Shout out to Jason Crandell on Yogaglo.com
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Shout out to Jason Crandell on Yogaglo.com

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This post is a shout out to Jason Crandell on Yogaglo.com.

I’ve blogged about other fantastic Yogaglo teachers before; this post is pure praise for Jason Crandell, whose thoughtful classes are a high point of my yoga practice.

Crandell is unusually articulate not only about the body, but also with the body. His instructions are intelligent and clear and human, a pleasure to follow. His classes often focus on specific areas of the body and I always come away from them with a new appreciation and new understanding of my hamstrings or my side body. A particular favorite was a class about the motions of the spine; another prized class is one that concentrates on steady, rhythmic breath.

I like a yoga class that is strong, steady, supple, rhythmic, and well-constructed, and Crandell always delivers. Check him out at yogaglo.com and at jasonyoga.com . My week isn’t complete with a few of his classes to give me ever more insight into my own body.

Jason Crandall on Yogaglo.com

Writing Well is the Best Revenge
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Writing Well is the Best Revenge

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Almost two decades ago, when I worked as a healer, I had my hands on a male client when my husband called.

New York city apartments being constrained for space, my healing table stood in the living room, not far from the answering machine.

My husband’s voice rang out as he left a message. He had a deep, resonant voice; it was one of his best features, a pleasure to hear.

But the client didn’t think so. “Just listen to him,” my client growled, “so sure of his own prerogative!”

Those words, and my client’s scathing tone, branded themselves irrevocably on my mind. It was early in my career as an energy healer, and this was my first palpable experience of psychosexual transference.

I remember freezing and thinking, “Uh oh. This can’t be good.”

Sure enough, a few months later my client erupted into blind rage. He spewed verbal venom at me, at length, haughtily assuring me that I was in delusion about myself as a writer, he had the proof, and therefore he couldn’t trust me anymore as a healer.

In fact, I had made a grievous mistake some days earlier: I had broken a boundary. My client was a well-known journalist; he offered to read a manuscript I had just finished, and I accepted his offer. The manuscript was a first draft hot off my printer, and it wasn’t even spellchecked. Remember those ancient days, when Word Perfect didn’t automatically spellcheck a document?

I told him it was a first draft. I said it hadn’t been spellchecked. Then I made the mistake. I handed the manuscript over to him.

Right around the same time, I had informed him that I had to start charging him for sessions. Mutual friends had introduced us when he told them he was writing a book about healing. At their urging, he came for one session. Then he came for many more, all free.

I had gotten sucked into this arrangement because he was writing a book, but healing was my business. I couldn’t afford to keep giving away sessions. It was time to set a boundary with him.

When he started working with me, he was a charming, brilliant, and carefully guarded playboy. He was locked into an unconscious certainty that no woman was good enough–beautiful enough, rich enough, wonderful enough–for him.

Most of the work I did with him focused on his heart. Not to be too technical about it, but I restructured his heart chakra and wove the energy of love into his being during every single session I gave him. There was other work too, but for him, it always came back to opening his heart.

By our last session, when he attacked me so vociferously, he was monogamously dating a woman to whom he would soon be engaged. He later married her. This particular woman was that beautiful, rich, and wonderful–she was exquisite, in fact, and talented and accomplished. But I also believe that the work I did on his heart and soul helped him reach a place where he could love someone deeply enough, and with enough maturity, to commit.

Over the decades, in order to deal with certain people in my life and to continue working on myself, I’ve read a lot about borderlines and narcissists. Borderlines are empty and have only rudimentary self-soothing skills. It gives them that astonishingly quick, unpredictable trigger: one minute you’re a saint, and the next you’re evil incarnate. They’re vicious.

And narcissists, well, they’re on the spectrum of sociopathy. Since the world must reflect their perfection back to them at every moment–and let’s face it, the world ain’t that pretty–narcissists are steeped in their own victimization. So steeped, in fact, that they can justify all manner of criminally unkind behavior. Narcissists are cruel.

I never figured out which category my client fit, if he fit into one at all. I only know that two years after he ceased working with me, his book about healing and healers was published.

