Psychology + Zen = Philosophy and methods to relieve suffering and reveal happiness.
Psychology: We project onto others what we reject in ourselves. Some call it a Shadow. Healing comes from making the unconscious conscious, taking responsibility for our projections, integrating what is split off as our own thing.
Zen: There is no separate self. When we can be at one with every aspect, then we belong everywhere and we reject no one.
We heal the world by becoming intimate with our whole selves.
I've written and dumped a few blog posts since It happened. Oddly, I started with Reasons for Hope, then hope gave way to lament, so I parked hope and wrote First, Lament, but by the next day the fever had subsided and I felt empty, so I wrote nothing. Nothing spawned new layers of understanding, and then more confusion, and then a sense of community, because actually we are all fucking confused, and maybe that's a good place to start.
A vagina has not yet planted itself on the seat behind the desk at the oval office. The oval office!
A vagina with a skilled woman attached to it is running for that seat against a brute. In response to decades of sexist attacks, overt and subtle, this woman has not crawled into a hole, has not given up, has not murdered anyone, has NOT made huge mistakes, has not given up her core principles. She has constructed a persona that this nation can barely tolerate--somehow delivering a medley of intelligence, ambition, kindness, steadiness, and enthusiasm. And in response, people hate her. Young liberal people preferred an older white gentleman offering slogans, and deplorables prefer the Deplorable.
and Who is the Other?
I don't mean to be elliptical. On the other hand, maybe "egg shaped" is exactly what I'm going for. This year I'm co-facilitating a class exploring how we project onto others what we can't welcome in ourselves. Our categories are Disability, Race, and Gender. We started the examination of gender with the question:
Am I a woman? Why or Why not?
Here is my answer
Does it spark joy? If not, let it go. 
It's easy to mock this instruction from the adorable and slightly insane master of tidiness, Marie Kondo, but I contend that it is an invitation to a radical revolution. Master Kondo advises us not to engage with a thing in the usual way. Don't read the book or try on the clothing; hold it to your heart and notice what you feel.
"Pay close attention to how your body responds when you do this. When something sparks joy, you should feel a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising. When you hold something that doesn't bring you joy, however, you will notice that your body feels heavier."
Attention to rising cells is revolutionary; it changes everything.
You may have noticed that I've been gone a while. I've been busy doing nothing. What happened is that I had a pretty good idea and I started to write, but then it went sideways and I had a hundred more ideas, and they led to a hundred more, so I started jotting everything down, and it was all connected, so I couldn't finish it, or, rather, them. I suffered. 
So I decided to step back and remember the main point.
Julianne, photo by Nicolas Genin"Well, she is more contemporary," the young lady clarified when I looked mystified. We were at a networking event for filmmakers and actors, and I had boldly raised my objection to the disappearance of older women. She responded by kindly offering hope that things were changing, and presented Julianne Moore as an example of an aging star. Thinking hard, she filled out her list of two by including an actress in her 30s.
Her 30s.
Along with so many others, I cheered for New York State last weekend--for our Governor who showed courage and resolve, for all the beautiful people who could now marry their beloved. At the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday, we were all bubbling in a soup of triumph and ecstasy. Most of you know that several years ago I decided to divorce my heterosexual spouse because the unfairness of the whole thing, especially the "Defense of Marriage Act," was unbearable.
I dozed until midnight, then adrenalin and heat fired up my body for the race, the chase, the battle in the jungle. Only I'm not in the jungle; I'm in bed trying to sleep. I'm having a major argument with my body: What is wrong with you?! Can't you feel the fatigue? Why are you flooding me with all this energy? Body: Hey, it's not my problem; you're the one with all the worries and ISSUES that keep me up. Mind: You have a lot of nerve calling me out on ISSUES when these things wouldn't even bother me if I weren't flooded with adrenalin and cortisol and whatever else you're doing to me.
Most functional people would have grabbed a cab straight to a psychiatrist for Ambien.
In the moments before ballet class was to begin, I was hanging over my legs, trying to find the inner awareness of my spine. Suddenly, improbably, I felt another body in my space--an intruder! I quickly rolled up to encounter a grotesque face, and it was actually asking me to take a step back to make room for her. I concealed my horror and annoyance (I think), and tried to explain that she was not in a good position, having encroached also on the person in front of her, who had nowhere to go. She didn't understand and I gave up, insuring that I would encounter her at close quarters for the remainder of the class.
Soon it became very clear that she didn't have the least idea of what to do. If she was lucky, she'd get a fraction of each exercise, but mostly she would stand and shuffle in that panicked way that beginners do. Please understand that I am normally very very sympathetic to this state of being, because that is almost always my condition.
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