Cirque du Malaise

I’ve written a lot about being a big fan of the Julia Cameron book The Artist’s Way. I’ve followed this 12-week program several times in my life, and it has really made a difference in the way I see myself and my potential for creativity. The last time I “did” The Artist’s Way project, I blogged about it every week. You can see the archive here.

One of my favorite things about The Artist’s Way project is that you make a creative date with yourself every week. This is a habit I have tried to carry over into my life as a permanent fixture. Not every week, necessarily, but regularly. This year, I decided to take one workday off every month and play creative hooky.

This is how my first creative hooky day of 2012 went:

First, I went to the Mill Valley Library and read magazines.

My intention was to find new magazines to submit my writing to. However, I will admit that O! Magazine sucked me in for a while. I hate it when I am an obedient example of the target market. But I did also (re) discover the McSweeneys publication The Believer, which you betcha I will be subscribing to from now on. I particularly liked this piece: Hatorade — about the phenomenon of hateful internet commentary. Been there.

While I was at the library, I checked out a free pass to the De Young Museum in San Francisco.

(Yet another reason the library system rocks the house.) If you haven’t been to the De Young in Golden Gate Park, definitely check it out. It’s my favorite museum in San Francisco. I particularly love that it doesn’t seem to have a theme. It’s not, like “modern art” or “heritage art” or “Asian art” or anything like that. It’s just a mishmash of cool stuff. The main exhibit right now is classic Venice masterpieces (oil paintings). The next one is going to be a Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit. My favorite things at the De Young this time:

The Art of the Anatolian Kilim (Ottoman empire rugs from like 400 years ago)

A very cool mobile sculpture with accompanying shadow art. (More on this.)

Stopped at The Village Market in San Francisco for a mocha.

And while I was there, bought some very expensive rice with bamboo powder in it. I don’t know; I’m a sucker for things that should be really cheap but are actually exorbitantly expensive. $7 for rice? Sign me up! But it was actually quite delicious.

And last but not least, went to pottery class.

The perfect way to top off a day of 100% creative activities. Ah, good for the soul.

Oh also, you guys, because I talk about The Artist’s Way so goddamned much, someone from their publishing team recently gifted me a free trial of their brand new web site service and iPhone app, My Artist’s Way Toolkit. The intersection of creativity and technology is something I’m really passionate about, so I was very excited to try this out.

It’s pretty cool. Whether you are interested in making a commitment to the 12-week Artist’s Way program, or just want a place where you can jot down ideas, receive Artist’s Way journaling prompts and “Artist Date” ideas,  and feel like you are really doing something for your inner artist and still being a cool, hip, technical sort, check it out. And they gave me a code you can use to try it for free for one month. Go here and type in: AWTOOLKIT

Make me proud!

I sometimes write about food and even occasionally post recipes, because eating locally, organically and sustainably is something I find really compelling and wholesome. (Although, just to be clear, I don’t care what or how you eat. Promise!) So I am pretty excited to officially announce that I will be co-leading a retreat at White Lotus (in Santa Barbara) next May with Christy Brown:

Christy Brown is an old friend of mine who I occasionally collaborate with to lead retreats where she teaches what she is amazing at: yoga, mindfulness and just how to be a generally decent and lovely person, and I lead reflective journaling sessions and try not to act terribly surly toward people.

Helge Hellberg is basically a rock star in organic/local/sustainable farming circles, working hard to bring us back to the days when farmers got respect and we ate according to what was natural for the season and the climate in which we live. What this means, in a nutshell: don’t eat watermelon in January if you live in New England.

The beautiful thing about shopping at farmer’s markets is that you are automatically eating local and seasonal food. And the even cooler thing is that you just might discover some pretty fabulous stuff that you never even knew grew near you.  I recently signed up for a bi-weekly organic produce delivery from Farm Fresh To You. Every other Tuesday, I get a box of delicious surprises on my doorstep. And, thank Christ, there are often no mushrooms in it.

If this subject matter interests you, I highly recommend the memoir Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Or anything by Michael Pollan, of course, but most notably Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Anyhoodle, if you would like to sign up for this retreat (please come! I was just kidding about being surly!) visit my web site and click on ye’ol’ Paypal link. Full details there. And beautiful photos of White Lotus below.

Santa Barbara is warm and sunny and will be epic in May.

We'll stay in these adorable yurts. I deign to call them magical.

This is the community table where we will share our local, organic, fucking delicious meals.

This is a place you can steal off and read.

This is a peaceful-looking Buddhist thingie.

I don't know what this is, but I think it's pretty.

Le ocean. Speaks for itself.

