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Truth

Guest Posts, emotions, Truth

On Anger

March 7, 2019
angry

By Megan Wildhood

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it makes me angry when people don’t mean what they say. It makes me angry when people think I should be okay with broken promises and unkept commitments. I am not. I will not be. And I will not apologize for my “high standards.” Without integrity, there is no basis for communication, let alone accountability and responsibility.

It makes me angry that people think “obligation” is a dirty word everyone should be free from. An entire industry called “self help” profits from people’s fear of accountability. Here’s all the self-help you need: take responsibility for your shit, mean what you say and follow through.

It makes me angry when I tell people about a difficulty I’m having with another person and they try to guess what the others involved are thinking instead of listening to ME, the person right in front of them.

This idea that I’d be less angry, less hurt if only I knew what the other person is thinking, makes me angry.

False peace makes me angry. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Tribe, Truth

The Something-Else

January 17, 2018
something

By Jennifer Rieger

There are some things that will never just feel like a coincidence.
~ A-Dack[1] Quote of the Day, May 31, 2016

The first day of school, she looked like she wanted to die. She chose the seat front and center, the perfect position for me to genuinely appreciate her major case of RBF[2]. There were moments during my entertaining first day multimedia extravaganza when she thought about smiling. I know she did. With a slight smirk, she’d look out the corner of her eye to her best friend, Dante, but then the seriousness would resume. It was, after all, AP Literature and Composition, and maybe I was particularly frightening that day with all the happiness and love.

However, it didn’t take long for me to win over Anna. The further we delved into the curriculum, the more she enjoyed literature, class discussion, and quietly contemplating life. She was in quite a state when she showed up for her college essay conference, bright red and full of angst. “Ms. Rieger… These people aren’t going to want me. Ms. Rieger… Nothing about me comes out coherently. Ms. Rieger… Maybe I’ll walk into traffic, or just stay here with you.” How I would have loved a world in which the latter was true. It didn’t take long to realize that I never wanted to let go of that RBF hot mess. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Truth, writing

Escaping Loneliness

May 10, 2017
loneliness

By Michael Wayne Hampton

“Loneliness, and the feeling of being unwanted, is the worst poverty.” – Mother Teresa

Introduction:

I’ve felt an essential loneliness throughout my life, and from the time I was a child I’ve struggled to feel the safety, understanding, and love that I imagined could be found in emotional closeness of others. Whether this defining emotion for much of my existence has its roots in a childhood where I often felt disregarded, out of place, threatened, and alone, in my neural biology living with Bipolar II, a psychiatric disorder which leads 17% of those it impacts to commit suicide, or is the result of all the unnamable psychic forces which shape one’s life is hard to quantify or define clearly. What became clear was that the continuation of this all-encompassing grief, as severe depression for the initiated moves far beyond sadness, had escalated to not only threaten my life, which it had nearly taken before, but had grown to the extent that I was left to either submit to the waves of hurt which battered me, or find a way to live and create. At the midpoint of my life survival, rather than living, had become purposeless and too much to bear. The comforts of religion, the rational accounting of all I have to live for, did nothing to inspire me to do more than live out each day distracted by work of social media until the night came where I could drink my sense of self away to sleep. In the last six month my ever-present loneliness, the sense that I was worthless and unloved, threatened not only my life, but my ability to create art, which in many ways I cared much more about than my own life. To move beyond the aching of questions unanswered, the silence that never left, the ghosts I carried, I turned to books to study how to exist. Stoic philosophy, social psychology, and Eastern religious traditions helped me form, and continue to form, a framework to evolve into a person who can do the work he felt he was born to do without the necessity for external support or acclaim. It’s a work in process, multi-faceted, and includes a number of various but cohesive personal lifestyle, physical, and psychological processes and projects, but in this essay I will focus briefly on the nature and impact of loneliness on the artist’s life, how ancient philosophy, theology, and modern psychology can aid an artist in moving past their personal loneliness no matter its roots, and present concrete principles that can be incorporated to escape the sense of loneliness toward the goal of better engaging in creative Flow states. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Surviving, Truth

