• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1069 0

to cope with her own desperate impulses to continually rescue and caretake her daughter. She had to let Kim go, to allow her to find recovery on her own. Tennie even held a symbolic funeral for Kim to assist her as she let go of her daughter. She described to me how, over and over, hundreds of times, as her fears about Kim resurfaced and reanimated her grief process, she would visualize her daughter. In her mind’s eye, she gently held her daughter in her arms and carried her to the God of her understanding. Tennie described her God concept as a conventional image of a loving father and said she would lay her daughter in her God’s lap, turning Kim over to a Power greater than herself, who could do for Kim what no earthly parent, however loving and dedicated, ever could. Tennie would repeat this prayerful visualization as often as necessary.

I pondered my God concept and to what I might be able to turn over to each child, what I could entrust to them. A river’s edge came to me, and I saw a beautiful, mighty, flowing river, which I realized represented God’s will. I thought of myself and how I sometimes wade right in, abandoning myself to the care and protection of God’s will without hesitation. Sometimes, though, I sit on the riverbank, stuck in my self-will, watching the river flow right by, unwilling to take the steps necessary to put me in the graceful currents. Other times I step in, but only to my ankles, back turned on the river, staring at the bank, thinking about why I can’t have it both ways, self-will and God’s will. Or I come to God as I did tonight, on my knees, crawling, begging for it.

As this powerful imagery was coming to me, I received it as a gift being washed up on the shores of my conscious mind by something preternatural inside of me. I knew that it would work for me throughout my life. In my mind’s eye, I was on the brothel roof. I picked up each child one by one. I cradled them, kissed their foreheads, tenderly said their names, and squeezed them into me, swaying gently as I walked them to the river’s edge. There, like Moses’s mother, I accepted my limitations and set them in the river of God’s love, which could take them someplace I never could.

Aadarshini

Yamuna

Nabhendu

Asiya

Aarti

Utterly drained, but now with some degree of peace, I thanked Tennie and hung up the phone. I carefully placed the small pieces of paper in a small fabric bag, and set them on my bedside table by a flower and a picture of Dario. I lay on my side, staring. I could put the kids in the river, but I couldn’t quite let go of the scraps. I trusted I would know when it came time, whether casually or in ceremony, and I knew it would be an enormous act of faith on my part that I wasn’t ready for just yet. The scraps were a way of hanging on, just a little longer, to the delusion that I have some control, some influence. Giving them up would mean accepting my limitations all over again, knowing there are things I cannot, and will not ever, know, such as how each child’s life turns out, if there would ever be peace. But I can hope, and I can believe. Along with hard work, it’s all that is asked of me.

That evening, I invited our group to a sharing circle in my room, during which each one could, if she wished, process their Mumbai experiences. Seane regaled us with her thoughts about her time with the women of Sanghamitra. It was ironic for a Westerner to teach yoga in the country where it all began, but the prostituted women of India are so isolated from their society that the benefits of their great traditions are often lost to them. Helping them to bring some healing to their own bodies, an antidote to the abuse heaped on them for years, was her dream. As always, Seane received much more than she gave in this simple act of service. She came back bursting with respect for their activism, heralding their life experience as the expertise the policy-makers and governments actually need.

We tried to process together every night as a way to release the emotions that surfaced during our time in the field. It is important