upper middle class buddhist new agey people are the most annoying people in the world. i decided this a few months ago when i went to the thirteen grandmothers meeting. it was held at some fancy unitarian universalist church and the audience was full of white rich people wearing too many heavy gemstones. (you know you can literally see money dripping off of these people) there was a cheesy couple playing crystals and tibetan singing bowls and everyone was smiling at each other, trying to create this atmosphere of well-being, and when the "band" was finished, the man said "namaste" to the audience and the audience said "namaste" back and i wanted to yell a big "fuck you" just for kicks. I thought of Eileen Myles in one of her poems saying to a crowd of rich, "Am I the only one with bleeding gums here?"
this presentation was put on to collect funds to create some movie about the thirteen grandmothers. i made a five dollar donation to get in and was surprised to see a ten thousand dollar spot for someone to check if they were donating that much. i guess no one else but me was hit with the irony of rich white people gathered in east liberty, a poor black neighborhood of pittsburgh, collecting money to make a movie about people from other countries. don't get me wrong, i appreciate the grandmothers and their message, but why do rich people never give a shit about the poor people in their own cities?
the positivity in the room irritated me because i felt it was really disconnected from life. today someone quoted me pema chodron who writes something about the greatest challenges in life giving us the greatest opportunities. yeah, well, actually- that's not always true. actually, that's usually not true for poor people. not that pema chodron would know anything about it, being born white and upper middle class, spending most of her time in isolation meditating and/or whatever it is that buddhists do. i am so tired of rich people monopolizing the discourse and misleading the world with their disconnected positivity.
maybe people need to recognize that there are a lot of people who are being totally destroyed by "challenges." this week i met a beautiful, insanely wise and brilliant woman who can't get out of bed because her spine is collapsing due to thirty years of hard labor and she is addicted to pain medication and every hospital she visits rejects her because she has no insurance and because they write her off as a drug addict. she spends her days laying in bed, smoking, slipping further and further into schizophrenia.
this week she took care of me and gave me stripper clothes and guided me from her bed while i practiced moves on her bedroom floor. i am so heartbroken for her and for so many people.
it's like you want to grab pema chodron and drag her out of the monastery and toss her into a hotel room where some young runaway girl is sucking richdick for cash to pay for her drugs. just to wisen the old lady up. just to give her a big dose of reality because why shouldn't everyone have to witness this shit? it's real. it's real. if it isn't real to you then shut the fuck up and let some other people write their stories and share their own methods of positivity- methods which don't start with disconnected fairy tales of how every challenge is an opportunity.
blah. i'm just overwhelmed.
after the thirteen grandmothers thing, i walked out and in the intersection there was some crazy homeless dude marching (literally, marching) in circles, carrying some huge pole with a rainbow flag attached to it that i guess he unearthed from the front of the church. he was waving it around like mad, blocking the crosswalk from some of the rich white women who were leaving the meeting. they were so scared and i started laughing because whatever middle class new agey positivity high they had from the meditation inside was now shocked away by the reality of the poor mentally ill man from the ghetto they were having their meeting in. they stood huddled in the corner scared as mice and looking to me to maybe take them acoss the lethe of the street to get them to their expensive cars. I diverted eye contact, put my hoodie on and walked right past the guy- scared, but not showing it because he wouldn't bother me then and i did not want to be on that side of the street with them.
24 comments:
When I go to a church it is the Universalist Unitarian. Each one I've been in has been so accepting. I also had a bead and candle shop. I'm now retired. My customers were a diverse crowd! loved it.
I love reading your blog and try to understand your pain and anger. I have my own as we all do. even people who you might consider rich. Everyone has a soul. Coming from different places ... meeting other souls from other places, always searching. Sometimes you can find a kindred soul in the damndest places.
I try to see life from your viewpoint as well as other bloggers with different lifestyles. I read to help me understand my journey. I haven't a clue why I'm me.
I'm 65 ... was a San Francisco 60s female. I've been and done lots of stuff. I've never been addicted to drugs. I've always worked. I'm not materialistic.
Some people disliked me because I was pretty. thought the world was my oyster, so they said... I was treated terribly. and exploited. a lot of anger and hurt. I was born the way I was... I had no control.
