Cirque du Malaise

I’m turning 40 quite soon. How do I feel about this?

Let me illustrate by telling you about a nightmare I’ve been having: I’m driving a giant truck speeding down a freeway; the brakes don’t work; I can’t slow down; there is a big-rig on fire spinning out of control and about to jackknife into me; oh, and I’m going backwards.

That pretty much sums it up. Thanks, brain.

This morning I had a meeting with a longtime friend client, Cynthia Simon. She said, “How are you?” and I said, “I’m freaking out about turning 40.” Cynthia — who is a beautiful, stunning, radiant post-40 woman herself, laughed and said, “You’re doing fucking great.” I appreciated that — mostly because of the swearing. But, I’m not actually doing that great. I’m doing pretty terribly, if you want the honest truth. I’m kind of losing my mind about it.

I just so happen to be reading By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham, a novel about two self-involved yuppie New Yorkers in their early 40s who constantly refer to themselves as “middle aged.” Really? Middle aged? I asked a few friends of mine this weekend — women about my age or slightly older — whether they think we are in fact “middle aged.” They all basically agreed that we are (as did Wikipedia, fucker). I nodded as if I could handle this information on a cerebral level, but inside, I was quaking with terror and rage at this concept.

In my mind, “middle aged” applies to people who have gray hair (that they don’t, ahem, color), retirement plans, and grandchildren. “Middle aged” does not under any circumstances apply to people who have barely figured their shit out, are single, live paycheck to paycheck, and still remember the sordid moments of their bohemian childhood quite vividly. Yes, my grandmother was technically just a few years older than me when she became a grandmother, but things were different then.

Incidentally, I had a lovely session with another of the intuitive Cynthias in my life —Cynthia Mellon — and she informed me that I have what’s called “renunciant karma.” She explained that in other times and cultures they might have called this “nun karma.” Remember when we were teenagers and endured tragic breakups with our boyfriends and then exclaimed in a tone of abject despair: “That’s it! I’m just going to be a nun!” Ironically, I actually am, apparently, going to be a nun. You win again, 13-year-old Joslyn.

Still, the middle aged thing is not sitting comfortably in my mind.

What does this all mean? I wish I had a nice tidy answer for you. But at the moment, all I have is this recent shoe purchase to tide me over:

Would a middle aged person wear THESE?

I only fell down 4 or 5 times when I tried to wear these today. I’m gonna push through. A homeless dude at the Whole asked me why I was wearing them. I said, for practice. He said, for practice for what? And I said, to be good at it. And he said, kindly, that he would teach me how to play the bass guitar if I need to be good at something.

That really happened.

How amazing does Wilbur Hot Springs look? They have flowers and cows! That's my kind of retreat. What can I say; I'm a country girl.

I'm going to be leading writing sessions at Christy Brown's weekend-long retreat at Wilbur Hot Springs in late September, and I'm excited/anxious because this is going to be my first time teaching writing. I taught yoga for about ten years and I've been a manager of enough small businesses that I'm comfortable teaching employees this and that: how to fix the danged printer, how to fill a paper towel dispenser, how to keep a smug smile on your face when customers are totally obnox. Obviously, I'm a big believer in teaching mostly by example. But I've never taught writing, and this is minorly intimidating to me.

To be fair, I'm not going to be teaching anyone how to write. I am not qualified for that. I'm just going to be leading short journaling sessions in between the yoga classes. This is mostly Christy's retreat, and let me just take a sec here to say that Christy is one of my worldwide favorite yoga teachers and someone who I consider a "real" yogi... she's one of the most authentic people I know. Whatever that means. I guess we are all authentic by its very definition, but Christy's authentic is more authentic than a lot of yoga teachers I know. She's kind, she's compassionate, she doesn't judge, and she leads 100% by example. (Kind of like me with the smug condescending attitude toward customers. We all have our niche.)

Regardless of the low level of pressure associated with this job, I am taking it seriously and really looking forward to it. I've been brainstorming things to lead as far as journaling goes, and my mind keeps coming back to one particular exercise I've partaken in through The Artist's Way and the phony yoga superstar I used to work for. It's always been a real powerful experience for me.

Here's what you do:

Write a letter to yourself, as if you had a split personality disorder. The personality writing the letter should be your kindest, most compassionate, most tactful, and most generous one. The personality receiving the letter is your bratty, wounded inner 5-year-old. Gay-sounding, I know, but once you've received one of these letters, you get the power of it. The key is that the letter gets mailed to you (by someone else, obvi) like six to nine months in the future. Just when you've forgotten you'd ever written it.

