Cirque du Malaise

Want to be a better person? Read novels.

And put that self help book down.

I wrote a little something for Elephant Journal on why I don't read self help books and how science backs me up.

I’m really into making pottery. I don’t talk about it all that much, partly because it’s hard to talk in words about something that happens purely from the right side of your brain, and partly because, well, it’s my thing, and I don't always feel like sharing it. Sometimes it’s nice to have just one thing that you don’t share with anyone else. I go to a pottery studio once a week and make things. And usually my favorite part of these evenings is putting in my iPhone earbuds, blasting some Chopin, and tuning everything and everyone else out.

Last night though, was different.

I was feeling sad when I got to class. I have terrible jet lag this week, it’s been rainy and glum in Mill Valley, and then, fuck it all, Steve Jobs died yesterday.

I know it’s a little weird to get emotional when a public figure dies. I did not know Steve Jobs and I really do have bigger problems to worry about. But Steve Jobs was that rare public figure whose existence actually did touch my life, personally, and the lives of those around me. He impacted my own life deeply with his brilliant product innovations at Apple, but also with his creative vision, in which way he was truly a role model. THINK DIFFERENT. He was a legend, and he really did the change the world. He definitely changed my own life. Everything I’ve ever done that matters, I did on a Mac.

So when I got to pottery, I was feeling heavy-hearted. I didn’t really want to be there. And I definitely didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to stay home and worry about what’s going to happen to the world without someone like Steve Jobs in it.

I put my headphones on, and I started throwing pots. But then, a funny thing happened.  I somehow ended up talking to the guy next to me — a new face at the studio — and ended up having a really meaningful evening. He was a visiting ceramic artist who gave me a whole bunch of insightful tips about how to throw on the wheel. Some of them were useful practical tips: “Get in, get out.” “Keep your elbows in close.” Others were more philosophical.

I watched him give a demo on how to throw off the hump. This is where you take a huge pile of clay, sloppily center it on the wheel, and then make little objects (bowls, mugs, whatever) from just the very top part of the wedge. In this way, you can pop off a whole bunch of things really fast without having to keep wedging, centering, and cleaning off the wheel. It also gets you away from the rabbit hole of being obsessed with centering the entire lump of clay perfectly, which can be a real time consuming OCD endeavor.

My favorite part of watching him throw off the hump was that he kept spinning these beautiful creative pieces, cutting them off the hump of clay, holding them up for everyone to admire, and then smashing them on the floor.

He said: “pottery is not precious.”

And this is what I love about pottery. You can’t take it too seriously. It’s a transient creative format. You can focus everything you’ve got on the most brilliant piece of artwork you have in you, but there are a million things that can go wrong. Even if you manage to throw it successfully, cut it off the wheel without warping it, carry it to the shelf without tripping, and trim it without fucking it up, you never know what’s going to happen in the bisque fire, or the subsequent glazing fire, or when some silly person picks it up to admire it and then accidently drops it. There might be an earthquake, or you might put a glaze on it that ends up sucking. You might get it home, only to have it break in the dishwasher, or slide off the edge of the table, or maybe the handle just breaks off one day. The thing is broken before it was ever born.

You’ve all probably heard the fable about Achaan Chaa, the Buddhist master, who loved his tea cup. His disciple said, how can you teach us about non-attachment when I see you always use that same mug? In the words of Mark Epstein:

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Pottery is all about nonattachment and it’s also about getting over yourself.

I left the studio in a great mood last night, grateful for a few lessons learned. And then I came home and watched one of the many Steve Jobs videos circulating around the Internet in memorium, the one in which he said:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

A word you hear a lot here in the Bay Area yoga mecca is “blessed.” As in, “You are so blessed.” I’ve heard this in alotta yoga classes. It’s the new “Namaste.” Really, it’s a fancy way of saying “lucky."

And it’s true, to a certain extent, I suppose. I have food, shelter, and I can afford to pay my bills, at least most months. I am relatively healthy; I don’t have any major physical deformities; I have so far retained all my limbs and internal organs (and most of my teeth!).

But I sometimes take offense to the notion that I should consider myself lucky in these regards. It should be a basic human right to have health, shelter, nourishment, and basic human needs met. If I have those things, am I “lucky”? Or am I just “fine”?

I don't just have my basic needs met, of course. I have much more. I have a sweet little cottage in the woods (with just a minor slug problem). I have more than my fair share of awesome friends. I have an easygoing lifestyle that includes the luxury of sleeping in almost every day. I run my own business. I love what I do for work. I have a creative project that means something to me. I just bought a pair of gold platform heels that cost $130.

But are these things all a result of being BLESSED?

I fear this is going to be a very controversial statement, but I deign to say that a lot of these things are actually the spoils of hard work and a lot — I mean a LOT — of self-work as well.

