Hasta La Gadget!

Growing up, my tough-guy WWII vet dad — who was perpetually digging under the hood of his Ford pickup, or hammering away at some home improvement — was anything but a cuddly guy.

He had true grit like John Wayne and seemed as powerful as Mohammed Ali.

To me, at 7 years old, Marty was a man to reckon with.

My Yiddish mama, who force-fed us third helpings of dinner and clutched her children to her breast every time we got a bruise, was the doting hen. Dad was the disciplinarian.

At least it gave him a chance to talk.

You see, my father never got in more then a few words when Mom was alive. She chattered away his airtime. When he did speak, he mostly spoke in grunts, or what I call “Marty Talk.”

“MMMM,” meant he wanted more of whatever he was eating, which he almost always did.

“Shaaaaap,” was his abbreviation for SHUT UP!, which later on dwindled down to “shaaaaa!”

“Shut up or I’ll crack you one!” eroded to “Shaa orrrr!”

It astounds me that a softer man with the ability to speak entire sentences, sometimes two or three, has emerged in Dad’s twilight years.

He is 88 years old and lights up like the 4th of July when I visit.

“There’s my beautiful daughter who never forgets me!” he announces.

Granted, a lot of that joy revolves around the fact that I bring him his favorite treats when I visit: kosher hot dogs with sauerkraut and mustard, Chinese vegetable egg rolls with that sweet red sauce dip he loves, dairy-free apple turnovers from the kosher bakery and the piece de resistance, dairy-free ice cream for my ice-cream-loving, lactose-intolerant dad. “Thank you, Tofutti!”

Old friends can’t believe how attentive I have become to my father in the last few years, the first years of his life that he let down his guard and invited me in.

“How can you be so nice to him, when he was anything but to you?” they ask.

I can only say that every time I make him laugh, it’s like going back in time and giving a high five to the runaway teen I was.

The gift of these last few years with Dad are what a pal of mine calls “the long goodbye.”

Oh, it’s not all sunshine and butterflies with Dad. He is an old, cranky, demanding geezer. I accompanied him on a bus trip with some of his fellow residents from assisted living to see a photography exhibition of photos taken just after super storms like Hurricane Sandy, for which I had a first row seat.

Five minutes into the documentary that was captivating his neighbors and me (Hey, Brad Pitt was in it for his work rebuilding homes after Katrina), Marty yelled, “I’m bored with this! Get me out of here!”

Sigh.

“Dad. We’re in a group, be patient.”

“Borrreowwww!” Marty Talk for “bored and outta here, now!”

But I find that between Marty Talk and downing kosher hot dogs without chewing (by the way, yech), I am learning from him.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked him recently.

“Yeah. I wish I had traveled more. Now I’m too old.”

I thought of all the times my girlfriend asked if we could go to Italy. There never seemed to be a right time to get away. There was always some obligation that felt more time sensitive.

That night, I said, “Honey, we need to plan that trip!”

We went, and it was fabulous. Thanks, Dad. I just needed a little push.

Recently, Dad’s beloved Timex broke and went missing.

It didn’t take much — $39.95 at Target — and I was able to present to him that exact watch he missed so sorely. For five fantastic minutes, Dad was awestruck by me.

Then, of course, he started demanding egg rolls, but you know, those five minutes were sublime.

I think of J.K. Simmons’ Oscar speech for Whiplash when he said, “Call your mom, call your dad. If you’re lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call ’em. Don’t text.”

Thank you, J.K. I hope people listened.

If a former runaway teen with decades of anger and distance and thousands of miles between her and her father could find her way back to a lonely old man in a wheelchair finally ready to talk to anyone who wants to listen, anyone can bridge the gap.

Don’t hold a grudge. Call your parents. Life is so short.

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Like most people, I always had a plan.

Yet it wasn’t long before minor blips started upsetting what I considered to be a blueprint for a happy, fulfilled life. At 15, I sank into anorexia nervosa.

A narrow escape from death due to this mental condition inspired me to precipitously switch my college major from abstract math to law (I needed the discipline of a “rulebook”), cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis. Becoming a lawyer, though, was not for me; and in those times in Greece, a woman becoming a shrink was the stuff of lewd jokes.

That is probably why, still at college, I accidentally floated into journalism. A week-long furlough from my “regular life” to pursue life as a writer in my country’s equivalent of the NYTimes somehow turned into my life. Fifteen years later, everything had changed and everything remained the same. Yet I was profoundly unhappy, teetering on the brink of anorexia yet again, ashamed of my strange hollowness and yearning for an incohate “meaning” to ignite my life.

