Posts from — November 2007

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Here’s where I do.

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There are two things writers want: time & creative flow. Getting away from your everyday routine makes space for both. Join me on a retreat constructed especially for writers. The focus will be on plenty of time alone for personal writing, combined with daily meditation practice and evening discussion groups. Open to writers of fiction and non-fiction, published and unpublished. Meditation instruction will be offered.

Please email me with any questions.

January 4 – 11
BARNET, VT
Karme Choling Meditation Center
$850 (includes housing + food)

April 14-18
RED FEATHER LAKES, CO
Shambhala Mountain Center
$TBD

May 11 – 16
LENOX, MA
Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health
$295 (does not include housing + food)

June 29 – July 5
BARNET, VT
Karme Choling Meditation Center
$850 (includes housing + food)

What past participants have to say:

I had not written anything in a long time. The Writer’s Retreat gave me the space, time, and inward focus to let creativity happen naturally. I hadn’t realized how much I had to say. The meditation aspect of the retreat provided a peaceful structure where writing could be a pleasure once again instead of work. Susan led each day with a purposeful blend of meditation practice and writing sessions and I appreciated the fruits that came from a firm, but generous schedule. –A.B.

I cannot recommend this writing and meditation retreat enough! Susan’s carefully considered practice schedule offers precisely the right balance of meditation and space in which to write. Her teaching style allows for full creative expression to unfold because she neither interferes with the writing process, nor does she abandon the writer to his or her own devices. The result is a profound deepening of the work of writing and the practice of meditation. I left with an much more sophisticated understanding of how these two practices are not only complimentary, but how meditation is crucial to the life of the writer. This is a very rare opportunity for anyone, indeed. –C.G.

Susan, thank you so much for the amazing retreat at Karme Choling! It was such a powerful and inspiring time for me. The space itself, so beautiful and peaceful, is perfect for getting away, and the rhythms of the day there provided a wonderful structure for work and rest. Writing time balanced with meals, walks and meditation, and I arrived at a new place in my work which is very exciting. Please keep me posted on future events; I would join you again in a heartbeat. Thanks again so much. –C.M.

P.S. They’re incredibly fun…

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Please check out these wonderful responses. Most people eventually find a way to get over a broken heart, but not with so much awareness and generosity toward self and ex.

What helped you? (If anything.)

Time. And our ability to keep in touch throughout all these years
after. This was a wonderful midlife romance that has turned into a
friendship for going on 15 years now. At the time of the breakup
though it was trauma. The pain lasted for at least 6 months to a
year. one thing about being an adult (hopefully) is that you don’t
go away mad when you realize there are other riches to be had. What
helped me was her easily letting me down, being honest about how a
life together would create issues in her life. And I knew from my
heart of hearts that we would be at each other’s throats in the day
to day of of a relationship. The hardest part to let go was the
sexual intimacy. I had come out of a second marriage that was
basically emasculating, manipulative (on her part), and fuel to my
rage. Once this marriage ended (a 12 years), an enormous weight was
lifted off my back and my rage, which I had seen professional help
about, deflated like a balloon in few weeks. When miss future
heartbreak and I got together it was like teenagers all over again,
something I had not experienced since before my marriage. We were
both coming out of marriages, hers a 30 year run which ended when
her husband ran off with another woman. We were both rebounders. Or
is that reboundees? She was obsessive about cleanliness in her home
to the point that a dropped peanut husk on the kitchen floor caused
her to say on one of my visits, with THE LOOK only women can
give…”we will NEVER EVER get married!” Of course i was not
looking for a third marriage so i was perplexed. At my place, which
was a bit of a mess, she had no problem. my place was my place and
how i kept it was my business. she didn’t try to change it nor
clean it (darn it). My place was a refuge from her hectic life of 4
grown kids and 9 grandkids. there is a number of things she trusts
me on, my judgment, my honesty and frankly now that we are not in
a heavy deep relationship i can easily be more honest with her. she
values my opinion.

What did you learn about yourself?

