More Draft Video Commentary

Continued from previous...

Still, in the way that video-conferencing beats a 12-hour plane trip, I figure giving people the opportunity to watch the movie is better than nothing.

3:15-10:14

I tell a long story centering on my time at Maclean’s during the Montreal Massacre

To my co-editor and me this is the most powerful story I tell in all the nine hours of footage. In seven minutes it encapsulates everything I am working against in terms of the accepted ideas and mores of our culture. I was going to use it as the very first scene but realized I needed something more hopeful and positive to begin. Still, it is the first main chunk of real matter: that encapsulation and me telling some of my story to get at truth grounds the whole film thematically and stylistically. From the expectation that I go to university to be “successful” to the heartlessness of ego-driven work environments and resulting adult ennui to “harmless” sexual advances in the workplace to idiotic either-or debates designed to entrench the status quo (e.g. the “debate” about whether Marc Lepine was a madman vs. men committing violence against women is socially sanctioned, as if both aren’t substantially true and there isn’t more to say).

University/Academia: I say: “I had no idea why I was there,” i.e. at university. I graduated in 1983 and couldn’t wait to get out. I didn’t have many words for my revulsion, just a marked lack of connection with the work I was expected to do and distaste for the machinations of the Philosophy Department where my then-boyfriend was a favored Ph. D. candidate much envied by his peers. I had the naïve idea that people in philosophy should have learned to be nice to each other!

Almost 30 years later I am in a similar situation. This time I am enrolled in university to get a credential so that I can continue to teach at the college level, rather than to please my parents and follow my socio-economic tribe. I am vastly more distressed by my current experience because I am now 48 years old, a woman of experience, consciousness, depth, and intelligence—a teaching award-winner even—and what is meaningful to me is dismissed by simple virtue of the parameters of the institution. A grown-up has almost no agency in the Education faculty, yet we think we are educating children to function in an extremely complex world. I wonder if the philosophers are being nice to each other yet.

Recently in a class I took for my M.Ed. the professor sent out a questionnaire. One of the lines was: “Education is…” We were meant to fill in the blank. I wrote “Education is: fucked. I do understand how history has shaped it and how much education has given to the world. But earthly events are moving at an exponential pace and educational institutions are locked in the past. Where we are today in terms of the urgency of our very survival is not reflected in what I see happening in any education system. I find this extremely frustrating.”

She indicated that she was rather shocked by my answer. I’m not completely sure why. But I find it interesting that a very liberal and open-minded professor was surprised by this answer. What is obvious to me seems hidden from most. Can I really be the only one saying this stuff? I am in the classes I’ve been in, but watch Sir Ken Robinson saying it more charmingly and knightedly on TED.com in 2006 and 2010. (An examination of why Ken is a knight and I am someone the U of L Faculty of Education presumably can’t wait to get rid of could be an interesting tangent. Is it Britain? Is it Lethbridge? Maybe Ken enjoyed writing scholarly articles before he became a speaker on the Chardonnay circuit whereas I can’t think of a better way to waste my time, energy, and skills.)

I realize I may seem to be on a bit of a digression here but it relates, on an essential level, to my work in the Human Body Project and the exact textual artifact we are discussing, my film. I may also not be practicing what I preach as an award-winning teacher, i.e. tailor your discussion to your audience, the audience in this case perhaps not amenable to my dissing of their chosen profession. (Reminder: I do not have tenure. I do not even have a job.) So I will emphasize that, for me, personally, the M.Ed. program has done one thing: I have reached a point where I feel completely strong and validated in my own process and choices, which, without a lot of inauthentic contortions, do not fit into the way academia is run. Those processes and choices are very much in evidence in this film. They are powerful, necessary, educational, and original. They are also inherently, and in the case of this digression, explicitly, critical of academia.

There is a fairly dramatic tension between my work then and my two intended audiences. One audience is the people of the world who are open to exploring how to move things forward, which very certainly includes our students. One is academia. Isn’t it sad that that Venn diagram has almost no intersection? God help them, where does that leave our students?

This isn’t just some melodramatic question; this is crucial. “What is curriculum theory?” asks eminent theorist William Pinar. This film is in that no-man’s-land: it is that “complicated conversation with oneself (as a ‘private’ intellectual), an ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action—as a private-and-public intellectual—with others in the social reconstruction of the public sphere “ (Pinar, 2004, p. 37). Pinar adds: “Curriculum theory asks you as a prospective or practicing teacher, to consider your position as engaged with yourself and your students and colleagues in the construction of a public sphere, a public sphere not yet born, a future that cannot be discerned in, or even thought from, the present” (Pinar, 2004, 37-38). I would suggest that the teaching, curricular, and research methods of the Human Body Project “cannot be discerned from the present” of institutional realities.

For me, my hidden work gets me a teaching award. My explicit work can literally only be held on the fringes (I talk a bit about this later in the film) with me fighting tooth and nail to keep it in the dialogue of the academy. It is impossible for me to write and talk about the Human Body Project and this film without “going there,” i.e. to those places where it rubs up against orthodoxies. This piece of footage under discussion is critical of institutional culture and the above is a deeper explanation (there you go, folks!) of how that relates to my experience.

Maclean’s/Ethics/Litigation/Being Liked: This kind of work is ethically challenging. I’m not making a piece of fiction. I’m talking about my own experiences and opinions; these are my stories (or, when they tell them, Megan’s or the audience members’). It’s possible I may hurt the feelings or pride of university professors in what I’ve written above. It’s possible that I may hurt the feelings or pride of people, some of whom I once worked with and am on friendly terms with, who work or worked at Maclean’s. I have come to realize that I can’t predict when, how, or whom I’m going to offend; there is pretty much a guarantee that offense will be taken, though. I’ll talk about that first.

Contrary to appearances, I’m a person who actually does not enjoy confrontation or conflict. I am very much someone who would like to be liked. I am thin-skinned and utterly pervious to criticism. Needless to say, it sucks to be as determined as I am on a course that, while I do also have supporters, guarantees criticism, misunderstanding, conflict, ostracism, judgment, weird sexual attention, dismissing, rejection (all of which are on the go), and, quite possibly, aggression or even violence (so far, so good, but I’m still a relative nobody). I can get very lost in anxieties about these consequences.

Guess what? I made an intention to allow myself to be vulnerable and it can’t be compartmentalized. It isn’t just part of my project, it is part of my life. I can choose when I write or show up naked but I can’t and won’t choose to go back on this path. Every day my conviction that this work is necessary grows stronger both because of what I see in the world and because of the growth that takes place in myself. I feel strong.

This piece of footage really brought out some of my fears of rejection and creating conflict. I was in Toronto recently re-editing and trying to lobby to get the film picked up by the Toronto International Film Festival (jury is still out) and was watching the film again with my co-producer who mused that the editor, who is still alive but difficult to find so I will not give away his name—if you want to know, you’re going to have to dig deeper than Google—might have reason to sue me.

But everything I say in the film is true. He was an introvert. He was, in my opinion, as I say, a damaged guy. He did drunkenly grab me from behind at a Christmas party in a way that can only be interpreted as old boss guy (younger than me now!) makes entitled advances on cute young hireling. (If you think this sort of thing doesn’t go on anymore, read “Drinking With Men Who Are Not Russell Smith,” by Stacey Fowles, June 28, 2010, on The Walrus blog, about gross male behavior in Canada’s publishing industry.)

I should add that he sent out a webmail memo the following week apologizing for his behavior at the party (no specifics mentioned, no apology directed to me personally), which he said was caused by mixing alcohol and prescription drugs. My young colleagues and I enjoyed great ironic amusement from this less than adequate admission. (Irony for me then was the great leveler. I now find irony less than adequate and really fucking irritating actually; hence the seriousness and conflict-prone nature of my current assignment.)

It all happened more than 20 years ago and could he possibly care and would he even ever find out? Hard to say. It did send me on a major freak-out spiral, though. I realized in a deeper way that huge conflict of interest I have doing this work. On the one hand, I want the work to get out. On the other, the more it’s out there the more I could be a target. What a vulnerable feeling and I’m only just beginning. As I said, I’m strong and determined to do it anyway but it makes me have some empathy for George Bush.

Draft Commentary On My Video Documentary

This is the beginning of a draft for some commentary about my film, Tasha Diamant’s Human Body Project. The film is 53 minutes long so at this rate I have a long way to go.

