Melissa Lynn Block's Open Salon Blog

From A Great Height

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:03:58 -0400

All day that day, on 9/12, Alice waits for the sound of explosions, for the invasion, a hundred soldiers of God landing at the beach a mile from the secondhand children’s store and storming the bike path full of families of tourists on pedal cars who always look like they aren’t having nearly as much fun as they imagined they would. About where she might take Michaela to keep her safe. Canada, maybe, or Mexico, or the mountains.

That night, sitting at her computer watching news clips of tiny people falling from windows hundreds of stories up, Alice thinks yes, she will hide in the forest and come upon other mothers hiding there with their children. They will form a primitive village, weave baskets out of pine needles, make lean-tos out of branches and mush out of acorns, catch fish at Lake Casitas and feast on avocadoes from ranches raided in the wee hours of the night. They will sit cross-legged in a circle talking about how little they miss their old lives with their dishwashers and pot-smoking Internet porn-surfing husbands, their luxury SUVs and health club memberships. They will all grow brown and sinewy and strong and clear-eyed.

***

It's late, almost the children's bedtime, and the market is empty. It takes on a sinister air. Buzzing fluorescent fixtures send needles into the crown of her head. Hopeful labels festoon each box, bag, and can, images and words worm their way through her pupils, hiss onto her retinas, march through her mind setting fire to the lovely old buildings.

In a leaden stroll, Alice pushes a full cart through the aisles. One bum cart wheel does elegant pirouettes from the swivelly base where it attaches to the frame of the cart. The wheel itself is stuck fast in its housing.

Arden, one and a half, sits in the place appointed for a baby’s bottom, the metal bars nearly buried in his chubby thighs, one shoe on, tears drying on his cheeks and a bag of goldfish crackers clutched in one grubby fist. “MAMA, CACKA, eat,” he commanded, holding out to her a handful of drool and neon-yellow cracker crumbs topped by a single intact goldfish. She picks the single cracker off his palm with her lips, chews, makes the yummy! face.

On the far end of the cart, facing back towards Alice, perches four-year-old Michaela. Preternaturally thin, pale, with sad eyes like big blue saucers full of exotic tea, white-blond hair like her brother’s standing in frizzy wisps around her face, she gazes at the passing shelves with cool aplomb.

Arden, asked to hold the shopping list, has destroyed it in a fit of angst that almost escalated into a tantrum. Alice is doing one last circuit with her full cart to try to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything.

She’s a terrible shopper. The cereal remembered, the milk is forgotten; the cheese remembered, the half-stale whole-grain loaf stays behind on the shelf, nestled between its half-stale brethren. This lack is not compensated by any other ability as a homemaker.

Her cramped home isn’t so much made as it is an episode, an incident, a series of chance occurrences, with occasional efforts made to set things in order counteracted by Alice’s growing sense of helplessness in the face of the chaos. Her efforts with cleansers and rags and soaps and abrasives turn dust and cobwebs and bits of food and toothpaste globs and mold into mud and the mud into something crusty and impenetrable.

“Why are you having tears, Mommy?” Michaela asks Alice, bringing her back into the fluorescent chaos of the supermarket.

“I used to be so interesting,” Alice says. “I used to be exciting. I used to have things to say.”

Michaela says, “Now you are quiet a lot, but maybe it’s just because you are listening.”

As Alice leans across Arden to put a box of cereal into the cart, he unfists roughly a dozen goldfish crackers into his lap and onto the floor and tries to reach into Alice’s shirt, smearing sticky neon yellow crumbs onto her shirtfront. “Nuyse?” he says. Nuysenuysenuysenuyse.”

Nursing. The mouth like a moist rose searching, the milk letting down, the sound of the child in her arms quaffing like a thirsty factory worker. The pudgy fingers tracing the lines of her collarbones, caressing the front of her neck. The happy, milk-full grin, nipple still held between toothless gums, when their eyes meet. The baby heavy in her arms, the sucking tapering off until the finger can be inserted between baby’s mouth and breast, pop! and the mouth still sporadically puckering and relaxing even after sleep comes.

“No more nurse, Arden, baby,” Alice says. “Milky’s all gone.”

“Boobie,” he says firmly.

Michaela pipes up, “Arden! Mommy says no more milky. You kept biting her. Re-MEM-ber?”

Arden considers this. Alice holds her breath, hoping beyond hope that there will not be a tantrum. His lower lip begins to quiver and his eyes brim with tears. He is deeply saddened by this turn of events.

“No mo milky, Mama?”

Alice lifts Arden out of the cart and he wraps his arms around her neck and puts his cheek on her shoulder. She buries her face between his neck and his still nearly-bald head. They both weep quietly like cousins at the Lutheran funeral of a well-loved aunt. Michaela, who is accustomed to such displays, makes up a song about the lady exercising in the picture on the cereal box.

“I like your song,” a male voice says.