In 2010, my country went bust. My friends started leaving for other European countries. I could not conceive of leaving my homeland and my mother — the two interchangeable in my mind — for a new life. A single mother, she worked 18 hours a day to raise me, her only child. Every Saturday we picked cyclamines and anemones in the forest north of Athens. She tried to draw me out of my insular, solipsistic existence by reciting Emily Dickinson: “I am nobody. Who are you? Are you — nobody — too? Then there’s a pair of us!”

Then some ancient pagan gods must have decided to intervene. During a short sojourn in New York (researching a book I was writing while covering a conference on the future of digital journalism) one of the very important people I was interviewing expressed interest in me and my book, offering me a job that seemed perfect.

The elation of that night evoked the unadulterated sunniness of my infancy. My mom who was in Greece, and I, pulled an all-nighter on videochat. “Spread your wings,” she said, pushing me to pursue my dreams like she had not, sacrificing herself for others.

So I stayed, in America. Greece went — is still going — through meltdown. Alone, I watched the derailment, from New York. I no longer had a past to return to if I needed to. There was only one way for me: forward. In America.

That did not make things easier, though. Red Riding Hood meets the Wolf was an appropriate metaphor for the job and book deal I had been offered. Even more importantly, neither covered the requirements of immigration law.

Soon my situation became Kafkaesque. Although working full-time, I was not getting paid. My meager savings were running out, and practical problems like Hurricane Sandy, Arctic Vortexes, bad plumbing and heating, and even the roof collapsing over my head twice, were child’s play compared to my immigration woes. I floundered in a murky wasteland of immigration lawyers. One tried to blackmail me; another vanished; a third lost my papers; a fourth refused to hand me my passport unless I met him at an underground storage facility in Clinton, at 3 a.m. Initially I could not stay on in the U.S., then I could not leave, even to visit my mother back in Greece. The few people I had hoped would help commiserated, dissembled, vanished. Quite spectacularly, I managed to contract pneumonia twice. One morning, a deranged biker threw me to the ground, pummeled me, but did not mug me.

In the spirit of Murphy’s Law, one day I slipped on black ice and injured my knee, badly. With no health insurance or money, hobbling and constant pain became my new constant. The grief of my isolation and severance from my homeland and mother did nothing to diminish my nightmares of suddenly finding myself outside the U.S. and not being allowed to re-enter. When I started obsessing each night, about ways to end my life, I realized I was losing my mind.

To find it, I hit the streets.

I walked myself through days of bitter cold and snow; through angry summer nights where you could not breathe for the humidity, the city’s forsaken and mad(dened) crawling out of the woodwork, while the more fortunate passed them by without ostensibly registering their presence. My tenuous existence, oscillating between the two conditions, made feel like a ghost.

Then I cooked. On my half-broken microwave (no stove or oven) I learned to transmogrify my purchases of discounted produce into tasty stews and curries that nursed my body and spirit to health.

One afternoon, on the West Harlem bus, I sat between a gorgeous Viola Davis doppelgänger, and two guys so deeply in love they evoked everyone’s first golden love. Another night, I watched a horde of cheery Lithuanian Haredim, storming out of Magnolia Bakery, help a bedazzling transgender multiracial woman carry a velvet couch someone had thrown out on the street. The sickness inside me abated.

People from all walks of life started telling me their stories. In these encounters — always random and fleeting — whole lives were contained and shared: pieces of the daily fabric of so many people existing in different orbits, around the same sun. This inspired me to write, and embark on my new career, as a counsellor and life coach, here in New York.

One post-snowstorm afternoon that had rendered the city into white screaming silence, I was walking along the Hudson. Its frozen waves, reminiscent of the vulnerability that binds us all together: everyone, everything in this world. In front of some auspicious luxury condos, a doorman yelled out to another: “I am lonely. Tell me a story.”

I came to learn that in New York, “arrival” can mean different things. For some, it means achieving success and status. For others, tapping into a communion of stories to create our own.

If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.

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This is an interview with Ena Burrud, E-RYT500, a certified yoga therapist working with veterans in Colorado and Wyoming. Herself diagnosed with PTSD from chronic trauma, she has been offering iRest (integrative restoration) since 2012; and began sharing the practice in VA facilities in 2014.

Rob: What originally motivated you to do this work, and what continues to motivate you? How, if at all, has that motivation changed over time?

