25/02/2026
The Practice of Remembering
I was nine years old when death first became real to me.
My father died of cancer. I did not understand the word. I only understood that he was fading. The house had already shifted before his breath stopped. Something had withdrawn long before the final moment arrived.
I remember standing beside his casket and asking my mother,
“Why is he lying there, not moving, in this beautiful box?”
The box was polished. Formal. Almost ceremonial. He looked peaceful as if stillness had been arranged around him.
“He is going to heaven,” my mother said.
Heaven.
The word did not comfort me. It expanded the mystery.
If he is going somewhere, what part of him is going?
If the body remains, what leaves when breath leaves?
Is heaven a place above the sky? Or a return to something unseen?
Before the funeral, I watched as his body was prepared. I did not know the word embalming. I only knew that adults moved with deliberate care. The air felt different. The stillness felt unnatural. Sacred and unsettling at once.
How could the same body that once filled doorways now feel like an object being arranged?
At the burial, I watched the casket descend into the earth. Soil meets wood. We turned and walked away. I remember thinking it felt lonely to leave him there.
Even now, cemeteries carry a quiet that does not shout. It simply waits. A reminder that touch, voice, and footsteps do not remain. That one day I too will enter something I cannot yet comprehend.
The unknown frightens me loudly.
It hums.
It unsettles me.
And it deepens my curiosity.
My father was a strict man. A police officer. Firm. Mercurial. Discipline arrived swiftly in our home. Affection, if present, was quiet and restrained. I learned structure before softness.
Looking back, I see how that shaped me. Independence came early. Emotional self-reliance settled in before I had language for it.
Sometimes people see my composure and mistake it for aloofness. But what they perceive as distance is often spaciousness. I feel deeply. I simply learned that gripping tightly does not prevent loss.
So I practice presence.
Growing up as the seventh of eleven children in the Philippines, life was collective. In our small diner and mini mart, responsibilities rotated. Washing dishes. Peeling potatoes. Sweeping floors. Caring for younger siblings. No task belonged to one person. We moved through labor together.
Dharma was not yet a word.
But alignment was already happening.
Impermanence was not a philosophy in which I grew up. It was water rising into our home after heavy rains, sometimes to waist height. It was lifting furniture. Waiting. Cleaning. Beginning again.
I remember earthquakes when I was young. Not constant, but enough to feel the ground tremble beneath my feet. Typhoons bending trees. Skies turning dark without warning.
The earth moved.
The wind rearranged.
And still, after the storm, we scrubbed the floors.
Nothing stayed.
Life continued.
Years later, when I first witnessed autumn in America, I recognized the same teaching in another form. Leaves igniting into gold and crimson before releasing themselves. Winter covers everything in snow, quiet and white. Spring returning with tender green insistence.
Nothing argued with change.
At fourteen, the question that began beside that beautiful box found language when I read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. The idea that beneath personality and circumstance there is something steady did not feel foreign. It felt remembered.
Later, in Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, I encountered the sacred pause between stimulus and response. Even in suffering, there is space.
Through Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein, I learned to observe directly. Breath rising. Breath falling. Sensation appearing. Dissolving. Impermanence was no longer an idea. It was visible in every moment.
And in studying Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam by Joan Ruvinsky, something settled deeply.
Recognition.
Awareness is not separate from experience. Duality is not a flaw. The wave is not separate from the ocean.
We forget.
And then we remember.
This understanding did not remove grief. It did not make me invulnerable. I am human.
I feel pain.
I feel sorrow.
I feel love and joy.
But my path clarified.
Not escape.
Participation.
I pursued yoga not as exercise, but as inquiry. I studied anatomy and subtle body. I trained. I listened. I became a certified yoga instructor, later deepening into yoga therapy and Reiki. Each step was not achievement, but refinement. Not accumulation, but alignment.
Each doorway opened into deeper listening.
I remain a forever student.
Curious. Evolving. Watching my samskaras surface. Practicing buddhi before reaction. Remembering that awakening is not departure from the world, but clarity within it.
My dharma is remembrance.
To remember awareness beneath form.
To remember presence within impermanence.
To remember unity within apparent separation.
To help others remember what they already are.
The question that began at nine has never left me.
It walks beside me still.
And in that question, I continue my journey…
