Justine Musk's Blog, page 4

your passion quest. a kind of manifesto.

You have an inner source code – a soulcode — that holds the secret to where you belong in the world.

You unlock that secret slowly, over years, on a passion quest.

The quest is necessary because it makes you into what you need to be.

Your place of belonging, your golden niche, is defined by your ruling passion: the thing you do in the way that only you can do it, that puts you in the heightened state of flow, evoking your best and most creative self in service to something larger than yourself.

A ruling passion is twofold: your purpose, and the method by which that purpose is delivered into the world.

Your purpose is timeless and unchanging.

The way you choose to express that purpose depends on your time and place, and it evolves as you evolve (or transforms into a different expression altogether).

Your purpose is often connected to an inner wound of some kind. Those places of hurt and shame can be valuable clues to who you are and what you’re meant to do.

The word ‘passion’ stems from the Latin word for suffering. To discover your ruling passion is to die to your immature identity and be reborn into a deeper relationship with the world.

It is an initiation.

It involves a separation from the known and the comfortable; a time of trial; and a death of the old.

You know you’ve been initiated when you paradigm-shift from serving your ego to living for the world. The ego is an excellent ally, but it is a very small place in which to live.

Every ending contains the seeds of the next beginning; every psychological ‘death’ opens into a rebirth.

A crisis serves to disorganize the self, so that it may reshape itself into a bigger conversation with the world.

Initiation involves going into your personal darkness, to reclaim and integrate lost parts of the self. Your soulcode drives you toward wholeness.

We live in a consumer culture that suffers from what Jung described as “soul loss” and the greatest injury of our time. We do not know our place in the world, we have forgotten our interconnectedness. Most people refuse to see the process of initiation all the way through, or fail to recognize it when it comes for them, or give up on the passion quest altogether.

In the absence of a ruling passion, there is a void we try to fill with things and addictions that leave us wanting more, or devising new forms of escape.

An initiated culture is one in which all members move into a state of flow on a daily basis and utilize their highest and most creative selves to save themselves, each other, the world.

The initiated artist can use creative work to open up pathways of soul and light the way for others.

your ruling passion. a kind of manifesto

You are constantly reinventing yourself in the world, choosing among your potential future selves by the actions you take, or don’t.

You have an inner source code – a soulcode — that holds the secret to where you belong in the world.

You unlock that secret slowly, over years, on a passion quest.

The quest is necessary because it makes you who you need to be, in order to do what your soulcode demands of you, and to give the world what it needs from you.

Your place of belonging, your golden niche, is defined by your ruling passion: the thing you do in the way that only you can do it, that puts you in flow, utilizing your highest and most creative self in service to something larger than yourself.

A ruling passion is twofold: your purpose, and the method by which that purpose is delivered into the world.

Your purpose is timeless and unchanging.

The way you choose to express that purpose depends on your time and place, and it evolves as you evolve (or transforms into a different expression altogether).

Your purpose is often connected to an inner wound of some kind. Those places of hurt and shame can be valuable clues to who you are and what you’re meant to do.

The word ‘passion’ stems from the Latin word for suffering. To discover your ruling passion is to die to your immature identity and be reborn into a deeper relationship with the world. It is an initiation. It involves a separation from the known and the comfortable; a time of trial; and a death of the old.

You know you’ve been initiated when you paradigm-shift from serving your ego to living for the world. The ego is an excellent ally, but it is a very small place in which to live.

The beginning of your initiation is often a crisis or tragedy. It uproots your life. It takes apart your sense of who you are. It separates you from the familiar and signals a passage into a new way of being.

Every ending contains the seeds of the next beginning; every psychological ‘death’ opens into a rebirth.

The point of crisis is to disorganize the self, so that it may reshape itself into a much bigger conversation with the world.

Initiation involves going into your personal darkness, to reclaim and integrate lost parts of the self. Your soulcode drives you toward wholeness.

We live in a consumer culture that suffers from what Jung described as “soul loss” and the greatest injury of our time. We do not know our place in the world, we have lost touch with our interconnectedness with all things. Most people refuse to see the process of initiation all the way through, or fail to recognize it when it comes for them, or give up on the passion quest altogether.

In the absence of a ruling passion, there is a void we try to fill with things and addictions that only leave us wanting more, or devising new forms of escape.

An initiated culture is one in which all members move into flow on a daily basis and utilize their highest and most creative selves to save themselves, each other, and the world.

The initiated artist can use his or her creative work to open up pathways of soul and light the way for others.

a female creative is a rebel

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

– Anais Nin

For so long, creative achievement – to make something out of nothing, to shape meaning out of raw experience, to impose your soulprint on the world — was the province of men.

‘Woman artist’ was an oxymoron: such a person was not a real artist (a lady artist, a dilettante) or not a real woman. To be a creator is to be the one who looks and invents instead of being looked at or invented, who chooses instead of being chosen.

A female creator is by definition a rebel, and a female rebel is a dangerous woman.