The word blessed, to me, implies a certain non-deserving of things. And you know, I think most of us actually deserve the good we do get. Not cuz we’re lucky. But because we’re doing our best to be good people.

I also find it interesting that the same people who talk about "how blessed we are" are the same ones who like to interject thoughts about manifestation. As if we could simultaneously be controlling our lives with The Power of Positive Thinking and, also, just be BLESSED. Um. Which is it?

Instead of talking about how “blessed” we are to not be suffering, maybe we talk about people who are not so blessed and who are still making positive contributions anyway?

I just read Dave Egger’s Zeitoun, about a Syrian-American man who stayed behind while Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans so that he could help his community and try to be of service. He ended up getting arrested and jailed for almost a month based on not much more than the color of his skin and the post-9/11 conspiracy hysteria that is rampant in our country. He was denied his basic judicial rights, imprisoned and tortured without cause, and eventually let go without so much as a “Sorry, our bad.” Harrowing and eye-opening story. In the end, Zeitoun returned to New Orleans and became a pivotal figure in rebuilding his adopted home.

Wow.

Zeitoun was not blessed. Not a manifester, either. Just a good person doing his part to triumph over adversity.

I just finished reading Man's Search For Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. (I should say that I just finished RE-reading it, since I've read it before, but thanks to the magic of old age forgetfulness, I can now re-read books I read when I was younger and it's as if for the first time. Perk of dementia.)

Food for thought:

More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms.

In other words, just cuz you're miserable does not mean you're maladjusted. After all, life is kinda hard.

And also:

Edith Weisskopf, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended, in her article on logotherapy, that "our current mental hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to  be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable happiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy."

Well said, Edith. A legend before her time.

Takeaway: It's okay to be sad, depressed, miserable, and just generally over it sometimes. Don't let the positivity propogandists tell you otherwise! "Mental hygiene," ew.

I was editing an article for a client, Dr. Susanne Babbel, in which she described a simple journaling exercise about hope. This exercise is intended to give trauma victims a purpose in their life, but it’s basically straight out of the pages of The Artist’s Way, one of my favorite creative projects.

Hope is kind of a hangup for me right now.

Last year while at a retreat I was given a piece of red string to tie around my wrist with a wish. The idea? When the bracelet wears off, the wish comes true. I wished for “hope” — in other words, the possibility of some of my personal dreams coming true. The red string was tenacious and stayed on for months until it was ratty and gross. It finally fell off on one arbitrary but markedly hopeless day.

Recently, I’ve been re-reading Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search For Meaning, which recounts his experience in Nazi concentration camps in the 40s, and his theory that only those with hope and a purpose for their survival made it through the war, despite their physical conditions and the things that happened to them in captivity.

Hope. It’s all about hope. Freud thought it was all about desire, but it’s all about hope.

I need to work on this. So, I decided to try Susanne’s Hope Exercise.

First, you make a list of things you genuinely enjoy doing. Things that give you peace and put you in your right brain (that’s your creative mind — the one where you lose track of time). Not things you think you should like doing. So not, in my case, things like “practicing yoga” or “going to Burning Man” or “eating mushrooms.”

1. Writing
2. Reading novels
3. Hiking Mt Tam
4. Cooking
5. Going to the movies
6. Taking pictures (heart you iPhone)
7. Making pottery
8. Picking flowers (especially late at night off the neighbor’s lawns)
9. Making things for my imaginary spice company, Simple Basic
10. Lying around listlessly in the sun

Second, make a list of things you would like to achieve in your life. This is big picture, blue sky stuff.

1. Write a book
2. Make actual money off a personal creative project
3. Have a family (not picky about what kind, very picky about the participants)
4. Go to France
5. Learn to speak another language (ideally, French)

Third, make a list of baby steps you can take to get going in that direction. This takes an “off the paper, into the world” mentality that I rarely possess.

1. Take a writing workshop (I’m trying to manifest one at Esalen later this year. And by “manifest” I mean “get around to putting a deposit down for it.”)
2. Spread the gospel about Recovering Yogi relentlessly while working on my side project with Matthew Teague Miller, a children’s book we’re writing called The Clam Before the Storm.
3. Steal a baby. (Just kidding.) Alternate plan: Elope with gay BFF in Thailand later this year. (Again, kidding. Sort of.)
4. Pray to money gods while making a plan with my cohorts Leslie and Vanessa to really do this France thing. Next year.
5. Pull out those Rosetta Stone CDs I bought off Craig’s List and develop an iota of self-discipline about my French lessons!

Now, the good part: you share it (like I’m doing here). This turns it into an incantation. Saying things out loud makes them real!

