This week one of you guys wrote me a question on the internet. It was a good question. I know this because I had no idea how to answer it.

Q: Why is it that if we are doing all the things we should be doing yoga, meditation etc. we still have these days where we feel like complete ass and can't see any reason to do those things when we are still chasing our own tail and dealing with our SELF. - Jana G (a lovely person currently living in a designated mindfulness practicing area, funny enough)

NEARLY USELESS REPLIES STOLEN FROM OTHER PEOPLE:

One of my best teachers ever was my college roommate, Jose. We lived together from the year I turned 18 until I was 23, a time of my life and maybe everyone's life marked by behaviors which make the fact of our continued friendship nothing less than a milagro. Not only was he older, smarter and gayer than me, but I loved him like my life depended on it, which made it easy to believe everything he said. He taught me some important foundational things. That all ghosts are real ghosts, that corn tortillas are the only tortillas, that a person displaying signs of hysteria should be offered a glass of water and little else.

Jose and I used to practice viola together, meaning that he used to practice viola while I made drawings of him practicing viola. He would play the same phrases again and again, trying fingerings, bowings, again and again. And once they were right, he would make it alive, again and again, he'd bring it to life, the same phrase for days, again and again, sounding alive, the fingers all right, again and again, days and days the same phrase. I noted that he would never be able to keep a roommate who didn't adore him. He knew it strained me, but what it did to him was worse. Once in a while I muted the sound a bit with my bedroom door, muffling all but the intermittent, "WHY I AM NOT A VIRTUOSO?! WHY I AM NOT A VIRTUOSO?!"

He wanted to know why, after so much devotion, so much discipline, he still struggled to learn. Why didn't things start coming together more easily? Why was he born without the genius of effortless mastery? Sometimes I let him wail it out his f-holes. Sometimes I said dumb sweet things like, "You are a virtuoso to me." But most of the time I couldn't say much. That wall, that bitter reality was the reason I'd long since stopped bowing phrases, and taken up Anything and Everything Else 101.

Jose got his masters and moved to Canada, where he is now a sought-after pedagogue and a conductor and also a violinist (surprise) and like, the freaking director of a real live conservatory of music up there. Jose won. Jose did the thing that makes people say shit like, "practice makes perfect," and maybe you thought that's what I was going to say I learned from Jose about the topic at hand, that if you just keep trying, you'll be glad you did. Well guess what. Everybody already knows that. It's just that, firstly, knowing that in your mind area isn't enough to sustain you when the thing you're trying to do is change your mind area, and secondly I've got something way juicer to tell you.

You might have seen this coming, but I was in love with Jose. Like, in the way that doesn't work out for a young woman and a gay man. (We shall not even address our best friendship and roommatehood and same school/ same teacher/ same orchestra jobs problems.) Jose did love me back, but in a far more appropriate way, and was pretty (mostly) kind to me, given the improvement his quality of breathing and sleeping would have seen had I taken a permanent internship in Kazakhstan. Because I loved Jose in a romance way and also a teacher crush way, I wanted to share every single thing with him so he could explode my consciousness about it.

Lots of times in the morning, Jose would make coffee and tofu scramble and sit at the kitchen table with a book about things that could never, ever happen in time and space as we know it. Then I'd place myself directly across from him and tell him everything I dreamed all night. One day, at the table exchanging unrealities, the following things were said:

J: Wait, this is still the same dream?
K: Yeah, why?
J: I don't know how you remember all that.
K: I'm not even telling you the whole thing. I had to leave out a lot of stuff. You know how dreams are.
J: My dreams aren't like that.
K: What do you mean?
J: The last time I had a dream, it was the sea. Just that. Not like, I was at the sea. There was no me. It was just, the sea. Not even blue. Just gray. I don't know. Maybe I'm not a good dreamer. I might be mentally ill or something.
K: I don't think you're mentally ill. But I think you might be depressed. That seems sad, not dreaming things.
J: It's ok with me if it is sad. I don't want to be happy.
K: Bullshit. Sure you do. Happiness is definitively the thing a person likes, so if you like sadness, then sadness is what makes you happy.
J: I don't mean that I don't enjoy happiness, I mean that happiness is not my goal. I'm not trying to be happy. If I were trying to be happy, oh lordy, I would be very unhappy.
K: But aren't you unhappy anyway if you don't try to be happy?
J: Sometimes I am happy and sometimes I'm not happy, but it doesn't matter which one. It's the same thing.
K: I take back the thing from before.
J: Which thing.
K: You might be mentally ill.
J: That's ok with me, too.

