Laurie Sandell

More lessons from Ajhan Amaro

Well, it’s official: I’m totes monked-out. I ended up going to all three of Ajhan Amaro’s lectures on faith at the New York Insight Meditation Center. On the second night, he gave us a meditation that helps you deal with your emotions, and since my friend Amanda used to call me “TK Emotion,” I was interested to hear what he had to say. ”TK” is a symbol used in journalism as a placeholder for something you plan to insert later. It’s short for “tokum,” a deliberate misspelling of “to come” (which is done so it won’t end up in the final print of the magazine.) I used to write essays and scribble in, “TK Emotion,” as in, I’ll get to my emotions later. Part of it was my Aquariusness–we’re more cerebral than emotional–but the bigger part was a general fear of feelings. So this meditation’s for me, baby. And here it is: Sit down, close your eyes, and call your attention to something you’re worried about. Feel where it’s affecting you physically: Does your stomach tighten up? Is it like a knife between the shoulder blades? Then let go of the story and sit with the physical feeling, until you feel your body relax. It might take five seconds to call the situation to mind, and 40 minutes to let it go. Eventually it does go, and then you’ve experienced the entire life cycle of the pain. Body awareness is incredibly helpful, Ajhan Amaro said, because you know it has a shelf life; it doesn’t last forever. Or as he put it, “It’s difficult to remain anxious when you have abs of Jell-O.”

He also talked about difficult people, in light of this story about the Buddha. A man, who later came to be known as Baravaji (?) The Abusive, came to the Buddha, angry because his brother had shaved his head and joined the monastery. He yelled and screamed at the Buddha, who listened calmly. Finally the Buddha said, “Baravaji, let me ask you a question. When you have family or friends come to visit, do you offer them food and drink?” Baravji got indignant and said, “Yes, of course, I know how to be polite.” The Buddha replied, “And if they refuse that food and drink, who does it belong to?” Baravaji said, “Me, of course. I offered it and they didn’t want it, so it’s mine!” The Buddha smiled and said, “Accordingly, you’ve offered me your anger, but I don’t accept it. So it belongs to you.” Oh, snap! Ajhan Amaro continued, “You don’t have to fend the person off, defend yourself, or become smug and superior, but that state of calmness holds up a mirror to the other person’s behavior.” Similarly, it can be used if someone comes to you very excited about something you don’t care about, like, “The Yankees won the pennant!” You don’t have to match their level of excitement; that wouldn’t be honest. You can simply say, “I can see that you’re very happy.” Awesome; can’t wait to use to that one on my little sister. Oh, wait. He also said that we’re not to use spiritual tools to make other people feel less-than. Shizz. As Mary J. Blige would say, “I’m a work in progress.”

An audience with a really cool monk

The British-born monk Ajhan Amaro visited the New York Insight Meditation Center last night, and gave a talk on “Faith or Belief: The difference between blindly going along with what we’ve been told and learning to have confidence in the implications of our own experience.” First, the guy was adorable. Is that wrong to say? Look at the kindness and joy in his face. I loved his prominent ears; they were like two large, round sugar cookies. (My friend Patty’s description of a guy she once dated.)

But let’s get to the good stuff. The lecture was about the importance of doubt when it comes to faith and spiritual experience. Even when you have committed yourself to a path or a way of life, he said, it’s still important to periodically ask yourself if this is still working and why. Not because we’re cynics but because questioning and taking stock is the way to tap into the joy of experience. “So I ask myself, why do I do this? Why do I wear a brown sheet and shave my head and travel around the world giving talks? Is it working for me? Has it made my life better? Yes, it has. Maybe the Buddha is a fraud–” here he paused and mock-gasped–”But if he’s a fraud, he’s a good one, who has made my life better, my experience richer.” He went on to talk about turning our attention to the ordinary, which makes up 98% of our field of experience. “We’ll look at something and say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting–so it has value.’ Or, ‘That’s not interesting, so it has no value.’ We tell ourselves, ‘Peace is not interesting. The silence between words is not interesting.’ The mind has habituated to needing a high degree of stimulation in order to be happy, and we need to break that habit. When we turn our attention to the ordinary, we will no longer depend on excitement in order to feel alive.” Da-yum.

