When Yoga Turns You Into An Alien

I lost my keys.

I lost my sweater and my good bra. I lost my flip-flops.

I wrote notes to myself so I would remember things and I lost the notes.

I lost my temper too.

I left my wallet on Fire Island.

I leave a door open and the cats get into the room they’re not supposed to go into. My spell check app doesn’t work and I send an article full of typos to my boss. My boyfriend asks me to help with some errands and, somehow, I mess up every single one. “Floaty yogini,” he says in dismay.

I’m sorry to everyone who’s suffered from my negligence. Believe me, no matter how frustrated you are with my inability to hold onto things, stick to a schedule or follow basic directions, I am twice as frustrated at least.

I wasn’t always like this. That’s what I envision myself shouting as I plunge into an abyss of missed deadlines, lost items, bad decisions and stunning miscommunications.

The fact is that my connection to the material world, always a bit tenuous, has faded in the past few months, and my spiritual practice has a lot to do with it.

It hurts me to say this, because I would never want to say anything that might discourage people from practicing yoga and meditation. I’ve heard many spiritual teachers promise that meditation won’t make you weird and spacey, I think mostly not to scare people off, because it really can make you weird and spacey. At least for a while.

At least for a while, you might feel like your whole life is falling apart. You might feel like the light inside is shining stronger and stronger, and on the outside everything is slipping away.

It’s part of the path, I think. It’s from the same reason that meditative states sometimes feel like a very blissful type of dying.

Think of it like a movie projected onto a screen. Usually, we have our backs to the projector so we only see the image, all the different colors and shapes, and we don’t see the single beam of white light that they come from. In meditation, you turn around to look into the projector beam. The colors and shapes are there inside it, but you only see white.

Going deeper into meditation is a path of uncreation. Reversing the process of manifestation that generates our incarnated experience.

This is the 36 tattvas in Kashmir Shaivism, the branching path through which the divine descends into material reality and the human being ascends to the divine.

The pure “I am” splits into internal and external, the external splits again and again, more concrete with every movement away from the source. The Self identifies with its creation and becomes limited.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. You know this story already.

When you go back into the “I am” you are retracing these steps and erasing them behind you. The infinity of creation which emerged out of consciousness dissolves back into it.

It’s not the end. On the tantric path it’s not enough just to melt into oneness, you have to bring oneness into creation. This world is only samsara if you have a samsaric mind; if you have a divine mind, it is Shakti. The mountain peak, where you leave the world behind and fall into God, is one stop on the road, and from there you turn around.

But it’s a place we all have to go. We have to go alone and we must be prepared never to come back.

For now, I’m not able yet to transform this reality but I’m too bound to it to transcend it entirely. The dim lights of this world lose their color and blur together, but the bright light still seems so far away.

It’s like in the Torah, if you look at the story of the Israelites as the journey of the soul. We go out from Egypt, slavery to the ego, towards the Promised Land of enlightened consciousness. Between those two poles, there’s the desert. The vast open space. No markers, no path except what’s right in front of our eyes.

This is the space of spiritual development. Sometimes things seem more clear, sometimes less so.

Things are less clear for me right now. I walk around like a foreigner in the places most familiar to me, talking to people I’ve known for years and wondering, who are you?

I can’t bring myself to care about the things that most people care about. I meditate in the morning and everything comes together into a single point of clarity, and for the rest of the day I blunder around feeling like I just landed from another planet and I have a map from the wrong decade. I barely recognize my own life. Everything I try to do veers off in the wrong direction.

I see now that I can’t trust my own mind. My emotions do strange, crazy things and I’m not in control of them, I have no part in them except what I give to them. The sense of control over my life, the ability to manage things for myself, is a ripening of a certain karma. It’s a grace.

I’ve neglected and disregarded the material world in the past, and so now I experience the ripening of a different karma.

And that’s also a grace.

The times when things seem clear are more dangerous, I think. We’re in the desert here – if you see an oasis, good chance you’re heading for a mirage.

When you’re lost, you can be humble. You can be in that sacred space of bewilderment where everything is possible and all you can do is laugh.