0:00-0:57 Opening scene in which I walk across stage naked, get my husband to hug me, and wish the audience peace

I chose this as the opening scene to start the film with love and peace. The hug between my husband and me is very sincere and gives me, anyway, a visceral feeling of the love and trust that is between us in that moment. This seemed, to me, to be the best possible evocation of the feeling I am hoping to promote in the world.

I then turn to the audience from this place of love to wish them peace. The clip continues for a while as I walk around the room looking at people while silently wishing them peace with my hands in prayer position. I continued with this part of the clip because I am hoping the film audience also takes in this wish for peace.

The day this clip was shot, my second Tasha Diamant’s Human Body Project show, was the most uncomfortable and difficult show for me at the Edmonton fringe. The audience was very quiet and stony-faced. Two women complained about the nudity in a way that made me feel defensive (one shows up later in the film). Both Megan, my co-presenter, and I felt that the feeling in the room was hostile. We also learned later that the Edmonton Sun reviewer was there. He’s in the back with dark hair and glasses. He gave the show 2 1/2 stars complaining that it was political and that he wished we’d put our clothes back on. My loyal cousin in Edmonton was outraged, but I actually thought it was a fair review for a Sun paper.

At the time of this clip under discussion, it was near the end of the show and I felt a strong need to at least try to connect with this audience in a peaceful way. I don’t as a matter of course always wish my audiences peace in this manner but it felt very necessary in that moment.

So it was really interesting for me to watch the video footage of that show months later and see that the people in that audience did often smile at us, many did often look engaged, and, contrary to what both Megan and I remember, they did clap for us at the end. It was a good reminder of the inaccuracy and inadequacy of perception. I think some people at that show were confused and irritated by their confusion but I also think there was more goodwill there than Megan and I were able to take in.

Unless video audiences read this commentary, they won’t know the background of that clip that day, but I think it adds another important layer of introduction to the video: the idea of overlapping realities—individual internal and external realities; and the realities of each person separately and together.

0:57-1:33 “Being naked is easier than being open-hearted… Another thing though that I’ve realized is that it is easier to be open-hearted when I’m naked.” That should sum it up!

But, still, I lengthened this scene, against my co-editor’s will, after making the first version. I added the statement about how I’d been doing “this” for four years and the part where I say I’m very uncomfortable.

Several people who had given me feedback about the first version said they would like to see more explanation, like why I’m doing it or how it came about that I’m standing there naked. I actually agree with Muniré (my co-editor and co-producer) that the video is enough explanation; as the video unfolds people have a discovery experience and there is plenty of explanation. The whole film is explanation! I find it interesting that even after watching the whole video many people still need an explanation. Like Megan has said to me, you can explain and explain but that doesn’t mean people will understand. This film seems like a perfect document to illustrate the difficulty of talking across paradigms (Clandinin & Connelly).

I also find it odd that people often don’t seem to get that my discomfort is part of the point. I am sure that for many people there is an assumption that I must be an exhibitionist. There is such a visceral response to nudity and vulnerability and crossing over the line from personal to public. Some people can’t get past their initial discomfort and discomfited squirminess and/or maybe they think there needs to be a linear explanation for everything. It is my distinct impression that the response spectrum from rejection to low-key that I have received from the Education faculty, none of whom have been to a Human Body Project event and most of whom have not seen the film, has at least some relation to these types of reactions.

1:33-3:15 Megan and I enter, introduce ourselves, Megan eventually says: “This is totally weird, hey?”

This footage is from the very first show in Edmonton. Megan joined me spontaneously at my third annual Human Body Project event in Lethbridge in 2008 (she talks about that later). But neither of us had ever done a fringe show and we hardly knew each other. We were very nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to show that palpable discomfort early in the film to allow the film audience to have that experience up front just as the real audiences do. As Megan says, it is “totally weird” to be in a room with two naked women who are showing up authentically. Later on in the film I talk about how there are no social norms for such a situation.

In our culture it is more socially normal to be in a room with naked women who want to grind their crotch on yours—if you are a man (as a rule) and if you pay them money. At the very least, in our culture, naked women should suggest titillation. We, even beautiful, nubile Megan, are decidedly not titillating. How, then, does an audience deal with the non-titillating presence of these naked women? One of the delights of the film as it progresses is that many members of the fringe audience were very much up to the task.

This is the first time that Megan speaks and moves on camera. She is 25 years younger than me. I am old enough to be her mother and I felt and feel strong maternal feelings for her. We are now friends but on the day of this clip we had probably spoken with each other for a grand total of 15 minutes plus a few emails. After joining me in 2008 Megan kept in touch sporadically and indicated that she’d like to join me in Edmonton for three of the six shows. Her suggestion to join me felt right to me and that’s how I made the decision to include her. I also feel like her presence in the film adds something important and special—her youthful energy and easy openheartedness, for instance.

I find it painful on my friend Megan’s behalf that almost every person who saw the first version of the film complained about Megan as show-offy and over the top. One of them wondered why they all found her somewhat irritating and I said: “Because you’re all old fogies!” (Every one of my friends who I showed it to is over 40.) I have warned Megan to be on guard for this if the film ever becomes something. We will both be projected upon left and right but she, as a young and beautiful woman, may well bear the brunt.

Eve Ensler, on TED.com, talks about the missing “girl” in the world. She is talking about the suppression and oppression and repression of feminine energy and emotionalism (and more). We have lived for millennia in this kind of world and it is shattering us all on every level (I talk later in the film about the overbalance to masculine energy). To me, Megan perfectly embodies Ensler’s idea of “the girl”—beautiful, emotional, shining, joyful, honest, flowing—and threatening! When you have lived in a culture that has squashed “the girl” in you, seeing that kind of freedom and openness is bound to bring up all sorts of defences.

Interestingly, the fringe audiences responded to Megan with what I perceived as great empathy and love. It could be the audience but I also think there is no replacement for the actual experience. A real, live, vulnerable person can and does evoke deeper emotion. While I made the film to share the Human Body Project experience and to help the project grow and to spread the message of peace through vulnerability, I’m not sure it can substitute for the lived experience of sharing that vulnerable situation. We are just too inured to seeing and separating ourselves from people on screen.

Index Card

One side:

wish Unity + Integration

lie Adulthood... Culture... What isn't?

dream classic shit dream, even in mouth

truth I forget

wish Joy + Community

lie I have deep respect for men.

dream darkness, stairways, lost

truth Peace is possible (not without discomfort, though)

blessing May I be guided and supported.

blessing May all children be safe and loved.

Other side:

drawing of Tasha as an aborigine before the white people came (giving whoever the finger)

What the fuck?

Okay, here's a real question... Universities used to be the place where paradigms shifted, now they're the upholders of the status quo: who cares?

U of T (In Which I Complain to a Professor About the M Ed Program)

Hi Professor X

I honestly can't tell if there is something here that will be offensive to you. Please take what I am writing in the spirit of honesty and doing my best to make it about me and my work. My intention is to create understanding. I have no quarrel with you but I do with the program, as you know. I am trying below to communicate my difficulty with fulfilling the requirements and my confusion over how to work that out even with you, an understanding and caring teacher...

I was thinking about your suggestion to consider doing 100 hours of work in order to fulfill the requirements of a course.

I am not being glib or purposefully obnoxious by contending that if this is the criteria, here at the University of Tasha, I have many PhDs by now.

The University of Tasha, solely populated by one idiot savant, has been a very very busy place lately. Full of idiocy and, if not knowingness, then at least a lot of awareness of idiocy. Here at the U of T, I am always busy and aware if not always able to act on my awarenesses in any "successful" way--success in terms of personal and societal and academic criteria hardly ever being achieved! Fail me now!

But your lonely researcher has been toiling: sincerely, effortfully, and with purpose.

Right now I am typing on a keyboard while barely being able to stay attached to the earth my body is so rapidly vibrating. Some of that is about taking the Human Body Project on the road in a few weeks, but there is more to it; I am always working at being myself in what the majority of my perceptions tell me is a hostile world. Twelve years ago (in a longer timeline of not-so-good vibrations) I felt like this and was diagnosed with sub-clinical depression (?) and prescribed drugs. With my many U of T PhDs I am now able to stay in this vibratory place drug-free. I do believe that one day it will even be enjoyable (it isn't yet; it's exhausting).

