Today's guest is Mag Dimond, author of Bowing to Elephants, which recently won Best Indie Biographies & Memoirs from Kirkus). Her book has been compared to EAT PRAY LOVE in professional reviews and has received accolades from many thought leaders in the mindfulness space. Mag joined me today to talk about using mindfulness practice to help ease your writing experience during the pandemic.
Mindy: You are the author of Bowing to Elephants, which is a bit of a memoir and also a tale of your travels as well as some teaching advice about mindfulness. So if you could talk a little bit about the book Bowing to Elephants, that would be great.
Mag: It started out as a collection of travel essays. That's where I thought I was going with it because I had traveled so much and I had great, good records of my experiences. I thought it'd be really fun to compile a whole lot of travel essays. I picked out some of my favorites and, and I started going with it and I was also part of a writing support group. As I got into it, I realized that my family were showing up in my mind and asking to be part of the, of the adventure and I realized it had to be a story about both my evolution through childhood and into adulthood. Looking at the through lines of, from childhood into what I did as an adult, which was just obsessively travel. And the mindfulness practice came about relatively late in life when I was living in Northern New Mexico, uh, in the early nineties when I was suffering greatly from all levels of suffering, from physical to emotional. Somebody pointed the way to meditation and I decided to give it a shot and once I started doing it, I realized I'd found a home for myself. I began to see what everyone would say about meditation, which is give it a chance and it'll help you ease the suffering in your life.
Mindy: I think especially right now we're all dealing with the Corona virus and with quarantine and a lot of people have had their lives turned upside down in very real financial ways, but also emotionally and mentally. People that are accustomed to being out in public or at least in an office are now at home working from home and only seeing the same people every day, or possibly no one every day. For a lot of people, that's been really difficult. Myself, I already worked from home, so there hasn't been as difficult of a transition for me, but I do know quite a few people and especially writers who are struggling in this time period to produce. So can you talk a little bit about mindfulness practice in terms of applying it to this particular time that we're in, and some of the mental and emotional stresses that we're all under?
Mag: I was alone. I lived in San Francisco, in a house by myself, and I am a senior citizen person. You know, I'm 75 and I realized I couldn't, I couldn't bear the isolation. I moved to the countryside to live with my daughter, but I'd been meditating every day. That's my habit anyway. But I've been stepping it up and doing more. Once you have a meditation practice, you begin to understand some, some sort of serious truths about life, which is that everything is always changing. You know, your mind states always changing your emotional states always changing. There's little that you can grab a hold of. But my main practice within Buddhism is loving kindness. You know, the Buddha taught many different practices. But uh, in loving kindness you work at giving loving kindness to yourself to start with and then to other beings in your life, some close to you and so on.
Mag: And you kind of expand it outward so that ultimately you're offering loving kindness to, to all no matter where they are. And you know, no matter what they do or how they look. This was one of the really core practices of the Buddha because he believed that all humans were part of the same family. I think in this time and especially when we think also about this time politically, we're all very aware of being so fractured. It too is painful. If we can step back and see that we all are really looking for the same kinds of things in life, whether we live in Miami Beach, Florida or New York City or Albuquerque, New Mexico, we all, all humans really are looking for their safety. They're looking for love, they're looking for peace. When you get in inside yourself and you practice this loving kindness, it then affects how you cast your gaze outward. When you think of other people, it really changes how you see other people.
Mindy: A lot of what you're saying makes sense to me too in terms of self care, which is so important right now. You, you said that you have to practice loving kindness first upon yourself, and this is true because you have to be on solid ground in order to be able to support others and I think that's something that a lot of us forget in this particular time. I just did an interview. The host asked me if I had any advice for my readers at home or writers at home. And I told them, you know, it's okay to feel bad right now because I'm seeing so many posts about people that are like, Oh, we made this window art, or we did this, or we made a cupboard for our local community and all of these things. And those are wonderful things and if you're capable of doing those things right now, go for it. But I know plenty of people that look at that and it makes them feel badly about themselves and they think, you know, I'm just like bummed out right now and I can't really hardly make myself do anything. How can I go help other people? So I do think that first step of practicing loving kindness on yourself is very critical.
Mag: The Buddha said there's no one more deserving of love than yourself. And then I heard the Dalai Lama in a teaching once. The theme of his talk was about bringing peace into the world. But he said very clearly that you can't bring peace into the world until you bring it into yourself first. That's really the ground, and that's really the foundation where you start is with yourself. I grew up with a mother who didn't know how to love me and didn't know how to recognize who I was. I was searching for love for a long, long, time, various different ways, but always outside myself or someone outside of myself to love me, and to make me feel like I was significant. And this happens to a lot of kids who grow up with alcoholic parents. There's this incredible hunger for love and there's the lack of understanding that it really does start with yourself.
Mag: And I had a grandmother who I talk about in the book quite a bit, who was like my fairy godmother in a way. And she gave me lots of love and lots of respect and recognition. She was Buddhist without even knowing it. I mean, she was just an amazing woman and she loved herself, but she loved everybody else. She had an across the board acceptance of all humans, you know? And, and I noticed that as I was growing up about her and I thought that that was a marvelous way to live, but it started with this deep respect she had for her own self and the life that she had lived.
Mindy: And that's critical and too many of us don't have that. I think today, especially with social media, everyone is putting their best self forward. You're supposed to put your best self forward, but we're really just putting our best selfies and that's what everyone is seeing. They're seeing our airbrushed lives and I personally don't participate in that. When I post pictures, social media, it's usually my cats or something going on with other people. I am not fond of advertising my own self as a commodity. I've always been very upfront about my own struggles with depression and anxiety and I don't think that, uh, me pretending like everything is great and I'm fine and I woke up looking like this is going to do anyone any good at all. There's no positivity in that for me.
