But, this one is see-through

In the food business, traceability is the way of the future. Know where your food comes from, follow it back through the supply chain all the way to the farm. Farm to fork. Its a spiritual experience, to take life and eat it. That's hard to do with most of our food the way it is being made and delivered now. Traceability means supply chain transparency, to see through the chain. Our supply chains are not see-through and it's difficult to know where food originally grew or where it went before it became a meal. Case in point, the Subway Tuna Scandal. Journalists for the New York Times doing their due diligence about a lawsuit against the Subway, the second largest quick serve restaurant in the world, bigger than Burger King, Starbucks, KFC or 46 other mega food stores that made the top 50 fast food global restaurants, they tried to trace the tuna in the Subway tuna melt. But, they couldn't. In fact, they couldn't even find any actual tuna DNA present. No tuna in the tuna. On the one hand, this makes me happy. Tuna are to the sea what lions are to the savannah, disappearing. There are very few big tuna left and I'm hoping that Subway secretly knows this and is lying to the public out of a conservation mindset, but since there's no transparency in the supply chain, it seems like nobody will ever really know.

In choosing a mid-life mantra, I'm thinking about choosing traceability, following the breadcrumbs of harmony all the way back to the source all the way to where everything is translucent, transparent even. The way to get there, I've heard, is by taking the road less traveled, cutting out the middle-man and by consuming only healthy snacks. It seems logical that by incorporating less and less of everything, and in general, by taking in only the littlest bit and letting everything else go, that the road to invisibility would get shorter, easier...faster. But, like so many things that I want now, practice is key and practice takes time. Practice removing obstacles everyday, over and over. With less incoming the load will get lighter and lighter, very very thin, whisper thin, wafer thin... transparent.

Many of the women I know practice practicing choice. There's maybe an over-abundance of choice. It's offered through the supply chain of ideas, a long and winding superhighway of anonymous idea farmers adding the tiniest extra pinch of sugar to the original sin. Even the busiest among them, especially the busy ones, practice choosing self-care. The self-care revolution is the great rescue plan for we women on the verge as a way to catch a bit of the harmonious style of happy that has been promised. We work very hard to cultivate a utopia of calm through relaxation. This paradox of self-care includes meditation and mindfulness. Focus on me! Time and energy to the self. I don't know much about the generational, omnigenders on other ends of the chain, but here for folks with middleageworkingmom DNA, self soothing and spiritual cultivation is a supreme force that demands practice and worship.

In my experience with meditation and mindfulness from the times I really focused on it, which is to say when I practiced, I was not a Mother. So, pre-Motherhood, meditation was oriented more towards the collective than the self. Ironic right? But, in the organized versions of meditation I frequented, in 'communities', meditation was always about cosmos-care. Tapping into the power of the One meant first you had to feed it a little. Like a venus fly trap. My teachers all held a common belief that required some measure of acknowledgement that self -consciousness doesn't really matter as much as the collective-consciousness. I think that's part of the pandemic lesson that we're skipping over. Its gotta be all of us or none of us. We are all connected, masked or not.

I've chosen teachers who have come and gone. I think a good teacher or spiritual guide is always a way forward or a way to Now. Forward and Now are both great places to visit. I often spend way too much time with future. My teacher MG, of the desert ashram, used to say "ah, know where you visit but where do you live?". I have had some of the best realizations about that, about living on Earth, and my place on it, thanks to a local witch. The point is, wherever you're going it's a good idea to pack a guide.

One thing I know now after years of multi-tasking mindfulness is that it only works if you choose One path at a time. Otherwise, the associated noise of too much choice becomes disincentivizing. I failed at juggling listening partnerships with embodiment sessions and community circles (even with a heaping spoonful of locally sourced witchcraft) for a limited time before it all got too woo-wooey for me. Wooey is the anti-release, it's the cellphone light in the movie theater. Too much choice leads is the way out of the moment and self consciousness, usually in the embarrassment realm. Seven years was my longest monogamous teacher/student relationship and like most outlets where the power source is one sided, my battery eventually stopped holding a charge.

I have great love for my teachers; Erich Schiffman, Michael Gottleib, Deepak Chopra, Gurmukh and multiple Mothers and Priests of the Episcopal church since I was young. From my experience all of these humans held or likely hold a common purpose that dedicated themselves to fixing and guiding, and they had a common cause. In my stream, all my teachers focused on some version of explaining and teaching how the Great Mystery or God holds the answers to the most complex ideas about and all around us. And, before we can ask, before asking the questions, before seeking anything, the requirement is to simply disappear. Meditation. Mindfulness. Prayer. Poof.

