Out of my head

Huffington Post just put up my latest post and so far there has been very little reaction. I think I know why.  It was written by my head. The others just poured out of me.  This one was very much about explaining, trying to recapture the initial impulse of an earlier post.  And then this morning I read this quote, from 2009, that I had posted, and it was a good reminder:

"My teacher Trungpa Rinpoche encouraged us to lead our lives as an experiment, a suggestion that has been very important to me. When we approach life as an experiment we are willing to approach it this way and that way because, either way, we have nothing to lose.

This immense flexibility is something I learned from watching Trungpa Rinpoche. His enthusiasm enabled him to accomplish an amazing amount in his life. When some things didn't work out, Rinpoche's attitude was 'no big deal.' If it's time for something to flourish, it will; if it's not time, it won't.

The trick is not getting caught in hope and fear. We can put our whole heart into whatever we do; but if we freeze our attitude for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead."

Here is the post:

Fire Away:  A Husband, A House, A Mortgage, the Sequel

A month ago I wrote a post called "A Husband, A House, A Mortgage, A Baby and A Lightbulb Moment" in which I talked about having had what I thought was the "American Dream" and how in the end, it didn't feel like the "prize" I had imagined it would be.

My marriage ended in divorce. We sold our home. My ex and I are not only not in love, we don't even communicate. Everything I had dreamt of having essentially imploded, leaving me to question most of the values I had held dear in the first half of my life.

I received over 1,000 comments and attacks on this blog and after awhile, I had to stop reading them. The blog was not meant to say my ex husband was to blame any more than I was. It was not meant to say that marriage, a home and a family are not worthy desires. It was simply to say that for so many of us, life is not one size fits all. We all have different paths. What works so well for so many families does not work for everyone. And that is not the end of the world -- it is simply the beginning of a new world.

Recently I was in a workshop with several men who talked about their families, their wives and their children. They were so proud and devoted to them, and I felt a pang of envy. To anyone who thought that I was saying that I don't believe in love -- or that I was critical of men -- I apologize. If I didn't believe in love, I wouldn't want to live. Love is, for me, the single most important part of my life. I am surrounded by love and though I do not, at this time, have a partner or a spouse in my life, that doesn't mean that there is no love.

I love my daughter, deeply. I love my dog, Lucy, who has been with me for over 12 years. We rescued her when she was 4 and even at 16, she's hanging in there. I lost a beloved dog, Lola, a year and a half ago when she was only 9. It still kills me to think of her. I love my friends and my family. I love writing. I love babies. I love New York City. I love this entire country and I also love many other countries. I love ice cream. I love people who can put their beliefs front and center and make a real difference in this world. I love spiritual teachers like Pema Chodron -- she saved my life when everything felt like it was going wrong. I love meditation. (I even feel not completely stupid when I chant now.)

I actually love my ex husband. I just don't want to live with him. And it's pretty clear that he is relieved not to be living with me.

When I was in my 20s and early 30s, I believe that walking down the aisle was the equivalent of my "Rocky" moment, climbing up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in my wedding gown and raising my hands in triumph. I believed that my life was now complete.

And then I saw how challenging it was to keep a marriage going when two people wanted different things out of it. I wanted simply to have a partner and an ally, to know someone had my back and wanted to spend some time with me. He wanted to come together when he wanted to, and that turned out to be, in the end, not at all.

I was not right and he was not wrong. It simply was what it was.

In losing that "Rocky" triumph, I found myself. I found that all the external things I thought I wanted were less important than the internal work I had to do. I found a core of strength I didn't know I had, to help my parents die, to be a good friend to others. To try to know God, or whatever that "higher consciousness" is.

I do believe in love. I do believe in marriage and kids and a home and all of those desires of human connection. I just believe that our lives can be complete and joyous without all the external prizes we think we must have.

Despite a difficult divorce and some very painful losses, the past three years have been some of the best years of my life. Were they better than the early years of my daughter's life, when we were a loving family and we were all together? They were different; not better, not worse.

It's an amazing feeling to fall in love and plan a wedding and embark on a life with the person you believe is your soul mate. But sometimes the person we chose at 24 or 29 or 37 is not the person we can live with at 40 or 50 or 60. Should we be miserable for the rest of our lives because it didn't last? Or should we move on and accept that life has other plans for us?

A year ago, I started studying swing dancing because I hoped that dancing would lift my spirits after a horrible divorce. It did. Recently, one of my favorite dance partners told me that I had to go into more challenging classes in order to improve. I think that's true now about love, too. I think it's time to come out of hiding and put my heart on the line again. I'm scared to step on my partner's feet in an advanced intermediate dance class. And I'm also scared to get my heart broken again. But I know that if I don't take chances in life, I might as well just die right now and forget about the remaining days, months or years. Where would be the joy in that?

