On Connection, Her New Album, Attachment Parenting, Postpartum, and Healing from her Eating Disorder.

Interview: Maranda Pleasant

Maranda Pleasant: Hi, Alanis, how are you doing?

Alanis Morissette: Really well!

MP: What is it that makes you feel most alive?

AM: I would say community, connectedness. Certainly family, parenting, relationships, friendship. I’m quite obsessed with the idea of nailing the girl friendship. It’s such an art, so delicate. Then all the way into colleague relationships and relationship with spirit, relationship with one’s own self and inner child, and animals, earth, planet. Fostering and nurturing and really focusing on connection—connection in relationship with other and my own self and God. When I don’t feel connected in all those three areas, life is not very good.

MP: Yeah, I’m kind of there right now.

AM: Yeah, it can suck so hard, man. I’m just like, wow, give me a reason to stay here!

MP: That is perfect. I’m going to say that today, “This sucks so hard right now.”

AM: [laughing] Someone give me a reason!

MP: [laughing] It puts a fun spin on this tailspin of pain.

AM: Giggling is good, humor is a good one.

MP: This last week and a half has kicked everyone’s ass that I know. Today is the full moon. We’re going to go up into the mountains all these women that I know and are going to just hit stuff with sticks.

AM: I’m going to join you on that one.

MP: One of our team members is already picking out her stick right now. We didn’t even make it until noon here before people had to hit stuff. [laughing]

AM: See what I mean by community? I can be in the worst PMS, Mercury in retrograde, most awful circumstance—and then if my girlfriends and I are giggling about it, everything’s okay.

Photo by Williams & Kirakawa

MP: Community! What is it that makes you feel vulnerable?

AM: I think when someone blindly projects and it’s showing up in the form of envy or hate—and I actually think they’re synonymous—that’s when I feel the most afraid and disconnected and vulnerable. Like whenever I don’t feel safe in my own hands, in terms of my not being tender or merciful with myself, or when we’re treating each other that way. When we’re operating from the belief that we’re not connected, it feels so dangerous and scary and vulnerable and awful.

MP: Envy and hate are the same. I’ve never thought about that.

AM: Anytime there’s separatism going on. It happens all the time, because the illusion before us is that we are separate. It gives us this sense of egoic identity, which is lovely in its own way. But it’s almost like that’s step one in a four step process. Because step one is the story, the separation and the individuation and the dualism. I think Neale Donald Walsh nailed that so hard in his Conversations with God series.

The next step is, as Eckhart Tolle says, this further disidentification from this egoic story— as lovely as it is and as entertaining as it is, for us to continue to step back. I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I’m done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what’s really going on here. That usually softens things. There’s a way for me to quickly return back, and that’s usually praying and meditating and journaling. Which are decidedly feminine, those are feminine approaches.

MP: I do have some big sticks, if you want to go with a more masculine approach.

AM: Those are the Kali approaches—love those, too, believe me.

MP: How do you process emotional pain? Whether it’s a breakup or a loss of some kind, do you have a process?

Photo by Williams & Kirakawa

AM: I did a lot of work with the somatic experiencing from Peter Levine, and then a lot of Gestalt work. A lot of the journey over the last years has been returning to my body, which I have been so dissociated from for a long time. So really coming back into the body and feeling where those feelings are. We live, in North America in general, if I’m given the indulgence of selling us down the river, in a culture of fear of this connective sense of spirit. We’re in our heads so much in the West in general—but definitely in America, I dare say. My journey and my challenge has been to really see where those feelings lie. When I’m angry, do I feel it in my jaw? Do I feel compelled to raise my fist? When I’m angry, do I feel heat? When I’m in pain and grief and despair, my throat is clenched and my heart hurts.

Having done a lot of shadow work, working with Debbie Ford for many years, I have always noticed that if I feel healing all the way through, that there is a bottom. I think Gangaji really beautifully said at one point that the only feeling she has experienced as having been bottomless was joy.

When I’m really, really angry, if I’m privileged enough to be next to someone who can hold my anger, I’ll definitely take them up on holding the bucket. I just woke up this morning filled with anxiety. Some of it born from my hormonal moment, but I just woke up thinking, Okay, I’m really, really scared—I’m going to go all the way into that fear. When I didn’t resist it anymore, everything got much better. The whole idea of emotions being something we can’t escape as humans, but that deep suffering that comes from resisting them, we can move out of that just by not resisting anymore. But it takes a really brave warrior soul to sit there in these emotions that admittedly don’t feel good in the body. It doesn’t feel good for me to be in deep grief. It’s not my favorite.

MP: It’s not my favorite, either.

AM: Watching my son right now—how stunning it is to watch him. He’s two and three months old. Watching the waves of emotion that move through him and beholding him in them, literally sometimes holding him in them—my validating and emphasizing his bevy of emotions that moves through like currents every ten seconds, my offering this to him has actually taught me how to offer it to myself. I’m much better at giving it to him, incidentally. But it’s becoming habitual now. When emotion or feeling presents itself, I would move toward it with a little bit more of a sense of curiosity and inquiry versus, Oh shit—I have to run away from this through shopping or eating or having a cocktail or whatever the yummy fun thing.

MP: All of the above!

AM: By the way, they work, too, temporarily. I was going to a therapist to recover from my eating disorder for years. At one point, in this one particular exchange, I said, “I feel so badly because I was really overcome with these feelings, and I just went and ate.” She said, “What’d you eat?” I said, “I ate a bagel.” She said to me, “Well, that’s so great that you ate that bagel—was it delicious?” I’d had so many people try to show how I was wrong for moving toward food to comfort, when really, on a very basic level, and in a way that I think Byron Katie would chuckle about, these things that we move to, these addictive substances and processes and people, they really do temporarily help us step out of that despair. They release us from this grip that cortisol and stress has on our body. I am a firm believer that one way to become enlightened is to be so relaxed, as relaxed as you possibly can be.

MP: I’m in trouble.

You talked about meditation. I don’t know if you do yoga. But how do you maintain your center in the middle of chaos? Do you have some sort of practice?

AM: I have two answers to that one. One is that sometimes I just don’t. I don’t always maintain my center and then I feel the effects of that. As an attachment parent and a wife and a friend and a writer and a performer—the many hats that we wear, a modern woman these days wears about twenty hats on any given day—some days I just don’t. Some days I’m not centered and that’s just how it’s going to be. Other days, when I’m really losing it or I need to return, I have altars all over my house. I have a very special one in my room. I literally just sit down and light a candle. I have a couple of books around, journals, pens, markers, crayons, incense, sprays, and oils that I’ve collected. I’m a bit of an alchemist sorceress. I’ve collected probably 1500 oils from around the planet over the last ten years. I’m kind of obsessed with the sensuality of it. Elaine Aron, who wrote all the Highly Sensitive Person books, she super validated my temperamental predisposition. I was able to come to see that my temperament and my approach and the lens that I saw life through was actually quite lovely and not freakish. I’ve been enjoying my own identity in a way that I was definitely taught not to.

MP: Let’s talk about your current project.

AM: My album came out last year, it’s called Havoc and Bright Lights. The first single’s called “Guardian.” The chorus was inspired by my relationship with my son, and frankly, the verses were about what we talked about a few minutes ago: I was noticing that mama bear guardian protectorship that is what it is with my son, and it’s really glowing and striking. The verses are about applying that to my very own self. It was an inner child and outer child song. That’s the first single.

We’re shooting different videos, picking different singles. The second song, my preference, is a song called “Empathy.” We were on tour last year for seven months and we shot a video in Jerusalem. I love the universality of music and how it can viscerally connect people from culture to culture, regardless of anything. It kind of levels everything out and connects us. That universal sound thing is a big deal to me. We could talk about that for hours, too, the whole art and planet part.

MP: Is there something special that this album represented for you? Is there something in you that wanted to be born, that had to come out?

AM: My son was five months old and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house. My husband was making his record in the other room, so literally this house was this secret makeshift studio for both of us while I was breastfeeding and hanging out with my son. I had postpartum depression—I’ll look back on this and just shake my head and wonder at some point, but I’m still kind of in the trenches right now. Writing the record for me—every record is almost a surprise. When people ask me, what are the themes you want to grapple with on this one? I have no idea until the record’s finished. That was again the case. I love it.

2013, to me, is the Year of the Divine Feminine. It’s this resurrection of the Divine Feminine. Not just in women. 2013 is about embracing and embodying and evidencing the Divine Feminine in me, period. That showing up in the professional context. How can politics be rendered more driven by the feminine? How can commerce? How can retail? How can dancing? How can cooking? How can all of these day-to-day experiences for us have the feminine be infused into it? That’s my whole orientation for this year. It’s been really healing and terrifying and breathtaking at the same time.

MP: That is powerful. Thank you so much.

alanis.com

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Legend. Poet. Father: Wanderlust, Clusterf*ck, Austin, Biggest Regret, Expectations, Greatest Struggle, His New Band, What Matters Most, and the Beautiful, Accidental Time of Led Zeppelin.

Interview: Maranda Pleasant

Robert Plant: Maranda!

Maranda Pleasant: Hey!

RP: [laughing] I’m so sorry, my calculations were a bit adrift this morning.

MP: [laughing] I was like, oh shit, I just woke up Robert Plant—not on my top ten list! Sorry for calling you so early. It’s been six months in the making.

RP: Yeah, I remember meeting you near the coffee shop parking lot in Austin.

MP: Yeah, I almost beat on your window and almost jumped in your car.

RP: You’ll have to help me clean it first.

MP: Six months later, we finally have this conversation!

RP: Well, what were you going to talk about before? Really, life is life. You do a lot of different things and you have great adventures but there’s not a lot to talk about unless you’re in the middle of an adventure at the time. Circumspection is not one of my better, favorite conditions, really.

MP: Wonderful. Do you want to jump right in?

