On Being Human Read online

  I became close with Rosie’s family after she died. Rosie never used the term beauty hunting, of course, but that girl was the fiercest beauty hunter I ever met. In her yellow nightgown and with all those tubes around her neck and in her arms, she was bow-and-arrowing her way to find the good. There was beauty in that room. And fear. Both existed at once.

  You can understand what I mean when I say how one Yes, I will be there can change the whole course of a life, and not just one life. Imagine that! One little Yes, I will come see you at the Wesley Woods hospital can do that!

  So, I will ask you this: How many moments have been missed because you said No, I can’t come to Wesley Woods hospital to see you?

  The exercise in which I ask people in the workshop to write a letter in the voice of someone who loves them is my favorite. The air leaves the room. The way people’s hands tremble when they read the letter out loud, and the way their voices shake and tissues get passed around, but all eyes stay on the person reading the letter. This is the way everyone really just wants to be seen and heard. Don’t you, too?

  Becoming the Connector

  I can think of all the clichés: yoga found me; when the student is ready the teacher shall appear; yoga had been in me all along. And I want to punch them all in the face.

  Even though my workshop On Being Human isn’t yoga, not in the traditional sense—little about me is traditional in the traditional sense—“yoga” does mean “union” or “connection,” and that is what I do in my workshops in my nontraditional way.

  Even as a child, my nickname was “The Connector.” Also, “The Worrywart.” (This sounds like my Yiddish grandmother, my Bubbe.) Aside from my workshop being about connection (the thing everyone ends up saying to each other during and after the experience is, “I got you”), yoga was the conduit for my workshop. I have always believed myself to be terrible at most things (typing, cleaning, baking, sewing, math, returning e-mails) except connecting. I excel at connection. And deep listening despite my deafness. I am now able to bring groups of people together because I used some of my street skills and my instincts to craft something that was outside the box and make it my own.

  My connector skills were helped along by waiting tables for five hundred years (well, thirteen and a half), so I had what you would call people skills, if not serving ones. I was a terrible waitress. I would remember in the middle of the night that Table 32 wanted Cholula sauce or someone asked me for a Grasshopper (mint, wheatgrass, pineapple, ice, blended). I was the worst. If I waited on you during my serving years, I apologize if I messed up your order, brought you the wrong check, double-charged you for your latte, spilled your latte, brought your latte cold, dropped a hair on your plate, made you repeat yourself seven times as I squatted by your table so I could be eye-to-mouth with you and read your lips while I was still in denial that I was deaf. But I’m not sorry if I rested my hand on your shoulder or made you laugh or remembered you from the last time. I was a terrible waitress but a pretty decent human.

  On top of my connecting and (forced) listening skills, I’d also studied acting and was a writer (albeit a writer who wasn’t writing), so I combined all these things and voilà! I created my yoga-not-yoga workshops.

  People are always asking me, “But how did you start doing this? How did you go from working at The Newsroom as a waitress for almost two decades to being a guest on Good Morning America with your Karaoke Yoga and doing your self-designed retreats all over the world? How?”

  I get messages like these on a daily basis. People asking me for tips (tips!) on getting started or wanting to know how I went from wanting to die and hating my life and my body and everything about myself to not wanting to die and loving my life a good majority of the time, even when it’s difficult. It’s worth noting that I did not say, from wanting to die and hating my life to being happy all the time and loving my perfect life. I love it, most of the time, but not all the time. My life is not perfect (is anyone’s?). An Instagram filter is just a filter that obscures the hard edges of reality.

  So when people ask me for advice on how to get started, I wonder: Started with what? I just woke up and I was leading retreats to Italy and I was writing a book and my son was potty-trained and I was comfortable feeling my feelings instead of thinking that they would kill me.

  What a load of crap. I also wonder what people mean when they ask, How did you get started?, because I can’t fully explain what I do. The way love and listening alchemize the fear in the room and turn strangers into friends, friends who stay friends and support one another across miles and through countless troubles. The way all the people who try so hard to hide who they are and what they are afraid of and what they want for themselves, until they don’t. Until they stop hiding and they let the snot fly and they let themselves truly be seen. In other words, they let themselves become fall-in-loveable, a word I made up.

  As my workshop started to morph into something more than yoga poses, I began to feel like I was falling in love with everyone in the room who allowed themselves to be vulnerable. And it dawned on me that the part of them I was smitten with was the side they probably tried to hide, just as I had done with my own vulnerability or perceived weaknesses. It wasn’t people being strong or snarky or guarded who made me want to know them more, who made me want to wrap my arms around them. It was the ones who had snot dripping from their nose, who whispered, I am afraid, who admitted they had no idea what they were doing. It was the ones who let themselves be silly and sing out loud, the ones who told the truth, the ones who shared their stories wholeheartedly. It was when they started to take off their armor and soften that I felt that surge of love, the same one I feel now when my son says Mommy, or when he wakes with his hair sticking straight up. It was the feeling I got when someone was utterly themselves without any self-consciousness, when they allowed themselves to be seen. What is more desirable than that?