I've done this exercise a few times and, although I was at first a little eyeball-rolly about it, I did in fact get profoundly moved when I later received this letter to myself. The first time I did it, I had written myself a letter with my goals for the next six months. I picked some pretty outlandish things, figuring, why the hell not? I was astounded and quite pleased with myself when I got the letter in six months and realized that most of my goals had come true.

(As an aside, this is where I do in fact believe in the Law of Attraction or whatever the freak you want to call it. When you put stuff down in writing, you're far more likely to follow through with it. It's not about manifestation; it's about holding yourself accountable, even on a sub-cognizant level.)

I have another idea for a workshop exercise:
Use random celebrity tweets as jumping-off-points for free writing. My favorite muse in this arena is actor Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on The Office. His tweets are hilariawesome. Example:

"What if I told you you only have 50 more years to live?"

And then there's Neil Patrick Harris, formerly of Doogie Howser fame and now of the intellectually riveting How I Met Your Mother. He's actually the one who coined the seminal term "hilariawesome."  (FYI I am using the word "seminal" here in its fourth definition, not it's first.)

And another great sitcom star, Mindy Kaling, also from The Office. She's head writer, so has an edge when it comes to tweeting I suppose.

I've been staying in a lot. Can you tell? My imaginary best friends are all celebrities.

I am obviously one of those people who appears to know what they are talking about, because I am constantly getting asked questions that are way out of my league to answer. It happens to me in stores all the time. I'll be at Whole Foods, wearing whatever I slept in the night before, with my hair all askew, my jacket on, my bag over my shoulder, reading the ingredients on a box, and someone will say, "Excuse me, what time do you close?"

For serious, this happens to me all the time.

Similarly, when I am up on Mt. Tam hiking, other hikers are always stopping me to ask me for directions. This happens to me whether I am alone or in a group. The other day, I went for a hike with my friends Lark and Mira, and I was stopped three times for directions. No one asked Lark or Mira anything; it was always clearly directed at me.

In these situations, I generally find it best to just answer the question as if I know the answer quite definitely. "Absolutely, I do know how to find the Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Trail. You just keep going up this way until you see a big Sycamore tree, and it'll be off to your left."

I don't even know if Sycamore trees grow on the West Coast, but no one ever questions me. They just thank me vehemently and follow my advice. I wonder how many people have gotten lost following my directions?

I think this all comes from being a big sister and a latchkey kid. I had to figure a lot of things out on my own when I was growing up. Mostly, I figured them out by reading. I am pretty sure I learned to read when I was still in the womb. I learned how to use the English language from books.

The interesting thing about learning from books is that you develop a unique vocabulary based on what books you choose to read. So, I know a lot of really random words. The down side of this is that you don't learn proper pronunciation from books. To this day I get laughed at every time I mispronounce the word "bury." I also can never remember how to say this word: "thesaurus."

Speaking of reading, here's another great clip from spoken word artist Taylor Mali called "Reading Allowed." Get it?

While I was at Spirit Rock last week I spun the dharma wheel (I have no idea what this thing is actually called, so that's what I call it) and it landed on:

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

This is a poignant topic for me right now, as I am greatly lacking in it.

I had lunch yesterday with a favorite spiritual soul of mine, Miss Cynthia Simon. (Her web site, The Radiant Heart, is almost ready to go live, and I really want to give you a sneak peek at this collaborative project we've been working on together, but it's not quite ready yet. Stay tuned.)

Cynthia clarified some things for me that have been foggy in my head for quite a while. I was telling her how I am quite happy dating myself right now (and by right now, I mean, forever). In turn, she was telling me how she one day hopes for me to meet a dude who really gets me.

Wow, thought cynical me. What a naive, yet oddly compelling idea. And, I must admit, reverie took over about all the times it would have been nice to be with a guy who really actually got me.

A guy who, instead of saying "You're crazy" when I melted down about some dumb thing for no reason, just smiled and said "You're so creative. I love your weird artistic personality." A guy who adored me for my unique and eccentric and often just plain confounding ways. A guy who thought it was totally hot when I wore the same hoodie for three days straight or went to the coffee shop in my pajamas with my hair all fucked up. A guy who worshipped my complexity and the inexplicable dichotomy of my moody, sensitive personality and my controlling virgo nature.

Cuz, artists are sensitive, obvi.*

Cynthia. Isn't she pretty?

I have decided to start using the word "creative" in place of the other negative words my inner critic learned from certain less-than-enlightened beings I have encountered along the way. For instance, in my revisionist history, that certain someone who used to say "You're crazy!" would have actually said "You're so creative! I love it!"

