The question: Which image is the life of this girl? My answer: All of them.
Of course we have multiple lives. I have seen them. I do not mean reincarnation. I mean multiple lives that whisper their existence to us even while we live the one and only life we have.
You know the feeling of multiple lives. Something stirs deep within. It’s almost tickles, a longing in another direction. We often call them regrets, “Oh, if I had just…” Or “If I just hadn’t…” “If I had just moved away from here.” “If I had just taken that risk.” These deep stirrings are often felt in relation to another person. They can have a romantic, potential life-path quality to them. You know the ones. The person you didn’t let yourself explore or circumstances made that exploration impossible, the relationship that didn’t or couldn’t happen. Maybe the person in question was already with someone else. These are the multiple lives. They are felt but not acted upon.
The truth is that we are incredible sensing beings that can feel both backward and forward in time. Unfortunately we dismiss such transcendence as ordinary and call it memory or anticipation. In our mystery bags, however, we can also feel simultaneity; or to follow the metaphor, we can sense not just backward or forward in time but also across. This sensing provides access to multiple lives
We can sense them in others too. I have a yoga student Chris who lives with severe cerebral palsy (CP). His gets around in an electric wheelchair; his body is pretty twisted up; and he cannot bring his hands to his mouth. He also came to the very first yoga class I ever taught and has been a student of my lifetime for the last seventeen years. About ten years ago, he came for the first and only time with his older brother who was about eighteen months his senior and an engineering student at the University of MN. Chris’s brother was very good-looking, in really good shape, and clearly loved his younger brother. I was taken aback by how similar they were. They had the same body but with very different manifestations; they had the same contagious laugh; and the same quiet charm. More than once in that class, I looked out of the corner of my eye and startled with the feeling that Chris had miraculously rid himself of CP. The experience was both unnerving and beautiful.
That night I drove home weeping. Seeing his brother, I could feel Chris’ other body, his other life, the one without cerebral palsy. It hovers right next to him, just barely out of phase. I am sensing one of his multiple lives. This made a profound impact on the way I teach Chris. It gave me confidence. I realized that my job was not to try to help Chris’s body with CP become his body without CP. Instead, my job was to realize that Chris possessed both bodies simultaneously, both lives. My job is to always teach both.
My son Paul and I recently escaped the MN winter and went to Ixtapa, Mexico for five days. The weather was warm and the scenery beautiful. We stayed at an all-inclusive where there were many things to do: walk on the beach, swim in the ocean or pool, kayaking, nature hikes, and on and on. The problem, of course, was that most of these things I cannot do, especially with an ailing shoulder. At fourteen, Paul is not quite ready to pursue adventure on his own, especially among strangers. For now, he needs to be lead in his exploration of a bigger world. I want to be that dad, the one that shares physical adventure with his son, that kayaks and hikes and swims in the ocean, the dad that shows his son that there is much life to be had if you just lean into it.
The truth is that I am that dad. I have multiple lives, multiple manifestations. Some happen; some don’t, but I AM all of them. Of course, sometimes I feel a little sad when I feel the fun in my other lives, but that is a small price to pay for knowing that they exist. Paul and I had a great time. We soaked in the sun; we had adventures in eating unknown cuisine; and we played 35 games of ping-pong. I do not regret the life I have, nor wish for others, but I won’t give up the simultaneity of all of my lives.