This is my work: I feel deeply, I stay in the shit, it takes me places. I could write about it and I could art about it and sometimes I do. I could also attach it to the work of other people and say they have influenced me but that is mostly not true at least not in the limited academic sense of doing that. I have said from the beginning of grad school that the biggest influences that happened for me were: illness, Kripalu Center's yogic teachings, and becoming a mother. These three educational contexts shifted me into a new paradigm forming me as a human being working toward wholeness. I am, of course, moved and interested by the work of many other writers, artists, and teachers but I am able to find and process that on my own when I want or need to.

Here at the University of Tasha, most meaningfully and importantly, I learn and research emotionally and in my body. This research experiment basically consists of one theory: how I feel is how I feel and is meaningful and is connected to a bigger picture and influences the bigger picture in a way that leads to greater human understanding.

Here's what drives me crazy:

-I'm good at this

-I hold an incredible amount of wisdom and knowledge about how the dots of our world connect

-I've created a completely original project, the Human Body Project, to share and grow my own and humanity's wisdom with no institutional support that puts my whole self on the line, not to mention my finances and, in some way, my family life.

-Also I know why I'm doing the Human Body Project and, while I actually could write essay after essay about what it connects to in education, in academia, in art, in non-violent protest, in activism, in feminism, in cultural criticism, in documentary filmmaking, in theatre, in ethical grey areas, in life writing, in curriculum, in health and wellness, in evolutionary biology, etc., I don't value that process as meaningful for my own education or use of time and energy. The project speaks more strongly for itself and is enough in itself. The fetish in academia for being more meta-critic than creator is not useful for me. My idiot savant skill is meta-criticism. I don't need more.

-I spend and have spent hours and hours and hours (decades) feeling and processing deeply

-I, Tasha Diamant, a wise and 48-year-old adult person, am not only satisfied with this process in the sense of I understand it to be the most educational way of being for me, it is also very valuable and very educational for others (supported by data, as they say)

But, unbelievably, in my education that I am paying for in time, energy, and money, it appears to not be enough to satisfy Master's of Education criteria.

In my M Ed I have been asked to be honest and when I have been let's say that my perception is that I have not been supported.

I get that you are trying to forge some kind of mutually satisfying agreement with me and I feel very appreciative of that even if I sound like I'm not.

It's just that what I need to do is feel feel feel and vibrate vibrate vibrate! That is the most educative process for me right now and I'm okay that I am the one deciding that. I don't want to have to explain and justify. The process is exhausting enough.

I mentioned before that I feel like I am continually straddling two paradigms and that it can be unbearable. We live a compartmentalized, fragmented, unnatural, masculine-energy reality and I am connected to the muchness of all. Most people, of course, are vaguely okay while being vaguely miserable with the first reality. And there are some people who are able to navigate or negotiate holding both--I see you and Y and Z as people who seem to be able to do this and I admire you all for it. And then there is me who struggles struggles struggles. I am only barely able to do both, e.g. in my "real" life I barely manage a household and kids in suburbanality-land.

Here's a far-out, unsubstantiated-by-clinical-studies belief I hold: I am one of the people who is moving us into that connected to the muchness of all paradigm. I believe that some of us are doing that work for others. I believe that my illnesses and intense feelings are like a filter for those who don't feel. When I started to understand that I was in a deep healing and learning process that goes beyond my own self I was finally granted a layer of sanity and non-desperation that did not exist in my previous life. I still struggle struggle struggle with insanity and desperation but there is a strong and determined part of me that knows that I am moving myself and the world forward (I do at least have the "data" for this contention from people who have experienced Human Body Project).

My point is: If hard work and hours and results are the criteria I should be good to go. And if they're not, does it not seem reasonable that some explaining and justification to me, rather than from me, are in order? Ha ha. In other words, I believe there is no way to reconcile what is best for me with the parameters of the institution.

I know we talked about some options for me to write about and right now I'm drawing a blank.

Thank you for your kindness and consideration and understanding, Tasha.

Draft for Presentation That I Made Today

A lot of the time, I feel like I’m learning to be in the world. I will share some of a current learning process.

Missing component of curriculum, for me, is about context. “What is most pressing for you right now?”

Parallel to: “How are you?” The answer is a preordained, “Fine.”

For me right now? A feeling of no ground, no clarity, lostness, paralysis.

My state is related to some ideas under discussion at this conference: bridges; connecting heart and mind; and learning and education.

For the last few weeks, I could say I’ve been on a bridge. I also call it a learning experience. I also call it really uncomfortable. I haven’t crossed this bridge yet and I suppose I’m, if not enjoying it, paying attention to the view.

Actually it could be more like prolonged digestion.

I had an experience recently that really characterizes my naïveté! I began to understand power relationships in a way I hadn’t been able to absorb before.

It’s a long story but I feel lost because of it right now. I had some naïve belief that, if only I got the chance, showing people a way out of limiting beliefs would be welcomed.

But I learned something humbling about power: power systems are eco-systems. At the same time that I was confused and disappointed about people acting in a close-minded way, I was watching my own little eco-system in which I had the upper hand. My dog, my beloved loyal dog of 11 years, because he wakes my husband (and sometimes me) in the night, has been kicked out of our room. I am fully complicit. In the eco-system of our small household this unfairness and indignity has been carried out to keep those in power saner so we can function. Swampy’s feelings are hurt and he deserves better, but there it is.

Education is run by institutions. Institutions are eco-systems. People who run institutions have to balance the needs and beliefs of a lot of people. They may actually be doing their best.

I happen to think that our institutions are seriously failing us at a crucial time in history. Why? They are not addressing in any focused sense what is most pressing right now: global issues such as climate change; severe economic shifts; pollution; weapons of mass destruction and mass weaponry; poverty; violence; social injustice; entrenched misogyny; etc.

But my long-story experience in which let’s say my useful views were ignored in a less than fully fair way has forced me to look at my own way of understanding and acting within an institution and institutions in general. It has forced me, as well, to realize, whether I like it or not, the institutions we have right now—educational, religious, corporate, medical, media, financial, political, etc.—while I believe they are no longer serving us properly, are sort of all we’ve got.

Why am I so naïve? I left the corporate world at about 30. I couldn’t handle the contradiction of being a journalist at a national news magazine and basically being a lackey. I understood it was “a prestigious job.” But it wasn’t an intellectual decision. At 48, I now know that I feel my way through things. At that time, I just knew I had to get out. Then I spent 10 years trying to make it as an artist and became a teacher at a yogic and holistic studies centre. Then I worked briefly in advertising, which is a whole other story about where creative people can go to sell their souls. Then I started contract teaching at Lethbridge College, the best job I’ve ever had because I am able to share what is important to me: empathy, connection, and community, along with rigorousness, in learning.

I haven’t done well in or by institutions.

Now I’m doing an M Ed at this august one. I call it an arranged marriage—I am doing it for the Master’s degree credential, which I need to teach in this monopolistic system. Anyone who thinks most people are in a university program for the loveliness of their betterment is more naïve than me. Somehow the credential has become mistaken for an education. Curriculum as what is most pressing right now? I don’t come across that much as an idea in the M Ed program (or any educational program) and I find that next to useless for me.

But back to my new understanding of the way institutions work. Finding myself in a position of no longer being able to just say no—I want to continue to work in one, after all—and understanding in a deeper sense this idea of institutions as eco-systems, I now find myself in a position of not knowing how to go forward.

My state resembles paralysis. I feel it on a bodily level that I can’t fully explain. In fact, I have been a complete non-joy to be around; you can ask my husband. This learning experience, which I am still in the middle of, has affected me to my core. I am currently reading a book about post-traumatic stress in an attempt to understand the bodily nature of this learning experience.

My own understanding of many of my own institutional experiences is one of engaging in a toxic or hostile environment. In some ways, this parallels the human condition, the contradiction between having potentially unlimited, loving hearts and the requirement to enjoy and suffer this gift by living in a limited, physical body that leads to a mind with limiting beliefs.

I believe I have something to say about this contradiction as someone who feels it very deeply. I have created a project, the Human Body Project, as way out of some of these limiting beliefs that are holding me, most people, and, in turn, our institutions back. If you are interested, I have a website humanbodyproject.com and will be speaking tomorrow at 8:30 in TH277. I will also appear at the Calgary and Edmonton fringe theatre festivals.

