The Ultimate Happiness Prescription – Deepak Chopra

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The Ultimate Happiness Prescription was the thinnest book on the stack so it bumped the 400, 500 and 900+ page monsters aside. Deepak Chopra rides to the rescue on a day hijacked by too much real life. Good message for the frazzled, in any case. The book explores spiritual and neurological dispositions toward emotional equanimity and follows each of seven keys (Deepak Chopra likes to write self-help books in lists of seven) with some simple steps to move your happiness set point up on the scale.

It’s quite sensible, not very woo-woo at all. Body awareness provides clues to how you really feel about events, circumstances and decisions. Chopra examines the interrelatedness of matter, the energy field consisting of the entire universe and you in it, as he tells you to pay attention to what you feel and where in the body you feel it. Stress affects certain areas, anger and fear others—by bringing awareness to physical feelings you can mitigate and even heal what might be making you unhappy, or unwell.

There’s a very good section on being present in the moment. Nothing new about the teaching—it is thousands of years old—but it is a powerful catalyst for change. The point is that happiness can only exist in the moment because the past is over and the future does not yet exist. That seems obvious but we cart around so much baggage that we seldom devote full awareness and appreciation to the present. Chopra recommends a mindfulness practice to increase present-moment awareness. He emphasizes the benefits of meditation as well.

I tend to like Chopra’s audio and video lectures more than his books. Those events seem to treat subjects in greater depth than the slim, nicely laid-out books. But The Ultimate Happiness Prescription is worth the relatively short amount of time it takes to read it and probably worth a few re-reads, too. The activities Chopra suggests and the points he makes apply to every type of self-improvement effort. In the end, he delivers an introduction to the quest for enlightenment—not some exalted mystical state but a better, saner, more intelligent and, well, happier way to live in this world.

The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keys to Joy and Enlightenment   Deepak Chopra | Harmony Books 2009

The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul – Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

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Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee is a teacher in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order and the author of several books on global consciousness and the concept of oneness. The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul is a collection of talks and teachings that expound on his thinking. I picked it up after hearing him speak in a conference with the shaman Sandra Ingerman. It’s unusual to hear a spiritual teacher so wholly committed to the concept that the patriarchal repression for millennia of matriarchal or feminine energy got us into this planetary mess we experience today. Vaughan-Lee believes we must rediscover and honor the feminine if the world is to heal itself and we are to survive.

He makes a compelling argument that the deep knowledge of creation is embodied in woman and that energy is the key to transforming our existence. His beliefs imbue the planet with a life and consciousness and he invokes teachings about the anima mundi or world soul and the lumen dei or divine light and how the material presence of the one is not inferior to the transcendence of the other.

It’s very interesting and might read at first as complicated to an initiate. But the chapters explain and revisit Vaughan-Lee’s arguments so you can grasp his meaning from various perspectives. This is both a strength and a failing of the book. I would recommend reading it over time rather than in one big gulp. Read in a single setting, it feels unnecessarily repetitive. Contemplated in a more leisurely study, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul, is a lucid primer to another way of looking at the problems we have created on this planet and the ways in which we might fix them.

I borrowed the book from the library but it will go on my acquisitions list because I think I’ll want to revisit it more than once. I’m always resistant to male explanations of why women have the responsibility to repair the damage, but Vaughan-Lee’s writing does seem reasoned and sincere and there is a wisdom to be gained from it. The Return of the Feminine…is a book to underline and to work with. Many of the passages are powerful and beautiful and I will use them to inspire my intuitive inclusion of these ideas in my own fiction.

The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul   Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee | The Golden Sufi Center   2009

The Fire Starter Sessions – Danielle LaPorte

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Danielle LaPorte crams a lot of type into The Fire Starter Sessions—bold black large fonts and tiny san serif and some red, italic and gray here and there for emphasis. It’s as visual as it is legible. The messages are hard to ignore—which is the point. TFSS is a wake-up call from a Type-A, high-enthusiasm, self-help guru who believes that balance is overrated and doing what you say you’re going to do is the secret of success.