—-the first thing i learned going into this rebound relationship
was that I had not lost my touch in the bedroom despite my fallow
second marriage. the second thing i learned was that all those
years in marriage i had not grown emotionally. i had stagnated. and
this created a number of irritations in this rebound relationship.
i was an embarrassment of excess baggage. I also learned the value
of deep friendship with a member of the opposite sex and i have a
number of women friends now, many of them happily married, or
settled in their lifestyle, and their perspective is greatly
appreciated. I learned how to grow up and get rid of that excess
baggage just in time. Because that allowed me to also confront my
cancer in healing ways. I became more in control of my emotions.
and in helping others sometimes tackle theirs.

About love?

—-it don’t come around very often so when it does embrace,
cherish, coddle, nurture, feed, and grow it. Do not smother it.
Let it seek its own sunshine. Become water and live and let live.
Love has many forms. I have lots of people that I love and that
love me even though I have chosen celibacy since that relationship
ended. Not out of bitterness but out of being set in my ways and
enjoying that. If the right person came along….perhaps a well
worn path between two houses may be the ticket. Altho as a
cherished friend of mine, since passed, once said, the problem with
that is you never know who is coming in the back door. Ha!

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I’d love to hear your story for my next book.

What helped you? (If anything.)

What did you learn about yourself?

About love?

If you don’t want to post here, feel free to email me directly.

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Please watch this.

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I appreciate you who come here to read my blog. I keep up with the stats every now and then and am so happy about the amount of visitors. I’m about to start a site re-design. I’m looking for input in two areas:

First, what do you enjoy reading about?? My interests are so varied: Buddhism, music, relationships, marriage, my own personal life (of course!), pop culture, personal organization, and the Enneagram. Till now I’ve just been writing whatever I feel inclined to, from little observation-ish things to personal essays. What would like to read more of? When you come to this site, what are you hoping to read about? Take away? Any and all thoughts are welcome. Please e-mail susan@susanpiver.com

If you’re a design person, do you have any suggestions for look and feel? As it is now, the site seems a bit cramped and I’m looking for a more attractive way to present all this info. Any thoughts? Please e-mail susan@susanpiver.com.

Grateful for input!

Am in a bit of a no man’s land regarding the next book I want to write. I want to write about heartbreak from this perspective: there is wisdom in it. The good news and the bad news is that it basically destroys self-view. You are no longer able to see yourself or your life in the same terms; the slate is wiped clean and even though it doesn’t feel very good, there is extraordinary wisdom in this not knowing. A broken heart is like the world’s swiftest BS meter. Whatever is without genuine value–stale friendships, responsibilities that don’t align with your deeper intentions, empty aspirations–simply drops away. You no longer have the stomach for these things, or at least you see them for what they are. You see what everyone and everything in your life is actually made of. You are able to see clearly.

In the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, we talk a lot about spiritual warriorship. What is a warrior? One who is tough enough never to feel pain, never become intimidated? No. That is actually thought of as stupidity. A real warrior embraces clear seeing. She has the intelligence to look directly into her pain and to build from it deeper wisdom. If you can do this, if you can sit night after night with your broken heart, tasting it, feeling it, tolerating it in order to learn its lessons, you deserve to wear the badge of extreme courage. This is a warrior. I bow to you.

I want to write this book so much. I hope my publisher will like it. We shall see.

“So each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground; the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster but the discovery of an inner refuge..

Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood and used, can often turn out to be an unexpected source of strength. In the biographies of the masters, you will often find that had they not faced difficulties and obstacles, they would not have discovered the strength they needed to rise above them. This was true, for example, of Gesar, the great warrior king of Tibet, whose escapades form the greatest epic of Tibetan literature. Gesar means “indomitable,” someone who can never be put down. From the moment Gesar was born, his evil uncle Trotung tried all kinds of means to kill him. But with each attempt Gesar only grew stronger and stronger. It was thanks to Trotung’s efforts, in fact, that Gesar was to become so great. This gave rise to a Tibetan proverb: “Trotung tro ma tung na, Gesar ge mi sar,” which means that if Trotung had not been so malicious and scheming, Gesar could never have risen so high.

For the Tibetans Gesar is not only a martial warrior but also a spiritual one. To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche tells us, becoming a warrior means that “we can trade our small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision, one of fearlessness, openness, and genuine heroism…” To enter the transforming field of that much vaster vision is to learn how to be at home in change, and how to make impermanence our friend.

