I secured a living arrangement with my sister’s friend Coby.
Coby had moved from Atlanta to NYC and now lived in a tiny
apartment in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Avenue neighborhood (which, in ‘96, was far
grittier than I understand it is today). Coby, who worked nights at a cafe in
Manhattan’s East Village, agreed to share his shabby efficiency unit with me and
another Bennington colleague pursuing a NYC internship. Irina, my fellow
apartment-crasher, and I split the rent, and the three of us rarely saw each
other because of our disparate and chock-full schedules. I worked days (unpaid)
at The Other Place, and worked nights as a telephone customer service operator
at a Midtown Manhattan Barnes & Noble to afford living expenses.
So, how did I, an aspiring actress/writer/possibly-psychologist of 18 years,
end up noshing on food-bank bagels in an old church basement on 85th
Street with fifty of my closest severely-mentally-ill friends?
It all stemmed from an impulse to throw myself off a cliff. Three months earlier,
as I researched potential “Field Work Term” gigs, I noticed a desire burbling
up from some mysterious, secret geyser in me…
a desire to use this two-month “real world” immersion as a chance to take my
soul on a walk through some new kind of fire. I craved being placed in a role
that demanded everything of me in service of a need greater than myself or my
own evolving “career goals”. My utter lack of concern for climbing
professional ladders, impressing anyone, or making money – all
valid facets of a conventional approach to internships – may
have puzzled those closest to me. I, meanwhile, felt both quietly
confident that I was being led into this experience, and, terrified
(…New York City?! Unpaid internship? Severely mentally ill
population?!...???)– and, just as curious as anyone else as to why this work
seemed to be what I needed to do.
I had not sought out The City for its tourist
attractions, or even for its cultural offerings. I had chosen New York because I
wanted to do the work that The Other Place offered, and because I did not own a
vehicle, and knew I could travel freely there by public transit. To say that the
city “overwhelmed” me would be like saying pouring boiling water on your eyeball
feels “kind of uncomfortable”. The city, particularly in winter, was a beast.
Grey, bone-chilling, heavy and damp like wet wool. Dirty, rife with shadows and
hidden dangers that lingered at the fringes of everything like forgotten coins.
Expensive. Especially for a young lady with so little to her name. Demanding of
constant attention, perpetually eschewing sound, sight, motion, smells.
The clients I worked with at The Other Place were no joke.
There was Yakov, a 70-something Russian immigrant who had survived WWII
and was so traumatized by his war experiences that he remained suspended in a
mental “war zone”, amped up, on constant alert, and broadcasting some sort of
historical war coverage on a tiny headset he wore 24-7. There was Leonard, the
profoundly schizophrenic, brilliant painter and pianist with an almost angelic
face. Leonard’s paranoia repeatedly led to a belief that his psychiatric
medication was a form of mind control, leading him to drop out
of the program and disappear for weeks and months on end. There was Pat, a
delusional hypochondriac in her early 60s who constantly pulled ragged tissues
out of her bra, shirtsleeves, and pockets to offer to those in her midst as
cures for sniffles, headaches, or germ exposure. Her compulsion to project her
obsession with sickness onto those around her had a tender, mothering quality to
it that was at once endearing, comical, and stifling. Then there was Luis, a
50-something man whose eerie composure and beatitudinous smile belied a grisly
past: over a decade ago, Luis, a husband and father of two, had suddenly
snapped, killing his wife and daughters in the middle of the night with a blunt
kitchen utensil. I was informed of his past only after one of the staff – a
tough Carribbean-American woman with a dark sense of humor – found it comical
that I had bandaged a cut Luis sustained while out in the city on a field trip.
This staff member laughed her deep, rich, resonant laugh, marveling at the depth
of the psychic disconnect that must allow Luis to remain calm at the sight of
blood, given his associations with this visceral substance from his own past.
Sometimes my job was simply to circulate – to
hang out with clients and engage them in conversation, in order to draw them out
of themselves. This role came naturally (– if anything, I came across
as an overly eager “engager” –) and I found
the work fascinating. At the surface, the stress I was most aware of was simply
the burden of bridging awkward silences and remaining open and nonreactive as
clients exhibited compulsive behaviors. The goal of engagement was to pull them
into the moment, beyond habitual compulsive patterns. Finding ways to do so
while coming across as casual, friendly, and relaxed, proved a healthy
challenge, yet because the results were so satisfying (watching clients open
up, relax beyond their patterns, and surprise themselves with the spontaneity
of their own present-minded interactions), I found the work deeply
fulfilling.
