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Excerpt from my recent Huffington Post blog:

The recent throwdown between Amazon and Macmillan publishers is very, very interesting. I’m observing from three perspectives—as a working author trying to make a living as such; a Macmillan author, and an ex-music business exec.

When I read this on an Amazon forum: “I am not in the habit of supporting bullies…” I thought, yes. The idea that Amazon would actually refuse to sell an item because the supplier would not consent to their pricing demands was shocking, awful, a manifestation of everything that is wrong with the way we sell art/entertainment in our culture. A total and complete bully’s move.

Then I read this,  “…and will forever refrain from purchasing any book published by Macmillan [heretofore known as 'the bully'] or any of its divisions. I vote with my money and they just lost my vote.”

Oh my. How did the American public get hoodwinked into believing that the suppliers are the bullies rather than the retailers?

As an ex-music business exec (1989-2000), I’ve already seen how the story ends when an industry allows retailers (rather than suppliers) to set product pricing. Recording companies waited around for someone else to take the hit by telling Best Buy or Walmart to stuff their “loss-leader” strategies and outrageous price and position fees. But no one did. Kudos to Macmillan’s John Sargent for his bold gesture.  And shame on Amazon for calling the move to accept Macmillan’s pricing (for now) a capitulation. That word really gave me the creeps. Silly us-and-them PR, dudes. As if you were the ones struggling to hold on to margins, not publishers and not the lowest paid of all in this supply chain, the author. (Somehow, we’re never considered in this debate. If the publisher’s prices fall, so do our royalties. Which are an urban legend anyway.)

Amazon, you are being ridiculous. Just call it like it is: YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY.

And if anyone stopped to consider the author’s royalty (which is not paid by Amazon), they would see who is really being trampled here. Jeez.

5 Steps to Heal a Broken Heart

Long interview on WebTalk Radio.

* whom I adore.

Here is some info about it. If you’ve ever wanted to try a retreat but aren’t quite ready to leave home and go into a strange environment, this is the retreat for you. I was one of the teachers last year and I can say that the way Jen has structured it really gives a feeling of being on retreat. It was very inspiring and people learned a lot. You go, Jen. Plus look how cute she is.

You know the power of retreats and you also know you can’t be inspired or give birth to your creative dreams if you are depleted, exhausted, or run by fear. Recharge your inspiration and find your self-confidence again -with 13 other world famous teachers without getting out of your pj’s. Best-selling author and long time retreat leader – who wrote the Oprah featured book, The Woman’s Retreat Book, has created a Valentine’s Day weekend VIRTUAL RETREAT designed to give your creative heart a boost and your mind a rest.  You can participate in all 13 mini-retreats or dip in and out because all the sessions are recorded and transcribed – allowing you to get the renewal you need on your time table, without travel or hassle. The retreat includes a free e-book How To Retreat to help with fear and finding the time, gentle ‘get ready’ emails, a private blog for support, plus 13 heart expanding mini-retreats. Price increases $50 bucks on Feb. 5th so sign up now.

To all you wonderful people out there and beyond, I have one thing to say to you. I love you!

Oh, and this too:

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be
violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert

OK, here I go again. Am back from retreat in Vermont where, for one week, I practiced meditation, wrote, read, slept soundly–all the things I so want to do in my non-retreat life. I realize there are major differences!! Like on retreat someone else does the cooking and washing up. That’s a biggie. But still, I long, long, long for a life of order that grounds me and keeps me focused on my personal loves: spiritual practice, study, self-expression.

Once again, I’m tired of coming to the end of each day feeling like I lived half of my life while the other half somehow got sucked up by TV, poor planning, and, most of all, self-doubt that causes me to put off things that challenge me. (Which is basically everything at this point–I’m standing right on top of some big professional and spiritual moments.) So once again, I want to marshal myself.

The theme of this GDE Redux is the same as the last one: Take all the things you say you should do everyday (or most days) and do them. Now, these things aren’t earth shattering. They’re simple and should be within my ability to accomplish. Write. Meditate. Study. Exercise. Drink water. Take vitamins. It’s so embarrassing how simple those things sound.

I learned several very valuable things from the last GDE. I want to take them into account on this go round. They are:

1. The GDE didn’t give a crap about my energy level. Somedays, I simply didn’t have much energy, while on others I did. I became very confused about how to react to all this: give in to it or plow ahead with the schedule anyway? Last time, I gave into it. This time, I’m going to plow ahead.

