New Tools

Years later, I had crossed over into my thirties and was headed to my fourth silent meditation retreat. A girlfriend relayed to me what another girlfriend had said when she told her I was gone for another ten days to find myself. She said, “Didn’t Amanda go and find herself last year?” Which made me wonder: was this a life-long quest or would I never be found?

I’ve found a tool in my meditation retreats, and on those mornings when I meditate for an hour so I can feel normal for the rest of the day. Another tool has been the yoga mat, particularly when I’m pushing myself like I did last week. For the first time I tried to do The Scorpion asana. This meant balancing on my forearms and kicking up my legs over my head so that my toes could touch my head. I had met my spotter only a minute before, and after holding the asana for ten seconds, I fell out of it with a heavy sigh. My teacher had watched and walked over. “You were right there,” she said. “You should have seen it. Your feet were like, two inches from your head.” I smiled at her shaking my head, “That’s typical me.” I had pulled out because of my own fear.

Other tools for my toolbox have come through transformational workshops where I’ve spent hundreds of dollars to forget to live what I have learned. My life had improved with these tools over the years, except when it came to relationships of the intimate kind. That was where my life felt like a puzzle to be left on a card table because too many pieces were missing.

It wasn’t until I began to see a pattern regarding my relationships that I discovered my next tool in Al-Anon. Al-Anon was for the friends and family members of alcoholics, and although I didn’t have an active drinker presently in my life, the effects of growing up around alcoholism were still affecting me. When I read the criteria on how people who come to Al-Anon feel, the signs were all there. I didn’t know that Al-Anon was a spiritual program, a program about relationships. I didn’t know until three months ago that there was room for it in my new toolbox.