Eat Pray Love: the Four Brothers

The Four Brothers Meditation included in Ria's post deserves some explanation. According to Ketut, the Indonesian medicine man (p. 251),

"The Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her--they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord, and the yellow waxy substance [vernix] protecting the baby's skin. When the baby is born the parents collect as much of these extraneous birthing materials as possible, placing them in a coconut shell and burying it by the front door of the family's house...the holy resting place of the four brothers, and that spot is tended to forever, like a shrine."

"The child is taught from earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtures a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and (I [Liz] love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven."

These parallels between the bodily organs and spiritual virtues echo the Yogic tradition of the "gross body/subtle body" dichotomy (p. 144). I also love that poetry -- not just truth/beauty, or even the recognition thereof, but the expression of it -- is required for wholeness. I couldn't agree more.

Eat Pray Love: Ria's Bali

The third part of Eat Pray Love is... Love!!! Ooooh, I get to write about Love?!!!

If I recall correctly, Liz selects her three destinations based on her quest for balance between physical experiences (Italy) and spiritual experiences (India). Early in the book, her Balinese medicine man tells her how this balance is achieved by way of a picture; of a man with his head in his heart, and two feet planted on the ground. It goes without saying at this point that the whole book resonated with me but the idea of balance or continuous tension between two seemingly opposing forces is especially topical for me, especially when it comes to love!

I've always been an assertive person. I go after what I want. I make things happen. This has been my pattern, in my professional and personal life. In my recent past, I've come to the realization that I know how to be assertive. My lesson is in being receptive... instead of making/forcing events or relationships, I am learning to allow events or relationships to unfold. At some point in India, was a quote "Life's metaphors are God's instructions." For me, in 2009, the metaphor for the lesson I must master is The Dance.

It began with the poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer that I found by accident at the library. And then (mom's of preteens will laugh), I took my kids to HSM3 and started crying (yes, crying) when Gabriella sings with Troy, "Can I have this dance?" And by a string of strange coincidences, I found myself enrolled in an Argentinian Tango class.

Let me tell you about tango... it is the best metaphor for the perfect, functional relationship ever! Both the leader and the follower are strong, in different ways. As the follower, my focus is on my partner's chest. I'm responding to the energy and the intention he projects with that part of his body. His focus is behind me, steering me safely around traffic in the line of dance. I have to surrender to him and trust that he is making the right choices, because he can see what I cannot. My job is just to take the next step.

Quite literally, I put my head in his heart.

People think that tango is so sexual. But the alignment isn't in the root chakra. The whole dance is built on "the embrace," the perfect alignment between the two dancers' heart chakras.

But honestly, it has taken a few months for me to be ready for this. I felt like Liz, very tenuous about "showing up for the dance." Allowing... following... requires vulnerability. It requires the lowering of the armor that a close friend of mine pointed out to me was my "blind spot!" But again, Liz showed me how. The secret was in the opening of the heart, just like Liz does on Gili Meno, to accept EVERYTHING about ourselves.

In Bali, Liz learns about the four brothers. I'm a little fuzzy on the details but I think I recall that these four spiritual brothers are there to protect you from doing stupid things like... condemning and judging yourself. Nonproductive thoughts, as it were.

During this tumultuous period in my life, I had a difficult time allowing myself to be angry or bitter or resentful. I just didn't think that was productive. But I had to learn to accept where I was and not beat myself up for those feelings too. Yes, the part that was cruel and hurtful... I had to open my heart to those aspects of myself. The me that was capable of betraying a trust... that was part of me too. Acknowledging those parts in me allowed me to stand in the shoes of every other person who has acted out of anger and hurt. Or anyone who has betrayed another... and forgive them!

One of the last messages I received from a former lover said, "It's your Highest Self that I fell in love with." I realized how small that was... but it was ME who put limits on that love because I never gave him the chance to see anything other than my Highest Self. I was too afraid of being vulnerable. I was always strong, always the one saving someone else. My lesson (and Liz's) was to love my WHOLE self, the highest and lowest. I'm not always Vitamin D in human form! Now that I've accepted my flaws and share it with the world (the self that sometimes needs saving too), amazing dance partners have miraculously shown up. Is it really a miracle? Because all I did was allow it to happen. By learning how to follow, I've created space for someone to lead.

I am in love... with the dance!

Attitude

I'm working through Jennifer Koretsky's ADD eWorkshop #3, "ADDjust Your Attitude."
The idea follows #2's call to stop working against the ADD. I'm making a list of 5 things I'm good at doing:
--- Playing with words: rhyme, puns, rhythm.
--- Accents
--- Spreadsheets
--- Big-picture thinking
--- Explaining through analogy

These are the first five things I extracted from my head. Are they the five best things? The five most important to securing a good job? How important is free association to an ADDer's thought process?