After that blog post got so many critical comments, I talked to a few successful writers I know about how they handled criticism and personal attacks. One of them, Michael Eigen, a therapist and author of at least twenty books, said to me, "If you go out into the world, you will be attacked by others. If you stay in your cave, you will be attacked by yourself."

I'm ready. I feel that Pat Benatar has taken over my soul and is singing, "'C'mon and hit me with your best shot... fire away."

Which is also a good song to dance to.

The Only Way Out is Through

"The only way out is through" is often mentioned at Friends In Deed.  I remember the first time I heard it, I hated it.  But I think it's really true.  Latest Huff Post:


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The Only Way Out is Through

The first time I heard that I thought, “Damn!  I don’t want to go through this.  I want to go around it, over it, under it.  I want to sleep through it, wake me up when it’s over, fast forward me to happy days are here again.”

“It” is a dark night of the soul, which by the way is a misnomer.  It generally is dark “nights”—although I have heard of people who have a spiritual awakening in one night, most notably Eckhart Tolle, who was suddenly enlightened and began immediately writing bestselling books.  But for most of us, “a dark night” is a longer period, often a year, maybe even a few years.  And if you are simultaneously an agnostic, an atheist and a believer, as I considered myself for most of my life, it is a challenging path out of what feels like hell.  (“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Winston Churchill.) 

You can, if you want, try to avoid the pain – drinking, drugs, sleeping, lying, stealing, cheating, shopping, sleeping around, eating gallons of ice cream, bags of potato chips, staring at the television, gambling . . . you can do any or all of those things but sooner or later the grief you are avoiding will show up in a meltdown, a pile of debt, another divorce, an illness, an accident, or any number of other possibilities.

My dark night was years of caregiving and then a tsunami of loss. My life became a blank canvas that had to be re-painted at a stage in my life when I was not expecting it. I feel like I should have made a t-shirt for that first year so that if anyone asked me how I was they could just read the t-shirt:

~ separatedmotherdieddaughtermoved3000milesawaynojobnohome2dogs ~

When my dark nights began, people recommended books. First was Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart:

“I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us...It was all about letting go of everything.” 

Then came The Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore:

“Many people think that the point of life is to solve their problems and be happy.  But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of problems.  Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life.  That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life.  They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having.  A dark night, may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to living.  It pares life down to its essentials and helps you get a new start.”

I definitely needed a new start, so then I read…

Getting Naked Again: Dating, Romance, Sex, and Love When You've Been Divorced, Widowed, Dumped, or Distracted by Judith Sills.  I managed that pretty quickly, thanks to the "divorce diet," it was much easier than I imagined it would be. But it didn’t change anything; I was still deep into my dark nights.

Crazy Time by Abigail Trafford was helpful: “Breaking up a marriage may be as common as Main Street nowadays, but when you finally do it, the psychological experience seems as uncharted as the dark side of the moon.”  That made sense to me.  And – if you were the complacent partner in the marriage and you suddenly stand up for yourself, all hell breaks loose.  I could see that happened in my divorce.

In fact, my divorce was such a nightmare, that I had to turn to the Psalms:

“Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

I praise you for that which is.

I will not refuse this grief

or close myself to this anguish.

Let shallow men pray for ease:

‘Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.’

I pray for whatever you send me,

and I ask to receive it as your gift.

You have put a joy in my heart

greater than all the world’s riches.

I lie down trusting the darkness,

for I know that even now you are here.”

            [Psalm 4, Stephen Mitchell translation]

Somehow that brought me comfort.

Recently, I read this very powerful quote by August Gold: 

 “To enter the conversation with Life we only have to change one key word: We have to stop asking, ‘Why is this happening to me?' and start asking, 'Why is this happening for me?’  When we can do this, we’re free.”

And this:  “Life, as the biblical tradition makes clear, is both loss and renewal, death and resurrection, chaos and healing at the same time; life seems to be a collision of opposites.”  Richard Rohr, Falling Upwards.

Over the last twenty or so years, I have watched many friends walk through hell.  I didn’t understand how truly difficult their lives were at the time because I had no reference point.  I understood it intellectually, but not deeply, not emotionally.  I have watched friends deal with cancer and illnesses I’ve never even heard of, deaths of beloved spouses and children, long term caregiving, loss of homes, businesses, jobs, and deeply painful divorces. 

Now I understand. Now I understand that no one is immune, nor should they be. I wouldn’t trade any of my dark nights.  “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

The only way out is through – which it is kind of like a birth, or re-birth.  It is a path to a more meaningful life, though it might not feel that way at the time. It is the path to a second half of life that is deeper and about tuning out some of the noise of the outside world and listening to that inner voice in the quiet of a dark night.

