Monthly Archives: September 2015

Letting Go

A few months ago, Addison (my fiancee) bought me a book called “Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm” by Thich Nhat Hanh.fear book

Throughout my slow-growing meditation practice, I’ve been aware of ‘levels’, perhaps not unlike a video game, that I have to ‘overcome’ in order to get to the next level.

Many times this involves gaining certain tools, making certain mistakes or have certain experiences before I can ‘pass’ that level.

A few months ago (and even now) I’m in level ‘Fear’.

I’ve recognized how incapacitating Fear is, and how incredibly free I am or will be when I am no longer afraid.

I imagine living without the negative voices in my  head that are constantly instructing me and giving me their opinions from a fear-based place, and simply making choices based on intuition.

I imagine being one of those people who laugh and smile all the time, and are totally unafraid of rejection.

In fact, these people seem to no longer require approval in any way.

I’m going to grow up to be like that. 🙂

In the meantime, I am reading and re-reading the last sections of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, ‘Fear’, and doing the meditation practices he has laid out.

I wanted to share this exercise and part of this chapter with you, because not only is it a wonderful practice, but the writing is eloquent and hits home with me every time I read it:

Letting Go

“Breathing in, I observe letting go. Breathing out, I observe letting go.

This exercise helps us look deeply at giving up craving, hatred and fear. This concentration helps us touch the true nature of reality and brings the wisdom that can liberate us from fear, anger and despair. We let go of our wrong perceptions of realitys so as to be free. 

‘Nirvana’ literally means ‘cooling’, ‘the putting out of flames’; in Buddhism, it refers to extinction of the afflictions brought about by our wrong perceptions.

Nirvana isn’t a place to go or something belonging to the future. Nirvana is the true nature of reality, things as they are.

Nirvana is available in the here and now.

You are already in nirvana; you are nirvana, just as the wave is already the water.

water-waves-_584707-15

-Thich Nhat Hanh

Thank you for reading this post. 🙂

Don’t forget to share your thoughts below…!

A jar of angry mice

Do you ever find yourself battling voices in your head?

Especially when you’re trying to write?

It can be very distracting, when all of your different mental personalities are reading over your shoulder as you type, giving their two cents.

laptop-peeking-500

I don’t know about you, but I receive opinions on everything I’m doing whether it’s taking a shower or running a stop sign on my bicycle.

There’s always imaginary, alternate-ending stories that play out for every occasion of my life.

Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, shared this great exercise for helping to quiet all of those voices.

So, here’s what you do:

“Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up.mouse

Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse.

Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar.

Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the trail, drop it in he jar.

And so on.

Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head.

Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want–won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often.

Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle.

Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices.

Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to your.

Leave it down, and get back to your [writing].

A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head.

But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you.”

I hope that helps, or that at very least, you cracked up a little reading about it. 😉

Have a great day!

By the Pale Moonlight–another look at characters

Hey, so last week I shared some thoughts about character perspectives in books vs. movies, and a funny story from Anne Lamott’s book, ‘Bird by Bird’.

A song I wrote recently (‘By the Pale Moonlight’) has an interesting character perspective switch half-way through that I wanted to share with you. I based the song on the well-known French song “Au Claire de la Lune”.

“Au Clair de la Lune” is a common French folk song that dates back to at least the mid-18th Century. In 2008, the earliest known recording of the human voice was digitized, and the unknown singer on the recording is singing a small snippet of “Au Clair de la Lune”.

In this song, the story begins from the perspective of a lonely poet/author, who is knocking on his friend’s door so he can borrow a pen and light his candle in the middle of the night.

Back in those days, if you wanted to stay up all night with creative ideas or wake up at 3 in the morning and write something down, you’d better hope you have ink for your pen and some coals left in the fireplace to light your candle with!

A couple verses in, the perspective changes.

Is it from his friend’s perspective as he watches from his window, or just an omnipotent perspective?

Here’s how my english version of the song goes:

At your door I’m knocking

By the pale moonlight

Lend a pen I beg you

I’ve a word to writecandle

Dark now is my candle

My fire burns no more

For the love of heaven

Open up your door

 

My friend cries in answer

By the pale moonlight

“In my bed I’m lying

Late and chill’s the night

Yonder at the neighbor’s

Someone is astir

Fire’s freshly kindled

Oh get a light from her.”

 

To the neighbor’s house then

By the pale moonlight

Goes our lonely author

To beg a pen to write

“Who knocks there so softly?”

Calls a voice above

“Open wide your door now

It is the God of Love.”

 

Seek they pen and candle

By the pale moonlight

They can see so little

Dark is now the night

What they find in seeking

That is not revealed

All behind her door 

Is carefully concealed

 

And in my version of this song, I finish up by singing the first line in French (what they are saying in French is a bit different from the English version):

Au clair de la lune
Mon ami Pierrot
Prete-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot

Ma chandelle est morte
Je n’ai plus de feu
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour l’amour de Dieu

matthias_stom_young_man_reading_by_candlelight1

If you want to hear me play the full song, just click here! (the song starts at around 4:40 in the video)

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. 🙂

Please comment below to share your thoughts about writing, characters, or song-writing (or anything else this topic made you think of!)…

A perspective on characters

claude_monet_PortraitThe writing project I’m in the middle of right now has caused me to examine characters and their perspectives in a deep, inquisitive and sometimes confounded way.