Quiet

May 22, 2016

By Daniel Elder

1.
You scurry around looking for quiet. You search for it in all of your familiar places. You see quiet’s tail disappear around corners but when you turn them all you see is neon Little Italy, all you see are fading brownstones, all you see is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway running its surgical scar through Sunset Park. You know this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, that the chase has a loudness, and this is absurd. Chasing quiet. You sit in a yoga studio with strangers and you drink a foul plant brew. Sometime in the night, in the space between the curandero’s songs, you discover quiet. She is curled up in a tender ball just below your heart, so that every beat awakens against her and her purr soothes every peal of your tired bell. You sit with her, so close you feel inseparable. But you can only sit there for eight hours. You can only vomit so much of your trauma into the plastic bucket that’s provided. In the morning you leave the yoga studio, leave the warm embrace, step out into sunlight that caroms off of all the steel and glass surrounding you. You feel quiet stir and you try to hold on to her but quiet is a twitchy woodland creature and once again she is off and running. A wind stirs litter in the crowded street. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Life, Trust, Truth

Truth and Consequences

April 15, 2016

By Amelia Zahm

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”

“The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control.”
–Adrienne Rich

I sat down to write about lies. More specifically, I intended to write about your lies, all the millions of tiny and gigantic untruths you spun into a glistening web around you and me. I set out to tug on those fibers, to peel back the sticky net and expose the raw, pink flesh of truth hiding underneath, to reveal you. I want to bring your greatest fear to life. I want the world to see behind your mask, and I want to be the one who pulls it off. That’s the meanness in me.

But I can’t hold onto meanness the way you do. I don’t have the stomach for it. Anger and jealousy flash through me, blazing then burning out. I’ve learned to clean up the debris, compost it, and move on. I’ve seen what holding a grudge can do. During the twenty years of our friendship, I watched you smolder with resentment and envy when you felt slighted, upstaged, or challenged. I just never believed you’d turn that on me. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Gender & Sexuality, LBGQ, Truth

What is it like to be you?

March 2, 2016

By Nina Woulk

Someone asked why I am so interested in how transgender people, especially those who grew up with no transgender community and had to create their own identity in isolation, construct identity.  Here is an answer.

I date back to the times when it seemed possible to construct a lesbian community that would be a life-long support system for its members, and spent some years working on community-building. We were not simply discovering that we were lesbians, although that’s how it felt at the time; rather we were trying to create an enduring lesbian social/political identity that we could share, that would be embodied in the community institutions we were trying to build. This was ambitious of course but humans are often ambitious. Continue Reading…

courage, Guest Posts, Self Image, Truth, writing

Ghosts

February 28, 2016

By Helena Montanez

The thing is, you don’t have to be told that certain things are for white people.

You just know it. Or at least believe it, in the way you believe other seemingly simple and absolute truths.

The sun will rise and set every day. Queerness is for white people. The sky is blue. Only white people can be mentally ill (and normally in the form of depression, or, say, something that can be used in court to explain why a man shouldn’t be held fully responsible for his decision to shoot up a public place). The world is a sphere. White people need more thrills from life, so they mess around with ridiculous stunts like skydiving, and/or the occult.

The reality of these things aren’t as simple; there are all sorts of factors that come into play to create them, such as gravity, lack of proper representation, and the like.

Still, none of that changes the fact that I, as a queer poc with social anxiety who happens to be interested in otherworldly things, am what shouldn’t exist, what some might even go so far as to claim doesn’t exist, because I’m probably making it up, trying to be as “other” as I can be. There’s a limit to how different a person can naturally be from what is the traditional norm before it’s labeled as a ploy for attention, and the bar for that limit is quite often set impossibly low.

In fact, a common consequence of this is the person in question doubting themselves and their diagnoses, sometimes believing that they’re just making it all up, that it’s all in their head (though, of course, the nature of mental illnesses is that it too lives in the mind). These sorts of doubts can be difficult to rid yourself of, even in a span of years, and especially when you can’t see yourself, in people like you, in the media.

I think that’s why I was determined to go on a school trip to take a ghost tour in Virginia City.

It was a good trip, all in all. I’d always been interested in history, and Virginia City is full of that, both good and bad, and readily apparent in the old buildings that line the streets, the boardwalks lined over the partially collapsed tunnels that run underneath the city. You could feel it in the air as we walked from place to place, as the tour guides told us stories of people and times gone by, as they asked ghosts to appear and make their presences known. Still, something about it all bothered me slightly.

