AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS by Martin Seligman
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AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS by Martin Seligman

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Recently a wonderful opportunity came my way: I was able to tell a well-respected, practicing psychologist my objections to psychotherapy as it is currently practiced, and he listened carefully, and he responded with both clarity and respect. I have a chance to rethink my position with new insight.
Fine critical analysis is not always a gift. For those who follow Vedic astrology, I have Mars in Virgo rising. Astrology is descriptive, not causative. In my case it rather beautifully describes my forward movement (Mars) with critical discernment (Virgo) and how it pisses off people (energetic, non-diplomatic Mars, in the first house).
And to those who scoff at astrology: “I use astrology for the same reason I use the multiplication table, because it works.” This is a quote from Grant Lewi (1902-1951), an English professor at Dartmouth.
Astrology is a multi-faceted art and my chart yields a further description. Jupiter the great benefic sits in the 7th house, facing my rising sign. In Vedic astrology, Jupiter is in Pisces, its own sign, which creates a Hamsa Yoga, the swan yoga, for good luck and evolutionary progress. Jupiter aspects that rasty Mars of mine. It is surprising how often something good comes out of my forward movement.
In this case, the gift was twofold: one, the psychologist received and validated my careful observations (ever notice how few therapists can listen to anyone, or hear criticism?) and two, this thoughtful man responded with ideas that hadn’t occurred to me. His willingness to engage me intellectually gave me a new insights, new awareness. I enjoy that. I am grateful.
My beautiful step-daughter at Johns Hopkins is aware of my on-going debate about psychotherapy, and told me about a class she took at Hopkins called “Positive Psychology.” She sent her professor’s book to her dad for his birthday. Naturally, I pounced on the book.
And the book is fascinating. Dr. Martin Seligman makes the point that most current psychology is negative psychology: the study of despair, depression, organic illness, failure, self-sabotage, e.g., “discovering deficits and repairing damage.” What about the study of positive mental and emotional traits, like peace, joy, hope, faith, and optimism? Don’t we all want more of those in our lives? But those don’t get funded by grants so they tend not to be studied.
In my opinion, ‘positive psychology’ has largely been left in the hands of New Age self-help gurus and “The Secret” purveyors, which is mixed. Some of those people are selling snake oil, some of them are on to something. (No, there is no irony in a follower of astrology stating this truth.)
Seligman points out, rightly, I think, that people stand to benefit from studying “positive institutions that promote strengths and virtues,” that lead to “lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose.”
Seligman admits to being agnostic and I am always surprised at the lengths to which ethical humanists go to avoid acknowledging a divine presence. What is the big deal about accepting the infinite field of all-consciousness in which we live and have our beings? Still, his well-written book builds toward an explanation of how to achieve meaning and purpose, and true happiness, in life. I recommend the book. It’s good reading. It’s a rich feast for thought.
Social Questions
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Social Questions

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Last night at a pre-Sundance party in NYC I had the great good fortune of meeting the talented and impressive Anthony Whyte, whose work is being made into a movie.

He was there with his business partner Jason Claiborne, who runs Augustus publishing, “Where Hip Hop literature begins,” and fellow author Erick S. Gray.

They were an intriguing trio. Whyte has a background in the armed forces, as did my dad, so we had that to discuss, as well as books and movies.

This morning I did some googling around and learned that Whyte had trouble getting his first novel published. He then self-published, and people were so hungry for his message and his platform that he sold several thousand books quickly. Of course then a publisher jumped on the bandwagon, bought the rights, and republished… to sell over a hundred thousand copies. Pretty good! Whyte mentioned none of this to me; he was classy and unassuming, and left it to me to discover his story.

We talked about Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. I remembered reading how Hurston had ended her life working in a library, and as a maid. It’s distressing that she died in obscurity, enduring financial struggles, when she’d written one of the masterworks of American literature. It left me thinking again about some questions that my oldest daughter had posed to me, over a year ago, when we discussed an African American Literature class she had taken: How did we in the U.S. create an underclass that left an entire group of people disenfranchised, struggling to find and authenticate their voice?

Is it enough that we have elected Obama as president? Is it enough that brilliant minds like Whyte, Claiborne and Gray are not accepting the status quo regarding their work, but are going out and creating new opportunities?