2.T he main failing of the GDE was that it created enormous levels of aggression towards other people. Especially the ones I really like. My husband, for example. Instead of being people I care for (or not), every single being (including my cats) became instead potential friends or enemies of the GDE. I couldn’t tell my friends and family to have their mid-life crises or muse about vacation spots only during times that were convenient for me. The people in my world needed me on their own timetable and I had no idea how to reconcile this with my needs. This time, I’m going to expect this and not get freaked out when people need me, but just try to support them the best I can and then get my butt back to the experiment.

3. The GDE lives and dies on advance planning. If I left any part of the day to chance, it all fell apart. So for instance, tomorrow, I know I want to meditate, write, and go for a run. I also know I have to run an errand at Crate & Barrel and pick up some colleagues at the airport at 630p. So tomorrow AM the first thing I need to do is examine every hour of the day and plan when I’m going to do what. I need to do this for the entire week, actually.

So here is the schedule I’ve come up with. Please hold me to it:

Monday, Thursday, & Friday
6-730 writing & meditation
730-10 personal writing
11-4 other kinds of work
4-5 run
5-530 meditation

Because I have all day meetings on Tues and Weds, they will look like this:

530-630 meditation, journaling
7-5 meeting

I am completely open to suggestions! And in the meantime, please wish me luck. I will keep you posted and if I can do it, I know you can too. xoxox Susan

Susan Piver is an ideal guide for anyone suffering from a broken heart.  Spiritually deep, funny and utterly practical, she reveals how this near universal experience can become a gateway to living and loving more fully. Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance

Susan Piver’s book makes the mending of a broken heart into a transformative journey, guiding us toward reclaiming our center and entering into the sacred space of forgiveness. Allyson and Alex Grey, Visionary Artists

Straight to the heart and from the heart, Susan Piver is the your best friend and wisest guide. The Wisdom of a Broken Heart is a roadmap for how to deal with all the feelings of loss, disappointment, and betrayal.  Clear, accessible, this book is for everyone. Buy it or suffer the wrath of Josh.  Josh Baran, author of The Tao of Now (and one of my very best friends who told me to definitely take out that last line. But I love it too much.)

I recently did a phone interview with The Writing Spirit. Since I’m just back from teaching a week-long meditation retreat for writers, I thought I’d post it, since these themes are very much on my mind.

JULIE:     I see that you’re about to lead a new meditation retreat for writers in a week. Are you looking forward to it?

SUSAN:    I’m looking forward to it very much. I have tremendous love for this combination, meditation and writing. They seem to go together extremely well.

JULIE:    I agree. And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about today.

So, Susan, what type of meditation practice do you teach?

SUSAN:    I teach a practice called Shamatha, which is a Sanskrit word that means calm abiding or tranquilly abiding. It dates from the time of the Buddha, about 2500 years ago, and is a basic breath awareness meditation; meaning, instead of allowing your thoughts to absorb your attention, you place your attention on your breath instead.

JULIE:    Susan, how does meditation relate to mindfulness?

SUSAN:    Well, meditation, I guess could be thought of as the cultivation of mindfulness. Because mindfulness, it’s come to be associated with many things, but I think all it is, is attention to the present moment, being in the present moment. Meditation is practicing being in the present moment so that when you’re off the cushion, you can more readily employ mindfulness as you wish.

But it’s not something in our very speedy world that we can just suddenly do. Okay, now I’m mindful, or I need to be more mindful. Well, yeah, we all need to be more mindful, but it’s not a matter of will. It’s a matter of practice and experience and a cultivation of mindfulness. And that’s what meditation does.

JULIE:    Is there any aspect of surrender in that? Surrender to the moment? Or is it more cultivation?

SUSAN:    Well, I don’t know. What do you mean by surrender?

JULIE:    When talking about the willfulness and focusing on thought and not being in the moment. To me, being in the moment is a relaxing, is surrendering. So, I’m just wondering how that relates to your view of mindfulness and being in the moment?

SUSAN:    I think you used the key word, which is relaxing…which is, I guess, the same thing as opening. I suppose surrender could mean the same thing. But at the same time, if you’re focused surrendering, you’re not paying attention. You know what I mean?

If you’re engaged in surrendering, you’re not so much engaged in what’s happening. And sometimes it feels great to be engaged in what’s happening, but sometimes it doesn’t feel very good. And you wish you didn’t have to. But, nonetheless, the ability to relax enough to relate with your world is critical. Perhaps you could call it surrendering or relaxing or allowing. I think we probably mean the same things by these words.

Here is the full transcript. Warning: it’s long….

As mentioned in a previous post, in Buddhism, there is something called The Four Immeasurables. They are:

Lovingkindness
Compassion
Sympathetic Joy
Equanimity

In this post, we’ll discuss the second immeasurable, Compassion, and how it helps quell fear.

