Category Archives: Books

5 things I’ve learned about meditation

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Meditating Buddha.

Ommmm.

Just last post I was whining about meditation and how my erstwhile suitor always jettisons me after a torrid courtship.  He’s a fickle sort, my tormentor, but he seems to have settled in for the long haul this time around.  What happened? you ask.  Wish I knew.

All I know is that a month ago, my husband and I were thrust into a chaotic situation in dealing with my mother-in-law’s medical treatments after her stroke.  We’d thought she’d been recovering, but the truth was something far worse than we’d guessed.  Suffice to say, a thousand miles from home and sanity, both of us came unraveled. And, somehow, in the unraveling, I finally found what everyone else in the universe finds in meditation.

For the first time in the months I’d been floundering and flailing, I actually found a moment’s peace.  Everything went quiet, and just for the five minutes of guided meditation, I was still and in myself fully.  Maybe all of the pain had finally set me up for a breakthrough, or maybe I was having a breakdown.  Either way, meditation has been almost easy ever since.

You’ll note the almost.  Meditation is a discipline, and when you’re a space cadet like yours truly, discipline isn’t something that will ever feel fully natural.  Here are a few things I’ve learned in the process:

1.  The time to begin meditating is before you truly need it.

Your breath is coming harsh in your lungs.  Bands tighten across your chest when you try to inhale.  Your thoughts circle in your skull, around and around, racing the Indy 500.  You think, “I should learn to meditate.”

That was me, trying to head off editing’s anal madness.  And it was the wrong time.  When you sit and observe your breath when you can’t actually breathe, you create a feedback loop that just intensifies your anxiety as your ever-shallower breaths turn into soup in your lungs.  And then you panic.

If you’re not currently anxious, start meditating now, so you have a coping tool when the tough times hit.  Meditation can be a valuable tool for easing anxiety if you’ve sharpened your skills before it takes hold.

2.  Don’t feel stuck with your current form of meditation if it isn’t working for you.

When you’re anxious, you don’t want to focus on mindful breathing.  A body scan or chanting a mantra might be more effective.  When you’re feeling furious, you probably don’t want to focus on unconditional love (metta).  Instead, perhaps, mindful breathing might work better.  When you’re feeling jumpy and overwhelmed, you might not feel comfortable sitting.  Maybe a moving meditation or yoga might be more helpful.

If you’re having issues with a particular type of meditation, maybe you shouldn’t keep forcing yourself to practice.  Keep an open mind and be willing to try something new.

3.  Start slowly and if that’s too fast, take it even slower.

You’ve probably read what I have—that you should aim for twenty minutes of meditation a day.  Even the wimpiest meditation trainers I’ve found on Google Play start at five minutes per session before jacking you up to ten minutes within a couple of weeks.

That’s too fast.  It definitely was for me.  Five minutes of observational breathing to someone completely untrained feels like five centuries.

Scale back.  A lot.

In the heart of my most anxious moments, I found two minutes to be almost more than I could handle.  Even then, I had to baby myself by keeping my eyes open—closed brought me panic attacks—and by watching a timer visually count down on my tablet as I counted my breaths.

Two minutes of extremely controlled, deep breathing actually relaxed me.  It was the first time “meditation” actually felt like it was supposed to.

4.  If you’re learning how to practice from a book, make sure the program style fits your personality.

I think I wrote about my joys in dealing with Meditation for Your Life: Creating a Plan that Suits Your Style by Robert Butera.  I thought, “Bingo!”  Most things don’t suit my style because I’m weird.  This book didn’t either, despite its five-star rating on Amazon.  It’s one of those, “make your entire life revolve around meditation” books, delving into every irrelevant aspect of your existence.  Maybe the process works for some, but for me, well…

I really hate wasting time.  Time dredging up endless past emotions just to be told, “The only thing that works is trial and error.”  I’m not bitter.  Really.

I’ve personally had better luck with 8 Minute Meditation: Quiet Your Mind. Change Your Life. by Victor Davich.  It’s a straightforward, breezy look at meditation, introducing a progressively more difficult form of meditation for each of the eight weeks of the program.  I’m finding its deceptive simplicity almost profound and a hell of a lot easier to deal with.  I’m on Week 5 of the program, “Gracious Declining,” and I’m finding I’m a lot more focused these days.