~From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
by Sogyal Rinpoche

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I hung out with my friend Chris Flett today. Chris is an executive coach who only works with women. He recently published a book, “What Men Don’t Tell Women About Business.” I love Chris and I only wish for his success. When I heard that Newsweek slammed the book pretty hard, I felt so bad. This is his first book!! Totally vulnerable!!

Well there was no need to worry. Here’s what he said about it, via his Facebook update: “Christopher is ticking off Newsweek.” Where I would have been crawling under a rock, he was seeing the bad review as an indication of his power. Word up, my friend. I learned something valuable from you.

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This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

Upside Down: What Really Killed the Music Business

In 2000 I said to a friend, “the music industry is dead. It’s just a carcass that hasn’t been drug away yet. Little things feeding off the remains but soon it’ll just be dust.” Not a pretty image, but not inaccurate either.

When I expressed this sentiment to longtime fellow-music business colleagues, about ½ of them scoffed, ¼ nodded in agreement, and another ¼ had the saddest response of all: belief in the system. Belief that some fresh form of music would act as a rising tide that lifts all boats and “save the business,” just as disco, hip-hop, and punk did in the 70s/80s, and as the introduction of the compact disc did in the late 80s/early 90s. Then we grownups would shake our heads and go well we sure didn’t see that coming but let’s make hay with the recordings and the radio promotions and a zillion endcap displays in Musicland and Walmart.

Whenever someone said something like this—that a new kind of music would rise up to save us—I’d ask, do you see any signs of this right now? Any underground club scenes? Regional sound that’s got good buzz? Crazy stuff coming out of the radio at 2 AM? Kids speaking some incomprehensible music scenester-inspired lingo? No, they’d say. But we’re too old to know. Anyway there’s techno and electronica and we hate it so maybe it’s the next thing… It’s got to be happening somewhere. Well, it isn’t, I’d say, I don’t care how old I am. There is no next thing.

A “next thing” isn’t a derivative mix of existing sounds, no matter how mind-blowingly creative, beautiful, or shocking. A next thing is like Rock and Roll. R&B. Reggae. Soul. Disco. Funk. Metal. Hip Hop. Punk. We got all these forms from the 50s through the early 80s. And since then?
No new forms have evolved since the early 80s. Go ahead. Argue with me. Tell me that Alternative or Grunge or Techno or Emo or House are new forms and we can be certain that even now the young people of America are experimenting with music that is going to blow us all away. Go ahead. (They’re experimenting all right, but with how to share music, not how to play it…) And I’ll tell you what I would have said to a classical music aficionado in the late1800s: no new shoots are going to grow on this plant. You had your Medieval, your Renaissance, your Baroque and what have you, but after the Romantic period, what new forms evolved? I’m not talking about the occasional astonishing instrumentalist or crazy avant garde soundtrack that catches mainstream attention. You classical people, you had your—what?—500, 600 years of evolution and we popular music people had our 30 years. For both of us, it’s over. All there is to do is mix existing forms together to create hybrids or play the old stuff in new ways.

I’m not saying there aren’t amazing musicians making extraordinary music. There are.

I’m not saying people don’t care about music anymore. They do.

I’m not saying extraordinarily interesting and creative new amalgamations of sounds aren’t being produced. They are.

But it’s still not a sign of evolution.

For the music business, new forms of sound are not the future. Delivery systems are.

How did it get this way?

It’s very popular—and understandable—to blame the stunning rise and fall of the music business on digital downloads and the hubris of record labels execs. But this is not sophisticated enough. The decline didn’t happen because kids started downloading music and old guys didn’t get it; the seeds had already been planted. Downloads are the symptom, not the disease.

Downloads didn’t kill the music business. It killed itself long before downloading became widespread.

Here’s how it happened.

