The Zen of Travel

Anyone who has met me for all of five seconds knows in an instant that I am a planner.  I am as enamored as a Swiss watchmaker with efficiency and order. Pretty much every moment of my life has some sort of prearranged structure, from exercise class to office hours to date night, and I really like - scratch that - love it that way. I pencil even my routine personal errands (grocery or pharmacy shopping) and self-care appointments (fitness and yoga classes) in my calendar as a sort of holding spot so that I don't blow myself off.  Also, being unproductive brings on an existential angst that I really just can't handle not one bit I mean what if life is totally meaningless and we really are all alone in an infinite universe and nothing matters oh my god somebody get me my iCalendar before I stroke out.

I can relax within the container of an organized life.  Social ambiguity and insufficient notice can leave me feeling frustrated and trapped rather than free and easy.  Not that I can't be spontaneous, but I've reserved my ambling and meandering for times that I've set aside for such dawdling.  Times like snowstorms and PMS Sundays.  Times like a three-month Eurorail backpacking trip along the northern Mediterranean coast from Spain to Israel (excepting the Balkan countries) in the fall of 2007.

After a solid decade of working and going to school for a 30-something career change, I found myself on the brink of delirium halfway through my master's degree.  I needed a break desperately and realized I couldn't wait until I collapsed from some absurdly preventable health crisis to take one.  My husband and I had just sold our home in South Florida at the peak of the mid-aughts real estate boom, and we were still renting in our new city.  For the first time, we had the resources to support ourselves in not only not working for a few months, but actually indulging ourselves a bit during that time.

A vision board (for those not in the New Age know, basically a collage of your dreams and intentions for the immediate or distant future) I'd created as part of my art therapy graduate training sealed the deal: luscious pictures of Aegean beaches and Provençal countryside, with magazine ad catch phrases like "Because you're worth it" and "La dolce vita" pasted between the beckoning images.  The fact that a two-dimensional assignment had organically morphed into a sculptural piece which ultimately evolved into my own personal Ark of the Covenant, parchment scrolls and all, instilled a sense of sacred obligation to follow this strange stirring.

This isn't something I would have even remotely entertained while still living on the East Coast.  I was raised with the unquestioned assumption that, if you wanted to travel for any extended period for no good occupational reason, you needed to be either: a) college student, b) a retiree, c) a billionaire or d) a fugitive.  Otherwise, you worked full-time and you were happy with your two measly weeks of vacation a year when I was your age we didn't even get Christmas off you insufferable crybaby.

In many ways, our Mediterranean odyssey was every bit like stepping right into those autumnal snapshots of grape harvests, azure coastlines, stuccoed trattorias, ancient marble ruins covering my vision board.  From the Iberian peninsula to the Holy Land, I was continually awed at the sheer fact that I could hike up the slopes of a seaside vineyard with no one in sight for ages, and then, whenever the spirit moved me, just glide on down to the next village for the most exquisite espresso in human history.  Welcome to my Eden.

But what doesn't sell splashy jet setter magazines and prearranged group tours are the contradictions and clusterfucks inherent in any region, even that after which the biblical Paradise itself was modeled.  The endless nagging of roadside litter, homicidal mopeds, chain-smoking, and a healthy dose of xenophobia are right here alongside all the beauty and charm. What the average Condé Nast travel writer also won't gush about in her next article under the Tuscan sun is the outright pettiness of some of those working in the travel business in oft-visited locations.  Italy, which boasts a 136-billion-Euro annual tourism industry thanks to being the home of more World Heritage Sites than any other country on the planet, is a fantastic place to visit.  If you speak Italian.  If you don't, well, just expect to be charged more, treated like less and generally ignored. As our hostel mates in Venice put it, they charge you to drink the water and then they charge you to piss it out.

And don't even think, particularly with people who work in the mainstream hospitality industry there, that you can eek by with some pathetic hybrid of your high school French and restaurant Spanish, because people who work in Italian tourism seem to hate... wait for it... tourists.  What they despise even more than tourists is tourists who ask questions. In place of the American childrearing cliché,   "There's no such thing as a stupid question," Italian parents and teachers terrorize their children with, "Who asks questions? No one! What are you, a fuckin' idiot?!" while beating them mercilessly with a freshly-picked tendril of seaside grapevine.  If you can look past that, which I highly recommend doing if you want to have any fun at all, Italy is completely all it's cracked up to be, worth every single brush-off and missed bus and government worker strike that comprises the disjointed choreography that is Italian transportation.

It turns out that, upon further research, it is not unusual at all for things to get mired in bureaucracy in La Bella Italia. After all, since the fall of Mussolini's regime following WW II, there have been more than 60 governments here. Sixty! That's approximately one a year, a veritable coup every single year, which explains why I haven't yet heard back from the American Consulate regarding my 105-euro fine for not signing and dating my Eurorail Pass before boarding my first Italian train (a complete about-face from Eurorail protocol in France and Spain, where conductors have you sign in front of them after boarding). There's this sort of "tough shit, figure it out for yourself, we've got more important things to deal with" ethos. Important things like looking stunningly fabulous in the latest in Milanese footwear, or taking days to cook up the most ecstatically sublime sauce the world has ever known, or painting epic biblical frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

But let's not single out Italy as the gold medalist in Olympic attitude-throwing. There was similar drama in Paris having to do with metro tickets. I'd been tossing my validated tickets so I wouldn't get them confused with the good tickets, but on one particular day the metro authorities happened to be doing a random check to see if people's tickets were validated. They just happened to pull me aside when I exited the metro, already late for my train to Biarritz, and demanded a validated ticket or 25 euros (about $45 dollars), half of which they pocket for Thursday poker night. The brusque guard first interrogated me mercilessly, then settled for writing all over an unused metro ticket so I couldn't actually use it. Rumor has it the last dictators in Europe deeply resent their demotion to menial jobs in public transportation and relish their absolute power over who shall wait and who shall ride like Caesar at the Coliseum.

Conditions weren't considerably different in Spain, where a generally straight shot from San Sebastián to Madrid was Project Mayhem. Apparently, early that morning, suspected Basque separatists sabotaged the rail lines from the north and we had to take buses all the way to the capital - eight hours on a bus with no bathroom, just at the moment that I started my period. That's the day I learned about a special brand of misogyny that herds women onto vehicles of public transport with no potty.  Upon arrival in Madrid, and unbeknownst to me, it is a national holiday, so the Atocha train station is pandemonium with the whole country getting off work early for a long weekend and scrambling to get out of the city. I waited two hours in lines I didn't even need to be in, because no one in authority was patient enough to offer the proper information in its entirety. It's just not in their sphere, even if that sphere is in another ticket sales office downstairs in the very same building. Needless to say, I was a hot mess by the time I staggered off the platform in Toledo close to 10pm with no dinner, no hotel room and no cash.

Yet amid all of these tiny hassles dwells a parallel universe where a stranger, an angel of sorts (usually a kind civilian, often a fellow traveler or an older person moving at a slower pace), takes me under his or her wing and points the way. Just as I am about to have a complete meltdown and curl up in a ball in the squalor of a train station bathroom - which I am reluctant to leave on account of its modern miracle of indoor plumbing at the ready - kindness taps me on the shoulder to show me the way out.

It is then that I realize that I myself have been shamelessly committing my least favorite of sins: judging a people by their government.  Me, of all people. The one who goes out of her way in her travels to point out to locals that, surely, I am no fan of the Bush dynasty (remember this was 2007), and then is delighted and relieved to find that most Europeans I've encountered have the good sense to separate the U.S. government from the American citizenry. Yet, here I am confusing a country's people with its government, as little did I realize that many of the businesses in the E.U. tourism sector are in fact government agencies - the rail lines, the museums, the ferries. They are not, as is often the case in the U.S., in the private sector, and with the amount of routine striking their workers seem to do, there is unshakable job security. Basically, they could whip you senseless with a seaside grapevine tendril for asking a stupid question with nary a raised eyebrow from their supervisor, who is too busy playing poker with the bribe money from your bogus Eurorail violation to notice.

Now it makes perfect sense that guy at the information counter at the train station wants to do anything else but answer my questions, and that the lady selling tickets to the Accademia (home of Michaelangelo's David) rips me a new one because I said "veinte," the Spanish word for 20, rather than "venti," the Italian word for 20 (puta, puleeeese).  Truth be told, I have come across only a minority of officials who were so rigid and aggressive in their enforcement of the rules that I was reduced to a blubbering pulp in my vivid imaginings of being deported on the spot, or sent to some Guantanamesque prison of torture for Eurorail Pass offenders, sugar substitute requesters and other wayward tourists. Truly, when you don't know your rights in a country, it can be extremely unsettling to be accosted in such a way. But, really, it happened only twice in more than a month - a month of two-dozen destinations and countless interactions in three completely different countries. Amazing how stress and anxiety escalate perception.