You might not, however.  You might like Butera’s book, or (in my view) the surprisingly obtuse Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana.  Or the classic, but very mystical, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

If the book you’re reading and practicing from isn’t working, dump it quickly and move on to whatever suits you the best, otherwise all you’ll court is frustration.

5.  Find your proper time of day to meditate.

This is, I think, the real biggie.  I was meditating midday and wondered why I kept falling asleep late in the afternoon.  Meditating at the wrong time can be more destructive to your energy levels than not meditating at all.

Davich, in 8 Minute Meditation, recommends meditating either when you first wake up before your morning coffee, or before you go to bed.  I’ve started meditating an hour or two before I go to sleep, and suddenly, the meditational energy drain is gone.  I also sleep better because my mind has stopped racing.

That doesn’t mean either of those times will be better for you.  Experiment.  Maybe you’ll be better off taking a few deep breaths during your lunch break or after you get off work.  Just like any other aspect of meditation, timing can be equally important to your success or failure.

I hope a few of these tips might make your journey into the deeper realms of consciousness a little more bearable than mine.  Good luck!

A Clash of Archetypes: Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” A Review

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She is not me, though I wish she was.

Temperance – She is not me, though I wish she was.

I’ve read all kinds of manifestos, from the short to the Communist.  I can either take them or leave them, honestly, which is probably why I haven’t come up with one of my own.  They can be motivating or distracting, boring or fascinating.  I can nod in agreement with every word or wish that the words could be scrubbed from the page before my eyes.  Which is why I’m not completely surprised that I didn’t find Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art to be the motivational masterpiece that so many others have.

I’ve been waging my own war with waning creativity lately, and perhaps that’s my problem.  For Pressfield, “resistance” is the enemy: the writer’s block, the tardy muse, the drugs and the sex and the rock ‘n’ roll that’s so much more appealing than forcing words to appear upon a page.  I can’t say he’s not right.  If there ever was an enemy to creativity, it would be that unnamed force that keeps the muse at bay.  All I know is that war is exhausting.

Raise that keyboard high!  Let the pencil strokes fly!

So, we fight!  We lift keyboard in hand and raise our pens to the fore!  We heft that palette upon our shield-arm, and thrust our brushes forward.  We slice and dice our ineffable enemy with keypresses and brushstrokes.  It won’t ever stop.  It’s around us everywhere, both seductive and violent.  It seeks to distract us from our objective: getting words on the page, lines and circles on the canvas.  It will stop at nothing to stop us.

You think you’re safe, don’t you?  You’re ensconced in your office or your studio, staring at the wide wall of your monitor, of your canvas.  You’ve barricaded the door, and blocked off all extraneous thought.  You have fingers poised, ready to perform intricate actions, to bring the vision that dances behind your eyes to life before you.  You ready yourself.  You’ve made sure your Maginot Line is well-fortified, and you’ve allied yourself with your neighboring distractions.

How about a little cake? something whispers in one ear.

You look around in alarm.  Nope, there’s nothing.  No one is holding a delicious slice of indulgence over your shoulder just inside your peripheral vision.  You return your attention to the blank whiteness before you.  You set your fingers on the home row.  You dip your brush into some basic black, then blue, and start stirring.

You’ll never be able to bring it to life, the voice says, menacing now.  You think you’re good enough, but you’re not!

But I am!  The voice is defiant, and you press deliberately upon the shift key.  The brush feels heavy in your hand as it hovers above the canvas.  And if I’m not, who will bring my creation to life?

That’s right!  Just hit that key!  I dare you!  And then another.  And then you’ll have a whole string of nonsense to cringe at!  Better to back away.

But!  But!  You slam your fingers over the keys now.  You’ve managed to write a sentence.  Your first line isn’t a thing of beauty, all smudged with paint or faulty antialiasing, but it’s there.  It’s a start.  You can always fix it later.

And I’ll be here later to bug you! the voice says.

You think you’ve won a respite, but Resistance has breached your Maginot Line.  Suddenly that imagined cake is looking pretty good, except it isn’t with you.  It’s at the bakery, halfway across town.  You put down another sentence, stroke out a gentle curve.  You mix another color, and futz with italics.  The cake screams, Buy me!  Its voice is louder than mere resistance.

