Queen of Peaches

Late in the summer of 2010, I found myself participating in a two-day silent Zen meditation retreat.

The temple that I belong to periodically hosts silent retreats of varying length—typically either two-day shorties or five-day intensives. This was one of the shorties, and I’d signed up to attend, thinking that it would be a decent way to refresh my practice in the midst of all the other things I had going on in my life at that point. There was my 40-hour-a-week day job, a new band, and a burgeoning interest in developing, beyond mere meditation, my psychic abilities.

I’d recently just completed a five-week course where I learned some basic techniques for psychic development. These techniques included getting energetically grounded, clearing out the layers of my aura, understanding and working with my chakras, creating and destroying energetic constructs, and—the one that everyone in my class was most excited about—manifesting objects and circumstances in my life.

So, though I’d been regularly sitting in meditation since 2007 and had even taken formal precepts as a Zen Buddhist practitioner in the summer of 2009, I now had this host of other techniques I was learning to work with. The two approaches didn’t necessarily conflict, but they didn’t necessarily 100% synch up with each other either.

Zen meditation retreats can be brutal. Not in the sense of Zen masters beating you with sticks or depriving you of food and water and sleep or anything like that. Just in the sense that…you’re left alone with your own mind for hours and hours at a time. The lack of distraction can be really beautiful when you’re able to sink into it, but it can also be really punishing if you find yourself in a negative mind loop for any reason. The weekend of that retreat, I happened to trip into a negative mind loop and just couldn’t get myself out of it.

Armed with my new roster of psychic meditation techniques, though, I thought I might as well try to switch my approach. I figured if I was going to be stuck sitting in lotus position on my mat and cushion anyway, at least I could use all that quiet time to try to transform the thoughts that were making me feel bad about myself. So I thought, hmm, let me try one of these manifestation techniques I just learned about.

And so I walked myself through the steps of creating a thoughtform that I would release with the intention that that thoughtform would eventually come back to me (hopefully) as an actual, physical object in the real world. One of the many things that often made me feel down on myself was my lack of skill with money, and my tendency to carry more credit card debt than I would have liked. So, I began to think, how can I create a thoughtform for enough money to pay off the remaining debt that was sitting on my credit card?

And in the process of creating the thoughtform, I realized I had to ask myself, if I had the money to cover that debt, would I actually give it to myself? Like, if I, as some hypothetical third-person construct, were to ask myself—the true me, the inner me—for that specific sum of money, would I be willing and able to give myself, with kindness and generosity, the amount of money that I needed? And I realized that, sadly, no, I wouldn’t. Through whatever trip of bad self-esteem I was on, I was convinced that I wouldn’t have enough compassion to get my own self out of debt if I somehow actually had the immediate means to do so.

Obviously, this left me feeling profoundly bad! And once I started feeling bad, self-flagellating over my perceived lack of money sense, it wasn’t long before I started to feel like a straight-up bad person on top of it, thinking about how much, under my perky exterior, I secretly loathed myself, how despite all my highfalutin ideas about being a virtuous meditator and whatnot, I was actually a crummy person full of self-hatred. And if I hated myself that much, then, hoo boy, my logic went, I was probably not a very nice person to everyone around me as well. Shit upon shit!

So, after quite some time dragging myself mentally and emotionally through the mud (while outwardly sitting quietly in lotus posture, ostensibly tracking my ingoing and outgoing breaths over the course of several 30-minute sessions), I thought, OK, let’s back this up and try again with something easier, something that won’t make me feel so completely horrible about myself. So I thought, when I get out of this retreat and head home at the end of the weekend, I just want a cupcake. Pulling a little bit of sugary comfort out of thin air felt both achievable and necessary. Crucially, however, since I am an absurd overachiever in all things, as I was going through the mental/energetic techniques to create the thoughtform, I processed it with the intention that I would manifest “the perfect cupcake.”

In my innocence, I was simply conceiving of the perfect cupcake aesthetically. I wanted a cupcake that would be gorgeously crafted, with the ideal proportions of frosting to cake, in an inventive flavor combination, decorated beautifully and lovingly, like something out of a Zooey Deschanel movie.

And so, that’s where I left it. The retreat eventually ended, and though I didn’t feel that much better about myself at its conclusion, at least I was free to go home and zone out a bit.

But first! The bass player/principal songwriter/covocalist in my band had wanted to meet up with me after the retreat to hand off a burned CD with some new demos on it.

Even though I was fairly exhausted and wasn’t in the best mood of all time, thanks to all the self-flagellation I’d been putting myself through over the past few days, I showed up at the restaurant we’d chosen, which was about halfway between the temple and my apartment.