She’s dangerous because her full-blooded, authentic spirit and its insistence on expressing itself through her chosen medium cuts against what it means to be traditionally feminine. To be feminine, as our culture would have it, is to be quiet, inoffensive, self-sacrificing, restrained, pretty, pleasing and nice.

It is to discount your inner truth when it threatens to be even remotely disruptive, as truth tends to be; it is to listen, nod and smile; it is to be weaker and lesser; it is to strive for a level of perfection that isn’t so perfect it might intimidate other people, especially men; it is to split off the stormy emotions and tamp them down deep where they can’t hurt anybody – except maybe yourself.

It is to learn to see yourself from the outside in, constantly adjusting your image while knowing that you’re somehow, in some way, constantly falling short: as an object of desire, as a wife and mother, as a woman who doesn’t want to be a mother, as a working woman trying to Have It All.

It is to navigate words like slut, ballbreaker, bitch, golddigger, crazy, overly sensitive, ugly, overweight, selfish, spoiled, old.

It is to shy away from words like ambition or power or greatness.

It is to feel a kind of blankness, mental fog and/or vague sense of shame over personal finances.

It is to go shopping a lot.

It is, often, to see other women as the competition, or the enemy.

It is to try to be all things to all people without knowing who you are at core.

It is to keep yourself modestly sized, including dreams and ambitions that aren’t related to being in a long-term monogamous relationship or having babies.

Writes Linda Austin:

“The bolder a man of achievement is, the more he is actually conforming to his gender stereotype; his social position becomes safer than ever, and he thoroughly gratifies the expectations of his parents, family and society. For a woman, boldness puts her distinctly at odds with the role that society expects of her. She leaves the safety of conformity to group expectations for a solitary adventure that is hers alone.”

From necessity, then, a female creator is creating from the ground up her own sense of what it means and how to be a woman.

That is the challenge — and the opportunity.

creating yourself: the art of healthy boundaries

I move

and live on the edges

(what edges)

I live

on all the edges there are.



— Margaret Atwood

You would not have wanted to mess with Mother Teresa. She was tough. She meant it. Christopher Hitchens was not fond of her. Instead of a sweet, saintly, little old lady – the popular depiction – evidence suggests that she was a productive narcissist..

Her will was powerful, and she got shit done.

Mother Teresa, I imagine, had incredibly strong boundaries. She knew what served her purpose, and she could reject or let go of everything else.

She knew her deep Yes, and when to say No to protect it.

(Boundaries.)

Because Mother Teresa knew where her edges were, she could push herself without burning out. She always knew when to draw back.

She gave her love, her time, and her energy without giving away herself.

She knew that you can’t give what you don’t have, so it was important to keep the reserves of her self filled up.

(Healthy boundaries.)

Structure gives shape to things. It gives you a sense of identity.

Mother Teresa knew who she was, and thus identified the work of her soul.

(Or as Stephen Cope defined it, her dharma.)

We inherit our boundaries from our parents. If they had walls, we are likely to have walls; if they had holes, we are likely to have holes.

You can tell what kind of boundaries you have by how often you use the word should.

Should is an external voice, imposed from without and internalized within; should cuts you off from the deep and quiet knowing of your soul.

When you slap a should on someone else, you’re falling through a boundary hole as you try to take responsibility for someone else’s reality, to define it for them.

Should makes you a perfectionist. It makes you grandiose (“I am capable of achieving these impossible standards!”) even as it undercuts your self-esteem (“I did not achieve these impossible standards, thus I am a loser”). We beat ourselves up with our shoulds and because the way we treat ourselves is the way we treat others, we beat our loved ones with those shoulds as well.

What would happen if you:

1. banished should from your vocabulary?

2. paid thoughtful and curious attention to feelings of resentment — before you downplay or dismiss them? Or even that first glimmer of anger — before you disconnect from it, shove it into that shadow-space holding all the things that, as a nice person, as an unselfish person, you’re not supposed to feel?

Like all emotions, resentment and anger are messengers. They carry important information. They let us know when our boundaries are being violated and urge us to rectify the situation.

We are afraid to assert ourselves because we don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings – only to end up betraying ourselves, which doesn’t serve us or them.

You can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t protect what you love when you can’t protect yourself.

One of the paradoxical things about creativity is that it thrives when it has edges to chafe against. You can’t break the rules when you don’t have rules to break. You can’t explore the breadth and depth of your territory when you don’t know where it begins and ends. You can’t invent out of necessity when there is no necessity.

If the most creative work of your life is the act of inventing, or reinventing, yourself — and it is — give yourself the freedom of knowing where your edges are.

Listen to your feelings, your instincts, your soul. They will outline those edges for you.

When you’re safe inside them, you can develop a self that is bold and rich and overflowing with talent, love and purpose. Then, no matter how much of it you give away, you can always make more. Much more.

love. fear. sex. ( + the power of radical listening)

To speak of wilderness is to speak of

wholeness. Human beings came out of that

wholeness.

– Gary Snyder

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

doesn’t make sense any more.