Next list of five: things I LIKE to do:
--- Vocal harmonies
--- Drink good red wine
--- Walk and ride through the woods
--- Write
--- Watch movies

Next, five things I've done well in the last 24 hours:
--- Written a poem I didn't particularly want to finish
--- Made useful career-related contacts
--- Saved heat by wearing two pairs of wool socks
--- Managed my temper with my kids
--- Been honest with the Jung/Keirsey temperament sorter

I'm supposed to do this every day. I'm going to run out of things to do well in a 24-hour period. Unless "drink excessive coffee" can be reused.

Eat Pray Love (then Blog), Part III: Indonesia

Back, finally! And with a posting partner, no less.

My co-author told me about a strand of yoga in which one breathes in pain, and breathes out love. I read Italy is an in-breath of pain, India the stillness as oxygen enters the bloodstream, and Indonesia the out-breath of the love Liz found.

Morning Dew
"I go to rice fields in morning, before sun. I sit in rice field with mouth open and take water from air. How you call this...Dew? Yes. Dew. Only this dew I eat for six days.....same thing that is god is same thing inside me. Same-same." (Page 233)

The notion of Ketut following his dream and his self-imposed rules to the point of near starvation jumped out at me. With no food or water for six days (the length of the Judeo-Christian biblical Creation, just to transpose a tradition), finally he resorts to the simplest, most poetic nourishment I have ever heard: breathing in the morning dew, until he sees the golden color of god within himself.

Circle in the Sand
"'God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now.' I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen." (Page 280)

These are Liz' thoughts after she announces to Wayan that she has raised $18,000 (lucky number 18 - "life" in Jewish tradition, and (of course) one sixth of 108) for the purchase of a new home. This is the notion of prophecy in Greek epic literature - it is not going to happen because it was prophesied; it was prophesied because it is going to happen. We choose our way to our destinies, perhaps. I see Liz breathing out here, even though she experiences considerable anxiety before Wayan buys the house. She has given away her own home in New York out of pain and desperation, and created a home for Wayan out of love and chutzpah.

Gili Meno
"'Show me your shame,' I asked my mind. Dear God...'Show me your worst,' I said. When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, 'No-you don't want ME in there...don't you know what I did?' and I would say, 'I DO want you. Even you. I DO. even you are welcome here. It's OK. You are forgiven. You are part of me. You can rest now. It's over.'"(Page 327)

This was perhaps the most personal passage of the book for me to read, because it is still the hardest thing to do - to welcome in those thoughts you hate, the ones you KNOW are just trying to hurt you, that you are sure hate you. How else, though, to walk with strength in a world where whole personas are built around such words, and can exert influence on the day-to-day, without first conquering the ones inside, that influence the minute-to-minute and the year-to-year? And what was the lesson Liz learned from Bob over in Utah (p. 274)? "When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping...Tutti."


I want to stop there. I hope we can generate a comment or two before putting this one to bed, and maybe hear a suggestion or two about how to attack the next book. I didn't start with a "review," but maybe the next one could be approached more conventionally.

ADDaptation?

The puns will start to sour, I'm sure. But this article from William Saletan at Slate.com reports on a Northwestern University study that suggests ADHD might be a genetic adaptation suited to pre-agricultural settlement patterns and lifestyles.

I recently watched 10,000 BC, a stupid and wildly improbable historical nonsense. Yet I found myself, as I have at natural history museums, fascinated by pre-Bronze Age technological societies, and the primitiveness we associate with their minds solely because of their tools. While these tribes surely had some divisions of labor based on physical attributes and cerebral skills, it is reasonable to suppose that nomadic tribal life required more broad skill development of an individual than does our increasingly technologically specialized arrangement.

I wonder if this means there is a correlation to the ADD's interest in everything, and desire to master many skills, and why that seems increasingly disfavored in our niche-driven economy.

ADD 2.0?

Yesterday I had the kids home all day, and was failing miserably at multitasking. I did have about 95 minutes during naptime to read, write, and sit quietly, which I did. But by late afternoon I was behind. I'd lost the energy to get ahead of them, to proactively manage their activity. The four year-old said "no" to most of my suggestions, and the 16 month-old was purely driven by whatever I did NOT want taken out.