The reason why didn’t hit me until later on. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but I’ve always believed in ghosts, or if not ghosts specifically, then at least some sort of entity, whatever you’d like to call it. And more than that, I believe that though they don’t have the same physical form, they’ve still got some semblance of being, and are deserving of respect (of course, there are evil spirits out there as well, but without knowledge of their stories or how they ended up that way, I’m more inclined to feel pity or sympathy towards them, even if they might feel that is worse).

I felt that certain people didn’t always show the proper respect towards the ghosts. In particular, in one part of the city there was allegedly the spirit of a young girl, and they didn’t necessarily act as if she were just that, a child, albeit a ghostly one.

It occurred to me that the ghosts and I have a few things in common, on a few basic levels: we’re not always treated like people, don’t always command respect, and though our reasons for being unable to tell our own stories differ, we often have to rely on others who aren’t like us to do so.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for some time now, despite the fact that I don’t know very many Mexican American authors, and even because of that. And during the tour, I felt a strong urge to learn more about the stories of the people who’d lived and died in that city, and to share their stories with more people, perhaps to bring some of them some sense of justice that they didn’t get to have in life. In the end, I suppose, my wish is the same in both cases: to give a voice to the largely voiceless.

Helen Montanez is an aspiring writer, currently a junior at Sierra Nevada College working towards a bachelor’s degree in English, and well on her way in achieving her goal of ascension to “local strange cat lady” status.

 

March 13 NYC! A 90 minute class for women, girls and non-gender conforming folks (we encourage teens 16 and up) and all levels that will combine flow yoga, meditation, empowerment exercises, connection and maybe, just maybe, a dance party. This will be a class to remind you that you are enough and that you are a badass. It will be fun and empowering and you need no yoga experience: just be a human being. Let’s get into our bodies and move! Be warned: This will be more than just a basic asana class. It will be a soul-shifting, eye-opening, life-changing experience. Come see why Jen Pastiloff travels around the world and sells out every workshop she does in every city. This will be her last class before she has her baby so sign up soon. Follow her on instagram at @jenpastiloff and @girlpoweryouareenough. Jen is also doing her signature Manifestation workshop in NY at Pure Yoga Saturday March 5th which you can sign up for here as well (click pic.)

March 13 NYC! A 90 minute class for women, girls and non-gender conforming folks (we encourage teens 16 and up) and all levels that will combine flow yoga, meditation, empowerment exercises, connection and maybe, just maybe, a dance party. This will be a class to remind you that you are enough and that you are a badass. It will be fun and empowering and you need no yoga experience: just be a human being. Let’s get into our bodies and move! Be warned: This will be more than just a basic asana class. It will be a soul-shifting, eye-opening, life-changing experience. Come see why Jen Pastiloff travels around the world and sells out every workshop she does in every city. This will be her last class before she has her baby so sign up soon. Follow her on instagram at @jenpastiloff and @girlpoweryouareenough.
Jen is also doing her signature Manifestation workshop in NY at Pure Yoga Saturday March 5th which you can sign up for here as well (click pic.)

 

Join Jen Pastiloff in Tuscany Sep 17-24, 2016. There are 5 spaces left. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com asap. More info here. Must email first to sign up.

Join Jen Pastiloff in Tuscany Sep 17-24, 2016. There are 5 spaces left. This will be her only international retreat in 2016 and is her favorite retreat of the year. Email barbara@jenniferpastiloff.com asap. More info here. Must email first to sign up.

death, Guest Posts, Truth

Some Thoughts On The Day John Lennon Died

December 8, 2015

By Jonathan Jones

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Whenever I think of the opening line to De Maurier’s  Rebecca, I’m aware of a telling gap, not only in my reading, but also my own memory. It has always managed to evoke, even echo a thought I often had as a child on waking, that it was still dark outside.  A news report coming in, confused by static. Maybe a radio in another room, light downstairs.  It was like at first, nothing had happened, a recurring dream that spoke with a voice both present and at the same time absent. My father told me once that the name he initially thought he heard when he turned on the news was “Lenin.” Apparently it took him a few moments to realize, it wasn’t the Tsar’s Winter Palace going up in flames. All that chaos and violence and shooting and the promise of a new world waiting at the end. I sometimes wonder if he remembers telling me that story, waking up one winter morning to a different name, the definitive end of another era.