I asked the first question of the night: “Faith in what? Is the concept of God incompatible with Buddhism?” He turned a wide smile in my direction and said, “That’s tomorrow night’s lecture.” Oh. Naturally, I never looked at the program, which lists the title of tonight’s program: “Faith in What? And How?” That’s because I was living in the moment, people. Then, so as not to shame me, he said, “Faith in things exactly as they are right now. Very good question.” A Buddhist cliffhanger!

Poets make the best memoirists

My favorite memoirs are by poets: Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss. Mary Karr’s The Liars Club. Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face. Tonight I heard the most incredible essay, by  poet Mark Doty; it appears in the “Sex” issue of Granta and is called The Unwriteable. It’s about a gay affair he had when he was 18 and married. He wrote, “Now I understand that his body–beautiful though no gym body of a later decade, a broad chest with a rich swath of hair, the beard pointing downward as though to point to the symmetry of his body, the warm total embrace of him–was one of the doors through which I entered my actual life.” He read it at The Half King–a bar partially-owned by Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm–and I’m telling you, it knocked my socks off. It’s very hard to write about sex without resorting to cliché, and Doty’s (very graphic) sex scenes felt fresh and intimate and not at all forced. The only essay I can think of that compares is Jo Ann Beard’s The Fourth State of Matter, and that is my favorite essay of all time.

A weekend of music and readings

When I started going to artist’s colonies, I became friends with artists, and now most of the art on my walls comes from friends. Likewise, I’ve gotten to know some musicians over the past few years, and as a result, I’m always listening to a friend’s CD or going to his or her show. Last night I went to Rockwood Music Hall to hear Amy Correia perform, along with her friend Richard Julian. Amy and I shared the Joe’s Pub stage last September for the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series, but I’ve been listening to her music for years. Her new album–a twangy, rockabilly collection of songs that was entirely fan-funded–has been in heavy rotation in my (cough) boom box and I think it’s her best one yet. It was so magical to hear her sing the songs live.

Then this afternoon I stopped by The Living Room to see my friend Randy Kaplan perform. He lives in LA but was in New York doing one of his kids’ shows. The guy is a genius songwriter and storyteller and there’s always plenty of winking subtext for adults in his songs (his cover of The Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is about kids’ id-based demands and the lesson they learn when their parents say “No.”) Capped off the weekend with a reading at KGB by my old “co-worker” David Goodwillie (we used to write together at NYU’s Bobst Library.) His new novel, American Subversive, has been winning raves in the press and the guy deserves it, because he is still hunkered down at the library, writing, while I am running around town attending shows. It’s OK, though, I am on a different writing schedule–one book every seven years.

Latest iPhone marvel

Last night in Williamsburg I ran into my meditation teacher and his wife; apparently, we’ve been obsessing over the same iPhone app: The Hipstamatic camera. Today Amanda and I walked around Greenpoint, looking for a street fair, we ended up in this goth little parlor in the back of a store, snapping Hipstamatic photos. This, too, shall pass, I’m sure.

Seek and ye shall forget how to read

Once upon a time I was a voracious reader, intimately acquainted with the works of Philip Roth,  Hermann Hesse and Hawthorne. Then one day in the mid-nineties, I was in Barnes & Noble with my friend Zoë. She disappeared for a little while, then returned with a candy-colored book in her hand. Giggling, she dropped it onto our table. It was called The Real Rules by Barbara DeAngelis, and had been written as a response to that awful anti-feminist relationship guide, The Rules. We turned to the first chapter, ready to mock it mercilessly (we both hated self-help books), when the unthinkable happened: We were completely sucked in. We read it cover to cover, forced to admit the perky, dark-haired woman on the jacket might know a thing or two about relationships that we had yet to learn.

