…correctly understood religions should be liberatory in nature (an orientation which is typically lost through the process of institutionalization and the distorting gravitational warp of proximity to wealth and state power), and rather than smug dismissal and disengagement that cedes the religious domain to regressive forces, as has typically been done by those on the left, following from an acknowledgement that most working people worldwide are religious, it is more constructive to embrace this domain as one of many ideological battlefields, and learn to engage with people of faith on their own terms with a liberating message that challenges conservative narratives.
If you have been a reader of this newsletter for any length of time, then you probably know where I stand on the recent eruption of liberatory student protests for Palestine. As is likely true for anyone who has protested or gone on strike and faced the consequences to their personal safety, their careers, and their futures for the sake of that alignment, everything I’ve been doing lately has a slightly wry reflective layer to it. Things I’m reading, watching, interactions I have with people, have all been coming back home to what I understand as the ultimate goal of all religions: collective liberation. The occupants of the encampment at my institution UC Santa Cruz are close to my heart, poignantly since I am halfway around the world and cannot join them. My mind’s way of joining them has been to connect everything, by a thin and flexible and unbreakable silvery thread, back to them.1
When I took a leave of absence last year to seek humane living conditions, the university absolved me of my health insurance plan, and my beloved therapist along with it. (He really was great!) You already probably know that I am a child of southern California in the 1990s, and as such, have large parts of my personality construct derived from that cultural environment. The New Age movement flowered in California for 30 years before I was born into its most materialistic, commercialized milieu yet; but its basic principles (as I absorbed from my mother and the local bookstores, beach hippies, my yoga teachers) still included the law of attraction, mind over matter, and an acknowledgement of a universal intelligence, of which the human soul is a microcosm.2
Believing that life has a purpose, and is basically benevolent, had always come naturally to me. I had an unthinkably privileged childhood, after all, and a mind bent on making sense—beautiful, pleasing, hopeful sense—of what was set before me. It is no wonder, then, that when the more challenging ‘rejection, poverty, and homelessness’ portion of the show got going, in my mid-20s, my heretofore subconscious ‘faith’ was sorely tested.
Eager to avoid the denial and toxic positivity for which superficial critics give superficial New Agers flack—eager to avoid flack, that is—I sought to apply my educated rational mind to ‘proving right’ those foundational principles of the hippie shit that had been the air I’d breathed. Reckoning with one’s upbringing often ‘needs healing’: for me, this meant seeking to resolve the root causes that produce symptoms that lead to suffering. Allopathic medicine was always viewed askance in my house: “drink more water” was the semi-kidding Rx for a headache; and a militant insistence on individual will-to-change underwrote all instances of care (“I’ll never get better,” kid whines, sniffling, to which mother cheerfully replies, “Not with that attitude!”). We weren’t superstitiously refusing necessary surgeries or antibiotics; instead, alternative/holistic medicine was allowed to coexist, qualitative, personal, and idiosyncratic, a more human and self-administered repository of wisdom for when little things went wrong.
Holistic health’s greatest contributions to my developing personality were its promotion of bodily autonomy (salvific for a young American woman) and its willingness to believe in a cure. In general, aware of the oppressive regime of scientistic dogma at work in my education and most acquaintances, I kept my ‘faith’ (as I had never thought of it) to myself, continuing to develop those practices, many contemplative, which had served me as they had served my mother (meditation, Tarot, astrology, energy medicine, and prayer, to name a few). Cynics and leftists often struggle with the imaginative possibility that one could be both intelligent and a believer in something (other than the market or Marx), and when I left the nest, this erasure (implicit in my new social scenes, universities) caused doubt and breakdown in my self-construct.
Depression and anxiety are symptoms that I didn’t realize I had until a few years after they had been brewing beneath my conscious awareness. I was in graduate school in the Midwest, bone-cold for the first time in my life, lonely and heartbroken (but not homeless). I started to see the forest for the trees during the vicious silence of those three long winters. I felt that, in my case at least, depression and anxiety were umbrella terms for a host of coping behaviors that were responding to long-term dysfunction—not just in myself, not just in the outer socialized world, but in both, and in our relationship with each other. Resolve the root causes and I should feel good, right? I set about investigating.