I have never been a morning person and getting up early has always been a struggle for me. In fact, getting up, period, has always been a struggle for me. I like to clock about 9 hours of sleep a night and if I don’t, I generally feel like murder all day. Except between 9pm and midnight, when I always feel completely alert and pretty much fantastic, no matter what.

It’s not uncommon for me to stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning reading or writing or watching mindless sitcoms, but luckily for me I work for myself and don’t have to set an alarm. Not setting an alarm is a way of life I am quite devoted to, in fact. You might say it’s a personal philosophy. I think the world would be a better place and we would all be better people if we were abiding by our own natural sleep rhythms. For me, that means I don’t generally wake up before 9 in the morning, and sometimes later, depending on the time of year and how enthralling the book is that I am currently reading until the wee hours. (Which, right now, is the new Steve Jobs bio and yeah, it’s a good one.)

Occasionally I will make the mistake of having a soda at the movies — like I did when I saw the incredible Steampunk (thanks, Maynard) masterpiece Hugo the other night — and then I’ll have an even harder time getting up because of the sugar hangover.

This is not just laziness or petulance on my part. It’s my genetic legacy. The other day I called my dad at 9:30pm East Coast time and asked him what he was up to. He sounded groggy and out of it. I thought I might have woken him up. And I had. “I’m napping,” he said grumpily. That’s right, napping. When pressed, he elaborated that he generally naps in the late evening and then gets up and starts painting. “Jos,” he said, “You know I get my best painting done between midnight and 3am."

My dad is retired and recently managed to finally shake his horrible evil coldhearted wife of the last 25 years, so he can afford not to set an alarm or bother to care what society at large thinks about what time it is appropriate to get up in the morning. In this way, he is my hero.

Roughly 15-17 times a week, someone tries to convince me that I should really get up earlier so that I can better accommodate their schedule. My exception-less refusal is just one of the many reasons I'm starting to suspect that I will always be alone. But as long as I can sleep in, I'm fine with that. Oh, and before you start to suspect that I'm a nihilist, here's my Christmas tree:

Every once in a while — okay let’s just call it once a month — I resign myself to take a mental health day. A mental health day is when, despite the mountains of work and exercise obligations and “should’s” and “must’s” and “have to’s,” one instead collapses on the couch in a state of general malaise, maybe sobs a little bit, and then watches 8 straight hours of mindless television while eating cookies and soup for dinner (in that order).

Mental health days are absolutely essential for maintaining spiritual equilibrium, especially around the holiday season. And to be really worthwhile, they have to happen when it’s least convenient and there is the most amount of pressing things to get done STAT.

I had a mental health day yesterday. Mondays are good days for mental health days because they are a) high pressure days to begin with and b) a great way to set you up for a week of saying “fuck it.” On this particular Monday, I had just gotten back from spending the weekend with good friends up in Mendocino. I had already taken a half day to drive home, and was planning to buckle down the moment I arrived at my office in order to power through several hours of work before going to yoga at 6:30pm like a good Godfearin’ yogi.

But it was not to be.

It was too cold in my house to think (cursed damp 55 degree November day) and things were out of sorts. Because I was gone all weekend and have been busy lately, there was an ominous pile of laundry calling me. There were tumbleweeds on the floor and a sink full of dishes and, try as I might, I could not ignore them. But I couldn’t get myself to do them, either, because that would just be admitting defeat over my concentration issues. So instead, I did the logical thing: I flung myself on the couch, had a tantrum for just a sec, and then commenced to watched back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under until midnight.

I didn’t go to yoga. You know how they say, “You never regret going to yoga”? You know how they say that? You know how they tell you that going to yoga will fix whatever ails you? That if you have a cold coming on, you should “sweat it out”? If you just got really bad news, you can “find gratitude” on your mat? If you are experiencing general malaise, you should “get out of your head”?

Sometimes they are right. I’ve had these yoga-saving experiences; I have. But I’ll tell you what. Nothing brings you back to a state of equanimity and peace like a good old fashioned mental health sesh on the couch.

The slow decline into winter’s dark days is a time when my bio-clock says “Slow down! Hibernate! Store up fat for winter!” and accordingly, my energy level plummets and I desire warm, high-calorie foods and less activity. This is the season when I am most inclined to blow things of a social or active nature off and geek out on the Internet instead.

I used to fight it. I used to self-judge. But I’ll tell you, I’ve really learned to abide by my need for a periodic mental health day. I’ve been taking them my entire life. They really do work. Better than yoga.

I was recently dismayed to find out that I weigh 20 pounds more than I did 2 years ago and 30 more than my ideal, target weight (which is: the weight I have to be at for my awesome collection of size 6 hand-me-down jeans to actually fit). I had a mild nervous breakdown for a few days. Okay, not mild.