― Rumi

1

Not long ago somebody left chocolate bars outside my front door.

“Somebody left chocolate bars outside your front door,” said the manny. “Do you know anything about this?”

He showed me a red drawstring pouch. It held a Crunchie, a Maltesers, and four or five Flakes.

I said, “Those are my exact specific favorites.”

I grew up in Canada, where you can get them at any convenience store. In the US, you have to make a little more effort. I drive out of my way to a gas station in Beverly Hills for its rows on rows of imported candy, where I will buy my fix and leave without remembering to actually put gas in the car.

(When I do remember to put gas in the car, I then have to remember to take my Starbucks or my wallet off the roof of the car, which is where I tend to put things while I’m fueling up, before driving away.)

No one in my house seemed to know about the bars or how they got there. Everybody agreed it was a sweet, thoughtful gesture, and then reminded each other to lock all doors and windows in case I had a stalker.

It was, I thought, like finding a note in a bottle washed up on my front gate. Someone was communicating with me in a way both personal (they knew my tastes, either because they knew me or I’d mentioned it somewhere online) and impersonal, their identity reduced to an abstraction. As a woman living in Los Angeles in the year 2014, I had to crack an uneasy joke about stalkers ( — although I didn’t, because other people did it for me — ) but it’s just as likely to be some sweet soul who wanted to reach out without risking rejection.

We are both – if in different ways — wary of exposure, scared of being hurt.

And this, I can’t help thinking, illustrates an essential truth about men and women:

We are afraid of each other.

2

When I was investigating the pick-up artist scene for an article that never got written, someone explained to me that the percentage of men who approach women is actually tiny. He gave me a number. I can’t remember what it was, but I know my jaw dropped.

“It doesn’t feel that way to me,” I said.

“You are a woman,” he said.

“I know this,” I said.

“What I mean is, you would have a different perspective. You probably get hit on all the time –”

“All the time,” I said airily.

I was lying through my teeth, but whatever.

” –so you think all guys hit on women. And the guys who hit on you are the cocky narcissistic assholes, so you think we’re all like that.”

“I don’t,” I said.

I know I’m not the most approachable person in the world. By the time I was into my twenties I had my quote-unquote “bitch shield” firmly in place. I wasn’t out at a club or a bar to get hit on; I was there to spend time with friends, to dance, and to wear a cute outfit.

If men are wary of approaching women, then women are just as wary of being approached. You never know what you’re going to get.

Margaret Atwood is quoted as saying, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

(Jessica Valenti went Atwood one better, adding, “Women aren’t just afraid that they’ll be hurt; they’re afraid they’ll be hurt and they’ll be blamed for it.”)

I am by no means implying that the above equation is fair or equal in its implications; gender violence is composed mostly of men killing women, as sadly evidenced in places like the Congo. But my friend was pointing out that in some ancient part of their brains men do associate going up to a woman with possible pain or death.

“That fear served an evolutionary purpose,” he said. “If you see a strange woman, you don’t know what tribe she’s from, it could be an enemy tribe. She could have a boyfriend or husband or male relative who might take offense and club you to death.”

(Clearly there was something to be said for staying in, and marrying the girl in the cave next door.)

So we constantly hang back from each other, like at a junior high dance where the boys line one wall and the girls the other, or dinner parties where the men congregate in one room and the women peel off to another.

We put distance between each other. We justify it by saying that men and women are from different planets, speak different languages.

The walls go up.

I’ve heard it said that any action traces back to fear or love. When we eye each other from our respective corners and hang back against the ropes, we’re not doing it out of love.

3

A couples therapist once asked my then-boyfriend and I what we would do if we wanted to get back at each other.

“Flirt with other men,” I said, “in front of him.”

“Shut down,” he said, “and withdraw. Be there, but not there.”

When we love each other, we know how to hurt each other.

4

The thing about arguing with someone, anyone, is that it doesn’t work. It locks people more firmly into their pre-existing positions.

If you want to shift someone’s point of view, if you want to change their behavior, you have to reach them emotionally as well as intellectually.

For all those years when we would stereotype men as logical (and thus, the implication went, objective and correct) and women as emotional (and thus, the implication went, unreasonable, hysterical and possibly crazy), it turns out that emotion and logic are not opposites. They work hand-in-hand.

Emotion makes logic possible.

It gives different options a different emotional weight. It enables you to recognize what is important and what is less so. When information is delivered with an emotional charge, pleasant or negative, we encode it more vividly in our brains.

It’s why storytelling is so powerful, or why TED coaches advise you to have one holy-smokes moment in your talk to make it memorable (such as when Bill Gates released mosquitos into the crowd during his presentation on malaria).

To reach people emotionally, you first have to connect to them and step inside their worldview.

That usually involves making yourself vulnerable in some way.

Body language gives a physical demonstration of this. When someone stands with his or her arms folded, and gaze and body angled away from you, that generally means they are closed up and defensive. If you mimic their body posture, that indicates the same thing about you. Intimate conversation is unlikely.

