years; I had only met him twice, but we all got on the phone. Vishnu and Lakshmi were devastated. As soon as we hung up I wanted to go home, to give them space to grieve, but Vishnu insisted I stay. He wanted me to sleep over, to “comfort” him.

  I tried to sleep in his bed, but I couldn’t. Then we heard Lakshmi screaming. Vishnu ran upstairs and was gone an hour. When he came back, I told him I had to leave, and he said, “No. You are coming upstairs to spend the night with Lakshmi and me.”

  I knew that Shiva had lived with both of his consorts. I knew that when the women weren’t with him, they were romantically involved with each other. I wanted nothing to do with a relationship like that. Was Vishnu suddenly suggesting we start one?

  Timidly, I walked upstairs to Lakshmi’s room. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at me with hate in her eyes, but said nothing.

  Vishnu looked at us both and said, “We are all one family, and we are going to spend the night together.” He got in the middle of Lakshmi’s bed. Lakshmi reluctantly crawled in next to him. I sat down on the edge of the bed, then lay back, staring at the ceiling, trying to take up as little of the bed and be as far away from Vishnu as possible. Lakshmi faced Vishnu and put her arm across his chest. Then she told me to do the same. I rolled onto my side to face Vishnu and placed my arm across his chest. My arm was now touching Lakshmi’s. We lay there in awkward silence for a few minutes before Vishnu started snoring.

  I am pretty sure Lakshmi and I lay awake all night. Neither of us moved. Finally, as the sky began getting lighter, I fell asleep. I awoke not much later. Vishnu was still sleeping. Lakshmi was sitting up in bed, glaring at me. Her usually blue eyes were now a deep, evil green, filled with hate. I got up and went home. I never wanted to see Lakshmi and Vishnu again.

  I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about my relationship with Vishnu and Lakshmi, about how they were “behind the curtain,” but I had to talk to someone before I completely lost my mind. I called Lisa on my drive home, and she invited me over for coffee. I didn’t give her details, but I told her I was starting to doubt our teachers. I said I wanted to quit.

  She listened and then reminded me that Lakshmi was Enlightened. She retold a tale Lakshmi had told us in a class: The katana, the Japanese Samurai sword, is one of the strongest blades in the world. For three days and three nights, smelters shovel up to twenty-five tons of iron-bearing river sand and charcoal into a furnace, creating a single batch of tamahagane, which is then fired at high temperatures but never allowed to reach a molten state. A swordsmith then heats, hammers, and folds the tamahagane repeatedly in order the blend the iron and carbon—but also, and more importantly, to draw out any remaining impurities. If impurities are allowed to remain, they will weaken the sword.

  “You are just being heated up, hammered, and folded down,” Lisa said. “To remove your impurities. That is going to make you sharper, right? And stronger than any other.”

  I smiled through my tears. She was right. This was what I had signed up for. This was The Warrior Path. I went back to work with a vengeance. I was not going to give up.

  Chapter 18 Flip Flops

  Our next Power Trip approached. This one was to the Grand Canyon. Even though I had organized the trip, while there my duties were kept to a minimum so that Lakshmi and Vishnu did not have to interact with me. I stayed in my room much of the time. In the meditation events I sat in the back. I stayed as small and as invisible as I possibly could, the way I had learned to be around my mother as a child. While at the Grand Canyon one day, I sat on the edge and contemplated jumping in.

  If Lakshmi told me to jump, I would, I thought. I was that committed to her now. I honestly believed that if she told me to jump, it would blast me into Enlightenment—whatever the hell Enlightenment was. And sticking around was causing me so much pain I honestly thought jumping might be better.

  When we returned to California, Vishnu became even more controlling. He said he was getting closer to Enlightenment and needed me available in case he “went through the door.” Suddenly, he was too sensitive to do much of anything. Even Lakshmi began waiting on him. He wanted me to text him constantly and report on my whereabouts. He wanted me to buy more and more obscure groceries every day, and when I would call him to clarify, he wouldn’t answer the phone, saying later that he had been in somadhi (the highest state of meditation). He took over teaching Lakshmi’s classes again and ramped up our karate classes, making everyone bow to him as much as possible in both.

  He wanted me to get an alarm put on my house, saying that Dark Beings would be attracted to the light coming out of my house because he had spent time there. He told me I could not trust people, that they all wanted to steal my energy. Like moths to the flame, he said, dark, broken people would seek me out and cling to me because I had been sleeping with him and his light was “flowing through me.”

  One night, I came home late after doing a task with Lisa for Lakshmi. I walked into my office to send Lakshmi an e-mail. My computer was gone. What the hell? I called Vishnu, afraid.

  “I told you so,” he said. “I told you people would break into your house. Is anything else gone?”