The first picture I remember seeing of John Lennon was the Double Fantasy album cover. It’s an image that seems to float around my childhood with a vengeance. The day Lennon died I must have gone to school, although I don’t recall any special announcement at assembly, or anything that stands out to tell me I was present that particular day.  All I know is at some point I was in bed and I knew it was still too early to get up, because it was still dark outside. Beyond that, only my parents movements below me and the front door closing, as my father left for work. It was years before I realized what had happened and by then it was a memory fashioned by snippets of TV and the film footage, flaky in its original transmission. But a memory nevertheless, which had nothing to do with the real memory of my dad closing the door, as he left the house that day.

I was five years old at the time and to be honest can’t say for sure, what my own feelings were on the subject. It’s all too easy to suggest our earliest memories reveal some telling inner glimpse into the adults we grow into. Yet when I think back, the years between my fifth and fifteenth birthday rarely found a clearer point of reference.  The Eighties were too bright, too colorful  by comparison to that  day in December. T.V. that brought us up on game shows and  cheap nostalgia.  Back then trying to teach myself to whistle Jealous Guy, I knew the tune was how I felt for a long time, a permanent angst for the same city he came from. It was a post-lapsarian landscape I remember as a kid, muddy brown, tarmac cracked, whole streets abandoned and boarded up. The docks still so majestic and so tragic in their derelict hollows. A city I only knew from a distance, with its accent and its humor and its tough working intellect. Continue Reading…

courage, Gender & Sexuality, Guest Posts, Inspiration, Self Image, Self Love, Truth

What’s In A Name?

October 22, 2015

By Cassandra Pinkus

I never was very good at writing in cursive. I remember in the second grade hearing another student mention that the teachers in the higher grades didn’t care if your homework was written in cursive or not. Right then I figured, if they don’t care later, why should I do it now? I started turning in my homework in print on that day, and never wrote another word in cursive for years.

Sometime later in my childhood I learned that sometimes you need to put your signature on certain papers. It seemed that the only expectation for a signature was that it be written in cursive. I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t matter that much though, because I didn’t need to sign my name very often.

I thought of when I saw my mother or my father sign their name. Whether on a report card or a check, the pen-strokes were always quick. It was clear that it was not the letters that counted. When they were done, I could make out clearly the first letters of each name, and all the rest seemed to descend into mad squiggles. When I went to sign my own name, somewhere I understood that no one would read the letters.

A first mark to indicate the name’s beginning, followed by a wave of jagged ink. A second mark to indicate the name’s end, and another cacophony of squiggled lines. The signature was not a thing to be read, but an action to be performed. It was done not when it was received, the way one writes a letter. It was done when the signatory had left their essence drying on the page. Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts, Truth, Video, Vulnerability

The Truth About Depression. No Bullshit.

May 11, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88

 

By Jen Pastiloff

I just got back from leading a beautiful retreat for Mother’s Day. I feel hung over today. From love. Is that even a thing? It is now. I’m in bed trying to process it all. One of my favorite writers came, Christa Parravani, who is a dear friend. She wrote the book Her. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it highly. I also partnered with Christy Turlington Burns’ Every Mother Counts and gave away a free spot. It was a remarkable and heart-mending weekend. It is truly a great honor to support Every Mother Counts.

At one point, we were talking about depression and I mentioned an essay I had written last year on my own depression and how I had gone off of my anti-depressants. I said to the group, “I wrote this essay about going off my meds. I’m back on now and I haven’t written about it because it’s no one’s business.” It’s not. I am not ashamed of it but it’s not my job to alert the media of everything. So I said that and then decided that maybe I should make a video about it. Who knew my videos were going to be such a thing. Must be the high production value. (Not.)

So I had a beautiful lunch and went out to sit in the cacti and I couldn’t do it. My hands were shaking and I started to sweat. I started and stopped it five times. I couldn’t do it.