Gurmukh at Golden Bridge vibrated the prettiest and perhaps the most powerful disappearing act available to witness. I often say that I am an 80s lady who had no female role models (it's not true but you know what I mean). The 90's was my career building time when I could have used a female One, especially as I skip roped up the business ladder behaving like a man. I'm sure I could have found a woman mentor if I had looked harder. And, now upon new reflection, I find I had the perfection of feminine power mentoring me right off Sunset. Gurmukh. I paid for weekly Oneness with Gurmukh at her temple, The Golden Bridge, in the heart of Hollywood just around the corner from the Cineramadome (my actual temple).

Kundalini yoga paved the path to the weekly bath of radiance with rose petals and nag champa. The luminescence of this feminine force was proffered as a way up but I barely paid attention, it was too hard to hold my arms up for that many many minutes. Also, I can't really hum a tune without hearing myself be offkey amidst so many AMWs in the room. In spite of the super yoga mat freeway with all lanes open to the golden bridge, my path was blocked with self-consciousness. So, Gurmukh sort of came and went through my timeline. But, she was there. And, she was there for the better part of a year so something may have seeped into the cracks that were broken open by the Kundalini serpent. All that chanting was likely the basis for keeping me tied to Sanskrit classes at Loyola Marymount, Sundays with Rev. Anderson at All Saints Episcopal Church, the Ayurveda masterclasses, the Shambhala Center lectures, hours and capital spent at the Bhodi tree bookstore and of course the Jacumaba retreats in the high desert with Michael. I was a seeker in the 90's.

Years later, when I started my first solo album (aka starting a business) I felt much of the magic that I had witnessed in these moments of blissed out yoga. The creative charge that came to me in the early morning farm runs or late night logo making for the business was that heady, exhilaration journey of being lifted up up and away from the self into something bigger. Being an entrepreneur makes that journey easy. It just happens and you get to ride it. Meditation is much harder. Meditation is when you sit alone with yourself trying to make yourself disappear while you watch yourself doing it. Doing meditation was always an exercise in failure for me, because I found it too hard to look away from Me. Me was always warning me not to let go. Me is worrywort addicted to the future, not a pretty Sikh like Gurmukh.

The flirtations with Gurmukh led me to Sacred Movement in Venice which led to Shiva Rheam, Tiffany Cruikshank, Seane Corne, Max Strøm, and the aforementioned Erich Schiffman who all taught me how to drive a stick and soar through the cracks in the universe and back into the body. All that West Los Angeles county yoga served up on a sea of sweaty community Prana opened up the possibility of safe passage as a stow-away onto a crowded ship that could, potentially, maybe be headed all the way to God. I took regular community church Sunday field trips to Carol Anderson's sermons in Beverly Hills just in case. With yoga at my foundation, and ecumenical time card stamped, I was sufficiently pre-ordained to be so full of other people's dogma that the trip was sure to get me to at least one good off ramp exit. Still, it was really all about me. I was single then, so there was always the spec of stardust future possibility of getting lucky, a spiritual force multiplier.

Ah, but visiting with Gurmukh. The golden goddess herself. If only I had taken a closer look inside the request to make infinite arm circles. If I'd only gone beyond those tired arms and my own offkey singsong feelings of ridiculousness, and tried harder. I might have found salvation by now. With her jewels and white silken turban, the beads and the translucent skin, Gurmukh exuded light on every vibrational level. She embodied the femininity that comes before/with/through the force. She emitted enough light to power or destroy the greater Los Angeles area. All that was required to tap into eternal enlightenment was slightly more courage than it took to slide into a Chateau Marmont barstool. But, the Chateau gave out free MDMA and at the Golden Bridge you needed really strong arms.

I never found love at Golden Bridge. I never tapped into power. I Gurmukh and her brand of Kundalini yoga was transcending all the selfs simultaneously to make a connection way, way up there, higher than we know how to be on our own. The teacher can lift you up and hold you there for a minute or two, but you need your own wings to fly. The bell tolls for all of us, it's in our face with this virus. Some things are not a choice. In this moment we might cast our devotions upon this emergent occasion and instead of fighting the others or going it alone ~ we might all get something out of getting into the business and beauty of transparency, of seeing all the way through a self to something mightier ~ to One. Woo-woo- whoosh!