LaPorte is pithy, funny, hip, direct and wise. She’s produced a caffeine-jolt of a book that stuffs you in the mouth of the cannon, aims it at a Really Big Goal and lights the fuse. Since death is inevitable, LaPorte writes, your only intelligent choice is to live your passion—and then she tells you how to do it. Part attitude, part tunnel vision and part divine inspiration will start a business, achieve enlightenment, capture the heart of Rhett Butler, sail you through medical school, raise joyful kids, compose a symphony, invent the next technology after Apple.

All the clever turns of phrase, colloquialisms, cussing and conniving keep the pages moving and the message coming. No slacking, no drudgery, no fuzzy thinking, no selling yourself short. First define your self because, like it or not, you are a brand. Know thyself—and really take some time to find out what floats your boat and which is your favorite flavor. Get spiritual—not all tangled up in religion–uncluttered by meditation, yoga, tree-hugging, journal-keeping, making time and room to just be so the creative ideas will arrive in that cleared space.  

TFSS is crammed with suggestions for positive thinking, from post-it notes with one-word reminders to ditching the daily planner and immersing yourself in the flow. Pick your heroes, Gandhi and Lady GaGa, and write down four of their traits you admire—then acquire those traits. Make art that feels good—why would anyone want evidence of your enforced industry? It will have struggle written all over it and you won’t have had any fun. Remember that inevitability thing about death? Don’t waste your life.

Starting fires looks like your best and only choice as you devour big chunks of this book. It is served up in big chunks, so you won’t be perusing it sedately. From the flaming red cover to the pyromaniacal advice inside, The Fire Starter Sessions will incite you to blaze a new trail through the weedy dullness of your days, embrace your most combustible ideas, prioritize what is sacred to you, and shine.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms   Danielle LaPorte | Crown  2012

Peace is Every Step – Thich Nhat Hanh

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Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who organized the Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in 1969, has written numerous beautiful slender volumes dense in mindfulness philosophy and practical teachings. Peace is Every Step, introduced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translates the mindfulness practice into ordinary life. It is infused with the gentle wisdom Nhat Hanh has shared with readers and audiences since the turbulent 60s and is no less appropriate for these tumultuous times.

Nhat Hanh’s point is that we cannot just work for, legislate or impose peace—we have to become peace to have any influence on our surroundings, our government and on the health of the planet. His is a very empowering teaching. By paying close attention to the moments of our lives, we enter that still space of perfect balance, of being fully present in the now, and release all chaos and confusion.

The book is divided into three main sections—each consisting of subheads with precepts, inspiration and examples to make mindfulness absolutely clear. Breathe! You are Alive outlines how to eat, wash the dishes and walk mindfully with instructions about the attention to the breath that returns your consciousness to the moment. Transformation and Healing deals with anger, love and compassion. Nhat Hanh explains a way to hug using three deep meditation breaths to anchor yourself firmly in the connection. It sounds a little bit awkward but extremely cool. Peace is Every Step talks about real awareness of the immediate and extended world around you, seen and unseen suffering, and how to contemplate clouds when you are the river.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the great masters of mindfulness meditation and his appeal to many people is his approachability and his no-fuss notions of how to live a richly rewarding and generous life. From politics to ecology to watching leaves color and fall in autumn, Peace is Every Step is a prescription for healing ourselves and our fractured planet, a do-it-yourself manual for replacing fear, enmity and confusion with a serene and sustainable existence.  

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life   Thich Nhat Hanh | Bantam Books  1992

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There – Sylvia Boorstein

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I’ve been revisiting some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings lately and thinking about consciously living with more mindfulness. That seems like a fairly gentle way to de-stress, be present in the moment and very focused on whatever I am doing. Sylvia Boorstein’s Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There is a down-to-earth how-to for elevating the quality of your life without making yourself crazy. It’s not a story; it’s a primer for giving yourself a meditation retreat that will establish or deepen a mindfulness practice. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to follow the schedule and reap the benefits. You just have to do it: sit, walk, eat, sleep. Simple–but not. Most of us don’t retain the skill, through childhood and into adulthood, of just being with ourselves.