“Thank you,” Michaela answers in her clear, sweet soprano. “It’s about the lady on the cereal box. She’s dancing to the beat.”

“I see,” he answers. “She looks very healthy.” Alice takes a deep breath, wipes her nose on her sleeve, and looks up. It’s David. They know each other. Where from? The gym? Occasional visits to the same church? Did he give her a massage at some point? She can't remember. She notices his tremendous olive-skinned arms.

“Hi David,” Alice says, trying to put a protesting Arden back into the cart. He’s having none of it, so she hoists him onto one hip. He fingers her collarbone. David scrunches his brow, trying to place her. “I’m Alice,” she tells him.

“Oh, right,” he said. "Hi there." He has a basket over one forearm. A tub of yogurt, something leafy and green.

She plays with Arden’s fingers, looks this way and that. He peers down at her, seemingly unfazed by the several seconds of silence that follow.

“Your kids are really cute.”

“Thanks,” Alice says. Her eyes well up again and she wipes them with the front of her T-shirt, which she then sees is covered with mascara.

When in the bloom of youth Alice failed to recognize that youth and fecundity have their own appeal, that she was being watched when she was unaware, that the shape of the nose or the breasts or the ass, the texture of the skin, the style of the hair or the shape of the mouth didn't matter so much, despite her hours of self-flagellation over having been born with entirely the wrong set of assets. That these assets -- or lack thereof -- had been trumped by the very fact of her cells being created faster than they were dying; of the fact of her hormonal/pheromonal heat. Only now, now that she was on the far side of 35, now that she was falling apart faster than she was regenerating, did she see it.

That morning, both kids had fallen asleep in the stroller while she walked. She'd passed the store where they give free makeovers. As though drawn by a mysterious current, she'd found herself inside. Then, she was sitting in a high chair with black vinyl cushions, her feet barely touching the metal crossbar meant for feet, consulting with a very young woman who had a great deal of makeup on: eyelashes sticky-looking with mascara, liquid eyeliner, bright lips, something glittery on the cheekbones.

“So I’m seeing you have rilly cute lips, and good skin,” the girl told her. “And we can rilly pop your eyes, like, with some rilly nice color. And I have something soooo awesome for these eye bags and dark circles right here.”

“OK,” Alice said. “Just hurry and finish before one of my kids wakes up, please.” And the girl had gone to work, painting, buffing, polishing, dabbing. Once or twice, she giggled maniacally, then muttered, “Oh, shit, um, I’m rilly sorry, hold on.”

Finally, sparkly cheekbone girl said, “Okay, all done! Want to see?”

“Sure,” Alice replied, trying not to sound too enthusiastic. Her face felt spackled, heavy and greasy. She climbed down from her chair, turned it towards the brightly lit mirror on the glass countertop, climbed back on, and had a look.

The effect was startling, and not bad—her eyes looked glittery and slick; her lips were shiny and puffy with gloss; her cheeks had the look they had after she’d drunk two glasses of wine.

“So, here, these are the products…” the girl began. Mercifully, at that moment, Michaela woke up crying. “Mommy I have to go pee right now,” she cried, bouncing. This woke Arden, who also started crying. “Sorry,” Alice told the girl as she wrestled the double stroller out the doors with much awkward crashing into the doorframe.

And now, hours later, not having looked once into a mirror since her makeover, here she stands with David, who must wonder why her body wears standard sweats-and-tennis-shoes-and T-shirt mom garb while her face is painted up like a girl at the prom, and now it looks like the face of the girl who painted her face for the prom who waited and waited for her date, sitting crying on the couch with her mom.

“Tell me your name again?” David says.

“Alice.”

“Alice, you’re a mess,” he says kindly.

Her eyes brimming over again, she sniffles, wipes her nose on her arm, tries a self-effacing chuckle that falls like a pebble into the air between them.

David, there in the cereal aisle, puts his basket down and leans in to talk to Arden. “Hey, little guy, can you sit in the cart for a sec?” He reaches for Arden and astonishingly, Arden lets himself be lifted away from his mother and gently placed back into the cart. “Cacka,” Arden says, pointing, and David hands him the bag of goldfish crackers.

Then David turns to Alice and folds her up in his arms. He rocks her almost imperceptibly, putting his cheek against the top of her head.

Alice feels she might burst, like a ripe plum bursts when it hits the ground from the top of the tree. She cannot remember ever having been so happy. Her ears make an underwater sound. And then she leaves her body for a moment, soars up amongst the fluorescent fixtures, performing smooth backflips over the freezer aisle before diving back into her skin.

Her breath catches in her throat. She turns her head a little to check on Michaela, who is busy trying to score some goldfish crackers from Arden. He hands them to her one at a time. They're fine. The children are fine.

Her mascara has smeared on David’s clean, unwrinkled blue T-shirt. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” she mumbles, looking up at him. “I got your shirt all schmutzy.”

