The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  But this time around, I was able to notice my mind’s habitual judgments and contractions for what they were—a misguided attempt to armor the vulnerability of my heart.

  When I finally introduced him to Forest, I discovered an added bonus: Forest thought he was wonderful too. Now almost nine, Forest had been studying martial arts since he was four and had recently started learning guitar. He immediately recognized Teja’s mastery in both areas. “You don’t happen to have any ninja throwing stars, do you?” he asked at one of their early meetings, referring to the weaponry he’d heard about in samurai stories.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” said Teja. And on his next visit, he brought them along and showed Forest how to throw them.

  For our first Christmas together, Teja gave me a necklace with an om sign on one side of its medallion, a yin-yang on the other—a symbol of his qigong practice meeting my yoga. He gave Forest a beautifully illustrated role-playing book titled Legend of the Five Rings.

  He also gave me a spacious, circular yoga mat—and as I spiraled and spun through my practice, I could feel the rectangular coffin-shaped box that I’d unconsciously been putting myself into start to dissolve.

  Two years after we met, Teja moved in with us. He set up a man cave in my in-law unit, where he could hunker down with his sixteen guitars; his samurai swords; a keyboard and a music stand; microphones, amps, and recording paraphernalia; bookshelves of writings on qigong, dharma, and neuroscience; Chinese calligraphies; stacks of zafus and zabutons; a closet’s worth of black Zen robes and crimson rakasus; wall hangings of Buddhas passed down from his great-aunt Leona, who had been a missionary in China in the early 1900s. It was a lair where he wouldn’t keep me awake when he stayed up late rehearsing folk harmonies with his band Samurai Wolf; and where he could retreat when Forest and his fourth-grade friends were howling through our living room, testing from how far away they could leap into a giant beanbag chair.

  And it was my favorite place to go on a date.

  * * *

  —

  It’s different finding a partner when so much of each of your lives is already behind you. I knew my ex-husband’s history almost as well as I knew my own. My new love and I had to assimilate each other’s pasts bit by bit.

  Over the weeks and months, we swapped tales. I told him how I used to make hot bran mashes for my horse, Kentucky Lady, on Christmas morning. He told me how he’d bought his first guitar at age nine with money he’d earned from his newspaper route—a cheap instrument with strings so stiff they made his fingers bleed. I told him about how I’d started practicing Zen in college, after I signed up for a class in world religions only because it didn’t meet too early in the morning. He told me how he’d grown up on stories of China from his great-aunt Leona—stories that inspired him to start training in martial arts at age fifteen.

  As I heard his stories, they gradually sank into me as if I’d shared them—as if his past were being transplanted into me, through our bodies as much as our words.

  * * *

  —

  Now, I imagine that I can see him with his brother in their teenage home in Des Moines. In the basement, they have set candles in wall sconces almost as high as the ceiling. They compete at taking running leaps into the air and kicking out the candle flames with their big toes—without knocking down the candles.

  I see him in his twenties, during a year in a Christian monastery—his curly brown hair past his shoulders, a cross hanging around his neck. I see him in his thirties, tumbling across a rock-hard aikido mat in a dojo in Iwama, Japan. I see him playing guitar in his forties at the Palau de la Música Catalana concert hall in Barcelona.

  Though I wasn’t there with him for any of that, when we touch each other I feel as if I find then nestled in the heart of now.

  His gray hair is shaved off now. I’m ten pounds heavier than I was before my son was born. I can’t do a drop back into a backbend. He can’t kick out a candle flame (though he can still snuff out the candles on a birthday cake with a flick of his wrist). We never knew each other as the young woman and young man we used to be.

  But when we wrap our arms around each other, the energy that flows between us has no age. And I feel that all of my previous incarnations are kissing all of his.

  SUTRA 13

  The Best-Laid Plans

  • • • • •

  FOREST IS NINE years old, with a 103-degree fever, and I’m having a spiritual breakthrough in our hotel room at the Dallas—Fort Worth International Airport.

  Well, okay, so maybe it isn’t exactly a breakthrough. Maybe it’s more of a little crack in the prison walls through which a ray of moonlight can shine.

  By prison, of course, I don’t mean the hotel room. We actually had a very comfortable seventh-floor room with a panoramic view of the runway. That is, we had it until Forest threw up all over the rug, at which point we got switched to an identical fourth-floor room with a panoramic view of the parking garage.

  No, by prison I mean those iron bars of thoughts and beliefs that…well, let me start the story a little earlier.

  * * *

  —

  A few months earlier, I had begun planning a two-week trip to Guatemala with Forest to study Spanish and live with a Mayan family in a remote mountain village on the shores of Lake Atitlán.

  I’d set up our trip through a nonprofit organization run by a young American couple who had made their home in Guatemala. The more they told me about our situation, the better it sounded. Our homestay family—Pedro, Gladis, and their three boys—could speak no English. We’d learn to make tortillas in Gladis’s wood-fired stove. Forest would accompany the ten-year-old, Selvin, to the village school. Every morning, we’d take Spanish lessons while looking out at the three huge volcanoes that ringed the shimmering waters of what Aldous Huxley called “the most beautiful lake in the world.”