I remember sitting down at the table and saying something to the effect of, “I don’t even know why I’m here right now.” Which probably sounded rude and dismissive, when in fact it was an expression of self-hatred. As in, “why would you need to see me right now, don’t you know that I am garbage, why am I even in the band, who would ever need or want my horrible, ill-informed opinions about anything, much less anything as sacred and important as music?”

He just kindly told me about the handful of new songs that he’d recorded at home with his four-track Fostex, described how he thought I could fill them out with some backing vocals and/or harmony lines in a couple places, and told me he’d e-mail me the lyric sheets subsequently.

I went on my not-so-merry way back to my apartment. No cupcakes fell out of the sky that day, or that week, or that month. Stupid manifestation technique. I couldn’t even seem to get that right.

Time passed. My attitude regained equilibrium. Life was good. Over the course of the next few months I took a trip to Spokane to visit some dear friends who’d just had their first child. I got on an Edith Wharton kick after reading The House of Mirth for the first time. I signed up for a yearlong training program to formally develop my own clairvoyance at the school where I’d taken my first psychic meditation class. I reached the end of my second year as a volunteer on the advisory committee at the Buddhist temple. The band continued to play gigs, including a monthly residency at a tiny club in a slightly out-of-the-way part of Chicago, and we decided to self-record and self-release a full-length album.

I’d wanted to be in a band for so long. I grew up enthralled with my dad’s life as a musician and desperately missed that world. For better or worse, my father always basically treated me like an adult, even when I was very small, and there was nothing I loved more than being allowed to hang out with him and his musician friends while they talked shop, rehearsed, or listened to music together. I struggled for years to find my own musical comrades, and I was overjoyed when I met the bass player through a mutual friend and he told me that he’d been wanting to add female harmonies to his songs and wondered if I might want to join the new band that he was putting together.

And though I struggled with low self-esteem about it, perversely feeling like this was maybe too good to be true and living in fear that he and the guitar player and drummer would all soon realize what a horrible mistake it was to have invited me to be in the band, at the bottom of it all, I was thrilled to be back among what I felt were my people—the show folk. Playing music was a big part of it, sure, of course, but it was also the kinship, the agreed-upon acknowledgment that we were all chasing a lifestyle at odds with regular, respectable society (what with all the rehearsals and gigs in crummy shitholes, the specialized vocabulary, the time sacrificed on nights and weekends when other people are usually hanging out and relaxing).

And so, sitting in the car for hours after rehearsal with the bass player, talking about music and books and anything and everything else, felt like this huge, triumphant validation that I’d finally ended up in the kind of place, in the kind of life, I’d so desperately been looking for. Not only was I finally in a great-sounding rock band after years of failing to get any traction in other musical scenes in the city, but I’d also made the kind of forever-friend I hadn’t made since my days performing in musical theater as a teenager.

But in the same way that, during the previous year’s meditation retreat, I was so distracted by my inner monologue that I was incapable of enjoying what was happening right in front of me—namely, an opportunity to commune in silence with my fellow practitioners in a peaceful, supportive urban Zen temple—I was so myopically focused on my own agenda for joining the band that I didn’t realize that, over the course of the past year, the bass player had fallen in love with me. And whoops, whaddya know, I’d actually fallen in love with him too.

After we played an eerily perfectly timed mini-tour as a duo in Lawrence, Kansas, we realized we were going to have to contend with our obvious attraction to each other. It wasn’t long after that that the truth finally had to come out. Feelings were aired, declarations were made. Chronologies were compared: “When did you know?” “When did you know?” Life felt like it jumped onto a new and exciting track.

Our band’s next gig was actually the final date of our monthly residency. We’d had the third Thursday time slot for about a year and a half, and it was time to move on. I had nothing but gratitude for the bar’s gracious hospitality for our weird little band and our weird little group of fans. Month after month, it had been a reliable place for me to regain my confidence as a performer.

The night of that final show, I’d had to race to the bar from an event at my psychic school, and I rolled up in a cab, beaming, in love with my crazy life, ready to sound check. The rest of the guys had set up their gear, and the bass player was waiting near the stage for me. “Oh, I got this for you,” he said casually, pulling a small plastic container out of his bag. It was a vegan, gluten-free cupcake that he’d picked up at Whole Foods on his way to the show that night.

And in that context—newly in love, celebrating the end of a great residency with a great band, sparkling with the hard-won ability to start to see things psychically rather than just focusing on the darkness inside my own headspace—I’d finally manifested the perfect cupcake.