Abuse and traumas in my life drove me to express myself initially as an actress in college, and then professionally. Although successful, I was drawn to dig deeper. Yoga and iRest meditation put me in the trenches, both in my personal work, and in teaching yoga. In my first iRest training, the class consisted of 70 percent veterans and those working with them. The sense of duty and pain were palpable.

My father is ex-Navy. I was briefly in civil air patrol as a teen, and later denied enlistment in the Air Force for health reasons. I’ve always been attracted to warriors; yogic texts, like the Bhagavad Gita, flesh out the metaphor of battle. Those stories help us identify personal forms of conflict and resolution. Our nation owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who have given their time, hearts, minds, and skills to protect our liberties. I am compelled to help them come home, inside and out.

Is there a standout moment from your work with the veteran population?

It occurred during an iRest training session: a beautiful female veteran stood up, took the microphone, and began to cry. She said that when pressed to find a symbol for her safety, she couldn’t decide between her newborn baby or her weapon. The entire room was quiet. She spoke not only for a soldier’s surreal dilemma, but also for a woman’s place in modern warfare.

What did you know about the population you are working with before you began teaching? What were some of the assumptions you had about this population, and how have those assumptions changed?

I’m quite familiar with facing life after trauma. I had not, however, heard the details of these exquisitely personal war stories of the veterans I teach. How can anyone experience war and NOT struggle back home? The rules of engagement for war are based on strategy and staying alive. We watch war movies, the news and other media from the comfort of our couches. It’s neither right, nor wrong. It is simply our present-day reality. But it is startling that we do not seem to have enough resources for our vets’ needs back at home; veterans are very underserved. My experience as a vendor for the VA is that we need smoother, more expeditious systems in place, as well as more providers and diversity of treatments.

What are two distinct ways that your teaching style differs from the way you might teach in a studio, and what are the reasons for these differences?

In a typical studio group class, my approach is based on theme, requests, Ayurvedic assessment, and often the seasons. The cadence and style are light or contemplative, with breath work geared to philosophical and spiritual growth. In private sessions and veteran groups, I use a structured approach for sense of success and familiarity. iRest has a protocol, but each session shifts its inquiry within the framework. Some deconditioning is the result of this slower-paced journey; that can be uncomfortable. Calming breathing techniques, grounded poses, lifestyle choices and applied yoga psychology are part of the work we do together.

What has been the greatest challenge in your teaching experience, and what tools have you developed for addressing that challenge?

Personal agenda is a sneaky creature. It pops up right when a client is having an insight and finding words to express it. Through the years, the greatest moments of healing come from my listening and presenting the work while I remain somewhat invisible. The challenge is to keep things simple, easy to take home and to duplicate, to not overload too much information. There is such a wealth of text out there with incredible philosophical content that can radically alter outlook. But we can only digest a little at a time; it takes a while to feel the difference. That “felt sense” (iRest vernacular) is the catalyst for change.

What advice would you give to anyone who is going to teach in the population you work with?

Do it! This is an amazing group of people. Enroll in specific training and procure professional mentorship of those who are already doing the work. Seek advice from western and eastern medical fields, and nurture those relationships. Stay optimistic when a group series yields attrition; we can’t know what kinds of struggles keep our vets from regularly attending sessions. Keep the pacing slower, the language easily digestible, and intuit when to shift the class or session plan. Cultivate the skill of synthesizing yoga philosophy with other cultural and religious belief systems. Finally, develop strong personal and professional boundaries. This will elicit respect and reverence for all involved.

What are some of your ideas about, or hopes for, the future of “service yoga” in America in the next decade?

The wounds of our veterans permeate all realms: physical, psychological, and spiritual. Posted on The Huffington Post, January 10, 2014, “veterans make up nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population, they account for roughly one in five suicides, according to an analysis conducted by News21, an investigative student journalism initiative, CNN reported in September.” Their needs are immediate. Yet our nation struggles to allocate resources. Implementing more models in which non-VA care providers network and advertise directly to this population would be advantageous for all involved. Websites that categorize grant-funded, nominally- and competitively-priced services would facilitate greater access to more care. Our imperative is to assist these brave men and women with re-integration into the very culture they have fought hard to protect. Training for war is intensive. Training to return to their home lives is crucial.

How has this work changed your definition of service? Your definition of yoga? Your practice?

