Wonderfully Made: My Story of Belonging
Rachel will be leading a joyful movement, music and meditation on Wednesdays in January at 7:00PM to usher in the new year. Register here.
(Trigger warning. Mention of sexual trauma).
Everyone has a story of longing to belong that carries some measure of shame, pain and more. I am no exception.
Throughout my formative years, in pretty much any social situation where I found myself, including church, I felt alone. I felt a longing and love for God, a devotion to Jesus, and even secretly yearned to be a nun, completely not understanding that I had to be Catholic, not in an evangelical Methodist community, to do so.
This desire to be the Bride and Lover of Jesus felt mysterious and lovely and fueled the fierce longing in my soul to be connected, to belong, or else explode into flames.
However, in waking to real life, I felt invisible to God. I was sure that I loved God, but not so sure that God loved me or even saw me in my hand-me-down clothes, kitchen table haircut, and in a house where there was violence, alcoholism, emotional and sexual abuse.
I grew up in the Methodist Church in SW Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s, which involved singing hymns as men in suits passed by with offering plates, and eating lots of jello desserts in church basements. Our Sunday School curriculum didn't invite introspection or questions.
Obeying, memorizing, sitting in the same pew Sunday after Sunday, my boredom was relieved only briefly by focusing attention on the stained glass windows or the rare occasions that we had something exciting happen, perhaps in the form of a visiting missionary working in a developing nation--or even more exciting to my young mind--a Communist country. My church also welcomed the occasional long-haired hippy of the 1970s, the ones who would actually wear jeans (their Sunday best!) to church and brandish an acoustic guitar singing the song of the time, “Pass it On.”
I understood that the church had space for missionaries and even “long hairs” wearing jeans --but not for trauma. No one in the church seemed to notice, address or ever mention these very real challenges present for me in my household.
As soon as I could leave my house, I did. I left behind church and also God (I thought).
Fast forward through a decade of drugs, promiscuity, atheism, and agnosticism. Yet, a shaky faith in God somehow stubbornly held on through trauma and self-sabotage. This is what grace is, plain and simple. God never let go of me. I found my way back to the Methodist Church and allowed myself a curiosity and openness that supported a measure of belonging, while still holding space for my questions. I continued to hold back the sharp shards, fragments and vulnerable pieces of myself that still didn’t feel welcomed in a faith community.
In my early thirties, after marrying and divorcing, losing my house and all my financial assets, I was left with a baby, a dog, a car that needed a transmission, and a library card. With that library card, I discovered the mystics and followers of Jesus who forged their own path outside of mainstream, religious culture.
I read Howard Thurman, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Hildegarde of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Kathleen Norris, and a nun whose name I can’t remember who wrote beautiful poetry about people dying of AIDS, the earth and the ordination of women. I found Anne Lamott and Shane Claiborne. I found feminist theology, and liberation theology from Central and Latin America. These findings woke something dormant in my soul. Like water in the desert, my longing met the doubts, the calling of the faithful to social justice, the upside down Gospel, and the devotion and ecstasy of the mystics.
In this space of discovery and growth, I met the man who would become the love of my life. I became pregnant and the 19-week ultrasound showed that our baby, gender not yet known, had spina bifida. Spina bifida is a neural tube defect that is like a stuck zipper that separates in the spinal column, leaving nerves exposed and the parts of the body that those nerves traveled to implicated. We learned of an experimental surgery to repair the birth defect while our baby was still in utero, but it had to be done right away. After an MRI and consulting with a whole team of specialists, we had the surgery March 1, 2000. I had complications and ended up as a patient in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. for seven and a half weeks until our daughter, Riley Grace, was born via c-section on April 14, 2000, at just twenty-nine weeks gestation, eleven weeks premature.
For four months, my husband, son and I lived in Philadelphia, hours away from our family and community, in a time before Facebook or even reliable cell phone coverage. I spent the first two of these months in the hospital while my husband John, and son Johnny, lived in the Ronald McDonald House in Camden, NJ.
Alone in the hospital, a nurse who knew me well brought me a Bible. In our rush and frenzy to have the surgery, I had neglected to pack one. The hospital chaplain, Barbara, visited and asked if she could stop by weekly. I asked her instead if she could come everyday. She prayed and cried with me through Psalm 139 at least four times a week.
I couldn’t run away or even get out of bed. And this is where I first learned to meditate. I learned that both my physical and emotional pain had sensations that I could explore rather than have them swallow me whole. I learned to locate and name sensations and emotions and breathe and be with them as they arose and as they faded.
I had to learn to breathe in and out and calm my racing mind challenged with the uncertainty of all of this that was present: the unexpected challenges of the fetal surgery, the pain that gripped my body as I lay in a hospital bed with compression boots on my legs, my extremely limited range of movement. I had to call on myself and seek agency in a room where I needed help with a bedpan. In this room, where I had no control over who entered and where the window only revealed a patch of sky, no trees, only gray, white, blue or black.
I prayed and I breathed through the uncertainty of seven and a half weeks in bed, waiting for my daughter to be born. I prayed and breathed through the two months I lived at the Ronald McDonald house with John and Johnny while my tiny newborn daughter lived in the NICU. I prayed and breathed through parenting my three-year-old whose life was completely uprooted.
We made it home finally. My body was a wreck after the confinement. Nursing a baby and no sleep. My joints ached. My core lacked strength. . . and I was exhausted all the time.
Surviving in this state for a full year, I finally revisited a book on yoga that I’d used when I was a single mother. I remembered it had offered me a semblance of peace that allowed me to sleep during that time. I found an old yoga mat tucked away in a closet and pulled it out.
Moving, stretching, breathing, I attempted a couple cat/cows and eventually found my way into a basic set of forms that are known in Yoga as Sun Salutations. One day, engaging in breathing and moving, something shifted. Just as the Christian mystics and misfits awakened something in my soul, here I landed in my body. I heard a voice, through the years of trauma, uncertainty and living in full-out survival mode, that clearly stated to me: “Welcome Home.”
This was twenty years ago now, when I landed on the path of yoga - the beginning of being able to create a refuge in my own body, despite its violated boundaries, the challenges of the fetal surgery and C-section, and the confinement.
Music plays a major role part of Rachel’s teaching and healing practices.
I began studying with many teachers, in various styles (Iyengar, Ashtanga,) to land in a Kripalu-influenced teacher training. I learned the ethical precepts of yoga, which also sparked another awakening to explore yoga beyond asana, as a science of wellness.
I continued to learn and grow, eventually seeking training to teach from a trauma-informed, social justice framework rooted in mindfulness. This is a practice that is non-performative, centers the experience in the participant’s experience, engages in the practice of paying attention to being alive and to what a strange and wonderful thing it is to be here.
What became real and clear to me when I was able to actually be in my own body and integrate these fractured pieces was that God incarnated in the flesh as a human, was born, lived, died, resurrected and ascended in the flesh. I know this should seem obvious but it dawned on me not just intellectually but as a knowing in my bones. Jesus walked on earth, with a central nervous system and a divine nature. Jesus performed miracles and healed the sick--yet also needed to rest, nap and seemed to enjoy snacks and meals. The incarnation of Jesus had a whole new layer of significance to me as someone practicing yoga, as someone who had been so separated from my own body.
My bones contain minerals found in the earth, and my body is full of the water that fills the planet. Like the molten core of the earth, the fires of my metabolic system transform food into energy and waste. My pulmonary system, like the atmosphere of the earth, contains a spaciousness that has the capacity to hold all things.
Arriving in my own body, I now no longer feel invisible to God, but cherished and beloved as a reflection of Creation.
I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139, v 13)
