Welcome your whole self into this moment. Thoughts will come and go. Let them pass without judgment. You can do this practice body sprawled across the laminate floor in your living room while you enjoy the spring sunshine, or resting on your bed, supported by the t-shirt quilt your mother sewed for you and your husband as a wedding gift.
Allow your awareness to settle on the breath.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your heart-space. Notice how you feel. If you would like to set an intention for your practice, do so now. For example, you could focus on the concept of forgiveness. Your intention should be whatever elusive feeling you need to redefine and better understand.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Now bring your awareness to your toes, the tops of your feet, and your soles. Try not to focus on how much you dislike your own feet with their Greek toes. Don’t think about being ten, when the sole of your right foot was more warts than skin. Instead, think about the day before your wedding, when your best friends—who were more excited about your wedding than anyone in your family—took you and your fiancé to get pedicures. Remember the feel of another human handling your shame.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your calves. Remember when hair spurted outward at twelve, when you took your sister’s razor into the bathtub and tried to slash away the dark fuzz that started to cover the mosquito bite scabs. The razor scraped away hair, skin, and scabs, your blood swirling in the bath water. Red against white porcelain.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your knees. Your mother’s knees were both replaced four summers ago. She’s stopped wearing pants that reveal the scars that stretch over her knees, deep and pink. You sometimes think about the blood that must have seeped out at the touch of the scalpel, the way the surgeons pulled out bone and cartilage, refilling the space of her with aching metal. Wonder how long you will keep your own knees before you, like your mother submit to the surgeons’ scalpels. Already your knees ache when you do squats. At twenty-two, you stopped running because you could feel the foreshadowing in your joints.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Let your awareness spread upward to your thighs. When you still practiced your mother’s religion, you spent your adult years wearing sacred underwear. Garments. The garments stretched down your thigh, ending just above the knee. Your mother promised garments would provide protection. She didn’t know that at nineteen, when you were finally allowed to wear the garments, your body had already been invaded and claimed. You still wonder sometimes if wearing the garments as a child could have stopped your cousin from finding your body on the brown shag carpet of the basement bedroom in your parents’ house.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Now allow your awareness to settle on your pelvis.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Try to stay in this space.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Here is the space where you were formed, where you divided, divided, divided. At conception. At birth. At six.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your navel. In a Sunday school class, when you were growing up, one of your classmates asked the teacher if Adam and Eve had belly buttons. You didn’t understand the question. You had never been taught why you had a belly button. Now you understand that your navel is the physical scar of your expulsion from your mother’s body.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Allow the awareness to spread outward to your stomach, your lower back, and your love handles. In your mother’s body, this is where you began. You swelled in her center, forcing her to expand. Wonder now if she ever wanted to be a mother. Contemplate the pioneer women who shared husbands, whose bodies swelled and emptied each year at the demands of church leaders and husbands. You have tried, to imagine who your mother would be without this legacy.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your chest, your upper back, and your shoulders. At nineteen you clipped a black nametag on your chest that read: “Elder Anderson. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” You wore it for your mother. You carried her name—the last name she took from your father—and the name of Jesus Christ on your chest. You never knew which name weighed heavier. You asked her on four separate occasions if you could leave the missionary legacy that she passed down: twice before you clipped on the nametag and twice while wearing it. Each time she insisted God will bless you for the time you dedicate to His service. Each time you swallowed her promises. Each time you convinced yourself to stay.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Let the awareness slide down your upper-arms to your elbows. The garments were two-piece, tops and bottoms that covered collar bones to knees and shoulders to mid-bicep. As your awareness returns to the garments, understand that there was never fabric holy enough to keep your cousin’s hands from peeling you. Remember the way his hands tugged at the rainbow-colored dinosaur quilt and the cotton pajamas sewn for you by your mother.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Now let your awareness settle on your forearms. Remember the first man you loved had forearms like Popeye. You spent the summer before you wore the missionary nametag sharing an apartment and a bedroom with him. He laughed at the way you spoke to stoplights, called you “charming.” You spent nights easing into sleep while he told you stories about his Idaho farm boy childhood. You tried to get as close to him as you could without touching. You worried that touching would solidify something inside you that remained unnamed. You could only imagine your mother’s face crumpling under the weight of the word “gay
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your hands, your palms, your fingers, your fingertips. Consider the fact that your fingerprints were formed inside your mother’s womb as you strained against the constraints of her body. From conception your identity has required that you push against your mother.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your neck, your throat, your chin. The first man you kissed slid his mouth, his tongue, his teeth along your throat. The last time you felt the wet warmth of him he told you that you could fuck him or leave. You thought of the years your mother taught you to save your sex for marriage. You slid yourself out from under him and left unsure if you were damned or saved.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Bring your awareness to your face, your mouth, your nose, your ears, your cheeks, your eyes. During your first night of Thanksgiving break, the year after your time as a Mormon missionary, when your roommates had returned to their homes and families, you stood before your small apartment’s bathroom mirror searching your face for anything you could love. You found a circlet of gold right around the iris. You have your mother’s eyes, deep and brown. The rest of your face—your thick eyebrows, your dark hair, your rounded cheeks—you can trace back to your father.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Allow your awareness to settle once more in your heart-space. You came out to your mother in an email, while you wore your missionary nametag. She tells you years later that she cried. She says it unabashed, and you want to resent her for crying over the truest thing you have ever told her. But you cannot deny her grief over the loss of the son she thought she had. Your words have taken that son, have left a stranger in his place. Twenty-one years after your first separation, you now sit nine hundred miles apart, strangers, trying to reach one another. Your mother calculates the two decades of lies, of half-truths and deceptions. She worries about your future, your salvation. She cries.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Notice how you feel.
Return to the intention you set at the start of the practice. If it still feels out of reach, you might need to redefine forgiveness once more.
Open your eyes. Bow your head. Thank yourself for practicing today.