Shift in purchasing patterns from regional to national. In the 90s, there were things called record stores. They sold recordings. There were things called appliance stores. They sold appliances. There were things called grocery stores. They sold food. Somewhere in the early 90s these things started to get all mixed together. When it became apparent that the CD was for real and not only were people going to buy new releases in this format but also replace every single thing they already owned, the industry kaboomed. In a good way. Suddenly every retailer wanted to stock CDs. (I’ll never forget the time Rounder Records got a 3000-piece bluegrass catalog order from Blockbuster video stores.)
Around the same time, we saw the rise of big box stores selling music. The famous phrase “loss leader” came into our lexicon. CDs became those inglorious leaders. They were imagined to be just the thing to lure unsuspecting customers into the big box with the hope, I suppose, that they’d realize they needed a new washing machine while shopping for Nirvana’s Nevermind, or perhaps the other way around. To capture market share, Best Buy, Circuit City, and others priced music below even wholesale costs in some cases. What knucklehead thought of this, I have no idea, but this was the beginning of the end. Suddenly regular record stores had to compete on price in order to survive. But they couldn’t achieve the economies of scale, so instead they ate each other. 20-store chains became 100 store chains. 100-store chains became 800-store chains. Independent stores began to die. First individual stores and then small chains.

So what, you might think, it’s the American way to compete on price and anyway bands were still making music, so what’s the big deal. The big deal is that purchasing became centralized. This had two important consequences:

One, Regional bands or labels couldn’t sell records to a buyer in their own hometown, thereby building a local base, and, drum roll please,

Two, Central buying can only succeed with hit-driven product. When one guy in an office in Albany is deciding what’s going to go in 1200 stores throughout the country, he can’t buy this for Miami and that for Ann Arbor. He doesn’t have time to buy 500 copies of a new release this week and then monitor sales patterns and buy another 500 (or 10 or 1000) the next week and then keep 2 copies in the bin just in case someone wants to buy it in a year. Too labor intensive. Plus he has no idea what people care about in Miami or Ann Arbor. He needs quick turns on music that’s going to blow up out of the box and then be gone. For good.

Buh-bye regional music.

Nationalization of music distribution. Central purchasing systems do not thrive on having a multitude of vendors, each with different terms, sales cycles, pricing structures, and styles of customer service. They want to buy a bunch of stuff from as few people as possible. Distributors had to figure out a way to do business with retail behemoths. They had to become behemoths themselves. Major labels actually began scouting indie labels and offering distribution deals to the bigger ones. Smaller indie distributors and one stops began gluing themselves together to form national distribution companies. Though they were once the bastion of new music, indie labels and distributors had less and less time for developing artists themselves.

Buh-bye developing artists.

Nationalization of radio. The final nail in the coffin came in 1996 when President Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act removing ownership restrictions for radio stations. Instead of being limited to how many stations one company could own in one market, they could own a whole bunch. Programming decisions would no longer being made city-by-city, but format by format. You could turn on the radio in Sacramento or Scranton and hear the same exact thing. Local radio lost its local-ness and all the pride, quirkiness, and opportunity for new artists and creative programming that went with it. Again, a few people making decisions for a huge number of outlets. And, again, only hits serve an infrastructure like this.

Buh-bye new music.

Shift in creative locus. Hits, hits, hits. Have I made my point? Instead of a record label being able to survive by selling a few copies of a zillion different recordings, they had to sell a zillion copies of a few recordings. Product lines became less and less diverse, less and less risk-taking. What can sell a zillion copies without artist development? Only already-established artists or those lucky few who a label would choose to get behind and push, push, push until they made it to the top (as long as it happened within the first month after the record came out). To do this would literally require millions of dollars. To spend millions of dollars, you have to have a sure thing. To have a sure thing, you look at what has already succeeded and try to copy it by going out and finding an act that fits the bill. When you copy others, you end up with bullshit.
So at this point, instead of music coming off the streets and up to the marketing office, it was imagined in the marketing office and then shoved out onto the street. Of course with this kind of creative process, someone new is going to win the popularity contest today and by tomorrow, Mr. Today will be Mr. Yesterday. It’s just what happens when instead of starting with the musician and working forward to find the audience, music starts with the audience and works back to what kind of artists it will sign.

This is the only model the industry can support now.

And the saddest thing of all? We didn’t even notice that music itself was dying. We can no longer tell what is music and what is posturing. If we could, when it came to A&R decisions, we kept it to ourselves.

The introduction of digital downloads could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen to music in an unrestricted, un-mandated, un-stuffed-down-their-throats, tits-and-ass-flying-every-which-way-to-get-their-attention way. When you add to this the rise of social networking as the distribution means of the present/future, and word of mouth as the primary marketing took, I think we have an incredibly hopeful and optimistic situation. For music. Not for music executives.