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.
pic by Leor MillerThis is how I swim now. With the full support of my daughter I can kick like a toddler learning to swim. Except of course I fucking know how to swim. I fucking used to pass the fucking alpha males with their gear and their struts and I was fucking proud!
Pride comes before a
whoops.
I fell the other day as I
What do you see when you see me now, head drooping, carefully stepping, barely balanced on sticks held by arthritic hands? "Bless you," I've heard, or "good job," or some just smile to show I'm included in this beautiful day. I am accorded that kindness reserved for heroic cripples who might have given up but instead still struggle, still battle, and maybe even overcome obstacles. Thank you.
My right hand is giving out, so I'm practicing parsimony.
Problems I don't have:
Look, this is not trivial. Countless pages in my lifelong diaries are filled with efforts to shape my body into something lovable.
sometime in the 80s
Problems I don't have:
Updated on Friday, June 11, 2021 at 5:37PM by
Elena Taurke
Last night I went to an online premier for a wicked and brilliant and thrilling dance at the Joyce, Giselle of Loneliness, by Katy Pyle. I urge you to buy a ticket and see the show, streaming through June 23rd. In it, seven queer dancers audition for the role of Giselle by dancing a compressed and extremely difficult sequence from the mad scene. Any one of them would blow your mind, and yet we as audience were asked to judge them according to criteria like Jumps and Extension, but also Ethereal and Hysteria and Suffering. I laughed and scoffed but then got into it. We were given 30 seconds so the judgements had to come fast.
Who are you?
When I write I feel you as a benign and understanding listener. I feel an obligation to write each week because I said I would, but I also know that almost no one reads this blog, partly because I don't tell anyone about it. Recently a wise advisor commented that it was as if I had people over and kept the food in the fridge instead of making it available on the counter, or serving it or something. I stopped writing the newsletter and I don't use social media, so this is more like a semi-coherent diary than anything else.
I've always had a fraught relationship with the public. "Pooblic" is the pronunciation given by the brilliant clown teacher, Jean Taylor, to coax humor from the interplay.
"Primal Scream! :)" by Dplanet:: is licensed under CC BY 2.0In the apartment next door there is a toddler who is unceasingly protesting life itself. The screams rise up, swallow the universe, and persist, persist, persist. I am thinking of his mother, a professional, now alone at home with this seeming agony. Where is her mind?
I saw her at the elevator and said, "It must be hard being quarantined with a toddler." She responded that I was the first to notice such a thing, admitted the truth of it but then prevaricated, saying it is easier now that he can talk. Maybe so. One of the axioms of my former profession is that we might feel what our clients cannot. Maybe this toddler is expressing what she cannot.
Mothers are really not allowed to complain.
I'm excited to finally offer this little 6-minute vignette of the work of the PsychoZen Mixed Messages ensemble. Here we are playing with a format that I designed from the family therapy technique of sculpting. One person begins by arranging two people into a shape that expresses a relationship between mother and daughter. It could be her own relationship or an imagined one. Then the players reveal the sensations, emotions, thoughts and desires that arise. The director modifies the flow and the sculptor continues to shift the tableau according to what is happening, what is needed. It enables us to move and shift trauma, and emerge with freedom and love.
November 2020
This 2-minute video is another expression of the complex and loving relationship between mother and daughter. My mother's death in February set in motion a process of opening to who we were together, of letting go, and of appreciating life as it is.
I've included a passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here I am." My mother and I turned out to be reading it at the same time, and when Sal Randolph asked for contributions to a collection of performances of reading, I asked my Mum to film herself. Then I read the passage she chose while filming myself. You'll also hear me reading bits from her poem, "Blue Butterfly," which I wrote about here.
Sometimes people who see this work pity me. Please try not to. Sadness is a part of life and love. I'll take it.
July 2020
My mother died on February 17th.
In recent years I called her Mum as a repair for the awkwardness in my youth that arose from obeying my father’s insistence that we call her Mother. This stilted salutation, I believe, was to repair the fall from aristocracy that our family suffered by leaving Russia. The proper word really would have been Mama but it didn’t stick, maybe because we were repairing our Russianness too. So much brokenness, never spoken but always implied.
Who was my mother? Who are any of us under all those repairs?
