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“In our model of misogi, there are only two rules,” said Elliott. “Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die.” I understood the not-dying part, but asked him how he determines if something is hard enough. “We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success—if you do everything right,” he said. “So if you decided you wanted to run a twenty-five-mile trail, and you’re preparing by working up to a twenty-mile training run and doing thirty-five or forty miles a week of running…that’s not a misogi. Your chance of failure is too low. But if you’ve never run more than ten miles, think you could probably run fifteen, but are iffy on whether you could run twenty…then that twenty-five miles is probably a misogi.”
The Comfort Crisis
Michael Easter
The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it. In our solitary longing for some reassurance that we’re behaving okay inside fairly isolated families, personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it.
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr
THE ARTIST AND THE TERRITORY The act of creation is by definition territorial. As the mother-to-be bears her child within her, so the artist or innovator contains her new life. No one can help her give it birth. But neither does she need any help. The mother and the artist are watched over by heaven. Nature's wisdom knows when it's time for the life within to switch from gills to lungs. It knows down to the nanosecond when the first tiny fingernails may appear. When the artist acts hierarchically, she short-circuits the Muse. She insults her and pisses her off. The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her. When the artist works territorially, she reveres heaven. She aligns herself with the mysterious forces that power the universe and that seek, through her, to bring forth new life. By doing her work for its own sake, she sets herself at the service of these forces. Remember, as artists we don't know diddly. We're winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. It's blasphemy and sacrilege. Instead let's ask ourselves like that new mother: What do I feel growing inside me? Let me bring that forth, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
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