Suddenly, you’re exhausted.  You’ve scratched out a start, but it isn’t anything close to what you intended, and your defenses are down.  You should keep slapping away at the enemy with your keyboard, jabbing at it with the cruel ballpoint of your trusty pen.  Instead, your head dips.

Curse you, Resistance!  You’ve won!

I’ve never been a warrior, unlike Pressfield.  I just don’t have the will to fight every day of my existence.  He might have armor and an unflagging spirit.  His words drip with challenge, and have been honed to optimal sharpness by a master blacksmith.  He slays, he declares victory every day.  I try to slay, thinking of the page’s blankness as an enemy, but instead I shrink away, pained.  I’m slashed to ribbons even as I’m seduced by distraction.

My inner storyteller is battered and bleeding, and she seeks respite from his relentless words.

And now she’s rambling about the Storyteller… sigh.

My inner writer isn’t a warrior.  My muse isn’t Durga.  Instead, she’s insatiably curious.  She’s innovative in her own quiet way.  She wants to know as much as you do what lies ahead for the myriad characters she’s woven, and wants to spin a yarn as best she can as they interact in the world she’s sculpted.  She is Storyteller, both for herself, and for anyone else who cares to listen to her words.  She hears Pressfield’s stirring words and lies down for a nap.

Nope, not for me, this endless clash!  It hurts too much!  Just tell me what comes next!

What next?  What is next?  She reaches inside herself for the world she’s created from the soil of thought and reality.  She feels it take shape in her hands as she feels the silken strand vibrate that she keeps connected to her characters at all times.  She sees as they do, and feels the clay flow into buildings, trees, races.  She watches and listens as they speak to each other.  She smiles as they become all the more alive in interaction.  In life.

Tell me, she whispers to them, what are you going to do?

Sometimes they comply with what she’s envisioned.  Sometimes they don’t, and chart their own course.  She is the last to predict, the first to step aside and let them assume control.  She speaks their words and thoughts.  She reveals their motivations and describes their actions.  She allows them to guide her fingers over the new world she’s created and refine it.  She is their conduit, their channel, and when they rest at the end of their journeys, she weeps until a new world beckons or new characters introduce themselves.

What’s next?

That should be my rallying cry, but sometimes I know what comes next and my Storyteller balks.  Why should I tell the story?  I already know what happens.  Who cares?

Because writing isn’t always about you, I tell her, but she usually ignores me.

I tell her to put on her armor and poke and prod herself into compliance with the corner of my keyboard, but she just curls up in a ball and hides.  I can’t blame her.

What does that have to do with archetypes?

I just recently started on Archetypes: Who Are You? by Caroline Myss.  So far, I’m not finding anything particularly surprising about it, though I haven’t really spent much time delving into my primary archetypes to see if there’s anything I can use to get me up off my butt creatively.

Myss points out in her introductory chapter that archetypes are universal.  Months before I picked up the book, I’d already intuited that Pressfield’s creativity is best represented by the Warrior archetype and that mine really isn’t.  I’m not a warrior, dammit!  I’m a Storyteller!  When I took Myss’ test at archetypeme.com, the results didn’t surprise me so much as finding out one of my dominant archetype’s alternate names is “Storyteller.”

In case you’re curious, my dominant results were: 33% Creative, 33% Intellectual and 14% Visionary.

I can see why so many creative and innovative artists find Pressfield’s work so motivating: my guess is that they either have a hint of the Warrior or the warrior’s drive within them.  Pioneers, heroes, and advocates all have to harness the warrior’s courage to impel others to change.  I’m a little too laid back (a very kind way of saying “low energy”) for his words to spur me properly.  Instead, I just felt tired after reading The War of Art.

The importance of ritual

If you take a look at the Amazon reviews for Pressfield’s book, you’ll see a number of comments about how Book 3 goes off the deep end in speaking of angels and rituals to the muses.  Sadly enough, this was the part of the book I found the most personally applicable, even if the language was highly figurative and “mystical” in nature.  Maybe Pressfield’s dead serious in viewing his language as concrete and literal, but I resonated with it on a more abstract level.