And when I hear myself talking to myself that way, ditto. I'm not going to have bad days anymore. I'm going to have "Artist Days."

* (Shout out to Anna Hughes for contributing my new favorite word diminutive.)

The Buddha once asked his monks, "Which do you think is greater: the water in the oceans or the tears you've shed while wandering on?"

I went to see that movie Up In The Air, about three months after everyone else, as usual. The theater was empty... except for me and the super lame couple who came and sat down right behind me.

What is that all about?

Anyway, everyone in the world was right: it was excellent.

I was a little disheartened by it, though. The whole thing about me and George Clooney being the two last single people on earth is kind of depressing, especially since I don't particularly find him attractive.

The New York Times (a rag I rarely read but heard someone throw out in a snobby sort of way the other day, so thought I would mention it in a bit of underhanded, snide irony) called the movie a "stealth tragedy", and I love that. It's sort of how I feel about my life at the moment.

I'm sure everyone has this moment in their life—and pushing 40 seems like just about the right time to have it—when you realize that not only have you not achieved the things you thought you were going to, but you are never going to. Maybe you achieved other things. Maybe, when you were growing up in backwoods Massachusetts and dreamed of being a writer, you had no way of knowing that the internet would even exist, never mind that you would make a living writing for it.

Or maybe, when you were little and thought that Boston was the most exotic, cosmopolitan place you could imagine, you would have been shocked to learn that you would spend most of your adult life on the Pacific coast.

On the other hand, that bustling family of little boys you imagined? Yeah, not so much. Strange how things transpire.

Life is a stealth tragedy, or, as the Buddha called it, Samsara: the somewhat aimless wandering between life and death, the cycle of birth and rebirth until we get it right, the polar opposite of nirvana.

Samsara, by many accounts, literally means "wandering on." So here I go, wandering on...

I overheard a conversation at Spirit Rock last week that perfectly encapsulates what I hate about the world of spiritual phonies.

As spoken by dude to a girl he just met: “You have cute energy, you know that?”

Really? Cute energy? Do you maybe mean that she’s cute? Or that she has a cute personality? Or that she has a cute voice? Or a cute way about her?

Or do you really mean that her energy is actually cute? What does that even mean? Are you talking about her aura? Why don’t you just go ahead and ask her what sign she is?

JD Salinger would roll over in his grave.

I am pretty sick of hearing about people’s energy and other people’s opinion of it. It’s such a copout of a way to describe someone. It reminds me, actually, of this amazing video by Taylor Mali that, if you haven’t ever watched, you should watch immediately:

Like, You Know

Wherein he makes fun of the way kids these days talk. And by “kids these days”, I mean us.

In an effort to improve my level of articulation, I have gotten in the habit of playing back my voicemail messages before I go ahead and send them. It’s painful and interesting to hear your own voice. You realize how often you say the words “um”, “like”, and “wicked awesome.”

However, I vow from this point forward never to use the word “energy” to refer to another human being’s vibe again. And for that matter, I won’t use the word “vibe” either.

And that's a declarative sentence for you.

I asked my friend Aaryn Herridge about her New Year’s Resolution and she informed me that she plans to go on an “abstinence binge.” Brilliant.

For those of us who never quite got a grasp of the everything in moderation concept, an abstinence binge is how we health kick.

At this time last year I was just launching Slow Incline Health Kick 09. It was a mellow, unambitious project with one wonderful high point in about October…. then a terrible, tragic crash landing.

Well, it’s that time of year again. And not because of the whole New Year’s resolution thing. Truth be told, if I was going to announce a resolution this year it would be something like “I resolve to accept myself exactly as I am and not try to change a damned thing.” Because in my heart of hearts I think New Year’s resolutions really only work if you are already inclined to do them.

(One year, my New Year’s resolution was to not read any educational or self-help books. I only read novels for an entire year…. very easy to stick to that one, and I succeeded! And read a lot of great books, might I add.)

New Year’s resolutions aside, I am thinking of joining Aaryn on her Abstinence Binge. It’s been a rough couple of months, and I’ve been spoiling myself with indulgent, lazy, unhealthy behavior. In the wake of my recent breakup and life transition, I’ve been trying to “go easy on myself.”

Well, I know how to go there. I can go so easy on myself that I stop going to yoga, drink wine every day, eat cookies for lunch, and never wash my face. I’m actually pretty awesome at going easy on myself.

But that’s not really self-love, is it? When a 2-year old throws a tantrum, do you indulge it, or do you put the 2-year old in time out and let it calm down? My ego is a tantrum-throwing 2-year old these days, and it needs a time out.

