My Story

Well, hello there.

Thanks for wanting to know who I am.

This website is my portal for my thoughts and lessons and discoveries. It’s my blog and my business.

I’ll just cut to the chase. No, Bindu is not my birth name. No, my parents aren’t hippies, or really progressive commune-dwellers, or expats in India.

About 20 years ago, when I was 27, and in my Saturn Return (no real clue what that is, but I think my real life began around that time, so let’s just refer to it as that), I met my first meditation teacher and it was like “the thing” to ask what your spiritual name was and so I went up to her and asked her and VOILA, I was crowned, Bindu, the Blue Pearl, the point containing the universe. I was overjoyed with the name and have been going by it ever since.

And so my journey began. My journey has been one of emotional education, healing, Buddhism (Tibetan), and art (writing).

I left home for the first time when I was 8, and then after becoming a chronic runaway, landing in a mental hospital for awhile, etc. etc. etc., I can honestly say, I’ve been to hell and back.

Going to Hell and back can leave you with many gifts. Like tenderness, and clarity, and psychic abilities, and resiliency, and a wicked sense of humor wherein you laugh about things that you shouldn’t really be laughing about. You get these things if a) you can unwind the knot of confusion going to Hell and back leaves you with, and b) not let the victim mentality and the bitterness overtake you.

Oh and I can’t forget to tell you; I’m gay. Between the Evangelical home I was raised in and my own internalized homophobia, I didn’t come out until I was 35. When I told my parents, they were angry and shocked even though I hadn’t brought a boy around in over 10 years and I was shaving my head and wearing black combat boots. My father told me to make a choice between the family and the lifestyle, and well, it was the one thing he has ever said to me that was simple and that I knew the answer to. “Sayonara,” I said, and peeled out of the driveway with my girlfriend in the passenger seat.

My sister, who knew before I did that I was gay, shamed my parents ceaselessly in the following months for their bigotry and lame parental love, and after several years, they came around and now my mother sends my girlfriend slippers for Christmas. Just like the Cleavers.

I lived in San Francisco for 10 fantabulous years getting my gay ya-yas out of my system. At the end of those 10 years, most of my lovers ended up blacklisting me on some permanent record that I’m sure is in some big vault at the IRS or the Moral Police Headquarters, and writing books about me declaring I had a personality disorder. I lost a small village of friends and acquaintances to AIDS (it was the early 1990s). By the end of those 10 years, I was wrung out, I turned 30, and so I moved back East because sometimes you just have to pull a geographic.

I got a couple of graduate degrees in American Lit and Secondary Education in Boston, and because two degrees are clearly not enough, I am currently getting my MFA in non-fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence, which is what I should have done in the first place seeing as how I have wanted to be a writer since third grade.

I moved to NYC about three days before 9/11 and was so freaked out afterwards that I enrolled in an Anusara yoga teacher training because I was like, “This world is seriously F*#ED UP and I have NO IDEA what to do in light of the world blowing up.” Yoga was the only thing that seemed to make sense to me on a personal level. I had been practicing for about 10 years at that time. I taught yoga for the next nine years (let me brag: some people have called me the best yoga teacher ever) to about a gazillion people in public classes, workshops, and intensives. I eventually stopped teaching publicly and taught only privately with the rich and famous who have their own airplanes and who want to multi-task during yoga. I’ve been teaching yoga for about 10 years now and would like to start doing yoga and writing retreats in warm tropical places in the future.

I’ve never had a yearning to be a rock star yoga teacher (which seems to be the current track of many yoga teachers). There are some levels of delusion that are exhausting even to me who loves a good project. Yoga can seriously change a lot of things and heal a lot of things. I highly recommend the practice, sans all the “yoga clothes” and “yoga scene” and wacky teachers who aren’t properly trained, emotionally processed, and don’t have a real teacher themselves.

During my yoga training, I also became a Life Coach through The Fearless Living Institute in Boulder, and have had a hoot cheering people on and telling them to cut the crap while they bust a move on their lives.

For the last 10 years I’ve been working on healing my PTSD (Post-Traumatic Dtress Disorder) — which I acquired in childhood — with a very gifted therapist, and learning how to be a decent human being through Buddhism. Between therapy and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala Warrior Training, I am happy to report I am more myself than I ever have been. The teachings of Tibetan Buddhism really resonate with me, because it’s a process of returning to the original sanity that we are born with as well as expressing and accepting ourselves fully while taking responsibility for our lives. In Buddhism, nothing is wrong, so there’s nothing to fix and wow, that sounds good to me. Also, the Buddhists are sort of obsessed with suffering and death as a way to live fully, so I finally found my posse.

Beyond these two wonderful beings, writing is my life and whatever I can do to help people to write or attain their creative dreams, or heal the past, I will do it.

I am on the edge of publishing my personal essays that are about all kinds of things, like painting, and war, and PTSD, and Anne Frank etc. etc. (I can’t tell you EVERYTHING! Hopefully you’ll buy lots of copies of the book.)

I’m also working on a full-length book where I will hopefully get revenge on everyone who talked smack about me but more artfully and developed than they ever could, and that will get picked up by Magnolia Pictures. Remember my dark sense of humor?

You can follow me on Twitter here. I’m still resisting Facebook, but I don’t know how much longer I will be able to avoid it. I mean high school was completely traumatic the first time around. Do I really want to go through that all over again?  As the saying goes, Facebook is for everyone you already know, Twitter is for the people you have yet to meet. And that means you! Introduce yourself. Comment on my blog. Or even better; hire me.