Getting candy in a family with five kids when you’re the youngest is a rare treat. For me, it was all about Mary Mare. Mrs. Mare was an old woman on our street — she lived in the smallest house at the end next to Electric Boulevard with a cherry tree right there on the edge of her yard, cherries hanging out over the gravel road. My brother and I would pick them and sell baggies of them from a stand on Lake Road, the busy street at the other end. We never gave any of the money to Mary Mare. She gave us things, though. First, it was access to her tree and her cherries. But more importantly, it was candy. All we had to do was knock on the door and it would swing open to reveal her smiling face above a basket full of lollipops. Sometimes, she would have tootsie rolls too.

This is what I thought of when I found myself struggling to breathe, bent unnaturally back in yoga class. There’s a connection, I swear, and I’ll get to that. But let me try to explain how it happened first. It was the evening of the day that America commoditizes the concept of love each year: Valentine’s Day.

“If you don’t like this, that’s good,” she said. My favorite Kundalini Yoga Boston teacher, a powerful presence whose words and eyes absolutely command my full attention for reasons I don’t understand. When she said that, I groaned a little. I always know when she says things like that, it’s a bad sign. It means I’ll be feeling pain.

The teacher explained the pose and demonstrated it. She stood on her knees, reached back with her hands and grabbed her heals, bent back what looked like way too far, then let her head fall. “It’s important to release the head and neck completely,” she said. It didn’t look that bad (because she makes everything look easy). I started to get up on my knees and heard her say that it might be challenging for us if we think a lot, if we’re used to being mentally engaged all day. She said that if we do this every day, then it might be very difficult. “The head and neck like being on top. They want to be in charge. They don’t like falling back and being let go in service to the heart.”

Well, no problem. I don’t think that much, right? (Insert wink and facetious tone here.) So I tried it. At first it felt good, stretching parts of my back that needed stretched. But then my neck stared to hurt and I realized I was holding my head up some. My instinct was to hold it up, as though I had to, as though I was holding it above water and if I let it go, I’d drown. I couldn’t just let it fall. I had to try. I had to deliberately let it go. I shifted my shoulders farther back, bent a little deeper and made my head dead weight.

My throat stretched and I felt panic. For a second I thought I couldn’t breathe and was going to choke, but it wasn’t true. I could breathe. But my head still kept thinking that I couldn’t. I thought I was going to fall back and hit my head but my arms were straight and strong holding me up. And yet, I couldn’t stand the edginess, the anxiety, the heat of anger rising. It had to end. I started to lift my head to get out of it but then I heard her voice. “Observe what your head will do in the face of discomfort and stay with it,” she said. So I stayed with it. I went even deeper, gripping my heels and bending my elbows to stretch farther back and wider out across the chest.

Then it happened. My chest suddenly felt like it was ripping open and an intense heat bloomed there. It spread and leaked warmth all through me, all the way out to the poor circulation in my fingers and toes. I fell in deeper and started to move my mouth along with the mantra that was playing with music in the room. There were parts of it that hurt, but other parts that opened into an enormous sense of freedom — not through engaging my relentless fantasies or addictive patterns, but through a pure and uncomplicated love affair with life. There was that sense of wonder that I’d experienced before but only fleetingly. Then, there, in that pose, I was widening the range of that wonder, pushing out the perimeter of patience with myself and with the world, cultivating courage so big that no amount of fear could overpower it.

My mind started to pout and be quiet like a child sent for a time out. I brought my awareness to that heat in my chest and that’s when I saw it. It wasn’t thinking but something else. Something like dreaming but more vivid.  I saw my brother and me on the gravel road reaching into the branches of the cherry tree, plunking the red orbs into our plastic buckets, smiling. Electric Boulevard was (and still is) a very still, zero traffic road. More like a footpath between the residential area and the neighborhood park. The cherry tree on the edge of Mary Mare’s yard wasn’t the only fruit. There was an apple tree just a bit further down and vines with tart grapes in between. Not too far off, there was also a plum tree and a mulberry tree. I understood without thinking that this was my heart: a place where abundance lives and everything is freely given. Mary Mare and her open door and her basket of candy and her smile. The fruit trees and the sun and the innocence of that time.

Then there was Lake Road at the other end where all the traffic was. This was where we took the cherries and sold them to people driving by. It had its beauty too. It stretches along the edge of Lake Erie where, on a clear day, we could see clean across the lake to the hazy horizon and think we were looking at the shores of Canada. Sometimes it had less traffic and sometimes more, but it always had the aura of danger about it – that anything-can-happen-and-it-might-not-be-good mystique. Lake Road was where my sister’s car accident happened. It was where our cat was hit and killed.  It was where I learned to drive too fast. I understood without thinking that this was my mind.

This hallucination or vision or whatever it was happened in one instant. It was all there all at once and I understood it without question.

Finally, it was time to carefully come out of the pose. The teacher’s voice coached me out bit by bit and my head was so heavy to lift I nearly fell over sideways with the effort. She told us to go into child’s pose and I did, laying my heart down on my knees and resting my forehead against the floor and letting my arms go soft along side my body. The teacher turned up the music then to help us relax, which was fortunate because without warning I started weeping. Just sobbing. Loudly and powerfully, my whole body shaking. I don’t remember the last time I cried so hard. It was short but it was hard and ragged and deep.

It took me just over two weeks to write about this because for all that time, I couldn’t fathom any assemblage of words that would come close to touching it. Maybe it’s because I’ve continued to do this pose every day that I finally found its proper story. The heat from my heart has been seeping into the rest of me. It hasn’t been all lovely. There is still discomfort. In fact, it’s floated old grief to the surface to be dealt with. And by dealt with I mean simply felt. There is nothing to do but sit with it and feel it and try not to move.

I trust the power of this place I’m calling my heart. I felt what it’s like to connect into it and I want more of that. I want to live my life from that place. I don’t know if it’s possible. I mean, nobody can live in a perpetual state of uninterrupted bliss. Yet, as it’s already shown me, it’s not all blissful. It just gives and opens and turns everything soft and bright. It’s not a pleasure-seeking or pleasure-promising place. It’s a place of unfiltered truth. And I still don’t know whether it’s possible to live from that place. But the desire is so potent and constant that it’s turned to flavor in my mouth. It’s the tingling of sweet candy on my tongue.