Like a curiously high number of my friends and intimates, I have been a longtime sufferer, or survivor, or nonconsenting host, of chronic pain. It presumably derives from an illness or imbalance, but no doctor I have visited in the last 20 years has been able to identify one. The pain organizes itself across time based on my menstrual cycle, but I have no hormonal imbalances that they can see, no thyroid issues, no endometriosis, no PCOS, no sexually-transmitted diseases, no physical uterine abnormalities, etc. As far as allopathic doctors are concerned, I suffer from a ‘hysterical’ (imagined or unreal) female mystery illness, one that until fairly recently in history would have been grounds for permanent commitment to an insane asylum. My holistic/alternative healing, ongoing, is a slow, laborious, rewarding process of recovery of self. It takes place 100% outside of institutions.
(in the copy of Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook I found at the infoladen in Leipzig, this quote is attributed to Janet Napolitano, also Department of Homeland Security, who went on to become President of the University of California. This means she called the cops who busted Robert Hass’ ribs—see below.)
Certain pieces of my self-healing puzzle have entered the mainstream. Following therapists and doctors like Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Gabor Maté, it’s become natural, even fashionable, to jump on the explanation train called trauma. My cultural background in syncretic psychosocial vibeyness had me working on root causes before trauma entered mainstream discourse as the answer (or problem, I guess) to everything; to me it is significant to note that the work of trauma researchers has contributed to the ongoing normalization (normie-lization) of formerly-disparaged New Age principles like mind over matter (e.g., outlook of patient has controlling stake in treatment outcome) and trans/interhuman intelligence (e.g., intergenerational trauma; the environmental factor in mental health).
Apprenticed in the traditions and armed with my share of the resultant ‘insights’ of contemplative practices like yoga, meditation, Tarot, astrology, and prayer from a very young age, I have always understood the bodymind as one being, although of course the two components often go to war. It is this war, I realized, that needs peace for physical healing to occur permanently.And it is trauma, you might say, from without, that casts the first stone.
The first few steps, then, are credible enough: trauma (e.g. childhood emotional neglect, high sensitivity, sexual assault) leads to mind-body coping strategies of chronic pain or illness (menstrual cramps measured to be more severe than labor contractions, monthly doses of hours-long agony immune to painkillers and most tranquilizers). And as anyone living with chronic illness or pain can attest, there will eventually develop alarming psychological repercussions for being out-of-commission for lengths of time due to a cause that you’re told has no cure.
The mental health behaviors and patterns (depression, anxiety, c-PTSD) don’t crop up right away, however. With the advent of 2024, I finally started to feel the deepest feelings I had put on ice in 2020, when the pandemic froze us all; and, unintentionally, it seems like the released pressure of emotions from that time period has encouraged earlier pressures to release simultaneously. At its most intense, this has been very ugly and scary, and its wrackings have almost cost me my relationships (some it did) and my life. It has already cost me my former idea of myself, for which I am grateful. I am, of course, describing grief.
(Like Hekate, goddess of the underworld, Grief always has at least three faces.)
Grief was the missing step that fired the physical illness up into mental ones to match. More than anything, my depression and c-PTSD were, and still are, expressions of deep, lifelong grief. While taking in as much protest content as I can the last few weeks, I had unconsciously been reflecting on the psychological-emotional arc of the pandemic as another example of widespread trauma, though here that specifically refers not to outright horrors of state-funded genocide and authoritarian police brutality but to the emotional neglect and psychic atrophy that results from prolonged isolation. Everybody lost two to three years of their life-as-they-knew-it, life-as-they-had-hoped-for-or-expected. The shock and the silence following the shock—and this is the most bare level, applicable to people who did not lose loved ones nor get too sick themselves.