I never get scared to make videos or write. Except when I do. And when I do, it’s usually something that I have to do.

Like I always say, I am afraid I a lot. But I do it anyway. I buy my fear a cup of coffee (or wine) and show it how it’s done.

I thought that making a video about being back on my anti-depressants was like a who the f*ck cares? kind of thing. I mean, I am not curing cancer or saving babies. Who cares that I take meds? But after I shared that I was back on and I was not ashamed five people in five minutes came up to me to thank me.

I had hired a sound therapist to give a sound concert for the people at my retreat with Tibetan singing bowls and a gong. Her name is Fawntice Finesse and she’s magic. For real. Anyway. We went into the yoga studio for the concert. Everyone was lying on their mats with their eyes covered and their socks and I shot up. I knew I had to make the video. I quietly stepped over all the bodies as the sun was setting and, with still shaking arms, made the video below.

I am not ashamed of being on anti-depressants. This is not to create a debate about whether you should or should not be on meds. This is not to discuss which meds I am on or how many milligrams. This is to create an honest discussion about depression, about how it does not define us, about how we must do what it takes to get out of bed. How it does not define us. Just like if you have cancer, you are not your cancer. You are not your job. You are not your depression.

I remember when that essay of mine went viral. I made the mistake of reading a few comments before I realized I was never to do that again. Maybe you should reconsider leading “inspirational” retreats, lady? Maybe you should stop taking people’s money? Maybe you should do more yoga?

I never call my retreats inspirational just like I never call myself an inspiration. If someone says that about me, well, I have no say in that. I do my best to share about my own journey and to have a sense of humor. And to love. That’s it.

My workshops are not woo-woo although Kaisa McDonnall Coppola, from my Mother’s Day Retreat said this, “Loved loved loved the retreat. I can’t imagine how you even describe your retreats other than kumbaya-badassness-where we get to say ‘fuck’ out loud and in our journals. Thank you, Jen…you are sending out ripples of coolness all over the world.”

We do (a little) yoga, we share, we listen, we let the snot fly, we sing, we pay attention. I am certainly not preaching “Positive thinking.”

But there was a little part of me that was afraid that I was shooting myself in the foot by talking so openly about this stuff. I realized, however, that this was precisely why I had to share. I want to take the stigma away from this. I am not encouraging you to walk down the street vomiting your secrets or over-sharing. But I realize there is so much shame and misunderstanding surrounding mental health and depression that perhaps I would be doing a great disservice if I wasn’t forthcoming. After all, I am not ashamed, so why not speak of it?

I have been depressed since I can remember. Then my dad died and that nearly took the life out of me. I left NYU with one year left after being a scholar because of my severe depression and anorexia. And yet, I never did a damn thing about it. When I finally had another breakdown years later at the restaurant I had been working at for thirteen years, I finally went on anti-depressants.

And they saved my fucking life.

Did they make me “happy?”

No.

But they threw down a rope into the well I had been stuck in and I began to climb out, little by little. And my life changed. And I didn’t want to die anymore.

Cut to about a year and a half or two years ago. My life was “amazing” by any standards. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get pregnant but I knew I couldn’t with the particular meds I was taking so I began to ween off because hey, my life was amazing and I maybe wanted to have a baby. Maybe.

The truth: It was terrible being off. My life was amazing amazing amazing just look at her amazing life and yet, I couldn’t even get out of bed to brush my teeth. But still, I stayed off. I weened off slowly.

I would get hundreds of emails a day (yes, a day), and lead retreats and I had a great husband and yet.

I felt flat and like a nothing person.

All the amazingness does not matter when you have something chemically awry in your brain or you are dealing with depression. I don’t need to remind any of us of Robin Williams, do I?

I finally was completely weened off (I went very slowly as I couldn’t afford to go through any serious withdrawal.) The minute I was 100% clear of my meds, we tried to get pregnant. Once.

And it worked.

It was an emotional roller coaster, to say the least, and then, the pregnancy ended up being ectopic.

Here I am, off my meds. Pregnant and then no longer pregnant. I am slowly slipping father and farther drown the rabbit hole. Then, I break my foot.

You would have thought I was dying. It affected me so profoundly and I fell into possibly the darkest place I have ever been in. Continue Reading…