I know that I don't KNOW anything. I have no answers. What I do want, however, is peace. peace with myself. and I know I don't hate. I refuse to hate. and I play this youTube thang.. 27 times a day. I will end each day with a smile. I promised me that. I'm worth it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkiT9vk1F90
I can not fathom what it was like to grow up as you did. I wish you peace ... I wish us all peace. It's a constant quest but a noble one.
Carolyn
absolutely, you are right. the compassion i felt later is summed up pretty well with what you said. i felt a lot of anger at this moment and my way of dealing healthily is to write it out. I don't want to alienate people. And I don't always feel the way I did in that moment.
Excellent post, intelligent writing.
Jessica, fucking A. God, I feel so strongly about this too. I think the next Buddhist event I go to. I am speaking the fuck up.
especially if it is in East Liberty, I tell you I worked there for a year and a half and saw one other white person working with students and parents of that community. the rest were only to be found on sundays protesting the war in Iraq.
haha, i love you and your class anger. new age flakes piss me off too.
Quote from one of my recent blog entries:
"The last thing C and I say to each other before I leave is not a word I use: Namasté. It's Sanskrit, a one-word that is many words: "The light in me honors the light in you." I usually associate it with white women who practice yoga as an advanced stretching class with some pseudo spirituality thrown in."
I'm glad you're willing to share the rage. A constant barrage of compassion would be more than I could take. Rage? anytime.
Dane,
you always get me. :) As a friend says, "You always smell what I be steppin in."
haha
I once had a man of color say to me, "save your compassion. I want your anger."
Put me in my place right quick.
I am glad you wrote about this. Ugh, I get so frustrated with the same group of folks.
Because I have Ojibway Native heritage I get really annoyed with people appropriating Native culture. The fact that mainly monetarily rich white folks appropriate Native culture makes me so mad. They do not respect it and honor it. They also have no idea what real rez life is like and romanticize Native life.
I love the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. :-)
Naw, I don't always get you. Just sometimes.
No disclaimer needed on this truth Davka. It's the truth, except for the disclaimer.
Yeah, maybe you appreciate Pema in another reflection, but, this reflection is also worthy of it's space without any apology.
I've been the token ethnic who walked into a Unitarian church and felt those "nice" smiles. I felt othered & pitied or put on a pedastal when they realized I was not Mexican, but Greek. It was a veiled pity followed by an obvious adoration - for what?
Davka, you lift the veil here.
I teach Yoga in English instead of the Sanskit I learned years ago, because I am American. Who put more spiritual strength on one language, than another? I use English because my students speak English!
To the daughter of "foreigners" "exotic" languages are not more or less spiritual-
it's the intention in the communication that makes it spiritual. Using Sanskrit as a U.S. citizen to another is putting on airs. It says to all, "See (ego) I have studied exotic religions (ego) and have changed them to fit my need(ego) to be better than my lowly neighbors (ego)."
We can all sigh when we read about the rich white Americans cowering past the pain and suffering in their own country, always looking outside themselves, outside the country, while misquoting the very spiritual practice that says (they all say this) LOOK IN!
Pema is OK, I appreciate her work and her choices. But, she is also human and you call out the spinach in her teeth and the spinach in the teeth of her followers (the whole type).
Davka, apologies are unnecessary.
There is a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. You can't have compassion without having reverence. You can't respect others till you respect yourself. Maybe being first generation allows me to see both old world and new as equally important, equally beautiful, equally ugly. I'm American, born in Detroit not far from Car factories and I am no better or worse than my cousins who were born in Greece, not far from the ancient Minoan ruins, Knossos.
When the speak in a language they are not fluent in, I ask WHY? What is wrong with the language that you can use to convey the same meaning to the man outside with the flag? Did anyone tell him they saw the light in him? Did they make eye contact and acknowledge his humanity?
It takes no internal force to voice your anger at uus or at pema. it only shows your pain and to dismiss a whole class of well-intentioned people is just an interesting gambit for attention from the bootstrap crowd that shine your shoes since with this distorted prose.