“It’s just a shirt,” he says, pulling her back into his chest. “So,” he asks her, “Are you OK or aren’t you?”

Alice mutters into his chest: “I’m fine.”

He stops rocking, stops moving altogether, but draws a big breath and lets it out. Then, he gazes down his nose at her, his face racked with sad concern. “Did you just say you were dying?”

After a pause, she finds herself nodding. Tears flood up in her eyes, making a convincing portrait of the woman who will die too soon and leave her young children behind.

This isn’t exactly a lie. Her expectation is that she will be diagnosed with a fatal disease much sooner than later. Which would it be? Ovarian cancer? Leukemia? Lymphoma? Hepatitis? Rheumatic heart disease? It just seems a matter of time and of obtaining the proper diagnosis.

He steps back from her, seeming overwrought for a moment, putting one hand to his forehead. The fingers of the forehead-touching hand curl inward and scratch the forehead. He squints at her, lifting his eyebrows. “Is there some way I can help?”

She smiles as she imagines someone facing a fatal illness might smile: with a combination of bitter resignation and the appreciation of the gifts of the present moment. Michaela diverts Arden into a game of bite-the-baby’s- toesies.

“I wish maybe you could hold me like that for a few hours,” she says. Jesus God, did I just say that out loud? she thought.

She had. So she went on.

“Horizontally.”

He stands there looking at her for a good eight seconds. Then he folds his hands together behind his head and smiles, showing his teeth.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

And then David takes a woman who is obviously married (simple gold band), with her two small children and several bags of groceries, to his extremely tidy apartment with its futon bed covered in Indian blankets, his tea pot, his scrubbed-clean bathroom, his view of the foothills through silk drapes. This married woman tells him to turn on the television for sleepy Michaela and to leave Arden, already sleeping, in his car seat, while they go into the bedroom and close the door.

A cool moist breeze comes through the open window as he pulls the curtains closed. He washes her face gently with a warm washcloth.

“I can’t stop crying,” Alice tells him. “I’m so happy I can’t stop crying.”

“Shhhhhh,” David says. “No talking.”

Alice obeys him, afraid her slightest word, movement or intention to move will land her with a crusty thud into her crumby, greasy kitchen with both kids crying around her legs.

He leads her over to the bed and she sits down on its edge. He helps her lie back on the clean, soft pillows, then bustles around, lighting candles, pulling windows closed, turning on a space heater, turning on some music. Then he cracks the bedroom door and goes out to peek out at the kids. Alice watches him as he clicks the television off, covers sleeping Michaela with a blanket, and returns and eases the door shut again.

He comes back over to the bed and sits on his heels between her spread ankles, one hand on each of her shins. She lies there with her eyes closed, her forearm flung across her forehead, breath shallow, as though she has fallen from a great height.

Yoga and the Ecstasy of Attachment

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:03:34 -0400

You're in that yoga class. The one you get to when you can get to it.

Slow flow through sitting and standing poses, holding them until they hurt. You fill the places that grip, that grab, that hurt with breath. You send the laser point of the mind away from thoughts like

…I’m way better at this pose than SHE is. I wish I had arms like her though. How does she get those arms? I bet her boobs are fake though. Oh wait, but I suck at this pose. God I hope I don’t fart during savasana like I did last week. I don’t think anyone knew it was me, but still. I have to remember to change the oil in my car. Maybe today. I can get a coffee drink while I wait…Ouch, fuck. What’s this song? I should ask him to burn me a disc. I wonder if he has a girlfriend?

…to the sacrum, the ribs, the front and back of the heart, the scapulae. Drift away, come back. Drift away, come back. Oh. Breathe. Yeah. There it is.

Good thing you bought one of those $35 thin towels to spread over your sticky mat to absorb all that nice clean funky sweat you’re producing because this teacher who has the sweet voice and the cute nebbishy Jewish thing going on with the curly hair and the glasses is fucking KICKING your ASS with these long lunges held and held and held.

And he’s talking. He doesn’t stop talking for a solid hour and a half.

All variations on the same theme: that this panoply of yogic positions you’re so intently trying to nail is really just a game. That being attached to the body looking or performing a certain way (according to your own expectations or those of some media-addled Other) is a sick waste of time and a one-way ticket away from True Joy. So, too, is a goal orientation held while practicing yoga: If I keep doing this I’ll have a butt like that chick up front in approximately 2.5 months.

True Joy, he says, is to be found only in “the truth of your shape.” The shape you are in right now, today, because you know damn well – although you really would rather not think about it – that this shape is temporary. The fiery hormone-enriched glow of the 20s and 30s gives way with alarming rapidity to the downhill slope toward decrepitude. Collagen, sex hormones, joints and organs that work properly, a body that attracts the kind of attention that makes you feel Beautiful – they are going, going, gone, and well, you know, then what? You’re in a box or getting cooked down in a crematorium and someone has to take down your Facebook page for you and write to the credit card companies that you’re dead and will not be applying for any more lines of credit, thanks very much.