  What could be better? I booked our flights for Forest’s February school vacation and began making plans.

  * * *

  —

  That’s what I do: I plan stuff.

  By the time I booked our flight that morning, I’d already planned a novel set in ancient Assam, a dinner of butternut squash and black bean tacos, a Skype conference with Forest’s fifth-grade teacher, an online yoga workshop, and a trip to Walgreens to buy wart remover. And I hadn’t even washed the breakfast dishes yet.

  There’s nothing wrong with planning, in and of itself—my plans have created some wonderful outcomes over the years (as well as, of course, some spectacular misfires). The problem is, my planning respects no boundaries. I plan while driving, while hiking, while washing my hair, while sitting on the toilet. I scribble my do-lists everywhere—crumpled napkins, torn-up envelopes, sticky notes, dream journals, the palm of my hand. I sit in meditation retreats planning to sit in future meditation retreats.

  For decades after starting my Buddhist practice, my incessant planning—amazingly—remained largely invisible to me. Sitting in meditation, I noticed the ice storms of fear; the tsunamis of lust; the endless reruns of disastrous love affairs and childhood disappointments. But my planning mind was a constant background hum I took for granted, like NPR on my car radio.

  But a few years before our Guatemala expedition, I’d actually begun to catch myself planning during my yoga practice. I’d always thought of my yoga as a sanctuary from the din of my thoughts—a sensual, intuitive, intimate realm I explore with no GPS. But then there I’d be, deep in a forward bend, swimming through a wordless flow of sensation and emotion—when I’d notice my own voice-over, preparing instructions to an invisible future yoga class about how to swim through a wordless flow of sensation and emotion. Or I’d be blissfully doing sun salutations under a tree on my deck when I’d catch myself planning a “yoga in nature” retreat, where I could do yoga under a tree on a deck.

  Suddenly it was as if a blacklight
had been turned on in my inner world—and all my invisible-ink planning was glowingly apparent, scrawled like graffiti over every available mental surface. I realized how often I slaughtered my actual life—the smell of bay laurels in the rain, the creamy surrender of an avocado to my spoon—on an altar to a ghostlike future. I saw how regularly I sat outside the wide-open gates of heaven, trying to order the keys online.

  I was horrified. All those decades of meditation and yoga, and things were still this bad? Surely there must be something I could do about it. There must be—well, a plan! So I promptly made one: To make planning itself an object of my mindful awareness. To learn how to live skillfully with a planning mind, without being ruled by it.

  That’s a good idea, I thought, grabbing for a scrap of paper to scribble it down. I should plan to write about it sometime.

  * * *

  —

  As our trip to Guatemala drew nearer, my to-do list drummed relentlessly through my mind, waking me up at two in the morning to bark commands: Update Forest’s hepatitis-A immunization. Buy travel-sized contact lens solution. Get international plan for cell phone. I loaded Speak Spanish with Michel Thomas into my car stereo and began repeating his useful phrases as I drove from errand to errand: Can I make a reservation for dinner tonight? What do you think of the political and economic situation in Argentina? My friend is a drunk.

  With each mental preview of our future trip, I thought of more items to add to my list. Forest typically got carsick on winding mountain roads: candied ginger. Forest should offer a gift to our homestay family’s kids: remote-control helicopter.

  The problem was, I’d squeezed the trip to Guatemala into some white space on my calendar, right between teaching a yoga retreat and rewriting a screenplay. A website that I’d helped develop was due to launch while I was away. Emails were sprouting like kudzu in my in-box. My life felt like a suitcase I’d stuffed too much into. Now I was sitting on top of it, trying to get the lid to close.

  Through studying my “planning mind” over the last few years, I already knew some tools for working with it—the first one being, of course, to notice and name it. As my trip grew closer and the planning crescendoed, one of my dharma teachers suggested some other inquiries: How much of my planning was redundant? What benefit did I derive from it? What feelings did it help me avoid? How did it help me bolster the illusion of a solid self?

  Again and again, I’d spread out my yoga mat, sit on my cushion, and offer a deep bow to my planning mind: Thank you so much, but not now. I’d draw my attention gently back to my body and notice the feelings that lay underneath the plans: the shallow breath, the gripped spine, the emotional cocktail of excitement and anxiety—wildly out of proportion, as if I were Jack Bauer on the TV series 24, with the clock ticking on my plans to purchase sturdy walking sandals and thereby avert worldwide nuclear annihilation. Apparently, deep in my cells, I believed that if I didn’t keep reciting the mantra of my REI shopping list, the entire universe would implode. And as my breath would slow, I’d look straight in the eyes of the demons that muttered and snarled under the veil of my plans: If I’m not planning, I’m not worth anything. I don’t even exist at all.