RP: Yeah. I’m just watching an absolute identical remake of the very first slave ship that came to Tasmania, pulling out of a harbor and the sails are just unfolding. It’s beautiful.

MP: I’m talking to you while you’re in Tasmania. It’s really great.

RP: It’s an interesting thing, really. When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do. I’m able to actually choose places to go which have intrigued me for the last god knows how many years, and Tasmania’s always been one of those places. I see it all and yet I see so little because it’s so fast.

MP: I can imagine. I looked at your tour schedule, and I was like, he’s in these amazing places. But I always wonder how much you can actually absorb.

RP: Well, it’s pretty good. We’ve been here—I think this is about the third or fourth day. We leave for New Zealand tomorrow. You kind of plan out what you want to do, and people are pretty helpful. Also, I’ve had many years to consider what I would like to see about a particular place. I don’t waste any time and I enjoy it. The people here are spectacular people. It has its own tempo and its own rhythm, which is so different than most of the life that I lead. So it’s quite refreshing, stimulating. It’s great. As another sail unfurls on this old ship below me, it’s quite something.

MP: Beautiful. What is it that makes you feel alive?

RP: Well, once you get the groove of your life and you sort out the aspects of your life that you prefer, and you’ve performed all your responsibilities as a father and as a partner. And just discovery and the great adventure of having eyes wide open. There’s so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way. By using my career as the wind in the sails of my adventures, I could see so many things and so many people that I might have missed had my career gone a different direction.

MP: How is it that you maintain your center in the middle of chaos, in the middle of life moving so quickly?

RP: Well, life isn’t moving quickly—time moves very quickly. But I don’t really have a schedule now that’s very challenging. I make the calls and I call the shots, so I feel reasonably centered. Sometimes I wonder whether or not it’s even necessary to do concerts and stuff. Recently I met some people who help in an archeological project in the South Pacific, between sailing to the Marquesas, which is an island group not too far from Tahiti, and I think, well, wouldn’t that be great? I have such a fascination with history and especially history in my own country.

The idea of actually taking sharp turns left and right has always intrigued me, but I’ve never really been bold enough to do that. As musicians go, I’ve allowed myself to be carried by other people’s enthusiasm into places where I’ve learned a lot. There is no real tumult anymore. What I want to do, I do! I’m pretty fortunate.

MP: Is there anything that you would like to create with your life from this point forward?

RP: Well I’m supporting some people. Experts in medicine, back in the UK. Which is not my creation, but by being attentive and by being supportive, I’m able to help in endeavors which could lead to a lot, as far as bringing health and maintaining health is concerned. I’m more of a supporter. Creating a good home in Austin, as well, one that doesn’t fall down or blow over, that would be good.

MP: [laughing] You spend a lot of time in Austin? My friend said he sees you when he walks his dog. I just moved from Austin a few months ago, are you there pretty frequently?

RP: Austin, it’s a stimulating center. In this conversation, the very first two questions were talking about my kind of wanderlust and my adventures. Some people at my time in life travel forever. I don’t know whether it’s the British or the Australians, whoever it is—you can kind of stagger into some sort of far off bastion in the middle of nowhere and you’ll find someone from Britain or someone from Australia, or maybe an American. So I treat everywhere as being a center from which I can enjoy the surroundings. And so Austin is very stimulating. I’m familiar with a lot of very, charming people who have brought a lot of color to my life and a lot of love.

I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I’ve lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity which I try and avoid. Austin is a great sort of stepping off point, if you like. I’m from a temperate climate. We know that right now in the UK it’s freezing cold and it’s the fourth month of year. I passed through the Hawaiian islands recently on the way here, and I began my tour in Singapore. Everything is so different than what I’m used to. Austin is already all those things. And then beyond there it’s something else, too. It’s got a kind of rhythm to it, it’s great. It’s got a lot of musicians. It’s vibrant. It’s somewhere to walk other people’s dogs.

Photo by Greg Delman

MP: [laughing] What is it that matters most to you right now in your life?

RP: To maintain the connections that I’ve developed as time goes on. It’s funny, you know—time does travel pretty quickly, and I do have good friends, and the further away I go from them in location, it matters that I keep on the same line and the same groove that I had, and preserve that groove with people who I see seldom. Now that I do spend a lot more time away from the UK, it’s important to me that I still feel the beat of the people that have been close to me for a long, long time. It’s also important that I have really strong and beautiful relationship which I wish to preserve. That enables me—or challenges me, ultimately, to get a Texas driving license!

MP: So women can beat on your window.

RP: Well they can’t get very far, because the woman sitting next to me actually forms a very good fist.

MP: Is she a Texas woman?

RP: Well, she thinks she is. I think she comes from colder climes.

MP: Wonderful. What is it in life that you feel you have struggled with the most?

RP: Well, my sort of stability as a character, it’s never been one of my strongest attributes. I’m a bit of a clusterf*ck. I get so many great ideas that I kind of mesmerize people with another plan before the previous plan is hatched out; people run away, pull their hair off, go off in different directions, nodding their heads, and going, “Oh, god.” I am slightly disheveled, I think. I’m really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician at least.

There’s that. And the passing of time, I struggle with that because I love my children very much, and even as they have children, I’ve come to terms with that. Everything changes there. I’m pleased for them, and I have a wonderful time with all my family, which is great.

I’m like one of those firecrackers that goes off in your pocket occasionally. I’m not really struggling with it as much as the people around me. But at least I’m not doing too much damage to anybody or to myself. It’s just the condition I’m aware of.

MP: You just wrote my editor’s letter! [laughing]

RP: Well, you know, the thing is, I get offers. That’s a great title for my piece: “I Get Offers.” There’s so many things that I can do that—should I stop and smell the roses? Or should I do that for the next thousand years? I don’t know.

MP: I love that. What is it that you are most proud of in your life? The one thing that you are most proud of bringing to this planet?

RP: Beautiful children. They are a reflection of the love that you put into them. They have a great resonance and they’re spectacular. All three of them have got a great beat. I wouldn’t say that they understand me but at least they are supportive. There’s a great mutuality and I’m really proud of that. In the middle of everything that I’ve done as a singer or as somebody who’s jumped on top of a few old books and turned ‘em into songs about hobbits f*cking vikings, I think I’ve danced a beautiful dance through it all, without becoming too much of a cliche. I’ve enjoyed the two-step. It’s brought me great gifts. When I sit back there with my driver’s hat on and I look at my passenger, I think, Well, this ain’t so bad.

MP: That’s really beautiful. You sound like a poet. What is your biggest regret in this life?

RP: Well, I can’t say that regret is a term that would be appropriate. Because if you do what you think is right for the benefit of everybody and everything and you make decisions, to go back and regret them afterwards—it’s a futile experience and it’s not worth thinking about. Because life just unfolds. Provided you do your best and you think you’re on the right track, you can only be right or wrong. But to regret it—I don’t think there are any huge errors or misdemeanors. You know, I should have hung out with Elvis a bit more.

MP: There you go!

RP: I can’t regret until the end. And I won’t regret then, either.

MP: “I won’t regret it until the end and I won’t regret it then, either.” That’s beautiful. What is it that you feel makes you feel vulnerable? Men really love this question.

RP: The mirror.

MP: Yeah.

RP: Maybe a calendar, in fact. How ‘bout that? Somebody gives you a diary for the forthcoming year and all the pages are empty, and you go, oh my goodness—that means there’s another year! That means I’m never going to be Captain Cook. There’s so many parts of your life, you know? People say that you don’t get any better after the age of about forty or something like that, as a performer. I find all that to be a misconception. I don’t feel bad about the way I present stuff. The calendar and the mirror—they’re bastards.

MP: Yes. What current projects are you passionate about right now? What are you doing that you’re excited about in your life? You have a big tour coming up in the US in May and June. I know every time must be a little bit different.

RP: I like the idea of actually jumping on a project and going with it without creating a huge fanfare. It’s hellishly optimistic in a way to think that once upon a time in our world, people made records and then they got behind ‘em and they toured. They got the records in every store, you did the whole projection of a career and an image and whatever it was. Whether you were involved or not, it still continued like that. Now the game is turned upon its head. I’ve been fortunate to travel with these guys in certain combinations, into the Sahara, Mali, Timbuktu, Tunisia, Morocco, through most of Latin America. It’s like an undercover operation, and having such an amazing blend and mix of musicians, the combinations are so exciting that I’m really proud of them and the way that they meld, and we discuss and create a kind of spell, a kind of trance.

Photo by Oli Powel

It’s audacious because a public quite often wants to see the goods the way they’ve always known them and can recognize them. But when you’ve been carrying these things around in your pocket, in a partnership one way or another for forty years, you have to bring them out and air them in the way that makes you really want to put it down, get it out. I use the music almost as a compass in some kind of quasi-romantic way. I try and go to places that I’m intrigued by, and I take this music with me, using my name at the front, but at the same time, I play the part I play but I don’t play the dominant part. We had this amazing sort of crazy concoction, mad shards of music flying off the stage. It’s great and it’s funny and it’s grandiose and it’s pompous and it’s massive attack—and the crowd slowly, slowly wakes from its slumbers and finds that it’s actually not in Vegas.

It’s great. Something really, really exciting and good, and it doesn’t say, this is exactly what you expect it to be—which is kind of challenging and interesting to deliver. Some people say they like it. Some people say, Why didn’t you do the f*cking obvious thing? And you know, they may say that and then they may think afterwards, Well, okay I get it.

MP: I’m just taking you in. I lost my dad early in life and one of the only memories that I have of him is him talking about your band. I was maybe six years old and I was beating on my Muppet drum set, and he said, “Baby, Led Zeppelin will wake up your soul. These people are dialed into whatever channel that is coming down from the Universe.” [laughing] And so that’s one of the things that stayed with me, these last thirty years.