So, let me reframe my ridiculously generalized comments about asking questions in Italy. It's fine to ask questions. It's fine to stumble over your Italian like a monolinguistic dope. It's fine to ask for directions to a train station that is right in front of your nose. As long as you're talking to everyday, ordinary folks. In fact, we had more than our share of go-that-extra-mile generosity from everyone from trattoria waitresses, to hostel owners, to scrappy hillside hunters, to mom-and-pop shopkeepers. Everyone except the people whose job it is to give you information. And once you know your sources, you can get any information you need. And sometimes even get invited over for dinner.

Seasoned travelers will know that most of these inconvenient delays and near-misses ultimately led us to synchronistic experiences we could never have planned.  Like a detour through the Tuscan countryside and an unexpected stop in Pisa, home of what one guidebook cheekily referred to as "the world's biggest architectural disaster." Or a spontaneous side trip to the southern French town of St. Paul de Vence, a reverse red velvet layer cake of stone houses with terracotta-tiled roofs perched perfectly on a high hilltop like a fairytale village, where locals engage in lively matches of pétanque (pretty much French bocce) under the plane trees on a late autumn afternoon, all cigars and sweaters and lively arguments over each and every toss. 

I happened across this quintessential southern French phenomenon just as I accidentally rounded an unintended corner, when I was admittedly a bit lost and had to pee really badly and just couldn't see what all the fuss about the French Riviera was anyway because - and this is my bladder talking - "to hell with the South of France it's way overrated go to California you can find all the same shit there but cheaper and with nicer people." As they say, don't give up five minutes before the miracle, for in that very moment, in the raucous joy of pétanque, I settled into myself, into the present moment, and fell into deep appreciation and gratitude - which is, as it were, the only place to find fulfillment, provided you have relieved yourself.

Next, on the way to the bus stop, I found myself on a magical stroll along the town's chemins piétons (footpaths) perched on the terraced hillsides overlooking the coppery patina of an early November countryside. And stumbled upon tiny stuccoed chapels filled with ancient frescoes and local artwork. And tasted for the first time the heavenly experience of a ripe fig fresh off a tree, green as spring, yet subtly sweet and with the slightest hint of musk. 

On a dime, it all changed. But actually nothing had changed. Only my perception. Such is the zen of travel. Such is surrendering my agenda, my expectations, my standards of perfection and excellence. Such is the humility born of being in another country and allowing there to be more than one right way of doing things.  Which hasn't necessarily translated into more scheduling flexibility in my everyday life back home, but at least informs me that I am theoretically capable of changing plans when fascist train conductors force the issue with grapevine intimidation and heavily-accented blackmail.

Macroneurotic

Sometimes I like to go into the co-op and rock a diva attitude, just to counterbalance all the hippie.  But that's mostly because, as an ex-Lola Granola, I'm rebelling against my former rebellion.  Like a Jack Mormon who drinks like a fish, swears like a sailor and wears any goddamn underwear he likes, I have renounced patchouli for Chanel No. 5 and Earth shoes for stilettos because middle age.

And also because I don't want to limit my life or revolve my activities around what I can and cannot eat.  There's a reason why my forebears stopped keeping kosher, especially after they moved to the Caribbean.  It's difficult to be flexible amid a diverse populace when food, the universal currency of friendship and hospitality, becomes imprisoned in a rigid construct.  As a friend put it, "Beware of anyone who has more 'nos' than 'yeses.'"

A colleague who offered trauma healing services in Bosnia in the wake of the 1990s Balkans war told me that, while she did not drink coffee at home in the U.S., she would never refuse a sip or two from the refugees living in tent camps who boiled a pot just for her whenever she arrived.  She said she would not deny anything from those generous, destitute souls unless it would make her deathly ill.  I thought of her sharing that thick, sludgy Eastern Mediterranean coffee, poured into whatever stray vessels could be scrounged from around the camp, and of the women who served her and sat with her and talked like normal friends on an average day because they needed that social engagement as much as they needed air.

Those reassuring, everyday comforts - archetypal in their ability to evoke the natural rhythm of home - are the things many people say they miss the most in times of war, famine and natural disaster.  I realized then that my friend's decision to partake rather than abstain was one of the greatest acts of lovingkindness that she could have offered.  I later thought of her when I would serve and share microwave popcorn with the inner city teens in my after school art program.  It was nuked, full of GMOs and not organic.  It may not have actually even been food.  And it might have been the only thing some of those students ate all day.

I was not always so accommodating with what I ate.  I was, in fact and for far too long, the annoying second cousin once removed to the Nitemare Hippy Girl that Beck so cleverly drones on about on his first major label album.  Back in the day, when I was completely new to the health food scene, I asked a waiter at a Boston organic cafe for some soy milk for my coffee.  I was aghast when he said they didn't have any, so I canceled the coffee, which I refused to drink with even a splash of cow's milk for no other reason than that I had become a self-righteous college-age food fundamentalist.  He told me something I will never forget: "Don't be macroneurotic."

As Buddhist nun, author and teacher Pema Chödrön puts it, “We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.”  I was one of those sudden converts to macroneurosis, and addicted to others' wrongness I was, to the tenth power.  I wish I could say this was due to a lightening bolt spiritual experience involving some deep ethical transformation.  True, I had taken a 101 survey course in Eastern religions freshman year and was uncomfortably struck by Buddha's description of animals as "fellow flesh."  But really it was the fact that I was hopelessly codependent on my first love away from home, and he was a sort-of vegetarian, meaning he didn't eat red meat (the scientific term for this is lacto-ovo-avian-pescatarian a.k.a. poser).  Also, the best dining hall on campus was the vegetarian one, outside of which, at any given meal time, countless tofu-eating badasses would be chain smoking in leather biker jackets and nubuck motorcycle boots just before entering for their seitan stroganoff.  

One of those smoking vegetarians, a street smart Chicago kid, called me out as I was bemoaning over my quinoa the psychological torture of dinner out with my family back home, during which everyone ordered veal - baby cows in bondage! - parmigiana.  Affronted, I refused to speak to him for weeks, until there was nowhere else at "Veggie" to sit other than directly across from him, and I couldn't help but chat him up because I haven't had a silent meal since I had strep in fourth grade.  Not long after, a Zen teacher in the Tibetan tradition, which recognizes that Himalayan people need red meat lest they die of altitude-induced anemic hypothermia, warned us students against the spiritual narcissism of believing we are superior to others just because we meditate, chant and take the Four Great Vows.  She said, "When you're out in the world, partake in whatever others are doing.  Don't put yourself above. If they're having a burger, have a burger with them."  As mentioned earlier, this advice served me well years later when, working with various impoverished populations, I joined them in a bite or two of whatever they were having due to the immense honor it was that they were inviting me to share in what very little they had.

The other crucial ego-deflating piece around my so-called conscious eating was that I had worked too hard on recovering from an eating disorder to make a constant issue out of food.  The entire point of getting help for that primal dysfunction was, for me, to restore a normative relationship with food, to practice what Chödrön describes as "no big deal."  I simply could not join the ranks of compulsively aisle-blocking label-readers at Whole Foods and have the freedom I wished to experience around eating.  Because spiritual practice is the foundation of my recovery, I also had to give up any notion of arrogance around what people eat, which often amounts to an insidious form of classism in which the privileged get to indulge in thinly-veiled snobbery around the fact that we can afford to pay $227 for three bottles of supplements and a bag of micro greens while the People of Walmart save their pennies for the $1 value menu at BK.

I was once one of those value menu people, back when my working mother was going through some financial hardship and the only eating out we did was during $0.99 burger week at a chain fast food joint.  During a windfall, I might actually get two 99-cent burgers and maybe share some fries.  Downing two burgers in one sitting was nothing to me, even at the age of 8.  I have always been a big eater.  From as far back as I remember, I loved to eat, I liked pretty much everything, and I always went for seconds.  There was a saying in our family: "Take all you want, but eat all you take."  When I was 9, the kindly proprietor of an all-you-can-eat buffet in the small Appalachian mountain town where my grandmother lived finally broke down and told her, as politely as possible, that he would start charging the adult rate for my lunches if I kept on eating, and I quote, "like a truck driver."

The thing is, I was never overweight.  I had always been petite in bone structure and pretty much a normal weight for my size.  I must have had the metabolism of a rabid hummingbird to eat as much as I did and remain slender.  Until adolescence, that is.  Then, suddenly I sprouted more than the standard girly curves and could not understand for the life of me what the hell had happened to the sweet buy-now-pay-never deal I had always had.