Mag: It saddens me to see kind of indiscriminant use of the social media. Then when I had to work on doing publicity for the book, I was being led in the direction of using social media and it was a learning curve for me. It was really hard because I just, I didn't feel like I wanted to be part of this community of people that's shouting out to everybody, you know, look at me, look at me. I'm great. I'm great. I think I'm a pretty interesting person. I mean I believe I'm a pretty interesting person and thanks to the trajectory that the book has taken with its acceptance and admiration that I have a lot of confidence in the fact that I've written a really good book. But you do have to bite the bullet and do the dance there on social media. You know, and I've lived long enough to remember the days when writers published books. The only thing they did to publicize them was to go out and do readings in bookstores. That was it. It was just a lot simpler. And now you have to create advertisements for yourself. I don't do it myself. I pay somebody who is also sort of an old friend and somebody I really respect who, who likes to do this kind of work and I pay him to figure it out.
Mindy: When it comes to social media, I am of course not above using it to market myself, but I'm always trying to be honest as much as possible. Um, I'm just not someone that's going to set off glitter cannons or do too much look at me. It's just not who I am. It feels disingenuous and so I'm not going to participate.
Mindy: Let's talk about mindfulness practice for writers because as I said before, I know a lot of writers who are at home and struggling right now to find the inspiration or the positivity to sit down and write. Writing is never easy. No one should ever make the mistake of thinking that it is. It takes a certain type of mental space and mental ingenuity to be able to begin to write and to continue. And right now a lot of writers that I know are at home and struggling because now they've got the time, but they're struggling to find the mental space to make that happen. So do you have any tips on mindfulness specifically for writers?
Mag: I can give you maybe an example from myself. I suffer from exactly what you're talking about too. When I first came away to live in this new environment, uh, to create this new little mini life for myself, I thought I was going to get all this writing done and I realized that my heart was sort of felt broken and I, and I didn't know what. I started to write and it, you know, it didn't go anywhere. And I felt horrified. One of the ways that one pays attention to one's state of being, the idea is calming your mind and calming your whole system. You notice how things are in your body. For instance, you notice how, and you can do what they call body scans. You can go from, you know, head to toe and go slowly and kind of just note all of that and note if there's anything unusual going on in any part of your body.
Mag: And so that if you do that really calmly and slowly, it takes maybe about half an hour. The other thing that that happens in practice, you can devote a session to paying attention to your thoughts, watching your, how your thoughts come into your mind, whether it's about wanting to have something special to eat or being annoyed, any number of things. But you do notice the coming and going of thoughts and how it's all very, it's like clouds floating through the sky, right? You realize first of all, that they're very repetitive and some of them are very silly. I mean they're really ridiculous thoughts. They're not anything you want to own. I have a mentor who, he was a Buddhist also, and when I was having trouble with the book, he said, Mag, don't believe your thoughts. Don't believe what your mind is telling you. It's nonsense. Go ahead.
Mag: I was sitting with addressing my body. You know, the parts of my body and I was feeling where I was all constricted and sad and I realized that I had this really deep sadness about what's going on really around the world. I really was feeling it more in the sense of I'm part of this really global horror. And I just acknowledged that I felt that way. You know, I didn't try to make that feeling go away. I just, the thing in Buddhism is that you allow it to be there and as you make space for it, it actually softens. As I did that I realized that what I wanted to do was write a piece for my website about my feelings about the pandemic right now. And I was able to go then sit down and do it. It wasn't a strain.
Mag: I sat down, I started with one thought, something I'd heard in a little, uh, talk. And it's about the four kinds of love. You know, there's the familial love and then there's friendship and then there's this, and then there's sort of what they call universal love. And I love this. I held this idea about universal love and I realized that what's happening around the world is that people are manifesting their love for one another in amazing ways. So then I wrote my piece. I found that the entryway into expressing my feelings. So while I was expressing my sadness, feeling of, of the chaos inside me, I was also able to say, Hey, look what's happening around us. The title of the piece is Surrounded by Buddhas and as the pandemic unfolds, you know, so there's all these Buddhas around doing good work. It made me feel really good to realize that. Circling back, I'm trying to really affirm that if I hadn't been able to recognize in my body the level to which I was sad and really be with it and say, Hey, my ideas and emotions are worth sharing.
Mindy: It's very true. You have to have enough conviction that your story matters or that your words matter before you attempt to share them with someone else. The act of writing them down solidifies that, but you have to reach a point mentally where you believe in yourself enough to share them.
Mag: I don't know if you're familiar with the writer, Anne Lamott wrote the famous book Bird by Bird. She is an advocate of writing short things, writing little things. Don't write thinking you're going to write something with meaning, but it's the idea that you keep the muscles in yourself working. I totally agree. I mean, I think if, if you just let go of the idea that you have to write something really smart and brilliant and meaningful, we write what's really important to you. She gave a couple of ideas for how people could jump in and just immediately answer the question like How is life different for you now with this pandemic? How is it different? Everybody can answer that question.
Mindy: I find that awesome. I love it. Why don't you let people know where they can find your book and if you have a website online, if you could let us know about that.
Mag: What I do to tell people where to buy the book order from your independent bookstore. I am not a fan of Amazon, although Amazon is the giant marketer of all things. The book is readily available on Amazon. Of course, but I tell people to go to independent bookstores and there's a website called Indiebound. You can identify the bookstores, independent bookstores in your, in your neighborhood, in your area. So that's a cool thing to tell people about. And, and I think bookstores need to be supported. Now more than ever. My website has a wealth of interesting stuff, including photographs and all my blogs and everything, including the first chapter of the book and this whole gallery of travel photographs that I put in on the website. It's a lovely website if I do say so myself.