At the end of the year, after a year and a half of marriage, Rick and I decided to separate. He would move to Los Angeles to study acting, and we could visit each other. Jeremiah would go with him, as he had become Rick’s dog, and I would keep Jake. There was no urgency about divorce. Gigi and I considered living together, but decided not to. I didn’t want to leave Ojai and I didn’t want to put any more distance between Rick and me or to move farther away from Robin. I felt empowered now that I claimed my love for this woman and opened to love and friendship on new levels. I stood taller and walked with more grace. I was melting sweet butter in every cell of my being at even the thought of my angel sister lover friend.
I had never been so happy and so much in love, and neither had Gigi. We relaxed into self-acceptance, understanding that love is all that’s accurate, not labels for our sexuality. Gigi was very visible in her small community, yet she wasn’t afraid to flaunt her sexy love for me in public. We were as much in love with life as with each other, and our passion seemed to enhance our appeal to men, who flocked to her door after her husband left, to see her or to see us both if I was visiting. We had lovers, and every so often, feeling tentative and daring, continued our own sexual explorations together. We were ripe with life as we tasted the forbidden-yet-so-available nectar of our juicy, loving friendship and we drank from the strength of that friendship during the waves of uncertainty that come with divorce and readjustment to autonomy.
In Ojai, the four-bedroom house with the pool felt too big sometimes without Rick, but I had to stay open to possibility. Gigi’s life was full. We saw each other less as the months went on, talking by phone about life and our dreams and who we were dating, if there was someone that especially interested us. She would eventually settle on her next husband and move away from Carmel, and I would fall in love again and again and again. I would learn many years later that Gigi had saved all of the cards and letters we wrote to one another in that first, passion-filled year we knew each other. On her dressing table she would keep a porcelain figurine of a woman set into a padded burgundy velvet box, a gift I gave her soon after we met. That figurine is a symbol that says my heart is always at home on your hearth. That feeling goes with us wherever we are.
Carmel Valley, it turned out, had more delicious surprises in store for me. One evening, during a visit to Gigi, a friend named Mackie and I attended a yoga class that Charles Muir taught at the Carmel Women’s Club. I had taken yoga classes before, and I knew every teacher had a different style. Charles’ style interested me because of his focus on our chakras (energy centers), on deep slow breathing, and on a quiet mind. His instruction was clear, and his hypnotic voice was positive and empowering. “As you exhale, send your love to your stiff or aching back,” he would say. “Remember to bring your busy mind back to following your breath as you inhale, expanding your lungs and filling them with the prana in the air, sometimes seen as an angel in the air.” In my inner vision I saw angels flying up my nostrils along with my breath and felt love in my heart before exhaling the breath into my aching back. By the end of the two-hour class I was light-hearted, grounded, and eager to pay my ten dollars.
Charles said good night to each of us as we left, finding our way to our cars in the chilly night air. I thanked him, smiling into his startlingly blue eyes. As Mackie and I walked to the car, she said with a knowing twinkle in her eye, “I thought you’d like Charles.” She told me he was offering a weeklong yoga retreat in February at a spa in Mexico and she was planning to go. “Come and room with me,” she said. What an idea! Why not go? It was a dream of mine to spend a week at a yoga retreat. I wanted more of what I had just experienced. I needed this kind of soul expansion. “Count me in,” I said.
Chapter Five
Kundalini, Here I Come
Rio Caliente Spa is tucked into the Sonora Mountains of central Mexico about an hour’s drive from the airport in Guadalajara. At its source is a volcanic river, making its way downstream through wild high desert once inhabited by the Quichol Indians. The spa was built in the early ’60s at the source of the hot river as a retreat for people who wanted to soak in its healing waters. People primarily came down from the cold New York and New England winters to “take the waters,” as Charles did, in 1968, when a yoga teacher of his in New York City first introduced him to Rio Caliente. Some years later it was a favorite place of his to hold retreats.
In my roaring twenties, I was introduced to my chakras and to yoga. These were my thrilling thirties, and the expansion of love inside me was happening at a fast pace. At Rio Caliente, with the many hours of yoga practice with Charles, my heart chakra finally exploded into shimmering shards of diamond light. I was in the company of twenty-two kindred spirits committed to time spent on our lumpy Mexican yoga mats and all that could happen there. At an altitude of 6,000 feet in the magical valley of primavera (eternal spring), I knew for the first time what a chakra looked like in full bloom and I knew how it felt!
From that day on, it seemed I tasted the smell of the wild sage covering the mountainous terrain for hundreds of miles around the spa. I could feel the lithium from the mineral-rich waters of the volcanic hot river that snaked its way through the valley for several hundred miles to the Sea of Cortez; it coursed through my system once it penetrated my skin. My eyes became a brighter shade of blue from the inner light that had awakened in me and they dazzled all who came under their gaze. I was in a naturally altered state from fasting, cleansing, soaking in the steam cave or the rushing river, and experiencing massage and healing treatments from Charles and other healers like the Rolfer Owen James, polarity therapist David Fuess, and John Sanderson, who offered and taught massage. Long hikes down-river deep into shaman country fed the adventurer within me as I felt delivered into an invincible state of vitality, health, and expanded awareness.
Between the intoxicating location with its beauty and warm sunshine, the six hours a day of yoga practice, the new friends, and the guidance of Charles Muir, who was fast becoming a friend as well as a deeply inspiring yoga teacher, the experience at Rio Caliente was life-changing. I knew that feeling this much love for everyone and everything was the way I wanted to live my life. I worked to maintain this state when I returned home to Ojai and continued my yoga classes, long hikes, and bicycle rides through the orange groves in bloom. I continued seeing Rick every week as our marriage transitioned into a friendship of wishing one another the best that life could offer.
In July, on my second trip to Rio Caliente, I stayed for two weeks of both beginner and intermediate yoga classes. I assisted Charles in teaching basic Hatha yoga to two husbands whose wives were in Charles’ class, and I assisted David with many of his polarity and massage sessions. Gigi came to Rio for a week and had a hot love affair with one of the massage therapists on staff, while I enjoyed flirtatious early stages of a love affair with David. This passionate affair lasted a delicious six months or so before I met another man, a chiropractor from Malibu, and canceled a vacation in Hawaii with David the day before we were to go. To say that in those days I was unconscious of how my actions impacted others would be an understatement. I’m not proud of it. I just wasn’t ready to be in integrity with the heart of another.
Life as a single woman in Ojai was a balancing act between aloneness and loneliness. The Malibu chiropractor turned out also not to be “the one,” and I was on my own again when the divorce with Rick was finalized. It didn’t take much more than a visit to a divorce lawyer in Ventura—one hundred and fifty dollars later my marriage with Rick was over. Neither of us wanted the cost or the anguish of a contested divorce.
Arnie and Rick, these two who had been my closest companions and who sincerely cared for each other, were a foundation for me as I continued to grow, living on my own and being a long-distance mom as I drove into Los Angeles every few days to help Arnie and his new wife, Nancy, with Robin, to discuss school changes, her time with friends, to give her rides here and there, and to simply have time together. I treasured the time I spent with Robin, Arnie, and Nancy, and Rick, too, all of them offering a much needed reminder that I was loved and forgiven for my inconsistencies.
And then the pioneering