RP: It was a majestic and beautiful and accidental time. It was one of the great accidents of music and yet it was steered by great, great artistry at that time that your dad’s talking about. But today’s a different day, and I’m going to a penal colony, which is probably where I would be now if I was still with those guys. [laughing]

MP: [laughing]

RP: If you just look at a place called Port Arthur in Tasmania, [some] of the most brutal mismanagement of people that the planet’s ever known—so therefore, it’s either there or Tin Pan Alley. So I’m going there today.

MP: Wish I was there. See you on tour.

This summer, Robert Plant will be on tour with his new band, the Sensational Space Shifters. Visit robertplant.com for more information.

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Love is All You Need: Love, Cancer, Family, Painting and Saving the Planet
Interview by Maranda Pleasant
piercebrosnan.com

Pierce Brosnan: Good morning, where are you?

Maranda Pleasant: I love the accent. I forgot you had an accent.

PB: Thank you. Well, I have some kind of accent, I’m not sure what it is, Mid-Atlantic, Irish, English.

MP: We support Sea Shepherd. I saw that you’re on his board.

PB: Yes. He’s been a friend for many years. He’s become a superstar of the seas, but he’s still a radical man. A warrior, for sure. He’s come into close contact with annihilation a few times. He does remarkable work for the oceans and the great creatures out there.

MP: What are the things that make you feel most alive in this world?

PB: Being here by the ocean in Malibu. Living in this beautiful house that we built, that took so long to build. Being in my art studio, painting. Packing my bags tomorrow to go home to Kauai where we have a house. Which all sounds very grand, and I suppose it is, in some respects, but nothing comes from nothing. It all comes from hard work. Being with my wife and children in Kauai, seeing old friends there, being on the beach, painting, paddleboarding. Sitting under a Kauai moon with a bonfire going, buddies around. Those are the things that kind of make my world turn.

MP: Now I really want to fly to Hawaii and start a bonfire. That’s really going to make my day very difficult, thinking about that. So thank you for that. What does love mean to you?

PB: Love means that everything is right with the world. Love and only love. Love means that you are content within your own heart and in the presence of the person that you love, who fills your day and makes you stronger and wiser, and gives you the confidence to go out into the world. Love is just the most beautiful, joyous feeling. It can come from many places. Hopefully, the one who is beside you, the one who is there on the pillow beside you in the morning—my wife. We’ve been together nineteen years, we’re celebrating our nineteenth year on April 4. We’ve done a lot of life together. It’s been a great journey, a great road, and we still have lots of plans and desires and wants and wishes and plans. She’s my north star, somebody who has been a constant companion. And we seem to do well at being together and being in love and more importantly, liking each other. The like factor is a great thing. Love cannot burn constantly.
It’s very hard for it to be so intense. But it’s wonderful. I tell her I love her everyday. It’s important to say that.

MP: Well, if every woman in America wasn’t in love with you already, they will be after this interview.

PB: I’m Irish, for gods sake. I’m a romantic.

MP: The accent, the looks, and he’s a romantic! And he cares about the planet!

PB: Stop it, Maranda! Who else is listening to this?

MP: What makes you feel vulnerable in life?

PB: Sickness of my family, sickness of friends. Sometimes the limited time you have. The news. Listening to the world, hearing the madness, seeing the madness of mankind and our leaders. The fragilities of our societies, the fragility of our ecosystem. The sheer shameful neglect of our leaders not to collectively get together and try to sort this planet out. China, North Korea. All of the above.

MP: Are there causes or things happening on the planet that you’re sensitive to or you’re passionate about? Organizations or causes that you’re behind?

PB: On my website there are a number of organizations that I have supported, from the NRDC to Sea Shepherd to Jane Goodall to Save the Elephants. All of these players are significant human beings and organizations. The slaughter of the elephants—it seems to have a dreadful inevitability to it, which is just absolutely shocking and appalling. You don’t see it on the news at night, you don’t hear the drum loudly enough through the static of other issues. So the demise of that creature will come with such a death knell, if we don’t really collectively pull together and try to stop the trade that’s going on and the slaughter for the Asian market. That has to be done through the young people, really, because those are the ones that will stand up and say, No, this is unacceptable.

MP: Do you have a daily routine, a way that you keep your center and your balance?

PB: Play tennis in the morning after dropping the boys at school. Then I go to the gym and I come home. Make a cup of coffee, go up to my studio, and paint for a while. Read scripts, answer phone calls, have lunch with Keely. Then I go back to the studio and paint for a while. Pick the boys up from school. That’s about it, really. It’s very simple. I live a very simple existence when I’m not on the road. Because when I’m on the road making a movie, I’m away from home. The next destination is Croatia. Last year I was in Sorrento, Mallorca, London, Tokyo. When I’m home, I’m home.

MP: About the film, Love is All You Need—is there something about it that you connect with on an emotional level ?

PB: It’s a movie about a woman with cancer. There’s a man who watched his wife suffer and endure the greatest emotional havoc and physical havoc from cancer. That leaves an indelible mark. So the film connected to me initially on that level, but it’s not all about that—it’s about love. It’s about this woman who has breast cancer and is fighting the good fight with family, a son and daughter and a husband—who’s an idiot. The daughter’s getting married in Sorrento and she bumps into a very grouchy guy like me. They fall in love. It’s about a wedding, really. Susanne Bier directed it. She makes very intricate, complex, human stories. It’s like a Mama Mia! Luckily, I don’t sing. There’s no singing. The world is safe. You don’t have to endure my dulcet songs. But it’s a beautiful film. I love this film. It’s like a warm embrace. And so for any man or woman who is suffering through all of the onslaught of cancer or anything like that, this is a delightful film. It’s not sad, it’s joyous. It’s about family. And it looks ravishing!

MP: It looks ravishing! I love the way you say that.

PB: You’re just having a good old chuckle here, Maranda.

MP: I just interviewed Ram Dass yesterday, and he was like, “Do you ever stop laughing?”

PB: Oh, he’s a good one.

MP: He’s so great. He was like, “You need to love everyone.” I’m like, “I can’t do that.” He said, “Maranda, I need you to love everyone.”

PB: You need to love everyone, Maranda, you do.

MP: Oh no, Pierce and Ram Dass tell me in one week!

PB: You do, darling, just keep loving and hold that thought.

MP: It’s a constant meditation. I didn’t realize you were a painter. I financed this magazine through my artwork. What do you paint?

PB: I paint in oils, I paint in acrylics. I paint figurative and landscape portraits. It’s all in my own kind of style. I’m self-taught. I was a commercial artist when I left school, but luckily I became an actor. I’ve painted for many, many years. Now the last few years it’s gotten more serious. Thinking about and hoping I will put on an exhibit and make a book shortly. Maybe next year.

MP: Now he’s a painter, oh god. Put that on the list.

PB: He paints like he sings and he acts like he sings. It’s all a game, Maranda. It’s all a game. The thing is to get away with it! Get away with it, great!

MP: I have a PhD in getting away with it!

PB: So there you go! Wonderful. Thank you so much.

MP: Anything else you want to say about the film?

PB: I love the film and I think anyone who sees it will have a wonderful evening in the theater. Any woman and any family who is enduring such rigors of cancer, breast cancer, will come away a little bit happier, stronger, and full of life. There you go.

piercebrosnan.com

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Author. Mystic. Spiritual Teacher. Medical Intuitive. Caroline Myss talks to us about prayer, suffering, humility, and her time with Oprah on Super Soul Sunday. 

Interview: Maranda Pleasant
myss.com

Maranda Pleasant: I want you to know, I told our designer that I was about to talk to you, and you would have thought I’d said “Mick Jagger,” the way she screamed. She said, “We’ve got some serious magic going on in this issue.”

Caroline Myss: That’s fun.

MP: What are the things that make you feel most alive?

CM: Teaching. My research. Writing. I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That’s probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I’m perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That’s it right there.

MP: What is it that makes you feel deeply vulnerable?

CM: Through the years of my life, the older I’ve gotten, the more sensitive I’ve become to the suffering of people and to my inability to really fix that. I wish that proportion was different. I wish I could help more. Unfortunately, that’s not how the equation is working out here. I can sense and feel this wretched compassion that I don’t want. But it’s there. It’s a very painful kind of compassion. It’s not one you look for. You don’t want this kind of compassion; it just happens. The amount of suffering you actually can feel, you want to be able to do something about it. You want to be able to attend to it, to change the system that is making this happen. Because you are so aware of how unnecessary it is, and therein lies the deeper pain. To feel the suffering and then to know the pain of the unnecessariness of it. That right there has me in its grip. The only way through that is serious prayer. I can’t get through it any other way. I’ve got to believe that that’s making a difference somehow. I can’t see the difference, but I’ve got to believe it does, because in some way it lets me sleep at night. My only other alternative is to become angry, and I can’t go that direction. I have to trust that there is a force greater than me that also knows and sees this, and breathes with it and knows that it’s part of a grander plan, and all the good things people do matter.

MP: You mentioned prayer. Do you have any practices that help you maintain that center in the middle of chaos?

CM: I do a lot of reflection. I do. I spend a lot of time in reflection and contemplation. I guess the way the old mystics used to do. I don’t do meditation. That’s not for me. It’s not my thing.

MP: [laughing]

CM: I have no use for that. Sorry, but I don’t. Get out of here. I don’t think most people know how to meditate—they fall asleep and they call it meditation. I prefer a kind of sweet, deep, rich prayer in which a person goes in and says, Take me down deep into the reason you gave me life. Take me down deep. It silences the chaos in me. Take me away from my sense. I need to go away now, because I’m in chaos—take me down deep. Hover over me, because I need grace. I say that a lot, many times a day. So that’s my practice.

MP: Wow.