I’m going to diverge for a couple of seconds into the land of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and cognitive functions.  You may or may not see the sixteen types of the MBTI as more pseudoscience and inaccurate mumbo-jumbo (I’m mixed about its true accuracy, even if I find my “type” describes me almost perfeclty).  Either way, to a certain extent, I’ve found the side-theory of cognitive functions to be very helpful in understanding how my personal thought process works.  Essentially, in this theory, there are four primary functions, expanded to eight based on their inward or outward direction: Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and Intuition.  All of these four can either be Extraverted (outwardly focused) or Introverted (inwardly focused).  I’m using Jung’s spelling of “extrovert.”

My personality type is INTP (Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving), and my cognitive process stack is as follows:

  • Dominant: Introverted Thinking (personal inner mental model of the world outside)
  • Auxiliary: Extraverted Intuition (awareness of outer patterns and the complexity of the exterior universe and all its possibilities.  The “wheeeeee!” in life)
  • Tertiary: Introverted Sensing (recollection of personal experience in all its details, awareness of how the body feels internally)
  • Inferior: Extraverted Feeling (longing for universal harmony, universal values, the welfare of all within a group)

If you read a lot of books on developing intuition, you’ll find that most encompass the development of introverted intuition.  This is the land of gut feelings, your “sixth sense,” and the universe within you.  Pressfield’s was the first I’ve ever seen that explains exactly what extraverted intuition feels like.  You look and scan everything around you to get the gist of reality.  Suddenly, you’re smacked with an “A-ha!” moment, which can either hit you like a brick in the face, or like a gentle whisper.  When you hear of “angels” or muses actually whispering an idea in someone’s ear and you secretly wonder if the purveyor of such words is actually bonkers, maybe they aren’t.  Maybe they’re hearing their Extraverted Intuition talking and expressing the sensation in the most accurate way they can.  The experience feels highly abstracted, so the language follows suit.  Or maybe they really do believe they’re hearing angels and they’re nuts.

Pressfield’s rituals are precise, and his language, frankly, sounds insane if you’re not comfortable with extraverted intuition.  He’s elaborate in his processes for preparing his perception for the act of writing.  My own processes and rituals are far less precise, wacky and intense.  But, really, to ensure my best writing I do have a ritual to prep my mind for the writing act. In short, I prime my perception just as Pressfield does with his muse-invocations and prayers.

Basically, I imagine what mood I’m going to try to convey for the writing session.  I then visually scan my hard drive for the album that I think conveys the mood the most accurately.  I take a few deep breaths, fire up the album on Windows Media Player, and then I open my document.  Then I close my eyes and try to tap into my characters’ inner logic and emotions.  I remember what I wrote the previous session, and let myself get sucked into their world.  Without that kind of initial ritual and initiating process, my writing and inspiration suffer.

A germ of what might work for future exploration…

Who is your inner writer?  Who is your outer persona?  Are you a warrior?  A hero?  Someone who loves to slay inner demons?

If you’re like Pressfield at all, this manifesto will get your blood pumping.

I’m not.  Instead, I’m thinking I need to find a way to spark my Storyteller’s curiosity to get moving again.  I need to tap into her need to tell the story to others.  I need to actually perform my rituals to get her interested again.  In short, I need to focus on priming my perception.

Grokking the Author Platform

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stage

All the world’s a platform!

Publishing these days, from everything I’ve been reading, involves massive amounts of marketing on the part of the author.  You need media savvy, business acumen, and a vast array of skills that don’t actually seem to be related to writing.  I’m of two opposing positions on this new change, but here I’m going to pretend that I’m not feeling personally violated in the slightest.  Nope, not at all.  Nunh unh.  Instead, I’m going to try to convince myself that the process of developing a personal platform is sparkling with the fairy dust of inspiration, and glittering with pure potential.  Because it is, and in an odd way, it’s exhilarating.

So, what is this platform thing I’ve been ambling on about?  Glad you asked.

At its most fundamental level, your author platform is you.

Building from that base, your platform is how you present yourself, your personal strengths, and your writerly arts to the external world.  Your expertise, if you don’t mind me slipping into the marketing jargon I’ve been reading too much of lately.

Disclaimer: I’m just at the ground level (ridiculously grandiose exaggeration) of platform building myself, and I’m still trying to get my brain around how it’s done.  But I can point you to the books that have really helped me understand the process.