While I was mourning her loss, my Zen teacher, Roshi Joshin, asked if there was an image of her that came to mind, a way that I could sense her presence now. I thought of a butterfly, then changed my mind because butterflies land on things, and my impression of her was that she never really landed. "Perhaps a hummingbird," said my daughter. Perhaps. All I know is that I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her. Or I couldn’t get her to reach me. I’m not sure what the difference is.
Later I realized that she saw me as a butterfly. And when I saw one several days later, seeming to call for my attention at the window, I realized that she was present in the way I see myself. In fact, my first memory is of a blue butterfly crushed by my brother. Maybe I expressed it to my mother. Or maybe I constructed it from things she said. Anyway she wrote a poem called "Blue Butterfly" for my 50th birthday. It memorializes the time when a photographer asked to use my picture in an ad, then saw that my legs were in casts and I could not walk. Here’s an excerpt:
Here was a spotlight on the indifference around, the dismay of a mother,
the trust of a child, and her innocent faith that she would be well,
made so by the grown-ups who loved her. With a turn of the prism,
our powerlessness was bared in the glare. A slight twist cast a softer
yet lucid light on the sweetness of innocence that, much too soon,
would be lost.
Yet another refraction made blaze the pain that awaited
in the tomorrows, no matter our will or resolve. In the midst of this spin,
there she sat, my blue butterfly, tranquil still in the moment.
Time enough later to learn of the future and change.
Refractions upon refractions. Reading her poem now, I understand that my illness (JRA) destroyed her idea of innocence and beauty, and there she was, spinning, while I sat, tranquil still. Of course I had no choice; I couldn’t get up and walk, could I? And this, in a nutshell, produced my lifelong struggle. She was moving so fast I couldn’t sense her center. I felt like I needed to move faster but I couldn’t. The frustration was immense. When I expressed it, they called it rage. And then it became rage. Such is the tragedy of interconnection, healed somewhat by poetry belated.
The 9th Zen precept is classically translated as "not being angry." I remembered that the Zen Peacemaker version was something like 'transform suffering into wisdom,' but when I went to look it up, it had changed! Now it is "bearing witness to emotions that arise."
Oh, if only someone had been able to bear witness then! How different our lives could have been if she had been able to bear witness to her dismay and grief instead of trying to escape it; how different had I realized that brokenness is part of the nature of things, to be included, not rejected. What if the photographer had chosen to feature the disabled girl? How different the perceptions of all those consumers of culture, how different our understandings of each other!
Thankfully the world is trying to change. Thankfully I have access to this wisdom now as I heal and accept my body as it is. I just listened to an On Being podcast with Resmaa Menakem on healing racial trauma through awareness of the body and an understanding of the context of trauma. And our own Village Zendo featured a talk by Tokuyu Hoshi on brokenness. And yesterday I watched a conversation on Disability Justice sponsored by Dance NYC on Facebook. We are bearing witness. We are acting. We are healing.
was me not you
I thought
I knew
butterfly adieu
now who?
Related: Who Was She? Part One
June 18, 2020
Womanhood: three generationsMy mother died on February 17th after refusing invasive medical treatment for several weeks. I was ill at the time with the thing that landed me in the hospital later, yet I travelled to California twice, once before she died and once after. We were able to have a conscious final conversation, for which I will always be grateful.
At the gate to the other world she finally saw herself as what she was, divine woman energy. "I'm not just crazy mixed-up me, I am a great woman, I am womanhood." Later during our vigil she revealed how she wanted to be a boy when she was young. I remembered her as a woman aspiring to appeal to men, whom she valued over women. "Dress for men," she would say, "women's fashion is ridiculous," or something like that.
She insisted I survive, called me a humanitarian, beeped my "pretty nose," said she wished I could have believed I was pretty. Later she bumped up against a disturbing memory. "Wasn't there something, something hostile when you were a teenager?" Oh, yes, there was something--so much rage the neighbors called the police, so much hurt that couldn't be expressed. Naturally I tried to brush past it, absolve us both, go back to the divine absolute love, but she stayed, wanted to resolve it so that she could let go. It was too big for that, but I gave her a morsel and it turned out to be enough.
Enough for her but not for me. Only after emerging from the nightmare hospitalization did I start to ask into what I had lost. What was this "crazy mixed-up" legacy? How could I reach her, touch her, so that I could let go?
My mother is a winding road
of pockets far from the center
My mother is a winding of whorls and eddies,
each teaming with tiny life
safer tinier far from the center
Lost in the eddies that she
mistakes for the big life
No, not lost
She is hiding there
June 18, 2020