I started this project in a way like an engineer; mothers can be like engineers. I wanted to contribute to solving a complex problem, the problem of my children (all children) growing up in a dysfunctional, unsafe, and unkind world. I believe my project has some profound things to say to make people (including myself) act more kindly and functionally.

I had real convictions of its usefulness. Today, not so much. Engineers understand that they have to work in the world that is. My recent deeper understanding of institutional systems makes me question my approach.

Quotes:

Leaning on Martin Heidegger’s notions of bridges as dwelling places for humans and his critique of instrumentalism and technology in education and society, Ted Aoki invites teachers “…to understand what it means to dwell together humanly…”

(Ted Aoki, from Curriculum in a New Key, 1991/2005, p. 439)

“…any true bridge is more than a merely physical bridge. It is a clearing—a site—into which earth, sky, mortals and divinities are admitted. Indeed, it is a dwelling place for humans who, in their longing to be together, belong together…on this bridge, we are in no hurry to cross over; in fact, such bridges lure us to linger…”

(Ted Aoki, from Curriculum in a New Key, 1991/2005, p. 438)

“Life stories and autobiographical writing locate the writer in a network of contexts, including family, neighbourhood, community, and cosmos.”

(Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009, p. 205)

“Life stories and autobiographical writing…have the potential to become transformative curriculum inquiry.”

(Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009, p. 205)

I Am Naive

A Facebook friend of posted this: "Olympics core vales: Excellence, friendship, and respect. What a joke! Excellence=only professionals, no more amateurs, Friendship=what peace, supports oppressed countries Respect=commercialism, exploitation, what is the environment"

I feel like an idiot for still having a little naive excitement about them.

I am a naive person. It's all those years of not having a career. I finished my M Ed project proposal. Only as I was finishing it did I realize that when some fancy academic says to me, "You should read so-and-so," most of them don't mean actually read it. They mean look at it and take a few ideas or quotes from it.

I honestly thought they meant I should read all these books and I just thought, fuck off, how can you seriously expect me to have the time or energy?

I know some of them really read these tomes and really digest them. But it finally dawned on me that many don't and don't actually expect me to either. BUT NOBODY SAYS THIS!!

It would have been really useful information for me.

One Wonders What Happened in the Meetings

I have been working on the M Ed project proposal. The one below is a very shitty first draft. Some very nice professor ladies are working with me and they are so kind and patient and good at what they do that it seems very churlish to complain about how much I hate doing it. My complaints are never ever directed at them.

I just don't care about fitting into the way these things are done. But I am so close so I will mostly shut up and do it and I am very thankful for the help and guidance they are are giving me. Thank you E. and C.

I received $9200 in research funds from Lethbridge College to edit a Human Body Project video this term, mostly the footage from the Edmonton fringe (the same video that will be my M Ed project--it's just the M Edders need a different fancy proposal wrapped around it). The college even announced it publicly last week. Around the same time last November, I submitted a proposal to do a Human Body Project presentation at WestCAST, an education conference hosted by the University of Lethbridge this year. I was accepted in December. That's two naked lady thingies supported by two actual institutional thingies!

Except that today the U of L faculty people in charge of the WestCAST conference sent me an email asking me to remain clothed! No reasons were given for this turnaround. I have asked them to explain. One waits.

Needless to say, I have some ideas about how to approach this but I'll wait to see their reply. If I was at my office I could copy my proposal here but I'm not. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow. I mean who doesn't want to see a WestCAST proposal for a naked lady thingie?

Anxiety to Utility

“You have the ability to sense and know higher truth.”
--My recent post-fringe fortune cookie message.

Since I wrote a revelatory autobiographical piece for an M Ed class in June, I have been experiencing higher than usual levels of anxiety, i.e. pretty high, like constant low-level anxiety attack. I attributed the main cause of my anxiety to be the realization that I had to tell my parents I was writing about them and then, when I finally got the guts up to do that, and my father wanted to read what I had written, to having to show him. I was also gearing up for being naked and vulnerable in Edmonton for the Human Body Project and knew that was causing me anxiety, as well. I don’t know how much weight I’ve lost but my pants are loose.

But now the Edmonton Fringe is done and I’ve not only shown my dad what I wrote, but have been able to more positively reinterpret the last 33 years of our relationship due to the post-revelation discussions we’ve had. Yet I’m even more deeply anxious. This past weekend I had close to a full-blown anxiety attack. My husband took my kids to Calgary so I could spend the time writing for my M Ed work and I spent most of it trying to breathe.

What’s the anxiety about? I wish it were so easy to give cause and effect. God, the insatiable desire for people and their cause and effect—well, preferably a simple, fixable cause and effect answer, right? Fuck. Good luck.

What if what I believe was true was actually true? We are all connected. Some people feel it more deeply than others. Me, for instance. You know what I’m really, like really really, NOT good at? Compartmentalizing. Compartmentalization is, first of all, a head skill. It requires relegating feeling and other bothersome body-related attributes to separate compartments to be called up usually when there is seen to be some utility and/or when it comes spewing out (as in a personal/health crisis). As someone who has long understood that I am in a healing crisis/process, I am no longer able to call up this skill. So this living in the comfort of my own home and driving my car and buying crap and “getting on with life”/“sucking it up” and being entertained and all that SHIT, does not necessarily work for me. I’m too busy feeling, whether I want to or not. And here’s what I know about feeling, when I feel, whether I want to or not, I am more connected to myself and others.

What if I really am one of those people who are doing the feeling work for others? God knows, somebody has to do it. I cried pretty much every day of my 30s. I often didn’t understand where the grief came from; it felt much bigger than my own life.

I have been ashamed of this, this feelingness, this weakness, this sensitivity. Well, fuck off shameful feelings, I’m coming out more. I am doing big work, not just as creator of the Human Body Project, and that is big work, but as a feeling human being. I am feeling the disconnectedness and the sheer stupid, willfully ignorant wastefulness of love and beauty in this existence. And maybe by feeling it I’m working through some of it, for myself and, yes, for others. This is serious, emotional work and, needless to say, it goes unrecognized and unpaid. Well, at least I can recognize myself and maybe encourage others to start recognizing themselves too.

What if self-love, authenticity, and love of others really did all intersect? What if instead of hiding and surviving, I look after my sensitive self by showing up honestly and vulnerably? What if “look after your own” meant connecting to the world and doing whatever you can do to make it better? Why is it me who is the “whack job”?

One of my professors said derisively, about research, something like: “We can’t deal with world peace [snort, chortle] so we can take on smaller chunks.” Without a far more derisive aside from me about the sheer obtuseness of a great percentage of social science research (the “smaller chunks”), I submit that if you are an adult, perhaps more particularly an adult in an institutional position, i.e. medical, educational, religious, legal, financial, etc., and if what you are doing is not on some purposeful level about creating more peace in the world than you should fucking quit right now. I submit that every job interviewer should be asking every job interviewee: “What are you doing to create more peace in the world?” ESPECIALLY in education.

The grotesque cynicism and stuntedness of adults projected onto children disturbs me more than anything else in the world. Apparently kindness, caring, and sharing should only last until Grade fucking Five. Good, let’s keep the cycle going. Put the burden of caring on children. Never walk the talk. Do as I say, not as I do. It is so blatantly fucked up, yet the complacency and complicitness of adults is seemingly infinite.

What have we learned? Go backwards from that point, well, that must be what we teach. Some North American lessons: Be skinny but drive a big car. Get a big house. Fashionable clothes are really important. Sex is a big deal but shameful but a big deal but shameful but a big deal… Buying stuff will cheer you up. Fast food is easy. We should always be comfortable and never unhappy and suffering should be fixed and is shameful (and boring, too). Criminals lurk everywhere. At least we don’t live where there are earthquakes, famines, no TV channels, wars, female genital mutilations, and our house isn’t on fire, etc., so we must be doing something right. Our kids should be successful. Success = car, house, clothes, big boobs (either you should have them or your girlfriend should), no signs of suffering, etc. A fancy title beats a human connection any day. Look after your own. Guard your heart to the point that you don’t know you have one.

Look, I know people who are never going to get beyond their very few realizations. Job, house, TV, maybe some family connections, is all they’re going to manage. And maybe they manage those kindly, compassionately. I don’t really want to dis where people are at. But for those of us who can get more expansive in our thinking, those of us who hold positions maybe in institutions that are supposed to be serving other human beings, I challenge you to ask yourself every day: “What am I doing to create more peace in the world?” I challenge you to push beyond your usual comfort zone to expand whatever it is you are doing, because from what I know and see and feel, it’s now or never.