CM: I hold myself accountable for my contradictions. I deeply, deeply believe in the mystical laws. I know that every thought sends an eternity in motion. I mean, I know what I am capable of as a teacher; I know what I’m capable of because of my intelligence. But I also know that that’s useless if—I have been humiliated so often, when I think that I can combat the terrors of life with intelligence. Because you can’t. It’ll bring you to your knees.

I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is—that becomes a practice. Otherwise you’ll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It’ll control you the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven’t mastered it, I haven’t come close to it. Someone asks me what’s my practice? I don’t want the fear of being humiliated to have authority over me. I don’t want it to come near me. I don’t want it to have a voice in my decisions. I don’t want it to be anywhere near me. What’s my practice? That one. I don’t ever want to humiliate a human being, and I don’t want the fear of being humiliated to participate in my thoughts.

MP: Yes.

CM: I don’t want to ever, ever give that kind of pain to one living mortal. And I will not give that thought power in my life. That’s my practice.

MP: I am really moved by this. I’m guessing you make a lot of people cry. [laughing]

CM: Stop. Stop that!

MP: If you could say something to every woman on the planet and they could hear you, what would you want to say? What is the message that you think we most need right now?

CM: Oh my god! I mean, wow! If I could say something to somebody, to humanity? Ah. Let me see.

I would remind them that this day of your life will never come again. Do not use one day of your life carelessly. It will never come again. You’ll never see the person you’re sitting across from in that light or in that way. You will never see the sunset twice. This day will never come again. Knowing that every single day is so filled with potential—you cannot wait for life to give you anything. You have no right to feel entitled. You are not entitled to anything. If you really get that, if you actually get that you’re not entitled to be loved, not by one person, not by anybody, and if you get that and then you look at people who love you—who love you—who think, my life is better because you, you are in it—that they get up and think, my whole world is better because you’re in it, that for some reason they love you, and that they walk this world when you’re not around thinking, but you’re in it, and they come home and they want to call you, they want to come home and see you, your face—you can never make a person love you but somehow they do. They do. That you are not entitled to. That you have it should be your first clue that there is a God taking care of you. You cannot make a miracle like love happen. That is what I’d tell. You want proof of God? That’s it.

Photo by Harpo Productions Inc. – Chick Hodes

MP: Wow. [laughing] Thank you so much.

CM: Which you also should appreciate—never, ever mistreat someone who loves you. Because you’re not entitled to that love.

I put my classes online because there are so many people around the world who wanted to study sacred contracts, but they couldn’t make it to the United States six times while I was teaching it. All my material took three years to convert to an online course. It took all my lectures and all the lectures of all my faculty members, everything—we converted it to an online class, because so many people from around the world wanted to study this, want to study this.

If you know your archetypes—and not just yours, if you know how to perceive the world in archetypes, through archetypes—everything changes. Everything. Because you have two things: you can see through one eye which is impersonal, and through the other, which is personal. That’s the way the game is written down here. It’s two things: it’s totally impersonal and it’s totally personal, simultaneously. That’s the nature of the mystical experience of life. Everything about life is impersonal, but you have a personal experience. And the bridge between the personal and the impersonal is called prayer.

MP: Wow, I’m just taking you in. Let’s talk about your experience with Oprah and “Super Soul Sunday.”

CM: First of all, I really enjoyed that interview, because I felt so relaxed. Which is a different experience than being on the Oprah show. She has a gift to make you feel comfortable. I think that that’s just part of her charisma, part of her natural grace. She has the gift of making the person she’s talking to feel like you’re an old friend of hers. That’s a real gift.

She also has the gift of always making you feel that she respects you in your work. You feel very comfortable opening up to her. In “Super Soul Sunday,” she has created an atmosphere where you can have a type of conversation that’s a bit more intimate or open than I think you would on her former television show. I think that was her intention in creating SSS. Because Oprah is one of the rare human beings whose creative intentions truly are motivated by goodness. There aren’t a lot of people you can say that about. There really aren’t.

MP: Now I’m looking at my own intentions, making sure they all come from goodness.

CM: I think they really are motivated by goodness, and I think she works with a lot of grace behind her, and I think that’s why she’s flourished and why people have flourished as a result of her being on the earth. People have benefited from her; they have healed, they have grown, they have found their lives changed. In the privacy of their living rooms, by reading books she’s recommended—she has changed the lives of millions and millions and millions of people whom she’ll never meet. I know from conversations, people will say, “Oh, I love the Oprah show, I just love Oprah”—she’s generated fields and fields of love. I know that that kind of love, though it doesn’t necessarily go to Oprah, it goes somewhere, and it goes into the collective pool of creation. It gets distributed into matter, into physical matter. It creates consequences. That kind of love has physical consequences. Maybe in some way it offsets bad decisions people are making somewhere. Somewhere, somehow. It goes into a collective pool because all energy creates matter, and it’s subject to the law of creation. Maybe it offsets all the psychic free radicals people generate with their dark thoughts. She’s like this big spinner of grace, of good thought and positive grace. She makes people feel good about themselves; she makes people believe they can heal; she makes people believe they can do better in life. That’s a lot to shoulder. That’s her role. And so when I think about her, I think she’s one of the great souls of our time. That’s how I see her.

MP: Wonderful! Is there a current project now? A book?

CM: Yeah, I have a new book out on archetypes.

MP: Well, we cannot wait to read it. Beautiful as always. Thanks for joining us.

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Kim Maguire Photography

Former Dixe Chick. Rebel Rouser. Truth Teller. Fearless Artist. Dedicated Mom. Soul Seeker. Opens up about Justice, Learning to Listen, Regrets, and Bathing Suit Vulnerability. 

Her most intimate new album, MOTHER, co-produced with music God Ben Harper, hits stores this month. 

Interview: Maranda Pleasant

Maranda Pleasant: I’ve already talked to your dad and your sister today.

Natalie Maines: Oh, you did? I didn’t know you were talking to my sister. What’d she say? [laughing]

MP: She’s actually giving us some cool photos for your spread.

NM: Oh, that’s cool! [laughing]

MP: I was living in Texas when it all got really interesting for everybody. I know that it was years ago, but everyone here just wants to say thank you for your fearlessness.

NM: Well, thanks!

MP: None of us ever want to be on the end of rightwing backlash.

NM: No, it’s interesting. I don’t recommend it! [laughing]

MP: We’re so happy to have you in. I almost accosted you once on Second Street in Austin a few years ago, back when I lived there.

NM: Where do you live now?

MP: I’m between Santa Monica and Boulder. Taking a little break from Austin. Let me jump in with our questions. So what is it that makes you feel most alive?

NM: Oh my god, these kinds of questions? I need free-thinking time on this kind of stuff. Makes me feel most alive…

MP: Take your time!

NM: Hawaii!

MP: That’s what Pierce Brosnan said yesterday!

NM: Really! Well. I know Pierce.

MP: What is it about Hawaii that makes you feel alive?

NM: The nature. I see life everywhere I look. I get the energy off the water. Hawaii really, when I am there, it feels like how we are supposed to live and how it’s supposed to be: slower, just appreciating our surroundings. I love the people there and the aloha, the history. They’re really rooted in something. Even though it’s still the United States, I think on many levels they feel separate, especially the true Hawaiians—who are not necessarily thrilled to be a part of the United States. But I just love the whole spirit. This sounds cheesy but when I would get in discussions with people about religion or spirituality, a lot of people would say, “I believe God is nature, there’s God in that tree”—and I would think, What the hell are they on about? But it was about four or five years ago in Hawaii where that all made sense to me and I got it all, and I felt God was in the trees and in the grass and the flowers, and I completely understood.

MP: That’s beautiful. I raised my daughter in New Zealand and it was very much the same thing. I noticed my heart rate was a lot slower back then. [laughing]

NM: I just got back from Hawaii on Saturday, and it’s so depressing how quickly all the stresses and the stressful energy of L.A. comes bombarding back. Everyone’s in a rush, you’re annoying everyone, get out of their way, everyone’s most important than you are, has got somewhere more important to be—very draining town. But I still love it in many ways. I wouldn’t leave California. I think it’s a fantastic state, if you can’t be in Hawaii all the time.

MP: How do you maintain your center in the middle of chaos?

NM: Well, for one, I hike every day with my dog, after the kids are off to school. I tend to get wrapped up in all the things that need to be done during the day, so I really am strict about setting that time aside for myself and not scheduling anything before eleven, so I can get my hike in. I did some years of therapy and self-realization, and I just move and think at a slower pace—doesn’t make me sound very smart! [laughs]—but really not reacting and doing more listening than talking, and letting people say what they need to say, and then maybe not saying anything at all. It almost takes people by surprise when I’m not a big talker. Because I’m known as being sort of a loud mouth. I have a lot to say. But I try to be more thoughtful with my comments or reactions, unless it’s something witty or hysterical that I just can’t keep myself from blurting or tweeting!

MP: I would have to go through a lot of therapy to not say everything I am thinking.

NM: [laughing] I know, it’s a good exercise. But I gotta say, it gets me way further in debates, conversations. I’m much clearer about my point when I just think more. I had to train myself, for sure.

MP: I’m going to call it my Natalie Maines 30-Day Program, and I’m going to try to listen more—I’m going to try it! [laughing]

NM: If something or someone’s really bugging you, just sit on it. Just sit on it.

MP: I’m gonna try it! [laughing] What has been one of your biggest regrets in this life?

NM: Hm.

MP: If you have any!

NM: Well, everyone does. You try not to but…

MP: Robert Plant said he wished he had spent more time with Elvis.

NM: There are some outfits I regret. [laughing]

MP: Good one. What is something in your life that you feel you have struggled with the most?

NM: Communicating. I’m not the greatest communicator. I kind of internalize a lot. See, I just said I need to be quiet, but that’s not the kind of communication I mean. I mean expressing myself or even standing up for myself. I can sometimes be very passive.

