how woo-woo are we
Friday 23 March 2007 | I like a cookie
Last night, a fairly hysterical dinner party—
our entire DBT group met at the raw-food member’s home. Annika served beautiful raw lasagne (thin-sliced red, green, and yellow heirloom tomatoes and zucchini interspersed with tomato sauce, basil pesto and pistachio puree) and raw chocolate mousse (coconut, agave, cacao and cocoa butter), and occasionally she as it were burst into gospel song about her raw-food salvation from mental illness (for as the Brujo’s student wrote, “salivation is a gift from God”) and how we pharmaceutical junkies could do the same. The rest of us were by contrast terribly irreverent, cracking jokes and just generally in high “the therapists aren’t here and we don’t have to be good” spirits. I especially appreciated the bleak, deadpan streak of him who I’ll dub the Gorgon—he’s wicked smart, a former public radio announcer, software programmer, piano and harpsichord tuner (and player of same), and from what I hear captains a mean yacht. He also currently heads up the non-profit charitable foundation whose website I will, cross my fingers, get a crack at designing, as soon as the Dying Book finally shuffles off this mortal coil.
The Gorgon: No, I wrote middleware.
Annika: What’s that?
Gorgon: Well, that’s the thing that…comes after something and before something else.
Unnarrator: Wow, your girlfriend is one lucky woman!
Gorgon: It’s kind of like the cream filling….
Unnarrator: …in the mighty Ding-Dong of life.
And so forth. At one point Libby leaned over to me and whispered, “Hey—you’re funny!” In fact I felt the sore lack of my beloved wisecrack-swapping Brujo, but managed to entertain myself nonetheless, which for me is the real point to being funny—it saves me from being bored in otherwise serious company. Not that this company was at all serious.
We unleashed a series of running gags about Diabolical Behavior Therapy, in which we practice mindlessness and vindication (mindfulness and validation), and I suggested that when our group facilitator comes back from her holiday, we should straight-facedly employ our new alternative terms and see how long it takes to completely weird her out. And we could create more—what about Wiseass Mind? Mindlessly in the moment? Emotion strangulation? Oh, I could go on. It’s like Zen inside jokes, though—they’re only available to the community of those who have been trapped together. Then the simplest stories become unbelievably hysterical (”Remember that one time you poured water on the floor during oryoki?!”) while outsiders sit and listen to the shrieks of ensuing laughter in polite disbelief (”These poor Buddhists; their lives are so impoverished they actually think that shit’s funny”). The other comparison I’d make is to theater; you can get weeks of amusement mileage out of someone’s flubbed entrance or garbled delivery. To me humor really defines community. Before its appearance, you’re just a bunch of people stuck in the same room on a regular basis. After the teasing rears its head, though, you’ve got a genuine family of friends—one it’ll be hard to leave this summer.
There’ll be new communities, though: the fellowship of longsuffering graduate students, wherever I wind up (”Hey, remember that time in workshop when…”), and perhaps a new family of witches, too. This is so hard to admit—I feel like such a freaking joiner—but I just sent in my scraped-together $50 deposit to join one of Thorn Coyle’s two-year Feri Tradition trainings (really nine quarters, or 2.25 years), this one beginning in Denver in July. Now please don’t be practical and ask me how I’m going to get myself to Denver every quarter for the next two years because I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll like it, I don’t know if I’ll stay in the training, I don’t know if I’ll be totally unable to keep a straight face because the proceedings will too closely resemble a renaissance fair, a Star Trek convention or a BDSM munch. Somehow it seems with Feri I have much less chance of dying inside from suppressed mockery, or passing vicious intellectual judgment—there’s not quite so much cloak-and-sword stuff that you get with the Gardnerians, because as an ecstatic, not a fertility, tradition, Feri offers a practice much more focused on internal awareness and development. It is, in short, more like Zen; but hopefully without the self-propelling masochism.
Thorn asked us each to write her a letter of intention, answering, among other questions, “What do you want from this training?” My answer, in part, with epigraphs (and I, squirmily embarrassed, only post this to honor Mandarin’s special request—yesterday an unflattering picture of my new 115-pound frame and now this! What horrifying revelation will next appear? As I said sardonically to the DBT a couple of weeks ago, for me to get any more exposure therapy I’d have to walk into group naked):
It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are. —Marion Woodman
A pagan education would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses. Our philosophy should be both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. —Camille Paglia
In my head lately I hear his name being chanted, again and again, over and over, I don’t know why. Dian y Glas, Dian y Glas! and it’s as if he’s laughing and hiding, ducking out of view behind trees in thickets of mental forest, teasingly both refusing to be seen, refusing to remain concealed. Who is this God, this peacock-blue hyacinth-boy, this young Lord Krishna? I’ve never met him before.
So why do I want this training—first, to encounter them personally, the Guardians, Goddesses & Gods—and to encounter them formally, because humans can only perceive infinity or boundlessness within the structure of form, whether group or solitary ritual.