The moment I stepped into the basement at The
Other Place Monday through Friday, I found it easy to surrender: I surrendered
myself wholeheartedly to whatever my role demanded of me that day (cook lunch
for 50 in 45 minutes using a hodge-podge of donated canned goods and restaurant
leftovers, lead clients through a craft exercise at a moment’s notice,
participate in a staff meeting in which clients’ progress and treatments are
discussed in clinical terms). Everything else about my life in New York City
felt like a struggle: pushing my way onto 2 different crowded subway trains
during rush hour; grabbing coffee and a bagel at a crowded deli while still
making it to work on time; getting from the Upper West Side to Midtown in time
for my telephone customer service shift at Barnes and Noble, where my
Korean-American boss barked orders in slightly broken English and furiously
disinfected our headsets and keypads with rubbing alcohol; riding two trains
home late at night and walking several mostly-desolate blocks from the station
to my apartment without much knowledge of the neighborhood. Affording the
subway rides, rent, and food seemed like a constant juggling act in a city
where most things seemed 2-3 times more expensive than anything to which I was
previously accustomed. And finding solitude was easier achieved between the
padded cushions of my headphones than in any physical place I inhabited: “home”
usually involved at least one other person’s presence, and in my travels through
the sidewalks, subways, and workplaces that filled my days and nights, I was
never without company.
A curious dichotomy began to present itself during
this “Field Work Term” – namely, a dichotomy of struggle and surrender. While
the struggle for survival and, potentially, for success, is nowhere more vividly
illustrated than in the crowded arteries of New York City, and while I was
obliged to participate to some extent in this struggle simply by virtue of my
being there, I felt completely unattached to the long-term fruits of such a
struggle. I felt like a servant – almost like a monk or a nun, as though I had
abandoned any attachment to personal gain, and had instead fully surrendered to
the work to which I had committed myself for these two months. The sense of
peace I felt about engaging daily with such a challenging population, especially
as an extreme novice, about working a rather intense second job to “afford” my
primary, unpaid job, and about living in a vast, costly, over-stimulating city
in order to do such work, stood in stark contrast to the state of perpetual
existential angst I knew back at college, as I struggled to discern an identity
and life-path, and searched for my first romantic relationship. As I grew into
my role at The Other Place, I began to imagine a life built on the act of
letting go – of attachment to all personal gain, of attachment to being seen in
a certain way in terms of my identity or ego, of attachment to short-lived
pleasures or unnecessary comforts. For this short period of eight weeks, I lived
life from an orientation of surrender rather than struggle, and felt more
grounded and at peace (in the midst of profound uncertainty) than I ever had
before.
One of my best “friends” during this time was a
practice I learned from Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s
tiny indigo tome Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness –
the practice of Tonglen. In the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, you
position yourself as an abundant recycling system by breathing in all the negative energy (tension,
anxiety, woundedness, fear, malice) in your midst, and breathing out
the good. Which suggests that each of us can be an abundant source for good, and
that we can give infinitely –
principles which run counter to the “struggle for survival” and “scarcity
mentality” modeled by those fighting for space, resources, and opportunities in
one of the world’s largest and most sought-after cities.
I turned to Tonglen out of desperation, really.
As a highly sensitive person overwhelmed by all the energy I was picking up on
from all the bodies pressing against me on the subway, all the faces I glimpsed
as I trudged up slushy sidewalks during the city’s collective morning commute,
all the voices I heard through the walls and out the fire escape of my Brooklyn
apartment (the sound of one particular child crying while being beaten haunts me
to this day), I needed a strategy. I needed something to do
with all this energy being absorbed by my body, mind, psyche, and spirit. If I just
allowed it to continue to accumulate inside me, I felt I, too, might be driven mad,
like the clients I worked with daily. Tonglen gave me a way out, which was
really a way in to a richer dimension of this challenging experience. Tonglen
turned the tables on the whole “stressful city living” scenario,
positioning the city’s intensity as an opportunity for
me to serve as one humble energy refinery in its teeming midst. The more I
practiced Tonglen, the more it grounded and uplifted me. It gave me purpose,
and something clear on which to train my
attention.
