Space Captain with Denise at Yoga Loka: Reno, Nevada: June 10, 2018

The first time I heard Space Captain performed live (Tedeschi Trucks and Friends Tribute to Joe Cocker, Lockn Festival, 2015), it was like I was shaktipat hit right between the eyes. I suppose to many, to find spiritual meaning in rock and roll songs and touring may seem odd, but actually sages have been suggesting everyday life as a pathway to freedom for thousands of years.

In the song Space Capitan, the line Learning to Live Together is sung over twenty times, unless of course you're lucky enough to hear a jam band, and you could hear it like a mantra a hundred times in this one uber fabulous song. How about that as an alignment? The song makes reference to all of us as a planet living together, but lately the practice has been a lot closer to home, like how to live with David during the remodel. How to live with this one person, much less the planet. In fact there are days in this remodel when I'm sure anyone would be easier to live with than David. Denise's class was divinely ordered and so impactful, I'm sure it saved my marriage.

Its one thing to sing a song about space, and another to study it, learn the sanscrit words, walk around a construction zone wishing for it, and quite another to actually experience it. its difficult to find the words about the practice with Denise because Space is wordless, timeless, eternal, echoing what the Rig Veda describes as Satyam , Ritam, and Bharat. Space, another name for God, is impossible to describe  with words. Meister Echert said something like, "If there was a God of my understanding, it wouldn't be a God worthy of knowing". God, like Space is beyond human understanding. Maybe that's why descriptions of these realms are more often caged in the 'not- this or not-that', like  the yamas and niyamas, non-violence,  non-harming, non-containment, non-grasping, and so forth.

Tension has been thick around the new place and when David announced he was going to travertine the kitchen I had a meltdown. Not that I care so much that the kitchen is travertined, or that it will extend our already over-budget and over complicated remodel, it's that he commanded it in such a way that I felt invisible. I wasn't even consulted and I didn't have a say in the matter at all. It pressed my last raw nerve and caused such an argument that we almost broke up (again).

Eventually I cooled down because it didn't seem like a great use of my time to go crazy about some stone on the floor of my kitchen. But the anger seethed and smoldered until Denise's class, until I could put some space around it and see it was the deep wound of unworthiness that got me hot and bothered. Space, to use Joe Cocker's song , allowed me to see "I lost my memory of where I've been. We all forgot that we could fly".

I've done enough work around self esteem to know I am the only person that can make me feel worthy or not. When I have the room to remember this I pop right back into feeling better.

Feeling great, in fact.

I went home and apoligized. I pleaded my case more calmly about why we shouldn't travertine the kitchen. He reminded me I'm not the cook in the family, which ignited a near argument but I let myself feel space and dropped it in the name of

Learning To Live Together
Learning to Live Together
Learning to Live Together
Until we die....

Health, Love, and Rock N Roll