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Out of the Depths

This is my latest Huff Post, which came out of a workshop I did last week on public speaking.  I told the story and everyone liked it so much, I decided to write it up.

Out of the Depths

It was the lowest point of my life.  My 23 year marriage was over. We’d been talking about it for a long time, but finally he was ready. 

I wasn’t.  I had just lost my job.

My daughter, who was 21, decided that she wanted to move to San Francisco.  Three thousand miles away.

I was thankful that my mother was still alive, having survived two hospice stays she seemed indestructible.  And then she died suddenly.

I never felt worse, or more terrified, or more alone.

One afternoon my cell phone rang.  It was an area code I didn’t recognize and normally I would have let it go to voice mail, but I picked it up.

It was a director, Matt Penn, calling to tell me that he wanted to do a staged reading of a play I had written with Gary Richards, at the Berkshire Playwrights Lab in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And that the reading would be happening in ten days. If I hadn't been so out of it, I would have panicked, a big, ugly hyperventilating panic.

The play was to be performed on a Wednesday night and I took the train up on the Sunday before. I waited at the station and watched as everyone got picked up or drove away and soon I was all by myself.  I tried to call the intern but got her voice mail instead.  I stood there thinking, what the hell am I doing? It seemed just like my life—I thought I knew where I was going and why, only to find myself stranded and alone.

Finally the intern called, apologetic.  She had picked up the actors, but had forgotten about me.

She came back and we drove to a little meeting house in the woods outside of Great Barrington and I met Matt and the rest of the actors.  Everyone was incredibly friendly and kind. Gary couldn’t come until the night of the reading because he was teaching. I’d seen readings of this play, Scrambled Eggs (the sub-title is, in my mind is: “The Wisdom of Insecurity”).  It’s a comedy about an everywoman – Karen – who is overwhelmed by life and she is loosely based on me and parts of all my friends.  She’s married to Dave, who is not so much based on my ex, but a fictionalized (funnier) version of him.  We see Karen at various stages of her life – struggling to figure out how to do it all – and how to maintain her equilibrium. 

We were all invited to Matt’s beautiful home for dinner that night and I got to know the cast members.  At one point, Matt was barbecuing and he asked me to join him.  He and two of the other directors of the Lab were talking about the play and how much they loved it, but thought that the ending needed some work. 

Didn’t they know that I was essentially out of my mind and couldn’t concentrate enough to write a grocery list, let alone a new ending??

I tried not to look like I was having a nervous breakdown and when we got back to the inn, I took my cell phone out to the parking lot, the only place I could get a signal, and I called Gary.

“Gary, they want a new ending!”

“Ah, don’t worry about it.  Just write something funny…you can do it.”

“GARY, I don’t know what the f*#k to write!”

“What?  I can’t hear you…”

I lost the signal. Amy Van Nostrand, who was playing Karen, saw me as I re-entered the inn and offered to go over the script. 

YES. Yes!  We went up to my room and read almost the entire play aloud and we bonded when we discovered we were both getting divorced.

We talked about the ending and we had some good ideas.  The next day I raced to type it up as the actors went into rehearsal.  I ran over at the lunch break and showed Matt what I had. He laughed and said, “close, but not quite.”

NOT QUITE???

So I kept writing and running over and finally by the end of the day he was satisfied.  Then I had to race back to Manhattan for a tech rehearsal of a solo show I was performing at the Midtown International Theater Festival. Nothing to do that entire summer except that one week I had the reading and three performances of a solo show. In one week.  And I could barely get out of bed and brush my teeth. 

I went back to Great Barrington Wednesday afternoon in time for a run-through and then Gary arrived right before the show.  At every other reading of my work, I’d generally felt the need to be sedated, but this time I felt pretty calm.  I didn’t know a soul in the audience.  Maybe no one would show up?

The Mahaiwe is an incredibly beautiful theater that opened in 1905 and was newly renovated.  Gary and I sat up in the balcony and watched as the theater filled up.  We didn’t know this at the time, but Matt had done a local NPR interview about the play and said, “this play is headed to New York.”  So the theater was packed, there were at least 450 people.  We could watch people laughing hysterically,  slapping their knees and elbowing the person next to them.  I started to laugh and I laughed for ninety minutes and watched the actors bring the play to life and the audience eat it up.

At the end of the reading, I felt something I had forgotten was possible.  I felt happy. I could breathe… for the first time in months.  I could feel the power of laughter, to bring you out of despair and to make you feel alive again.  

I also realized that I if I truly had a purpose, making people laugh is not such a bad purpose to have in life.

Three and a half years later…life is so much better.  Divorce didn’t kill me, it made me stronger.  Amy is stronger too.  And she will be starring in a production of the play next April, at the Beckett Theater in New York City, just as Matt predicted. 