Nearly twenty years later, I find myself riding
public transit once again, to my job in a somewhat gritty part of a large city
(this time, downtown Atlanta), where I teach two art classes back to back, twice
a week, at a large state university. My workdays are long, intense, and filled
from start to finish with people, with my only solitude to be found in a
bathroom stall (even then, I’ve usually got company just one door over…).
Working with college students is not entirely unlike working with mentally ill
clients – and I don’t mean this facetiously. College students (particularly
undergrads, which all my students are) are profoundly preoccupied with the
search for identity, for purpose, for social acceptance, and, in many cases
(especially with the largely working-class and middle-class populations at this
state university and commuter school), for economic survival. As teacher, it is
my job to draw these students out of themselves by engaging them in focused
exercises – just as I did with clients at The Other Place. Often, like my former
clients, students project their neuroses onto me, and, rather than react, I must
seek artful ways to redirect their energy in the interest of cultivating their
skills and understanding. In this regard, I am improvising every bit as
fervently as I did at The Other Place, and doing so can be draining. Space and
resources feel somewhat scarce here, too, and there is a collective stress on
students and teachers alike to make things work in spite of scarcities and
limitations.
On my subway rides and subsequent five-block
hustle to school over the past month, I have found myself, in certain moments,
feeling deeply exhausted – feeling almost bleak in the bones of my soul when I
picture what a life-long teaching career of this nature might look and feel like
(granted, I am currently an adjunct instructor with no office, who holds
several other jobs and is still working towards earning a living wage, so there
are more stressors at play than are being accurately represented here). It is
in these moments that the memory of my earliest encounters with Tonglen in New
York City has re-arisen. I think it’s Spirit’s way of telling me that there are
tools at my disposal that can transform my feelings of stress and exhaustion
into something more life-giving.
In the context of my current life as an artist and college art instructor,
it seems that to wholeheartedly practice Tonglen -- that is, to use the most challenging
aspects of my professional experience as grounds for transformation and for
generating good in service of others -- I must be able to approach my work from an
orientation of surrender. In order to do this, I must be able to see my teaching
work as an act of service, to commit to serving as skillfully and with as much
presence as I possibly can, and to let go of potential stress over scarce
resources, lack of personal space, or lack of rank or job security. Further, I
must be prepared to be excited by my students’ bad attitudes and short attention
spans, because these give me an opportunity to put my energy-recycling powers to
work and to be a source for the good. And for the most part, this is all do-able
and even happens on at least 2/3 of my teaching days.
However, what’s been gnawing at me is this other side of the coin – or story –
or…I-don’t-know-what, because I don’t understand it well enough to fit it into a
metaphor. How do I reconcile the part of me willing to surrender into
my work as a teacher –the part of me comfortable with viewing this work as an
act of service, and, as such, letting go of attachment to what this service may or may not
yield – with the part of me that is supposed to be willing to struggle
and to fight for my place in the competitive worlds of academia
and of ceramic art? This question has me stumped.
It’s the old struggle/surrender dichotomy, only now I feel more married to
worldly concerns because I’ve devoted so many years of my life to training as a
ceramic artist and art educator, and because I’ve incurred debt in the interest
of this pursuit. My spirit wants only to surrender, and the part of me that is
supposed to be willing to fight for my place in the field, is growing tired and
secretly doesn’t believe in fighting at all – doesn’t even care about worldly
success or recognition. (It seems scandalous to admit this…)
In a field in which it seems teaching opportunities are limited and
recognition and funding are not available in abundance, it would
seem inevitable that if you stop working tirelessly, you are
going to get squeezed out by other, more ambitious folks (of whom there is no
shortage!). What does it mean to lose one’s ambition, but at the same time, to
feel yourself dying more deeply into your role as teacher, as
an act of surrender? I want to serve, as a teacher, and I
want to continue to create (through visual art and writing) because these acts
of transformation and communication are essential to my purpose and well-being.
But I don’t want to be so hung up on the struggle for professional success,
which *feels* like a struggle – like a fight in a realm marked by scarcity and
ego-centrism…And yet, I need to sustain myself financially. Further, if
I don’t “fight” for a good opportunity as a teacher, I won’t be able to serve
in the way I feel most called to do.
…And yet, I am tired of the struggle, and want deeply to surrender.
I know I have yet to articulate the whole question at the bottom of this
well, and that I have yet to frame it clearly in all its facets. This question
has been begging for its release, and this here’s my clumsy attempt at honoring its need.