I had a group of students a few years ago who’d studied with me many times. I went around the room and said to them, “Well, what do you need now?” And they started in: “Well, you know, I haven’t been writing because my wife is such and such and my life is such and such.” I looked at them and said, “You know what to do, pick up a pen and write.” And their faces lit up and they said, “Oh, okay.” And I said, “Wait a minute. You traveled all the way from Chicago, from Boston, Kentucky, L.A., you’ve taken three other seminars with me. You already know this.” They said, “Yeah, but we needed to hear it again.” I was aghast. I said, “You came all the way here just to hear it?” They said yes. Something so simple and obvious, but we keep missing it. We need to discover it over and over. I remember this particular person I’m thinking of, his face was just glowing after I said it again, because he had thought this time it wouldn’t work, that this time there was really a problem big enough—and he was believing it—that it was so solid he could not write. He was so relieved to come back to this direct phrase: shut up and write. We have tremendously strong monkey minds that are very creative and always thinking of new reasons why we can’t write. Don’t believe your excuses.
Q: What is monkey mind?
Monkey mind is actually a Buddhist term. We could also call monkey mind the editor or the critic. Something that creates busyness to keep us away from our true heart. Our whole culture is built on busyness. And that’s why we’re so unhappy. But we love busyness. We have to understand it. There’s busyness, there’s monkey mind, and then there’s our true heart. What does our true heart want? We have to give it at least 50 percent. Otherwise we fill our whole life with busyness. I have to do this, I’m going here, I’m making that. Daily life is very seductive. Weeks go by and we forget who we are.
Q: What about talent?
I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you. I see many students who come to me who can naturally write beautifully. You can’t believe it—the first time they pick up a pen, the rest of my students’ mouths hang open. But sometimes it’s too easy for them, so these people don’t believe that what they wrote was good. Sometimes it just doesn’t mean that much to them. But someone I see sitting in the corner of the room, who struggles the whole time, who seems a little nerdy, a little bland—ah, but three years later the person is still showing up. After a while, this writer’s little coal is beginning to glow. That’s wonderful.
I never thought of myself as talented. No one ever told me I had any talent. Anytime I went to a palm reader, an astrologer, I was told I should be an accountant. So it was my effort, my determination, that made new lines in my palm. I guess I’ve always believed in human effort. Human effort is not just the hard physical work of putting your shoulder to the grindstone. What I’m talking about is work that wakes us up. We all have that ability within us. Talent has nothing to do with waking up. I’m talking about being aware and mindful as a writer. Knowing the names of trees and plants, noticing the sun and how it’s hitting the chrome on a car. That comes with practice. It’s pretty nice to be talented. If you are, enjoy, but it won’t take you that far. Work takes you a lot further.
Q: How is writing affected by Zen practice?
Writing has always been connected with my Zen practice and with mindfulness and meditation. Art for art’s sake never interested me, because I’ve seen many unhappy artists whose egos are very much solidifed. In this case the practice of art engenders suffering. But if you know you have nothingness at your back, emptiness, you can’t crystallize as easily. For me, writing is always connected with that kind of emptiness. You can create a word because there was no word there before. There was a blank page. If everything was filled, there’d be nothing you could step into. So I guess art, creativity, without meditation practice doesn’t interest me. Zen has always been at my back.
Q: What about benefiting others with your writing?
I don’t think that much of self-expression. I am definitely writing to benefit other people. But it’s tricky because I don’t want to please other people. I want to be able to say the truth, but I don’t say it for myself anymore. I think when I was a poet I wrote a lot of stories. There was definitely some self-expression in there and my need to feel that I could say anything. I used a lot of four-letter words in my poems, kind of stick-my-tongue-out-at-everybody—see, I can do whatever I want. Now I’m much more interested in communicating. How do I communicate through language, black words on a white page, to other people all over the country, so that I can hopefully hand some of my clarity, when I have it, to someone else? So I don’t care that much about self-expression anymore, though that might be a good beginning, a way to learn to assert yourself. Now when I’m writing and all of me is doing it, I’m out of the way, not a hindrance. Writing does writing. Instead of self-expression, it’s a wonderful letting go of Natalie Goldberg. I get to go beyond myself. I think if I were just doing self-expression, I could sit down and fill a journal and say, “I’m so happy today, I fell in love, I love my boyfriend so much, he’s so cute,” and someone else would read it and be bored. To learn to communicate beyond ourselves we have to let go of our immediate expression and go deeper, honor the signifcance of details, touch things as they are.
Q: What is the difference between meditation and writing practice?
When I’m sitting, the object is to let go of thoughts and anchor my mind with my breath in the present moment. But, of course, it’s not so easy. When you sit a lot, you see that those thoughts are sticky and they keep coming back. In writing practice, you grab these thoughts and write them down, and by writing them down, you go on to the next one and you keep moving through them. You are anchoring your mind with your pen. Your thoughts become a quick stream you’re sitting in. So they’re not quite as sticky. In a sense, writing practice is a more expedient way of settling into a quiet place. I get to run through the thoughts and then let them go; whereas when I sit, there’s no place to spit them out and they take a long time to digest. They just hang around, roll around in the mouth of my mind. So it’s a different process. It’s a parallel process. Writing is my deepest Zen practice.
