Posts from — October 2008

The first President I remember is Nixon and that was not such a good experience. As a kid, I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I knew it wasn’t good, I knew the rest of the world was somehow laughing at us and, worse, even us kids knew that we had fallen from grace in our own eyes. Whether Watergate ignited a wave of thieving, scamming, outright two-faced politicians whose mask one could not see behind, or simply exposed what had always been there, I do not know. All I know is there hasn’t been a moment since when I did not feel that whomever was running for office was not lying to me. Still, as soon as I came of age I voted, trying to guess who was lying less or whose lies were telegraphing in pol-speak the reality I found least heinous. That, combined with weighing other political realities that might checkmate the candidate into the positions I supported—such as who was likely to control Congress or what political scam most recently backfired and therefore wouldn’t be tried again—was the formula I used to choose my candidate. Party affiliation never meant anything to me, I’ve been a registered Independent my whole life because I never trusted anyone enough to throw my lot in with them. I never in my life imagined that I would see a candidate for President that I would vote for because I believed what he said and, further, for what seems like moral fiber beyond professions of faith, wisdom beyond clever sound bites, and, most of all, for his palpable, tear-inducing love of the American people. It just never crossed my mind.

So now I’m in a state of crazy agitation waiting for election day, unable to sleep and unable to pull myself away from HuffPo, Fox News, MSNBC, Politico, CNN, and election.twitter.com. Like a man in the desert who thinks he sees water on the horizon, I can hardly believe my eyes yet I grow thirstier with each step. I’ve found the President I’ve been waiting for all my life. My heart is completely on the line, the whole damn thing, there is nothing held back and that is a very scary position to be in. I am so exposed that is simply impossible to shield against disappointment. The only protection is to shed all pretense of distance and run towards renewed of love country and faith in our people, something I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t figure out how. If my heart breaks on election day, so be it. Just like any heartbroken person, I’ll simply have to find something else to do with all this love.

Barack Hussein Obama for President.

I like! Do you? (Subtitle still under discussion.)

These are times of extraordinary polarization. In its final days, our election is deteriorating into vicious slander and purposeful manipulation that aims to convince us, not of the other’s poor policy positions, but of their evilness.

Undecided Americans are being baited into believing that Barack Obama is positioning himself to destroy what they hold valuable. As an Obama supporter, I can’t help but believe that the McCain camp is using slander, innuendo, and the most transparent playground antics imaginable to convince us to take refuge in fear as the basis for giving their ticket our vote. These tactics are vile. They are meant to draw out the worst in each of us. Ultimately, they are a shocking expression of cowardice.

I can point to dozens of examples of McCain’s deceit, flip-flopping, and, worst of all, attempts to distract Americans from the issues that will impact us for generations. Instead of convincing us to vote for him based on his wisdom, statesmanship, commitment to our country, and devotion to its citizens, he is trying to portray himself as a “maverick” who will “shake things up” because he is a Washington “outsider” who has chosen a “hockey mom” who is “just like you and me” and between the two of them, they’ll clean up all the messes we find ourselves in. None of these labels mean anything. Anyone who calls himself a maverick is automatically disqualified as one, just as anyone who says they are spiritually enlightened is not. These are sickeningly shallow gambits meant to reinforce the image of a human being rather than the substance of one.

People of sanity! Yes, I’m talking to you! We suffer from image-poisoning. We have become dangerously confused about what is an image of substance and what is actual substance, to the point that we believe that how things appear is how they are. Our election right now is a case of dueling brands, not dueling human beings. We are therefore subject to manipulation by slogans, posturing, and emotionality. It is understandable. There is far too much complexity to wade through to comprehend who and what we are voting for, and from a collective sense of exhaustion and an inability to fight contrived media messages, we crave simplicity: This guy is bad. This guy loves terrorists. You can tell by his lapel pin. It’s simple.

People who play upon this exhaustion to achieve their ends (even if they truly believe it’s in our best interest) are exhibiting exceptional degradation of the human condition. They are cowards.

And it makes me angry. It’s so tempting to either attack back with equally sleazy means; become emotionally unhinged and try to out-scream “them;” or avoid the whole thing by throwing up my hands or pretending that because I’m a Buddhist I’m all Ms. Equanimity. (Hello? Bullshit.) If I respond in any of these ways, I am a coward too.

So what to do instead?

One solution is to look at what is underneath the anger because no matter how angry I am, what lurks just below the surface is tremendous sadness. I ache for the confusion that creates fundamentalism. I mourn the dissolution of our education system that produces shallow thinkers. I cry for anyone who would hope to help our country but has to fight so hard to do so honestly. And on my good days, I even try to feel a little sad for John McCain and Sarah Palin even though I always, always fail because, well, I don’t have to explain why.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. There are so many more ways to respond to sadness than there are to anger. Anger makes me dangerous to myself and others. It narrows my scope of responses down to a few very sorry possibilities. Sadness opens me up. It makes me look at what’s going on honestly, even though it is SO PAINFUL. Still, there are options. For example:

“The best thing for sadness is to learn something,” says Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “that is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. –T.H. White from The Book of Merlyn

I will remain a human being who cherishes other people and life itself, no matter how confusing it all becomes. I will hold my mind to this world and its sorrows and never give up. But I need your help. All of you.

Starting with Barack Obama.

This is how Simon & Schuster will describe my new book in their catalog. It includes the title, subtitle, brief description, and some very nice quotes to give me credibility and make me sound cool.