So, you know, now is all you’ve got. And now all you’ve got is the truth of your shape. So be in it. Enjoy it. Breathe into it.

He is also careful to note that once you recognize that the attachment to appearances and ego concerns is unnecessary, you can play with personas and manifestations and personality traits and relationships. You can dye your hair purple and get a tattoo one day and dress like Grace Kelly the next; you can change jobs, yoga teachers, relationships, whatever, without trauma or drama: because you realize that it’s all a game. That this shape, this problem, this relationship, this thought is temporary, and as long as you are attached to some expectation of it, you will suffer; you will be disappointed. And at any moment, you can choose to detach from those expectations and inhabit the truth of the actual moment that is actually happening right now.

Damn. He’s good.

You get it when he’s talking. Then you lose it. Then you get it again. So you’re glad he keeps talking. You need to be reminded of this oh, approximately every 45 seconds.

But there’s a catch. Maybe you’ve noticed that sometimes, attachment feels good. Sometimes it feels REALLY good.

You might feel elation and rightness when, for a brief shining moment, those expectations are met. You see that you have finally achieved that Yoga Butt. You think you have landed the Perfect Relationship and you are crazy in love. You finally nail that crazy arm balance you’ve been working on for the last two months. You have an intractable and passionate crush on someone you probably will never actually be with. You lie in bed at night consumed with longing that is both heartbreaking and ecstatic. And these moments, like any moment, are temporary.

What about the feeling of being enraptured by a work of art? By a piece of theater? It’s a whole different experience, and it is all about attachment.

This is total absorption in the mind’s response to something beautiful and right. It invades your body, a shiver that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It takes you out of your body, too. How does one stimulus have such a multiplicity of responses in a single human being? Ahhh. Ahhh. It’s too much. Give me more.

You want to get lost in this feeling. You want to follow it. It’s out there waving signal flags and shining klieg lights and beckoning to you like a thousand virgins to come, come, follow me, follow the bliss.

This very attachment that takes you out of the Truth of the Moment can show you your path. It shows you how to build your Self in the world. It shows you how to choose. Many mystical traditions celebrate these moments of ecstatic attachment as moments of connection to God.

As it is with all else, it is here: true non-attachment has to dance with attachment. Driven by what moves us, we build the Self and the ways we move within the world. And then we remember ourselves, the truth of our shape, and we relax our grip a little, and we remember that it’s all a game, a practice: a choreography.

Loving Jared Loughner

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:01:25 -0500

On January 8^th, 2011, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords set up a meet-and-greet at a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona, with the intention of meeting and greeting her constituents. One of them, an unhinged college dropout and Army reject named Jared Loughner, shot her and 18 others, six of whom have since died. One was a nine-year-old girl who had been born on 9/11/01. Giffords is still on life support.

As is usually the case following an unconscionable act, our knee-jerk reflex has been to figure out who's to blame. We rationalize the witch hunt with an implicit conclusion that if we can figure out whose fault this one was, we can take concrete steps to prevent the next one. If we can explain the motives of the murderer, maybe, somehow, that will help us heal or feel more safe.

Right-wing hate speech has been a focal point, despite the fact that neither Loughner nor his insane ravings were aligned with any political party. No doubt, for years, a deluge of horrid talk has been pouring over the airwaves via right-wing talk radio and Fox “News;” no doubt, right-wing political figures and wanna-bes favor lock-and-load, aim-and-fire military metaphors and other metaphors dealing in conflict, taking a stand and smashing one's opponent. Who can blame them? They're just trying to appeal to the baser instincts of their base. It's just propaganda. If it didn't work to rally the people who support them, they would take a different tack.

Requests to sign and pass along petitions and documents of support for more civil speech have made the rounds on Facebook and via e-mail. There is talk of the drafting of bills banning certain kinds of speech in political debate (e.g., crosshairs on maps). Plenty of screeching about the right to free speech has arisen in response. And folks on the Right are pissed off because they think they're being unfairly targeted as rich sources of incendiary language in political debate.

In a recent blog posting ( http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/the-progressive-climate-of-hate-an-illustrated-primer-2000-2010/) conservative journalist Michelle Malkins writes, “Tucson massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand.”

(Oooooooh! Ooooooooh! Such bombast! Ah'm shiverin' in my yoga pants!)

She proceeds to list many examples of left-wing hate speech, including “Abort Sarah Palin” bumper stickers, a Getty image depicting Sarah Palin with a rifle pointed at her head, several videos of Obama supporters behaving badly, a rally poster of George Bush's decapitated head, a photographer's manipulations of a studio portrait of John McCain (one gives him a Dracula-like mouth dripping with blood and another depicts a chimpanzee shitting onto the crown of his head), and mug shots of a few guys arrested for things like throwing tomatoes at Ann Coulter.

