She was Magic.
And that was what I called her.
She was pure.
Just like works of art are pure.
She used her words sparingly and it was such a relief because there was never any charge. The meaning was the meaning. You didn’t have to search for it. She pared down to their essence. And had mastery with words.
She was an artist.
And because she was an artist, she saw you with a view like no other.
This was her mastery.
Her joy sat in deep crevices and was unleashed in the same way she loved the color white. It had no limits.
We had a shorthand. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But it was extremely precise. Because precision was her language.
After 5 or 6 surgeries, my body hurt. My body was a body that held a lot of trauma. Beginning to walk, beginning to practice again took courage, even though once upon a time, I had been an athlete on my mat.
I trusted her. I always had. I met her a long time ago and I knew she was the one to go to when I decided to practice again and had both enough trust in myself and in the process of discovering with great care, who I was going to become.
She is the woman I did privates with in her home studio... when I was truly beginning to recover. It was the beginning of things I still can’t even speak about because they land in ways that are simply sacred. Pure. They live in boundless precision. They live in a covenant I built inside of me with my struggling body, (and my ability to hear its call) and my tender yet, eager heart.
Lisa and I had a shorthand. Because far too many things caused my poor body very very deep pain. And we both knew I listened to my body.
I had the extraordinary experience of trusting her very deeply. She would be teaching a large and robust group, and all I would have to do was shake my head in an almost imperceptible way... and that was it. She would continue to instruct the class, and set me up in an entirely different organization. It was usually extremely involved. And it inevitably made me weep. Sometimes on the inside, sometimes quietly on the outside. But what happened IN me was extraordinary: it always healed a deep part of me like nothing else ever had in my body nor in my life prior to that moment of concrete organization.
It was a profound generosity met with trust, silence, understanding, mastery, contained in a shorthand and held with kindness, reverence, compassion, and exquisite attention.
Lisa always made me laugh and I have a big loud laugh which is not common or not often welcomed in the Iyengar community. But I never held back. I was just too happy to experience the spaciousness of her Magic. It filled me with medicine. Soul medicine.
Shorthand.
We had it in our homes as well.
We shared some things that we would chat about that made my spirit soar so high and it was pure joy to share with her and impossible to contain.
Eventually I couldn’t come to class and that was when she could no longer teach publicly. While we were out at the same time, it was for distinctly different reasons and Lisa was so honest and brave about why she was sitting things out. She had always been profoundly compassionate towards me about my own physical pain and then her compassion obviously took on a new meaning. During this period, she shared deep deep truths with me which will never leave me. They are truths I can’t get over.
I’m bereft that her life was taken.
Lisa was Magic.
For me, she was always Magic. I’m so grateful that she knew I felt that way but I’m just so utterly heartbroken.
Given her life of service, I find it so fitting that the way she lived teaches me something every day.
I see her and I hear her. And I just miss her. And that is the tragic part of living and loving deeply. The wanting to gaze into her eyes. The wanting to share those special things we loved. The wanting to hug her. To have the ones you love be with you forever, which is selfish and just not possible.
I love her. I am always going to love her.
She handed me a shorthand maybe because I trusted myself enough to know I could listen to her through the struggle.
Having a shorthand like this when you have struggled with so much physical trauma, trusting yourself in the presence of another... is extraordinarily rare... and it came with impeccable sweetness and kindness and humor and love and with a pristine gaze that is emblazoned inside of me.
The words Lisa spoke to me softened my ears. Softened my tissues. They changed me. They were consistently some of the kindest words I have ever received.
Her precision was something I couldn’t close my ears or eyes to.
I hope I can hear it in some magical way for the rest of my days.
I hope we all can.
I hope.
I hope I can...
Live
in
Magic.
4.29.18
Jill Bacharach