What does it take to create a truly equal society based on the hard work and merit of the individual, without regard to race, gender, sexual preference, and religion?

I hope none of these questions are offensive. I don’t know if they are politically correct or incorrect. They are the musings of a basically white woman of mixed genetic heritage who can not document her Native American ancestry because records were lost during the Trail of Tears. I’m just a mom with smart, irreverent kids, who ask good questions and expect me to engage them honestly.

And what else about the party? It was too much fun for the responsible parent I am, and included me introducing myself to a famous TV/movie actor who now believes I am sketchy. Because I did make a sketchy introduction, and he was far more gracious to me than I deserved. But I had to sally up to him with my big, tipsy grin–if only to be able to text my kids that I’d met him.

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The Mechanism for Human Forgiveness

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Recent events in my life have led me to think deeply on the matter of forgiveness.

I’m not, in a broad sense, a fan of contemporary psychotherapy. It seems to me that the people who are in therapy the most are the ones who are most self-righteously entrenched in their own narcissism. Everything is about them and their process, and if you try to let some light into a closed and airless system by suggesting that not everything in the world is, in fact, about their process–well, it gets ugly. That’s one problem. There’s also, among some child therapists (many of whom, oddly enough, do not even have children of their own) a feeling that children are the unfettered kings of a home, no boundaries required. I think this is folly, and that it undercuts the very structure that serves to give kids a sense of safety and security, and a foundation in life-long values. Kids need structure. They also need a few lectures from mom and dad on topics like, “Don’t get drunk when you’re 14,” “shoplifting is bad,” and “just because all your friends are jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t mean you should.”

Note that Proverbs 13:24 claims that “he who loves his children is careful to discipline them.” I know, sure, it’s hokey to quote the Bible in the face of the great amorality of contemporary psychotherapy–but when psychotherapy has endured as human truth for the many thousands of years that Proverbs has, then I’ll quote Melanie Klein and all that rot.

Recently a friend, after I ranted on in this vein, told me to read James Hillman. And I am drawn to Jung, so I’ll make a go of Hillman, when I finish at least two of the four books I’m currently reading. (Which are: The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach, The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw, The 5 Rules of Thought by Mary T. Browne, and The Search for the Girl with the Blue Eyes by Jess Stearn.)

One of the biggest problems I have with contemporary psychotherapy is that it practices separating the doer from the action. Dr. Phil has espoused this on Oprah, and, with all due respect, this schism goes to the heart of why I view contemporary psychotherapy with prejudice. In fact, we define ourselves by our actions. If we tell lies, we’re a liar. If we cheat, we’re cheaters.

At the same time, in this view of the world that holds people accountable for their actions, there has to be a mechanism for redemption. For returning to self-worth, in our eyes and the eyes of the community, after an error, a wrong, a crime has been committed.

And for absolute sure: we all screw up. Each and every single one of us. Perhaps there are a few saintly monks meditating in caves who have never erred, and isn’t it easy to be a good person when you’re alone on a mountain in deep contemplation? But, for all the rest of us, we are going to hurt people, we are going to make mistakes, we are going to lie and cheat and steal and rage and be lazy and be gluttonous and be jealous and take advantage and persecute and oppress. On purpose and by accident. In the collective sense, and in the personal sense.

I’m reminded of the Passover Seder and how we are supposed to say, “It is because of what God did for me in taking me out of slavery,” and I am reminded of the group confessions during the prayers of Yom Kippur: “for the sin we have sinned before you forcibly or willingly….” I am reminded of Jesus saying, “Let he who is perfect cast the first stone” and “why do you behold the mote in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own?”

So we all make egregious mistakes. Some of those mistakes are cruel and hurt other people profoundly. How is redemption found in those cases? Well, best I’ve been able to figure out, with the help of finer minds than mine, is that we take personal responsibility for our own actions. This looks like: 1, acknowledging the guilt, 2, expressing remorse, and 3, offering to make restitution. Concrete action toward remorse and restitution are key. Someone who has committed a grievous wrong who acts in this way, following these three steps with persistence and humility, ought to get a second chance.

