A Really Good Day(31)

My highest hope for this experiment is that it will result in my experiencing more days like this. I have always been excitable, impulsive, and easily agitated. There is no quality I admire so much and possess so little as equanimity.

Is equanimity a characteristic of intelligence, or does it seem so because we associate rationality with intellect? Certainly, that isn’t true of brilliance. The genius of fantasy is often mercurial and tumultuous. “We of the craft are all crazy,” Lord Byron said. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”

I came upon that quote years ago, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I read it in a book by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry and an expert on manic-depressive illness, who is a fellow traveler. Her memoir An Unquiet Mind provided me with the comfort of shared experience, but it was her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament that I loved. In that book I learned that my diagnosis didn’t doom me to a life of somnambulant, drug-induced torpor alternating with ill-tempered irritability. Or at least not necessarily. All I needed to do was figure out how to harness my “heightened imaginative powers, intensified emotional responses, and increased energy” and I might, like Jamison herself, join the ranks of genius. Like the poets Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, like Emile Zola and Virginia Woolf, like Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, I might be “touched with fire.”

Except that all too often Jamison’s geniuses were consumed by the fires they set. Moreover, my work, though more “serious” now than it was when I was writing books with titles like A Playdate with Death, is no Café Terrace on the Place du Forum or “She Walks in Beauty.” My talent, such as it is, does not merit the emotional price paid either by me or by the people I love. I can’t simply dismiss my lack of equanimity as a necessary evil, the flip side of creativity. I must try instead to find it.

About an hour northwest of where I live, nestled in a little glen in the hills of Marin, is the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. I’ve driven by it dozens of times on my way to the coast. Every Sunday, the Zen Center hosts a public meditation and dharma talk, a lesson in Buddhism, followed by lunch. Their mission is “to awaken in ourselves and the many people who come here the bodhisattva spirit, the spirit of kindness and realistic helpfulness.” Equanimity is one of the four core practices of Buddhism, along with Loving-Kindness, Compassion, and Sympathetic Joy. Buddhism teaches that you can intentionally create equanimity in your body by relaxing and letting sensations wash through you. You can create equanimity in your mind by letting go of negative judgments and treating yourself and others with loving acceptance. You learn how to do all this through meditation. My favorite.

My first experience with meditation occurred when I was pregnant with my second child and frazzled from caring for his older sister. I was lured to that class (and have been lured since to yoga classes, meditation circles, TM mantras, and mindfulness iPhone apps) by the promise of increased happiness, decreased pain, improved memory and cognitive function, and a longer, more satisfying life. I sat in a middle-school classroom that smelled of pencils and feet and, at the behest of the instructor, practiced imagining a lotus blooming above my head, dropping its petals one by one. This was in the early era of the Internet, when it was not so easy to search out photographs of things we’d never seen before, and it was years before I realized that my “lotus” was actually a chrysanthemum. Lotuses have eight petals, chrysanthemums 1,327. This might explain why I got so bored.

I have been taught by a whole variety of experts how to meditate, but, rather than sit calmly, noticing my thoughts, I usually have an internal meditation monologue that goes something like this: You’re thinking again. You can’t even shut off your mind for five minutes. Now you’re thinking about thinking. Stop berating yourself for thinking! Why are you so full of self-loathing, so inept and incompetent, that all you can do is criticize yourself when you meditate? What the fuck is wrong with you? And on and on until the timer finally goes off.

One of the very few things I can say with confidence about the practice of meditation is that no one’s guru has ever given them the mantra “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Whenever I manage to meditate more than three days in a row, I consider attending one of Green Gulch’s Sundays. Once, I even explored the possibility of going there for a three-day retreat. However, Green Gulch is a “scent-free community,” and I have curly hair. I am, apparently, not so desperate for equanimity that I am willing to tolerate a day without my regular leave-in conditioner.

Also? The city in which I live is full of meditators of all shapes and kinds. In my experience, though the vast majority of them are models of empathy and equipoise, there is nobody as hostile as a hostile Berkeley Buddhist. He may brim over with bodhisattva spirit, but he’ll still snake your parking spot in the lot of the Berkeley Bowl.

Still. Here is a practice that claims it can help me achieve what I seek. Wouldn’t it be more admirable to commit to that practice, scent- (though hardly odor-) free as it may be, than seek equanimity in a medicine dropper full of Schedule I? Perhaps I should do both. I will try for the rest of the month of the protocol to meditate for ten minutes every day. On my own. Just me and my conditioner.





Day 13


Microdose Day

Physical Sensations: About ninety minutes after dosing felt nauseated. Diarrhea. Passed (ha!) in a couple of hours.