MP: I wouldn’t have guessed that. What is it that makes you feel vulnerable?

NM: Being in a bathing suit. [laughing]

MP: [laughing] That’s great. I’m living in Boulder right now, it’s so cold.

NM: Layers!

MP: Layers! How do you process emotional pain?

NM: I think I don’t and then it sneaks up on me when I least expect it.

MP: That’s a really honest answer.

NM: Usually right when I’m feeling it, right when it’s happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.

MP: I completely relate.

NM: I would like to do what my kids did when they were little and throw myself in the middle of the aisle and have a tantrum. But I don’t!

MP: I’m saving that for my later years.

NM: Yeah, when it’s okay again! Crazy old lady!

MP: And I’m gonna have a lot of cats. I don’t even like cats but I’m gonna have a lot of ‘em. I’m gonna be that lady. What would you like to create with your life from here forward?

NM: That’s a good question. I really kind of set the bar really low, so I don’t get disappointed. I don’t know. I don’t think about, Oh, I wish I was going to do this or I’ll do that. It won’t even end when your kids are out of the house, because then you’ll still be worried about them. I would feel like my life was a success if my children grow into well-adjusted, happy, functioning members of society. Capable and happy and normal.

MP: Are there any issues or causes that you’re particularly passionate about at the moment?

NM: As always, too many. But I’m definitely always drawn to the injustice of people who have been imprisoned for things they didn’t do. But also lots about abortion and gay marriage. Civil issues are usually what I am drawn to.

MP: Any organizations that you are a part of?

NM: Always the West Memphis Three. I’m a part of the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and things like that.

MP: I actually saw you at SXSW with the man that I am most in love with—I want to tell you, there was someone cat-calling and screaming and making weird sounds when you were at the church at SXSW…

NM: Uh huh! With Ben?

MP: When they said Ben Harper, I thought I was going to lose it.

NM: [laughing]

MP: I had no idea. What a dream collaboration: you and Ben Harper! What was that like for you, that whole process?

NM: It was awesome. Do you know Ben well?

MP: I don’t know Ben well, but Ben will fall in love with me one day.

NM: Well, you know what, if you’re single that could definitely be a possibility! He’s in that mode.

MP: I’ve been waiting. I shouldn’t actually print that, but I am in love with him. I’ve been listening to Ben on deadline since I started this magazine. I have him on repeat. So, I feel like he’s made every single issue with me.

NM: I’ll have to tell him.

MP: It’ll make me sound like a whacko. When he came on stage with you, I was like, Oh my god—so Natalie and Ben are creating this together! Does he play on the album?

NM: He plays on every song, he does harmony on almost every song. And we co-produced it together, and we made it at his studio. It was definitely a collaboration. We spent lots of hours together with his band. He’s got the greatest spirit. He was the perfect person for me to be around during the making of all this, just because of different insecurities I would have and fears of the unknown. He injects confidence into you and has an amazing free spirit. He’s very free with his emotions. He’s so enthusiastic. I wish I could just have an ounce of his enthusiasm for anything. He’s very childlike in the best ways. I think it’s easier for men to hold onto that than women. We take on the rest so they can go skateboard.

MP: [laughing]

NM: It was great. The fact that he’s playing with me live is an honor, and I can’t believe he wants to do it. I am so grateful, because I don’t know who else could take over all that he does. I could have my dad play with me but then he couldn’t sing all the harmonies.

MP: Please don’t make me love Ben more. Your dad is great, by the way. When I listen to Ben, the thing I notice about both of you, I feel like you’re both super unmasked. You seem to be very raw and very real, both of you. There’s also a certain intensity. How did that translate when you were working together?

NM: Hm. I don’t know how that translates in particular, because I’ve never thought about that.

MP: Was it an intense experience or was it pretty laid back?

NM: Definitely laid back. There were musically moving times, times where you really felt something click or connect. When we did the Jeff Buckley song, “Lover You Should’ve Come Over”—it was just an interesting night. It was hard to get that song. It’s a long song, and there are also all these different levels it needs to reach. You have to keep that energy going till the end. It took us the longest to track that song, and then when it was right we just all knew it. You did feel something weird, an energy in the air. When I went home that night, I got on Huffington Post just to check out the daily news, and saw on there that it was the anniversary of the death of Jeff Buckley, and I just had chills all over. I thought, Oh my god—because I think we all felt like he was there in some way that night. He and Ben were friends, so I think it really surprised Ben when I came in and said I wanted to sing this song. I think that was heavy for him. Because he was friends with Jeff.

MP: What was the most personal part about this album? Is there something that’s different about this one than anything you’ve ever done?

NM: It’s definitely a sole representation of me. The Dixie Chicks, it was always me but it was also two others. You become the master at compromise. Fairness and balance. This is definitely just what I like, what I want to do, what I hear. This is one hundred percent me, like it or not. It just is. And the most personal song on there is probably the last one, “Take It On Faith.” Ben and I wrote that.

MP: That’s my favorite.

NM: Aw, thanks. Maybe mine, too. I switch favorites but it’s definitely the one I feel most lyrically, emotionally attached to, and a little vulnerable.

MP: I imagine that that’s one of the most personal songs. I listened to your performance and was blown away last month.

NM: Thank you.

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Interview: Chantal Pierrat
elizabethgilbert.com

Chantal Pierrat: I have to just take a moment here. I can’t believe I’m talking to you.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Oh, you are sweet!

CP: I just had to get that out of the way.

EG: Oh, you’re lovely. Thank you. I’m sitting here in the airport for Toronto, eating a terrible chicken Caeser salad, and feeling very unglamorous at the moment. So that’s a nice thing to say.

CP: What is it right now that is stoking your passion? What perspective or practice is setting you on fire?

EG: Returning to writing fiction after thirteen years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It’s what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It’s how I got my start as a writer. My first two books were a short story collection and a novel. Then I took this weird, sharp left turn away from that aspect of my imagination, and very much into the world of the real. For the entire decade of my thirties and the early part of my forties, I didn’t write a word of fiction. I just left that behind, this dream of my life. It wasn’t a bad idea—Eat, Pray, Love came out of it. I moved into journalism, biography, memoir (in that order), and started to feel like I had left behind something really important. I made myself come back to it, even though it was frightening and intimidating. I wasn’t sure if I still even knew how to do it or why you do it. I felt like I had to return or else it was going to be gone forever. So that’s what I’ve spent the last few years doing and what I’m going to spend the next few years doing. It’s such a homecoming. I feel all abloom with excitement.

CP: Do you feel that there’s any real in the unreal? Or vice versa?

EG: I think there’s more real in the unreal than there is in the real. I think the thing that I lost in myself when I stopped writing fiction and the thing that I rediscovered and started mining again is, for lack of a better word, magic. It’s the way you can brush up against the inexplicable and the mystical. I’ve always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do—or that I can do—because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything. It feels like a collaboration between yourself and inspiration, a collaboration between the facts upon which your book is based and the lives you invent around those facts. There’s this great kind of spooky dance that happens that I can’t access any other way. I think most of us are given kind of one pathway to that dance, and that’s why I’m a writer—it’s the only way I can get there. I can’t do it through art, I can’t do it through singing, I can’t do it through mothering, I can’t do it through invention. There are other ways that people participate in that collaboration. This is the only way I can do it. What happens and what you encounter, what you collide with—it’s so exciting and revealing about how much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily lives.

CP: You have recently written a novel. Since you are coming from the world of memoir with your last two books, how are you represented in this new work?

EG: Somebody said once that when you write fiction, you’re writing memoir, and when you’re writing memoir, you’re writing fiction. When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you. I had a wonderful conversation with my friend, the novelist Ann Patchett, after she read this book, and she said, “It was so exciting to read that character and see bits of your hair and fingernails growing out of there! I think that what I personally know about you was showing up in this person who you invented. Who you can also embolden to do and be things that you would never do or be.”

It’s funny. So I’m all over this book. It’s about a 19th century botanical exploration. My character, Alma Whittaker, is a botanist who is the daughter of a great botanical entrepreneur, and she’s looking for nothing less than the signature of nature. She’s a real scientist and she’s stubborn about her quest. At the same time, this novel is a love story, and there are great disappointments in the love story.

All of women’s stories in the 19th century had either one of two endings: you either had the good Jane Austen marriage at the end and you were happy; or you had the terrible Henry James savage downfall because of your own hubris as a woman, or you’ve made some great error leading you down a path to ruin. One is the story of love that’s successful and the other is the story usually of reckless love that goes terribly wrong that destroys the woman.

But the reality, certainly in my life, is that we all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We’re not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That’s a kind of personal story of mine that I don’t think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.

CP: How has disappointment changed you?

EG: It softens me. It makes me be a more sensitive, kinder person. I know what it feels like to be bruised; I know what it feels like to carry things around with you that never totally heal. There’s closure and then there’s the stuff you just kind of like, well, I guess it’s going to be in the minivan with me forever. And you carry it with you and you continue on your journey with your minivan full of stuff, which I think most of us do.

All the parts of us that we ever were are always going to be with us. You make space to carry them and you just try not to let them drive. But you can’t chuck them out either. I think I have more compassion than if I had led a life where everything worked out exactly as I had planned or if I had never been wounded or if I had never been betrayed or I had never been harmed. I don’t think I would be as good a person. I’m still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think those disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.

CP: In The Signature of All Things, the character is looking for meaning through plants and nature. Is this a reflection of a connection that you might have?

EG: My mom is a master gardener and I grew up on a farm. I came back to it really late in life and discovered that despite how lazy and inattentive I was as a child, I had managed to accidentally learn quite a bit about gardening. This is a nice metaphor, too, about mothers and daughters—that when it came time for me to make my own, I was making a completely different garden than the one that my mom has. They don’t look like they came from relatives. Hers is a very productive and pragmatic vegetable garden, and mine is a ridiculous overabundance of useless plants. It doesn’t feed anybody, it doesn’t serve any purpose. I guess it feeds hummingbirds.