When I write articles for Elephant Journal I am often humbled by the agreeable comments from readers who are able to phrase things far more precisely and eloquently than I managed to. (I am also often appalled by the confrontational nature of anonymous commenting, but that’s a different story.)

This week, I posted an article called “Mercury in Retrograde is not a good excuse for you to be an asshole to me.” It's about theism, kind of.

I quoted the marvelous Pema Chodron, and in return, my Elephant colleague Scott Robinson (who goes by the “nom-de-blog” Yesu Das — and yes, I wish I came up with that cheeky play on words) posted two oldie but goodie quotes that I have to share.

The first is from a Somerset Maugham book that rocked my adolescence: Of Human Bondage (yup, I was a book nerd with a flair for dramatic titles, even then):

Yesu Das’s setup: “…in which Phillip, the semi-autobiographical protagonist, met a dissipated and largely unpublished poet in Paris named Cronshaw, who gave Phillip a remnant of a Persian carpet. The carpet, Cronshaw told him, held in it the answer to the meaning of life. Phillip kept the remnant for many years, through repeated failures and almost relentless suffering, as he tried to find what the world called “success” in life. One day, long after the carpet fragment had been lost, Phillip realized, with the abruptness of revelation, the truth that had eluded him for so many years: life does not have any meaning.”

“His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing…(T)hat was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life… Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful… In the vast warp of life (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace… His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realized that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design.”

And then there’s good ol’ Billy Shakespeare, from King Lear:

“his is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit

of our own behavior,—we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star!"

Nice, right? Thanks, Yesu.

The man has taste. You can read a blog he wrote about theism here.

I went to a talk that a friend of mine gave on stress reduction. He gave us a neat little acronym to help us prioritize our lives in the pursuit of stress-free health. It went like this:

D. (for “diet”)

A. (for “attitude”)

R. (for “rest”)

E. (for “exercise”)

Dare to be healthy! Get it?

The idea: to name one or two things we could stand to improve in each area, and then put this inspirational list somewhere that we will see it every day. Mine went something like this:

DIET

Seeing as how I just finished up 3 months of pristine, focused eating, and am finally able to relax and eat whatever I want, the only “goal” I really have for my diet is to let myself eat “bad” things sometimes, and just not give nearly as much of a f*ck. Can I count that as a goal? *

ATTITUDE

While I am aware that I may not have the best attitude in the world, I’m okay with that. Being a sarcastic cynic has helped me a lot (eg Recovering Yogi). As a woman about to turn 40 this year—HALLELUJAH, I’m comfortable with who I am. I don’t want to be a positivity activist. So, not sure what my goal is here, either. To be more outspoken about my bad attitude? **

REST

Uh, yeah, no one is gonna argue that I should get more sleep. I’m the reigning world champion of adequate sleep. I work for myself, I work at home, and I rarely set an alarm. In fact, I often proselytize to my poor friends about how I don’t believe in setting alarms and think that one’s health revolves almost entirely around abiding by one’s natural sleep cycle. I go to bed when I’m tired, and I wake up when I’m good and ready. And sometimes I nap. This is the prerogative of an aging female artist with no children or husband. ***

EXERCISE

This is one area in which I have actually made for-real improvement in the last few months. So when I pondered ways I would like to improve my exercise routine, the only thing I could come up with was “buy new hiking shoes.”

__________

* I started writing this blog on Friday. On Saturday, I ate a cannoli and some pudding. On Sunday, I went out to breakfast and had biscuits and coffee. Followed by more pudding. I’d call this a very successful weekend! One’s outlook is all about the goals.

** I’m doing pretty great in this department too.

*** I actually tried to set my alarm this morning because I am working onsite for a client in downtown San Francisco this week. The alarm did not wake me up. It went off for an hour. Sorry, job!

ARTIST: Vanessa Fiola

I recently I went up to Spirit Rock Retreat Center for a daylong mindfulness workshop called “Wisdom 2.0.”

It was hosted by Soren Gordhamer, founder of the annual conference of the same name, and Will Kabat-Zinn, son of Jon “Wherever You Go, There You Are” Kabat-Zinn. I was excited about this daylong because technology and spirituality are two major interests of mine, and the possibilities for discussion seemed endless.

At places like Spirit Rock and events like mindfulness daylongs, it goes without saying that electronic devices are generally frowned upon. There is ubiquitous pressure to be device-free at “spiritual” events. If you even glance at your iPhone during such a thing, people will judge you as an under-present douchebag. It’s a faux pas punishable by social annihilation to bring a cell phone into a yoga studio. We’ve all hated on that one person who dared to bring her Crackberry into class with her and lay it on her mat while practicing her day’s yoga. She could be a doctor on call for brain surgery for all we know, but in yoga, all that matters is the sanctity of the $20 yoga moment, right? Hmm.