At least, that’s what I am thinking now. This current thinking is subject to evolution, as I journey through my life. It’s a complicated, troublesome subject. I want to be someone who chooses forgiveness and who receives forgiveness. This is so despite my knowing that there are some things I don’t know if I could ever, or will ever, forgive. I also know there are mistakes I’ve made for which I am not able to make restitution, for one reason or another, though I wish I could.

Which brings me back to the essential conundrums of human life: this vale of tears. And the Buddha’s observation that “Hatred does not cease through hatred but through love alone they cease.”

So, here is my prayer: May all conscious beings be released from their suffering. And may I be an instrument of the Lord’s peace, giving and receiving forgiveness.

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The Art of Asking Questions

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The Art of Asking Questions

There’s a scene in the first HOME ALONE, a truly classic movie, where a child of about 5 years climbs into a van waiting to whisk a large family to the airport. The enterprising child besieges the driver with questions. He leans close into the driver and queries him relentlessly about all sorts of matters, a stunning barrage of interrogatory, verbal machine gun fire. The driver’s brain comes undone. He’s left rattled and nettled and hopelessly askew. It’s the first domino that falls in a trail of them, winding up with… a child left home alone to fend for himself during the holidays.

I think of this scene often (and isn’t that what makes a movie classic, the way particular scenes haunt you forever?). This scene comes to mind because I have a four-and-a-half-year old daughter who regularly enacts it. Daughter? Shall I call her the demon imp of questions, the patron saint of why, how, what, and how come?

As I write this, she sits next to me at the dining room table with a pad of paper. “What do we need from the store? Do we need sugar? How do I draw a ‘K’?” she asks. I surmise that she’s making a grocery list, something she’s watched me do a thousand times. “Can you show me how to draw a ‘K’?”

This is only the beginning. As long as she’s around me, and I don’t turn on the TV babysitter, she’s going to come up with questions. “Then what do we need, mama, after milk?”

“Eggs,” I tell her.

“How do you spell that? Do you like my ‘E’? Does ‘G’ have a kickstand like this? Do we need balloons? How do you spell ‘balloons’?”

It’s partly about observing and making sense of the world. The other day she launched herself like a missile into the bathtub and splashed around happily for a few minutes, making an aquarium of our bathroom. Then she turned serious. “Why does the water get higher when I get in? Why can’t I hear my hands when they clap underwater?”

So my hapless husband and I wracked our brains to explain the volumetrics of water to her.

Sometimes it’s about avoiding an unpleasant activity, like bedtime or picking up her crayons. Nothing will elicit a stream of questions like closing the cover of the last bedtime book. “How come the bear in that story has brown fur? Do all bears have brown fur? What about polar bears? Can you really fly all the way to the moon? How far away is the moon? Is the moon next door to the sun?” How long can she prolong the delicious moments of cuddling and conversation, before we flip off the light and close the door to her room?

And, naturally, the questions are about drawing my attention, or her father’s, or that of one of her three big sisters. This little sprite likes to engage with people. She enjoys the limelight. If she can draw us in with a question–she’s got us. She figured that out a long time ago. Not that it’s entirely self-serving. She can maximize the utility of what she’s doing, and suck in our attention while also… making sense of the world.

Most of the time I enjoy my little one’s questions. Sometimes they fry the gray matter rattling around in my cranium, sure. I get tired, I get exasperated, hey, I’m not the Buddha, and I don’t want to put together an explanation of why the sky is blue while I’m trying to make a dinner salad and, simultaneously, explain to my 14-year-old middle daughter why she can’t attend a football party where there will be 18-year-old men.

But often, in response to these questions, I experience the same piquant thrill that I do when I’m traveling. That is, I’m jolted out of my habitual way of seeing the world, and I look with new eyes, and fresh wonder, at the world around me. Isn’t the blue sky a kind of miracle, anyway?

My sweetie doesn’t do what adults sometimes do: disguise judgments as questions. This is the crucial difference, this matter of innocence. Her questions are really questions, not statements, even if they have an ulterior motive of getting me to pay attention to her or of getting her out of eating broccoli. She wants to know, and to understand. So her questions arise out of the innate art of our human core, the art of genuine curiosity.

