What my Motorcycle Crash taught me about My Truth.

Nothing like a brush with mortality to discover what you really think.  I had decades ago abandoned my belief in a God that plays favorites, The One that decides who gets to be homecoming queen or who wins the game, The One you can pray to or bargain with when the shit hits the fan.  Or The One who punishes you, thus creating the shit-hitting-fan situation that you deserve.  Instead, I adopted the yogic Atman philosophy that we are infinite souls traversing the universe in an ephemeral body.  Oh. So. Ephemeral.

So when I was riding my motorcycle, cruising down PCH at 50 miles an hour and a car was clearly about to make a u-turn right in front of me, I had an astonishing number of thoughts in those fleeting seconds before what I knew to be an immanent crash. 

“Holy Shit!” was the first…

… followed by anguish at my folly for thinking I was a safe rider so I wouldn’t crash, that I would be okay riding a motorcycle in LA.  Obviously, this wasn’t going to be okay.  And, in fact, I was certain nothing was ever going to be okay again.  But I quickly shifted gears, literally.  No time for denial and deals.  I surrendered to the reality of the moment and did my best to mitigate the damage. This is happening. Soften into it. Seriously? Seriously. I did not pray… just to hedge my bets.  It never crossed my very busy mind.  I was probably doing about 30 when I slammed into the car and flipped into the air, slamming my helmet once on the hood and then again on the ground after what seemed like an abyss of time floating in the air.   I skidded along the gravel presumably on my back? But there is a lapse in memory or consciousness because  I was already sitting when I got my bearings and had my next thought. 

Wow!  I’m still here. 

AND I’m sitting up.  My knee must be destroyed because the pain is excruciating. So that sucks.  And I’m not too sure where I am, so that’s not so great. (I do have the wherewithal -- or more likely survival instinct – to pretend like I have my holy shit together.) But in my first moments before all the details of the physical world truly registered, I had an utter sense of clarity that regardless of my physical situation, which was not looking so good, that “I” was still okay; that everything – whatever that is – was going to be okay because “I” am not really my body anyway. 

So hum.

For the first time, I knew I wasn’t full of shit when I told my yoga therapy students, “You are not your situation.”  I actually believe it.

The truth is, we are all the light of awareness that transcends any situation.

Namaste,

Leslie Kazadi