Food at that point became my sworn enemy.  Well, perhaps more like a frenemy, since I needed it to live.  But once my hormones changed at puberty, I always wanted more to eat than my body could metabolize without gaining weight, and then I'd regret my overindulgence and futilely attempt to pay for it with some crazy deprivation diet, punishing exercise or just plain old starvation.  Bear with me: I grew up in Miami, where every day is bikini season (because whole piece bathing suits are for swim teams and grannies) and the entire purpose of human life is to be impossibly, overwhelmingly, Photoshopped sexy at every waking moment, even when blowing your nose, cleaning the toilet or battling dysentery.  My disordered eating was never life-threatening, but I did at one point weigh 95 pounds on a 5'4" frame and didn't get a period for a couple of years due to an excessively low BMI.  As denial would have it, I was genuinely shocked when the high school blood drive nurses told me I was too thin to donate, and was convinced my doctor was being a drama queen as she worried about the possibility of my developing osteoporosis later in life if I didn't get enough fat back on my body to menstruate.

The first order of business in rebalancing my relationship to food was to cultivate a regular rhythm of three squares and a snack on a daily basis.  This meant for a time that I needed to eliminate what are sometimes called "trigger foods" - the treats and noshes that, once started on, couldn't be stopped until the container was viciously violated, down to the last addictive crumb, when you realize why the fuck didn't I enjoy this more when it was still halfway full and did I even taste anything during this whole entire wolverine binge and how many calories are in a crumb anyway goddammit I need to go work out where's one of those 24-hour gyms when you need one.

It took a solid two years before my eating patterns had stabilized enough - one part behavioral habituation, three parts intensive psychic transformation - to venture into slow gradations of flexibility, like eating reasonably healthy sandwiches and pizza (dude, onions are totally vegetables) instead of a stingy dollop of cottage cheese on a sad wilted leaf of rubbery iceberg lettuce.  It was actually during this time that I lost too much weight, mostly because the diet mentality had brainwashed me into believing that bread and chips constituted the Axis Powers of Butt Fat Unlovability.  So I ate carbs in half portions and became semi-skeletal.  But I had to start somewhere.  I knew I couldn't stay on a diet forever, even if it had been convincingly rebranded as a "food plan," and still be as portable as I wished to be in my life.  I was about to go to college, and the last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself by weighing my chicken patty from the cafeteria line with a postal scale.  My crazed teenage binges and diets drew enough unwanted attention around eating weirdness for a lifetime.

I actually began to experience balance around my relationship with food during my college years, right around the time that the smoking vegetarian told me to lighten up about carnivores and my Zen teacher gave her "nothing special" dharma talk.  While backpacking during a summer internship at a national park in the Rockies, the revelation that food is fuel for the body, that refrigerators and restaurants are like gas stations, not opium dens, dawned on me like sunrise over the Grand Canyon trail I was hiking.  I was living in my body in an entirely new paradigm as I used it to descend canyons, climb mountains, stretch into asana twists and ride my bike for transportation around the city where I lived.  As opposed to my body's primary function being to inertly lay on the beach looking sculptural because Miami.

It was also during that time that I discovered the power of yoga practice, breathing meditations and body-centered psychotherapy to relieve me from the constant imprisonment of craving.  There were several hundred PSI of repressed trauma and unmet needs behind my addictive behaviors that needed to be embraced, expressed and integrated before I got even the beginnings of relief from their grip.  However, once I attuned more deeply to my body in an internally-connected way, eating became simply easier.  The satiation meter on my belly became palpable, perhaps for the first time in conscious memory, and I could sense what my body needed to eat from a physiological, rather than emotionally reactive, standpoint.  That was 25 years ago, and I have been practicing intuitive eating ever since, with few setbacks, mostly involving under-eating during times of acute grief or anxiety.  I now know to keep high-protein soft foods like nut butters in my pantry so I don't lose weight or vital nutrition when I'm too upset to chew, and I've been neither underweight nor overweight for years.

Recently, I have had to make dietary concessions for some unfortunate allergies developed later in life, which has led me to a still-robust but mostly anti-inflammatory diet.  This involves minimal gluten, sugars, fermented foods and acidic fruits.  Not because I want to lose weight or micromanage my food or be the special one when ordering out, but because I like breathing.  Breathing rocks.  But even when my allergies suck ass and I'd prefer decapitation over the pounding migraine cursing my sinuses for days on end, I will not go on a cleanse. In fact, frequent flyers of nutritional cleanses often strike me as the absolute last people who need them.  Unless you're "cleansing" because you're an IV drug user, have been in a major industrial accident in the past three years or have a serious chronic illness, you may be falling into the insidious pattern of orthorexia, a more recently recognized eating disorder characterized by perfectionism around the perceived "purity" of the food one eats. I personally cannot afford to go down that road because I'm pretty sure it will lead me right back into the unforgiving arms of macroneurosis - or worse.  I am confident that routine exhaling, armpit sweat, urination, peristalsis and the occasional bout of food poisoning offer my body sufficient detoxing on a routine basis to keep me going.

More recently, I've made the shift from "no big deal" eating to eating as a sensory gratitude meditation, pausing to deeply appreciate food for its presentation and aroma as much for its taste and texture.  A recent prayer before meals involves bowing my head toward my plate and taking a deep breath through my nose to fully appreciate, by way of my sense of smell, the blessing of food as a present-moment experience.  My husband was astonished when I taught him to place food or drink on different parts of his mouth to experience the spectrum of flavor in each bite or sip, not to be pretentious about bouquets and finishes but simply to slow down and savor.  Harvard-trained clinical psychologist and author Joan Borysenko states that her "all-time favorite meditation is a small, moist piece of chocolate cake eaten with exquisite attention and tremendous gratitude.  Any time that we are fully present in the moment, we are meditating.  We are free from limitations of thought and at one with the river of life."  I have tried Borysenko's meditation with a variety of food (mostly savory to minimize metabolism-spiking sugars) and it truly is a portal to the divine presence of now.  It's also loads more fun than straight up zazen.

You could say that I'm a foodie recovering from eating disorder, which in and of itself is nothing short of a miracle.  Nowadays, food is neither my best friend nor my worst enemy.  It doesn't love me unconditionally or keep me company when I'm sad.  It is not my mother, lover or secret admirer.  Nor is it a mocking torturer or a serpentine siren song.  It is one aspect of my sustenance, one facet of my pleasure, one domain of my worship.  The long and winding road has led me to the door where I started, yet I know the place for the first time.

I suppose my divatude at the juice bar is in some ways a celebration of the free range, fair trade joy I now experience around food and eating, something I never thought would be possible for me.  If you see me there, I'll be rocking that sass about my dirty chai indulgence while you rock yours about your cayenne lemonade fast. And we will toast one another with our overpriced organic concoctions because, either way, peristalsis.

When Sh*t Stands in Your Way

Editor's note: This entry was written in 2008 during a clinical art therapy internship at a forensic psychiatric hospital, before Desertfish had entered the blogosphere.

A solid week of psych hospital orientation can prompt even the dullest person to thinking about some serious issues. My recent completion of 40 hours of First Aid, CPR, institutional safety protocols, natural disaster planning, diversity awareness, lockdown procedures, five-point hold techniques, sexual harassment prevention and the Don't Be a Nurse Ratched video series have led me to a single stunning conclusion: personal hygiene is not a mental patient's top priority. Which if you think about it makes sense, bikini waxing and cuticle trimming being last on the list in times of personal crisis. But clearly I did not think about it enough because now I am nothing short of revolted by the realm of scatalogical possibility I am facing.

If I had thought about it, I might have turned down this position on account of my excessive squeamishness in the face of any bodily fluid that does not mind it's manners and stay inside the body in public like it's mama told it to. I am a mental health intern, people, not a nurse. Give me psychotic delusions of Christ-like grandeur. Give me cyclic episodes of euphoric mania characterized by streaking in odd venues. Give me paralyzing depression or body dysmorphia or heroin addiction or paranoia. But do not, whatever you do, expel something that comes from your body in my workplace unless you are in a bathroom with the door closed.

Consider me schooled. Little did I know of all the vile goings on that can go on behind that razor-wire fence. Like residents throwing their various and sundry bodily secretions about, trying to bite their ward mates with their hepatitis-carrying mouths, and making weapons out of just about anything (a sharpened sparerib from the dining hall was one brilliant product of such ingenuity and craftsmanship). It's a veritable Lord of the Flies out there, if you listen to all the war stories collected through the years and fed to us eager new employees over the course of a few condensed days.

