Cuckoolini in La La Land

I rolled into LA on the day that Michael Jackson died; June 25th 2009. It was hot as hell. There was a lot of traffic. And Hollywood Boulevard was absolutely jam-packed with mourners and fanatics who had come to pay their respects by littering his star with flowers and with photos and candles and oddly enough, gloves. Vendors had somehow already started peddling “King of Pop” souvenirs. T-shirts. Black fedoras. As if by some eerie wavelength they had already known before the rest of us. As I crept along the road, inch by inch, I watched a velvet glove float and land on the windshield of my trusty silver Honda Accord. I flicked my wipers on and swiped it away.

The radio had been blowing up with the news for the past couple of hours, as I had driven alone through the sweltering summer heat of the desert from Las Vegas. I really can’t remember if I was hungover, probably, but I do remember that I was sad. A pre-nostalgic kind of sad. A back to reality kind of sad. For I had just seen off two of my closest girlfriends at the end of our summer cross-country road trip. They were flying back to the East Coast to resume their lives, and I, well I, was not. I felt the heaviness contracting in my chest, knowing that even if I tried to do the same, I couldn’t. Because underneath those categoric sads, was another really big one. My Mom was gone, pancreatic cancer had taken her, therefore rendering life as I knew it utterly obsolete.

I drifted in and out of my thoughts and it was hard not to be distracted by the whole bizarre circus of the streets. My GPS was re-calculating up a storm as there were so many detours, I just couldn’t find Hawthorne, which was the street my cousin lived on in downtown Hollywood. I was tired. I was hungry. And I was running away from everything.

I don’t know what I expected to feel when I got there. I was excited, for sure, because my radically shifted life plan was to stay with my cousin for three months and see her life as an actress and a model in LA, and then move to New York to go to acting school. But I was also vulnerable and naïve. I was depressed without even knowing what that meant. And I didn’t have any friends there. My boyfriend thought I was crazy. I didn’t have a job or real plan of a day to day life. I thought I would audition for commercials or something, but when I mentioned that to my cousin she scoffed. As if I you could book a commercial only being here for three months. I longed for the feeling of connection that I thought I would find in a world of glamour and fame. I longed for something other than the emptiness I had.

When I arrived at her house it was cluttered and dirty and she informed me she was planning to move to Topanga in a month. So, I would be going with her, helping her pack up, etc. This was a surprise. One of the first of an entire summer of them. I had no idea what Topanga was, the only frame of reference I had in my mind was Boy Meets World. But I was on board. I was just glad to be there and grateful she was having me. I didn’t realize at the time that she was going through a divorce and that life as she knew it was changing too. That maybe we were both broken. I looked up to her infinitesimally. She was so beautiful and confident. She dropped out of college to pursue her dreams. She had an agent. She was on Entourage! But of course, there were signs. How she was really into Burning Man and rarely washed her hair. The state of the apartment with piles upon piles of junk and random tchotchkes blocking any flow of energy. The friendly neighbor shooting up and disappearing for days, where she barely batted an eye. The fact that she really didn’t eat much. The fact that she had declared “This summer I’m not doing any drugs.”

So, there we were. She was following a thread of extreme spirituality, it seemed, and I was a lost little girl, along for the ride with not an inkling about what kind of spirituality was right for me. We went to raves sober with glitter and fairy wings. She wore long flowing dresses and pink lipstick. We ate at Urth Café and drank soy lattes and tried to spot celebrities. We ate vegan food that tasted like actual dirt, and some that wasn’t so bad. We went to drum circles in Venice. She introduced me to people that emanated light from what seemed to be the inside of their chests and others that felt like gaping black holes who would swallow me up. We moseyed in Griffith Park, which ultimately became my personal sanctuary. She went on a couple of auditions. I slept, a lot. She was ethereal and people fell at her feet. I was lonely. She went on a couple of dates with Adam Levine. And I was just… invisible. I found out later what Topanga was. The beautiful homes that sat sweetly in the canyon. But where we moved was a commune on a plot of open land, where we downsized into a one room shack. I honestly thought that I would die there. More on that later though!

Because…

She also took me to Kundalini yoga.

Ah yes, Kundalini yoga. Wait. What exactly is Kundalini Yoga, you ask?

Well, it is not your average, run-of-the-mill type of flow-sequence, pose-centric yoga that most people in the U.S. would automatically envision!