But if, as you talk, you slowly and gently start opening up your body language – let your arms fall away, turn towards the person, make appropriate eye contact – chances are the other person will fall into your rhythm of movement and start unfolding as well. I don’t mean just literally: the way we stand and move has a direct influence on how we feel, and what we do and say.

(Try this exercise to see what I’m talking about. Carry on a conversation while standing with your arms folded tightly across your chest. Then have a second conversation on the same topic, holding your arms out to your sides with your palms turned upward. See if you feel and speak any differently, if the nature of your conversation changes.)

When you reveal yourself and tell your truth, you give the other person permission to tell theirs. Open up (appropriately), and the other person often follows.

But somebody has to go first.

5

As a culture, we have a strange relationship with vulnerability. We associate it with softness, weakness, victimhood, the feminine. We might admire the ability to go there in certain creatives – actors, musicians, filmmakers – but we shy away from risking it ourselves.

Famed psychologist and author Carol Gilligan has built a career on exploring the relationships between gender, authenticity, and voice.

Her work posits that boys disconnect from their true voice around the age of five, when they absorb the cues of the culture to suppress their empathy and vulnerability. But if vulnerability is the channel through which we connect to others, boys also suppress their capacity for intimacy and deep relationship.

Girls disconnect from their inner authority when they’re a little older – around age 12 – and learn to place a greater premium on maintaining harmony than speaking their opinions and feelings. They learn to unknow the things they know that might disrupt relationships, give offense, or cut against the messages of the larger culture.

So if women supposedly have easier access to their emotions and permission from the culture to express them (or at least more of them), they will still resist naked authenticity out of concern for the damage it might do to others.

There is also the desire to be a ‘strong’ woman: our definition of strength is steeped in traditional notions of the masculine.

A ‘strong’ woman is a warrior woman, a badass, who doesn’t show the softer emotions and doesn’t fall in love (witness the online outcry of certain fans when warrior Brienne on the show GAME OF THRONES started making soft eyes at Jaime). In this light, a ‘strong’ woman is a woman who imitates male behavior, no matter how isolating and emotionally damaged that standard might be.

Why not revise the culture’s definition of ‘strength’ so that it celebrates the power of relationship and interconnectedness? This isn’t a trivial matter: research shows that the quality of your inner circle has a direct impact on the quality of your happiness and your health. Men not only have a shorter expected lifespan than women, they are more likely to kill themselves. It might be interesting to think about why.

If we can’t or won’t speak in our authentic voices, if we disconnect from our inner authority, if we refuse to ask for what we need (or if we don’t know what we need), how can men and women reach across the gender divide that separates us and recognize each other for who we are? Maybe we shouldn’t cluck our tongues over the high divorce rate; maybe we should be awed and amazed that men and women stay together for any length of time at all.

6

Somewhere along the line, certain parts of the culture picked up this idea (and some of them actively promoted it) that feminists hate men.

This is about as accurate – and as fair – as saying that all men are rapists.

Feminism would probably advance much more rapidly if feminists did hate men, but the women’s movement stops and starts, advances and retreats (we refer to the first wave, second wave, third wave). We gain, and then give up some of those gains. A lot of this can be attributed to the regular, inevitable bouts of cultural backlash.

But heterosexual feminists are also, so to speak, sleeping with the enemy. We fall in love with them on a regular basis. We desire them, we create families with them, we go on adventures with them, we can’t imagine a world without them. It’s difficult to be in opposition with the same people we go home to (or long for) at night.

But here’s the thing. The enemy of feminism isn’t men. It’s patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality.

When patriarchy declares that the masculine is superior to the feminine, it implies that the masculine should rule over the feminine, which means that the masculine needs to define itself against the feminine. This expresses itself in a contempt for the feminine. It’s fine for Brangelina’s daughter to show up as a tomboy, but show a photograph of a mother painting her son’s toenails and all hell breaks loose.

The masculine ‘elevates’ the feminine.

The feminine contaminates the masculine.

And when communication is more about pleasing those in power — or maintaining positions of power — then the game of flirtation and attraction becomes more than a game. It becomes our model for how to relate.

We lose track of our shared humanity and objectify each other: women become sex objects, men become walking wallets. Many men don’t seek the respect of women but use women as a way to gain the respect of other men: woman as prize, woman as status symbol. Many women will play into this system to try and get what they need – security, safety, attention, belonging, love, identity – because they can (or think they can), or don’t know that they have any other choice. (After all, it feels so good to be chosen.)

But if women truly equated wealth and power with male desirability, Donald Trump would be a sexual icon.

He is not.

(Trust me on this.)

When communication breaks down, when we no longer see the heart that beats inside the body of the Other, male-female relations become a game of sexual and/or emotional conquest. Win or lose, the shrapnel wounds us all.

7

If we could really listen to each other.

Put aside our egos and defense mechanisms and just listen to each other.

When I watch a phenomenon like #YesAllWomen unfold in real time, I don’t hear women accusing or blaming men.