Boorstein counsels you about setting up a retreat–in a formal retreat center, a borrowed cottage or a room of your house with the phone turned off and the family on hold for a couple of days. You structure the get-away however you can, even if you can’t actually get away. Prepare your exit strategy from daily responsibilities–someone else may need to walk the dog, cook the meals, collect the mail, etc. You’ll be busy doing nothing. Organize the most basic necessities–comfortable clothes, good meditation cushion, timer or alarm clock with a pleasing tone, a shawl or cover-up to ward off chills, walking shoes–unless you are lucky enough to be staying on a warm beach and living barefoot.

Walking and sitting meditation periods alternate between and around meals and sleep. It can be hard to just sit and empty your mind. Minds chatter–Buddhists call this monkey mind–and it can seem impossible to turn those streaming thoughts off. But that’s why they call it a practice. Let the thoughts arise, note them and let them go. Eventually they will go. At some point, you will become aware of your breathing. Focus on the breathing. Return focus to your breathing when a thought interrupts. No big deal. Do it over and over and the thoughts will get bored and go plague somebody else. But it takes practice and you don’t make a big competition out of it. Take a break and take a walk.

Here’s how you walk: find a clear, quiet, private place. If it is in your garden or along a wooded path, be sure you can traverse it without a lot of interruptions. If you are home and your path is a hallway, clear it so you can walk unimpeded. Set the timer or the alarm on your watch. Then stroll. Don’t check the time. Walk for half-an-hour. Begin by becoming aware of all the sensations of your whole body–the feeling of the breeze, sunshine, relaxed shoulders, relaxed breathing. Gradually your steps will slow and then you can focus on the sensation of your bare feet touching the floor or the movement of your knees as you step. If your mind starts up with its flotsam and jetsam routine, go back to the whole body awareness and run through the progression again. Stop when the alarm goes off.

There are many brief instructions for various ways to approach the sitting and walking practices and how to overcome the dread monkey mind, or at least get it to chill a bit. Boorstein relates the actions of the retreat to the precepts of compassion and awareness that are central to Buddhist teaching. But the lessons are logical and pragmatic, not didactic. You’re not becoming a Buddhist–you are becoming a more peaceful person. A peaceful person knows how to eat mindfully. There are ways to pay attention to the food, to your reactions to it, to the sensory impressions you have, to the acts of chewing and swallowing. Those tricks make you very present to the moment of eating a meal.

Throughout the book, there are short stories and anecdotes to illustrate a precept, a practice or a common pitfall. It’s very easy and very doable. You don’t de-stress by stressing over how you let go of stress.  You do discover more of who you are, buried under all the layers of your busy, disconnected life. You could follow Boorstein’s guide for a weekend, a week or a lifetime. Every activity–or lack of activity–can be folded into regular daily life. Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There is a kind of Mindfulness 101.  You don’t even need a retreat to try these techniques. You can practice them for a half hour here and there in the carnival of your quotidian. Little by little, they will help you to get past all the noise and really hear the music.

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There: A Mindfulness Retreat with Sylvia Boorstein   Sylvia Boorstein | HarperSanFrancisco   1996

The Man Within My Head – Pico Iyer

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When I saw that Pico Iyer had written a self-examination of his long fascination with and links to Graham Greene, I knew I’d have to read it. Iyer’s work evokes Greene for me sometimes—the outsider’s adventures in extreme and theatrical cultures are the stuff of movie swashbuckling or gritty documentaries. But the exploits cast another kind of filter over the events that I knew as well. There is a sharp and bitter loneliness in not belonging. There are shadows, a knife-edge of introspection, a heightened awareness of what is—and what you are not. It’s easy to become someone else when you travel beyond your own social boundaries but, paradoxically, it’s impossible to avoid yourself.

The Man Within My Head covers territory not often encountered in travel writing. Iyer digs into his bifurcated childhood as an Indian boy in a British boarding school with regular trips home to Santa Barbara where his parents’ academic lives were immersed in the culture of the 60s and 70s. Pico Iyer’s boyhood public school experiences were similar to those of Greene—and his subsequent wandering around the globe duplicated patterns of Greene’s journeys as well.  Greene became for him a kind of surrogate father, a fictional counterpart to the real father, a distinguished Gandhi scholar, who regaled college students with his brilliant syntheses of East and West, classical and contemporary.