Needs are dynamic in the continuum of healing, and iRest and yoga therapy are flexible approaches that can serve anyone on that continuum. This is important, because healing doesn’t occur in a linear fashion. Service here is now defined by an explorative quality of being with, rather than “dealing” with, a condition. Classical definitions of yoga practice from my early years had markers of progress. Now, charting those markers has become less concrete. There is a soulful artistry in allowing pain, joy, confusion, loss, and success move through our open hands like water. Nothing here is permanent. This realization has fostered deeper appreciation for me. I am in each soldier’s story. My personal practice more deeply honors the chaotic and the mundane for the gifts they bring. My teen children need me to just do nothing with them sometimes, to listen to them talk of friends and new shoes. I am also compelled to listen to the pain a vet shares when remembering unimaginable destruction. Those relationships are the union to which the definition of yoga refers. That is the practice now. I listen, breathe, and feel the sacredness of it all.

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If you — or someone you know — need help, please call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you are outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.

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Editor: Alice Trembour

The Give Back Yoga Foundation is honored to provide therapeutic yoga resources at no cost to veterans and active duty service members, offering them with tools to successfully navigate the transition home after combat. Stay connected with Give Back Yoga as we share the gift of yoga with the world, one person at a time, by following us on Facebook and subscribing to our newsletter.

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The Pakistani activist Sabeen Mahmud’s murder has shocked the nation’s progressive circles. She was killed in Karachi Friday evening after The Second Floor (T2F), a social forum she directed, had organized an event to discuss forced disappearances in the country’s largest province of Balochistan. The Pakistani military and the intelligence agencies are believed to be responsible for widespread human rights abuse in Balochistan, the resource-rich province where the ethnic Baloch nationalists are fighting for a separate homeland.

Since civil conversations on Balochistan directly criticize the country’s armed forces, authorities in the intelligence services do whatever it takes to prevent or disrupt such talks. The event Sabeen’s organization had organized was actually supposed to take place at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan’s equivalent of Harvard, a top-class school for urban elite. But the LUMS management had to cancel the program because the army had objected to such events that highlighted its controversial operations against the Baloch citizens and confirmed the accusations of rights violations in Balochistan by providing a platform to families of the victims of state oppression.

While some murders remain mysterious and they leave us all speculate about the forces behind such incidents, Sabeen’s seems like an evident case wherein it should not be hard to trace the roots of her killers. Days before hosting Friday’s talk on Balochistan, Sabeen, according to her close friends, had been receiving threats to cancel the event. She was under pressure and having second thoughts whether or not she should let the event happen. All this background conversation was taking place two days before her murder in an email that was sent to the panelists of Friday’s talk and to many of her close friends, including this writer. Everyone believed that the event would go smoothly and it actually did. However, the aftermath of the event turned ugly when Sabeen was shot dead and unidentified attackers critically injured her mother.

Sabeen’s murder will hopefully open doors for even difficult conversations in Pakistan about race, diversity, equality and human rights. Pakistan has used military force, media propaganda and political proxies to keep the rest of the country ignorant about Balochistan where several journalists, lawyers, professors, students, human rights activists and politicians have been killed with absolute impunity. This tragedy should remind the educated Pakistanis that silencing people because of difference of opinion is not fiction but a reality that the people of Balochistan experience every single day. Had we stopped it the day it began in Balochistan, this madness would not come to the streets of karachi.

In most cases, the Pakistani security forces have been blamed for carrying out these killings of government opponents from the ethnic Baloch community. The voice of independent human rights organizations and local people barely reached the national mainstream debate because of Islamabad’s strong and effective propaganda machinery that it is capable to easily and immediately distract public attention from the illegal policies the army is pursuing in Balochistan. The government has discredited the indigenous people’s complaints and also succeeded in promoting a one-sided narrative that the unrest in Balochistan is only caused by ‘our enemies’ [referring to India, Israel and the United States] and the army is out there only to fix the ‘anti-nationals’.

This official narrative is gradually losing its authenticity because of increased interactions between the Baloch political activists, journalists and human rights defenders and their counterparts elsewhere in Pakistan. This nexus has produced such results that have greatly discomforted and embarrassed the army. No longer convinced that the army has no blood of the Baloch people in its hands, liberal urban educated Pakistanis have begun to side with the Baloch instead of those accused of committed human rights. Sabeen will be remembered as one courageous Pakistani activist who sacrificed her life by standing against oppression and injustice with the people of a neglected an impoverished province of her country. Support from the Pakistani liberals like Sabeen has culminated in more opportunities for the Baloch to appear on the national news channels, participate at authoritative discussions to share the actual situation in Balochistan and gain support for their demand i.e. the recovery of hundreds of missing Baloch persons and equal treatment as citizens.

The Pakistani establishment has mainly been held responsible for the attacks on Baloch intellectuals but now these attacks have been extended to the non-Baloch elite as well should they decide to stand on the side of the Baloch instead of the armed forces. Last year, one of Pakistan’s top television talk-show hosts Hamid Mir was badly injured in an assassination attempt in Karachi. He blamed the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.) for plotting the failed murder attempt because he had extensively covered the conflict in Balochistan and provided airtime to perspectives that criticized the army for misusing their official authority against the civilians. Mir is a popular journalist and the attack on him did not silence the national conversation on Balochistan but increased the intellectual curiosity across the country even among those who did not previously care much about Balochistan. Those who wanted to kill Mir had a clear message for him: If you are not with us, you are with the enemy (the Baloch) and you will be treated like them.

Sabeen’s murder will increase the national and international debate about what Pakistan is actually doing in Balochistan. The Pakistani authorities should realize that it is not possible to eliminate every single individual who questions and criticizes their policies. By bringing hard policy questions on a table for an open conversation and public debate, Sabeen proved herself as an ardent believer in democracy but by failing to defend her right to difference of opinion and protecting her life, Islamabad proved itself as an ineffective and faulty democracy.

Targeting the urban friends of Balochistan will not necessarily silence the debate on Balochistan. It will clearly push Pakistan in another age of public awareness, more public debate on human rights. Urban Pakistan has just begun to witness the same harrowing experience what rural Balochistan had been facing for decades. The response from the educated urban activists to brazen events such as the murder of Sabeen will surely be more strident than the protest of the underrepresented Baloch activists whose voice is seldom heard in the nation’s mainstream media. A brave, articulate activist has left Pakistan and this world. She will only be emulated by the future generations of young Pakistani girls who will stand heroically against injustice and oppression.

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“This Is Divorce At…” is a HuffPost Divorce series delving into divorce at every stage of life. Want to share your experience of divorcing at a certain age? Email us at divorce@huffingtonpost.com or tweet @HuffPost Divorce.

Marylou V. Raymat knows firsthand that getting a divorce is about as far as it gets from taking the easy way out.

“In fact, I’d say the divorce process is the emotional equivalent of scaling the highest mountain in the world. It’s that hard,” the 37-year-old mom of two told The Huffington Post.

Below, Raymat shares why she went forward with divorce after 17 years of marriage and what she tells those who worry about how the split will impact her kids.

“What about the kids?” I heard it again and again post-split. At the time, my two boys were at the tender ages of four and one. This was the typical, irking first question most people incredulously asked once I had told them I was filing for divorce. I, like most divorcés, never imagined I’d ever have to field this question. When I committed, I committed for life. “I don’t believe in divorce,” I’d stubbornly say to myself. I was naively oblivious to the experience of divorce. After all, my parents had been married for two decades and so had my husband’s.

In my mind, there were only two ways out of a marriage: death or adultery. As time went on, however, I sadly realized I was not immune from either. My soul was dying, slowly, subtly in my dysfunctional marriage. He had betrayed me with his work addiction and his emotional absence from our lives. I struggled with the notion of divorce because I equated it with giving up. Then one day, I finally realized there’s a big difference between giving up and letting go. I was holding onto something that no longer existed, except in my head.

(Photo courtesy of Marylou Raymat)

I wasn’t seeking perfection but I was seeking happiness. My reality at that point was far from that. The unspoken tensions and constant conflicts had become the norm in our home yet I knew it wasn’t normal. I wanted my children to know relationships could be different but they would never have learned that if I had stayed. In fact, they were learning the wrong things about life and love.

Deciding whether to stay or leave was the most difficult choice I’ve ever made. I was in my 30s, everything appeared great on the surface. My husband and I had two healthy and gorgeous children, a beautiful home, financial comfort and a relationship we had invested 17 years into. In some ways, it would’ve been easier to stay and just go through the motions. In my heart, however, I knew that staying in an unhappy marriage was a tragic choice for everyone. I knew my young kids would grapple with the blows of divorce more easily at such a young age than if I waited until they were older.

After much reflection, I realized that staying in an unhappy marriage was the true tragedy. As difficult as it was, divorce created an opportunity for my family: an opportunity to teach my children the right things about life and love and relationships. And so I filed, not despite my children but because of my children.

I think of life like swinging from a trapeze: you can only grab the next bar if you let go of the last one. And so I, like a brave trapeze artist, let it go. For my kids, for me, and even for him. Although I don’t know what might come next, I do know that whatever it is, I’ll be just fine — maybe even better than fine. And to those who delicately question the well-being of my children because of my choice, I say the same thing: They’ll be just fine….maybe even better than fine. I’ve learned that life gets better by change, not by chance.

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