Yes, Michelle, there is no shortage of stereotyping, minimizing, mocking or hatred on the left side of the aisle. Although this hate speech doesn't seem to incite as many people who own firearms, we do like to talk about the stupidity of our right-leaning counterparts. This conversation has created some of the funniest television any of us has seen in years. We liberals like to laugh – and not just at World's Funniest Home Videos and Jersey Shore. We like our humor a little more highbrow.

Oops! I just did it myself. See how I dehumanized those other guys? Called 'em stupid? Those guys who think Sarah Palin, Dubya and Reagan are national heroes and who compare Obama to Hitler? Yeah, those guys. The guys who scream and yell about liberals being the death of America. I love to watch and laugh a horrified “oh my God can this really be TRUE?” laugh while Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert eviscerate those guys. I think: Oh those stupid, stupid people.

Keith Olbermann's brilliantly inflammatory histrionics and Bill Maher's liberal-crowd-pandering insults and stereotyping appeal to those of us who want to believe that the problems of our nation are their fault, and that in our superior intelligence we have every right to point fingers and laugh at them.

I hate to be a party-pooper, but in doing so, we're taking an even lower moral road than the Righties. Because we should know better. Still, we cave to the desire to divide and conquer. To make someone else the problem. To make the other an Other – another species, another breed, a bad, bad something we are not and could never become.

If we can step back from this puerile back-and-forth – about who's doing the worst hate speech, the most name-calling – we might actually be able to see the issue in a way that will bring healing. We might be able to honor the wishes of Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, "I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." He also said: "Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." And: "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Love is the foundation of a society that doesn't allow someone as obviously mentally ill and unstable as this shooter to go without intensive help. And I'm not talking about a society that cuddles psychopaths or people who have been eaten alive by their own shadow sides, never to emerge whole again. I'm not talking about coddling criminals or unmitigated, self-righteous assholes or even about excusing their wrongdoings. I'm talking about taking care of each other. Of living life with a sense that we are all in this together, and acting accordingly. That if some of us are being treated unjustly or are sick and unable to help themselves, we need to do something to try to help.

People who knew that Loughner was dangerous keep coming out of the woodwork to have their fifteen minutes of fame. They tell stories about him that remind me of that urban planning acronym NIMBY (Not In My Backyard): Sure, build the nuclear power plant, or the cell phone tower, or the homeless shelter, or the dump for the hazardous wastes, but Not In My Back Yard. Sure, this Loughner guy is probably going to hurt somebody, so I should just get him OOMBY (Out Of My Back Yard) so he doesn't hurt me or anyone I care about. Let somebody else deal with him. Nobody dealt with Loughner except to continually reject, ostracize and marginalize him.

How could he have been helped? Help might have come in psychiatric, spiritual or familial forms, from a community that sees the loving and lovable heart in every person, or from some other source. However it had come, it would have been our best chance at protecting the people he ended up harming.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a fierce kind of love that has, at its root, a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, and a valuation of the interdependent web of life in which we all exist – a valuation that trumps individual interests. This kind of love sees God in everything while at the same time demanding accountability, interaction and cooperation. And when people are too broken to help themselves, real love presses the rest of us to intervene in some way before their brokenness breaks others.

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan famously said that "we must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." But there is no individual apart from society. Society births us, feeds us, grows us, and influences what we become in ways that are too strong to tease apart from our astrological, genetic or past-life tendencies.

Sure, some of us come in with much bigger burdens than others, and we are accountable for what we do with those burdens – whether we surpass them, allow our broken selves to be vessels of light instead of denizens of darkness. But to truly live out King's version of love, we must recognize that if we were born into the life of of a criminal, asshole or psychopath, we could just as easily have ended up with that weapon in our hands, pointing it at a public servant in front of a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona.

We don't have to befriend people who have given themselves over to a darkness that terrifies us. But we do have to risk joining together to protect those people from themselves, and to protect ourselves from them.

Until we see that Loughner is not other than us—and that Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Dubya, and all those other Others—are our brothers and sisters, and that no one gets to win the arguments we're currently having, the pointless pissing matches will continue. Who will stop first? This isn't about preventing anyone from buying firearms and killing innocents. It's a crisis of humanity. We are ceasing to see each other as real human beings in all our frail, powerful, paradoxical glory. We're making each other into stereotypes, pointing at those cardboard-cutout substitutes for actual people, and shouting and screaming and name-calling and laughing. Denying each other's humanity, each other's blood-filled, beating hearts, makes it so much easier for us to hurt each other.

Put away your pissing parts, people. Let's ask ourselves what we are doing to perpetuate an atmosphere of strife and violence. None of us are innocent. Let's admit, this, accept it, and try to love each other and have some civil debate already.