Then, because at this point in my life I’ve learned the hard way that no secret angel is ever going to come fix all my problems for me, it became sadly obvious that I only had one choice: DIET.

I have never been a dieter, ever, although I have tried every smart and wholesome eating system this side of the Sierras. I’ve done all manner of juice/wheatgrass/colonic cleanses/protocols, and they have never worked for me. All they ever do is whack out my blood sugar and send my entire system into the sort of distress that inevitably leads to horrific rebound binge eating and emotional trauma. (And if you are thinking of recommending that ONE AMAZING CLEANSE I have never tried, save your breath.)

I’ve also gone the route of more gentle and holistic eating protocols, such as the 3-month elimination plan that my acupuncturist Caylie See put me on last winter. That actually made me feel fantastic and helped me with a lot of things, but, unfortunately, it did not make me lose weight, even though I stopped drinking, eating sugar, eating dairy, gluten, stopped enjoying everything, basically, for three months. (And I have to note here that the goal of the program was NOT to lose weight, so it’s no fault of Caylie’s. She’s truly incredible at what she does.)

Here’s the thing — the women in my family get fat.

I’m from a long lineage of matronly women. The Westcott/Bangs/Hamilton women, they start out reeeaaaallly skinny and then swing to the opposite side of the pendulum over a long lifetime of having babies and being enduring, stoic New England sorts. I thought I might evade this pattern, since I am woefully childless and moved to California, but it turns out that it doesn’t matter. It’s hardwired.

As a kid, I was emaciated and actually anorexic for a while, and my mom and grandmother were also wispy little waifs when they were young. It’s when we get older that things predictably slide. Now, my mom is in pretty fine form these days, mostly because she owns a restaurant and so (ironically) doesn’t eat because she’s too busy running around being mad at her employees all the time. She also doesn't have blood sugar issues. She’s one of those annoying people who “forgets” to eat food and maybe eats one meal a day, maybe. And she is a jogger. Me, not so much. I wake up starving and get hungrier, crankier, and fainter from there. If I go too long without eating, I become palpably murderous. And as for jogging, no.

I know that technically it’s unhealthy to starve yourself, but here’s a dirty little secret that all women know and most holistic consultants don’t want you to find out: it’s the only real way to lose weight.

So I have come up with my own eating plan that is my shining salvation and only hope. Fingers crossed.

The Small Bowl Diet^TM is basically an artistic expression-meets-portion control eating plan.

Here’s how it works. First, you make a really cute, small bowl in pottery class. This is your one and only Small Bowl^TM. Now, you can eat whatever you want (except evil sugar, of course) as long as it fits in Small Bowl^TM. When you eat out of the bowl, you always take a moment first to admire how good you are at pottery. This is essentially a distraction from the fact that you are eating a concentration camp amount of food.

You wait until the point that you are absolutely starving, and then you wait just a little longer, for good measure, and then you eat ONE Small Bowl^TM of food. You eat it slowly, as if torturing and punishing yourself for being fat, and when that’s gone, that’s it. You should still be hungry when you’re done with the one Small Bowl^TM. If you’re not, you overfilled it or you need a smaller Small Bowl^TM. The key is to always be at least slightly hungry.

Then, you once again wait until you are out of your mind, chew-your-own-arm-off starving, and you wait the requisite little-bit-longer, and then you maybe accidentally murder someone, and then you eat another Small Bowl^TM.  Don’t go overboard.

Again. The key is to be basically starving all the time.

Oh — and a fucklot of exercise. You can’t forget that part. Basically, if you want to lose weight, you have to get on board with your genetic legacy and mimic the amount of physical activity your forbearers used to get. So in my case, the same amount of exercise as if I was chopping firewood and lugging water uphill from the river on black ice, 15 hours a day. That’s how much exercise my aging metabolism demands for me to stay at my “peak weight,” and even then, it’s a losing battle, since my genes think that a faux pregnant belly is a good thing — gets us through the long, cold, sedentary New England pilgrim winters, after all.

Unfortunately, my genes and my jeans are at odds, and if me and Small Bowl^TM have anything to do with it, the jeans are gonna win.

I have a cardiac arrhythmia. It’s a genetic thing and, according to my doctor, I shouldn’t be terrified. It’s simply a “disturbance in rhythm” that makes my heart STOP.  And then catchupreallyfast… about a hundred times a day. It feels like a hummingbird caught in my chest, but if I take a deep breath, it goes away. It doesn’t happen when I’m stressed, or when I’ve had too much coffee, or if I overexert myself. In fact, I usually notice it when I am totally calm. Like, lying in bed reading. Or watching the latest episode of Wilfred.