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Genart Hosts the Nice Fashion Collective

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My life consists, right now, in raising children, writing, and wiping up our new yellow lab puppy’s pee. And have I mentioned child rearing? Whole weeks go by when I wear my yoga clothes until my husband sniffs at me and orders me, firmly but gently, to take a shower. So it was with vast, oceanic pleasure I found myself invited to the GENART Nice Fashion Collective Show.

On arrival, we were whisked through the line of plebes into the special portal for those invited by GENART. We were given seating tickets and then ushered through a red carpet where photographers snapped pix. I was really glad to have pulled the spinach from my teeth and shaved my legs. Actually I was wearing a black skirt, suede boots with 4″ heels, and the Spanx hose that make my tummy look as if I haven’t had 3 children. I’d also taken care with my make-up. I’m humbly hopeful that I didn’t look as old as Methusaleh, who seems like a youngster to me on all those mornings where I’ve been up once, twice, or thirty times during the dusky hours of night. If my 4 year old isn’t having a bad dream and needing cuddles, or the puppy doesn’t need to pee, or my 18 year old isn’t returning from a night of debauchery at 3:00 am, then I wake up to see why not.

There was free alcohol and lots of it, and swarms of people with strangely lacquered hair and high contrast eye-liner. My husband sniffed and claimed everyone looked like art students from an art college. There were goody bags on our chairs filled with eye cream and tequila, and naturally the tequila prompted the notion of a strip-tease. I reined myself in and instead hollered risque things at a man in an aviator hat who was climbing the rafters. I think he was supposed to be performance art. I mentioned this supposition to my husband, who snarled, because he was checking out Aviator Man’s biceps and feeling jealous. Maybe I shouldn’t have been screaming, “Take it all off, nakedness is more artsy” ?

“Yes,” my husband the Renaissance sculptor spat from between clenched teeth, “this is the difference between artsy and art.”

But who cares, it was fun!

Then the clothes: Dickensian pickpocket chic with a twist of Afghani rebel and urban ghetto ‘tude. There was lots of smeared gray eye shadow, matted hair, and angry ‘do rags. A couple of models sauntered through with their faces covered, so I called, “Robbed any banks lately?” It made my husband snicker.

But I did like the monochromatic vesty, bowler hat Oliver Twist look; it seemed to fit the gray economic times. Brought up images of dark bleak London filled with coal smoke. I wasn’t quite as thrilled with the union suit look and I was pretty sure one of the models was stuffing his codpiece. If not, I feel sorry for his boyfriend. Nor did I love the shiny white scuba pants on the female model, but they could have been white leather, hard to tell. Either way, they’d be hard to wear if you weigh more than 85 pounds and have the body not of an adolescent boy, but of a woman with curving hips and an indented waist.

All in all, an enjoyable evening, a break from the usual fare. There was still plenty of kid & puppy stuff waiting for me at home.

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I Still Support Gay Marriage

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I support gay marriage.

It doesn’t matter whether the bodies of the betrothed couple are both male, both female, or one of each. We’re going to discard the bodies anyway, after 80 years or so. And what is left is the journey: gay, straight, or bi, people have an inalienable right to the dignity of a journey that includes marriage.

Any two consenting adults over the age of 18 should be allowed to marry. Moreover, they should be congratulated and supported on this momentous undertaking. Marriage is unfathomably hard. It’s painful in too many ways to articulate. You have to live it to really grok the exquisite mental, emotional, and relational agony that is marriage.  Two people committing to it need all the help they can get from their community. They are co-creating a fundamental unit of society, and should be bolstered and praised for that effort.

I suppose some people object to what is perceived as an overly promiscuous lifestyle that can be part of the gay community. I never liked that either–if it was true. But I don’t like excessive promiscuity in straight people, either. There’s a point where healthy sexual exploration becomes soul-numbing, heart-deadening–that’s not good for anyone, whether straight or gay.

But gay people who want to get married are acting, it would seem, to settle down into a life of open-hearted, soul-united monogamy. So how could a promiscuous gay lifestyle be used as an excuse to oppose gay marriage? I just don’t understand.

Are people really that concerned about which body part goes where? Why should it matter?