It might not make such good television. I, for one, would weep to see Colbert and Stewart go off the air (and I'd dance with joy to see Limbaugh disappear). But debate around issues of politics, human rights, the economy, health care and the like should not be like an episode of [insert name of your favorite reality show here].

Let's not be the populace that can be manipulated by drama and propaganda. Once our elected officials and the media mouthpieces see that this shit won't work on us anymore, they'll class up their acts, and fast.

Beautiful/Not-Beautiful

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:12:55 -0500

I’m sixteen years old. I’m alone in my dim bedroom. On one wall is a mirror. From where I sit, I can see a reflection of my upper torso and my face. Intensely I gaze across the room at myself, turning my face and shoulders this way and that. There, I think. Right there. I see it, I’m catching a glimpse. I’m…beautiful! Oh my God! I AM beautiful!

Elation surges up in me. When I leave that dim bedroom to move around the house with my family, when I leave the house to roam around the world where the other humans can lay their eyes on me, I feel the warm simmer of that same elation. I feel irresistible, sexual, glamorous, mysterious. Others gaze at me, envious and admiring. My heart swells with hope and the world is full of promise.

But then, the next day, or maybe even that same day, I’m walking along a sidewalk with my mother, and I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a shop window. And I am, quite suddenly, not-beautiful.

I don’t look at all like the images in the magazines. I’m not delicate and gaunt and otherworldly. My nose, my hair, my cheeks, my walk, the shape of my ass, the curve of my back – my God, they’re all wrong! Now, when others look at me, their expressions convey the opposite of attraction and admiration. They don't even want to look at me, I'm so hideous.

With this, I slingshot from exultation to deep sadness, a sense of loss and lack. Why, oh why couldn’t I have been born beautiful? What can I do to get myself back to that deep delight I’d felt in those hours where I felt beautiful? Is there a product I can buy, an article of clothing I can wear, a way I can arrange my facial expression or cut my hair that will return me to my beautiful-me manifestation? It felt so good. And why wouldn’t I want to feel like that?

Twenty-four years later, I sometimes catch myself doing the same thing, despite the fact that I know better, I really do. Cameras, mirrors and reflective shop windows frighten me. They hold the power to ruin my day or my week when they show me my crow’s feet, wrinkled forehead, stained teeth, awkward smile and receding gums.

Still, when I make an effort, when I put myself together just so, and when the light’s right and I stand far enough away from the mirror, I can get that feeling. This can happen when someone takes a picture of me that matches my image of what I ought to look like. Ahhh. I AM beautiful.

Sometimes I can hold on to that and walk out the door with it. But now, in my 41^st year, this all has started to feel tenuous. And that, I’m now seeing, is a good thing.

In his book, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self (Bantam, 2000), psychologist and yoga teacher Stephen Cope writes:

To some extent, most of us are unconsciously driven by our ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is simply a set of ideas in the mind about how we should look, feel, behave, think. This collection of ideas and mental images is created out of fragments of highly charged experiences with important love objects in our lives, and out of the messages we receive in our interactions with the world as we grow. It remains mostly out of our awareness…[but creates] the foundation of our scripts for life…The feelings we are most apt to have when living under the sway of [this] mental image are…feelings of pride, euphoria and elation…when the world seems to be confirming my self-image. The bad news is that their opposites—dysphoria, emptiness, and panic—show up when the environment does not confirm us…Euphoria and elation are, in fact, as psychologist Stephen Johnson says, the “booby prizes” of life.

Like most people, I don’t only go through this holding-up of the ideal self to the reality with my appearance. I do it with my achievements, my parenting, my activities, my relationships, even my thoughts. Image and reality wage a constant war in my mind, and that’s the way it has always been – I’ve almost never chosen to question it. And that's because those moments where image and reality meld feel so delicious.

Those moments have, until now, seemed worth it. But with Cope's insight, I see how they've kept me trapped in a cycle of striving, fear and doubt.When would the wheels fall off? A client would praise my work and I'd feel that familiar thrill. Then, another client would take issue with my work, and I'd feel as though all my hopes and dreams had been torpedoed.

What a relief to accept that the manic sense of joy I’ve felt in moments where my reality seems to live up to my unconscious “shoulds” is not actually something to reach for. Sure, that manic joy feels fantastic, but it's always a hair's-breadth from flipping into its opposite. Not only do we become attached to the image, we end up also becoming attached to the feeling we get when we think we're living up to it. And then, we're even farther from true happiness and contentment - where we can be present with the body and in the breath, where leaves and birds and books and food and exercise and a cozy bed and the love of another being and [fill in something simple that you wouldn't want to live without] are all we need.

Letting go of "shoulds" and being present makes me a better parent, a better worker, a better friend, and a better participant in efforts to help instead of harm.

What's a "should" that runs you? Where did it come from? When do you notice it? How does it control your behavior? Your relationships? Are you ready to let go of it? When you do, what's left?