It has something to do with electric signals in the body. I don’t know. But this arrhythmia makes me anxious. (Everything makes me anxious, so this is not surprising.)

I’ve always particularly hated the awareness of my own heartbeat. Listening to my own pulse makes me queasy. I can’t yog because it makes my heart pound, and I hate that. As far as my heartbeat is concerned, no news is good news. So, this is a particularly nerve-wracking disorder I have.

The other day I had a session with my shamanic healer, Cynthia Mellon. She gave me a somatic practice: to take a moment every day — at least a few times — to connect with my heart. Like, put my hand on it, breathe, and feel it.

She had no idea how challenging and also poignant of an exercise this would be for me. I’ve never told her about my arrhythmia or my phobia of my own heartbeat.

But she knows how twitchy I get when I am out of my rhythm in LIFE. So, in a weird way, it all ties together.

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!

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!

I just finished up 3 straight months of a fascist eating program courtesy of my insightful and talented acupuncturist, I went cold turkey off coffee and tea, sugar, alcohol, gluten, dairy, vinegar, soy, potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. Among other things. I also took Chinese herbs three times a day for three months, swallowed a handful of acidophilus pills every morning, got needles stuck up in me weekly, did yoga regularly (yup), started hiking more, journaled every day, and just generally took immaculate and spectacular care of myself.

Now that I am wrapping up this program, people in my life are asking me how I feel. “You must feel amazing,” they say.

The truth is, I don’t feel that much more amazing than I did before — which was far from amazing. (What is the opposite of “amazing”?) My size 6 jeans still don’t fit by a long shot; I still get a stomachache every single time I get anxious (which is always); yoga still feels like torture; I still can’t walk straight up a hill without getting winded and really irritable. I still need 10 hours of sleep a night and feel like I have the flu if I don’t get it. I still get nasty PMS and I still feel mildly congested and sinusy most of the time.

On the other hand, I did learn some things about myself:

• I am not lactose intolerant (huge relief, as cheese is basically the only thing I live for).
• I feel like a better person without alcohol in my life.
• I like the way coffee smells far better than the way it makes my stomach feel.
• I have insane self-control and determination.
• I basically rock.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get a coffee milkshake.

I am on a very strict and somewhat joyless food plan by mandate of my acupuncturist, the brilliantly talented Caylie See, L.Ac. of Acupuncture Kitchen in San Francisco. She got sick of my whining about always having a stomachache and decided to fix me. She gave me a 6-page typed-out plan that outlines food suggestions along with things I can’t eat; prohibits me from going near sugar, caffeine, alcohol, dairy, gluten, or nightshade vegetables (among other things); and insists that I get 30 minutes of “quiet time” a day. (My whole life is quiet time, so I checked that one right off.)

Favorite breakfast: cooked leftover yam, blood orange, blueberries, avocado with Bragg's liquid aminos and turmeric EVOO

I’m not a fan of cleanses, having previously tried all of them — The Master Cleanse (Really? You want me to drink sugar all day long? That doesn’t raise any red flags for you?), the Liver Cleanse, various intestinal cleanses and colonics programs, wheatgrass bootcamp, starvation cleanses, the Type-O diet, Atkins. Not to mention that I excelled at anorexia nervosa for most of my pre-teen years. (There were months in there where I would only eat jellybeans and yogurt. Ask Judith.)

But I trust Caylie, and I was feeling desperate to make a shift, so I promised to acquiesce to her instructions for three months, no questions asked. So far? It’s been awesome.

For starters, getting off caffeine is one of the most empowering first world activities one can undertake. I am sleeping like a lamb these days. Cutting sugar out of my life has been hard, but rewarding. I feel lots better. Although, I crave strange things, like butterscotch pudding. And it’s kind of sad that the way I indulge these days is a $6 pressed green juice that I can drink in under a minute.

All in all, the shiz is working. Who knew that all I had to do to get rid of my stomachaches was stop eating almost everything, get off black tea, choke down Chinese herbs that taste like dirt three times a day, swallow billions of microscopic probiotics every morning, trek an hour each way to get acupuncture once a week, and drink so much water that I need a catheter? No probs.

Just to be really clear, this fascist food plan I’ve been on since January 1^st has nothing to do with New Year’s Resolutions. My New Year’s Resolution — in keeping with my philosophy of only making New Year’s Resolutions that I would already be doing anyway, was to see more movies this year. I’m doing pretty great at that. I’ve seen almost everything that’s worth seeing in the theaters right now, and some of the things twice.