One slow morning, upon waking from my usual tossing and turning on the futon in the living room, my cousin got a twinkle in her eye and suggested I join her for yoga. She was incredibly charismatic, and it was hard to resist going along with that twinkle. It was like she had secrets to share with only me. So, I borrowed a pair of spandex shorts and off we went. We pulled up to a place that was relatively inconspicuous, tucked on the edge of a shaded parking lot. It was called Golden Bridge. I actually think that it was where she had met Adam. Or one of his bandmates maybe. So, you know, celebrities did this. Okay. I remember walking in and immediately feeling a sense of peace. There were billowy curtains, exposed brick walls and glossy wood floors. The air felt light and the sunbeams that shone through, highlighted particles that danced around like magic. They had luxurious cushions and soft blankets. There was a smiling girl standing over locked cases of crystal jewelry at the front desk and there was a big gong and some kind of incense or candle or oil or something that just smelled heavenly as it settled into my nostrils. There was a café that was warm and inviting as the scent of healthy curried food wafted towards us. And there was complimentary tea. And I was a little bit nervous. Self-conscious. I had only done a little bit of yoga here and there and I absolutely had no idea what I was in for. Did I even deserve to be in such a place?

We waited to begin, and I fidgeted here and there. Do I sit on my cushion? Do I lay down? What are the other people doing? I clocked them around the room. Most were very still. I found myself imitating them and trying to become still too. But my mind raced inside. A radiant woman with a turban wrapped around her head took her place and began to lead us in. She opened with a chant. A chant?! We’re gonna chant?! I froze. And everyone chanted to tune in. It was loud and nasally. I didn’t chant along. I just sat there, holding my palms in prayer against my chest, stunned. And then came the breathing. Breath of fire. It was intense. Quick and powerful breaths in and out of the nose. We were supposed to pump the breath from our belly with power as well, but I couldn’t quite find the rhythm. I just felt like a fish out of water. By the end of it, I was lightheaded and woozy. I longed for my inhaler, which was back at the apartment. Shit out of luck. And then more chanting. Oh no, it’s a thing. Whatever peacefulness I had experienced since stepping into the studio was long gone at this point. I felt like my whole system was shocked. The tones of the teacher on the microphone and the voices of the rest of the class reverberated through my ribs and I cracked my eyes open every few seconds to see what was happening. I was searching to find another pair of eyes that maybe felt unsure. Another pair of eyes to laugh at the joke of this class. But there were none. They were all locked in. So I guess I was the joke of the class. I felt my cheeks grow hot as embarrassment unfurled through my limbs and magnified with each completed mantra. Sat Nam. Sat Nam. Sat Nam. What is that? Is that even English? Is this what they do here? THIS IS SO FUCKING WEIRD.

Not even just weird. It was cuckoo. Cuckoolini! These people were out of their damn minds. Also, it got really hard! I was formerly a D1 athlete and I couldn’t keep up with what seemed like one million leg lifts. This is torture! I almost cried, but the hardcore athlete in me didn’t want to give up. I could pass this physical test. I’m not pathetic. I squirmed through the rest of the class, pushing myself beyond my boundaries. When the closing song came, I found the lovely melody coaxing some solace into my world. I was moved by the love that filled up the room for a moment. But when it was over, I just went back to wanting to curl up and die in the corner. Okay, I tried it. I did it. But I didn’t want anyone to look at me. I wanted to leave. This isn’t for me, I decided. I just want to go back to my normal life.

But there was nothing normal about my life. We went a few more times and I went back and forth with it. I do have to admit that some moments were nice, while others brought that same searing self-consciousness that outweighed them. I tried to feign enthusiasm. I didn’t want to disappoint my cousin because it was clear that she was getting something out of it. Maybe I was too, but I also felt like no amount of weird embarrassing noises and excruciating movements would heal the gaping hole that I had in my chest. It was oozing and empty at the same time and I felt like everywhere I went, everyone could see it. I wasn’t open, and the more prompting she and her peers did for me to open up, the more I wanted to close. Don’t fucking tell me what to do! There were two guys who stayed with us for a night or two on their way up to some rainbow festival, or something weird and hippie which by that point in the summer had just become overwhelmingly cliched and old to me, who cooked us organic rice and asked me ten thousand questions. And then the three of them cornered me and told me that I should just open my heart. Like it’s so easy. I don’t even know you. They pushed and they pushed, likely with good intentions but their observations and their judgments humiliated me, so I couldn’t help but continue to shut down. I was so upset that I didn’t eat the rice they had so painstakingly prepared for us. (Because my God, rice is just so hard to make.) My cousin told me in the car that night that I was acting rude to the guests and that they were right. And that I should be more giving, like they were. But nothing about that situation felt even remotely safe to me. What do I even have to give? I don’t even know who I am anymore. I cried myself to sleep in silence for yet another night in the canyon.

I often dreamt about my mom. It was usually along the lines of some impending disaster, a flood or a tsunami or something involving a lot of water, sweeping us away. It always separated us, and I could never reach her or hear her. I would just stand on the edge of the chasm as the water flowed violently beneath me, able to see her reaching toward me on the other side, desperate, but there would be nothing I could do.