Over the next ten years, I amassed a small library of such books, hiding them in drawers until the day I said, “Ah, screw it,” and put them on the shelf among my novels. Now my apartment looks like a real book store, albeit one with only three sections: Fiction, memoir and self-help. Which brings me to the point of today’s blog post. In the past two years, I’ve shifted my focus from these books to live teachers. Josh Korda, who teaches meditation at Dharma Punx in New York. Marianne Williamson (pictured above), who lectures every Tuesday night in Los Angeles. And I know I’m late to the game on this one, but last night I heard Deepak Chopra speak, and I’m adding him to the mix. Come on in, Deepak, the holy water’s fine. I’ll get back to my Russian novels someday.

Thanks for coming out, Westport

Thank goodness the Westport Public Library is run like a well-oiled machine. I had no idea how bad the traffic was going to be from Brooklyn and showed up five minutes late. Normally that wouldn’t be that big a deal, but my reading is a PowerPoint presentation, with slides and audio and a million chances for things to go wrong. Since I’m not a backup plan kind of girl, I usually end up standing there shaking and smiling and saying, “OK, well, while they’re setting up, why don’t we talk…no question too personal!” The reading was nicely attended, and my college friend, Nikki showed up; she even brought a photo of the two of us in 1991, wearing our fashion forward “Jersey Shore” garb and petting sheep. (What is it with me and sheep? Check out this earlier blog post.) And if you weren’t able to attend but would like to hear the reading, here’s a podcast of the event. Q/A with the audience begins at 23:10.

Tonight @ 7:30 PM: Reading in Westport, CT

Thanks to the wonderful Lisa Wexler of the Live! With Lisa radio show–sister to none other than Jill Zarin of Real Housewives–I will be reading tonight at the Westport Public Library. Info here. Everyone tells me it is a wonderful place, with tons of cool events, and I’m really looking forward to it. But let’s be realistic. Tonight it is supposed to rain. I don’t know a soul in Westport aside from Susan Harrington, who can’t make it. My friend Paul said he’d try to come, but has been mysteriously silent since Saturday night. So it looks like I’ll be going it alone, and perhaps reading to just a handful of people. If that’s the case, I’m going to regale them with every celebrity secret I’ve been holding inside for the past eight years. At the very least, I will sign each book with a made-to-order cartoon. I look forward to meeting the two of you!

Mom’s Day with the sisters

Met up with my mom and sisters for dinner at Extra Virgin in the West Village. Mom was ordered to open her gifts in order of lamest to least lame, so mine was handed over first. (I gave her two books and a bunch of peonies.) Not that I consider books a lame gift, but when your banker sister splurges on diamond earrings, your gift sort of falls into the macaroni necklace category. The books I gave her were Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman–unfortunate title notwithstanding, she writes brilliantly and hilariously about motherhood, and Then We Came to The End, by Joshua Ferris. I also picked up a book for myself, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I’ve been avoiding it because I understand that everyone who reads it becomes a vegetarian. But I’m ready. I ordered what might be my last guilt-free spaghetti and meatball dinner.

New Yorker Cartoonist Night at Happy Ending

For the past five years, I’ve been attending the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series on a monthly basis. It features three writers (or in this case, cartoonists) and a musician, each of whom is required to take a risk onstage. Yes, its founder and host Amanda Stern is one of my closest friends, but I wouldn’t attend so faithfully if I didn’t love it so much. Last night was “New Yorker Cartoonist Night,” featuring slideshow presentations by Liza Donnelly, Carolita Johnson and Drew Dernavich (who is a close friend of my friend Paul’s and has been very supportive of my cartooning career.)

What I learned: Carolita Johnson gets her best ideas in the middle of the night, so she keeps a notepad by her bed. She said that half the time an idea will come to her that she knows is the “best idea she ever had,” then she’ll wake up to find that her handwriting is illegible. Drew, who engraves headstones for a living (really), took the best risk of the night: He played air guitar. He must practice at home a lot, because he did it to perfection: Every time he took the “guitar” off to kick and smash it, he would mime putting the strap back on when he started to play again. At one point he was down on his knees, leaning all the way back, just shredding the thing. My favorite cartoon of the night was one that was never published, by Liza Donnelly. It depicted a dog walking into a filthy room and saying, “Mmm, smells like ass in here!” Here’s a photo from the after-party at Indochine (with Amanda), and photos from the night. It rocked.