Stayin Put
The right decision is often the hardest. The bull is set free. Beauty Returns.
“Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Salty Crone ✨ Prajna O'Hara reveals meaning when meaning feels lost. Linger a while with a cup of tea. I’m happy you’re here!
I could write chapters on staying put—remaining—full stop. To sit with heartbreak, what is scary, unfamiliar, unknown…
The whispers that speak through dreams in the night. The stopping that recovers our erotic instincts and interrupts internalized patterns to push through, to keep pace with grind culture, MacGyvering inner resources to show up with presence and grace.
For the first time ever, I cancelled my work in Europe. One of the hardest decisions of my four-decade professional life as a seasoned therapist, passionate guide, and evolving medicine woman—an apprentice to the spirits of all beings, specifically plants.
With a heavy and humbled heart, I wrote an email to 28 beautiful people with the subject line: Tender Times.
“I will not be able to travel to England this year to facilitate our retreat…”
Not a decision I take lightly. My body unfurling feelings, lingering spiritual personas, learned to bypass, possibly to survive:
Strange, disorienting, tender feelings.
Like so many, we sit at the intersection of personal depletion, collective grief, and a collapsing healthcare system—one that leaves families like mine piecing things together with duct tape and desperation.
Recently, I had my first full-blown anxiety attack—a ten out of ten. Wouldn’t recommend. It felt eerily similar to a message from my dreammaker.
In the dream, I’m driving an old-fashioned motorcycle with a sidecar. Three of the tires are flat, yet somehow, I’m still moving along with ease.
I come to a crossroads in the town where I grew up, surrounded by barren fields and zero people, except for one lone gas station. I strut in and ask for a repair kit. The attendant is strange, indifferent, as if pulled from another dream entirely. He says flatly, “We don’t have tire repair kits.” I shrug, say, “Okay,” and breeze out the door, like I’ve got four working tires and a playlist.
Next, I meet a familiar Irish friend. He doesn’t have a kit either, but he’s quick to EXPLAIN that three of my tires are flat. He rolls up his sleeves, all too happy to push. I thank him, but somehow I'm moving steadily toward the crossroad without his push or a kit.”
What is this dream circling that I haven’t yet admitted to myself?
Some parts of me hum along just fine; others feel like I’m on autopilot in a Land Rover through a demolition derby—three flat tires, boots to the ground, and a prayer.
Brain flat. Adrenals fried. Nervous system spitting sparks.
And my soul? She’s whispering something about a hermitage and a long nap.
As the fifth child in a wild Irish Catholic patriarchal family of ten, I excelled at bulldog determination—a phrase often shouted in the rigid fire of Bikram Yoga, founded by Bikram Choudhury.1
In the summer of 2014, my friend—let’s call her L for Lovely—invited me to drive six hours from the Sierra Nevada foothills to Los Angeles for a week-long advanced teacher training led by Bikram.
L was a certified Bikram teacher; I wasn’t. I was a former Kripalu yoga teacher, later mastering the yoga of single motherhood to three daughters, two (twins) with complex disabilities. I craved movement, the sweat, the structure, the child-free break from the invisible labor of domestic life to refuel my body.
Rumors about his methods were everywhere. Studios were quietly purging their association with a man who had built an empire on sweat, spectacle, and the control of women’s bodies.
Bikram promoted his method as a therapeutic system. What festered beneath the heat was far more insidious: racism, misogyny, and a growing list of sexual assault allegations. I didn’t long for punishment, nor did I doubt it. This wasn’t my first rodeo with male gurus. I needed to see for myself how an ancient tradition—so widely revered for health and well-being—had been twisted into domination and shame. (Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.)
We arrived at a sweltering mirrored studio, over 105 degrees, like a sauna, where 120 students arranged themselves on perfectly aligned mats. At the front, Bikram—bare-chested, in tiny swim briefs that revealed more than necessary—preened and prowled in front of his reflection, flexing his butt cheeks in the mirror more often than attending to his students.
I slipped in, curious, skeptical, and mostly unnoticed as a fifty-six-year-old white woman, dog-tired with sagging breasts and stretch marks to boot.
I’ll never forget the moment Bikram called out to L—not by name, but by pointing from his dais in Utkatasana (awkward pose) and asking, “Where are you from?”
She answered, “Los Angeles.”
He pressed, “No, where are you really from—Vietnam? You're not from here, you're from Vietnam!”
She shrank. Humiliated. Shamed.