  * * *

  —

  The night before we left, Forest was so excited he didn’t fall sleep until after midnight. Walking into the airport, our carry-on packs strapped to our backs, he caught my hand and exulted, “We’re off on an adventure together! We’ve been planning it for so long and now it’s here!” But as our plane lifted off, he turned pale and droopy. He leaned against the hard plastic of the window and fell asleep, foregoing the usual thrill of watching the San Francisco Bay fall away below us. He turned down apple juice, and honey peanuts, and watching Megamind on the seatback video screen. By the time we landed in Dallas for our connecting flight to Guatemala City, his head was throbbing and he could barely lift his backpack.

  As I hustled him toward our departure gate, where boarding had already started, I looked at his face—pale and miserable—and knew I couldn’t get on another plane. I spoke with the gate attendant, who tore up our boarding passes and issued us new ones for the next day. Fifteen minutes later, we were checking into the airport hotel for what I imagined would be a night of recovery before flying on. Three hours later Forest was vomiting, with a high fever—and I knew we wouldn’t be doing a homestay with a family in Guatemala anytime soon.

  Forest was not only too sick to go on, he was too sick to fly home.

  We were stranded at the Dallas airport.

  Now, sitting up in his bed overlooking the parking lot, Forest is weeping with disappointment. “I’m supposed to be driving to Lake Atitlán today!” he sobs. “I’m supposed to be giving Selvin his helicopter!”

  I ache for him. I know the all-too-human pain of comparing your actual life to the one you had envisioned, and having it come up short. We’d pictured this day so many times—the shimmering water of Lake Atitlán, the bright clothes of the Mayan women washing their clothes at the well, Forest running down the cobbled streets with his new Guatemalan friends. We’d planned it so much that we had thought it was real—a solid future, just waiting for us to come and inhabit it. Instead, it has dissolved like the mirage that it always was. Instead, we are in an airport hotel, hearing the roar of a jet lifting into the air—filled with people, presumably, whose plans had worked out.

  Except that’s not true, of course, I remind myself. It’s safe to assume that every person on that plane has experienced derailments and disappointment in their lifetime far worse than our minor travel setback. What we are experiencing is not one of the big plan-shatterers—the bad blood test results, the phone call at two in the morning, the goodbye note on the kitchen table, the car swerving out of control on the patch of freeway ice. We are comfortable, safe, and well fed, I remind Forest (and myself). For heaven’s sake, we have room service.

  It isn’t as exciting as being in Guatemala, of course—but is even that true? If Gladis’s family could be dropped down in this room with us, would they find it tedious? Or would they enjoy the flat-screen TV with its on-demand movies; the built-in mini fridge stocked with Pringles sour-cream dip, Schlitz beer, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? And how do we know what our trip to Lake Atitlán would actually have been like? We are comparing reality with an airbrushed fantasy pinup—and in that context, reality generally comes up looking uncombed and disheveled.

  I decide to look at our stay in this hotel room—for however long it would be—as a mini meditation retreat. While Forest naps and recovers, I will meditate and do yoga on the travel mat I’d conveniently stuffed in my backpack. When he is awake, I will embrace being present with him as my practice. I will fully open to the trip that is actually happening and stop comparing it to the imaginary one I had planned. And I’ll try to remember that what is most important is not what is happening but how I relate to it.

  This has its challenging moments. As Forest’s fever climbs every night, he thrashes and moans and calls out in his sleep—“That’s my snitch! The snow is two- to three-feet deep!”—apparently deep in a game of nocturnal Quidditch on a ski slope. As I lie awake listening to him breathe like a winded racehorse, the primal fear of a mother facing the unknown for her child surges inside me—entirely disproportionate to the actual danger at hand.

  When I was a few years younger than Forest is now, my father was sent to Vietnam on a two-year posting—his third tour of duty there—and my mother took me and my older siblings to the Philippines to wait for him. I didn’t learn until years later that while we were there, my father’s helicopter was shot down in the jungle behind enemy lines. It was days before my mother heard that he had survived the crash and made his way to safety.

  Now, on my improvised meditation retreat at the airport hotel, I feel my mother’s fear bubbling up inside me from its lodging deep in my cells. No wonder I like to plan things, I think; no wonder I feel that disaster will s
trike if I don’t. Rattling in the back of my plans is the throb of my father’s helicopter flying over the war-ravaged jungles; the terror of my mother, waking up in the middle of the night with her children, far from home.

  I lie in bed and try to meditate with my fear—to greet it with metta, loving-kindness; to get to know it, make it my friend. Whenever I can’t stand it anymore, I get up and stand close to Forest’s bed, bending my face close to his to see how hot he is and if I need to call the emergency room now, or whether I can wait till the morning. The third time, he opens his eyes in exasperation. “Mom,” he says. “I’m trying to get some sleep here.”

  But for the most part—when I stop comparing things to my imaginary trip—the three days we spend in this one small room are actually quite enjoyable. With Forest dosed up on ibuprofen, we play chess and gin rummy and a Scrabble-like game called Bananagrams. We rent The Last Airbender, which we both agree is slightly more entertaining than watching the four-story parking garage out the window. When I want a real thrill, I walk down the hall to the ice machine and look out the window at the runway as I fill a water glass with ice cubes.