(I can’t tell you what the project is exactly, because I’m ghostwriting and that’s just the way it is when you ghostwrite)

When you watch a movie, unless someone is narrating during the scenes, than you need to base what the character is thinking by their actions.

But when you read a book, the author has the ability to paint inter-weaving stories and perspectives for you. In one scene you can see the world from the perspective of the main character, while in the next scene you’re seeing everything from their arch-nemesis’s perspective. And who knows, maybe the following scene will be from the perspective of the detective’s hairbrush lying on the bathroom counter. Or an omnipotent perspective that sees and knows all.

Having options is great, but they can sometimes be overwhelming as well.

Learning more about who my characters are, without judgement or a need to change them, is a good place to start.

So I opened up Anne Lamott’s book on writing called ‘Bird by Bird’, and found a section where she talks about characters. The story she shares at the end of the section made me laugh out loud, as well as left me feeling better informed and inspired.

Here’s the lead up to the story:

“You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story.

Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time. As soon as you start protecting your characters, from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life.

Get to know your characters as well as you can, let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.”

Here’s the story:

“My Al-Anon friend told me about the frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of the night. The wife kept dragging him in before dawn so that the neighbors wouldn’t see him, until finally an old black woman from the South came up to her one day after a meeting and said, “Honey? Leave him lay where Jesus flang him.”

And I am slowly, slowly in my work–and even more slowly in real life–learning to do this.”

–Anne Lamott (author of Bird by Bird and Traveling Mercies)

I’d love to hear your perspective on characters and your experience with bringing them to life–gam-of-thrones-finale

(or killing them off, if you’re more of a George R.R. Martin kind of author) 🙂

–Just fill out a comment below…

A look at song writing…

love

Have you ever “fallen in love”?

You know, when your hormones are so jacked you can’t see straight, and just the thought of the other person sends you into state of unencumbered bliss?

I’m guessing this has probably happened to you, even if you don’t want to admit it. 😉

What I always find interesting about falling in love and about human beings in general (‘interesting’ is a nice way of saying ‘really fucking annoying’) is that when something is happening to us that we perceive to be really good, we can’t help but dread the potential end of it.

As always, we fear death.

The death of relationships, the death of the life we know now.

Even when we can recognize how healthy and normal change is, we can’t help but fear it subconsciously.

Well, at least I do, anyways. 🙂

So during the last bout of falling in love I did (which was about three years ago, thank God), the song Dark Angel was born.

This song asks alot of questions…

But does not provide any answers.

Here’s how it goes:

Dark Angel

Dark Angel Of Death Wallpaper - wallpaperest.com.

“I’ll be your innocence if you’ll be my sex appeal

Yes, I’ll be your innocence if you’ll be my sex appeal

You’ve got everything it takes to drive this situation wild

I saw you first, I saw you first

I saw you first and now you are mine

But I’m losing control of this situation all of the time

And are you the best thing that’s ever happened to me?

Are you the one to make my blind eyes see?

Or are you my dark angel of death?

Are you my terminal breath?

I’ll be your calling if you’ll be my answering

Yes I’ll be your calling if you’ll be my answering

You’ve got everything it takes to make a murderer of me

And are you the best thing that’s ever happened to me?

Are you the one to make my blind eyes see?

Or are you my dark angel of death?

Are you my terminal breath?

Are you the end of my fears?

Or are you a hurricane of tears?

Are you a hurricane of tears?

Or are you a hurricane….

of tears?”

Listen to Dark Angel by clicking here

dark angel

Thanks for reading this blog!

I’ll be back next week… 😉

~Jahnavi

Appreciating where we are

beautiful-forest-light-nature-sunlight-Favim.com-197959

Every morning (or almost every morning), Addison and I sit down and read a couple of pages from one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books before we meditate.

Right now we are reading “Fear: Essential wisdom for getting through the storm”.

I really enjoyed the reading we had today, and wanted to share it with you:

“Imagine two astronauts go to the moon, and while they’re there, there’s an accident and their ship can’t take them back to Earth. They have only enough oxygen for two days. There is no hope of someone coming from Earth in time to rescue them. They have only two days live.

If you were to ask them at that moment, ‘What is your deepest wish?’ they would answer, ‘To be back home walking on our beautiful planet Earth.’ That would be enough for them; they wouldn’t want anything else. They wouldn’t think of being the head of a large corporation, a famous celebrity, or the president of the United States. They wouldn’t want anything but to be back here—walking on Earth, enjoying every step, listening to the sounds of nature, or holding the hand of their beloved while contemplating the moon at night.

We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from dying on the moon. We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious, beautiful planet. Zen Master Linji said, ‘The miracle is not to walk on water or fire. The miracle is to walk on the earth.’ I cherish that teaching. I enjoy just walking, even in busy places like airports and railway stations. Walking like that, with each step caressing our Mother Earth, we can inspire other people to do the same. We can enjoy every minute of our lives.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

Want to receive updates whenever we post a blog? Just enter your email into the upper right hand side of this page!