By the little one's bedtime, I had no patience, no creativity, and no perspective. I lost it trying to teach a basic version of checkers to my daughter, who was utzing me about holding the other pieces (the ones we weren't using). I got irrationally angry when she kept interrupting my lesson with "Daddy, daddy, daddy..." this over here that over there this thought that thought etc. All I needed was a tap on the shoulder, but I was alone, and blew my cool.

After the tears and patchwork, I realized that what had set me off was her natural, 4 year-old lack of focus and constant interruption. One of my new worries: will she have it? And when is too early to observe symptoms?

To "Be" or Not to "Be" ADD

I had a job interview today for a position assisting junior high school students with behavioral or learning disorders. In my view, I'm a terrible interview. I prepared based on a list of questions teacher candidates usually get, yet when asked different questions, I tend (as I hear it) to ramble, stammer, and tangent. Still, I'm personable and intelligent and witty, so it was a nice interview. Moreover, I consider myself more than qualified for the position, so I don't fear the interview was necessarily a make-or-break part of the selection process. When I got home, though, I e-mailed the interviewer with a follow-up piece of information and felt compelled to delete a section I'd written disclosing that I had adult ADD and that sometimes interviews are not my strong suit. My wife asked why I'd want to label myself and warned against "making an excuse." Probably the safe bet, but I wondered if this wasn't likely the most understanding group of educators, and whether acknowledging and stating a fact is truly "making an excuse."

It's part of a new dialogue we're having -- I've tried to be more forthright about dealing with ADD, and she checks whether I'm "making an excuse." What I need to convey is that before I received the diagnosis, not having had the language to describe why I always did things differently, or incompletely, or tardily, that's when I was making excuses: my car, the traffic, the rough draft, etc. If I approach the ADD as a set of facts, and make those with whom I interact aware of them (if they're not already), then I can't possibly make excuses.

Job interviews are tricky things; everyone has a different way of evaluating a candidate, and disclosing something like ADD, as widely as the term is bandied about in the mainstream, could certainly seem like a lame caveat. I avoided mentioning it, but I wonder: if I don't get the position, will that be the excuse?

How openly should one manage their ADD?

Copycoinage

Fine, there's a band. I didn't know that until three minutes ago. I "coined" the term in response to my friend Sandy, who bragged about writing on everyone's Facebook walls as her New Year's greeting.

I tweeted "People's Choice = Blahscars" today (1/8/09), and later discovered its been floating around for quite some time. Earliest Google reference I could find was here.

"Finanstigating" - the act of stirring the money pot with unethical schemes. See Michael Millken, Enron, Bernie Madoff. Leads inevitably to FinanstiGate.

ADDiction

Web 2.0 is the shiniest thing in the room, a hive of mirrors. Since the bloginning, I have been exploring my social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, good ol' Google) to find resources on living with Adult ADD. A lot of life coaches out there. The very act of searching and clicking on all the ADD-related options can be a bit dizzying. Several referrals to timers out there. I will buy a timer and limit myself to 10 minutes of resource-seeking per day.

Newareness

At a meeting last night and just before class this morning, I have noticed the ADD as a part of my conscious interactive mind:

This morning, I arrived at school not tardy but later than I wanted to, and had very little time to go over the lesson plans before class began. It turned out that the teacher only needed me for about 15 minutes, and all I had to do was start the movie and take attendance (both of which I usually like to do myself but delegated to students), but I noticed that I could only digest about half of the instructions she was giving me. The combination of the written plans I glanced at while listening, the large stack of papers on the her desk to which she kept referring while she talked, the buzz of the students coming into the room and noting my presence, and the general seat-of-the-pantsness of this particular assignment swirled around my head like cream in coffee, puffing and lilting until finally I reached a tepid equilibrium of half-understanding.

Last night, I met a friend of a friend over beers for a conversation about his field (clinical psych), and although the bar was relatively quiet and mellow, and the conversation fascinating and personal, and the sensitive guitarist singing open mike tunes to a tiny audience, I had to take more than one time-out (literally - I even explained to him that I was making a more conscious effort to understand how ADD was affecting me in social settings) to still and separate various tracks of thought and attention. I wonder how experienced ADD managers do this consciously.

Elements of the swirl: menu offerings, draft options, the guitarist's setlist and "Hey! He just strummed the opening chord to John Mayer's St. Patrick's Day, I should be on Name That Tune!", my friend's friend's life's details, my life details, my friend's life details (he wasn't there, but his details were), another friend who would soon be waiting for my call...

I do know that I would recognize certain elements of the conversation or certain facts that were shared if I heard them again, but I couldn't narrate the course of the meeting without fictionalizing it. I do know that it was a good meeting, and that I will likely have another in the near future.

