By Jane Eaton Hamilton.
Jen Pastiloff & The Hunt For Beauty.
There’s something I can’t get off my mind; it’s been nagging.
A couple months ago, Jen Pastiloff came to town. She’s the wunderkind behind the online home for great essays, Manifest Station, and a yoga/writing workshop phenom. I first came to know Jen through her site when she published my essay about Paris, ‘Things That Didn’t Happen,’ which now appears in the Caitlin Press anthology This Place a Stranger, about women traveling solo.
All this is a long-winded introduction to the fact that Jen asked me to attend her yoga workshop here in Vancouver, BC, when she came to town earlier this year at Semperviva Yoga, and, reluctantly, I went. (Jen knew getting me out of my house was like pulling teeth, but she kept at me.) Despite a background in dance, I’ve never been a yoga enthusiast, and I’m also an atheist, and morbidly shy, and the whole spiritual thing makes me roll my eyes. I slid down the wall at the back of the room, gamely played along to the limits of my creaky old body, and kept my eyes and ears open.
And, folks, a bunch of things happened.
She calls the workshop, after all, “On Being Human.”
But the transformative thing, the thing that hasn’t gone away, was this:
Women are hurting.
I’ve started this post several times and dependably backed away because I don’t know how to talk about this.
Folks, these were not my people. I’m a wanna-be-butch dyke who has always wavered in my gender identity, and I’m old and my body is utterly broken, and the attendees were straight women mostly in their 30s who had maybe tried for:
Meet the guy of your dreams, have 1.6 children and a dog. Live happily ever after.
And somehow nobody told them the whole freaking enterprise was broken, and that when an enterprise is that broken, it breaks its participants as surely as if they were just sticks.
Crack, crack, crack.
Nobody had told them this, or they were so busy with the job and the kids and the hubby, so overworked and mega-stressed, that they had no time to hear. All they knew, really, before they landed at Jen’s workshop, was that they got a measure of peace from yoga, and otherwise, they were in trouble, and they were going down the tubes in a big fucking smear of shit.
They couldn’t save themselves. Anytime they tried, they felt overwhelmed and under-capable and completely lost. Anytime they tried, the drain just burped up more crap at them.
These were women living under seige.
Make no mistake: life with a career and young kids (why aren’t they born with volume knobs?) and aging parents and a sputtering relationship and financial problems and medical problems and indecision and no respite bites the big one.
Quiet desperation, which I define as even one fleeting thought about hurting yourself or your kiddos, bites the really big one. (As an aside, people may know that I decided to kill my children when they were 4 and 1, and wrote about it, and why I made that agonizing decision, and how I did not do it, but how I saved them from a molester instead, in my memoir ‘No More Hurt.’)
Women have always written about our dilemmas. Remember Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her “The Yellow Wallpaper”? Nothing here is new, but we’ve ramped it all up lately with the addition of technology and Super-Mothering. When a woman is under that kind of stress, when it feels like every goddamned new thing that happens is peeling off layers of her skin, it feels new. Bloody hell, does it feel new. And it feels like it’s gonna hurt someone.
It feels like someone’s gonna die.
That’s where Jen Pastiloff and her Beauty Hunting come in.
The workshop participants were there to tell Jen that their fairytale broke. They were there to tell Jen they were profoundly unhappy with their lives, and scared, and broken.
Now let me tell you what transformed me, and what I have not been able to forget or get over:
Women are hurting in huge numbers. Women at the apexes of their lives are in grave trouble.
It made me sad in a quintessential way and it has not stopped making me incredibly sad. Every time I hear that Jen is giving another workshop, I flash back to that crowd of 60-odd women in Vancouver speaking about grief and fear and loss, and I imagine more women in trouble, room after room full of more women in trouble.
(A message here for women-in-trouble. One or two things I know for sure, to plagiarize Dorothy Allison: It gets better. If you hurt like this now, it does not mean you will always hurt like this. It gets a whole lot better.)
Here’s the thing about Jen Pastiloff, folks. Here’s the revolutionary thing.
She listens.
She listens with an intent focus, a focus that follows your words inside you. Because she has hearing problems, she watches your lips as you speak, and she plucks the ash of your words from the air and takes it inside herself and lays it beside her heart, where before too long your words start beating as if they were strong, capable, living mammals. And then she gives them back to you.
Boiled down, this is the secret to Jen’s popularity. She can call what she does Beauty Hunting–she is for sure out there helping people find beauty. She can start a campaign called “Don’t be an asshole” and remind us all to stop a second and please, please, please be our better selves. She can use words like attention, space, time, connection, intimacy. She can ask participants to answer questions like What gets in your way? What stories are you carrying around in your body? What makes you come alive? Who would you be if nobody told you who you were? All of that is what it is. But why it works is because of her kind of listening.
And what her kind of listening does is simple:
It saves lives.
* * * *
*This originally appeared on Jane’s site here.
To attend a workshop with Jen click here.
Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry. Her poetry volume Love Will Burst Into a Thousand Shapes is out fall 2014. Her short story collection “July Nights” was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes and her short fiction collection “Hunger” was shortlisted for the Ferro Grumley Award. “Body Rain,” her first book of poetry, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and her chapbook, “Going Santa Fe,” won the League of Canadian Poets Poetry Chapbook Award. She has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology, Best Canadian Short Stories, and has been cited in the Best American Short Stories. She has won many prizes for her short fiction, including twice each, first prize in fiction in the CBC Literary Awards/Canada Writes (2003/2014) and the Prism International short fiction award. She has published in the NY Times, Seventeen magazine, Salon, Numero Cinq, Macleans, VIDA, Numero Cinq, the Globe and Mail, the Missouri Review, Ms blog, the Alaska Quarterly Review and many other places. She has been a recipient of arts awards from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council. Jane’s work is upcoming in several anthologies, Siécle 21 in Paris, POEM in the UK and other places. Jane is also a photographer and visual artist and was a litigant in Canada’s same-sex marriage case. She lives in Vancouver. Janeeatonhamilton.wordpress.com
Do you want the space and joy to get back into your body?
To get into your words and stories? Join Jen Pastiloff and best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch over Labor Day weekend 2015 for their 2nd Writing & The Body Retreat in Ojai, California following their last one, which sold out in 48 hours. You do NOT have to be a writer or a yogi.
“So I’ve finally figured out how to describe Jen Pastiloff’s Writing and the Body yoga retreat with Lidia Yuknavitch. It’s story-letting, like blood-letting but more medically accurate: Bleed out the stories that hold you down, get held in the telling by a roomful of amazing women whose stories gut you, guide you. Move them through your body with poses, music, Jen’s booming voice, Lidia’s literary I’m-not-sorry. Write renewed, truthful. Float-stumble home. Keep writing.” ~ Pema Rocker, attendee of Writing & The Body Feb 2015
Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being. Yoga + Writing + Connection. We go deep. Bring an open heart and a sense of humor- that’s it! Summer or Fall 2015. It is LIFE CHANGING!
Featured image: painting: Jane Eaton Hamilton, acrylic on paper, 2014, Paris
1 Comment
This slays me. Thank you Jane.