  My workshop is an exercise in allowing yourself to be fall-in-loveable. To make that original connection with yourself. It’s also about falling in love. I fall in love every day. (Sorry, Robert, my sweet husband.) I look at people with their quivering lips and their rounded shoulders trying to hide their hearts as they say, “I am afraid I will be alone for the rest of my life,” and I fall so totally in love with them that I want to take them home to my one-bedroom apartment and make them coffee and say, You’re not alone, I got you. I want to say, Everything is going to be okay. So I do.

  I have spent my whole life trying to hide who I was, trying to hide my clinical depression and my hearing loss and my swallowed grief and the fact that I was a college dropout and that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I also hid that I wanted a big, beautiful life and I wanted to make an impact on other people’s lives and make them big and beautiful, too. And then I stopped hiding. When I started to get honest about who I am, people started to . . . wait for it . . . respond to me. They started to say things like, You make me feel less alone. I thought I was the only one. Thank you for being honest.

  I was like, Um, all I have to do is tell the truth about who I am? And no one answered, but I took that as a resounding YES because people were coming to my workshops and reading my writing and I felt purposeful, full of passion, fueled by equal parts grit and grace. I was afraid that if I told the truth, I would shrivel up and die or get rocks thrown at my head. I was worried that if I let myself feel things, I would explode, and there would be nobody there to pick up the pieces.

  I did not shrivel up and die, get rocks thrown at my head, and I certainly did not explode (although I felt like I might at the very end of my pregnancy).

  So when people say, How did you get started? I want to respond, Started with what? I don’t know what to call this thing I do, this On Being Human workshop, I don’t know what category it falls into, how to label it. It’s not a yoga workshop, per se. It’s not a writing workshop, not really. It’s an experience, yes, but there is no gear involved: no zip lines or fancy equipment.

  But it is something. Just because I can’t put it into a box doesn’t mean it does not deserve to exist or that it doesn’t make an impact. I don’t want to be in the box, anyway. I call the box “The Just-A Box.” Just a yoga teacher. Just a teen. Just a mom. Just a girl. Just a waitress. Just a wife. Just a teacher. I reject that box. Fuck that box. It serves no purpose for me, and it likely doesn’t for you, either.

  Just because we can’t name things does not mean they don’t have a place or value in the world. Isn’t that part of being human? Not being able to define ourselves in a word? I can’t tell anyone how I started this thing, because I don’t even know what it is.

  The truth is, I am afraid to look back and remember my journey because it’s so much easier to be a walking-dead person with no awareness and to just keep moving, all the time moving forward. But that’s not really easier. That’s your Inner Asshole talking (further referenced as your IA) and it tells you lies. Dirty rotten lies.

  It’s easier to act like I have always been here so I don’t have to revisit any of the darkness. What if I get stuck there? What if I wake up and want to die again? What if it hurts too much? What if I become the “old me” again?

  * * *

  •••••••••••••

  SO WHEN PEOPLE SAY, How did you get started with this, like, you know, yoga workshop? I get annoyed—“It’s not yoga, okay?” But then I stop and ask my IA to step aside and I peer into my coffee-filled mind and imagine my shock and surprise when I see the truth.

  I am still the “old me,” and yes, it is yoga.

  I teach all these people around the world not to care (so much) about what others think and yet here I am, terrified I will get lab
eled as a woo-woo yoga person, so I don’t acknowledge the thing that got me to where I am. Yoga opened the door that said DON’T GO HERE, and I went in. The keeper of that door was my IA, and yours is the gatekeeper of your door, too. When you open the door to the place that says DON’T GO HERE, you find a roomful of people waiting for you, saying, “Ah, there you are. We’ve got you. We’ve been waiting.”

  Yoga unlocked the door and I went in and sat down on the mat and told my Inner Asshole to be quiet, and surprisingly, it did. Then, the next day, it was there again, saying, DON’T GO HERE, so I told it to be quiet. Again. And I did it every day. On my mat.

  A few weeks ago, I heard a story on NPR about a priest in Naples, Italy, who is trying to bring together the Mafia and art. Naples is rumored to be filled with Mafiosi and trash. I spend a lot of time in Italy leading my retreats and have been warned not to go there. They’ll con you in Naples, people say. They’ll take you for a ride, if you know what I mean, they say. They will drive you in circles and overcharge you in the taxi. Be careful in Naples. I’ve only been once. To the train station, where I took a picture of a magnet that said Napoli because I have people who are like family with that last name. The story on NPR talked about a priest who discovered a treasure trove of early Christian art under the cobblestone streets. Oh, I like this, I thought as I turned up my hearing aids, which are remote-control operated through the Bluetooth on my iPhone, and thought about my term: beauty hunting. NPR said, “Loffredo says crime families often feel trapped by a life they were born into and are eager to find alternatives for their kids. So he put them to work fixing up the seriously neglected catacombs. Mud and dirt covered much of the floor; an old lighting system left much of the artwork in shadows; and a storeroom had been stuffed with waste and old equipment from a nearby hospital. All of it had to go.”

  Loffredo said, “When we started they were sixteen-year-olds. Now they’re in their twenties, and they’re paid because they are entrepreneurs. It’s not hard to offer alternatives to crime if you’re creative and available.”