I found her in tears in the dressing room. Held her tight. Helped her pack. We headed home—fire in our hearts, ready to reclaim and live true yoga.
This moment is different. I’m setting the bull free:
The night after my panic attack, preceding the decision to cancel, my dreammaker returned and continued to work with me through the night.
In my waking dream, I’m lassoed like a bull in a bullfight—caught, strangled at the chest, unable to breathe, choking and spitting for hours until I fall into this dream:
I’m surrounded by herculean, macho men wielding shrieking power tools. With hands over my ears, I’m yelling, “STOP.” I jump up to punch their mouths shut. I can’t reach. They stand over me, jeering and laughing. I want them to stop. I fall exhausted but soon pick myself up and say,
“You’re not real. You don’t have power over me. You’re free to go.”
Just before waking, my soul whispers,
“It will be a year before the beauty returns.”
This is a critical moment, the edge where the unconscious psyche and conscious mind meet and cross a threshold. Dreamtime isn’t linear; the beauty begins now, in staying put.
The known world crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us. —Robin Wall Kimmerer
Alchemy
Many yoga practitioners are disheartened by power-over dynamics that play out in cult-like settings, especially if you believe another person can make you into something. Some can separate the predator from the practice.
I practice hot yoga regularly at Toadal Fitness with a teacher named M. He’s a single dad—funny and disarming. He says things like:
“This time is for you. Do what you want. Let the breath dump out. Thoughts are like little children, put them in the backseat for now.”
He offers options and adaptations, plays funky music that makes me feel uncaged and deliciously sexy, and doesn’t care if you spend the whole class resting in Savasana (corpse pose).
What I love most about sweating is that no one can tell if you’re crying, like I was yesterday. My body shook loose tears like an avalanche of ecstasy.
Before I left class, I reflected on the alchemy and reciprocity between mothers and daughters, as well as between all beings. My daughter often feels like she leaves one hard environment for another. I know this. I usually hold my advice and listen, but that night, I felt wrung out like an old dishcloth.
She said, “I’m not in solution mode.”
Of course. (Full stop.) “Do you want to sit on my lap?”
I meant it—but didn’t expect my six-foot, thirty-year-old daughter to take me up on it.
She did. No matter our age, we’re never too big—or too old—for Mama’s lap.
Never. And if your mama is no longer here, remember: the Earth is our mother.
This is as far as words travel.
The body does the rest.
The soul whispers.
“Beauty is already returned.”
Like Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us in Braiding Sweetgrass.
There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.
Dear Generous Reader,
I appreciate you more than you can know. Thank you for walking with me.
If this piece illuminated the rightness of making a hard decision, please tap the 💜 and consider sharing it so more readers find our stories. I’d love to chat with you:
✨ What is the beauty that is already returning?
With Love, Prajna
Thank you,
for always providing the perfect art for my writing. And the joy that fills me from regular supporters, whom I encourage you to read: and so many more.I am touched by the conversations that blossomed from related posts. Thank you!
Echoes of a Mother’s Soul: Songs Half-Sung
We’ve all been raised by patriarchy—our mothers, our feelings about mothers, even our choice to mother or not—shaped by its grip. Patriarchy echoes through our ancestral bloodlines. It was never my plan to be a mother. I was the fifth of eight children in an Irish Catholic, working-class family in the late 50s, sh…
Bikram Choudhury’s yoga system consists of 26 postures and 2 breathing exercises based on hatha yoga poses taught to him by his teacher, Bishnu Charan Ghosh in Calcutta, India. Though presented as a healing modality to invigorate the body, his approach became infamous for its rigid control and the cult personality he built around it.
I’m incredibly proud of you for doing the “hard - right” thing. And you did so with presence and an openness to see and grow.
Right in that moment BEAUTY RETURNED…by your willingness to say YES to the NO you had to give-you flung that door wide open to Beauty! A beauty that tenderizes my heart as I read this for the 3rd time.
Thank you for sharing your life, your truth, your struggles…you are BEAUTY personified.
And I am all giddy that my art gets to be part of the already emerging return of your unique Beauty. 🖤🤍🩵💙❤️🩷🧡💛💜
Your dream about the flat tires is both realistic and hopeful. While you hold things together with desperation and duct tape, you keep moving forward. A key asset, the dream suggests, is your ability to attract willing allies like the friend who pushes your car. Not everyone has this capacity. It can make the difference between grimly plodding along and finding joy in moments like the one where your daughter sits in your lap.