Astrology + Psychology = (A Certain Sort of) Freedom

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:12:42 -0500

When I’ve said the occasional “That seems surprisingly relevant,” while reading a newspaper horoscope, I’ve chalked it up to the same phenomena to which I attribute surprisingly relevant fortune cookies: 1.)coincidence, or 2.) vagueness adequate to make it applicable to anyone who reads it. Astrology has always made me think of a guy on the prowl sidling up to a woman in a bar and saying, “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”

When I first heard the announcer on Jennifer Freed’s podcast, FREED UP!, describe her as a psychological astrologer, I rolled my eyes. The idea that the position of the planets at the moment of my birth could have any significant effect on who I am, what happens in my life or where I’m going was much too out there for this rationalistic writer and veteran consumer of psychotherapy. Why would someone who’d gone through the rigors of a PhD education in psychology be messing around with something as esoteric as astrology? I kept listening, because I liked what she had to say and respected her work as a psychologist. And then, one day, she did an astrological reading on the air for one of her guests. I thought: Wow. Within a week, I was sitting on her couch having my own reading. And I was blown away.

Jennifer is a licensed marriage and family therapist, group leader and educator who has been a practicing clinician for over 30 years. She has held the post of Clinical Director at Southern California’s Pacifica Graduate Institute and continues to serve as a professor and adjunct faculty member there. But what she shared with me in my reading was not gleaned from a long therapist-client relationship. Based on three bits of information—my date of birth, my place of birth, and my time of birth (down to the minute)—Freed has showed me a portrait of myself that is detailed, thorough, and revelatory. Based on the placement of the planets, sun and moon at the moment of my birth, Jennifer has been able to hold up a mirror that accurately reflects a self that feels absolutely authentic. And this is a self I actually feel not just good about, but great about—despite a long history of questioning, frustrated meandering, garden-variety self-doubt and even the occasional bout of energetic self-loathing.

Jennifer’s discovery of real astrology came in much the same fashion—she had a reading that blew her away. “At 19, I had my first psychological astrology session,” she tells me, “and no one, including myself, had ever articulated my strengths, weaknesses and contradictions so clearly.” This interest in astrology led her to find a PhD scientist who knew and practiced it. As she earned her degrees in psychology and became a therapist, she underwent a parallel course of study in astrology that included study with many teachers. Since the mid-1990s, Jennifer has taught a diploma course in psychological astrology.

In her analysis of my strengths, potentials, and growing edges, Jennifer was affirming and encouraging, compassionate and funny. Her words gave shape to my most difficult paradoxes and are helping me let go of limiting beliefs about both present difficulties and past choices. Apparently, there’s a lot more to this astrology business than newspaper horoscopes predicting an ominous or auspicious future. And it seems that the man who asks his potential mate about her astrological sign might be more evolved than I previously imagined—that knowing a prospective partner’s astrological sign may be more meaningful than knowing what he or she does for a living, her hometown, or any of the other things about which we tend to ask prospective partners.

This is a tough one for me to wrap my mind around. My own graduate education in exercise physiology equipped me with tools for understanding how scientists use rigorous study designs, hard data and statistical analysis to come to solid conclusions about this or that hypothesis. And although I knew its limitations, I had come to believe that science was the place to look for answers about most things. How would the placement of the planets affect the way our personalities form? Where’s the data demonstrating how gravitational fields affect the genetic coding that creates our biochemical milieus? Show me the studies! Explain to me why this is true! (As it turns out, this view is in perfect keeping with my Capricorn nature. Down-to-earth, practical Capricorns want completion, achievement and accomplishment. Another part of my chart shows that I have deep fears around security. Faith, giving over to a higher power, hope, prayer, visioning, meditation? A big leap for someone who wants solid ground beneath her feet.)

I’m far from alone in my skepticism. Astrology is widely considered to be a form of pseudoscience—a subject that superficially seems scientific and is spoken about as a science, but that doesn’t hold up to modern scientific methods. Pseudo comes from the Greek word for “false.” Pseudoscience is false science. Fake science.

Sure, in terms of the very limited view of modern science, there’s little available to explain astrology. The same is said about homeopathy, shamanism, mind-body medicine, energy healing and depth psychology. But these protests are significantly enfeebled by two parallel trends: 1.) the failure of modern, mechanistic science to solve some intractable problems, notably the insanity that tends to set in when human beings feel increasingly isolated from spirit and faith; and 2.) the incontrovertible help that these so-called ‘pseudoscientific’ disciplines offer to real live human beings, despite continuous effort to debunk them by those who are attached to modern science as universal problem-solver.

The kind of science used to develop astrology is far older than the science its critics say it fails to stand up to. Astrology began with the ancient Babylonians and was developed over centuries of careful study of the paths of the planets (which, in astrology, include the sun and moon) and the linking of those paths to human traits, strengths and proclivities. Astrological science is about close observation of parallel phenomena, the discernment of patterns and the intelligent application of those patterns for the purposes of prediction or understanding.