  This priest in Napoli is a beauty hunter. He mentioned that crime families often feel trapped by a life they are born into and I thought: Don’t we all.

  We’re all crawling and clawing our way to get out from the catacombs of what we think we believe our destiny to be. We are, each of us, beauty hunters, whether we want to be or not. It’s part of the human condition. In fact, it’s the most beautiful part.

  Don Loffredo says this about the mafia: Don’t fight it, cure it, by offering something beautiful in its place.

  * * *

  •••••••••••••

  THIS IS A BOOK about how I got to where I am. How I crawled and clawed my way out and how, some days, I am back in the catacombs. And how that’s okay. I’ll tell you how the moments in my life that have haunted me have also made me who I am today. That they have been transformed through the alchemy of togetherness and salvation into moments where strangers come together, as they do, around the world, in rooms with me. This book will take us through some of those rooms, both dark and light, and into rooms yet to be built.

  At the end of my life, when I say one final What have I done?, let my answer be, I have done love. I say that a lot, but my god, don’t you want that so desperately that you can taste it and it’s like the best thing you’ve ever tasted and you want it all the time and you know what?

  You can.

  CHAPTER 1

  Rewrite Your Story

  Memory: Lost and Found

  BEFORE I WAS BORN, I was a memory. A feeling my mother once had, her grandmother Rose holding her in her lap, before Rose had the breast cancer, before it ravaged her body, before her broad shoulders began to slump with the weight of defeat and dying and the wrenching chemotherapy.

  Before I was a memory, I was my mother’s little head being cradled into her grandmother’s chest, after she’d been released from the hospital, after she had run, in her five-year-old body, out into a rural New Jersey road and a car ran over her tiny head.

  * * *

  •••••••••••••

  ROSE LIVED WITH my mother’s family at the time. Bubbe Rose was the only one who ever showed my mother any kind of affection or attention, besides my mother’s own sister, Ellen. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, Marion, saved money by never turning on the lights. She kept plastic on the sofa for protection. Cockroaches scurried over the dirty floor. She sat in the dark for hours on end.

  My mother, at five years old, wanting to die, ran out right in front of a car and that car drove over her.

  My mother floated over the houses and imagined landing in one that welcomed her with, Hello! I am so happy you are here. I am so happy you are alive. I love you. There you are. We got you. We’ve been waiting for you.

  Isn’t it incomprehensible what the imagination is capable of? How deeply we want affection and love? How we are, even at five years old, willing to risk our lives to find it?

  There is a scar above my mother’s right eye, barely visible. I remember how my mother would always say, When your time is up, it is up, don’t be afraid. Her time was not up, it would seem, by her reasoning. Bubbe Rose pulling her into her bosom, Shh, Bubbelah, I love you, it’s going to be okay, and my mother closed her eyes and saw only her own mother saying, I wish you were never born.

  My mother took her grandmother’s love and placed it somewhere inside of her next to the darkness of being unwanted and unloved and I grew from that. An idea as inconceivable as being run over by a two-ton vehicle and surviving with only a tiny scar that has to be pointed out to be noticed at all.

  When my mother’s grandmother Rose got to the end, my mother held her hand and whispered, Shh, shhh, it’s going to be all right, reaching inside of herself and away from the darkness to that memory of safety and love, and there she found the idea. The idea was this: I can give this away, this love, I do not have to keep it here in the dark, I can give it away and create more, even if I don’t remember what it feels like to be loved. I can create it.

  All the stories that live inside of me, that I am holding, both sustain and haunt me. The time when my mother was eighteen and had started working in Center City in Philly, at Rohm and Haas, a chemical manufacturer, where she worked in foreign operations marketing and airfreight. She’d bought all new clothes for the job, and came home once to find that her mother had taken a scissors and sliced through all of them in her closet. She sat and wept into half of a skirt, a sleeve, a pant leg, and yet, still, on every Mother’s Day, she sent flowers; she tried so hard to reach inside of herself and find a memory besides that of her grandmother Rose that said I love you, and when she could not find any, she begged her mother to love her, until she died all those years later when my mother was sixty-three years old. Please love me, please love me, please love me and my grandmother sealed her ears to those pleas and sat on her plastic-covered sofa in the dark and did crossword puzzles and complained about the weather.

  Before I was born, I was just a memory of love, and thank the gods of coffee and books for that memory, because if my mother did not have her grandmother Rose, if she was left to the machinations of her own mother, she would be forever stuck in that South Philly row house. My grandmother was endlessly picking up men at the nightclub where she was the hatcheck girl. They were dangerous and mean. Sometimes my mother sat in a damp basement with the neighbor my grandmother left her with when she went on dates. I can imagine men pulling my mother to them, her small body a separate planet entirely. How could she have stayed in her body and endured?

  Luckily my mother had the memory somewhere inside that body she so often left, a memory of the love she had felt from her grandmother. Before we are molecules, we are memory. Every time my grandmother winced as she looked at my mother, every time she tried to unspeak her into not existing, that’s in me.