A young friend of mine told me she quit university because she felt like it was “sucking the soul out of my body.” She said: “I couldn’t believe the passionlessness. I couldn’t believe that this was a place where we were coming to learn how to change the world.”

She made a mistake, didn’t she? Universities are not for people who want to change the world. They’re a place for people who want to be a “success.” That nebulous, phony, unreachable goal as defined by our society and explicitly marketed to us by our institutions of higher education.

I am in the extremely uncomfortable position of being a teacher in what is virtually a monopolistic system, a system that I have deep issues with. Worse (better?), I am an uncredentialled teacher in this system. I am extremely uncomfortable with the status quo. I am extremely uncomfortable! How can so many people be content going on like this? Sometimes I can just do what I do and sometimes it just completely boggles my mind. (This is one of those times).

I am a well read, well informed person who, when it comes to whole-self health, have never experienced an iota of assistance from the medical system, so I look very dubiously at mental health diagnoses, even though I know a fair bit about them. When I think of all the possible categories that I might fit into (depression, bipolar, ADD, one or all of these might work), post-traumatic stress disorder fits my scenario the best. Like that paradigm of exile that I’ve written about, I think we actually live in a paradigm of PTSD. I would characterize my trauma as birth; I’m still working on the trauma of being born. By saying this I do not mean to denigrate the extreme traumas that people experience from being victims of violence and oppression—just as by saying that I understand the feeling of exile, I cannot compare my experience to people who have really experienced the upheaval of war or disaster.

But there are parallels. As a deeply feeling human being and one who is trying to come to terms with being a deeply feeling human being, I find the disconnection and lack of heartfulness in our current condition together as humans on this earth, a condition that is completely unquestioned and acceptable on so many levels to so many people, traumatizing. (I believe it is only acceptable and unquestioned because of the way humans are taught to compartmentalize.) On a simple physical/energetic level, I have never been okay with it. (Of course, I’m not alone but, for the purposes of this piece, I’ll just use my own example.) Even before my intellect or even an emotional reaction can get in there, my being rebels; case in point, my current not very pin-pointable, PTSD-like anxiety.

I understand that it is my own job to work on my own self. But the tools at hand, particularly the acceptable tools at hand (e.g. Prozac, going for a walk, alcohol), are close to useless, for me, anyway. The best medicine for me is to show up as authentically as I am able. It’s hard! It’s socially unacceptable or at least socially challenging to admit stuff like this. I can’t just cut it off when I leave the privacy of my own home. Like my ex-university-student friend observed, passionlessness is more acceptable, in fact more worthy, than feelingness. Blurting, singing, dancing, screaming, running naked through the hallways throwing eggs (an activity I may eventually get enough guts to espouse since I think it’s what every one of us involved in a school should be doing) and other socially unacceptable/socially challenging outlets are not readily available to me as a person who still struggles with not wanting to appear too crazy. Either way, I’m stuck with discomfort, which may also contribute to the anxious/depressed/fatigued feelings that I often experience.

Feelingness is acceptable in art, or at least it used to be. For a variety of reasons—one being that the artist establishment has bankrupted feelingness in art, visual art particularly—I’m kind of sick of art. I’m for sure sick of separations and, anyway, I’m no longer able to put those dams or walls or rooms up in myself. Painting a picture is not enough for me anymore. Art, even great work that moves me to tears, isn’t enough for me anymore. In the cultural/economic milieu of commodity and entertainment that has seriously compromised creativity, I have a desperate need for authenticity. I crave allowing it in myself and I am honored and buoyed to meet it in others. When I am authentic, when I share an authentic moment, I feel connected. When I feel connected, I am not crazy. (Writing, as in a blog post piece like this, is a kind of halfway compromise between being feelingly connected and being socially acceptable. Even being naked for the Human Body Project is a halfway point—it’s in a walled-off, separate, compartmentalized, therefore, mostly non-threatening, place.)

I hate using the word crazy but let’s examine it for a moment. Recently, I was fondly called a “whack job.” I honestly can’t take offense because I get it. My admissions, my beliefs, my way of being, my sheer social unacceptability equate with crazy/whack job way in advance of me even considering buying the eggs and running naked down the U Hallway. If I can use an analogy, it’s like my insert politically correct adjective here students (I was going to say rural) who are 20 years old and have never tried an olive. I’m the olive. Too weird. Out of the comfort zone. Nope. Down goes the wall. Crazy.

It’s another Catch-22, isn’t it?

How do you get people to connect with you when they think you’re crazy? Well, you don’t win them all. Especially in, say, a 90-minute Human Body Project event. But I have found that even the most resistant students eventually get something from my classes. I teach public speaking, communication, and writing but what I’m really doing, and what I think is every teacher’s job and what I wish I got some fucking credit for and what I really really really wish was something that we as a race and as educators would seize as an idea to build upon, is I am teaching (and learning) humanity, community, connection, respect for self and others, empathy, the possibility of peace. How do I do that? Primarily by allowing myself to be as vulnerable and authentic as I am able. Am I perfect at it? No. But I am purposeful and passionate.

For Human Body Project events I show up naked. I am constantly reevaluating if this is necessary. I am not comfortable naked, though, admittedly, it seems to get easier. Nakedness also makes other people uncomfortable. But the essential reason is still there; my nakedness allows me to be as defenseless as possible. This is important because in defenselessness, in vulnerability, my heart is more accessible. Similarly, I do not script or prepare any material for Human Body Project events. Again, I am constantly reevaluating if this makes sense. So far, it has. When I show up defenseless and unprepared, I can let go of a willful agenda, which, for me, probably fits into the category of bitingly critical social commentary. The as-defenseless-as-possible stance, along with the in-the-moment allowing and trusting that whatever is meant to happen will happen has been unfailingly powerful for me and for, I believe, most audience members. (One man in Edmonton ran into me after he had been to my first show. He said something like: “I didn’t totally get what was happening when I was sitting there but it sort of exploded in my brain afterward.”)

This piece of writing is a more harsh and critical side of me than has yet shown up in a Human Body Project event. I am an angry person, motivated by my discontent and ill health and, most especially, my desire to see a kinder, deeper, more creative and connected world for my children. I’m not saying this angry/crazy piece of writing isn’t my truth but perhaps it isn’t my highest truth. I believe what happens at Human Body Project events is a higher truth or a more heartful truth and I am pretty sure that energetically, on a real world-changing level, it makes more of a difference than getting people to read this post. So perhaps you can understand my frustration with my inability to figure out a way to expand the project. (And maybe that contributes to my anxiety, as well.)

In different ways I keep saying the same thing. Heart: heartfulness is the bottom line. Vulnerable: by allowing yourself to be vulnerable you have more access to your heart. Feel: reassemble your compartments. Connect: we are all in the same boat. I am no paragon of heartfulness. But because of how I feel, I know—in that deep sense as a human being who is an instrument of knowing (Vicki Kelly)—how desperately we need to do this.

“You have the ability to sense and know higher truth.” No shit. With that knowing comes a responsibility to share that knowledge at the very real risk of being labeled crazy, egotistical, and most certainly, non-academic and unscientific. But I take my responsibility very seriously and feel it very urgently. There is rarely a moment that goes by when I am not trying to figure out a more effective way to share my wisdom.

Until we acknowledge the role of the heart, our conclusions, our learnings will continue to be faulty. I have written: “If everyone felt the same way that I do, the world might actually change.” I have been asked: “Can you better describe these feelings?” This is my attempt at describing a time of serious anxiety and the way I make connections in myself and to the world to understand where that anxiety comes from. For those who prefer the more limiting but easier to swallow medical model, go for it and, again, good luck.

For those who prefer the cynical response to my authentic, heartful, vulnerable, emotion and feeling-tinged argument, I get it. Until I became a mother I, too, took the cynical exit and am still habituated to take that route. I was not implicated in my own life because I barely gave a shit about myself, but I sure as hell care about my children. I woke up for and with them. I am implicated and so are we all, especially at this juncture in history. The cynical response may be the easy and socially acceptable response, but it is a harmful response.

I’m not saying we should start a movement of naked egg-throwers, although anyone interested in starting one, I might like to know about it. I’m not saying my argument is the exact olive you need. I’m not even saying that everyone should get beyond the habitual, destructive passionlessness of our culture and try a fucking olive, though I am suggesting that more of you might want to do that. Just give the olive some fucking respect.