It’s definitely a question of following your fascination. When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that’s making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning, and for me that thing was gardening. I thought, this book is going to have to be about plants, otherwise I’m not going to want to spend three years with it; I’ll resent it if it’s taking me away from the garden.

CP: What do you think the world needs from women right now?

EG: I think the world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.

I see women who have this struggle between what they know is right, what they know is necessary, what they know is healthy, what they know is good for them, what they know is good for the work that they need to do, what they know is good for their bodies, what they know is good for their families—all too often ending that statement with the upturned question mark: “If it’s okay with everyone?” Still asking, still requesting, still filing petitions for somebody to say that it’s all right. I think that, myself included, that has to be dropped before we can take our place in the way that we need to and the world needs us to.

The best and most powerful things that I’ve done in my life were when I decided that I don’t f*cking need somebody to tell me that I can do it. To just go and make it myself, do it myself, build it myself, do the project first and not bother along the way to get the requisite paperwork. That requires faith. Primarily it requires a faith in the condition that you are allowed to exist. You are here and you are allowed to be here and therefore you are allowed to make decisions about yourself and the people in your life; rather than sort of backing up and making sure it’s okay with everybody at every turn.

CP: Hallelujah! Do you have a consistent practice or a perspective that helps you through times of contraction?

EG: I do. It all comes down to these two words: “stubborn gladness.” It’s from a poem by my favorite poet, a guy named Jack Gilbert. He’s sort of the poet laureate of my life. He has a poem called “A Brief for the Defense.” In the poem he says, “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

Which is not to edit him but I guess that’s how I took him in. He carefully put those words in the order that he wanted them, but somehow in my mind they just go into the furnace and come out like two ingots, sort of melded together, these two words that I keep together. Stubborn gladness.

What I love about the line is that it doesn’t deny the reality of the ruthless furnace of the world. That God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy. Because of this extraordinary consciousness and this great ability for wonder and marvel, and without denying any of the terrors and horrors of the world, we also have an obligation toward joy and toward miracle and excitement. I feel like if I were to get another tattoo, it would probably be those two words. Just stubborn, stubborn, stubborn gladness.

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You many know him best by his ubiquitous “I heart New York” logo. As important as it’s iconography is to the lexicon of late 20th century popular culture, there is so much more to Glaser’s body of work. He is one of the greatest creative minds of our time. I had the priviege of studying with him at School of Visual Arts a few years ago, where I experienced firsthand his understated magnificence. I’ve been crushing on him ever since.

Interview: Zoë Kors

Zoë Kors: I learned a lot from you at School of Visual Arts about creative process. What is your creative process?

Milton Glaser: There’s that old expression that we’ve all grown up with: The mind is the slayer of the soul. When you begin to examine the idea of how the mind works, you find that intuition and logic are very often at odds with one and another. The brain’s division into a methodology of a logical process, then the abandonment of logic in favor of something else—in order to make something that basically has no precedent or that is not susceptible to logic—is an experience that we’ve all had. We know that the best things we do are really done without an objective procedure, right? Objectivity only takes you a certain distance. The imagination really lives in that part of the world, where you don’t know how to get there and you’re stumbling in the dark.

ZK: There is uncertainty in the process of accessing imagination.

MG: I always use the phrase that, “Certainty is a closing of the mind.” So, as soon as you really know how to do something—Picasso’s always been my example of this—you have to abandon it and go on to something else. Fundamentally, when you are sure of what you’re doing, you have lost a good deal of the capacity for astonishment. And astonishment is one of the indications that you’re in the presence of the imagination.

This is, of course, the opposite goal of professionalism. You teach people to be professionals. Meaning, they know what they’re doing. And they have to follow an orderly process to get there. Design, by and large, is an orderly process. I once read a great definition of design—moving from an existing condition to a preferred one. In other words, I’m here and I want to be there, and how do I get there? That’s logic, so you figure out a process. But you can go from here to there without creating beauty. Because beauty, in that case, is sort of gratuitous. But for me, getting from here to there is not enough if you don’t create beauty, because for me the issue of beauty became central in the satisfaction of work. And so, if you just solved the problem, well, it’s primary—it is not sufficient.

So I always have been obsessed—A, with what is beauty to begin with? And B, how do you integrate that into the design process, when it is not essential, but—to me—necessary?

ZK: You just articulated what makes you great. So what is beauty?

MG: Well, you know, I was wondering about that recently when I was reading some studies on brain activities, and what the neurological response was to certain conditions. And that under certain circumstances there’s more neurological activity in the brain when it looks at certain things. I was wondering whether, in the presence of art, what we call art, or as a way of defining what we call art, the brain was stimulated into more activity. So you could see these neurological explosions occurring when art stimulated the brain. In fact, it might be the only way we can come to some agreement about what is art and what isn’t art—which is to say, there’s something in the nature of what you’re looking at that moves the brain to be more active. And the question of what that could be gets very complex indeed. A certain kind of relationship before form and color and shape and so on. At this point, I think we’re at the beginning of this understanding, too complex to quantify.

I do know that experientially, in the presence of beauty—and we can use the word, I use the word interchangeably, art and beauty—something happens that doesn’t happen in their absence. So you can show somebody a work of design where there is no art. There is a solution to a problem, and sometimes very appropriately, but there is no beauty. So that aspect of it is just not there. But it doesn’t mean that the problem has not been solved. It does mean that the aspect of beauty has not been introduced. So to some degree, you could say that they’re really parallel activities, and not necessarily combined into a single experience. I think you can do something beautiful and not solve the problem, and I think you can do something that solves the problem that’s not beautiful. Any combination thereof. But for me, the most interesting and satisfying result is when you do something that both solves the problem—functions objectively—and create a work of beauty that satisfies another need.

ZK: Yes. This reminds me of a conversation we had one time about art versus commerce. You said to me, “Zoë, make no mistake—what we do as designers, most often, is not art. It’s selling biscuits.”

MG: For sure. The practice of design is intended to persuade. But that is not the practice of art. Art doesn’t attempt to persuade you of anything. It intends to change you.

ZK: To inform and inspire?

MG: It depends on what you mean by “inform” but mostly it intends to transform.

ZK: I am always inspired by Stefan Sagmeister’s astonishing ability to play in the space where art meets commerce. As if there is no difference. I say the same about you. Somehow you sell biscuits and you do it with beauty.

MG: Well, I don’t always succeed. I think if you’re a practitioner and you’re not doing art shows and you’re making a living doing it—I mean, one of the problems is you have to put bread on the table and you have to operate in the real world. We’re living in capitalist environment, and that means that you’re selling things, and you’re producing objects for sale, and somebody has to make a profit, and people have to be persuaded to buy and so on.

If you’re doing projects, which is different, and you’re not selling goods, and you’re having shows, and you can afford to work and build a studio operation around that assumption, then you’re in another kind of business. And if you’re keeping a small operation going, and you can do it with an occasional job and exhibitions—I think you have to first understand the economics of any operation. And once you understand the economics, then you can examine how people are able to marginally survive by not playing the big design ball, which involves doing corporate identity programs and the kind of stuff that the big agencies do. But they become the work, the professional work, of our time. I’ve never quite fit in exactly into that category and I don’t think Stefan has, either.

ZK: I am dying to talk to you about New York magazine, which you founded in 1968. I grew up on New York magazine. Every week, my family would pore over the latest issue. Origin is a different kind of publication, but we turn a magazine out every two months, and it’s a major effort. I think about you doing one weekly. That must have been some intense time.

MG: It was. But if you don’t know that you’re not supposed to do a weekly, you just do it. We used to do five book jackets a day at Pushpin, because we didn’t know it was too fast. I mean, we didn’t have any experience so we just started doing things at what any rate seemed appropriate. If you don’t know what the standard rate is, you just arrive at your own conclusions about that. And so, yeah, a weekly magazine was just, you turned around—now everyone works on a weekly. Except we had a very small staff, we only had a couple people doing it. But once you believe that it’s possible, it becomes possible.

ZK: Right. That’s something that I learned from you in an experiential way.

MG: Expectation conditions reality. You have a short-order chef at a diner who’s turning out a hundred meals at lunch time, with four burner stove in the back—how can he do it? Well, he never thought it wasn’t possible, so he could do it.

The degree to which your attitude towards performance conditions possibility is overwhelming. Belief changes reality. That’s one thing you learn in life. If you don’t believe you can do something, it doesn’t matter whether it’s hard or easy—you can’t do it.

ZK: The mind is the slayer of the soul. Are you still designing rugs?

MG: Yeah. Still going on. A new line for a Spanish rug maker that’s going to be—I think revealed in a month or two in New York, part of her line. Still doing that line I did for the company in Portland. That’s fun. I like doing that. Having an exhibition in a gallery, which is a nice idea—they’re showing the rugs and they’re showing the preliminary drawings for them.

ZK: I actually saw a photograph of that exhibit and it was impressive, and so distinctly Milton Glaser.

MG: Well, thank you. This exhibition hasn’t happened yet. That was the one, I think, in Santa Monica at the museum. This one is happening in a month or two in Cincinnati.

ZK: What inspires you?

MG: People are always asking me that question and I hate that question, because it’s so—it’s so specific. Who knows what inspires you? It’s anything. A sheet of paper because of the way it’s lying on the desk catching the sun. I went to see a show, Matisse, at the Metropolitan two weeks ago. I hadn’t looked at these Matisses in twenty years. Just referentially. They were wonderful but the thing that really inspired me in my visit to the museum was a small series of terra cotta heads in the Hellenic collection. They were tiny little things, maybe three inches tall. But the way the light reflected off the terra cotta was so breathtaking, and they were more inspirational than the Matisses. Everything has the potential for inspiration. For me it has always been eclectic and random.