And all I want to do is have them paint some pretty pictures and feel good about themselves. Okay, and maybe express some repressed inner conflicts through the subtle magic of chalk pastels. And maybe just maybe feel the slightest bit more human, respected and supported. Even cherished. My humanistic tendencies flying right over the cuckoo's nest and hitting me smack dab in the face like a bucket of ice water (which is clearly better than a bucket of anything else that could be chucked my way under these circumstances).

Despite the constantly lurking dangers of medieval disease brought on by the open sewer that doubles as a mental hospital, for each day of this intensive three-month residency, I am making an effort to fully immerse myself in every possible learning opportunity. I commit to harvesting every last pearl of wisdom from this clinical bootcamp: diligently studying time-tested approaches, taking risks under the tutelage of various mentors, hanging onto my supervisor's every word, collaging my worries and concerns in my own art journal, cultivating meditation practices to keep myself balanced, asking the deeper questions about insanity and criminality and the ethics of incarceration and what the fuck is a cuckoo anyway.

And contemplating some frequently disquieting answers. Psychoanalysts, who apparently didn't get the memo about not reading too much into things, believe that when you embark upon a rigorous undertaking in the psychology field - an internship at a state mental institution for the criminally insane is as fine an example as any - a theme emerges to draw your awareness to what needs more attention in your life, some sort of unconscious pattern that requires you to stretch yourself emotionally much in the way you are asking patients to do in therapy.  This could be anything from a fixed mindset or stale belief system, to a self-soothing habit or prehistoric coping skill.

I halfheartedly expected this to happen, perhaps in the form of a patient who reminded me of a key player in my childhood or some artwork that evoked disturbing primal urges. But for the life of me, I could not have foreseen this.  I have gone over it again and again, and I just cannot understand why the theme confronting me has everything to do with feces. I don't mean metaphoric or symbolic feces. I mean literal shit. As in the stinky brown substance that comes out of your back end.

For some reason that only my unconscious knows, dookie has been paying me a visit more times than I wanted to admit. And seriously, it has never been an issue for me before. Not like some old trauma or neurosis that I'd been avoiding all my life. My mother handled toilet training in my early years like a champ. I've never even been constipated. But here it is, scat at every turn. First, finding out that the friendly client I just shook hands with is what we in the clinical world call a "feces holder" (meaning he likes to touch and perhaps even fondle his excrement - which, revolting as it sounds, is considerably better than what we call a "smearer," meaning someone who enjoys doing a bit of abstract art therapy with his excrement, or a "horder," meaning someone who stashes his excrement away for safekeeping). Then there was the geriatric client haphazardly wiping his bum with the bathroom door wide open as I walked past. And finally, just yesterday, the bird who flew by and, barely missing my shoulder, dropped a bomb in the street.

So, my colleagues and I, art therapists that we are, started wondering just what deep existential message manure had in store for me. (New mantra: "What is shit trying to tell me?") And I started thinking about being full of shit. Those who know me well might not generally think of me as a bullshitter. But my sense is that I am not the only one of our species who can use a tune-up now and again in the authenticity domain. And what better context than being completely out of my comfort zone - living alone in a dormitory, sharing an 18th-century bathroom with several floor mates, eating cold prepared food for 3 meals a day, living 1,500 miles from home, being apart from my husband for 6 weeks at a time, working 45 hours a week in a forensic psychiatric setting? (Also, not being able to wear my earrings, pashminas or strappy sandals to work because once they try strangling you with your fashion scarf from Nordstrom Rack you won't be able to run away in your platform mules, girly girl. And not being able to sip my cozy hot tea all day long because, for one, it's just not culturally sanctioned to be all health foodie yoga yuppie inside the razor-wire fence, and two, it's so potentially filthy in the hospital's public areas that you just really don't want to get anything near your mouth.)

Well, wouldn't you know that, in Freud's eyes at least, all this bizarre pathological behavior with dung has everything to do with control, a particular specialty of mine. My underlying assumption in most things is that I keep my shit together and, unless you're a client on my caseload or under the age of 6, so should you. Admittedly not the most flexible or empathic philosophy, but one that has kept me from feeling sorry for myself or others in some of the extreme circumstances in which I've lived and worked.

Turns out Freud's concept of anal expulsion has been in a Hundred Years' War with my suck-it-up stance. Particularly on a day like one of my very first on the job, when I came across a shy elderly client while walking about the hospital campus. It was an extremely hot afternoon (as in 110-plus degrees), and a group of polite male patients were walking in my direction, presumably leaving a building to return to their home ward, when suddenly and without warning, our otherwise modest gentleman whirls around, drops his pants, and sticks his bare ass in the air just in time to release a most impressive display of projectile diarrhea - right onto the grass. Kind of like that scene in the animated Seuss classic The Lorax, only the output duct releasing the toxic sludge being a real live human rather than an cartoon factory.

And then he pulled his pants back up and went on his merry way, along with the others, none of whom seemed to notice a thing. For occurrences such as this are nothing to write home about at a mental institution (unless, of course, you are me and you are writing this very essay). In fact, even then, as I looked around aghast for staff to help me determine what to do about this pressing public health concern, I was swooning with gratitude that this hadn't happened indoors. This is the kind of desensitization that happens when you work in a psych hospital. I for one am considerably less squeamish than I was only a week ago. Of course, I did need to make a collage featuring some kitty litter and a baby's bare bottom, just to come to terms with it all. We art therapists do what we have to do in times like these.

Due to hospital bureaucracy, I still, several days later, have been unable to track down who, exactly, is responsible for the clean-up. Then it rained like crazy, essentially dissolving the pile of poop into the grass like nature's most perfect fertilizer. Let's just say I no longer take shortcuts across the lawn.

I am happy to report that my world has become considerably less shitty as my internship continues. Sure, shit still happens, but I have somehow become not all that phased about it. Case in point: the startling splash of bird dookie that plummeted from a high branch and landed squarely on the crook of my bare arm as I was walking across the hospital campus. And I didn't even flinch. No nausea, no squirming, no hypochondriasis about spreading a deadly plague of bird flu across half the universe. I was just all Zen about it, like, "Hmmm... bird crap. Isn't that interesting?" and then washed my arm as soon as I made it to the next building. I even entertained the curious thought that my elbow skin might actually be all the better for it, since there is in fact a Japanese spa treatment that charges top dollar for an authentic Geisha facial comprised of purified nightingale droppings. As they say, serenity is not the absence of the (shit)storm, but peace amid the (shit)storm.

It is truly amazing how much more enjoyable life can be without fear, even a neurosis as seemingly harmless as my former queasiness. True, my poop phobia has been both amusing and sanitary. But letting go of it (pun intended, Herr Doktor?) actually made my time at the hospital one helluva lot more fun. Instead of worrying about whether the client I just shook hands with was a holder, horder or smearer, I simply accept that these possibilities are part of the territory in working with severely mentally compromised people. The ranks of who I've recently joined as a compulsive hand washer.

The Odds Are Ever in Your Favor

Tina's life isn't a train wreck.  It's a ship wreck.  The Titanic being sunk by the Hindenburg on D-Day.  Only without the DiCaprio spreading his arms to the sky to that cloying Celine Dion power ballad part.

Tina had it rough from the start.  Her addicted parents fought violently, then divorced abruptly, ultimately leaving her prey to a pedophile neighbor who shacked up with her mom for drugs.  She went to foster care for a spell, then returned home in time for him to get out of prison and reoffend, rending her an indistinguishable pulp of truancy, alcohol abuse, noxious relationships, unplanned pregnancies and chronic physical pain.  Her children, at least one of them a product of acquaintance rape, have been taken away by the state for neglect and returned to her several times.  She loves them dearly but cannot get her head above water long enough to stop them from being taken away again.  And again.  She knows she's repeating her own mother's patterns like a script written generations before she was born, but she doesn't have the foggiest idea where to begin to piece together a more stable life.  She doesn't even know if she can keep the power company from shutting off the electricity tonight.

Tina isn't the next guest on The Jerry Springer Show.  She's a composite of dozens of mental health therapy clients I've participated in treating during my 15 years in the social services field.

Tina scored a whopping 9 on the ACE assessment, the highest score possible.  So did her currently and chronically incarcerated husband.  This is not a good thing, like getting a perfect 1600 on the SAT or a 9 in the Olympic ice skating trials.

It is, in fact, a very bad thing.  A high ACE scores portends an alarmingly poor physical and mental health prognosis.  Read: heart disease, cancer, obesity, addiction, stroke.  The saddest part of all is that the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) assessment is a measure of significant health risk factors associated with early childhood neglect, abuse and other adversity.  The unfair truth is, the more bad shit you went through as a kid, the worse your adult health.  So says the ACE study.