Baby Steps

Yes, this is definitely me. I've known this (as have you), but it offers comfort nonetheless. Living in an overdiagnosed society, I get the impression that anyone would claim the symptoms she lists, which makes as good business sense for her as the horoscope does for the astrologer. Still, the excerpt from her book Odd One Out reads well and specifically enough to the ADD mind that it might be a good tool to have.


This might also be a good tool to have. I'll put it on my birthday wish list, and by the time I get it, I'll have forgotten, so it'll be a nice surprise.

Searching for Teachers With ADD

- Searching "teachERS with ADD" yields better results than "teachING with ADD."
- Of the first 20 google hits on "teachers with ADD," all but three appear focused on the student, not the teacher.
- This article from addconsults.com appears to have been formatted by an ADD sufferer, but seems to offer some good advice. Worth a review.
- This Teachers.Net article, dating to 2001, sympathizes with the ADHD student because the teacher also suffers, but offers no strategies for the teacher.
- This must be a joke, but his heart (if not his head) is probably in the right place.
- Clearly a joke, and a good one. The host site is informative but lacks depth.

Eat Pray Love (then Blog), Part II: India

Note to reader: Since "intention" is a recurring theme in this post, please accept this apology if this entry isn't the usual book-club fare. In fairness, though, this book is bound to be intensely personal to many readers, and I am no exception. I would share many more thoughts and feelings on this section, but I swear I worked to keep it to just a few. That said, discuss away.

Tears and Prayers

I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said--that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. (Page 137)

So how to tell the difference between types of tears? The Inuit are said to have something like thirty different words for "snow." I wonder how many different words there are for "tears," if some can be so right and others can be, well, a mere tendency. What is cathartic and what is chronic?

Turiya

Has this happened to you, that you read a particularly powerful work at just the right time in your life? Where it seemed like you were meant to encounter it exactly when you did? This was Eat Pray Love for me.

Again, I was "given" this book by a recent reconnection, and we discovered that the reconnection was mutually meant, or intended, although we had not expected it at the time. In our conversations about healing old and new wounds, I called her my "Witness to Change," a notion she reciprocated. Oddly (or not), the feeling and the statement came the night of November 4, as millions of us felt as though we were bearing witness to a long-awaited change. Less than a week later, I came to chapter 66, wherein Liz describes the fourth state of consciousness, known as turiya. The three typical states are waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleeping, but "this fourth level is the witness of all the other states, the integral awareness that links the other three levels together." On top of all that, when I spoke the word aloud I realized it is a striking pun on my witness' name, at which point I about freaked out.

I had to laugh, remembering Liz' earlier inner argument -- her "Me" versus her "Mind," that erupted while she was trying to meditate (Pages 134-137). Her overactive brain was impeding her spiritual progress. Not too many pages afterward, she describes her shocking "personal encounter with the divine," and relates St. Theresa's observation about the challenges of relating that experience to others - once the troublesome mind "begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work."

Kavanah

Ria, your thoughts on prayer in your last post remind me of this:

"Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention." (Page 177)

Jewish mystics call this intention kavanah. It is the backbone of several versions of the story of the poor, illiterate or uneducated Jew in the back of the synagogue fervently reciting the alphabet, playing the violin, or standing completely still--depending on the storyteller--and despite the ridicule of many more "sophisticated" templegoers earns the praise of the wise old rabbi for praying with the greatest sincerity.

Perhaps this is the resolution to the Me vs. Mind problem - acting on what I want to do rather than continuing to do what I know I can.

Writing Left and Right

My wife didn't like the title of this blog, and so far isn't loving the notion of organizing my own personal blogosphere into the Right and Left sides of my brain. Since I want to keep both voices active, I thought the conscious dual (duel?) journal would help provide a structure. And a strong goal - to nurture both voices and to integrate them. They might even start to speak and listen to each other, rather than shouting each other down for more of my attention.

She thinks it could be an excuse -- one day over here doing haiku, the next over there barking about education policy, and acting like the diagnosis neatly ties it together.

She may be right. But 2009 starts like any good year as a Pisces should: dually.

Eat Pray Love (then Blog), Part I: Italy

I want to start this blog with the book that focused all this effort in the first place. Eat Pray Love marked the rebeginning of friendship and honesty for me after a nearly disastrous backsliding into fear and self-loathing.

With a bit of dismay I admit I have not traveled to any of the countries Liz visited (although I have been to Israel, and as another "I" nation that might make a good starting place for a sequel someday). But I will.