I hear this:

Listen to us. Just, please, listen to us. See it from our perspective. Pay attention to what we really mean and who we really are.

This is a culture, after all, where Freud’s famous question — what do women want? — has echoed down through the generations. But instead of theorizing about what women want, or telling women what they want, maybe a person should simply ask them.

It is time to practice the art of radical listening.

To listen so hard and so well to each other that we coax out authentic voices buried deep in the cultural sediment. If there’s one thing we have in common, it is the hurt, fear and loneliness that is the pricetag of being human. If we could acknowledge the heart in the Other, and the places where that heart has broken, maybe then we’d have a chance at a dialogue that would open into something more than another heated debate, more vitriolic comments.

8

I love men.

I love women.

I celebrate the ways we are different (but equal), I rejoice in the ways we are the same. I don’t think either gender should rule over the other, not because it seems inherently unfair (although it is). When we tag either gender as ‘lesser’ we close ourselves off to an alternative perspective that could round out our sense of the world, and of ourselves.

Diversity is necessary for creativity. The human species cannot afford to refuse fresh creative insights pointing the way to new solutions.

It’s not about wanting men to act “like women” or turning women into imitation men. It’s not about wanting the genders to be the same (as if the only thing that keeps us from being clones of each other is that single X or Y chromosome).

It’s about our right, as human beings, to explore and express the full range of who we are. It’s about our right to strive towards wholeness; to allow the soul what it needs to heal itself, as individuals and society as a whole. It’s about our right to speak and be heard, to connect, to see ourselves in each other and each other in ourselves.

To know who we are.

To remember who we are.

To love and be loved.

Because that seems like something worth fighting for.

the (sacred) art of breaking yourself open

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

– David Whyte

At one point last fall, someone I loved was in emotional crisis. I drove to see him, both hands gripping the wheel, the freeway unfurling in front of me. I remember a sudden and tremendous sense of clarity. It was as if the excess stuff in my life burned off layer by layer, leaving nothing but a crystalline core: the sense of what truly mattered.

In that moment I knew who I was, I knew my purpose. That drive jolted me into being. I was focused and present. I was alive.

The crisis passed.

Things gradually became okay again.

I haven’t had that experience of diamond-edged clarity since, but it left a taste and texture in my brain. Life holds every one of us to a final accounting, and when that moment comes I will know if I lived fully and well: if I loved, if I contributed; if I was wise and savvy enough to recognize the beauty of the moment, and then to let it go; if I handled pain with dignity and transformed my wounds to light.

I can only imagine – except I don’t want to imagine – Elliot Rodger’s final thoughts, the life he was forced to account for just before he ended it.

It’s easy to look at Rodger and blame the usual suspects: the parents, the bubble world of privilege, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, narcissistic rage. But as Sasha Weiss pointed out, the values that Rodger expressed in his manifesto reflect the values of the larger culture that raised him. A consumer culture. A winner-take-all kind of culture. And, yes, a patriarchal culture that offers up women as images, trophies, status symbols — and objects of blame. This goes all the way back to when Eve first ate the apple, when Pandora first opened the box, and shows itself now in the way the women’s movement is blamed for pretty much every social ill under the sun.

You can use an object, you can scapegoat an object, you can destroy an object. But you can’t form an intimate relationship with someone whose humanity you can’t or won’t even acknowledge. Rodger alienated himself from women and blamed them for that same alienation. He was a snake with its tail in its mouth, eating himself alive, taking others with him. Sad thing is, he’s not the only one – just an unusually disturbing and exaggerated example.

I’ve been thinking about spirituality, how you might define it, and I like Bill Plotzkin’s idea about the place where you break yourself open to the Other. If perception is reality, then we each live inside the worlds of ourselves; everything we see is slanted, colored, tainted with our own projections, biases, imaginings. The struggle is to get out of yourself and make genuine authentic contact with something or someone that is not-you: the Other.

We do that when we love – not romantic love, which is all about illusion and projection – but the love that develops when desire makes contact with the reality behind the dream.

We do that when we put our gifts in service to the world; to something greater than ourselves.

I first came across the phrase ‘sacred circuit’ in the excellent book SLAYING THE MERMAID: Women and the Culture of Self-Sacrifice , and it’s stayed with me ever since. The sacred circuit is when you sacrifice – when you make sacred – something you have in order to attain something of much greater value. What you give to the world comes back to you, bigger and better than before. The more you have, the more you give, and the more you give, the more comes back to you, so that you have more, and give more, and so on and so forth. The fate of the world and the fate of your world become one.

(This is not to hold people solely responsible for their own poverty and illness — as payment for supposed sins in a supposed past life — but to acknowledge the power of the gift economy.)

We screw ourselves when we take ourselves off that sacred circuit. Then all we have – is the me. All we give to – is the me. Our life’s work becomes the perfection of — the me. Everything begins and ends with – the me.

The me is a very, very small place. It’s never enough, in and of itself, to make you come alive.