He had written an entire chapter about me and our work together, employing a pseudonym that did not disguise my identity to others in the healing world. Using terribly clever and expressive language to skewer my writing ability, he went on for a few pages about what a terrible writer I was. I read it with astonishment. There was no mention of the warning I had given him: that it had been an unspellchecked first draft.

I have always loved Anne Lamott’s beautiful book on the craft of writing, Bird by Bird, with its outright approbation for ‘shitty first drafts,’ a term which she has immortalized, and claims is practically obligatory:

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.

In fact, I had entrusted my manuscript to that long-ago client hoping he would give me feedback that would help me take my shitty first draft to the next level, to being a good second draft.

My bad. I shouldn’t have given him the manuscript. He was my client, and I knew he was in the grips of deep and unconscious projections onto me. I learned a hard lesson about not breaking boundaries with a client.

After reading my client’s printed criticism, the gist of which was even picked up in a Publisher’s Weekly review, I cried for a few days. Then I moved on. He wasn’t the first, or the last, person to blast me with his negative projections.

Transference is a bitch.

In 2005 my novel Immortal sold to BantamDell, and it was published in 2008. It was published on four continents; it was a bestseller in a few countries. Since then I’ve published eight more books, of which five are novels.

My novels get good reviews and they’ve been socked with bad ones. Then there are the splendid reviews. After all these decades of working on my craft as a writer, I get some spine-tinglingly excellent reviews. I’ve worked hard for them, and I’ve earned them.

When drafting this post, I considered which great reviews to quote, to “prove” that I’m a good writer–occasionally, at my best moments, an excellent one. I’d bet 50 bucks cash money that my client still has that shitty, unspellchecked first draft of mine tucked into a drawer somewhere so that he can “prove” what he said about me being a terrible writer. He was that kind of person.

So I thought of quoting twenty or fifty reviews that say my books are wonderful; there are at least that many. Or perhaps I would quote from the fan email I regularly receive. My readers are vocal and appreciative and they reach out. I’m lucky that way. I could mention the awards my books have won or the “Best of” lists to which they’ve been appointed by enthusiastic book review bloggers.

But in the end, overkill is unnecessary. That old client is inconsequential, a distant and unpleasant memory from my past. What matters is that readers buy and enjoy my books.

I offer one quote, from a review of Far Shore (Book 3 of the After Series) by a book review blogger who had conflicting feelings about the novel. I could have chosen a rave review, there are plenty of those. I am grateful for every one of them, too. People have busy, complex lives and I appreciate it when they take the time to read one of my novels and write about it.

This particular review, on The Lost Entwife blog, reflects the reader’s ambivalence about the book. There were two sentences that have stayed with me and give me deep personal satisfaction. They prove something to me about my merit as a writer:

 If nothing else, Slatton writes in such an addictive way that I could swear there was some sort of addictive substance between the pages.  I know when I pick up one of her books I am not going to want to put it down until I finish it, and Far Shore was no different.  

Writing well is the best revenge.

Listen to this blogpost as a podcast on iTunes here.

 

Healing and the Mind
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Healing and the Mind

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When I was 15, I developed asthma. This was not as much fun as it sounds. The cramping in my chest, the inability to get air in, the creeping suffocation–it was terrifying.

My mother took me to a doctor who prescribed a drug called Quibron. I think that’s the way it was spelled. I took the medication and hated it. It made my insides race. I endured a jagged, speeded-up, jittery sensation that made me quiver with discomfort.

I did not want to take the medication. But I knew that if I had asthma, I had to take it. So I made an executive decision: No more asthma.

My body listened. The asthma vanished.

This event changed me. It was a profound lesson in the power of the mind-body connection, a lesson which stayed with me.

After graduate school, I started meditating. In meditation, I experienced some of the phenomena that meditators throughout the millennia have experienced and that many, many sages, Patanjali among them, have described. In a spirit of inquiry, I began to research numinous phenomena. Inevitably, the issue of healing and the mind-body connection arose.

It was John Pierrakos’ seminal book CORE ENERGETICS: Developing the Capacity to Love and Heal that made the first radical impact. Pierrakos was a medical doctor and a student of Wilhelm Reich. He had the educational and intellectual heft to convince my Yale- and Columbia-trained brain that what I saw and felt was seen and felt by other people, too. That what I perceived was real and could be useful.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of flakes in the “New Age” who have the intellectual grounding of a doorknob. They do nothing to validate and clarify the body of work that has arisen through the ages.