Then—though maybe it’s just part of the same desire—I aspire to something you spoke of on your website: “the project of deep self-transformation,” which I think means deep self-acceptance, that first and foundational love. Many of my Zen friends began their meditation training by learning to offer lovingkindness to themselves: May I be happy, may I be well, may I be peaceful and at ease. For whatever reasons, I wasn’t led to practice this way, though it might have been helpful. Instead, I managed to use practice to reinforce my core beliefs of unworthiness and imperfection. I brought Calvinism along with me when I came to Zen, imported my own fundamentalism, and wasted much of my energy on trying to be good, better or best. (Though having said that, sitting all those hours was also what brought me to see these beliefs more clearly; it helped me unravel my unhealthy connection to my teacher, and, strangely, moved me out the temple door. Zazen, paradoxically, put at least a temporary end to my Zen training.) Can I bring similar attention to Feri’s evolutionary work, to become aware of and move past behaviors and thought-habits?
(Valerie Walker wrote, “When we mature and get serious about Feri…it will only serve to illuminate whatever our personal core beliefs have been during our lifetimes. And this illumination will help us shed those things which are neither useful nor beautiful, and keep those things that are.”)
Then too, I’m curious about exploring pagan ritual as part of a community. Unfortunately, the few instances of this in which I have participated only served to arouse my disbelief, irritation and contempt. Yet when I practice ritual on my own or with one other person—though it does seem more organic and aesthetic, and less like creative anachronism—I suspect we can’t summon or contain the same levels of energy. So I think it’s worth trying again, to see what might result, although I worry. What if I’m too ironic, cerebral, educated, skeptical? What if I find it inane and crack up laughing? Well, but the point of transformation is to be different, which is of necessity frightening. And I know from Zen training that doubt is just another part of practice.
Which brings me to another desire. Having developed an aversion to meditation, no longer a Zen trainee, not sure what to do with my robes, bowls, lineage papers, rakusu, black sitting cushion with my dharma name sewn onto it in kanji—having lost this connection to practice when I left Zen training, I call myself a “recovering Buddhist”—and I literally would like to recover my sitting practice. Right now I can barely sit ten minutes (who used to sit heroic, self-immolating 45-minute periods back-to-back). My mind is scattered and injured. When I do sit still, I face open wounds and unhealed scars. How can I return my mind gently to itself without inflicting the kind of internal damage I did before?
Finally, I would like to be of service, though I have no idea how. But I am willing to find out. I want a spiritual practice which renders me more accessible and available to the world, not less.
She also asked, what is your commitment to this practice, process, work?
The night after I began this, I had a bad dream about the Denver trainings. In the dream, our teacher is rushed, travel-weary and indifferent—the exercises don’t flow, are random and unrelated to each other—she gives us only general feedback, says nothing personal or useful, only “a lot of you are trying too hard,” before fleeing gratefully to her room with a giant mysterious suitcase full of beautiful magical books & tools—but they are not to share with us, they are only for initiates like herself—we are left milling around to discuss our curiosity, envy and lingering frustration.
Now, even if this nightmare were to come true, would my commitment remain?
Three years ago I fell to the floor laughing and weeping and sneezing, and lit a candle for the Muse/daimon/duende, God Herself, She Whom I serve. I surrendered my life to Her, little guessing as I did it what the costs might be—and they’ve been surprising, and sometimes sizeable. When you say non serviam they tend to throw you out of heaven, as Jezebel was thrown down from her window for dogs to dismember. Yet I’ve so far survived my own witless avowal, through no fault of my own and every grace of Hers. Such a commitment is binding, inalienable and unshaken. Even when I collapsed on a frozen mountain, drunk and fucked-up and hoping to die, through self-pitying tears I shrieked at the moon, three days from full, “I tried! I tried to serve You! You might have given me a little help—You might have made it just a little easier—”
So my deepest commitment is to Her; it wavers but doesn’t break. For aren’t I Her, God Myself?
I believe the Feri flower prayer serves the same healing purpose as asking, “Whom does the Grail serve?” If I ask, what is this flower above me, then I have to acknowledge that the flower above can only spring from me—that I must be its root & stem (as in Dylan Thomas, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”). And if the flower above me is the work of this God, then I, its origin and progenitor, must be the God who made it. To know myself in all my parts therefore means not only my physical, intellectual or psychological aspects, not only the mundane but also the divine, that which bursts forth with life, is creative, generative, Star Goddess. Thus I’m led through three steps to perceiving and accepting my own deity, my power, my perfection. And I definitely need those steps to get there, because it’s such an otherwise impossible idea to embrace.
As I recover myself—or from myself—that first commitment to Her leads to the rest—to myself, work, process; all as one.
And now, before I fall to the floor and perish from self-conscious mortification, I leave off all this woo-woo palaver and turn to another kind of woo-woo palaver, albeit one that will pay my taxes, e.g. the Dying Book. Today we’re on chapter 13 or 14, which is about…well, I can’t exactly remember what it’s about. Something improving I’m sure. Oh, right—it’s on “radical optimism,” defined as having no expectation of outcome. It’s a hard sell to my imaginary average reader (receding-hairline Bob in Colorado, who wears a baseball cap and brand-new Nike running shoes with his jeans) and I’m struggling to create/defend it. The language is strictured and stuck at the moment.
Mais alors, on attaque—
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