  I was suddenly very afraid. He stayed on the phone with me while I checked everywhere in the house. My tango dresses were all gone. My tango shoes and expensive high heels were gone. My lingerie was gone, and so was my makeup and my new purse.

  “Whoever broke in knew they had time and knew exactly where I kept everything,” I said. “They came in through the window.” I could see that the screen was bent. In the guest bedroom, where the window overlooked the street, the horizontal blinds were slightly askew in one area. Someone had been a lookout.

  I had always believed I was safe in this world. Suddenly, I felt very unsafe. Vishnu was right; I should have listened. Suddenly, I doubted myself even more. Maybe I really had been incredibly naïve my whole life. I couldn’t trust myself or my instincts; they were clearly leading me astray. I couldn’t trust anybody; they could all be moths drawn to my flame, even my sangha mates.

  I realized the only person I could trust was Vishnu. I clung to him even more, spent more time with him. We began sleeping together again. Lakshm
i sensed this—or he told her. Either way, she did not handle it well.

  “Get her out of my room!” she screamed. “Goddammit, Vishnu! She is killing me. Get her out of my room!”

  Lakshmi had just landed at the California airport, and I was getting her room ready for her. I had washed and pressed the sheets, fluffed and folded her towels. I had put fresh flowers in her bathroom and on her dresser. I had opened the windows to let in fresh air and sunlight. I had Mozart playing on my iPod and mini speakers to raise the vibration in her room, and I was just lighting incense to clean it energetically when Vishnu walked up with the phone to his ear. I could hear her screaming through it. I was stunned.

  This woman hates me, I thought.

  I put down the incense. I turned off my iPod. And I walked downstairs, got into my car, and left.

  After that, I avoided the house when Lakshmi was in town, but when she was gone I continued to spend a lot of my time with Vishnu. He was protecting me, I thought. With him, I felt safe. Plus, I had nobody else.

  I listed my house for sale and began looking for a new one closer to Vishnu. Bruno was a real estate agent and showed me a few. When I showed up to meet him one day, he looked at me with sadness in his eyes.

  “I miss you,” he said.

  We used to surf together, go eat together, go to movies together, laugh together. We didn’t do that anymore. Vishnu wouldn’t approve.

  He looked me up and down and said, “You seem so sad, are you okay?”

  “Of course I am okay,” I answered, annoyed. I caught my reflection in my car window. It was warm out, and I was wearing a long skirt and a long-sleeved tunic, both three sizes too big for me. They looked like sacks. My shoulders were hunched over, protecting my heart. I was a specter of my old self, a shell. I was fragile and weak and broken.

  I did not believe Bruno when he told me I didn’t look well.

  He can’t see clearly, I thought. He’s addicted to the world. I shoved him further away, stopped returning his calls the way I did with everyone else who truly loved me.

  One day, I showed up to work in Vishnu’s garage. After a few hours, I walked into the house and asked where my flip-flops were; I wanted to walk down to the beach. In the beginning of our relationship, he had insisted I keep some of my belongings at his house. He wanted a set of my lingerie to keep in his bedroom and he wanted me to keep a pair of my flip-flops on the shoe rack in the closet by his front door.

  “They’re in the garage,” he said. “You shouldn’t leave them in the house. When your Teacher looks at your shoes, he gets hit with your attention, and you should not be in your Teacher’s attention.” He was referring to himself. This man that was fucking me. This man that was letting me buy all his groceries, do his cooking, run his company, and do his errands. He could not look at my flip-flops. My size-six, cute, dainty, pink flowered flip-flops. Not some old ugly stinky worn sneakers or hiking shoes or slimy Tevas. Tiny pink flip-flops. This man that was fucking me. He could have his body inside mine but he could not look at my shoes? And they were not strewn haphazardly around the house, in the middle of the floor. They had been left neatly side-by-side on the shoe rack in the closet!

  I stood there with my mouth open. I had arrived to spend another day in his garage sorting through bullshit for no pay—while he went to the beach.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I love myself too much to let you treat me like this. You have some serious problems. The only way Lakshmi can handle putting up with you is because she is an Enlightened saint. I don’t care if I never become Enlightened. I simply cannot be your consort any longer.” I walked out the door, got in my car, and left.

  It was over.

  I was finished.

  He called me that night and said he didn’t feel well and asked if I would come over and make him dinner. I said no but that I would order delivery for him. He didn’t talk to me for days after that. I still felt an obligation to honor my commitment to Lakshmi and her company. I kept working. He ignored my phone calls and e-mails. I began to panic. Maybe I had made the wrong decision. The self-doubt set in yet again. Maybe the occult had finally pushed me off the path. I had to make amends. I e-mailed him and asked him what I needed to do to be forgiven for not making him dinner. I left him a voicemail with the same message.