For spiritual reasons, emotional debt is the only kind I would recommend bothering to pay off. Just as everyone has had to grieve the unborn potential they had projected into the years lost to COVID-19, so too do people with trauma need to grieve what that trauma has cost them, be it time, energy, expectations of health and happiness, and so on. The mental symptoms of depression, anxiety, and hopefully even c-PTSD may lose their stickiness and dissolve in the flow of tears.
And as you know, while not directly, and not without supplementation in myriad material and immaterial forms, it seems I push literature for all ills. As Kafka famously wrote, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” I did not see until very recently, as I somehow outlived this period of hideous and rejuvenating grief, thatI have made my whole life—my relationships, my artmaking, my spirituality, my erstwhile academic career—devoted to a secret mission: to interpret the text of my sick body. If I could only decipher the communications, approach it reverently, despite its cruelty, if I could just break through to insight, wisdom, relief from that most opaque, difficult, seemingly ‘meaningless’ state called pain. Postmodernism is the traumatized child of the Modern. If you ask me, the academy’s dominant Enlightenment-then-Industrialization-derived critical modes (Deconstruction, Marxism, Poststructuralism) suffer from the same fate of the neglected child of a toxically-positive parent who goes on to become an atheistic tech worker, cynical and withdrawn, wondering why even the most ardent accumulation turns to ash in his mouth.
Which brings me back to the embattled university, where every bro got his bachelor’s degree and his ability to weaponize therapeutic language to abuse his mom/girlfriend. Who can blame him, when his university is an arm of the state that invests in the weapons manufacturers that genocide a holy land and its people? ‘You institutions based in domination all look the same to me.’ In seeking truth and health, two forms of wholeness, in the Modern/Postmodern West, both allopathic medicine and hegemonic literary and cultural criticism dispiritedly laser-focus on the ‘symptoms’ of their objects rather than face the vastly complex knot of root causes—which are often spiritual, or can be resolved through spiritual means.
The roll-call of spirit-rejection is familiar to us: these systems are imperialist, settler-colonial, patriarchal, capitalist. Christianity, like the university, has long since been left to the bureaucrats, whose institutionalization conspires with authoritarian domination and fucks everything Christ stood for (two basics being care for the marginalized poor and destruction of property). It is worth our time in this ‘secular age’ to consider religion and spirituality because the university belongs to its students only in spirit. The meek shall inherit the earth—they have not yet.
AFAIC, rejection of present evil is not incompatible with acceptance of the present moment in its divine perfection. I am grateful to the culture that people write off as California New Ageism, bullshit, not even a religion, for training in me (alongside conservative academic training I’ve had to unlearn) that capacity to contain and contemplate paradox. It’s made me a stronger and happier thinker, artist, activist, partner, and person.
I have written about Contemplative Studies before, but I have more subscribers now (hi! thanks!), and I want to gloss it again in the current context. Before he went rogue, Louis Komjathy was a professor of Religious Studies at the private (and Catholic) University of San Diego. He ushered in a new academic field devoted to research and education of contemplative practices and contemplative experience. As he puts it:
This includes three primary defining characteristics: (1) Practice commitment, especially formal meditation; (2) Critical subjectivity; and (3) Character development, with the latter being perhaps most controversial, but also especially relevant in the present context (I hope). “Contemplative practice” is a larger umbrella category; it encompasses approaches and practices more commonly referred to as “meditation,” “prayer,” and cognate disciplines. Contemplative practice refers to various approaches, disciplines, and methods for developing attentiveness, awareness, compassion, concentration, presence, wisdom, and the like. Possible connective strands and family resemblances include attentiveness, awareness, interiority, presence, silence, transformation, and a deepened sense of meaning and purpose.