The book is not a linear narrative. Scenes emerge, fade, veer off, double back like hairpin-turn mountain roads—the kind with single lanes, sheer drops and white crosses marking fatalities. Trips to Ethiopia and Bolivia seem foolhardy with explicit danger. In Sri Lanka, an explosion of violence makes leaving the relative safety of a hotel room unappealing. In Cuba, the trips are research for an eventual novel, Cuba and the Night, that is very thinly fictional. Our Man in Havana places Greene in eerily similar circumstances. In fact, Greene’s books ghost through Iyer’s travels from Indo-China to the Caribbean. Greene’s spiritual dilemmas engage Iyer in an enduring argument, even as Iyer turns his back on his world and upbringing, searching for some spare truth in his own peregrinations.

A surprise in the recounting of the life of a writer I have always sought out (Iyer, although I could claim the same thing about Greene), Pico Iyer is a good friend of Bernie Diederich. I knew Bernie and worked with him in Miami—he is the grand old dean of Latin American and Caribbean coverage and has written brilliant books on many of the region’s legendary dictators—but, in all the time I knew him, I never suspected he was close to Iyer. A small world just got much smaller. Made me nostalgic for the days when any bag I carried contained a passport, a reporter’s notebook, a pair of Raybans and some cash for the currency exchange.

Iyer’s trek inside his own mind isn’t an extended essay and it isn’t a memoir—more like the puzzling of a Zen koan or a long meditation on a literary and personal influence. Graham Greene was, and remains, a strong presence for him. The Man Within My Head examines the convergence of their lives and work, pulls out pieces of Iyer’s life and holds them up to the light, reveals as much about the author as it does about the real and fictional fathers who haunt him.

The Man Within My Head   Pico Iyer | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

Related post:  Cuba and the Night

Urban Texting

New York architect John Locke designs a "phone booth library" for seldom used street fixtures. City as library--YES!

Hundreds…

So far, I haven’t even hit the one-third mark in a year of reading a book a day. But I have logged more than one hundred books and a trillion hours of reading and some serious blog time. The epiphanies have been much more modest than the effort and they are more like observations than revelations. But there are a few.

Many books that seem juicy and eminently readable are HUGE—800 pages or more. Many. This is really really difficult to manage when you are juggling making a living and running a house at the same time. Skip too much sleep and your eyes go blurry—reading speed slows and the brain turns to mush. Skip the rest of life and no one gets fed, the rabbit runs out of hay and paying work evaporates like ocean spume on black sand. I started Marukami’s 1Q84 and had to return it to the library before I was finished. And it was good—I wanted to read it but it wasn’t happening in one day. Back on the endless library list now to check it out again so I can discover whether the entire book is as good as the beginning. Tackled a massive life of Mahler, another doorstop, and dropped it back in the book bin. Deadly. Not worth the epic read to get it finished.

One casualty of the daily deadline is reflection. I have to forego savoring clever or beautiful writing—or contemplating imaginative ideas—when it’s essential to push on through and complete the book. On the plus side, how fiction works and how language supports it get clearer and clearer the more books I read. A good biography will typically have a classic hero’s journey, even if the hero loses in the end. A good mystery will weave a believable world around a murder with no false step to jar you out of it. Some genres that I never read but pick up now to add variety to this daily adventure are actually entertaining—romance, for example, although I doubt I will ever spend too much time in the land of brooding heroes and heaving bosoms.

So, how is this changing my life? Obviously, it’s eating my time. I’m working my way through a lot of books. I’m also forced to produce some writing every day, tired or not, inspired or not. That has to be good practice for a procrastinating writer. And I have reinforced the knowledge that, if I sit down and begin, I will always find something to write. Never fails. I have more respect for genre books now—I always liked certain kinds but, a hundred books in, I understand that they are often more readable and enjoyable than the well-reviewed “literary” novels that display a mastery of dog-and-pony tricks but don’t pull me into a world. I still want characters who care about things and count for something. Being trapped in a book with a self-absorbed nihilist is a fate akin to falling in love with a vampire—it can never end well and the experience will probably be very painful to boot.