Except that there are always exceptions, perhaps more than are given fair credit.  Many of our world's leaders and role models might themselves have had high ACE scores had they been given that assessment by a family doctor, cleric or counselor.  The late Pulitzer-nominated poet Maya Angelou's beginnings were not completely unlike Tina's, only she wrote best-selling memoirs, won several Grammys and read her verse at a presidential inauguration.  That very president might have a high ACE score and yet, despite robustly-publicized personal issues, served as leader of the free world for two terms.

I, too, have a high ACE score.  But you probably wouldn't know it from looking at me or talking to me.  Or reading my medical records.  Or my resume.  I do not believe this is because I am particularly awesome or special.  (I am certainly neither poet nor president.)  I believe it is because of the unfreakinbelievable odds that were ever in my favor.  The countless synchronicities and kindnesses, forgivenesses and generosities that have embraced me at every turn.  In the shrink biz, we call these protective factors.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, which spearheaded the initial ACE study with Kaiser Permanente from 1995-1997, "protective factors are individual or environmental characteristics, conditions, or behaviors that reduce the effects of a stressful life."  The CDC website asserts that such mitigating variables "increase an individual’s ability to avoid risks or hazards, and promote social and emotional competence to thrive in all aspects of life, now and in the future."

So, what were these emotional talismans that staid my hand from the perilous choices that would have inevitably lead to a life of certain disaster?  Let me count the ways:

There was the loving extended family that stood in for my parents while they navigated a brutal divorce when I was a baby, making sure I was fed and burped, bathed and diapered, sung to and soothed.  There was the close-knit neighborhood where families knew each other and babysat each other's kids and planned block parties and carpooled to little league, the surrogate parents I turned to time and again for shelter and solace.  There was the fact that I was as gifted at academics as I was dismal at sports and thus developed an identity as a "smart girl" at a young age, which offered me a sense of purpose and hope.  There was my natural extraversion, which fit well into the tropical urban environment where I was raised and kept me laughing when depression threatened to Gorilla Glue me to the couch with seventeen blankets pulled over my head.  There was the honest mentor who begged me never to try hard drugs because "you'll love them so fucking much you'll never want to stop."  There was my ability as a promising young writer that led to a sustainable career.  There was the false HIV positive in college that scared me straight into healthier relationships with caring partners unafraid of commitment.

All of this didn't mean that I didn't have some serious hell to go through as I worked to address each of those risk factors outlined by the ACE assessment - risk factors that include parental separation or divorce, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, physical, emotional or sexual abuse, family member incarceration.  This is the sort of personal history that people like Tina and I are still unpacking.  After a dedicated period of time in ICU-style psychotherapy, things do settle down for many of us and we can begin rebuilding our lives.

In fact, my clinical recommendation is that people with substantial trauma or loss in their background don't wait until life returns to "normal" to actually get a life because healing is about a new normal.  (We actually don't want the old normal, or why bother to invest in getting help at all?)  Unless your emotional symptoms are so severe and disruptive that you truly can't function for a time, in which case you may require inpatient treatment, there is no reason not to keep plugging away at your degree or continue working at your job or take up a hobby or plan a nice trip somewhere special, even as you make a significant commitment of time, energy and resources at the beginning of your recovery process.  There is also no reason not to do something fun and creative every day, just to remind yourself that there is more to life than suffering.

Once that front-loaded initial investment in treatment starts to pay dividends, we might find ourselves more able to relax and trust that our lives are no longer in constant drama as we successfully self-regulate, change old negative patterns and make better choices.  And we might find that we are beginning to recover toward, and not merely from, something.  We often find ourselves more portable and socially flexible, better able to enjoy diverse experiences, places and people.  We may discover long-hidden talents and emerging interests that do more for us than just relieve our pain.  They delight us. They might even define us, perhaps more than our suffering ever did.

And then there are those times, which happen to everybody, when life rocks our world and the old feelings, perceptions and beliefs may come home to roost.  Those are the times to slow down and break life down into bite-sized pieces. They are the times to batten down the hatches and get extra high quality rest, hydration, nutrition and movement.  To reach out and strengthen our reliance on a healthy support system.  To stay in our pajamas longer and treat ourselves to massages more often and go back to therapy.  Twelve-steppers call this "getting back to basics," an approach that can be extremely effective during periods of vulnerability or reactivation.

We needn't be surprised if some of our symptoms reemerge during those periods.  As with any former injury, old aches and pains can rear their heads amid a susceptible context, the way a previously broken ankle may act up during a rainstorm.  This does not at all mean that the hard work we have done to resolve our losses has been for naught.  We and our treatment have not failed.  What we may need is a tune up, a temporary return to the therapies and other resources that helped us in the past.  How temporary is a case-by-case determination, but there is no shame in taking all the time you need to feel resilient again and no gold medal if you get there more quickly than anyone else.  This is about quality, not quantity - most importantly the quality of your life, internally and externally.

Sometimes this may be a more grueling process than others.  Sometimes what worked to ameliorate our symptoms in the past doesn't quite do the trick this time.  And sometimes there is just no way out but through, and there is just no amount of positive thinking or plan of action or spiritual practice that can exempt us from simply experiencing whatever it is we need to experience. That is no reason to give up and accept a life sentence of emotional reactivity and dysregulation.  When it comes to your recovery, don't take no for an answer.  As they say, don't give up five minutes before the miracle.

And whatever you do, don't go it alone because trauma loves to divide and conquer.  To know we are deeply loved, that we have a place in this world no matter what is happening, this makes all the difference.  My myriad protective factors have proven this to me time and again.  And, perhaps without your knowing it, so have yours.

My mother once told me that, when her family moved back to the U.S. from Hispaniola, where she grew up until age 14, she sometimes could not relate to cultural references her high school friends would make because she did not grow up with the same songs, games, books, commercials, etc. As she jokingly put it, "How can anyone be from Haiti and be normal?"

I sometimes make reference to this when a client asks me whether they will ever "get over" a significant trauma. I tell them it's kind of like growing up in a foreign country - you may sometimes not relate to certain things the way many of those without that experience do. It will always inform your perceptions, emotions and decisions in some way, even after it stops ruling your life. You may still speak with a slight accent on certain words. You can no more erase it than you could erase growing up in, say, the Caribbean.

And that's not a bad thing, as long as you can use your experience as fodder for creating something beautiful in the world.  We aren't meant to go back to the way we think we would've been had that "horrible thing" never happened. We are meant to move forward with all the wisdom we have gathered from it.

The Sultan's Harem

Topkapi Palace in Istanbul is a stunning example of Ottoman power and opulence.  The sprawling campus overlooking the strategic Bosphorus is connected by colonnaded courtyard gardens, its hundreds of rooms intricately adorned with Anatolian mosaics, carved lattice, embossed inscriptions, marble baths and gold-leaf murals. But none of those treasures left as lasting an impression on me during my visit there as did the stories of the harem.

An estimated four hundred of the sultan's private apartments were reserved for his Imperial Harem, which was comprised of his wives, concubines, consorts, female family members and their attendant eunuchs.  The word harem can be translated as "sacred" or "private," so in fact, this secluded area of the palace was where the royal family and its trusted servants resided.

Contrary to predominant Western fantasies - ranging from reckless orgies with pliant damsels in infinite configurations of servility, to a kindly sisterhood of constant solace and compassion amid a helpless, hopeless plight - the harem was a strictly organized hierarchy based upon the order and status of each of its members.  As SUNY Binghamton researcher Phillip Emeritz put it in his paper Feminine Power in the Ottoman Harem, "The harem was not an orgiastic prison, but rather a private site of female political enterprise."

And apparently, the politics inside the cloister were no less treacherous than those on Capitol Hill, with the sultan's mother in the role of co-regent to the sovereign himself.  The queen mother, often the slave concubine of a previous sultan who bore her monarch his successor, wielded absolute power in the harem, determining the future of the dynasty and therefore the Ottoman Empire itself.  One famous young concubine, Turhan, served the court's queen mother, Kosem.  But when Kosem challenged Turhan's son's ascension to the throne, Turhan arranged for her competitor's murder in a violent coup that dramatically altered the trajectory of the entire realm.

Turhan's story backhanded me as my three-month pilgrimage around the Mediterranean's sacred sites in 2007 came to a close.  On an informal sabbatical from a rigorous course of study in feminine spirituality, the genderless reality of the human condition hit me like a cup of ice cold holy water.  Here I was, within blocks of the Hagia Sophia, the original Byzantine basilica dedicated to Holy Wisdom, said to be feminine.  Just weeks before, I had stood on the stone labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral outside Paris, tears flowing at the haunting resonance of a boys' choir practicing as I prayed facing a statue of the Virgin Mary, embodiment of the Divine Feminine.  And I felt duped.