What I immediately and lastingly liked about this book was her structural approach: beginning with the end (the 109th bead), dividing the book into three sets of thirty-six (108 is a great number) chapters, and her ability, amid all that structure, to allow coincidental and interconnected people and events to unfold and pour out. Freely.

Reading the book offered a numerologically cathartic experience. I'll save that for a later post, as it might be nice to get people into the room and happy to be talking before spilling everything I might think there is to think about it.

It was suggested to me by a dear friend with whom I recently reconnected. We compared notes on our marital struggles, and talked a great deal about which feeling was more powerful - the urge to go or the need to stay. Needless to say, arriving so quickly at page 10, "I don't want to be married anymore," read like a splashing bucket of cold water. It was unsettling (and coincidental, maybe...) enough to hook me (although opening with 108 already had me).

That said, let's start with Italy. I found her stay intensely pleasurable to read about, albeit less impactful than later sections. The most striking sequence for me was the Thanksgiving dinner, on pages 108-109 (naturally). Liz wants to say everything she's feeling about the weight the dinner has lifted from her life, but all she can muster is Italian: sono grata. Why is it that words in foreign languages can take on more meaning than their English equivalent? Is it the effort of translating in your head? The tacit admission that "my native words aren't good enough for my nascent emotions?"

About my friend who gave me this book: we had hurt each other in the past, and hadn't spoken in nearly fifteen years when we reconnected. How easy it was to skip past small talk into the what's important voice with which we used to speak to each other. We forgave each other, spilled stories about emotional stuggle, and thanked each other for "being here," as we'd put it. Present. In the life of the other, despite the geographical obstacles. "Sono grata" came off the page, and through me right to her.

In response, she pointed out Luca's words, "Your tears are my prayers." It reminded me of a time when I was noticing how many years it had been since I'd had a real, hard, full-bodied cry. In my head, I was calling it an "orgasm in the heart." In a sense, I was praying for my own tears. The next day, I received them - although they were someone else's. A near stranger, who'd read something I'd posted on a forum, felt she had to let me know how it made her feel. That is indeed another story, but it was an act of gratitude on the part of the shedder to let me know that my words had found a place. Liz' Thanksgiving experience bound up tears and gratitude in a way that echoed my renewed friendship. The idea that giving thanks would undoubtedly bring more for which to feel thankful.

Appropriately, I finished the book just a few days before Thanksgiving, and as the wave of New Year's reflection, resolution, and planning breaks, I'll take this opportunity to thank you for reading and posting here. Benvenuto!

What They Should Write in High School History Class

I had a conversation with my mother-in-law this evening, about Ed 2.0. I don't know if that's what educators in the field are calling it, but what I'm referring to is the coming and ongoing shift in classroom planning and pedagogy to embrace and embed technology into the curriculum. Stepping out of the role of front-of-room deliverer of information.

Anyway, my mother-in-law. She's a 20+ year vet who's trying to become part of the new. When she brought up plagiarism, I wondered how high school students can possibly NOT plagiarize when asked to write a research paper about a war, or a president? My junior year US history term paper was about Roosevelt's supposed hesitancy to get the US into WWII. But seriously, now. I could either come back with a survey of the existing literature, or some carefully reworded paragraphs stating ONE author's opinion on that subject. A literature review would have been a reasonable and useful thing to learn to write. But to ask ME to take a side seemed ridiculous. Or at least, redundant.

What are they going to have time to find that hasn't been written about one of those issues? What purpose does it serve to send students through a tiny handful of secondary (or tertiary) sources, and ask them to formulate a thesis from a stack of notecards? How can a teacher help students wade through a given event or period and bore down to a level of specificity they can handle without reaching the absolutely trivial? Shouldn't a research paper encourage students to explore something they know, until they can find an area that is yet unknown?

I propose a research paper that forces students to identify a topic on which they can conduct original research. That connects to their lives AND, nominally, at least, to the subject of the class. Why aren't students spending the bulk of their US History class time tracing their own family's history to and through America? Not only would a rich tapestry of various family histories emerge and intersect, but a) students would have a natural hook to drive their interest and supply their research with primary sources, but b) they will have the opportunity to explore those events, processes, laws, and figures that most influenced that history. It would challenge the teacher to present the subject in non-linear fashion, but isn't that becoming increasingly impossible each year anyway? In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was coming down, we were studying the Civil War. Why weren't we studying US foreign policy during the Cold War? We barely got to Vietnam. How can this year's class possibly get through it?

By the time they even sneak up on the period that had the most visible impact on the world in which they live (or lived, pre-9/11), they will be out of time to write anything decent about it. Not that they'll care, since they'll be finished with US History, done with the Constitution test, and ready for summer.