My suspicion is that reading a book every day for a year is an odd kind of creative writing MFA. Some of the stories are very good, some not, but all of the books have a narrative to discern, and lit tricks to make the puzzle pieces fit. I’m better at picking them out. The randomness of the books I select increases the odds that I will learn as much about how to make a book as I do about the women who changed paleontology or where to sit when straddling a dragon in-flight. A book I might consider a fail has as much to reveal about the art of writing as a clear, fluent read with every note pitch-perfect.

I love reading and I’m not sick of it yet, although keeping a stack of books on hand requires a constant hustle. This challenge has intensified my appreciation for the public library. We should treasure our libraries; we would be savages and philistines without them. And one more trivial observation—the doorstop books are awkward to heft and uncomfortable to hold after a while. Their weight and bulk make a compelling case for the convenience of a slim, lightweight e-reader, however much you prefer the experience of curling up with a good, turn-the-paper-pages book.

Everyday Zen – Charlotte Joko Beck

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The Laundromat is atypically uncrowded and I get two jumbo washers right next to each other so I don’t need to take a deep breath and remind myself to accept life “just as it is.” I was ready for it, though, after spending the morning immersed in Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, a book-length collection of dharma talks on Zen practice, its purpose (no purpose) and the philosophy behind it all. I did manage to misread the SOAK and WASH cycles and dumped the detergent and bleach in the wrong ones. Oh well. Perfection is not the point, after all.

Beck was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Zen teacher (she died in June at age 94) who covered the Zen precepts from basic practice to enlightenment with stories, examples and candid directives. Sitting zazen—the Zen term for a meditation session—seems uncomplicated: sit, breathe, empty your mind. But it is a rigorous practice that exacerbates or initiates aches and pains and could torpedo your psyche. Get too emotionally uncomfortable, a very real possibility, and you might abandon the effort in order to avoid confronting your callous, misguided and unattractive dark side.

The dharma talks explain how—and why—to persevere. “From the withered tree, a flower blooms” is Beck’s favorite quotation from classic Zen teachings, much repeated. Uh oh. Guess who’s the withered tree in this metaphor? The flower represents your progress—maybe a joyful breakthrough or an experience of inner peace. Don’t count on a big explosion of light, O Buddha-wannabe. Imperceptible change is the norm—very incremental. Sit down on your cushion and settle in for the long haul.

It’s a seductive practice, though, tough as it may be. “Enlightenment is not something you achieve,” Beck writes. “It is the absence of something.” Sounds nicely minimalist and elegant, unlike the life of someone with every towel and bathmat in the house putting the soap in the wrong cycle and trying not to splash bleach on herself. I think I soaped too early the last time I was here, too.

Beck cautions that to seek enlightenment is futile and ambitious. Zen is a progressive clarification, a lifetime of lifting veils, shedding misperceptions, accepting the moment. She details ways to handle anger, pain, disillusion, confusion, even breathing. She punctures all the bright balloons of dreamy, nirvana-like states and says simply that you get better at knowing what is true for you and making decisions about your life as you progress.

Duality and individuality are false notions in Zen. Everyone and everything is connected, no separation, no difference. That maniac neighbor who screams and cusses at his kid for six hours straight on Saturday night? You. Every Presidential candidate with his hand out for corporate largess? You. That prune-faced fourth grade teacher who kept you in for almost every recess all year? You. The Dalai Lama? You. All the same. Zen is great physics. Nonduality contradicts James Hillman’s theory of The Soul’s Code, the book I read before this one. Hillman builds his work around the concept of individual fate. Zen is a zebra of another stripe. Not only are you interrelated to the entire universe but nonattachment is a central issue and benefit of all that focused sitting.

Nonattachment loosens the bonds that lash you to your desires so your life becomes calmer, less driven to get and do things, less tinged with disappointment at all you want but don’t have. People who aren’t in the grip of attachment tend to have fewer things, Beck says, but that’s really irrelevant. What is crucial is that you can tell the difference between what is impermanent and what is important. Soap cycle—impermanent. Clean towels—a greater good. All the toys in the toy box? Fine. Few or no toys–make do with your imagination? Also fine. You become free, light and smarter about how to live.