—from the American Philosophical Association blog; emphasis added
Komjathy was not long for mainstream academia after he made this radical pitch for an alternative discourse. He is now an independent writer and researcher, mostly in Daoist studies, practice, and translation; you can find information about his latest here. His two texts on Contemplative Studies remind me of DIY anarchist handbooks (like Recipes for Disaster, available in full here) in their usability, and in how empowered I feel when I read them (speaking of CrimethInc, Komjathy himself was called a thought criminal for pointing out the dearth of genuinely reflective criticism in the academy.) There’s both a weight of responsibility (and the attendant bolstering of self-esteem) and a relief in knowing this particular path is already appreciably bushwhacked. Following from Contemplative Studies and Contemplative Pedagogy as laid out by Komjathy, I offer a practice of ‘Contemplative Criticism.’
I’m currently writing my Literature dissertation as an emergent example of such contemplative criticism. This distinguishes me from most literary critics-in-training in that I am openly (well, semi-openly) committed to writing my dissertation for spiritual reasons. That’s part of why it’s more honest to identify as an artist than a researcher or academic or critic, though I intend to massage ‘critic’ to make it make sense on my terms (see below).
Valuing knowledge and self-knowledge as I do, I am eager to legitimize critical methodologies of compassion, especially, for example, genuine interdisciplinary cross-pollination between the arts, religious studies, and cultural studies, especially as the humanities are ongoingly kettled, beaten, arrested (the fields figuratively and their liberationist practitioners literally) for refusing to adopt the language and faith (militarized scientist fascism) of their oppressor (the sick university’s atheist materialism, aka research for Raytheon).
From 20 years of pain, I see how pain’s hermeneutics are only worth their yield in practices for alleviating suffering that can be applied to others ASAP.
Contemplative Criticism is one such practice.
Criticism in its highest form is appreciation.
Appreciation requires affirmation and gratitude.
Another way of saying this: Every poem is a love poem.
On that note, here’s a poem by one of my professors at Berkeley, Robert Hass (a writer, critic, translator, and US Poet Laureate back in the 90s). In 2012, protesting on campus as part of the Occupy movement, as I was, Bob (then 70) was beaten for standing between his students and the police (a cop broke his rib).
This small poem is from his second book, called Praise (1979). You can see the tones of Ashbery and Stevens underneath this poem’s wings, as well as the undertones of Catholic mystical traditions as they were uploaded into the California New Age movement. You could also meaningfully read this poem through a lens of trauma, and/or as an abstracted meditation on faith healing.
To A Reader
I’ve watched memory wound you.
I felt nothing but envy.
Having slept in wet meadows,
I was not through desiring.
Imagine January and the beach,
a bleached sky, gulls. And
look seaward: what is not there
is there, isn’t it, the huge
bird of the first light
arched above first waters
beyond our touching or intention
or the reasonable shore.
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Thank you for reading! As a reminder, I offer private writing mentorship for people interested in developing a contemplative writing practice for self-knowledge and self-transformation. At the moment, I am only accepting female-identified clients. If you or someone you know is interested in working with me, please reach out here.
To be teacherly for a moment: please take care to read metaphorically, or else fall prey to exactly what I am diagnosing as the ignorance of our present narrow-minded empire-of-empiricism. I have no interest and see no use in literal comparisons between US student protestors and bombed Palestinians or between my menstrual cramps and the horror of genocide. Metaphor works very practically in the mind to strip it of conditioned ideologies (like racism, sexism, Zionism, capitalism, etc). I will write more about this in the future. The intention in crisscrossing topics in this essay is poetic, that is, metaphorical: to shake each strip of spider web and show how the rest shimmers. My poetics is underwritten by an interconnectedness of all beings and all things, including those invisible to the human senses.
It goes without saying that “Free Palestine” is not a metaphor; nor are direct actions like strikes and protests. Learning to shuttle between and among many levels of meaning, material and spiritual/mental, with nuance and equanimity, is the best possible empowerment for simultaneous personal transformation and global community care. My goal has always been to raise awareness of the disparaged (feminine, dark) forms of knowing: therefore, my point has always been that without metaphor, which is to say without spirit, no liberation is possible.
For those interested in a scholarly treatment of the New Age movement, I recommend the works of Dutch historian Wouter Hanegraaff (his latest book explores deeper reasons why the academy has rejected the study of esotericism). His website can be found here.
