YOGA HEART ATTACKS

Part 1: Love At First AIM

In this digital age it appears that anything is possible. But love at first AIM? It seems ridiculous. But is it any more ridiculous than falling in love with your stalker? Let me explain….

I practice yoga. Yoga is all about opening the energetic chakras and encompasses a lot of other New Age Eastern psychobabble that I completely buy into. Anyway, my yoga instructor—guru if you will—is a magician in the yoga studio. Sometimes she gives classes that are specifically geared to “heart opening.” We’ll do a little chant to open the heart chakra, do some poses specific to opening the heart channels and then lots of backbends to move the energy in the general direction of the heart. It’s a little thing called Eastern Medicine, you probably wouldn’t understand.

Now call me crazy if you will, (believe me--you won’t be the first), but in the past year I have attended two of these “heart opening” classes and literally that day I have fallen head over heels in love. Not just gently in love either; the violent, fast moving, heady kind of love that kicks you when you are down and leaves you feeling dizzy and disoriented at the bar.

The most recent time this occurred was two weeks ago. A friend of mine on the west coast was convinced that a good friend of his was destined to be my soul mate. He thought we would meet and fall madly in love. For about a week he would hit me up on AIM and tell me that I had to meet this guy. He gave me his instant messenger name and told me chat him. I didn’t do this at first because it seemed kind of silly to me, being set up via instant messenger and all. Finally, in an attempt to appease my friend, I took a chance and chatted him. That morning I had gone to yoga. It was a heart opening class.

There was an instantaneous connection. Apparently my friend was right about us. In all my years chatting online, I have never experienced anything quite like it. The only way I can describe it is as some kind of cosmic wormhole of love, a rift in time and space, a vortex. No joke, we chatted for eight hours straight. I was glued to my computer wanting to stay in that moment forever. If there was such a thing as love at first AIM, I experienced it that day. I thought he might be “the one” of many.

By the time we were done chatting we had moved to Europe together, lived in Santa Monica and traversed all of South America via moto. I laughed, I cried, I was smitten, yearning and excited by the potential of finally having met one of my soul mates.

We talked on the phone. We had fun. He was going to fly me to meet him. I was ready to go. He told a couple of his friends who, of course, told him he was nuts. That’s when things went sour. He called off the impromptu trip and I was left feeling disappointed. The bubble had burst. The dream was over. Then the fights began.

For the past two weeks we have gone back and forth bickering and struggling to recapture the magic. He was texting me messages that said things like, “I’m pissed at you.” I was calling him drunk at 3 am telling him I loved him. I truly have a gift if I can piss someone off to the point of writing me off without ever having to meet them in person.

And that’s exactly what happened. Recently, we had what I guess I would call a falling out. When you start at the very heights of love…I suppose there is nowhere else to go but down. Which means that I fell in love, went through then entire gamut of a relationship and then had a falling out—sans the benefit of ever having some good sex—with someone I have literally never even met.

I don’t know what is more sad to me; that my AIM lover and I will never have a fair chance or that I don’t trust the stimulating, irresistible, invigorating feeling of yoga-induced love any more at all.

Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe I have narrowly averted disaster. I said there were two times this has happened to me. The last time was June of ’05. I went to a heart-opening class and that day and proceeded to fall madly in love with a local boy I had pet-named my “stalker.” Needless to say that whole situation ended disastrously. But that’s Part 2 of this tale….another crazy story for another day.