For those of us with extreme personalities, just having “one glass of wine” or “one cookie” is waaaaaay harder than not having any wine, or any cookies, or any cigarettes, or any ice cream, or any coffee, or anything bad whatsoever. We’re bingers. When we do something, we do it all the way.

That’s why—in the yoga world—you see so many people who used to be drug addicts or alcoholics or extremist of one sort or another suddenly binging on yoga, all the time, like it’s a drug.

So to get 2010 started off right, I suppose it’s time for a good strict housecleaning… starting on January 12^th. Because first, I’m going to Hawaii with Tom and Francesca! And there will be no rules in Hawaii!

PS This is Aaryn’s blog: http://goldenaaryn.wordpress.com/ She has a big plan for it in 2010. Right, Aaryn?

I love made-up words. My friend Gumbo Dave recently introduced me to two deceptively simple but amazingly sleeper new vocab words. I can’t believe I didn’t think of these myself. Props to Dave.

Untillectual: This one’s pretty obvious, and it describes my taste in movies, celebrity gossip magazines, and humor.

Yego: This is  a portmanteau, which is, in itself, a great word. It refers to the Yoga Ego.In other words, that ironic property of certain yoga personalities whereby instead of embracing the non-dual, humble nature of their individual selves, they allow themselves to become alleged gurus. I’ve had some experience with these sorts.

Yego can also refer to the average person’s attachment to their yoga practice. It encompasses ambition, striving and goal-oriented behavior around hatha yoga. Or meditation, for that matter.

Luckily for me, I am blessedly free of yego at this point along my so-called yogic path. I really, honestly could care less about my practice being beautiful or my body “better”. To a fault. You might say I lack discipline.

The alleged yoga guru I used to work for (who was rife with yego of the worst sort) once told me that there is such a thing as being too easy on one’s self. (Whatever, guy with a broken moral compass.)

I am not sure if I believe that. There are a few things I simply do not believe in feeling guilty about.

1. Not going to yoga just because I don’t feel like it
2. Going to yoga, but then napping through it
3. Indulging in untillectual movie-watching and magazine-reading and joke-laughing
4. Sleeping in, nearly every day
5. Mixing together vanilla ice cream and chocolate pudding (I actually did this, the other night, and it was pretty much awesome.)

Life is hard enough, right?

The Buddhist concept of shenpa is a big one for me lately. It's a Tibetan term that literally means "attachment" - a big theme in Buddhism. But this particular word has more nuanced connotations.

My personal verbal and spiritual hero, Pema Chodron, says that shenpa is "the hook of craving that keeps us mired in the prison of our own attachment. Or, to put it another way, it's the itch that we can't help but scratching."

I've been writing articles for clients lately about how shenpa relates to our addictions and the things we crave: food, sugar, alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, drugs, whatever. We all have our own special thing. I certainly have mine. But for me, those kind of attachments come and go. I can be really into red wine for a while, and then cut it out for months and not even miss it.

More dire for me is the subtle mental attachment to my hopes and dreams. And that kind of rigid fixation can be just as debilitating as a substance abuse problem or an eating disorder. The older I get, the more frantic and clingy I get about what I view as my own personal dharma in life.... and not shockingly, the less it actually transpires.

Now here's the catch. You ready? It's not about shooing shenpa out of your life and trying to avoid it. Cuz guess what? That's aversion. Whoopsie, just as bad!

And to some degree, shenpa—the attachment to things that please us, the craving for situations to be a certain way—can be motivating and keep us anchored in our real lives. It's not about becoming a sadhu and sitting on a mountain somewhere for the rest of eternity.

But not, on the other hand, like that toxic ex boyfriend you need to get out of your life. That's not healthy. And when your shenpa starts to act like a toxic ex boyfriend, well, then it's time to kick it to the curb.

Sayonara, "shenpa".

RECENT ARTICLES I WROTE ABOUT SHENPA

examiner.com:

Shenpa, attachment and craving... the lessons they teach us

Eating healthfully and avoiding shenpa

Suite 101: Eating healthfully and avoiding shenpa during your job search

ALSO READ

An eloquent essay about Shenpa by Pema Chodron

I'm actually off the radar right now, on vacation, but thanks to the miracle of technology, you're reading something I wrote a week ago.

So, I just learned that the spanish word for "dove" and "pigeon" is the same (paloma).

Think about that.

(Disclaimer: I learned this from the teenage Mexican gas station attendant on the corner. I overheard him talking to his wee daughter. So if I'm wrong, please just tell me gently and let's not make a big deal about this.)

la paloma:

Also la paloma: