Four years ago (when the video linked below was taken), I really had my life together! All the faith in the world, a gusto of ambition and a social media firecracker, I was in steady flow with the Universe and my wishes were coming true! I loved what I did because I did what I loved and all the positive-vibe “do what you want” blog posts were true!
BODYbybianca, Inc. had grown into a successful international business, I had more money saved in the bank than ever before and I had freed myself of the brick prison in which I was born (New York City) moved to sunny South Florida and was about to embark on another life changing adventure with a grandiose move to Nicaragua, the country which would swallow My Love and change my life forever.
What I see in this video is a little girl, innocent and naive with no experience of tragedy. About eight months after this video was taken, once all of my childhood dreams had come true and I was over the moon in love… Boom! May 3, 2015. I hit rock bottom.
I was caught with my love in the greatest oceanic storm I have never seen depicted on film to this day. I saw a human being I loved, the one my soul married, struggle for his life beside my own fight and vanish from my sight. And, I died.
Soon after I was disowned by his family, the family who had welcomed me as an oncoming daughter and sibling, the mother I had sent pictures of my dream wedding gown to just days earlier and the grandmother I had already formed an attachment to in my heart, having imagined us cooking breakfast together for the boys in her home in Colorado Springs. I had never had grandparents like Kevin’s, and for me, Grandma Pat was another dream come true! I could not wait to hug her as I imagined it would feel like Kevin was again in the room.
July Forth, 2015: en route to Pike’s Peak and grandma’s embrace, I sat in a Starbucks coffee shop, lost and alone in Golden, Colorado. Bear was beside me and Preçiosa was in a cat carrier under my chair, when Grandma Pat’s husband answered the phone: “You are not our granddaughter,” he said, “and if you come here, we will turn you away.” From broken to shattered, to dust..the wind blew what was left of me away on that day.
After three years, I will tell you, there is no returning to life before tragedy. The following day from The Storm, I held Kevin’s body, drift ashore on the deserted once-perceived to be paradise beach I had called home in Nicaragua. There is no unseeing what I have seen.
Six months ago and three years from The Storm, I began the process of releasing Kevin’s ashes with two fierce female teachers and healers in the cloud forest above Alejuela, Costa Rica under the umbrella of my yoga teacher and supporter Jimmy Barkan and his class of student teachers. The Release has been a cathartic process.
Last week, with the support of two friends, one old and one new, I continued this release at a waterfall in Northern Colorado, now closer to the summit of Pike’s Peak, where Kevin had prophesied in his journal he would propose to me and where for the last three years I have been journeying to marry a man who is under the Sea, and to release the last material remains of my beloved.
Like a feather blown by the wind, the waves of the 2015 storm knocked my feet out from under me and since, my steps have not been my own. While I used to stomp through the runway of life with ease and deliberate confidence that my direction was indeed my own, over the last three years I have rarely been sure of where I was in time or space or where I was going and why.
The tidal wave thrust me from a sunny beach in Central America to snowcapped mountains in Colorado, a journey across the United States twice and a drive through nine countries including Southeast Asia where Mother India and dear Nepal took me in for seventeen months, giving me the security to leave this worldly plane and soul soar high above previously realized material existence. I died, and I left my body, and India was the perfect place to allow for this flight.
A once self-proclaimed Adrenalin junkie and adventurer who could not sit still to meditate for five minutes, my body having broken and my soul having slipped through the hole my love’s loss had created, stripped of physical existence and renounced from the material world, sitting was all I could manage and for days on end I sat quite naturally and peacefully in India, often taking for myself no food nor water. I had no complaint, and while sleeping outdoors on concrete floors outside temple doors, I experienced gratitude for the Love, because of Kevin, I now knew, and held, and life was beautiful.
India fed me. After one year, I became physically ill without any remaining will to care for my being though incapable of being idle in the presence of suffering. I fed others and survived off the handouts of others for myself. Friend Elvin Hugi Ottokar Hansen recalls running into me while I was stealing food (I made multiple runs!) from a “high class” hotel “benefit” (to benefit the woman throwing the party) to feed homeless (and legless) babas and guru-bhaiyas (guru-brothers) on the street in Topovan, Rishikesh, India. In my lehenga choli and veil (traditional Indian skirt and blouse with half-saree veil of sheer silk), I sat barefoot on city pavement feeding as many homeless as were present and hungry. “Chai?” baba would ask after finishing a heaping plate of luxurious mixed Indian cuisine catered up to suit the Western appetite, and there was nothing to say, but to nod and walk back into the hotel, up the stairs to the banquet hall, smile at the socializing crowd of “do-gooders,” pour a glass or two and return hands full for baba. It is not a meal without chai… I get it. Though I did not know it at the time, acting insight of suffering and not for want or collection of merit, this action is called Karma Yoga; karma literally means “action.” By watching the hungry eat, I lost hunger. This is #karma.
Elvin (pictured in the foreground) captured our meeting after I had shared one of such meals with double amputee guru-bhaiya (pictured to my right) below:
February 2017. Over one year spent in India, exhausted and penniless on the streets of Haridwar, India, now sleeping in a tiny street-illegal car with a street dog named Raaja, I was given new clothes. The time was the annual Shiva Ratri week-long celebration for God Consciousness. Over the course of this most Holy week, from my feet to the cover of my head, I was clothed by three monks within three temples over three days, in the saffron robes of the Swami. Each piece of my three piece dress lain over with a blanket was a variation of saffron (deep orange lungi or cloth wrapped as a skirt, yellowish orange men’s kurta or tunic, light salmon-like pink ghumta, or veil *the color variation representing Sadhu families of Southern, Central and Northen India – I was literally the united nations of Sadhus).
Saffron is the color of sannyāsa (renunciation of worldly possessions) because it is the color material will go up in flame presenting the impermanence of material wealth, returning only as ash, which now cleansed of greed is worshipped by nagas and aghoris. I was renamed Ganga by the Giri sect of naga yogis who live in caves and small duni-centered dwellings (duni is a sacred fire) often apart from the world tucked into the Himalayan range. Naga means “naked,” and Naga babas (baba means father, *most nagas are solitary-living men) are yogis who live naked and covered in sacred ash for warmth and protection from the elements, or are adorned (especially when traveling) by one waste cloth called lungi resembling a skirt or even more minimally by a loincloth called langot tied to simply cover the lingham (male sex organ), testes and anus. Having overcome desire, there is no perversion in baba’s pure presence and nudity has no effect on the awareness of the witness, nor the witnessed. Combine this empowerment, with life in satsang–truth:sat, company:sang(ha)–and there is no room for distortion of one’s true relationship to an other as father, mother, sister, brother, daughter, son. And when there is no room for distortion of our True Nature, all that is left is the unbound comfort of infinite spaciousness. That is what baba feels like: infinite…spaciousness… Hence, naked men can be fathers quite naturally in the presence of beautiful, often younger women (sometimes even older women will carry daughter-energy for a baba, other times mature women of any age may be a mata:mother or didi:sister/”experience-Equal” to baba). A celibate fatherless daughter, I carry the ash of my late Love in an amulet at my chest, so it is no coincidence that I found in baba, my Ash Fathers (notice: what is singular is plural, and what is plural is singular. In Truth, He is One and All; in humanity, he is one and many). Baba worshipped the ash and I sat in speechless awe of His beauty and His Grace. In Western society, we are taught that one is either masculine or graceful, and that gracefulness in an inherently feminine trait. Grace has no gender. Imagine the energy of a fiercely disciplined warrior with the grace of a classically trained dancer. This is #baba. S/He who masters the balance and joining:yog of masculine and feminine into One is guru. This is #Tantra. There was no English spoken and yet, as if by Divine translation, I understood all as if all had been written within, from ages ago. This is #yoga.
It is said that survival is “fight or flight.” In the storm, tossed left and right, without breath and swallowing large amounts of water, in the face of death, I fought. Then… Flew.
Now, no longer in flight, I have descended from the highest heights of my knowledge into what I have called a corpse-like cage. For the last year, little Bianca has been pushing and prodding her way back into frame. “Why this descent?” I ask mysoul, my Lord. I spent quite sometime preventing this reunion of soul and frame for what I believed was a de-evolution from infinite formlessness into a limited reality bound by skin, the egoic and dreaded material consciousness, a lapse in my enlightenment. Is this my fall from Grace?
It has been a year since the time Bianca has sprung again into the picture. I recognize her as Ganga’s ego. Even her name means White Queen. She wants to play dress up, be adorned and adored, touched and made love to and kissed into the night. Ganga, through her travels was groped, though she never had desire for touch. Ganga had no desire at all: not for money, nor food, nor a bed to lay in at night. Impartial to difference, Ganga experienced all as the same (in English, Buddhists call this empowerment “one-taste”). Ganga was a true:sat sādhvi (female sādhu), a renounced and practiced ascetic and mendicant (monk); still, Ganga was. Natha Deva, never a name taken, was and is, not. Natha is full-y nothing and Perfect. Bianca, a cosmic actress in the illusive play (Māyā), wants to take on roles like girlfriend and wife, mother. Bianca experiences happiness apart from sadness, while Ganga experiences nothing and Natha Deva is .
Sultana Bianca is fully human and after THREE YEARS, FOUR MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS (1246 days) since El Tormenta (The Storm)…
BIANCA
IS
BACK.
And, it feels good!
If you would like to know more about this story and support the process of compiling three years of journaling interwoven with a chronological journey of trauma and recovery into a book detailing the walkabout in and out of material existence through renunciation and into the tantric lap of Vajrayana, returning to form, please send your support through comments and messages or PayPal a financial pledge to BiancasBookProject@gmail.com. I predict the book will take three to six months of dedicated effort to realize. It is my dream to realize this effort in solitary Winter retreat, confined to and snowed into a lone cabin in the woods. Financial support can be sent through PayPal to the dedicated email and PayPal account reserved exclusively for this project: BiancasBookProject@gmail.com. With over 2500 friends on Facebook, just $3 will get me on my way to making the budget needed to accomplish this goal.
Thank you.
BODY BY BIANCA 