Zen isn’t for everyone. But it isn’t some esoteric practice reserved for a few hardy initiates either. Sit every day, according to Beck, and you’ll gradually open your life to a quiet joy and a peaceful acceptance of each moment as it is.

Everyday Zen: Love and Work (Plus)   Charlotte Joko Beck | HarperSanFrancisco  1989

Change Your Story, Change Your Life – Stephanie S. Tolan

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Stephanie Tolan wrote an essay about gifted childen called “Is It a Cheetah?” It’s fairly well-known in gifted homeschooling circles and it is a cogent argument for honoring the intelligence of children and providing the level of challenge and the variety of subjects they need. Her Newbery Honor novel, Surviving the Applewhites, about a very unconventional unschooling family and the delinquent who is placed in their care as a last resort, is a delight and mirrors many of the tenets of our own unschooling journey in a conventional, competitive, consumer-driven society. So I was predisposed to enjoy a book-length exploration of the power of story when I stumbled across it in pursuit of some other scrap of knowledge.

Change Your Story, Change Your Life is Tolan’s primer for using the power of mind/intention/imagination to write your own story. She espouses something she calls the Story Principle that holds we are each the Author of our own life and can write it how we choose. The idea is to script the ordinary and the profound events into a narrative that works for you. Too often, in fact most of the time, she writes, we blindly accept the conventional wisdom we are handed and the way things have always been since we were old enough to notice. But these stories may not serve us at all and typically lead to missed opportunities, failure, depression and fear. By consciously writing our own narrative, we tell the story that should happen and life aligns itself with our plot.

Tolan’s research is deep and wide. She has read Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy and psychology, spiritual classics from all cultures, and scientific journals on the workings of the mind and on quantum physics. She’s bright enough to pull it all into a coherent argument for listening to the small, still voice within and taking action in our own best interests, not out of habit. She writes explanatory chapters followed by exercises to give readers the visceral experience of trying the storytelling practice and having it work. You may recognize experiences of your own in the examples she provides.

“A butterfly is not a caterpillar with wings” is one fabulous remark in the section on ways to view death and what happens next. Tolan compares the process of letting go of physical life to the formation of a chrysalis from which an entirely new and transcendent creature emerges. It’s a sensible and beautiful way to confront the social stigma of death and move past the fears into curiosity and empowerment. She discusses the need for a suspension of disbelief—skepticism being the norm in our world when it comes to the numinous and miraculous. Her view is that miracles are just the triumph of belief and practice over negative thoughts and their consequences.

Change Your Story… is not a Pollyanna prescription for avoiding harsh reality. It’s a seminal shift in POV that can determine our mundane and magnificent moments. I think, if you believe in the essential power of story and you create your own, you narrate a world and a role in it that can mirror your deepest desires and allow you to live them. Several years ago, I printed out the phrase Stories are Healing, a perfectly balanced assertion (s t o r i e s | h e a l i n g– both seven letters, easy to set in type) and taped it to my computer to counter existential despair.  So I’m already on board with the basic premise. Really, how does it make sense to consign a conscious life to a hamster wheel, followed by oblivion? For those who don’t mind reading on .pdf, you can access the whole book for free at http://www.storyhealer.com/story_healer_full.pdf.

Tolan’s Story Principle is logical and, in both small and substantial ways, it delivers. Try telling yourself you will find a parking space easily at a crowded mall, or that the train you need will arrive just as you reach the platform. Bingo. Life just got simpler. Try it with bigger and bigger things to prove to yourself that it works. Add some practices to still your monkey mind, like meditation or quiet walks in nature, tune into your own intuition, begin to study the volumes of science and spiritual wisdom she suggests and you can become a powerful bard with a life you choose—electrifying page-turner or peaceful journey.  Think about it. This could be the only New Year’s resolution you need–tell your own story, invent a beautiful life.     

Change Your Story, Change Your Life   | Stephanie S. Tolan  2009