1. The Productive Writer by Sage Cohen

If you’re even thinking of trying to become published or working in any capacity as a professional writer, I highly recommend this book.  It also should have been the book I began with first when I was trying to understand author marketing and the platform-building process.  Sage Cohen’s writing walks an elegant line between the practical and inspirational, and for that alone I’d recommend this book even without her excellent overview of what platform building actually is.

In short, start here.  You’ll receive a solid basis and context for understanding a lot of the more concrete advice in Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and Get Known Before the Book Deal.  Likely, you might be inspired enough to want to build a platform.  As it was, I’d already read the latter book, and had developed a thick crust of cynicism and annoyance.  This book washed it away in a tide of new ideas, and helped me to understand that a platform could actually serve well as both a professional and life guide.

Note: Turn off your inner editor when flipping through this book at a local bookstore.  For some reason, the horse’s “reins” are consistently spelled like a king’s “reign.”  I almost didn’t buy the book for that reason, and I’d have probably regretted that forever.

2. Sell Your Book Like Wildfire by Rob Eagar

I’m kind of torn in recommending this book over Get Known Before the Book Deal.  To be perfectly honest, the information within both books is quite similar, though Eagar’s book is more comprehensive.  Both rely on a fair amount of marketing jargon, but Eagar’s is probably a little more impenetrable; understandable considering this is fundamentally a business book first and a writing book second.  If you read this book, you probably won’t need Get Known, and I highly recommend you do.  I’m hugely biased though: this book reads like a professional effort, and not like a “chatty” self-help book the way Get Known does.

Eagar covers every aspect of platform building for both fiction (yay!) and nonfiction writers, from media interviews to newsletters, to guerrilla marketing tactics.  And he does it in concrete steps that are reasonably easy to follow.  The one drawback is his emphasis on shelling out huge amounts of money for professional web design, videotaping of speaking engagements, etc.  You’d have to be wealthy to afford everyone he suggests hiring.  That said, he’s clear that you don’t have to do everything in the book to build a respectable platform.

If you want to know everything there is to know about creating a platform, this is your book.

Note:  The term “leader” is used a lot in this book before Eager finally defines what he means in the second-to-last chapter.  He’s referring to the decision-makers in any group setting: managers, executives, church pastors and the like.

3. (tentative) Get Known Before the Book Deal by Christina Katz

I’m going to admit right off the bat that this book royally ticked me off.  It’s probably unfair, but there’s something in the author’s style that really, really annoys me.  The “chattiness” I referred to earlier isn’t the chatting of a friend to another friend, but that of a parent to a child, with that same hint of condescension and lecturing.  That put me right off the book, even if I did read it cover to cover.  The personality is thick in this book, while Eagar tends to back away and usually lets the facts do the talking.

If either of the examples below doesn’t bother you, or actually helps you somehow, you might want to choose Katz’ book over Eagar’s.  Otherwise, go with Sell Your Book Like Wildfire.  There’s enough overlap in material that you won’t miss out if you only read one of the two.

  • “The problem for writers who want a leg up today isn’t the state of the world, the unstable economy, or even the climate in the publishing industry… The problem isn’t (if you have one of these) your editor, your agent, your publisher or even your publisher’s publicist…  The problem just might be, my dear fellow writer, you…  Specifically your attitude.”
  • Exercise for establishing your platform: “Have you ever imagined yourself as an action figure?  Want to imagine yourself as an action figure?  Go to [website] and browse the action figures, and then describe yours.  What props does your action figure have?”

Katz makes a huge deal of the concept of “authenticity” in this book, and if that resonates with you, you’ll probably connect to it better than I did.  Despite the constant reminder to always be genuine when interacting with the outer world through your platform, I found the book to feel very inauthentic, in that Katz seems to have a clear platform-defined persona which she keeps under tight restraint.

That said, there’s a lot of valuable information in this book, and if you can read past the platform spin better than I can, you’ll get a lot out of it.

Note: If you really do want to see platform in action, read this book.  This book is clearly a product of Christina Katz’ platform, a real-life case study in what something engineered specifically for platform-expanding purposes might look like.

If you’ve been wondering what to read to get your brain around marketing and platform-building, I hope I’ve helped cut down your potential list just a little.