But Dr. Pierrakos and his mentor and colleague Wilhelm Reich were serious academics. Pierrakos earned my respect from the opening of CORE ENERGETICS:

Three main theses are woven together in the therapeutic approach that I am developing, which I call core energetics. The first is that the human person is a psychosomatic unity. The second is that the source of healing lies within the self, not with an outside agency, whether a physician, God, or the powers of the cosmos. The third is that all of existence forms a unity that moves toward creative evolution, both of the whole and of the countless components.

This opening to Chapter 1 of his book struck me decades ago when I first read it as it still strikes me today, as one of the most remarkable and succinct depictions of the existential human condition ever written.

Research into Wilhelm Reich, Pierrakos’ teacher, convinced me that Reich was on to something real and valid, too. He was right: The way energy moves through the body has everything to do with the indivisible psychological and physical health of the person. The healthy human organism does have a healthy orgasm. He was talking about sex, and he advocated the female orgasm, so what can be expected except the the US government would lock him up?

Do we think that a single one of the buttoned-up stuffed shirts who stuck him in prison could properly get a woman off? Better to jail Reich than to consider their own sexual inadequacy.

In my opinion, our current culture still can’t deal with true female sexuality or with actual female orgasm. It’s hip to see “sluttishness” as a kind of a good thing, a rebellious sexy quality. But it still misses the point of a woman owning her sexuality, and coming to orgasm, without being labelled.

The world still isn’t ready for Reich’s work.

But maybe it’s ready for Daskalos. Along my journey of learning everything I can about the mind-body connection and numinous phenomena, I picked up Kyriacos Markides’ book THE MAGUS OF STROVOLOS: The Extraordinary World of a Spiritual Healer.

Daskalos was a healer on Cyprus, and his descriptions of the astral plane, and of elementals, as conveyed through Markides, is quite similar to what I’ve experienced. When I was a healer in practice, Daskalos appeared a few times in my healing room, when I had my hands on a client. His work was miraculous, his instruction sharp and even peremptory, but clear. I found him to be quite the patriarchal Greek man, which is why I think the world may be almost ready to hear his words. Patriarchy clings to itself.

Daskalos came in his spirit form, because he had passed over. I do wonder about openly admitting that since I’ve stopped copping to what I actually perceive in the world.

Markides’ book quotes Daskalos as saying, “All illnesses are the result of psychonoetic conditions” and “the state of our health is after all the product of our thoughts and emotions,” a statement my own life and work has seen to be true, with the caveat that it all plays out against a larger background of karma, and karma is almost always partly obscured from us. Daskalos too talks about karma.

What it boils down to, for me, is that illness and health are psychosomatic. This doesn’t mean that it’s imaginary, it means that it roots itself in the mind, specifically, in a dynamic field of mind-body-karma. It also doesn’t mean that illness or health can necessarily be willed, though we’ve all seen people who have willed a disease into existence, and I got lucky when I dispensed with asthma. It does mean that we can examine our thoughts, feelings, and past actions carefully when we get sick, and wonder what we can rectify without judgment, and how we can return to love and peace.

 

 

Lip Service by M.J. Rose
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Lip Service by M.J. Rose

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Lip Service by M.J. Rose
Recently I was in Portland, Oregon for a wedding. I went alone because my husband had work stuff and anyway, someone had to stay with our little one.

Early in the afternoon, with several hours to spare before the much-anticipated headline event, I wandered down to the university area to check out the farmer’s market.

The sun shone, warm and yellow, through a high sibilant canopy of rich emerald leaves. The air was playful on my skin. I meandered through stalls of glistening red raspberries, juicy bursting blueberries, and gleaming purple blackberries ready to squish open on my tongue. There were heads of pale green fennel so fragrant and sweet, and rows of perfect round tomatoes, and long ripe squash… I was soon a little soft in my knees.

I found myself breathing faster and deeper. I felt both vaguer and keyed up, all at once.

A fantasy like a ball of yarn unraveled in my mind. I say ‘mind’ not ‘head’ because my whole body was involved, in the most emollient way.