In its earliest applications, before an understanding emerged of the potential for human growth, inner exploration and change, astrology was used to fatalistically predict and label. Today, astrology is still sometimes used in this way, and this is the kind of astrology to which most of us have been exposed in newspaper horoscopes. But now that we grasp the enormous potential of each individual to evolve, astrology has found a new application: as a tool to be used in psychology for the purpose of recognizing and working with inborn traits. This enables us to choose our courses in life in a way that recalls swimming with the current instead of against it. We can make choices based on what is and is not changeable about ourselves. Building a house that’s wrong for its foundation is a foolish thing to do, and many of us, in this time of radical individualism and the notion that we are free to choose in just about every aspect of our lives, have tried hard to build a house that didn’t sit right on that foundation, making it prone to earthquake, flood, and other kinds of disaster.

Psychological astrology uses the archetypes and symbolism of the Zodiac, which was first drawn around 500 BC, to inform the process of psychological inquiry. Practitioners usually adhere to schools of psychological thought that embrace important roles for the unconscious mind, the link between mind and body, and the power of mythology, spirituality and archetypes in the human psyche: depth psychology, transpersonal psychology, humanistic psychology, integral psychology.

You won’t hear a psychological astrologer diagnosing a ‘biochemical imbalance’ to which their client’s depressions or anxieties or neuroses can be attributed. Neither will you hear a practitioner in this niche tell a client to solve their psychological problems by mechanistically, willfully changing their thoughts or way they talk to themselves or others. Instead, they encourage clients to understand why they do what they do based on their inborn and lifelong traits, and to work within that structure to find a healthier way of being and relating; to see how hereditary leanings and astrological patterning collude to make us who we are and how best to work with what we have been given. A good astrological psychology session helps to bring more clarity about what is and is not one’s innate talents or tendecies in life and relationships. “This work will let you know what your classes are in this school of your life,” Jennifer told me. “It shows you what you came here to this Earth school to learn. What kind of student you’ll be is up to you.”

Psychological astrology does what few psychological disciplines can: it clearly demonstrates the relationship of individual psyche (microcosm) to universal/collective unconscious (macrocosm). It helps to heal the huge rift that has opened between individuals and the universe from which they come. Through recognition of the relatedness of each human being to patterns, energies and relationships much larger than ourselves, and through a grounding of very personal details into this larger cosmological map, we come to see that we aren’t the only ones driving the bus here.

Spiritual teachers often exhort pupils to “let go and let God,” to stop trying so hard to control our lives and to just say no to attachment to the outcomes of our decisions. Many of us place huge stock in having total control over our own lives, but control is a vastly overrated entity. There’s always some glitch in the works, just waiting to knock us off of our carefully orchestrated trajectories. And oddly enough, the harder we hold on to those trajectories, the faster and harder we tend to get knocked off. None of us are farther than a single disaster away from losing it all.

Trusting in psychological astrology requires a willingness to surrender into not-knowing. Pseudoscience or no, it forges a path toward knowledge and understanding that each of us is made a certain way. When we are helped to acknowledge this in gorgeous detail, as was the case with my reading, we can be present and move forward with greater confidence and joy. We can see the broader map of our lives in a universal context. There is a kind of freedom in this that is quite different from the ‘land of the free, home of the brave’ variety. It’s the freedom to be who we truly are and to share that with the world.

This once-cynical writer’s conclusion: the cycles and patterns of our human lives are, in some important fashion, driven by by complex and grand forces, including the gravitational pull of the planets, sun and moon—and this is a good and comforting thing. We still get to drive, but this particular bus has GPS. It’ll tell us where to go if we take the time to understand, listen and pay attention.

Widely recognized for her expertise on issues such as teen bullying, character development, marriage and family relationships and diversity, Jennifer Freed sees patients in private practice to help them with effective communication, anger management, sexuality issues, and prevention of drug addiction and violence. Jennifer also co-founded and directs a program called AHA! (the Academy of the Healing Arts), which helps teens in California and the Southwest to develop character, imagination, social conscience and emotional intelligence. Through AHA!, teens learn to set goals, support peers and serve their communities.

Freed is also the author of several books, including the books used for AHA!—Relationship Wisdom, Character, Compassion and Creative Expression—and The Ultimate Personality Guide (Tarcher, 2001). This year, Perigee Trade will publish Lessons from Stanley the Cat: Nine Lives of Everyday Wisdom. Jennifer has appeared on Good Morning America and National Public Radio, and hosts two popular radio programs, Signs of Change on Arizona’s KFNX-AM and FREED UP! on Voice America. For more information, to request a reading, or to sign up for her upcoming workshop (it starts January 15th), contact Jennifer at JFFREE@aol.com.