  He responded by e-mail: Your ego is huge, and you are in serious jeopardy of ruining your karma forever. You must sand down your humungous ego. You can start by writing the Code of the Samurai one thousand and eighty times.

  The Code of the Samurai is about three pages long. A thousand and eighty times comes out to 3,420 pages, but I did it. It took weeks, writing every day until my hand cramped, but I fucking did it.

  I submitted my one thousand and eighty writings of the Code of the Samurai in two beautiful leather-bound notebooks.

  Vishnu threw them on his desk and told me that I had three days to hand over all the files I had compiled while working for them, that I had to make a document listing everything my job entailed, that I had to return my ring and the katana he had given me, and that Lakshmi had given me a “new task”: to go get a full-time job at a corporation and to go back to school so I could become a computer programmer.

  In a very serious voice, he said, “When you decided to become my consort, you made a bid for power. And you failed. This will ruin your karma. In the future, you will be presented with a chance to redeem yourself. You better not fail again.” Then, as an afterthought he added, “I am a patient man. I can wait.”

  I was too numb to respond. I couldn’t imagine getting a full-time job at a corporation with a background in dance; I was terrified of trying. I wished I could undo what I had done, could go back to serving them and running their company, but I knew I could not. Now I just wanted the phone call to end so I could lie down and cry.

  I met Vishnu at the dojo/dance studio the next day to return the katana and the ring. Dressed in my gi, I kneeled in seiza in front of him and pulled the katana from its sheath, showing him that the blade had not been damaged in any way. I returned it to its sheath, presented it to him, and then bowed my head low to touch the ground.

  As I did so, he began to yell, “If you want to become Enlightened, change! If you want to have love in your life, change! If you want to stop being egotistical and selfish and cruel and immature, change! If you want your life to improve, change!”

  This man thinks he is screaming at me, but he is screaming to himself, I thought, seeing clearly how much he despised himself, seeing clearly how he was and had been projecting onto me all of his flaws, keeping my head low so I did not have to look at him. My God, did I make the right decision.

  I went home and felt incredibly relieved. I felt light. I felt free. I had done the right thing, I was sure of it. I compiled the files and cleared everything I had recently built up on my new computer. I handed it all over to his new assistant and began looking for jobs. It was June 2009, and the economy had crashed. Everyone was talking about not being able to get a job. As an ex-dancer and model, I really only had the work experience I had gained working for Lakshmi and Vishnu; I barely knew how to use a PC. All my adult life, I had feared working for a corporation. That was something other people did. Not me. I was a dancer. I couldn’t handle it. But Lakshmi sensed that, she sensed my fear, and she gave me the one task I dreaded.

  The one task I was sure I could not do.

  Chapter 19 How It Happens

  It happens so slowly. So insidiously.

  At first it is like winning the lottery: You think you’ve finally found someone who understands you, someone who seems like she knows what you’ve been looking for. She sees the true you, the bigger you, the you hidden inside, the you no one else can see, the you that was meant for greatness. You sit in front of this person, and you feel so much Light; you feel God.

  She showers you with love and attention, builds you up. Suddenly, you are doing things you never knew you could. You are growing and expanding. You meet like-m
inded people. You have a purpose, a guide. Finally, for the first time, you belong.

  You’re filled with new energy. Life takes on a magical quality. Every day is a new adventure. You want to tell everyone about your new Teacher, about your new friends. Many of them react strangely, not the way you had imagined they would. They react with fear, doubt, and worry.

  They just don’t understand, you tell yourself. They’re not wise enough to see, you say inside your mind. They’re asleep, you whisper to yourself.

  You continue your love affair with this new group, with this new Teacher. You spend more and more of your time following the teachings, more and more time with the other group members. Your life is changing in fantastic ways and you soon find yourself not wanting to be with the old friends who don’t understand this new you. You feel more comfortable with the other group members. You feel best when you’re with your Teacher, the one person who truly gets you.

  Your life slowly becomes filled with these new activities. There may be a long meditation practice to follow each morning, new tasks to do, books to read, movies to watch. You find yourself going on “field trips” with the group, outings with the Teacher. You stop returning calls from your old friends. Your family starts to annoy you; they ask too many questions and seem too skeptical. Your Teacher tells you that your family and your old friends don’t want you to change. They want you to stay small; maybe it’s best if you distance yourself from them so they don’t hold you back. You agree. Your family has always seen you a certain way; they don’t know this new you. Your old friends seem annoyed that you’re different. It’s easier just to avoid them. You change your phone number and your e-mail address, so your old friends can no longer find you. Slowly, but surely, everything that made you you gets dropped from your life. In your excited attempt to grow and try new things, you allow all your old favorite friends and activities to fade away. Before you know it, the group is your whole life. No one outside of it understands.