Duped because I realized that much of my emotionalism had been merely an adolescent religious fervor, one that idealized reality rather than surrendered to it.  I wanted so badly to believe that there was a way of organizing society based on so-called feminine values of total equality, respect and integrity.  I needed to mythologize a human history that may have been, had men not raped and pillaged, conquered and enslaved.  I insisted on believing that our biological drives do not determine our behavior, that competition for resources and status was pure construct.  And I ate that DaVinci Code shit up like a starving child, desperately wishing for safety and order in a chaotic world.

While there may indeed be both feminine and masculine principles in the universe, this in no way automatically endows human beings in a female body some sort of higher spiritual awareness or power, any more than it does those with a penis.  The exclusively female capability for live birth makes us conduits, not creators, of life.  It is just too easy and too tempting to want to take our turn at the throne of sexism as a sort of historical payback.  To spiritualize this is no different than the various groups of men in history who justified their own dominance as a divine right legitimized by the sacred texts they themselves authored.  While spiritual superiority may seem like an obvious oxymoron, the concept is in fact not evident to some, including those feminists who believe that matriarchy is a blissful paradise of nurturing cooperation.  Because, you know, women never get pissed off or fiendishly controlling or want their kids to beat your kids' asses in soccer or SAT scores or anything.

Today, I am no more impressed by unintelligent feminism than I am by idiotic patriarchy. Women who believe the world would be utopia if we were solely in charge may prefer bedchamber back-stabbing and poisoned wine to outright combat, but I do not prefer either. Just because we have estrogen and mammary ducts does not render us exempt from unchecked egoism and the primal drive to rule over.  Mature, thoughtful equality is what interests me now.  Without that, the oppressed becomes the perpetrator for awhile, and then it just flips right back again, over and over.  It is only a matter of time before those who identify as victims become bullies when the power falls into their hands.

I bore witness to this during several instances of advocacy training during my early days in the social services field.  While I am forever grateful for the vital social importance and personal growth value of privilege and oppression work, I in no way want to live in that paradigm in the long term.  I have met advocates who insist that they cannot possibly be racist because they are part of an oppressed minority.  I have trained with professionals who vehemently believe that there is no way that people of relative privilege have legitimate suffering.  I have even been mentored by highly educated and accomplished leaders who suppress voices that challenge the victimhood identity.

A few years ago, I met a former idol of mine whose work has been a game-changer in empowering females around the world.  Like me, she had worked with women in domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers and prisons.  She saw first-hand the devastation of early trauma on these ladies' adult lives and the heartbreaking consequences of catch-22 choices.  Yet, when I asked her at a book signing whether she believed that women could be abusers without being coerced or forced to do so by men, her answer was flat-out denial.  It was as if she regarded the female gender incapable of generating unprovoked violence, as though two X chromosomes made perpetration or even the thought of it impossible.  Would she tell those abused by women that their experience of violation is biologically impossible?  Or is she reluctant to concede to the complexity of the issue for fear it will weaken the punch of her girl power message?

Dualistic thinking like that serves only to buttress the shame and isolation of those who have been harmed by females.  People victimized by women are already walking uphill both ways to even begin to conceptualize their plight.  They are already fighting against societal taboos and collective denial.  They don't need a bunch of self-proclaimed progressives telling them to turn a blind eye, lest they throw a wrench into an already-polarized political agenda.

It is crucial we women own the ways that we can be perpetrators, too. Any feminism which does not give serious consideration to how we as women also bully, dominate, abuse and oppress is to me only part of the story.  I have witnessed insecure women relentlessly erode the confidence of a strong woman and then gloat like a hyena over a fresh kill as she disintegrated into a pathetic puddle on the floor.  The only male who has ever been crueler and more oppressive toward me than several women I have known was a diagnosed sociopath.  And even he apologized.

So, please, ladies, let's cut the shit and do the rest of the work at hand.  Yes, we need to continue signing petitions and voting and demanding equal pay for equal work. Yes, we need to protect our bodies and reproductive rights, which are increasingly at stake every day.

And yes, we need to take ownership of that absolute tyrant that is inside every one of us, male and female alike, and befriend and integrate it as a very real part of us - and not the sole domain of The Man.

Don't Look at Me / Look at Me

If a woman walks down the street and no man looks at her, does she really exist?  - Zen koan

In the 2004 philosophical comedy I Heart Huckabees, the petite bombshell character played by Naomi Watts inadvertently stumbles into an existential crisis that suddenly calls her entire life into question.  No longer enamored with her privileged status as iconic beauty queen - the face of big box superstore Huckabees, the trophy S.O. ornamenting Jude Law's meticulously manscaped arm - she begins to see the absurdity of her vapid life.  In a clumsy in vivo experiment to determine her intrinsic worth, she trades in her skimpy wardrobe for baggy overalls and a Laura Ingalls Wilder bonnet.  Not a big hit at her photo shoot launching the store's new spring collection.  Nor with her stodgily corporate boss.  Nor with her rising star boyfriend.

At one point, our cover girl seizes the beautifully blown-out locks of the new belle de jour slated to replace her and spews her agony for all to see.  Locking her competitor in a vice grip by the chin with one hand and pulling the bonnet over her face with the other, she wails in desperation, "Oh, stop!  Don't look at me!  I just want to be left alone.  I'm sick of this.  I'm sick of you all looking at me!"  Then, just as suddenly, she uncovers her face, positions the bonnet like this season's hottest headwear, and snootily sticks out her chin to demand in a needy whine, "Look at me.  Please, please, please, everybody.  Everybody look at me now!  I am so pretty.  I.  Am.  So.  Pretty.  Look at me.  Everybody just wants to be me.  I'm pretty."  She knows she can't go back to that spiritual wasteland.  But the way ahead looks even bleaker.  Either way, she is fucked.  Unless she leaves the road entirely and bushwhacks a whole new path.

I am fascinated by the above scenario, and the larger theme of Being Looked At vs. Being Seen, for many reasons.  The first of which is that there's no getting around it.  We as a species are biologically wired to be drawn to beauty, which to our animal brains signals health and reproductive viability, and we live in a visual age that constantly reinforces this wiring with ever-narrowing standards.  The second of which is that I am a woman of a certain age, and I'm fast approaching that threshold across which I may forever step from hypervisibility to invisibility.  The third of which is that - we interrupt this program for a secondary trauma alert - someone took some exploitative photos of me when I was beyond underage.  The only thing I'll say about that is that I hadn't yet had a double-digit birthday, the adult behind the camera was someone I knew and trusted, and it was horrible.

So, like you, I know a thing or two about objectification.  How we objectify ourselves.  How we objectify others.  How we allow ourselves to be objectified.  How we take ourselves out of the game entirely rather than risk rejection or worse, invisibility.

My inquiry here is not about placing blame on either side of the camera.  Or at all of us as third party voyeurs to countless splashy pages of Photoshopped opulence, which, let's face it, can be great fun.  It is about thoughtfully questioning that which so many of us, including myself, may take as gospel truth.  What happens to our worth as youthful beauty fades?  Does our value drain out of us like the once abundant collagen under our eyes?  Do we pass our merit onto the next crop of perfectly ripe fruit like a baton in a mad mating relay, or do we keep some for ourselves?  And who determines whether we have retained our desirability and, more importantly, our lovability?

I don't care who you are or where you come from, if you are a woman, you have surely contended with the power and pain of feminine beauty.  If you are a man, perhaps even more so.  Whether veiled beneath a burqa or flaunted in a thong, whether being debuted at a quinceañera or cloistered in a nursing home, there is no doubt that in countless societies, feminine beauty has been mistaken for human worth.  (As has masculine earning power.  But that's for someone else to write about.)

Because of my own early trauma around this theme, coming of age was an ongoing nightmare for me from which I feared I'd never wake up.  Hitting puberty at 9, I looked dangerously older than I was. Creepy old men started following me around the neighborhood in their creepy old cars.  Boys started snapping my bra strap in fourth grade.  Girls started calling me a slut.  I was emotionally immature and clumsy as hell in my new form, but that didn't stop people from assigning me with all sorts of erotic attributions.  I wondered if any male would ever look me in the eye again.  I hated being a woman.  I hated my body for betraying me so early.  Already?  Couldn't I have just a few more years of innocence after everything that had happened?