What is fear? One way to look at it is that fear is an unwillingness to open to reality the way it is. When we’re afraid, we fight the object of our fear, try to ignore it, or become desperate for someone or something to save us. None of these things help. The opposite of fear isn’t boldness, it’s openness. Tolerance. Curiosity. Fearlessness is the ability to remain open and observant, even in the face of very strong feelings or difficult situations. This doesn’t mean you are emotionless. It simply means you are awake. When you’re receptive and wakeful, you’re in the best position to figure out what to do with your fears and their causes.

The Four Immeasurables are four ways of remaining open. The second one, Compassion, has gotten a bad rap. People think it means some kind of saintly ok-ness with everyone, no matter how they act. It conjures an image of some long-suffering person who puts everyone else first. But true compassion is much more skillful than that. I wrote about all this in my book, How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life.

Compassion arises when you allow someone else’s pain into your own heart without a personal agenda. This has an automatic affect: You automatically want to free her or him from that suffering, no matter what. We are each capable of this. This is how we’re built.

When I was about seven years old, I was given a kite to fly during our vacation at the beach. My father taught me how to hold it, how to cast it into the wind, and what would make it dip or soar. He held on to the kite with me until I was ready to fly it by myself and then he let go. I ran up and down the shoreline by myself, following the currents of the wind. He could see how overjoyed I was. He was so touched by my delight. Suddenly I lost control of the kite, and it blew away. I ran down the beach trying as hard as I could to catch it as it blew higher and higher. I stopped only when the kite was no longer visible. Many years later, my father still remembers how torn up he was by the look on my face. If he could have flown up in the sky to retrieve the kite for me, he would have.

My father didn’t feel my pain by sitting down and considering it. His compassion just happened, on the spot, beyond theories, values, or beliefs. A child’s pain finds its way to a parent’s heart. The door is simply open.

Lovingkindness cultivates this sense of kinship with all people and leads to the ability to feel this compassion for everyone. When you practice holding your heart open to everyone, from your loved ones to your enemies, you are training to feel for all beings the kind of compassion my father felt for me.

Sometimes, though, it seems impossible to feel compassion. It can be really, really hard when you think about all the people and situations that you find ridiculously infuriating. But acting compassionately doesn’t necessarily mean being sweet and nice, or giving all your stuff away. In Buddhist thought, compassion is synonymous with skillful action, action that is rooted in seeing reality from the largest perspective possible. When you have the proper perspective, you know without thinking what the next right action is. If you see a child with a badly cut finger holding onto a band-aid he can’t figure out how to apply, you patch him up pronto. It’s obvious what needs to be done and doing it is considered compassionate. False compassion, or “idiot compassion” as Chogyam Trungpa called it, would be, in this case, bursting into tears at the child’s predicament or sitting him down for a lecture on self-care. These behaviors clearly lack intelligence and are an“idiotic” version of this sophisticated skill.

Acting compassionately doesn’t mean refusing to admonish people who make you feel terrible or sticking with hopeless situations because you feel sorry for the others involved. Putting an end to abuse or moving on from futile endeavors may be the most compassionate—and intelligent—thing you can do. One good way of testing whether your motivation is rooted in skillful action or stuck in emotional sludge, fear, or co-dependence is to check for your sense of humor. If it’s still there, there’s a good chance that you are grounded, sane, and courageous.

Stephen MItchell & Byron Katie

Byron Katie’s February newsletter is about love…

It’s not what you think…Or is it?

An excerpt:

If you say that you love your husband, what does that have to do with him?

You’re just telling him who you are. You tell the story of how he’s handsome and fascinating and sexy, and you love your story about him. You’re projecting that he’s your story. And then when he doesn’t give you what you want, you may tell the story of how he’s mean, he’s controlling, he’s selfish—and what does that have to do with him? If my husband says, “I adore you,” I think, “Good. I love that he thinks I’m his sweet dream. How happy he must feel about that!”

If he were ever to come to me and say, “The sorriest day of my life was when I married you,” still, what would that have to do with me? He’d just be in a sad dream this time, and I might think, “Oh poor baby, he’s having a nightmare. I hope he wakes up soon.” It’s not personal. How can it have anything to do with me? I love him, and if what he says about me isn’t true in my experience, I would ask him if there’s anything I can do for him. If I can do it, I will, and if it’s not honest for me, I won’t. He is left with his story. No one will ever understand you. Realizing this is freedom. No one will ever understand you—not once, not ever. Even at our most understanding, we can only understand our story of who you are. There’s no understanding here except your own. If you don’t love another person, it hurts, because love is your very self. You can’t make yourself do it.

I loved this post so much. Something to read and contemplate over and over. I particularly loved reading the story, written by Stephen, of their falling in love. And check out Stephen’s new book while you’re at it, The Second Book of the Tao.