The others in the group recoiled. They thought I was making a value judgment and being mean, but I’m around mental illness all day when I’m working as a therapist so it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. Also, for twelve years I worked in mental hospitals so I don’t have any beef with mental illness. Sometimes it’s not wrong at all.

Here’s a shortlist of people who suffered from severe mental illness and still made significant contributions to humanity:

Ezra Pound
Sylvia Plath
Beethoven
Kurt Cobain
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda
Ernest Hemingway
Vincent Van Gogh
Virginia Woolf

These folks gave great gifts to the world with their significantly different ways of perceiving. They were able to step outside the mainstream long enough to nurture their own uniqueness.

In this culture, we are sold an image of what constitutes sanity that is extremely superficial and soul-less. The healthy person is supposed to be robotically “happy” all the time, constantly productive and striving toward material success – outwardly focused, extroverted, socially slick, and looking the way we’re all are aware we’re supposed to look. If your nature is different than this, something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

People who are, say, sensitive, isolative, and introspective, are often are led to believe they are defective in some way. I meet people all the time who think there is something wrong with them when the only thing wrong is not accepting their own humanity.

I’m not trying to suggest that having a mental illness is not a painful way to live, nor am I of the school that romanticizes it, like the filmmakers of the 60’s who tried to convince us that the people inside the asylum were sane and those outside were crazy – that’s just not true. There are states of consciousness that do not allow one to adequately care for oneself, have loving relationships, or enjoy one’s life, and if that is the case, psychotherapy can help.

Why stigmatize people who have mental illness as any worse than people with physical illness? I say embrace the unique emanation that is you, and reject the constant pressure to be like Tony Robbins or Cameron Diaz. Plenty of people have already got that down. Maybe we need another introspective soulful poet, or a wildly flamboyant fiction writer. We need people with out-of-the-mainstream views. If the pain of the way you are is too much, get help. But we surely wouldn’t want to make you sane.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

2) Writing as a Spiritual Practice was the name of a workshop I once attended. The leader was a Zen nun with a severe grey crewcut and three-hour-a-day habit which she executed whether she felt like it or not, unlike me. When you write about painful material from the past, she taught us, the psychological issue will be fully resolved when the piece is complete.

3) “The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man,” Patti Smith rants on Easter.

4) Another seminar I attended, this one called River Stories, co-led by Kirsten Linklater, originator of the famed voice method, and Carol Gilligan, the distinguished Harvard psychologist, was attended by forty female actors and me. As one of the exercises, we wrote a song, a poem, a dialog, and a scene for four poignant moments of our lives. After I performed for the group my vignettes that had been transformed into ‘art,’ I felt better about my life than ever before. By that time I’d acquired a long resume I could’ve been proud of, but it meant nothing to me because I’d never planned on a corporate career nor did I value it. Creating stories, transforming the garbage into something worth sharing; I acknowledged for the first time the bravery of one little life.

5) “I don’t know why to finish my book,” I struggled. “Metaphysically it makes no difference if I finish it or not.” Andy Couturier, writing midwife and decent person extraordinaire, raised his hands to his heart in the namaste gesture, then widened his arms, palms up, out into the world, bringing tears to my eyes.

6) After eight years, I’ve finished my book. I apologize in advance if it adds to the pollution of the world. Personally I found that working with life events and turning them into fiction, fiction with its arc and mythic aspiration, liberated me from the quiet cell those emotions had entrapped me in for years. When the book was finished I could move on, and not a day before. Suddenly, the past no longer owned the best days of my life; now it was now; the best days are the present. Freedom, it spelled freedom. So I have learned: do your art; create your thing; write your book. It’s some of the best therapy in the world. Then widen your arms and let it spread out, offering a tear to the worldwide heart.

© 2009 Catherine Auman

He looked up to see her examining his food.  “Got to keep my strength up,” he said, squeezing a lime over the cukes.

Geno was one of the most handsome men she had ever laid eyes on, even here at the ashram, where she was becoming rather immune to the whole issue.  He stood at well over six feet with a body that spoke to years in the gym, and his hazel eyes and tanned skin glowed with vitality and health.

Early in the group, he had informed everyone that he had a partner back in Italy and was therefore off limits, although he was available to do exercises with.  Many women had shared a ping of disappointment.  This morning, Laurel and Geno had chosen to do the sensual massage assignment together.  When it was her turn to be the giver, she had watched in amazement as he didn’t even flinch when she neared the vicinity where most men take notice.  His touch on her was rough and insensitive, not at all in tune with her response or lack of it, sleepy and unaware.  He got somewhat excused for this by his otherworldly good looks, but not completely.

She hadn’t told him how unsatisfying it had been.  In true good girl fashion she had told him it had been “nice.”  Someone taught her once that “nice” stands for “Nothing In me Cares Enough about you (to tell you the truth),” and she supposed that was true.  It was not an unpleasant diversion, however, to sit at his table and gaze at that face.  And that body.

“What’s your girlfriend in Italy like?” she asked.

“She is a great and famous teacher of tantra,” he said. “Right now she is giving a seminar in Tuscany.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking back to his touch devoid of sensuality. “You must be learning a lot about tantra from her?”

“Oh yes,” he said.  “She’s an amazing woman.”

“Then why are you here, studying tantra several thousand miles away from her?”

“She says I need to learn more about being on my own, and she is right.  I want to lose my tendency of codependency.”

That buzz word, I hate it, Laurel thought.  “What exactly does that mean anyway?  It seems to me it’s a way to put down people who value being in a relationship over being alone.”

“Here, I hope to deepen my aloneness,” he said, “and then take it back to be with her.  In a more authentic way.”  He moved the tray with its mound of peelings and rinds to the other side of the table, and poised his spoon over the melon.

“A relationship is like climbing a great mountain,” he continued.  “It is a journey that is difficult and long and takes much preparation, much training.  It is the only thing in life that is of value.”  He dipped his spoon into the watery red fruit and took a bite.  “I don’t understand these men who come here just to sleep with any woman.  It shocks me; I don’t understand it.  It has no……,”  he scratched his head.  “Ah, my English is so bad.  What is the word?”  His eyes turned up into the back of his skull, searching his memory banks for an Italiano-Inglese dictionary.

“Rispettare….no?…No!”  Laurel shook her head.  She certainly had no idea.

“Decoro….stima….Ah, ah, I must know.”  He was frantically looking around the crowded lunch area, for what she couldn’t fathom.  “Ah!”  and he sped off over in the direction of the fountain.

Suddenly Laurel found herself sitting alone, not really understanding what had happened.  She shrugged it off to just another strange ashram occurrence.  First she was having lunch with a gorgeous Italian raw foodist, and abruptly she wasn’t.  She reached over and took a dripping bite of his watermelon, then replaced the spoon.

Geno finally reappeared holding a tattered book in his left hand.  He leafed through the pages, shaking his head and muttering.
“Ah hah!”  he trumpeted.  “Nobility!  That’s the word.  Nobility.  It has no nobility.  That’s it.  To sleep with so many women has no nobility.”  He got up and left the table to return the book.

© 2009 Catherine Auman

Wikipedia describes her as “a Belgian-French explorer, anarchist, spiritualist, Buddhist and writer, most known for her visit to Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was forbidden to foreigners.”  Check out this cheeky bio at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE3D61338F933A25752C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

Marie Howe
Patti Smith
W B Yeats
Kim Addonizio
Diane di Prima
Carolyn Kizer
Anne Sexton
Gary Snyder
John Ashberry
James Wright