All I can say, as someone who has felt rage since a few seconds after I exited the womb is-pema saved my fucking life and spoke the truth to my uneducated self when I really needed it. Let's just say I had a lot of time to look at myself and had been put in a time-out for grown-ups and pema was and is the shit.
davka, your rage is your pain.
c/s
helixtriphop
Helix-
I enjoy her work as well. Glad it "saved you." I never found it that helpful. But way to mistake a blogpost about occasional anger for an abiding opinion about a person.
And the magazines I read Pema Chodron was, as are her workshops and talks, full of rich white people. I don't find their disconnected philosophies helpful neither do I connect with all the advertisements in Mandala Magazine and Tricycle selling multi-million dollar real estate buys as if they are selling wind up toys. Those are her readers.
And my rage is my pain and my rage is also the awesome conversation that developed between my readers and friends (see above) who felt my rage was their pain and their pain felt better after reading and sharing because it all needs to be discussed and I don't sit around with my rage trying to meditate it all away- I articulate it and explore it. But hey, everyone has an opinion. :)
I never dismissed any class. Your identifying too much with the rich people in the story. Why not identify with the homeless guy who dug up the rainbow flag? He's much cooler. ;)
Thanks for reading.
Davka,
Thanks for the reply. I hear you about the back and forth with your readers and also have my questions about rags like mandala and trycycle. I'll give you a fist bump (kudos) for that one. But I am not iding with the white folk in the story or the guy with the flag.
I'm the guy that always lives in the neighborhood where the guy in the flag is shitting on my door-step and i have to tell my daughter not to worry about shit like that.
Just allow me to ramble a little more-In my eyes it all comes down to intent and if the guys with the flag and the white folk are all just as well-meaning, then it's no biggie for me either way and neither deserves rage or to be dismissed.
one life-one breath-it all goes that fast in this spinning piece of dirt we are all tripping on.
in my book- pema has a good heart- you can't fake that shit.
humbly,
helixtriphop
You are stereotyping people and lumping large groups of people together. While your points are good ones and valid, your self-righteousness and anger do more to deepen differences between people than heal them. Not all new-agers are Buddhist. Not all new-agers are rich. Not all new-agers are unaware of the plight of poor people. Not all Buddhists are rich, etc. etc. etc. I think that you could present your ideas in a way that could appeal to those that you are criticizing. For the time being, it seems to me you are perpetuating stereotypes and hatred. It almost seems like a disdain for positivity due to your own misery. Like jealousy, or something. I am not putting down the core message of this post, which is actually very good, but the presentation personally does more to increase my own negative emotions than anything else. I feel that it could easily have a similar effect on the other side of the spectrum, the uneducated, poor, non-white, minority groups that you champion. Do you consider the effect that your words might have on them? Honestly, I think that certain statements in this post display an ignorance and hatred which is very disturbing, and can have little positive effect on any of the parties mentioned. Be the change you want to see in the world, as the hackneyed phrase goes, rather than complaining about how people who are meditating and devoting themselves to psychological improvement aren't saving inner city black people. I think you have an important message but it's presentation does little benefit, in my mind.
I do want to say, however, that some of your criticism are poignant, but also that I don't think that you have enough experience from within the New Age or Buddhist etc. circles to really speak about it very authoritatively. While much of what you say holds true, it's still a stereotype. There are plenty of lower-class, struggling, very real, very down to earth, Western Buddhists, for example. Arguably most of them are very real and sincere people. In fact, event that you spoke about had nothing to do with Buddhism whatsoever, and I feel that it was pretty inappropriate to mention Buddhism in this context.
Cultural appropriation can be a rather harsh judgement on someone when they are genuinely seeking spiritual truth.
Again, much of what you say is true. There is much hypocracy going down, all around. It just saddens me to see the anger at this taken out on people who are some of the most intelligent and genuine spiritual seekers in the world, most of whom are far more sympathetic to your ideas than you might think.
bell hooks: Yet it seems very hard for people to fight this racism and sexism without hope for an end to it. There is so much despair and apathy because of the feeling that we've struggled and struggled and not enough has changed.