So I spent my teen years doing what I could to make it go away.  I went on crazy crash diets with torturous exercise regimens to shrink my curves.  I went on hibernation-worthy food binges and gained enough weight to disguise my hourglass shape.  I ate as little as I could until ribs and hip bones protruded from my neutered figure.  Sometimes I wore clothes several sizes too big and acted like everyone's kid sister.  Other times I dressed provocatively, simultaneously craving and resenting the attention, putting the power (so I thought) back into my own hands, trying to take control somehow. At the time, of course, I had no idea what was motivating my behavior.  I finally got the help I needed for that particular aspect of my crazy, and it has been the best thing I've ever done.  But looking back, it makes total sense to me why I - why we - might do that to myself/ourselves.  It is just too much fucking power to handle at such a young age.  And it's not real power.  It's a projection, like the phantasm of Oz screened from behind the curtain.

The therapeutic support I received - we're talking years here - offered me a miraculous turnaround.  I slowly came out of my shell shock and began celebrating my femininity in tiny increments - an understated manicure, a flirtatious giggle, a dress every now and then.  I grew increasingly bolder until I was back to the alchemical alloy of girly girl tomboy that I'd always been inside.  If you saw me today, you might not guess what a big freakin' deal it is for me not to hide the fact that I am a woman, ridiculous as that sounds.  I am once again free to feel safe in my environment in most circumstances.

And then something happened that took me by as much surprise as adolescence did.  It wasn't too long ago that middle age jacked my former young adult body in the night.  Seemingly out of nowhere, the round booty and flat tummy I had grown accustomed to for much of my reproductively mature life did a 180, and my physique became it's diametric bubble-belly-board-butt opposite.  And I got pissed at nature again. Already?  Couldn't I have just a few more years of enjoyment after everything that had happened?  I thought I deserved a special extension on fertility after denying it for its first decade.

If you're anything like me, you think this will happen much later in life than it actually does.  You think that you won't start peeing a little when you sneeze too hard until after you're old enough to collect social security.  And that those helpful young men at Home Depot and Jiffy Lube will always go out of their way for you, even as they try to rip your girly ass off with unnecessary purchases.  Or that the invisibility of aging won't happen to you because you've been exercising since you were 10 and you eat your veggies and you never nursed a baby.  You think maybe because you've come to peace with being a reasonably attractive woman that you get to stay that way.  Because you worked hard for that shit.  Because you fought for it.  Because you conquered it and reclaimed it and planted your fucking flag.  You think maybe people are making excuses for their menopausal body changes and just drink too many damn Frappuccinos extra whip extra syrup because why bother.  You think older women are too preoccupied with aging until you become one.  It's easy to love your body when it looks like what society tells you it should.

But it will happen to you, to all of us, no matter how organically you eat or how much fish oil you ingest or how many times a week you go to the gym.  As the Buddhists tell us, everything is impermanent.  In the words of one proverb, "Good health is simply the slowest way a human being can die."  And there is some grieving, as well as confusion and relief, in all of it.  It would be lovely, as the joke goes, to start off life as really old and decrepit and then get progressively younger and better until you end in an orgasm.  But that is not the human condition.

So if you meet me, and you size me up as a shallow fashionista because I go ga-ga for glitter lip gloss and bias-cut dresses and am not in any way aging humbly or gracefully, walk a mile in my shoes before you submit your verdict.  You might find these platforms can be tricky on uneven ground.

Kale is the New Black

Everyone's a doctor.  More to the point, everyone these days is a holistic health practitioner.  Post a Facebook status about being sick, and you'll get countless replies featuring magical remedies that your colleague's sister's mother-in-law swears by.  And she should know because she's been sick, like, 83 times in the past year, and she didn't die.  Apparently, it takes a social media village to cure a common cold.

You'll also get a couple of rants about the evil conspiracy of Big Pharma, including warnings that you should not, under any circumstances, go to the hospital, even when a limb has been severed, because you could die of a staph infection in a place like that and, of course, you will be forced to refuse antibiotics, no matter how hard those greedy doctor shareholders push them, because they mess up your gut, like, forever.  So really you might as well be dead.

I myself fed into the anti-medical-model paranoia for most of my 20s, and have dabbled in everything from aura clearing to aromatherapy to long-distance Akashic Records readings to cure me of several mild to moderate ailments.  Here is a less-than-exhaustive list of the alternative pop healing interventions I tried during that time, not necessarily in this order:

• Place a crystal on the body part that is sick
• Place a crystal above your bed
• Place a crystal over your door
• Place a crystal in every corner of your house
• Go to a crystal bowl meditation circle
• Wear a crystal around your neck
• Visualize a crystal in your meditation
• Live in a crystal cave
• Chant in Sanskrit
• Chant in Pali
• Chant in Hebrew
• Chant in Greek
• Chant in Latin
• Chant in Sino-Japanese
• Chant Rah-Rah Ah-Ah-Ah/Ro-Mah Ro-Mah-Mah/Gaga Oh-La-La/Want Your Bad Romance
• Speak in tongues
• Pray to your guardian angel
• Pray to the Archangel Rafael for healing
• Pray to Gonesha to remove barriers to your health
• Pray to the Blessed Virgin to have mercy on your suffering
• Pray to everyone you possibly can, just to cover your bases
• Place an image of the deity of your choice on a shrine in your house
• Get a tattoo of the deity of your choice on the body part that is sick
• Visualize yourself as completely healthy
• Visualize yourself as the powerful goddess you are
• Visualize your guardian angel performing spiritual surgery on your illness
• Visualize Matthew from Downton Abbey coming back to life and reuniting with Lady Mary and the baby

Hang on, yogis and yoginis.  Take a deep cleansing breath and chillax your chakras before you accuse me of undermining the legitimacy of the above practices.  I am convinced, through years of direct experience, that many of these methods worked on some level to rebalance my system and fortify my wellness.  People have been using natural medicines and indigenous rituals for millennia, and somehow our species has survived, most likely due in part to the effectiveness of such practices and in part to pure dumb luck.  Science itself, no longer the enemy of religion, has verified the efficacy of many of these approaches, from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for pain management to t'ai ch'i for arthritis.  But I personally didn't start getting significant results until I gave myself permission to break down and go to the damn doctor.  Once I did and got the additional treatment I needed, all the other things I was doing for my health began to actually work, as though a missing puzzle piece had finally fallen into place and completed the whole picture.

While there is likely some legitimacy to mistrusting the FDA's ability to discern public safety from profits, I have come to understand that being truly holistic regarding health means being inclusive of all wellness systems, regardless of their source.  Through several years of complex but not life-threatening health concerns, I have found traditional Chinese medicine as effective for some conditions as Western surgery and pharmaceuticals are for others.  My great aunt's aloe compresses are fantastic for minor to moderate cuts and burns, but high-tech skin grafting they are not.  I'm not saying that natural remedies don't work. But if they worked universally, pharmaceuticals would never have been invented.  The Black Death would not have wiped out an estimated half of medieval Europe's population if nosegays and bloodletting were panaceas.  It occurs to me that perhaps wellness is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor.  If it were, no one would get sick.  Or die.  Ever.

I had somehow convinced myself that receiving modern medical help was less "spiritual," as though I were selling out somehow.  Yet my mother had raised me to have an intelligent spirituality.  When a family acquaintance, whose religion dictated faith healing over medical care, died of an extremely curable form of skin cancer, she told me, "That was just stupid.  How do you think humans got the inspiration to develop medicine, if not from the Divine?"  She taught me not to split my perceptions into black-and white-thinking - that there was room for both/and, not just either/or.  Even my elderly Chinese-born and -trained acupuncturist would send me to my PCP when something was outside of his scope.  He said, "I can detect cancer earlier than many of your physicians, but I can't remove the tumors.  Surgery and emergency medication are what your Western doctors excel at."  I found lasting success when I began to incorporate both traditional and contemporary systems in a comprehensive approach, customized specifically for my body by highly trained and experienced practitioners.  As opposed to the opinionated dude working for minimum wage at the vitamin store, not because he has any knowledge or interest in health but because the schedule's ideal for his stoner snowboarding rock-n-roll lifestyle.

Let me also note the shameless and disrespectful co-opting of indigenous healing practices in which I participated.  My intentions were good, but they were, frankly, ignorant and superficial.  No system of medicine works unless the patient takes the full cure.  So goofing around with a shamanic ceremony here and a tribal talisman there is like taking only half the course of your antibiotics.  Unless the healer you are working with is fully immersed in that approach and has been mentored by elders in that tradition for years (not unlike the way our Western doctors train in medical school and residency for nearly a decade), there is no way to get the full benefit of the treatment.  Many of those healing practices are part of a way of life and a community that cannot be taken out of context without seriously diluting their effectiveness.  Tribal peoples have been so grotesquely exploited in our world that many are fiercely protective of their practices, for damn good reason.  So, unless you have specifically been invited into that community for a rigorous course of healing and participation, you may well be being sold the equivalent of tourist souvenirs by people who themselves may not have the deep understanding and respect for those practices.  Or are laughing all the way to the bank about your whiteass idiocy.