If you’re getting a bit lost with my olive analogy (as even I am but I still kind of like it), I’ll be more explicit. Let’s say you’re a guy who understands hard facts and linear arguments. Let’s say it’s important to you that columns balance and “t”s are crossed and other orderly, explicable things occur. Let’s say you are perfectly happy never trying an olive. Let’s say you do a good job, love your family, and are a really decent person. Let’s say that what I have just written above may be way out of, not only your comfort zone, but also your understanding of how the world works. I would like you to consider that my understanding is just as deserving of respect as yours. I would like you to consider that I am not necessarily asking you to propagate or convert to my view.

Mostly, most fervently, I would like you to see—given what I know you know because we all know, whether we want to or not: the overwhelming scientific, documented, empirical evidence of climate change, diminishing energy reserves, poverty, violence, war, misogyny, etc. on the globe that we share with more than 6 billion others—the utility of my argument.

A Response to an Interesting New Yorker Article About People Who Donate a Kidney to a Stranger

(“The Kindest Cut” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the July 27, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.)

New Yorker: The opening paragraphs describe (in typical New Yorker style) a 40-year-old man with strong convictions about giving back. “He believed that if his needs were met and he found himself in possession of a surplus… he was obliged to share it” (p. 39)

The other donors the reporter describes have similar spiritual values. One guy is kind of a fuck-up who can’t make child support payments, but realizes that he could actually do another human being a great deal of good. Two other donors profiled are women whose lives have been more explicitly devoted to giving back—one is a missionary and pastor, the other decides to donate a kidney in honor of her grandmother, a Korean immigrant who has always helped those less fortunate.

TD: I can relate to their urges to give back and to do something that has concrete value in terms of committing myself to the Human Body Project. For me, the project came as an inspiration, a calling. These people describe similar feelings of rightness, of deep knowing that they are doing something that has to be done.

New Yorker: The parameters of MacFarquhar’s discussion are American. It is illegal in the US to pay for a kidney. The people in this article registered on a five-year-old controversial website MatchingDonors.com to offer a kidney. None of them were paid, although at first the child support guy was looking for that possibility. (She also talks about stranger donor evidence more generally in ways that indicate that many of the donors are like these specific ones).

The article deals with the emotionality of this kind of kidney donation. Turns out there are incredibly strong reactions. MacFarquhar describes the different emotional processes of each donor-donee relationship, but first I want to discuss some of the outside reactions she describes and some of the questions she asks.

TD: While my project certainly doesn’t have the reach or impact of directly saving a life, I believe that because I use my body and because I act “against” self-interest, the reactions I get and go through are quite similar and related to the reactions reported here. I also believe that in some ways I’m working on the same principle, I do what I do because it is the right thing to do and because I am able to do it. It’s in the world’s interest and whatever is in the world’s interest is in my interest. These people are doing it because of the rightness and because doing something good makes them feel good.

New Yorker: Her questions: “Do you find the idea of donating a kidney to a stranger noble? Or freakish? If the latter, is it the extremity of the act that baffles you? Does it seem crazy, giving something that precious to someone for whom you have no feeling, and whom, if you knew him, you might actually dislike?” (p.40)

TD: Is standing around naked and vulnerable a noble thing to do? Is it freakish? Is it extreme? Why do it for all the fuckheads who are out there?

Many people think I’m noble and way more think I’m an extreme freak. I find both reactions difficult. I would like people to understand that I’m modeling something that I hope we can all do in our own ways to move humanity forward/make the world a better place/create world peace. In a way, it’s really not a big deal, but many people make it so.

New Yorker: MacFarquhar explains that for the donor, the operation is pretty easy and recovery is relatively swift. The main worry about only having one kidney left in your body is the possibility of losing one in an accident. If a person gets kidney disease later in life, it would affect both kidneys anyway.

TD: The idea of donating a kidney to a stranger does not call to me. I am still too afraid to even donate blood. It’s not rational, but there it is. But I don’t find the idea of someone else doing it repellent. It’s amazing how much projection and difficulty people have with it, though. See left column for reactions.
p.s. Since writing this yesterday, I made an appointment to donate blood tomorrow.
New Yorker: -Paul Wagner: reads about a lady on the website decides to give a kidney to her; his partner, sister and father don’t want him to do it (p. 39)
-Rob Smitty: loser/child support fuckup guy, first hoped for pay but after finding out it was illegal still wanted to donate; the recipient’s (Bob Hickey) surgeon refuses to do operation when he reads about the fact that the kidney was found online; Hickey intends to file suit and it becomes a news story; 2 days later operation happens; 8 days later Smitty is jailed for nonpayment and is disappointed that the judge didn’t show more lenience; a man reads about his case and helps him out with money; many media stories vilify him as an opportunist, though the man helped him out after the deed (p. 42-43)
-Bob Hickey becomes a kidney transplant activist; he believes that UNOS (Untied Network for Organ Sharing) which manages the cadaver kidney waiting list “intimidates transplant centers into rejecting Internet donors” (p. 42); UNOS position is that MatchingDonors.com ‘exploits vulnerable populations and undermines public trust in the equitable allocation of organs’ (p. 42)
-MacFarquhar reports at length about studies regarding living donors who were suspect even though they were family members; the medical/psychiatric establishment reactions are summed up in these sentences: the “surgeons and psychiatrists went to heroic lengths to draw out the conflicts and ambivalence that lay hidden beneath donors’ supposed willingness to undergo surgery. If the potential donor’s motivation appeared inadequately healthy, they turned him down.” (p. 43)

TD: She provides specific instances that are heartbreaking in the invasive psychological diagnoses by the outsider physicians and the outsider physicians’ arrogant ability to project motivations on the donors.

MacFarquhar brings up the emotional messiness of kidney donation, whether it be from a family member, a person found on the Internet, or an anonymous donor. The medical/psychiatric establishment clearly sees itself as some kind of proper arbiter of that mess. But I find it interesting that a profession known for the gigantic egos of its members mirrors their own egotism in their judgment of donors and, not only that, sees themselves as the people who can best decide about emotional consequences.

One reaction I often get from people is that I am doing the Human Body Project for attention. I find this really fucking irritating. One of my art teachers said, “You must have felt a lot of power.” Like that was my point!!! I am embarrassed, not so much by being naked, but my passion about it and commitment. It’s so “uncool.” When I send out press releases and put up posters, I feel I’m doing due diligence. Others see it as self-promotion. Holy fucking projection! It’s like they can’t get around their own twisted egos to see that there might be a sincere reason for me to do something fairly extreme and risky. I see this as mirroring the medical establishment’s reaction and the easy vilification in the media of the nonpayment dad.

New Yorker: MacFarquhar’s article reveals many examples of the difficulties of the donor-donee relationship. One young woman (the one with the Korean grandmother) hoped she would meet rock stars and become famous after donating to a rock musician. When she found out he didn’t really know Mick Jagger and he basically didn’t stay in touch, she was very offended (p. 46-47). MacFarquhar cites some examples of doctors not allowing certain relatives to donate: because a wife of a man who wanted to donate to his brother didn’t like the idea and the doctors thought the man was doing it to get away from her; or a mother wishing to donate to her daughter got severe nervous symptom during testing (p. 43).

TD: So fucking what?!!! This idea that the doctors know best about how people should lead their lives is very disturbing to me, especially this idea that messiness can simply be avoided. The young woman was still proud of what she did. We don’t know what happened to the brother and the mother; presumably if their loved one died, that couldn’t have been better than not donating!

New Yorker: I am particularly inspired by the last donor MacFarquhar describes, Kimberley Brown-Whale, a missionary who donates a kidney without needing to know for whom it is intended: “Most people who donate their kidneys to strangers say it’s not for everyone, but Kimberley Brown-Whale disagrees, ‘I don’t see why not,’ she says. ‘People used to say the same thing about the mission field: ‘I could never do what you do.’ Well, why not? You pack up some stuff and you go. Give it a try. We can do more than we think we can. If you’re sitting around with a good kidney you’re not using, why can’t someone else have it? For a couple of days of discomfort, someone else is going to be freed from dialysis and be able to live a full life. Gosh, I’ve had flus that made me feel worse.’” (p. 52).