Pema Chödrön: The main issue is aggression. Often if there's too much hope you begin to have a strong sense of enemy. Then the whole process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds more suffering because of your aggression toward the oppressor. Don't you see a lot of people who have such good intentions but they get very angry, depressed, resentful?
bell hooks: Yes, you're talking to one! I get so overwhelmed sometimes.
Pema Chödrön: Well, doesn't that get in the way?
bell hooks: Yeah, it does. I'm on tour right now talking about my book about ending racism, and I hear people say things like, racism doesn't exist, or, don't you think we've already dealt with that? And I start to feel irritable. This irritability starts mounting in me, and I notice how it collapses into sorrow. I came home the other day and I sat down at my table and just wept because I thought, it's just too much.
Pema Chödrön: Well, isn't that the point? That other people and ourselves, we're the same really, and we just get stuck in different ways. Getting stuck in any kind of self-and-other tension seems to cause pain. So if you can keep your heart and your mind open to those people, in other words, work with any tendency to close down towards them, isn't that the way the system of racism and cruelty starts to de-escalate?
The thing is, once we get into this kind of work we are opening ourselves for all our own unresolved misery to come floating right up and block our compassion. It's a difficult and challenging practice to keep your heart and mind open. It takes a lot to be a living example of unbiased mind! But when you see, bell, how you feel towards these people, you can begin to understand why there is racism, why there is cruelty, because everyone has those same thoughts and emotions that you do. Everyone feels that irritability and then it escalates.http://www.shambhala.com/html/learn/features/pema/interview/index.cfm
Namasté!
Hello. I stumbled over your wonderfully well written and perceptive blog when I typed in 'spiritual people are full of shit' which I know is a gross generalization and simplistic and childish statement but I was looking for something which summed up some ideas I have been thinking about and bravo you have done just that! I am a 26 year old woman in London from a very poor background and even when I left home ended up homeless for 5 years and in and out of hostels. When I finally got sorted I ended up with a job in an office populated with pseudo Buddhist new age cobbled together beliefs which seemed to mostly entail pretending to be very positive whilst being self obsessed and horrible behind peoples backs. These office people most of them lived in this new culture of go to the gym, eat a banana and some beansprouts, do some chanting , hold a crystal, spend a small fortune on clothes and hair and skin products and personal trainers, be incredibly bitchy about people spend all day discussing how celebrities look and on idle gossip whilst claiming to be spiritual. Anyone making honest observations is labeled 'negative' incredibly convenient excuse to not hear anything you don't want to hear and actually quite fascistic. I have left there now and am glad because they were a bunch of assholes of the worst kind.
alisha! thanks so much for your comment. I am so glad my words helped you to organize and cope with your own painful awareness of how hypocritcal materialist spiritualist people can be, just as your comment helped me think, "ahh, I'm not crazy, so many people see it and feel it like I do." I get a few hits a week with those exact search words, "spiritual people are full of shit," -so, a lot of people see what we do. I've been really thinking a lot about it lately because I am reading so much on American Indian activism and the colonialist, racist war that still rages in this country and all over the world against indigenous people who are daily fighting for survival while these spiritualist materialist make a FORTUNE off of stealing native art, sacred practices, etc and selling their appropriated crappy versions of something sacred for tons of money. And I want to know how much of that money they give back to indigenous people. Ugh, I am so sick of all of it. Thank you for reading and sharing and letting some of the naysayers above see that this anger is real and justified and ours. In revolutionary, radical love- DAVKA
also, thank you OMB for pointing out that this appropriating native stuff causes pain. According to some, intention is everything. No. Saying so is another tactic of prioritizing the feelings of the white affluent and culture stealers over the voices of those hurt by these actions.
Intentions can be great, but if your ACTIONS hurt people, then you need to shut up about your intentions and actually listen to what is being said. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The road to cultural obliteration for Native people and people of these "exotic" religions we love to dabble in is paved with well intended privileged people stealing cultural ideas and artifacts, mutating them, and calling it truth. Great for the well intended, horrific tragedy for those smashed underfoot.
FUCK THE RICH.
I'll say it again.
FUCK THE RICH.