Try telling that to followers of the Church of Transcendent Kombucha, where if you defiantly take a supplement pill instead of foraging your own herbs in a virgin rainforest, you risk excommunication followed by public flogging with dino kale stems.  It never ceases to amaze me how fiercely dogmatic people get about health, as though wellness were a measure of spiritual virtue the way that some churches in history viewed wealth as a sign of being favored by God.  This view is what civil rights advocates refer to as blindness to privilege.  It's easy to believe that there is something inferior about the character or efforts or even the souls of folks who struggle with something with which we ourselves have not had to contend.  In the case of survivors of trauma, particularly that of the compounded early childhood variety, judgy views about wellness can seem especially callous considering the statistically poor health outcomes of that population (more on that later).

Perhaps perfect health is in fact the exclusive privilege of the fortunate few who get to work, as I once did, peacefully from home in our vocation of choice, or no vocation at all, as we enjoy a life of no children or full-time childcare.  Our schedules provide the flexibility to attend 10am yoga classes, followed by an anti-oxidant power smoothie at a designer juice bar, followed by a nap.  We can live reasonably stress-free lives because we call our own shots, make our own schedules and rarely interface with the general public - certainly not poor people, who often have unreliable access to healthcare because they themselves have limited transportation or childcare.

Most importantly, we get street cred from our trustafarian peeps for carrying around a spendy green drink from a trendy cafe at our exclusive yoga studio.  The so-called weird shit I used to get teased about in college - doing sun salutations each morning, drinking milk alternatives like soy and almond - are now upper echelon status symbols.  Trust me, I have been a poser amid this hypocritical brand of snobbery, and it is the contemporary equivalent of wearing Guess? jeans and Giorgio perfume in the '80s to signal that you have arrived.

Nowadays, as a social services professional in school, hospital, corrections and other public health settings, I have much more compassion for the health struggles experienced by much of the world.  After working with children for the past five years, I am now convinced that they as a population have more germ warfare at their fingertips than the biological arsenal of all NATO countries put together.  And there is simply no defense against that hard-wired part of our mammalian brain that melts helplessly into the nurturing protector who picks up their tiny, convulsively crying bodies to soothe and comfort, no matter how much thick, chartreuse snot gurgles in gloppy pools from their cute little button noses.

Last fall, after six days down with a flu that went viral like Gangnam Style in my lungs, I vowed to never spend another dime on Oscillococcum, loquat honey, osha root, frog sphincter or some smelly but beautifully packaged tincture made by a sweet old hippie named Granny Gaia, no matter how much peace and vitality she radiates.  Maybe hard-to-pronounce herbs and kale smoothies are enough to bolster the immune systems of those who don't work with small runny-nosed children, who never - not even once - cover their mouths when they cough, sneeze or vomit.  As for me, I'm going for the hard stuff.

Why I Defected from the White Light

Dear New Age Movement,

We both know this has been a long time coming, but I will say it anyway: I am leaving you. We have had some really good times, and I thank you for all you have taught me. In so many ways, I grew up and found my place in the world with you by my side.

But lately your narcissism and magical thinking have left me feeling empty and exhausted. I feel there is no room for me as I mature and encounter the limitations of my own humanity.  I am certain you will not be alone for long. There are countless sweet young things as eager to worship you as I once was.

Meanwhile, I believe I have found an intelligent spirituality to partner with, one that includes everyday people with the courage to face realities like illness, financial hardship, disabled children and sagging breasts - realities which affirmations and prosperity prayers somehow don't instantly fix. One wish I have for you is that you can find a place in your heart for such people and stop blaming them for their frailties and foibles. Many of them really are great people, even if they don't look as polished as you and your bleached front teeth.

I wish you well as we go our separate ways. Namaste, you charming bastard, you.

Sincerely,

DF

It's not like I actually planned to join the New Age movement.  Not the way someone might plan, for instance, to register as a Democrat or relocate for a job in Des Moines.

What drew me inadvertently into what I call the Crystal Blue Persuasion in the late 1980s was an interest in recovery from mental illness beyond what traditional psychiatry offered at that time.  I was fascinated by approaches like body-centered therapies and acupuncture and yogic breathing for managing moods, reducing symptoms and increasing a sense of well-being for the kind of people who used to get sent away to someplace unspeakably scary or sent home grotesquely tranquilized for, like, a really long time.  People like a great aunt who suicided just before the FDA approved the use of lithium as a psychiatric medication.  People like me, who received a PTSD diagnosis during my senior year in high school in 1988, when many Americans still equivocated that condition with post-Vietnam Syndrome.

Please understand that this was a good 10 years or so before downward dog became a household word or anyone had ever even heard of kale.  Quality-of-life pharmaceuticals like Prozac, which could alleviate symptoms without completely tranquilizing patients, were just barely making their entrance on the treatment scene.  I simply refused to believe that people with mental disorders like PTSD were doomed to a life of either emotional torment or Mother's Little Helper coma.  There just weren't a heck of a lot of treatment options at that time.  Either you were in a hospital, in decades-long analysis, in a Skinner box, or hopelessly unstable with emotional issues that none of the above could alleviate.

I started exploring alternative psychotherapies like Gestalt and Bioenergetics, first as a client and later as a therapist-in-training.  Initially, these approaches grew out of the humanistic psychology model and took hold amid the counterculture of the 1960s.  I thought they were cool and a little rebellious.  There was so much creativity and inspiration going on, and sometimes downright heroics.  People's lives were bravely turning around before my eyes as they confronted their demons with unfathomable pluck.  The methods were a little out there, but still practical and in many cases effective where talk therapy interventions fell short.

I'm not entirely clear on how the practicality of techniques that relaxed and restored the nervous system morphed into an inclination toward metaphysics.  Something to do with Ram Dass and acid, I'm told.  Also, in the absence of today's unprecedented advances in neuroscience and brain scanning technologies, the benefits of these therapies seemed magical.  Even miraculous.  There was no doubt to me that there was a strong spiritual component to this kind of emotional healing.  I had always had mystical proclivities anyway.  In fact, I discovered my own spirituality in those types of somatic processes and continue those practices as my form of private worship to this day.  What I did not find inside myself was the wacky superficial theology that began to spring up around these holistic healing communities like mushrooms after a rain.  I did not drink the Kool-Aid.

Well, maybe a sip.  There was a phase of my own trauma recovery that was so brutal that I began buying into the magical thinking.  I began to believe that my thoughts could control outcomes (and incomes) and that imagining myself in a bubble of white light would exempt me from the human condition.  And I would secretly praise myself when this worked and chastise myself when it didn't.  I lived in what amounted to a spiritual meritocracy whose basic tenants echoed the wish fulfillment fantasies of a seven year old.

Until a dear friend got sick and much of our healing community either blamed her (for taking on bad karma) or blamed themselves (for giving her negative vibes).  This woman was on her death bed.  Her family was planning her funeral.  And our so-called spiritual group was morbidly preoccupied with who was to blame energetically?  I knew then it had to stop.  This was not a mature spirituality.

Yet I also knew there were some grains of truth amid all the hype and how-to gurus.  True, I could no longer emotionally afford to believe that we humans completely "create our own reality" like mythical sorcerers of destiny.  If we were that powerful, no one would ever be poor or sick or homely or heartbroken, ever.  I understood that deep acceptance of life as it is, without judgment, was key to happiness and mental health. But what I did draw from the movement was that how we choose to view reality - what we focus on, what narrative we attribute to events, how we organize ourselves around what happens to us - does impact our experience of life.  And, because of a whole bunch of cool, complicated neurological shit like mirror neurons, the world responds in kind.  (More on that later.)  Try this: wherever you are currently located while reading this, look around for as many red things as you can possibly find.  Red is freakin' everywhere, right?  Now look for green.  Wait, the whole entire world is totally green!  And so on.  But there is no way that you can make red not red, or green anything other than green, without a can of spray paint for which you will have to show some i.d. to purchase at Ace.

Fast forward a few years, and you'll find me a snarky veteran of the experiential workshop.  If, like me, you have been to countless touchy feely psychotherapy trainings, you have no doubt encountered the "What kind of animal is most like your personality and why?" group icebreaker.

And no doubt you've borne witness to such cosmic pearls as "wild gazelle," "winter swan" or "sparkly vampire."

And if you happened to be in that same workshop with me in recent years, you might have heard me say "billy goat - friendly, curious, stubborn, playful, naughty, bold and sometimes ornery just for the fun of it."

Because, Sparkle Pony, no one shits magic dust.