Life has a way of cracking us open so that, at some point, with varying degrees of emotional violence, we learn this. We learn that the fullness and wholeness we seek won’t be found in anything that doesn’t love us back; craving opens into nothing but more craving.

We learn to reach outside ourselves, toward the electric joy of the sacred circuit.

It is, ultimately, what saves us.

It might have saved Elliot Rodger, if he had known to break himself open, to expose himself to the heart that beats inside the Other, and to listen, listen, listen to someone or something beyond his own anguished prison of the me.

To do this in a culture that glorifies and celebrates the me — and all the things we buy in order to ‘express’ the me to others — is no easy matter.

But as we continue to scar ourselves, each other, and the planet, it is one of life or death.

how not to care so much what other people think

Last night a close girlfriend and I went out to a little gallery on Melrose that was holding a fundraiser for Sandra Fluke in her run for state Senate.

Two young women – one of them Thora Birch of AMERICAN BEAUTY fame – gave speeches, intelligent, impassioned, thoughtful, informed speeches, and I thought again of this hunger that is out there for female role models who are not celebrated first and foremost for their hotness (or criticized for a supposed lack of).

The same friend and I had gone to hear Sandra speak at another event about a year ago, and in the q + a someone asked how she felt about the vicious verbal attacks Rush Limbaugh and his ilk aimed at her when she spoke to the need for insurance companies to cover birth control.

Sandra expressed her relief that this particular spotlight had fallen on someone like her, who had such a straight-arrow past that she literally had nothing to hide from the private investigators the Republicans hired to to shame and discredit her. (“You,” one investigator told her, or something to this effect, “are one of the most boring people on the planet.” He meant it as a good thing.)

I liked this answer because it showed how Sandra recognized the impersonal nature of these very personal attacks. They weren’t going after her so much as what she stood for: the idea, or set of ideas, that she embodies.

She knows that those ideas are worth championing.

In other words, she is hooked into something bigger than herself.

I thought of Sandra when I went to hear Hillary Clinton speak at UCLA a few months ago. When her interviewer asked what Hillary’s advice would be to all the young people in the audience who want to change the world, Hillary spoke of the need for young women in particular to grow a very thick skin.

When you try to change the status quo, she said, you will get criticized, you might even get verbally attacked, by people whose primary goal is to make you sit down and shut up. (For women, these attacks still tend to circle in on appearance and sexuality.)

Male or female, though – unless we’re narcissistic or sociopathic – we generally want people to think well of us.

It’s easy to say you shouldn’t care what they think, but it’s harder to actually do that when the part of the brain that registers a social slight is the same part that registers a physical blow. We are social animals, and once upon a time isolation from the herd meant probable death. To lose approval in the eyes of others can be, to our ancient brain, as much of a survival threat as something crouching in the bushes to eat us.

We want to be liked.

Hell, we want to be loved.

The two are not the same.

The problem with ‘like’ is that it is such a lukewarm word (unless you have a gift for likeability; Tom Hanks comes to mind). Like doesn’t tend to fire people up, compel or lead them.

Like doesn’t invent new things, or disrupt old things. Like doesn’t rock the boat. (Why would it? Some people would get wet, and then they might not like you. )

Simon Sinek explains that when we ‘like’ something, we are operating out of the rational part of our brain.

Love, on the other hand, is deeper, more primal, pulsing in the emotional part.

It drives us beyond the so-called rational.

It drives out fear, including fear of change.

As Simon puts it:

Customers will like you if you make good products. They will love you if you stand for something.

We’ll follow what we love to the ends of the earth. We’ll fight for what we believe in, for what we hold dear. We’ll build a life around it.

Love is bigger than we are.

You can’t be loved without also being hated. There’s nothing lukewarm about love: it blazes. You’re dealing with ideas that get under people’s skin, that challenges the way they see the world, the meaning they make of it.

You can’t stand for something without standing against something else.

In order to have believers, you have to have nonbelievers, and some of them will say anything to intimidate you, to make you sit down and shut up, so that their worldview reigns supreme.

In order not to care so much about what other people think – in my humble opinion, anyway – you have to know what you stand for.

You have to know what you love.

Maybe it’s a cause, or a people, or your dog, or a movement, or an idea whose time has come. Maybe it’s something as stripped-down and vital as your right to be fully who and what you are, not to be defined by others. Whatever it is, you take it into you; its voice becomes your voice, it lives through you and connects to others who feel the same way. It takes your ego and subsumes it.

Which doesn’t mean that when the trolls and haters come out – and they will – and they try to shout and shrink you down – and they will – it won’t hurt. It just means there’s something much bigger for you, that remains when the hurt goes away. It redeems the burn through the meaning it gives it.

We live in a consumer culture, and a consumer culture encourages us to be small, to think only of our flaws and imperfections and what we can buy that will ease our sense of inadequacy.

But the thing about the self is that it’s actually not big enough to contain us.