I was walking indoors with a man I know, someone I hadn’t thought of in this most interesting context. We were inside and we were alone and he leaned down and wove his fingers through my hair. Then he pulled me close to his body, which was warm and taut.  When he kissed me, his mouth tasted salty but also sweet.

There was more, which led me back to my hotel room and some private moments. After a luxuriant nap, I texted my husband: “Really REALLY wish u were here.”

This lush diversion led me into some pleasant reveries: a memory of lying on a couch in the sun in Cape Cod, with the smell of bayberry thicket and sea on the wind, and the wonderful release I’d enjoyed then; a night early in our relationship that I’d spent telling my then-boyfriend-now-husband funny stories that were not G-rated, and which evolved into the kind of sweaty, rollicking good time I usually only read about; a sense of wonder at the pleasure and power inherent in sensual fantasy.

Reading MJ Rose’s delicious and often poignant and always intelligent “Lip Service” has brought all this back to me.

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Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception
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Core Energetics by John Pierrakos, and Paranormal Perception

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I know a woman who lives in the bell-jar of analysis. She’s a fine person, brilliant, successful, and lovingly committed to her children, though she seems not to like other women all that much. I have a few foibles of my own and I like her, snarkiness and all. It’s just that having dinner with her is a marathon of hearing about her feelings, her feelings about her feelings, her thoughts about her feelings about her feelings, her analyst, her feelings about her analyst, her thoughts about her feelings about her analyst… It’s a closed and airless world, fundamentally solipsistic. Masturbatory.
 
I have serious qualms about contemporary psychotherapy as it is generally practiced. There’s a lot of horse manure that’s taken as gospel by therapists and by people influenced by therapists. In fact, psychotherapy is one of the current sacrosanct priesthoods, along with “hard science.” Some months ago, I told a few psychotherapists that I didn’t believe in group therapy. Boy oh boy, did they get unpleasant. They wouldn’t admit it, of course. The most self-unaware people in the world are psychotherapists. But it was a lot like admitting to an Inquisitor that the Holy Trinity is bunk. Be careful when you poke someone’s sacred cow!!
 
Ultimately, I don’t think talk psychotherapy works. It’s brought general silliness and brainlessness into the culture. It’s an exercise in narcissism, self-indulgence, and inanity. People are afraid to think for themselves, and they are afraid to use their discernment–because “everyone is ok” and all that drivel. Values have been discarded in favor of bland lack of judgement that masquerades as tolerance. Personal accountability has been sloughed off.
 
So what does work? Because people need help: we are all suffering, to some degree. Orgone boxes work. Everyone should build one and install it in their living room. Sit in it for an hour a day and open the flow in the body-mind-spirit-psyche unit that we call our human self.
 
Orgone boxes work because of, as John Pierrakos writes, “Three main theses… the first is that the human person is a psychosomatic unity. The second is that the source of healing lies within the self, not with an outside agency, whether a physician, God, or the powers of the cosmos. The third is that all of existence forms a unity that moves toward creative evolutions, both of the whole and of the countless components. … The basic substance of the person is energy. The movement of that energy is life. The freer the energy movement…the more intense the life..”
 
Sitting in an orgone box is like charging a battery, the battery being the human being. As the person is filled with energy, blocks to free energy movement start to shift and dissolve. Those blocks are multidimensional: they affect the body, the mind, the emotions, and the spirit. They have to affect all those dimensions because those dimensions are yoked together, inseparably. There is no possible way to change the mind without also affecting the body, spirit, and psyche. And so forth. On the psychological level, a block is a neurosis or phobia, etc. With the free flow of energy movement restored, those can melt away like ice in hot water.
 
Orgone, as Wilhelm Reich defined it, is primordial cosmic energy. The Chinese call it Chi. The Hindus call it Prana. The Japanese call it Ki. George Lucas called it ‘The Force.’ Physicist William Tiller calls it the Quantum Domain. Everything is energy, and orgone is the fundamental, root energy substrata.
 
There are a lot of implications to this axiom. If you posit that everything is energy and start to pursue that into the realms of human consciousness, a multitude of seeming paradoxes, puzzles, oddities, and anomalies arise. One of those strange consequences of energy and consciousness is paranormal perception. Patanjali called them siddhis and warned against getting distracted by them. But everyone who meditates regularly eventually, whether after 20 years or 20 minutes, stumbles onto clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition, telepathy–past life recall.
 