What Jose introduced to my 19 year old self, was that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is optional. There are other ways to go about this. We aren't irreversibly locked into the the cycle of desire and disappointment.

The reason I mention that is, when things get shitty, when we are working at our practices and the practices aren't working, we have got to ask ourselves why we are on board. Is it really to achieve whatever enlightenment is? Or is it to feel better? Because I have two things to say about that. Here is thing number one: If we only practice in order to have more pleasant feelings, we are going to be really disappointed with the benefits of practice, which do not include discomfort removal. And here is thing number two: I, for one, am in this to feel better. To be helpful, sure. To be kinder and wiser and better at getting along with folks, yes, but, as a friend expressed to me this week, I am a far-ass cry from super most of the time, and have zero chance of achieving enlightenment this time around, let's be serious. Real talk, folks. I have to live with my shitbag self all day every day, and I don't want to have a lousy time. I want to have a good time.

The feelings talk reminds me of a scene from about a thousand movies that Jose and I reenacted twice during our time together. It goes like this:

Person 1 (desperate, urgent): But I love you!
Person 2 (unshaken): SO WHAT.

So you have some feelings! Big deal! They are going to go away like everything else! Chill out! Just because you feel something doesn't mean anybody, least of all you, owes your feelings anything. Feelings aren't nothing and I'm not saying that, and even Jose wouldn't say that. In fact, one day when I broke into his studio crying that I didn't want to do the thing on Earth anymore, he did a great thing that I have since done for a few people. He wrote down the call number of a book at the library and told me to go look at it until he was done teaching. Then he showed me out. The book was an anthology of French poems that had nothing to do with anything even slightly urgent. Jose had given me an assignment to go enjoy something beautiful for an hour. (I actually got lost and ended up with a book of Chinese ink painting, but whatever. Same same.) My emergency was there waiting for us both that night, when Jose attempted to convince me that everything would make more sense later. What he didn't say then was that it would make more sense by making so much less sense that I'd let go of sense-needing and have an ok time sometimes. But, back to having a shitty time.

Assuming that you know why you are practicing, and that you have fully swallowed the notion that feelings are not indications of anything that should be banked on, built from, or made into news, then I've got one more thing to share with you. Gleaned from my teenage youth minister, Jeremy Jones, and highly applicable outside the realm of Christianity, what he taught was that as our spiritual life develops, our ability to see ourselves becomes sharper and more sensitive. Because of this, we often perceive that we are getting crappier as people, when the reality is that we are simply becoming less tolerant of garbage (which starts to include debris, then lint, then dust, then smoke, then fog, then pictures of garbage, thoughts about debris, you get me).

Practicing diligently is guaranteed to bring the lamp of clarity over to the workstation, which feels a lot like staring into one of those magnifying mirrors with all the damn light bulbs on it. How is anyone supposed to feel ok with one of those in the bathroom? I get it that you want to know how you look before you go out of doors, but that, in my opinion, shouldn't be the only view you offer yourself of yourself. Jeremy said that the antidote for introspection-induced self loathing was to remember that grace is greater than our sin, that Jesus picked up the tab on that so everything is actually already way better than fine. But how does the non-Christian lacking that sense of limitless forgiveness deal with self-hatred? What do you do if you don't like having to believe in things? I admit this is tricky, but I ask you, does it really take tons of faith to believe that an ever-expanding consciousness produces an ever-refining perception of impurity, suffering and instability? Is it crazy sounding? Does it seem like that is not an equation we observe in nature and other places? I don't think it does.

For the non-Christian practitioner, I say designate blackhead-examination time, and then give yourself a break. Keep up your practices if you can stand it, but then also hang out with people that don't just forgive you, but really, really like the you a whole lot. Then try to be one of those people by doing things that remind you of your favorite self. Remember that we are all full of mess. Conjure the tiniest seed of faith that you are on the right track. Enjoy something without deconstructing the reasons you enjoy it. And if none of those things help mellow your inner hater, go right up to the big mean mirror and say,  "SO WHAT."