And, although her work has helped me, Fuck Pema Chodron and fuck me too. We are all just human beings with huge egos and an agenda of personal glory as much as anything else. I find Charles Bukowski poems about drugs, sex, and desperation to be far more honest and helpful than anything from the Pema Chodron, Deepak Chopra crap camp.
davka - I am keeping up on this thread as I get the comments in my inbox! People think we are dead as Native people. We are not dead we are made to be INVISIBLE by all institutions, etc in the majority culture. When I say I am Native (yes I am mixed blood) people want to dissect me and ask me, "how much are you? do you get per cap? did you get Indian money?" AHHH!! So sick of it! I want to reply more in depth so I will be back with more to say soon! Keep the conversation going!
Yes, rendered completely invisible. I once saw an interview with Wilma Mankiller describing how a tour bus full of white people showed up at the reservation asking, "Where are all the Indians?" And she looked at her watch and said, "well, it's about 1:30, they are probably at wal-mart." The point was that this HUGELY disappointed the tourists because they didn't want to see "Indians" wearing jeans and sneakers shopping and doing normal things, they wanted war bonnets and pow wows and all the romanticized, fetishized, exoticized images.
It's actually quite insane how invisible native people have been rendered by our culture. Where are the indigenous sitcoms or films or artists in the mainstream? Silenced. Sure, there are some here and there, but as far as representation- there is none unless it's fucking dancing with wolves.
I was recently researching the fake Indian and Generokee phenomenon and I was just astounded at how many people claim to be native with ZERO ancestry, ZERO cultural heritage, ZERO activism. "My great, great grandmother was 1/13th Cherokee, so I should be able to get college money." I saw actual threads in message boards advising white people how to steal native allotted scholarship money for their imaginary heritage.
Then reading about James Arthur Ray charged 10k a person for some bullshit sweat lodge that killed three people and the whole town of Sedona, AZ should go to jail for their stealing and selling native culture.
And with the new age making millions upon millions with their selling shaman classes and vision quests and healing seminars and sweats and every possible mutation of native ceremony you can imagine- reservations are still the most impoverished areas in our country. Toxic wastes are still routinely dumped near Native lands. Sacred sites are still violated. Wouldn't actually helping the cause of justice be the most spiritually transforming thing for people to do to show respect for other cultures?
Ugh, you know all of this, but it feels good to say it to someone who gets it. I've been in a lot of despair recently about this. Everyone wants Last of the Mohicans, but no one wants to see what is happening right now.
The dissecting questions are so strange. What do you think is at the root of that? I've been wondering because many people of color have told me that they have never experienced another person of color asking them the "what are you" question or the kinds of invasive questions you speak of.
Honestly, after reading a lot about this lately has made me quite uncomfortable with my own use of the word, "medicine," in my blog title. Deer girl- no. I began calling myself that at a young age after really loving deer and witnessing my father bringing them home dead and gutting them tied up in the barn. I don't say that with a "killing animals is wrong," type of way- I say it because deer hunting is very much apart of my heritage as poor Appalachian and my father killing and providing us with fresh meat is something I learned to be very proud of, although witnessing it as a child was very traumatizing. It was also a great, sacred initiation to me, but that is a whole other blog entry that I've been writing for years and have not finished. People think my "deer girl" is all cute and bambi, but little do they know it's actually about really connecting with and living with and living from these animals and also seeing, hating, and surviving from their deaths and crucifixions in the barn and guts and blood in bowls in the fridge and on our hands and a lot of stuff that I am proud to say is my history. But medicine, I'm not so sure of anymore. I love the idea of medicine as something that actually heals and it not just being limited to a pharmaceutical framework and that really captured me, but... yeah.. not sure. Will get back to you on that one.
and furthermore when people reference bambi to me I get very, very annoyed because I never saw bambi and my experiences with animals, especially wild ones like deer, were NEVER through a fucking disney movie. I experienced these animals like many people where I grew up- through living around them, eating them, loving them and they informed out narratives and mythologies of ourselves. When I tell the story of my dad and deer and someone says "Oh no, dad killed Bambi" I just look at them because it's like- no. Dad killed a deer. And I didn't watch Bambi first and then learn what deer were and then see a dead one and think of Bambi. I have still never seen Bambi. It's like people's first experience with animals is through film?? Really? Am I making sense?
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