A little bit of muck

I was talking to a friend earlier, who was feeling down. I was glad I called, it's good to be able to listen when someone is feeling blue. I suggested that she might want to go for a walk to feel better, as I was doing and then I remembered that the truth is, this is life and we aren't supposed to always feel great. I'm sitting in the muck right now, feeling worried about the election, the economy, my own future, my daughter, my poor old dog, Lucy, who isn't doing all that well. I am sitting in some sadness and worry and it's perfectly okay.

I saw a story on Rock Center about the Daily Show and how there are several dogs who come to work with their owners. They said it really helps everyone to cheer up when they can pet the dogs.

So here's my dog, Lucy, from several years ago, wearing a $6,000 sapphire, emerald and 24 carat gold necklace. She looks very royal, doesn't she?  (The necklace does not belong to me!) 

Please let President Obama do a good job at tonight's debate...please.

Falling Upward

I have been reading a new book called "Falling Upward" by Richard Rohr and essentially it's about, as the book jacket describes:

"In the first half of life, we are naturally and rightly preoccupied with establishing our identity -- climbing, achieving, and performing. But those concerns will not serve us as we grow older and begin to embark on a further journey. One that involves challenges, mistakes, loss of control, broader horizons, and necessary suffering that actually shocks us out of our prior comfort zone. Eventually, we need to see ourselves in a different and more life-giving way. This message of "falling down" -- that is in fact moving upward -- is the most resisted and counterintuitive of messages in the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity."

If I've experienced anything in the past three years, it has been this. Reading the book affirms so much of what I've been learning. And though it may sound bad in some ways, actually it is good! It actually is great. The years of pain and sadness have given way to wanting to share in the deeper truths that I have been learning. This morning, in a chapter called "A Bright Sadness" from the book, I read this:

At this stage, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services, quite simply, my desire and effort -- every day -- is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to -- from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, 'to live simply so that others can simply live.'"

This is a big shift in my consciousness because for so many years I craved "specialness" and recognition. And I wanted stuff. I bought "stuff" and though it brought me very little satisfaction or joy, I still wanted it. (This is not to say that I would turn down any presents that anyone wants to give me. Ever.) But "stuff" isn't a priority. I love being curious about life now. I love the life I'm living and much of the thanks go to all the spiritual teachers I've encountered along the way. It started with Mike Eigen (a therapist who writes a lot about spirituality) and continued with Pema Chodron, who I believe saved my life, and Eckhart Tolle, and Regena Thomashauer, and Friends In Deed, and then my dance teachers and too many others to name. I'm not quite sure where it's all leading, but it definitely feels like a move upward - and outward. It feels that it is about paying back and giving to the world a bit of what I've received.

Sitting with it

Lately, it seems as if I have heard of a number of friends and acquaintances who are dealing with some difficult situations.  I think that the economy and the struggles that so many people are having financially, is often at the root of it, but it also goes much deeper.  It is a struggle with aging parents, illness, young people searching for jobs, opportunities.  A very difficult election.  

I am at another crossroads and I'm not sure where it is leading, but if I've learned one thing in the past few years of studying Buddhism and spirituality it is to stay in this very moment.  It's one of the hardest lessons, since we human beings are always looking towards the future and worrying about what is coming, rather than appreciating and staying in the present. 

I went to help out a friend this morning who is about to give birth and is in a difficult situation with her new husband.  I can only imagine how hard it is for her to stay in this moment, when in six weeks she will be giving birth to her baby and life will get even more challenging.

One of the greatest gifts we can give each other is to show up - so that was what I did.  I listened and helped her unpack and just sat with her.  And now I am sitting with my own anxieties, as I have many days over the last few years.

I love what I have been learning lately from August Gold, a spiritual teacher.  She says:  "Life is a conversation.  We need to stop asking 'why is this happening to me' and start asking 'why is this happening for me?'" 

In reading about the Kaballah it says:  "This challenge is an indication that there is a great amount of Light to be revealed here!  I may not understand how yet, but I can make the effort to see why this opportunity has been given to me.  I can choose, instead of reacting or worry, to continue the development of my soul.  I can choose to not allow negativity in, and as I do this more and more, I will grow my certainty in the Light.

Negativity has power over us only when we allow it to.

So my choice now is to put on my shoes and go for a walk and get out of my head and my apartment.  And stay in this very moment, which is a rainy autumn afternoon, and be grateful for all the blessings in my life.  Starting with the fact that my daughter lives in Brooklyn and last year on this day I was visiting her in San Francisco. 

Enough sitting, it's time to move my feet. 

Joy of Divorce

This piece came to me a few weeks ago and I held off sharing it for awhile.  It's challenging to write about divorce when I know that there was very little joy in it for my daughter - but I do think that ultimately, it's been good for all of us.

Here is the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-amos-kahn/the-joy-of-divorce_b_1831076.html