ZK: What makes you feel vulnerable?

MG: I guess life makes you vulnerable, unless you spend your time defending yourself, which is what most of life is like. I don’t know how vulnerable I am, I guess. Someone asked me once, what do you do when you encounter doubt? I said, Embrace it. Because that’s where you start, with doubt. That’s like what I was saying earlier about certainty being a closing of the mind. If you’re certain of anything, you stop experiencing things.

ZK: Shoshin. Beginner’s Mind.

MG: You have to stay that way, right? You can’t think you’ve gotten there, because there’s no there to get. If you’ve gotten there, you’re beginning. I’ve been doing this forever, and I’m at a very nice point, where I realized I know almost nothing about what I’m doing. So the work I’m doing is very nice, because it’s surprising me, and I’m really stumbling around trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing. And it’s really nice.

ZK: Simple and pure. There’s a purity
to that.

MG: Well, it’s a mess, actually. It’s not so pure. It’s lacking resolution. And then all of a sudden, something will happen and you don’t know what made it happen. It just sort of—it’s, now that I’m talking about it, because I haven’t thought much about it. Again, it is a Buddhist idea of allowing things to happen or the accepting what is kind of Buddhist idea. It’s always difficult to talk about it. You try to allow what is to be what it is. I don’t know how you get to that without intervening. But it produces a different result.

ZK: Any projects that you’re particularly passionate about right now?

MG: Well, I’m doing some odd stuff, like I designed three clocks that I’m very fond of, for the Museum of Modern Art gift shop and they’re selling. They really look cool and they’re going to make wristwatches out of them. They’re really nice. Recently I designed a cork presenter for Alessi, which is the most absurd thing anybody could design. And then I have a new poster for the Hermitage Museum that really is terrific.

ZK: Hey, Milton, if you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?

MG: A melon of some sort.

ZK: [laughing] Yeah, I see that. Do you have a chair collection?

MG: No, but I love chairs.

ZK: Are your favorite chairs the most comfortable to sit in?

MG: Never. Quite the contrary, I find that I choose chairs inevitably by appearance and not by comfort. In fact, I’ve never chosen a chair because it was comfortable.

ZK: Yeah, there’s a little irony there, huh?

MG: There’s always irony.

ZK: The endless debate of form and function.

MG: Yeah, and in the case of chairs, I’ve never been able to find a chair that I was comfortable in that I like to look at.

ZK: There’s a lot of Milton Glaser to hold, if you were a chair. How tall are you?

MG: [chuckles] Well, I’m 6’2” but I’m not as bulky as I used to be. I think I’ve probably lost about forty or fifty pounds since you’ve seen me. So I’m skinnier now than I was in the old days.

ZK: Wow! So less work for the chairs. Is there anything that you want me to ask you?

MG: Outside of the meaning of life? No.

ZK: Do you want to comment on the meaning of life? I’d love to hear it.

MG: I decline.

ZK: Ha!

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The recent recipient of the first Grammy-nominated kirtan album, an internationally televised performance at the ceremony, and the subject of the new documentary by Jeremy Frindell, One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das, this “kirtan rockstar” is keeping his head screwed on and his heart open.

Interview: Zoë Kors
krishnadas.com

Zoe Kors: First thing that I want to say is, congratulations on your Grammy nomination and the performance. How was that experience for you?

Krishna Das: Well, there’s the nuts and bolts of the performance, so to speak, and then there’s the actual practice of chanting. The performance was pretty interesting because we had exactly five minutes to do the song and we couldn’t go over, so we had to plan it out very particularly— what speed we were going to do it, how many times we were going to repeat it. Usually, I go on and on. Nobody can stop me.

ZK: Well right. You are bringing what is essentially a spiritual practice to the world stage and presenting it as entertainment. People call you the kirtan rock star. In some respects there is a little bit of a dichotomy there.

KD: That dichotomy is in our heads, you know. We are just here, right? We are just people doing our thing. And the most important aspect of anything we do is our motivation, why we do it.

ZK: And why do you do what you do?

KD: To save my ass.

ZK: Say more.

KD: To save my heart. Every day. This is what I do to keep my head screwed on semi-straight and keep my heart open. Whenever I sing, that’s why I sing. Whether it’s at the Grammys, whether it’s in the bathroom, whether it’s in front of 10,000 people or three people, by my guru’s grace, my head stays in that place.

ZK: “By your guru’s grace.” I’m curious about this idea. Neem Karoli Baba devotees often use the phrase “Maharaji’s will.” So when we surrender to the guru, are we sort of abdicating our own responsibility for ourselves?

KD: Well, this is a humungous issue. It’s not easy to talk about it. Because the concepts involved are philosophical, but there is this other thing which is entirely experiential. We all inhabit our lives, in different ways to some degree. We see ourselves a certain way, and based on how we see ourselves, that’s how we see the world. Until you are fully enlightened, you can never know what another person’s reality is like for them. All we can know is our own subjective version of reality. That’s the way we go through our lives. Everybody.

So when we start talking about gurus, first of all we’re starting to talk about something that can’t be talked about, in the sense that you can never really know what a guru is as long as you are imprisoned by your own thoughts and circular ego. The true guru is someone who’s transcended all that. And we don’t know anything about that. It’s as if—how many colors are there? Red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet. Seven colors, is that right? There is an eighth color that we don’t have the sense apparatus to see or experience.

ZK: I love that metaphor.

KD: Can you imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden see another color that nobody else sees?

ZK: I have goosebumps.

KD: Yeah, it’s like that. For instance, the same thing can happen to different people, and they can have a completely different reaction to it. It’s inexplicable why somebody can lose a leg and it doesn’t effect them at all emotionally; and another person can lose a foot and be destroyed for the rest of their lives. So when we start to talk about gurus, we’re talking about beings who actually know what this is all about. They know who we were, where we came from, and where we’re going. They are not imprisoned in a selfish or self-centered view of the universe. It gets so complicated so quickly, but simply put, when you fall in love, nobody has to tell you. You know what you feel.

Photo by John Phaneuf

Now, when you meet your guru or a being who knows, who is no longer loving, but has become love, a being who is sitting in truth, and in compassion and kindness for all beings—you know. When I met my guru, I knew. And it was before I met him physically, actually.

ZK: Really?! Tell me.

KD: Yeah, first I met Ram Dass. He came back from India. And the minute I walked into the room with him, not knowing that much about him, and without a word being spoken, I knew that whatever it was I was looking for was real. And this was a really, really, life-changing moment.

ZK: Wow! And you say that you knew what you were looking for, you felt a longing?

KD: I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew whatever it was that I was looking for was real. There really was something to find. And I didn’t know what it was; I wouldn’t have been able to name it at that point.

ZK: Can you name it now?

KD: I can describe it now. I can say, “unconditional love.” I can say, “unbearable compassion for every being in the universe.” I can say, “total, absolute wisdom.”

ZK: So Maharaji’s Will…

KD: First of all, let me say, everybody who says, “Oh, it’s Maharaji’s will”—they might not know what the f*ck they’re talking about. It could be a cop out. It could be just bullshit. A way of not dealing with their own hang-ups and limitations. But it could also be a certain kind of awareness of that other color. You never know, and you don’t have to know, because it’s what your world looks likes to you that is important. It’s within your world that things will unfold and intuitive understandings will open up. Even if somebody tells us something, the hit, the light goes on inside of us, not out there. We learn and understand everything within ourselves.

ZK: Where in your body does that light shine inside of you? Where’s that spark when you reach that new awareness?

KD: Everywhere. It changes your life. Everything is different all of a sudden. Let’s say you wake up in a dark room. You don’t remember how you got there. You have no clue. You might knock into the walls trying to get up, because it’s pitch black. And then the light comes on for one quarter of a second. And in that instant you see there’s a door in the corner of the room. Now you know where to go, and nothing’s going to stop you. Until that light comes on, we don’t what direction to go. But once that light comes on, you just know. You don’t necessarily know it in your toe or your ear or this chakra or that chakra—you know it in your life, you know it. And then everything in your life mobilizes to get you through the door.

ZK: You described what you are looking for as “unbearable compassion for all beings.” I know that you recently visited Auschwitz. Can you describe your experience moving towards a space of compassion in what was clearly a very charged place, where tremendous suffering and pain went down?

KD: Well, there’s a lot that I could say about that. But a couple of things. I went to Auschwitz with Bernie Glassman, who’s a Zen master. He goes there every year as a spiritual practice of what he calls “bearing witness.” We’re not talking about getting caught in any particular emotional version of that story or your reactions to it. This is why it’s such hard work. Real compassion is not emotional. Real compassion is based on the experience that all beings, which might appear separate, are actually a part of my own body, and I am a part of the body of the universe. We are not separate. So if one being hurts, I also hurt. If you stub your toe, you don’t need to dialog yourself to be good to your foot, do you? When you see things that clearly, there’s no dialogue or emotional manipulation that you need to do to extend compassion to that being, because that being is a part of you, and if that being hurts, you hurt.

Now, there’s another very important part, since you mentioned it. When I was there,
at one point, it was very clear to me that if I had been born in Germany with family of Nazis and if I had been raised with those beliefs, there was very little chance that I wouldn’t be exactly like all those guards and all those people who tortured everybody. That I was no different than those people, no better at all in any way. It was my karmic circumstance that I didn’t have to go through that in this life; I was born somewhere else under different circumstances. But if I had been born there at that time, I can’t tell you that I would have done anything differently than those people had done. You can’t prove that to me. So what does that lead to? That leads to compassion for the victimizers, also. You see, they were born into a situation, they had no control over that. They themselves are victims.