To be perpetually self-conscious is to be anxious and miserable, trapped in the narrative in your head instead of engaged with the reality outside it. We need the world, we need love for something in the world so that we can lose ourselves in it and find ourselves through it at the same time.

When you know what you stand for, you know who you are.

When you tap into the power of that, whether people ‘like’ you becomes irrelevant. (Which, ironically, makes people like you all the more.)

Anyway.

I stand for Sandra Fluke. She is awesome.

the confidence gap vs. the badass feminine

I tweeted a link to the Atlantic article proclaiming that men are more confident than women.

A woman tweeted wryly, In other news; water is wet.

@justinemusk in other news; water is wet.

— Melissa (@liminalworks) April 28, 2014

No kidding.

Think about the kind of body language that signals confidence.

Confident people take up space: they’ll throw an arm around the back of a chair, puff their chest, sprawl their legs, scatter their belongings around them.

They assert their opinions and will interrupt others (hopefully politely). They’ll cross their arms across their chest or put their hands on the hips; if they’re sitting down, they’ll steeple their fingers or put their hands behind their head. They are not overly expressive. They claim their share of recognition. They do not engage in overly approval-seeking behavior (excessive smiling, constant nodding, head tilting, flirting).

In other words, confident body language is coded as masculine.

I honestly don’t believe that feminine badass has to be an oxymoron. The fact that our culture interprets ‘feminine’ as weak and submissive creates this belief that women have to become imitation men in order to be powerful.

I suspect it’s because of a confusion of sex and gender and body language, as if submissive body language is innately feminine and strong confident body language is innately masculine. Men and women both can find themselves in positions of power or powerlessness — and their body language changes accordingly. Women who act one way in front of other women might show up completely differently in a room filled with men (and vice versa).

As many women will be quick to tell you, a lot of so-called traditional ‘femininity’ is a performance, just like a lot of ‘natural beauty’ relies on fillers, makeup, style, personal trainers, strict dieting, expensive skincare, teeth bleaching, laser hair removal, good lighting – and I haven’t even touched on plastic surgery yet.

Behavior that is aimed to please, placate, manipulate and soothe can be just as learned as putting on a pair of fake eyelashes.

Maybe women are biologically wired to nurture relationships and keep the peace – or maybe women have been acting the way people act when their survival depends upon the whims, moods, decisions and general approval of those who have more physical, social and/or economic power than they do.

Could you imagine Oprah – one of the most confident and powerful women on the planet – tilting her head, batting her eyes, playing with her hair, shrinking into the cushions, lifting the end of every sentence into a question mark as she interviews some major movie star (or watches Tom Cruise jump up and down on her couch)?

Maybe ‘femininity’ gets so commingled with ‘behavior aimed at catching and keeping a man’, that people have difficulty perceiving ‘feminine’ in a way that exists independently of men:

“In the eighties, a male writer conducted a survey to see how a thousand different people defined femininity. Men of middle age and older, those most invested in the patriarchal tradition, defined femininity as related to men – women were most womanly while being admired by and attractive to men or during heterosexual sex. Male interviewees of any age didn’t think of women as feminine while giving birth or nurturing children, only in relation to themselves. Without men, women appear to fade from sight.” — Valerie Estelle Frankel

I don’t say this to be critical of men. Traditional definitions of what it means to ‘be a man’ are equally problematic.

But I’m thinking of something I said in my TEDx speech, which was about my own troubled history with confidence and self-esteem. We have a way of becoming what we think we’re only pretending to be.



In this extremely popular TED speech, body language expert Amy Cuddy

points out that influence flows both ways: the way you perceive yourself not only impacts your body language, your body language impacts how you perceive yourself.

In other words, are we ‘feminine’ because we’re submissive, or are we taught to be submissive in order to be feminine?

And if we’re so often acting submissive in the presence of people we feel the need to please (be they of either gender), how does that impact the way we see ourselves, or what we believe about femininity itself?

I don’t think anybody would consciously define confidence as ‘masculine’; I know I certainly don’t.

Confidence is about being comfortable in your own skin.

It’s about expressing yourself in an authentic and masterful way.

It’s about feeling entitled to a place at the table, to a voice, to a vote.

It’s about how you relate to your body, your self, other people, the world at large.

Confidence is power, necessary for creative achievement and professional success. This might be why society encourages some people to naturally have more of it than others. This might also be why confidence in women tends to look a lot like courage.

the creative process changes you

I like this quote from soul-poet David Whyte:

“All good work should have an edge of life and death to it. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.”

One of the best pieces of creative advice I ever got was in relation to the question of why you start a project at all, especially something as time-intensive and soul-consuming as a novel. “Will writing this book change your life?” the teacher asked me. “If the answer is no, then that’s not your real baby.”

Note that he was referring to the process, not the end product. He didn’t mean change-your-life in the way of accolades and Oprah and movie rights (although that wouldn’t suck). He meant what David meant: it should have an edge of life and death.

Which sounds dramatic, but here, the death is symbolic. (One hopes.)