I read with some amusement an article in The New York Times (Jan 6, 2011) that described the angry furor over a paper that gives strong evidence for extrasensory perception. These kinds of papers are published all the time, attracting little notice. This time, however, it’s the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is publishing the study. Some traditionalist psychologists are just outraged that a study that passed a stringent peer review would be published–when the study shows evidence for ESP. Remember what I said about poking people’s sacred cows?
 
So what to do if you’re not up for parking an orgone box in your den, in front of the treadmill that holds your dirty clothes? We are relational creatures, after all. It is human to want to move your energy in concert with another person. Then find a core energetic therapist. Go to a Barbara Brennan School of Healing trained healer, someone who is in supervision.
 
I was lucky enough to have a session with John Pierrakos before he died. He was a sparkly, gray-haired elf of a man, radiating both kindness and genius. I worked in my underwear and never before or since have I felt so safe, and so understood. But he teased me a little, too. “Traci has to know,” he told me, in a voice that was both amused and compassionate. I think of that often, especially in regards to foibles and personal bell jars.

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Yoga & Love

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Yoga & Love

I came to yoga, the ancient physical system for opening the heart, by way of heart break.

It was a bleak February years ago during the bleakest part of my divorce. The end of a twenty year relationship, of which twelve were spent in marriage, doesn’t qualify as easy. I found it fraught, a spiky tangle of anger, relief, grief, and confusion. I couldn’t integrate the double vision I experienced when I interacted with my former husband. There were now two of him: the sweet man I’d married, whom I’d always love, even if we couldn’t make a happy life together, and the difficult stranger who did not mean me well, when things came up to negotiate. It was painful. I was a mess.

I wasn’t alone during this time. I had a boyfriend. He looked like the reason I had left my former husband. But the higher calculus of the heart metabolizes change with infinitely more complexity than that, and no one ever leaves one mate for another. You leave a union for yourself, for the person you hope to be. “She left one man for another” was simply the judgment people made, uninformed people who hadn’t lived the emotional poverty of my marriage.

This boyfriend had a lot of patience for my desolation, but at a certain point, the change in my feelings over the elapsed time wasn’t an impressive differential. He’s a practical man. “Time for you to fix yourself,” he said. “I’m calling the Ashtanga place downtown to send you a teacher.”

So I began a practice of yoga. My teacher Laura arrived with her mat and didn’t want to hear any sad tales about my divorce. She wanted me to practice mountain pose and standing forward bend. She kept adjusting my sacrum. She kept telling me to drop my shoulders down from my neck, where they were squeezing my cervical spine in a relentless grip that would do any pit-bull proud. In retrospect, it’s amazing that any blood was getting up to my brain at all.

The first few weeks were a haze of twisty pain. I didn’t notice it at first, but I wasn’t as obsessed with the cycle of stories that had been playing in an endless loop in my head. It wasn’t until after a month of lessons that something clicked. I was watching Laura demonstrate trikonasana, triangle pose. Gracefully, consciously, she let her straight back leg pull her front body forward until she was clasping her big toe. She rotated her torso while extending evenly through it. She reached up in harmony with her breath while looking up, and it was such an expression of balance, strength, openness, and ease that the light-bulb flicked on over my head. I got it: there was a better way. A better way to move. A better way to feel. A better way to live.

I started to pay close attention to yoga. I asked questions: “How do I get an angle closer to 90 degrees in my leg in warrior two? “How do I better feel the relationship between my breath and my pelvis?” “What does my focus point mean to my mind?” Most of the time, the answer was, “Keep practicing.” Laura told me that all poses are led by the heart, and I took that seriously. Something inside me began to heal. The scars would remain but I was moving forward with my life. After a while Laura told me it was time for me to move on from her as well. She said I needed to attend a variety of classes and to pursue the practice of yoga in the way that I was led to, from within my own heart. It was a gracious example of setting someone free.

So I continue to practice and pursue yoga. It spills over into the time off my mat. When I stand at a street corner and wait for the light to change, I tune into my body. I drop my shoulders and check my pelvis and let my body flow softly into mountain pose. The subtle changes in position open up my breathing, and I remember that all movement is led by the heart.