ZK: One of the things that I say: the world is my altar and life is my practice, so whether it’s the person who cuts me off in the car or the cashier at the supermarket who’s rude to me—in each instance, we are presented with an opportunity to find compassion rather than take the reactive, emotional perspective.

KD: Now, compassion is a college education. It’s a doctorate.

ZK: I’ve been curious to ask you if you ran into any celebrities backstage at the Grammys who were at all interested in chanting or Neem Karoli Baba.

KD: No, I didn’t, I didn’t meet anybody. Unfortunately, I didn’t go to the one gathering that might have happened that way. We were so burnt out. I had just come back from India and then got on a plane and done a workshop for the weekend, and then got on a plane and gone to L.A. I was too busy to go at all, but when they invited me to sing, I thought, this is an opportunity that I shouldn’t pass up. An opportunity to present the chanting to people, make them more aware of it. And so I thought, well, I better go.

ZK: I’m so glad you did. And I’m so glad you wore your red flannel.

KD: [laughter] It’s not a shirt. It’s actually painted onto me.

ZK: I have to confess, I picture you getting out of bed in the morning in your red flannel feetie pajamas and padding over to your altar to chant a little bit.

KD: [laughing] Something like that, yeah.

ZK: What makes you come most alive?

KD: Chanting.

ZK: How do you stay centered when you’re on the road?

KD: Chanting.

ZK: What makes you feel vulnerable?

KD: Chanting.

ZK: I love it. I love that.

KD: It’s the main thing in my life, you know. In 1994, twenty-one years had gone by since Maharaji had left his body, and I wasn’t doing anything at all to help myself, and I was in very, very bad shape. I was really sinking, really bad. All of a sudden I knew—like a lightning bolt hit me—I knew that if I did not start chanting with people, that I would never be able to clean out the dark corners of my own heart. I knew it with every cell in my body and mind. It was the only rope being thrown to this drowning man. And that’s when you asked me at the beginning—I chant to save my miserable ass. That’s what I do. I chant to save my heart. Every time I sit down, that’s what I’m doing.

I’m reconnecting, I’m deepening, I’m opening, I’m releasing negativity and negative thoughts and all the limitations I carry around with me—again and again and again and again and again and again. And again! And that’s the only thing that keeps me alive.

ZK: And how lucky are we that we get to bear witness to your spiritual practice?!

KD: Well, it takes two to tango! I need everybody to sing with me.

ZK: It’s a privilege to tango with you, Krishna Das.

KD: Thank you, Zoë.

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Almost everyone yearns for change in their lives. We all want to experience more happiness, fulfillment, and peace. We want lifelong good health and an end to fearing the aging process. By combining the fruits of modern neuroscience and timeless wisdom, you can achieve those goals. That is what your brain is designed for. The key is realizing that you are the user of your brain. If you choose, you can influence every aspect of your brain, and therefore every aspect of your life.

In our new book Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being, Dr. Rudolph Tanzi and I make a distinction between the everyday brain and super brain. The everyday brain could be dubbed “the baseline brain,” because it operates at the minimum functioning to keep you alive and healthy. It controls your heart rate, your blood pressure, your immune function, all of your subconscious impulses. That’s not a minor role; the baseline brain is a marvel of complexity and efficiency. But too much of it is devoted to habits, old conditioning, unconscious reflexes, and lack of self-awareness. We believe that the brain is designed to deliver much more. By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

Super Brain provides detailed guidance on how to tap into your brain’s infinite potential and become the user of your brain. As we describe, your brain is waiting for you to give it direction. You can lead your brain and inspire it. You can actively shape new neural pathways. You can keep your memory intact, preserve your brain’s health, and minimize the risk of aging and senile dementia, things that are greatly feared as people grow older.

Here are a few of the most important practices for moving from a baseline brain to the power of super brain:

Practice self-awareness. You can expand your awareness in many ways, and as you do, your brain will evolve. It will grow physically by developing new neural pathways, synaptic connections, and even new brain cells. Perhaps more importantly, it will evolve to mirror the expansion of your mind into new, creative areas. Self-awareness includes awareness of your mental realm, which encompasses your thoughts, feelings, energy, and emotions.  Self-awareness is also your awareness of the world, which you experience through the five senses (sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell). Pay attention to your sensory impressions and be aware of those five ways that the world comes to you. Self-awareness also includes awareness of your body. Most people aren’t in touch with their body and tend to live in their thoughts. When we’re in touch with our body, we’re attuned to our intuition, needs, and desires and will be in the best position to make evolutionary choices for our health and wellbeing.

Practice self-reflection.  Every day, take some time to meditate and cultivate inner quiet. Then ask yourself what I call the “soul questions”: Who am I? What do I want? What is the purpose and meaning of my life? How can I create a better world? The more you reflect, the more your life will move into the answer. The interesting thing is that you don’t have to know the answers—simply asking the questions and your reflection itself causes the rewiring of the brain.

Meditate. A few moments of inner peace and quiet allows the brain to reset itself. You become more centered as this happens, since the brain is clearing out distractions and too much “cross talk.” So take some time each day to bring clarity to your inner world. Experiencing the silence of meditation doesn’t have to be complicated. You can lie on the floor with arms and legs outspread, paying attention to the sensations in your body. You can observe the outflow and inflow of your breath. You can also go to a park and let the impressions of nature calm your brain. You can learn more about meditation and download a meditation guide at the Chopra Center’s Meditation Resource library at chopra.com/ccl-meditation/.

Practice conscious choice making. A fixed habit is supported by old, well-worn pathways in the brain. When you make conscious choices to change a habit, you create new pathways. At the same time, you strengthen the decision-making function of the cerebral cortex while diminishing the grip of the lower, instinctual brain. So without judging your habit, whether it feels like a good one or a bad one, take time to break the routine, automatic response that habit imposes. Here are a few ways to face a habit and say “no” to it: Go outside your fixed routine; turn off the computer and the television; find a new outlet for your down time; talk to someone who holds a viewpoint contrary to yours and pay respectful attention, really listening.

There is a need for everyone’s brain to be imprinted with more self-enhancing impulses: the impulse to peace over violence, love over fear, compassion over selfishness. In the larger scheme, an endangered planet may depend on the evolution of consciousness. Survival of the fittest can take us only so far; competition and aggression have brought us to the brink of self-destruction. What is needed now is survival of the wisest. You can participate in this shift by expanding your own awareness. At the level of the mind, you are part of the human mind; at the level of the brain you are part of the global brain. This is a perfect example of becoming the change that you want to see.

About the Author
Deepak Chopra, M.D. is a bestselling author and the co-founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California. The Chopra Center offers a variety of signature programs and event, including the Journey into Healing: Super Brain workshop, taking place this August 22−25 at La Costa Resort & Spa. Join Drs. Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi and other renowned experts for an in-depth exploration of the power of the mind to heal and transform the body. For more information, visit chopra.com or call 888.736.6895.

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Interview: Robert Piper
drweil.com

Robert Piper: You’re a true pioneer in your industry. Can you talk about how you literally opened up a new field of healthcare?

Dr. Andrew Weil: I think integrative medicine, something I’ve pioneered, is the way of the future. Its great promise is that it can reduce healthcare costs by shifting the whole focus of healthcare away from disease management to health promotion and prevention. They can do that two ways: first, by focusing attention on lifestyle medicine, which is very deficient. And second, by bringing into the mainstream treatments that are lower cost because they are not dependent on expensive technology.

RP: Early in your career you were the pioneer of integrative medicine. You dealt with criticism. Can you explain how you maintained focus on your goal?

AW: I’ve always been called “controversial.” I think if I were not controversial I wouldn’t be doing my job. I tried to change the conventional paradigm, for example, by insisting on the reality of mind-body interaction, by stressing the importance of natural therapies, by focusing attention on lifestyle issues, by looking at worthwhile aspects of alternative medicine. Many people have been threatened by that. Doctors especially tend to think that they know everything about the human body, and don’t realize that medical education has really omitted many very important subjects.

RP: What most inspires you about your work?

AW: The Arizona center for Integrative Medicine has now enrolled its one thousandth fellow. These are physicians in intensive two year training, so we’ve graduated over 900 physicians from this training. They are in practice all over the country. Some are training other people and publishing textbooks. Seeing this growing number of health professionals “get it” and really represent the generation—that’s extremely satisfying to me.

RP: You’re a big fan of meditation. Can you explain why a meditation practice is so essential?

AW: I think it’s useful on many different levels. First of all, it’s a very useful relaxation technique. Secondly, it trains attention and concentration, which are useful in almost any activity—athletic performance, musical performance, cooking, anything. Learning to focus attention and concentration is very useful; meditation can help you do that. Thirdly, it’s a way to restructure the mind by learning to detach attention from thinking and put it somewhere else. That’s a useful long-term strategy for optimal emotional health because thoughts and images in the mind are often sources of fear and worry.

RP: Can you talk about the role of stress in our culture, it seems to be an epidemic?

AW: I don’t think you can live without stress; I think the human life is stressful, and it probably always has been, although the forms of stress may change from culture to culture, and from time to time. I think it’s worth trying to do something about obvious sources of stress in your life. But even more important is learning and practicing methods to neutralize the harmful effects of stress on the body and mind. There are many possibilities, anything from meditation and yoga to listening to relaxing music. My personal favorite is simple breathing techniques—they’re very effective, take very little time, and they’re free.

RP: Can you talk about the mission behind your foundation?

AW: The Weil Foundation was created to channel money to integrative medicine educational programs both at the University of Arizona and around the country. It receives all of my after-tax profits from the sale of products that have my name and likeness on it. It has supported fellowship training at various universities, and medical students’ trainings. I hoping that we will continue to expand and be able to give away more grants.

Dr. Andrew Weil is Founder and Director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the College of Medicine, University of Arizona, and Director of Integrative Health and Healing at the Miraval Resort. For more information, visit drweil.com.

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