TD: I’m kind of saying the same thing, we can all let ourselves be more vulnerable than we presently allow ourselves and by doing so, make the world a more peaceful place. It’s kind of matter of fact and not actually that hard. Reading this piece has solidified more for me the need for teaching actual ways of thinking about how we can use ourselves and our abilities to intentionally create a better world. Many people say, well there never has been world peace and there never will be. We have to at the very least teach the possibility of peace rather than that stagnant stance of cynicism.

A Story About Karma (another M Ed assignment)

I first met my first husband, Robert, without actually meeting him. I both admired and avoided him from afar.

To backtrack, I had started doing yoga in the early 90s. I kept getting a message in my head: Do yoga. (Karma.)

Before I got this message, I had dismissed yoga as idiotic. I didn’t get the point of it. I was all about exercise for some result: a) goodness, as in moral superiority; b) appearance, as in I was interested in appearing morally superior to anyone who knew that I was running or going to aerobics class or whatever; and c) most importantly, skinniness, which is, of course, a key visual signifier of moral superiority, and also the only way to look to get a man.

So I got into yoga, not in any way through my intellect or my understanding of how things worked, but somehow somewhere in my being something was telling me: do yoga. I was the poster child for yoga. I became an excellent yoga teacher (I think of myself as exactly the yoga teacher I would like to have) mostly because of my complete initial retardedness. I learned everything from scratch; I had almost no connection between my head and my body so everything the teacher would say had to be translated and questioned.

“Do you put your feet right beside each other or can there be space between them?”

“Should I be feeling a stretch in my hips even though we’re stretching our legs?”

“Is this how I should be breathing?”

As a former top student in school, I was very interested in getting it “right.” I drove my first yoga teacher a little nuts.

The more I did yoga the more I knew I needed to do yoga. Again this realization was not intellectual. Something in my being was continually drawn to yoga. I tried new classes; I tried different yoga videotapes. I traveled a lot to do my art and did yoga in Venice, on Greek islands, in my brother’s 200-sq-ft New York “apartment.”

One day in the spring of 1996 I was in yoga class in Toronto and I saw a notice for a weekend yoga retreat. I was broke (I was always broke) but I knew I had to go. I got someone to cover my waitressing shifts and off I went to somewhere in non-urban Ontarioland.

The instructors had come from a place called Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. As soon as they walked into the room, these words came into my head: I’m going to that place.

In November of that year I did. I signed up for a month-long yoga and service intensive at Kripalu. I walked into Kripalu, put my suitcases in my room, and went to my first evening yoga session at the place where I would end up living and working for more than two years. Robert was the teacher that night.

He had a long, lean body, a sad face, beautiful brown eyes, a soft New York-accented voice, and a shy, sweet manner. I loved the way he led yoga. Like me, Robert leads yoga by sharing his own practice. Like me, he is very at home teaching yoga. His yoga felt very nurturing. Besides me, he is still me favourite yoga teacher. My roommate, Holly, said: “That Robert is pretty attractive.”

Even though I hadn’t met him, I said: “He is a very damaged guy. You should stay away from him.” I just knew. That whole month, I made a point of going to all of his classes but I didn’t try to get to know him. The main chapel of Kripalu where yoga is held is pretty big and the yoga teacher is at the front like a performer on a stage or a professor or a preacher. He was kind of a star to me.

After my month, I went back to Toronto to organize moving to Kripalu for a longer period. I came back the following February to do a program where you get room, board, and spiritual development opportunities in exchange for working. I walked in the door and ran into a friend. We went to dinner together in the cavernous, austere dining hall (Kripalu was once a Catholic seminary; the building, built in the 50s, looks like any university or institutional building of that era). She said, “I want you to meet my friend Robert.”

This is how I felt: I am about to meet Robert! Robert is joining us! After my month of going to his classes and making him into a kind of star, I was really excited that I was going to be sitting with this handsome guy with the New York accent who seemed so sensitive, whose yoga felt so good. I remember I was charmed by what he had on, a green and purple striped turtleneck.

It was a really fun dinner. Robert is very witty and irreverent and he made me laugh a lot. It was the time of the OJ Simpson trial and we were both interested in the allegory of it. I hadn’t exactly forgotten my words to Holly or changed my mind about my assessment, I just enjoyed myself. It began a friendship that still exists to this day with a lot of extremely painful, hellish shit in between when we tried to be lovers and spouses.

My relationship with Robert—how it came about, the stuff that happened, the complete non-rationality of it—taught me and helped me understand the concept of karma. Robert is actually a deeply damaged guy who prefers to live like a hermit and is not very able to function in the world. Kripalu was a great place for him to be. He paid a minimal rent to live in one of the private rooms. He worked very part time hours as a yoga teacher and he was, along with any other man who entered the place, in demand. Women outnumbered men about eight to one.

I was a deeply damaged woman in her mid-30s, really lonely, desperate for a relationship, but utterly ill-equipped for a healthy one. The sensible part of me knew not to get involved with guys who seemed as damaged as Robert. Here’s a piece of karmic evidence, though: every day I would run into this hermit who barely exited his room.

“Can you fuckin believe that Johnny Cochran?! Getting OJ to try on the glove, that was inspired!”

We started having lunches and dinners together. In a fit of what I thought of as bravery and directness, I asked if he had a girlfriend. He allowed that he was “seeing” some woman from the town. “She thinks she’s my girlfriend,” he said with hilarity and contempt. Red flags all over the place.

One day in Robert’s yoga class I was near the front. I was in child pose and Robert came over and placed his hands on the small of my back, an assist, in the parlance of yoga teachers. Such a simply kind and simple act. But what amazing consequences! I had an experience of what I can only describe as God in that moment. (The yogis call it shakti.) I felt myself and my body as a pillar of white light extending from earth to “heaven.” While I have had other shakti experiences, I have never had that God feeling before or since.

I knew I loved Robert and had to tell him. I went from being in one of those lame, pretend flirtations that go nowhere to the real thing. I sat him down in the office that I worked in, closed my eyes, and explained my feelings, “I just love you.” I said I didn’t need him to respond or expect anything from him. But he was moved by my feelings and we soon began a relationship that was so extra-doomed from the start it wasn’t funny.

Maybe some hermits don’t mind being dragged out of their caves, but Robert did. For him, the stress of considering the needs of someone else was simply too much. For me, the idea of letting go was simply too much—inexplicably (karmically), he felt like home to me. Always instigated by me, we did a dark and destructive dance of on again-off again for more than six years. I spent many of those years sobbing and curled up in the fetal position and begging and crying to friends and trying everything I possibly could to get him to show up.

“I’m damaged goods,” he would sometimes admit. Or, “I’m not boyfriend material.” In his own way, he was honest.

When Robert took up with another woman for a while and ignored me, as in, he would literally pretend not to see me, I inappropriately told everyone I could think of about his transgressions, including the person who hired the yoga teachers and Robert's sister, in a 12-page letter. In my brain, I knew I was crazy. In my heart, I loved him and couldn’t release myself. It was a razor’s edge of awareness, living in and knowing I was living in pure fucked up shit—totally NOT a place of this makes any kind of sense. The most painful thing about it was how much I hated myself for not getting out.

By late 1999 or 2000, I was determined not to contact him anymore. I had moved into my parents’ basement in Calgary, tail between my legs, no money, no ideas, depressed, 38 years old (my friends called me Costanza), saved only by my beloved dog Swampy and the tolerance of my parents. Robert was in Lenox. We didn’t speak for a year.

Then one day, without admitting what I was going to do to anybody, not even my cherished therapist, I watched my hand press the buttons on the phone. I said: “I still want to be with you.”

In short order, he moved to Calgary, we got married, our families tried to be happy for us, we conceived Claire on our wedding night, and we had a few good months. I realized, in a deeper sense than I was allowing myself to believe hitherto, that I would be the one to support our family and in May 2001 we moved to Lethbridge where I got a job.

During my pregnancy I found out that Robert was using Internet porn at the same time that he was clearly uninterested in having sex with me. Do it baby, one more time! I was constantly getting my heart broken. It was textbook victim asking for it material or an opportunity to work on loving myself or both. 9-11 happened around the same time. Poor Claire. I was deeply distraught during my last trimester.

Then she was born! What a miracle! What a beauty! I understood love in a way that I had never felt before. Loving my child, this was love. Nothing was more important than caring for her. Robert and I both loved her so much. For a while, I got so much energy out of loving her and being with her and caring for her.

