The Rain in Spain is Falling on our Camper

The Rain in Spain is Falling on our Camper 
About the Manosphere, an AA meeting, and a Swami 

Maybe because of the rain and the cold and the gray, I woke in one of those moods. 

I am a great believer in repeating what works, and letting go of what doesn’t. 
If I can.
I try to begin my day with positive alignment. If I can.
Today, things felt harder and I’m not sure if I can.

Last Saturday, I was in Madrid, preparing for a weekend workshop. I was staying in a sweet, cozy apartment in the center of the city, the same place where the workshop would be, and woke early, excited. My usual morning ritual: wake, pee, register I’m still alive. That the madness of the world hadn’t come too close. Not yet. 

Coffee, morning writing, and getting the space ready to teach.

Last week I wrote about losing my voice a few days before and being apprehensive about how it would impact the workshop. I’m happy to say it all went well. One of the students, a young man from Brazil with a gorgeous, healthy voice, became my mouthpiece when I needed to demonstrate tone and get the group sounding with hums, moving scales, gibberish and more. The work I teach is good for the voice, and mine came back as the weekend went on. A week later, I’ve been singing again. Gosh, how I’ve needed to sing. 

This post is a hopscotch. My head is bursting with too many threads and I want to try to follow them––these threads weaving the carpet of my mind today.

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a writer from Iran. One Friday evening she drove us to a writing group. Her car was smooth and fancy. She’d built a startup in the US, sold it well, and would never, so she told me, have to work again. Could devote the rest of her life to her family and her writing. Her memoir was about the 1979 change of regime in Iran. She was a young girl then and lost both her parents.

“I hope Trump attacks Iran,” she said.

“No you don’t,” I answered. I’m usually reticent, but I doubted (even before anything had begun) that Trump attacking Iran wouldn’t bring the regime change she hoped for. I have not had contacted with her since the war started. Who knows what narrative she’s living inside now. 

Last night I watched the Netflix documentary about the Manosphere. I’d heard some of this before, but the depth and detail were new to me. The documentary maker’s shocked expression more than mirrored my own. The gut punch of the connections: to Trump, to Epstein, to the desperation of so many young men gravitating towards this world, and what feels yet another Ponzi scheme. A more dangerous one. 

The filmmaker looked into the early years of these figures and found hard, traumatic beginnings. Shadows never addressed. So much easier for them to choose a simpler solution, a brutal answer: women want to be dominated; men get nothing without forcing and pushing. The Alpha male that Trump personifies. No wonder he won with so much support from this crowd. All of it performance, all of it content, a way of never, ever having to feel what’s underneath. 

Shadow. That stuff that never goes away, fermenting in the unconscious. In my world, I urge people to sing, to dance, to lament, to write––so it doesn’t do all this harm, to ourselves and to the world. 

A few days before the Madrid workshop, I woke with no voice––a mixture of the end of a cold and the stress of the Trump world pressing in, and my own uncertainty. I don’t teach as often as I once did and the thought of leading a group with a weakened voice added its own dread. 

I joined some lovely women from my online AA group to a live meeting nearby. The topic was trust, giving ourselves over to a power greater than our frightened selves. I was drowning that morning, drowning in my dark shame. The stuff I rarely show people. The stuff I grew up pretending wasn’t there. The stuff I’d been healing from all these years.

I felt safe in that group and dared show them how I actually felt. I shared the powerlessness, that old familiar sense that I am somehow responsible for getting the world in a better direction, and the particular anguish of failing. To quote Hamlet. To be or not to be. Am I able to continue? Do I even want to? They looked at me with so much love that my darkness began to lift. 

It’s Saturday morning again. No workshop to teach, just me and my morning writing routine, which includes joining an hour of a writer’s salon from London. I sat down to journal, and thought about purpose, and meaning, and how different I mostly feel from what I read and see around me (certainly in that Netflix documentary). Should I continue writing, when it at times feels so hard? When I’d rather move––walk, dance, swim, sing and enjoy my golden years––anything but dig deep into the shadow. 

At the start of the salon today, they read words from James Clear: The modern world is optimized for convenience, not improvement. The body and mind only grow when placed under a stimulus. It rarely works out well if you have a life where you do not push yourself.

Okay, I thought. Push yourself. You’ll never get a word written if you don’t.

And then I opened Substack and read the latest post from Jeanette Winterson, one of my heroes. She was writing about spring, about the Tao––the way––about flow. About how exhausted we get from all the forcing. ‘That great feeling you get when you are in harmony with what you are doing. We live in a complicated world where most of the day is an act of force… the best thing to do each morning is to read your own energy…’

The complete opposite of James Clear. And both true.

In the Alexander work, we combine both. To become aware of our tension and allow that energy to move rather than force through it. There’s a difference between pushing and aligning. Between brute force and finding the current. 

Between faking reality and letting what’s really true come forth. 

I think of the Ashram where I lived in my twenties. The swami saw me. I waitressed for money in the mornings, came back to the Ashram for lunch, and in the afternoons my Seva (work we have to do) was to write in my little room. Three hours on uninterrupted writing. (Before internet, how much easier that was.) More than permission, it was a set order, and that worked beautifully. My other Seva was cutting vegetables before dinner. I loved that combination: three solid hours writing, then joining the others, chanting, chopping and sorting all the colorful veggies. I still love cutting vegetables for dinner. In many ways, I wish I were still living near that loving swami who held and protected me from the worst side of myself––and in that time before internet.

Perhaps that’s what connects all these threads: the Iranian writer, hoping for bombs to do some kind of magic, the young men in the Manosphere, building an armor of muscle and dominance over wounds never named or seen, and me, in that AA meeting, revealing my shadow and learning it didn’t destroy me, that love was waiting on the other side, that even without my solid voice, I was still able to inspire and encourage, and the swami, who gave me a room and the courage to write in it.

Maybe we don’t need someone to give us permission. But it sure helps to be loved when we reveal a bit of our dark shadow.

If only the people with their hands on the levers of the world could stop for a moment. Feel the shadow inside them. Express it in other ways than violence. Let someone look upon them with empathy and deep understanding. 

Maybe we wouldn’t need these wars and angst and insanity. Maybe we could as a species grow up.

In the meantime, here I am in the rain in Spain, snuggled warmly in our camper. Still searching. Still trying to understand. Shifting, even for a moment, from fear into love.