40 days and 40 nights — Day 16

8:40am Day 16…. I’m still wowed by the prospects (to paraphrase my friend Suzu) of who I will be at the end of the 40 days.

I’m actually sleeping better than I can ever remember. Along with the break I’m giving my body by only asking it to digest the easily digestible kitchari, now I’m giving it restorative sleep, too! What will they think of next!? Exercise, perhaps!? I can hear my grandmother tsk, tsk, tsking in the background — “be careful, you’ll fall,” she said in yiddish, as I ride my bike with joyful abandon down a short ramp leading to the basement of the apartment building where I grew up. This was something I’d done without falling more times than I could remember at that tender age of 8 or 9. It was also the last time I ever did it because . . . I fell. My grandmother, Bubbe Esther, who couldn’t have been but a few years older than I am now, happened to be walking by just as I began my descent. She issued her warning (or was it a prophecy?); I said “no I won’t” and within seconds I was down and bleeding. I imagine this to be one of the key Stories that keeps me attached to fear around using my body in particular ways. A good story to make peace with and release. Writing it now, perhaps she was making a prophecy, referring only to that particular trip down the ramp and not to all future trips. But since prophecy was outside the lexicon of Tremont Avenue in the Bronx in 1956, it couldn’t have occurred to me till now.

Oh God, how I loved my bike and how it felt to ride! May the memory of that infuse me with the willingness to feel that again — even if the bike I ride is attached to a floor in my co-op’s exercise room! And may I be willing to let go of all the self-limiting Stories I carry.

Today feels like the day to turn my attention to the Forgiveness Ritual I’ll be doing on September 18th — Yom Kippur. I want to learn more about forgiveness — what it means and what it doesn’t mean. I’m curious about what Yom Kippur really is about and how, if at all, to work any specific practices from the Yom Kippur tradition into the ritual. I will, of course, journey for Spirit-help in crafting this ritual, but I like to arrive having done my homework, so to speak. More on this as it unfolds.

Onward into this day.