Next step is to submit the manuscript (Oct 15) and then begin revisions based on editor’s comments and vision, which I look forward to very much. Then at some point, cover ideas will start floating around, probably in early 2009.

Nobody (meaning me, my agent, my editor at S&S) really loves the subtitle. I’m thinking of something more along the lines of “Discovering the True Path to Love” because it points to the wisdom journey that you take when your heart is broken and is less prescriptive. That said, people definitely want to know why it hurts and how to make it stop. Most of all, I think when your heart is broken, you want to know that you’re going to be okay. You will love again. You will stop desiring this particular person or mourning the relationship. But how to say that in a catchy (but not cutesy) subtitle? I open the floor to suggestions!!

The Wisdom of a Broken Heart
Why It Hurts So Much and How to Make It Stop

The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Questions and relationship columnist for Body & Soul looks at the hardest part of a relationship—heartbreak—and provides a practical, steadying, compassionate plan for emerging a stronger, braver, spiritually transformed person.

“The heart that is broken has been broken open,” writes Susan Piver. “When my heart was broken, it changed my life…From this most painful experience came the ability to find and appreciate lasting love.” The anguish and disappointment of a broken heart is devastating and overwhelming, but as Susan Piver reveals in The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, it can also create an opportunity for genuine spiritual transformation, paradoxically leaving one both stronger and softer—and capable of loving even more deeply than before.

Filled with on-the-spot practices, exercises, funny stories (often drawn from her own experience), poems, meditations, and down-to-earth, practical advice on how to cope with day-to-day miseries, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart offers a priceless prescription of solace and encouragement, wisdom and humor. Like an infinitely patient, trusted friend, it tells its readers in a thousand different ways the most important thing to remember and the easiest to forget: “You’re going to be okay.”

Praise for Susan Piver:
“Susan Piver is a deeply intuitive and innovative thinker. She has both tenderness and acuity regarding what concerns us. I could not recommend her more highly.”
—Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way

“Susan Piver shows us how to create a fearless life.”
— Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Healthy Aging

Susan Piver’s bestselling books include The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say ‘I Do,’ and How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life. A graduate of a Buddhist seminary, she writes the relationships column for Body & Soulmagazine and is a frequent guest on network television, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and The Tyra Banks Show.

My friend Sarah ingeniously outlines them this way. Check out her blog for more such Sarah-ness.

Here are the phases as I see it…

1) The Break-up/Emotional Thrombosis/International Freak-out
Whatever, that’s like a month to 6 weeks of hell, panic, devastation. All you have to do is survive and lean on your friends and family as much as possible. I just felt like the world had kicked me out and I was all alone in Queens.  Anyone willing to listen was truly a lifeboat for me.

2) Mourning
So now you’re 2 months in and something has to motivate you to not react so hard to the outside world and what it’s throwing at you.  Instead you do the opposite and drop inside of yourself to look for the answers.  This is around the time I read your blog.  It gave me that bit of altitude I needed to be like “Oh sad?  Ok, I can do sad.  I hate it, but I can do it.”  But the key for me was really investigating the sadness.  I was finally seeing the need to unbundle all of the stories and feelings, take what was valuable and release what wasn’t.  That seemed freaking impossible, but that’s where meditation came in.  I wasn’t doing Metta yet, but I do think I did my own weird versions.  So much of the journaling was just notes to myself to freaking hang in there.  I made a decision that whenever one of my cry-fests was about to come up, I wouldn’t push it down or just start in one of my re-run stories about what happened with us.  I would drop whatever I was doing, get in my bed and cry my face off until it passed.  I even left meetings at work to lay on my office floor for a few minutes and cry it out.  Gosh, you basically have to develop a split personality for a bit to pull yourself through.  Journaling is interesting here and I wonder if you’re right about the writer thing. Although I never consider it “Writing”.  It was basically heart nonsense that needed some air.  But I do know people who are opposed to journaling when a shrink has suggested it.  It’s actually troubling for them.  I think you should definitely recommend it, but make clear that it in no way needs to be valid “writing”.  It should be there purely as a friend.

3) Take your heartbreak on the road. 4-6 months in and ongoing;-)
I think you eventually have to leave the cocoon you built for yourself, while being mindful that you’re in a fragile place.  Your heart is sort of brand new if you’ve done the work right.  I was at meditation classes and getting involved in charities.  I went out on a date, (mehhh), but I went!  Oh, I did your writers retreat.  I started my blog. Got a trainer.  It was a hard time, but this year has been the most in-touch with myself that I have ever been.  I would have preferred to learn the lessons in a far less painful way, but what are you going to do. I’m reading this freaking awesome book, “The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”.  The first line from one of the chapters is so perfect I can’t stand it, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything”  Pfff, word.  Welcome to break-ups;-)

Oh!  remember when you sent me an email months ago about how to deal with my ex-boyfriend flare-ups.  I was feeling so tight and angry, meditating felt impossible.  You recommend that instead of focusing on the in and out, turn my attention to the actual feeling over and over.  Let it burn itself up.  That was soooo helpful Susan.  I used that a lot to move in to my stage 3.

Anyway, this is way too much.  But thank you for support and kind words.  I think “groundless” is the word of choice when it comes to post break-up experiences. Somedays I feel all kinds of freedom and hope. The other days the groundlessness is just scary.  But I really believe there is no other way. If I thought telling him off would work, believe me, I would have done it;-)

Keep the faith!