But looking after a 54-year-old baby didn’t work as well as it had. Well, of course, it had never, ever “worked,” but the demands of a real baby trumped the demands of living with my damaged husband. Our relationship exhausted me and made me ill. I actually felt like I was dying. And we fought in front of Claire. When Claire was a year and a half, I left and skipped down the hallway of my new little house. I was finally done! I was finally done!

I admit that I still got caught up in our shit for a while after we split but eventually I was able to not engage. Once I really realized that I couldn’t depend on him, I was grateful for what he could do and does do. He is a loving father and like a brother to me. It took me so long to accept on a full, embodied level, what was in my face for so long: he is a beautiful, damaged person, not able to be a real partner to me. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t something I did wrong that I had to fix.

I believe that Robert and I came into each other’s lives to work out some deep karma. I was able to work out a lot of rejection issues, to go from experiencing Robert’s actions as rejection, to accepting that what I needed from him was beyond his capabilities.

And we both got Claire out of the deal. I believe it was Claire who called up my pillar of light and Claire who called Robert back after a year and over thousands of miles. Claire wanted to be born. Her birth took my life in a brand new and miraculous direction. I am grateful for following my tormented heart. (Karma.)

26 Good and Bad Qualities of Human Nature (an M Ed assignment)

1.    Fun: Good if it’s about spontaneous delight and joy. I’m thinking about children and their endless capacity to be curious and react to and enjoy their surroundings. Bad if it’s about forced enjoyment. I’m thinking of my drinking days when drinking was the only way to create spontaneity but the fun was tempered with frequently harmful mindlessness.

2.    Struggle: Good because it’s about learning and growing as a human being. Bad because it can be really difficult and painful.

3.    Sex: Good because it allows us to experience our bodies and our partners in a very pleasurable and connected way. Bad because it can often be a place where people experience deep shame and/or dysfunctional obsession. It can be used like a harmful substance.

4.    Mother: Good if she is loving and nurturing and open and accepting and available. Pretty damaging if she is unable to embody those quintessential mothering qualities. In our culture motherhood is not particularly valued or supported, so the mothers are not mothered, and so how can they mother? Motherhood is fraught with difficult emotions.

5.    Peace: Good. Inner peace, world peace, these are qualities to strive for in a world of turmoil and pain and disconnection. Peace is harmony, connection, love, joy, acceptance, tolerance. We’ve got a long way to go.

6.    Education: Good if it is about creating a loving, open, curious, resilient human being. Bad if it is about control, squashing of creativity, perfectionism, measurement. Sadly, I see our education system more in the realm of bad than good.

7.    Authenticity: Good. I don’t see a way forward without truth, acknowledging what is real and dealing with it accordingly, rather than hiding from and ignoring what is difficult. Bad, in the sense that there is a danger that being authentic can be hurtful because of a hidden agenda on the part of the truth-teller. Real authenticity requires ruthless honesty.

8.    Christianity: Good if it is about creating more love in the world and using the life and works of Jesus Christ to inspire love. Bad, if it is about rules and dogma and cliqueyness. I have real difficulty with the closed, non-metaphorical statement, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” and the giving up of personal agency and responsibility such a statement implies to me.

9.    Aesthetics: Well, mine are good and many other people’s are bad! On an honest level, this is how I feel even if I try to rationalize otherwise. This is a truly thorny area of human existence isn’t it? My reaction to, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” for example, is largely aesthetic and I react to aesthetics viscerally. If I see/hear/experience something that is aesthetically pleasing for me, among other reactions, I feel a kind of resonance and comfort (which can include a comfort with certain kinds of discomfort) in my body.

The Jesus statement makes me squeamish. I feel at home with openness and open-endedness and colour and organic shapes and not knowing all the answers. My aesthetics reflect that. “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” speaks black and white and fixedness to me.  For me, Jesus was a guy who was exactly not about being a lord and saviour, but about teaching us that we can all be our own lord and saviour by his modeling of honesty, loving, and dealing with the mess of it all.

But words are close to useless to express spiritual matters. I am sure when I talk about openheartedness and connection, for instance, those words are aesthetically displeasing to many.

The Beegees sang that words are all we’ve got. I would offer that we actually have our bodies and our visceral sense of who we are and what love is. This is one of the reasons that work that is visceral is of the utmost importance to me. If we can access our loving hearts, this is where we can connect beyond aesthetics and move forward. Jesus, by the way, was all about that.

10.    Holistic: Good. We are more than words and intellect and what car we drive. We are dynamic, creative beings made up of body, mind and spirit, and we are connected to the earth, other beings on the earth, and to the whole universe. Any aspect of human life that acknowledges this is helpful to individual and global health.

11.    Creativity: Good. The ability to be curious and make connections and be in the moment and have fun and interact with surroundings/people/life in a fluid and generative way. In some languages, the word for human is “creative being.” Our culture has done much damage to creativity; we have separated the concept of creativity and the permission to be creative from everyday life. This is something we as humans must heal from to move forward.

12.    Art: Bad and good. I always think of my cousin Peter’s statement. Years ago when I was in university, I went on my first visit to New York: my friend and I stayed with my Greek relatives. She told them she was in art history and Peter said: “Art! I hate art!” (Sounded more like: Awwht!!! I hate awwht!!!—spoken very loudly). He didn’t understand modern art and hated it for not understanding it. Much contemporary art has become even more oblique.

Good art is good. Bad art is bad. I’m an artist and I don’t love art. Too much bad art. Too much bullshit art. Difficult to find a happy medium here. I will argue again for visceral work that reaches the heart and body as directly as possible. I will also argue for the nurturing and encouragement of creativity (a word, by the way, not allowed to be used in art school—how fucked up is that?).

13.    Teacher: Good teachers are caring, nurturing, sensitive, intelligent, firm, facilitating, flexible, open-minded, always learning and changing, etc…. in their own ways. Good teachers can be very organized and strict or disorganized and loose—there is no formula. Bad teachers are uncaring, inflexible, dull, insensitive, close-minded, hurtful, etc.

14.    Adult: Adult = damaged child (epitomized by Michael Jackson). I don’t know one adult who isn’t. Sad. Not bad or good, just is. A clear, responsible adult = good. The messiness of most adults and where they are at = something to keep working on.

15.    Child: The ultimate “Good.” Child = close to his/her heart, close to God. I don’t know one who isn’t going to be a damaged adult. I feel less sad than I do about the adults. Many of their adult mentors have moved forward from the past to acknowledge on a deeper level the agency of children. But we still have such a long way to go to really respect the beauty and power of children.

16.    Heart. If your heart can love = good. If your heart is closed = something to keep working on.

17.    Love. A state of being at one or connected to that which is loved. Clear love (requires love of self, first); love that is “easy” = good. Love that is based on requirements and duty = something to keep working on.

18.    Sacred. What is most valued and held in high esteem. Good if what is held in ultimate value is good for self and others. The valuing of appearance, materialism, celebrity, dogma, status, etc. is damaging.

19.    Depth: To look beyond the given, to be willing to look at what is below the surface; this is at the basis of honesty and sensitivity and it is good.

20.    Kindness: On a deep level, we know when we are being kind and when we are being treated with kindness. Kindness may be gentle, it may be firm; it is always sensitive and sincere. Kindness starts with self. Kindness is good.

21.    Sensitivity: To be able to feel and understand nuances of feeling. Good, if you can handle it. Bad, or at least difficult, if you live in a society that sees feeling as subversive, babyish, and/or of no utility.

22.    Mark: A measurement of how well you have done on an assignment. How using this relates to encouraging the growth of a human, creative being beats me. Retarded.

23.    Resistance: How I feel most of the time. I resent the many external demands I am forced to deal with that make no sense for who I am but are part of the “rules,” e.g. having to get an M Ed prescribed by a bunch of people who think their way is better. Good because it makes me think and act. Bad, because it would be nice to just surrender and take the path of least resistance.

24.    Karma: Life path as chosen by a timeless, higher self. Good = life has purpose. Bad = difficulties along the way.

25.    Purpose: reason for living. Good to have one; helps me stay alive.

26.    Tasha: complex, complicated, creative, loving, heartful, scared, intelligent, impatient, struggling, sexy, cranky, open-minded, busy, mother, artist, teacher… Good = working on loving myself. Bad = too bad I don’t love myself.