Read the rest on Elephant Journal...

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." *

I have a new project swirling through my right mind. Ages ago I bought the domain name www.recoveringyogi.com with the idea of turning it into an online "refuge for the spiritually disenfranchised." A forum where those who've been burned by the yoga world—or just are just flipping sick of hearing people talk about manifesting and chakras—can come together to embrace their East Coast-ness and be real. I have several columnists in mind, along with Vanessa Fiola's cheeky art, and I'm starting to get momentum around this idea.

I think it's important to say here that recoveringyogi.com is not going to be a yoga hater site. Yoga as a practice is awesome, and does a body/mind/spirit good—if it's your thing. Recoveringyogi.com is specifically about the culty vapid culture of mainstream yoga in America. Of which I am tragically familiar.

Anyhoodle, the point of all this is that I've been thinking a lot about Recovering Yogi over the last few days, wrote an article for Elephant Journal yesterday about why I stopped teaching yoga, and then suddenly got this exquisite piece of junk in the mail. Look closely:

I own the domain name, yes, but otherwise have never registered this name, talked about it, signed anything with it.... where did this come from? Awesome.

Incidentally, the quote above? I know it sound an awful lot like it's about manifesting. It's not. It's about synchronicity. Different. Yogis talk endlessly and mindlessly about "manifesting." Artists make things.

~~~

* (By the way no one seems to know where this quote actually came from, but when trying to research it I found this on some random blog on Wordpress:    "The Goethe couplet Murray refers to is from a loose translation of Faust 214-30 made by John Anster in 1835. Anster translating Faust written by Goethe and quoted by Murray (reference at The Goethe Society of North America).  Like I learned from my art professors at MCAD, there are no original thoughts.")

Not really, but that side of my personality that doesn't like to be bossed around (and by "side," I mean ALL OF IT) is a little bent out of shape right now.

I've been putting myself out there more as a writer, and that naturally means I endure a lot more feedback on my writing. I've been getting plenty of abrasive comments on my articles, especially the ones I've been posting on Elephant Journal, which (in case you've been missing them) is apparently where the hyper-serious militant vegans hang out. Yesterday I posted an article called I'm a Buddhist, but my cat is a serial killer: a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also basically earnest diatribe about how Buda (my poorly-named cat) has been busy slaughtering the songbird population in my neighborhood and shattering mommy's already-fragile nerves.

[BTW you can read the expanded version of this post on Elephant Journal if you prefer...]

I swear I'm not trying to be provocative, but for some reason I'm a magnet for angry vegans, although the article I posted had basically nothing to do with my eating habits. Somehow they took a story about my kitty's hunting skills and decided to apply it to my personal ethics as a conscious meat-eater. I say "conscious" because I'm actually pretty mindful of where I get my food from, whether it's animal, vegetable or mineral. But.... I'm not a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian once. For 8 years, actually. It didn't work for me. I feel like 8 years is enough time to figure that out.

That's not the point though, and I am completely disinterested in getting wrapped up in yet another Twitter flame-war about the ethics of my food choices. The point is this: please don't boss me. I don't boss you! I don't care what you eat! I don't care who you voted for! I don't care what God you worship! I don't care how you feel about environmental policy! I really don't!

I mean, there is a time and place for expressing your opinions in the interest of making the world a better place, and I am all for kind, compassionate education, sans rhetoric or condescension. I read Eating Animals by the brilliant Jonathan Safran Foer, every Michael Pollan book ever published, and watched most of Food Inc in utter horror. I get it. The atrocities of factory-farmed meat are plenty of incentive to go the extra mile and source your food from more ethical places. I do my best, and 90% of the food I buy is from local farmers with presumably good intentions and practices.

These are my choices. Mine. On the other hand, if my friends eat factory-farmed meat, I don't judge them! If my friends ask me to stop at McDonalds on the way to L.A. so they can get a box of Chicken McNuggets, that's cool! Cuz, my friends are adults! And so am I!

Sorry about all the exclamation points. I feel kinda passionate about this. Not in an "I feel passionate that it's my way or the highway" ironically-violent-and-dogmatic-vegan kind of way; rather, in a lighten-up-cuz-life-is-hard-enough kind of way.

And I'm not saying I don't like vegans. I think being vegan is a really awesome choice. An awesome and extremely personal choice. I love lifestyle choices made from a heartful passion, and people that actually believe in something are R.L.A.M. I know some really amazing people who are vegan. (There is one vegan on this planet who I think is a douchy tool, but it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he's vegan.) Lots of my friends are vegans, and that's just fine with me! Is it fine with you that I'm not?

Cuz honestly, it's none of your business what I put in my belly. And it's none of my business what you think of me.

I'll leave you with this Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.