I once had a dream in which I was beheaded – too many episodes of THE TUDORS – and as the blade went painlessly through my neck I felt myself leap into a different state of being. It’s the only dream I can remember that had me die, and the message seemed clear: I was entering a time of transformation. I would throw off one life, one identity, and be reborn into another.

The creative process changes you. Even as you’re making the thing, the thing is making – or remaking – you, and not just because it’s turning you into the kind of artist who is capable of making that thing in the first place. The creative process hijacks your brain in the most wonderful way and takes you to flow, where you can suddenly access new parts of yourself.

You go into the dark.

What you find isn’t likely to be nice, or polite, or pretty (your flow-brain doesn’t care), or else you would never have exiled it there in the first place. But by bringing it up into consciousness, and working with it — you reclaim it. It becomes part of your daylight self. It expands you. Do this everyday, over months or years, and at the end of the process you are not who you were at the beginning. You walked the blade. You opened yourself up to it. You were willing to bleed.

Art involves a blood sacrifice.

You need to create out of what scares you, what hurts, what makes you ache with longing, what makes you cry; I don’t know why it has to be this way, but if you can’t move yourself, if you can’t shake your own soul to pieces, how can you expect to connect with the inner lives of others?

But if I write from the depth of myself, aren’t I being narcissistic? (Women tend to ask this more than men. It’s the way we’ve been trained.) Is anybody really going to care? (Depends on your craft and technique.) What will my friends/parents/kids think? (Wrong question.)

We live, for the most part, behind masks. The great paradox of human existence: we want to stay concealed and safe, but also to be seen, recognized, and truly known. We want our freedom, but also to connect. We want to be individuals, but also to lose ourselves in something bigger, greater.

The most powerful creatives speak to the life behind the mask. They illuminate and reveal. Looking or watching or listening or reading is a private and solitary activity that allows us to touch the minds of others. Our lives weave together into one; our faces are different, yet the same.

Then the masks go back on; everyday life resumes: the normal, quotidian, workaday world that we find so many little ways to numb ourselves against. But the edge is there, waiting for us to go back out on it. It forces us to be alive to the moment, see the world around us, and create from a place of vulnerability. It gives us revelations and gifts. We turn around and pass them to others.

“art involves a blood sacrifice”

I like this quote from soul-poet David Whyte:

“All good work should have an edge of life and death to it. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.”

One of the best pieces of creative advice I ever got was in relation to the question of why you start a project at all, especially something as time-intensive and soul-consuming as a novel. “Will writing this book change your life?” the teacher asked me. “If the answer is no, then that’s not your real baby.”

Note that he was referring to the process, not the end product. He didn’t mean change-your-life in the way of accolades and Oprah and movie rights (although that wouldn’t suck). He meant what David meant: it should have an edge of life and death.

Which sounds dramatic, but here, the death is symbolic. (One hopes.)

I once had a dream in which I was beheaded – too many episodes of THE TUDORS – and as the blade went painlessly through my neck I felt myself leap into a different state of being. It’s the only dream I can remember that had me die, and the message seemed clear: I was entering a time of transformation. I would throw off one life, one identity, and be reborn into another.

The creative process changes you. Even as you’re making the thing, the thing is making – or remaking – you, and not just because it’s turning you into the kind of artist who is capable of making that thing in the first place. The creative process hijacks your brain in the most wonderful way and takes you to flow, where you can suddenly access new parts of yourself.

You go into the dark.

What you find isn’t likely to be nice, or polite, or pretty (your flow-brain doesn’t care), or else you would never have exiled it there in the first place. But by bringing it up into consciousness, and working with it — you reclaim it. It becomes part of your daylight self. It expands you. Do this everyday, over months or years, and at the end of the process you are not who you were at the beginning. You walked the blade. You opened yourself up to it. You were willing to bleed.

Art involves a blood sacrifice.

You need to create out of what scares you, what hurts, what makes you ache with longing, what makes you cry; I don’t know why it has to be this way, but if you can’t move yourself, if you can’t shake your own soul to pieces, how can you expect to connect with the inner lives of others?

But if I write from the depth of myself, aren’t I being narcissistic? (Women tend to ask this more than men. It’s the way we’ve been trained.) Is anybody really going to care? (Depends on your craft and technique.) What will my friends/parents/kids think? (Wrong question.)

We live, for the most part, behind masks. The great paradox of modern life: we want to stay concealed and safe, but also to be seen, recognized, and truly known. We want our freedom, but also to connect. We want to be individuals, but also to lose ourselves in something bigger, greater.

The most powerful creatives speak to the life behind the mask. They illuminate and reveal. Looking or watching or listening or reading is a private and solitary activity that allows us to touch the minds of others. Our lives weave together into one; our faces are different, yet the same.

Then the masks go back on; everyday life resumes: the normal, quotidian, workaday world that we find so many little ways to numb ourselves against. But the edge is there, waiting for us to go back out on it. It forces us to be alive to the moment, see the world around us, and create from a place of vulnerability. It gives us revelations and gifts. We turn around and pass them to others.