And then there was a day, where I just decided to go to yoga on my own. I don’t know why I chose to do this, perhaps it was an iteration of my higher self, prompting me along the path. Or perhaps it was the only place that felt familiar enough in a town that seemed like its only intention was to swallow me whole. Perhaps I was just desperate. Or bored! Perhaps, I was done listening to the preachiness of my cousin about love and light that literally ANY other preachiness about love and light would be tolerable! Perhaps it was the closing song and I craved the comfort of that. The love it projected and the hope it brought up inside me. Perhaps I was just delirious because I barely slept the night before because the howling coyotes, wandering the unfenced land, scared me. Regardless of why, I went back, on my own terms: an anonymous girl, flying under the radar. And I did the class. I tried to close my eyes and chant along with the others, even with a small voice, even sometimes only mouthing the words with one eye open and suspicious. And I felt something there that was soft, a comfort that seemed like something that had been so far away, inching closer to me.

And then after class I saw Sandra Oh at the café, eating a macro bowl or something healthy and I was starstruck and excited and thought to myself well that’s something. I loved Grey’s Anatomy! I loved Sideways! Sandra Oh does Kundalini! Okay!

And I did another. And another. Though I can’t say that it became a true regular thing back then, mostly because classes were expensive, and I felt guilty about the money that I spent. It did grow on me, but I also spent a lot of my time wanting to be alone. And when I did get to sneak away from the commune it was mostly to go to Griffith Park, where it was easy, and it was familiar, and I could just run up the hills and disappear into the nature and into the repeating album loop of Keane on my iPod. LOL. Every time I hear a song from that album, I have to laugh to myself at my obsession. I mean whatever, I still love it. But I must’ve listened to that album a thousand times during that period. I guess it was the only thing I could really hold on to. I would listen to my breath and the beating of my footsteps and the lyrics became a portal to feel my feelings. It gave me permission and I was free. It was my known form of meditation. It helped me escape and tap into the future. I would hike and I would daydream about becoming a more exciting version of myself, about all of the movies I would be in, about going to New York and my classes and my celebrity crushes. I would think about my Mom and what she would think about where I was. I was fairly certain she would be having a heart attack! I could hear her in my head. Be careful! I thought about how she had told my cousin to never give up on her dreams. I wondered if she could even see what my dreams were, if I even really had any worth pursuing. I wondered if she could see the new me. I wondered if I was just full of shit. I missed her more than I could ever have articulated. I missed home. But really, I missed myself.

At the end of my time in LA, I unfortunately left on a really sour note. As you can probably imagine, two people living in a one room shack in a commune didn’t work out to be all rainbows and butterflies! I had come to the realization that my cousin was unfortunately human and fundamentally flawed like the rest of us, but only after her unkind words cut through me like hundreds of knives into butter. To tell you the truth, I left that place hating her. I was heartbroken. She was so intent on giving “tough love” to a person that desperately needed to be held. She called me selfish and lazy and a drain on my Father’s finances. She told me I would never make it in New York. As an actress or a person. It was like I had been punched so hard in the gut that my soul had separated from my body and floated away like a cartoon ghost. Aight that’s enough, I’m out. She said I was so depressed it was hopeless and said she had basically complained about me to all of her friends for the entire summer I had been there. I was so embarrassed, and I couldn’t understand at all why she waited until it was over to tell me. I felt so helpless that I had no chance to try and fix it. And I felt so pathetic that I allowed her words to stick to me, to bore into my skin until they got down to the place where I could only hate myself. I walked out of that shack into a moment that was the loneliest of my entire life. I felt even more lost and broken than I had ever felt before. It would be a very long time until I could forgive it. Forgive her. Forgive me. My self-esteem at that point was so fucked it would take a lot of work to build it up again. I mean, A LOT. In fact, it wasn’t until I found kundalini yoga again!!! In New York! WHO COULD GUESS THAT?!

Ten years have passed since then, since that little girl began to crumble and fall away. In all honesty, it’s taken a lot of shakeups to make that happen. MANY since then, throughout the last decade. And sometimes I like to laugh and think that the universe just has a funny way of breaking us open so that we can grow stronger. It has a plan! HA HAAA! It’s all part of it! Other days I vibrate to my core with anger and shake my fists at the sky, imagining myself trashing my apartment dramatically like a movie character would. While on others I just am like WTF?! I give up, I’m fucking tired! And I won’t even get out of bed. But all of these things are tests. They’re tests of growth. And I look back now on that time as a plethora of lessons. I’m still learning them. I’m sure I’ll have something soon coming up in a meditation from that time. But I like to think that it was just a planting of the seed. And I never forgot that little seed. I never forgot the billowy curtains or the white light that would land near me in the room. Albeit brief. The glimmer of my heart that was still there under the mess. The cuckoo part! The part of me that wants something more.