The most important thing I’ve learned through sitting and writing is that thoughts are not real, they’re not solid. That we pay too much attention to them. That there’s tremendous freedom in letting go of them. But that’s easier said than done, because thoughts connect with emotions and you hook up a story and a past and memories, and in three minutes you’re psychotic. But if you can catch them at the root, at the simple level of the thought first arising, it’s very helpful. For instance, I’ll have an argument with my lover and I’ll believe in my point of view. Then sometimes grace comes along and I’ll hear this little voice in me say, “Nat, it’s just your position, it doesn’t really mean anything, let it go.” And wow, does that create space.
Whatever is in front of you is your life, so please take care of it. I don’t sit in the zendo trying to think what to write and then run to my notebook and try to capture what I thought. Each place is a different experience. Playing music is a step removed from the moment in the zendo, but it’s not a step removed from actually blowing that clarinet. That’s that moment. Painting—when I’m painting—it’s not a step removed. And when I’m writing, it’s not a step removed. They are just different mediums with which to meet yourself and the world. Watching your breath, being present with your whole body, is the medium of the zendo. Words are the medium of writing. When your words are alive, they are electric beings—they are not one jot removed or distant from human life. When I’m brushing my teeth, I’m afraid I daydream a lot, but sometimes I’m there brushing my teeth.
Q: Tell us a little about writing a novel.
A novel doesn’t work the way the mind moves. The way I wrote Writing Down the Bones was natural to the way the mind moves. When I wrote the novel Banana Rose, I had to have something in chapter 3, like a brown hat, have meaning in
chapter 33. Now, in our life a brown hat might not always have much meaning. Your car breaks down, it might just be that the car broke down. We have many thoughts. They come and go. No great meaning. But in a novel we have this tremendous need to tell a story, create meaning. So there has to be a structure, a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it’s not obvious. The reader’s mind yearns for meaning. So I had to learn the structure of a novel, which was different from the natural movement of the mind that I’d been studying all along and that writing practice is based on. It was very hard for me. Because of that, I don’t think I’m naturally a novelist. I don’t look for meaning. A novelist would say, “I’m not looking for meaning either.” But things have to fit together. In the end, when you finish reading a novel, you have to feel “ah.” And if it doesn’t work, there’s no “ah,” no settling into a certain rightness or a completeness inside you.
Once I began writing the novel, I was committed. I was willing to do whatever I had to to make the novel work. I never knew I had that kind of effort in me. I would sit at the Harwood Library in Taos and rework things and rework them again. The summer went by. I watched it go through the high windows at the library. And then I saw fall come. I felt as though I were in fourth grade: I’d been left back; everybody else had a summer vacation and I had to finish some composition. I couldn’t believe my determination. I’ll never forget that. That’s the awe I feel. It might not be the greatest novel, but it was my greatest effort. And that effort is actually what gives me—I don’t know if you call it confidence—but my own spine. I really did it the best Natalie could have ever done it at that point in her life, and I’m proud of it. I’ll always love Nell, the main character.
You know, maybe that is my talent. Tremendous determination. In this one area: writing. Not in other areas. For instance, I run around the block once—uh, I don’t want to do it anymore. I stop. Skiing: I fell, oh, I don’t like skiing; I take off my skis. But in writing I have that determination.
Q: Why do you write memoir?
I like it. Memoir is a study of how memory works. It’s analogous to writing practice, to working with the mind. Memory doesn’t remember chronologically A, B, C. I was born in such-and-such a year, I went to this public school, then I did this, then I did that. We remember in flashes. You see a glint off a fork. Boom, you suddenly remember the hot dog you ate at Coney Island twenty years ago. It works in slices. And I love that. And when you write memoir, its structure is more analogous to the way the mind moves than a novel’s is. And I love stories, family stories, where people come from, all kinds of things like that. I was in New York and I met this terrific Zen teacher. She’s quite large and jolly and has a shaved head. Well, we were talking, and it came out that her mother was a beauty queen and she had seven stepfathers. I went wild. Here she is, a strict Zen person, you’d never in a zillion years guess her background. I loved the juxtaposition. I couldn’t stop asking her questions. It’s important for people to spend some time digging into their past in their writing practice because there should be no place that you’re avoiding. If you avoid it in yourself, you’re going to avoid it whatever you write about, and that pollutes the writing. You need to be able to stand up with your life. Accept your mind and your life.
Q: How did writing practice come about?
I discovered this relationship with my mind. I was sitting a lot of zazen in Taos when I was a hippie, and I went up to Colorado in 1976 to study with Allen Ginsberg for six weeks at Naropa Institute in Boulder. He taught the examination of thoughts and writing. And I continued it. I feel as though he was the visionary and I was the worker bee that documented it. He said, “When the mind is shapely, your writing will be shapely.” I did a little retreat by myself before I went to Naropa, and I found an article in the retreat house that he had written in which he talks about polishing the mind. I didn’t understand all of it, but it piqued my interest, and I made a promise to myself that someday I would understand it all. Nobody I’d ever heard talked about the mind when I studied literature in college and grad school.
I started to write and time myself and keep my hand moving. I explored the vast space of what was possible on the page—where my mind traveled, backward, forward, upside down. I had no goal, no product direction. I watched how I thought. I came into some kind of intimate relationship with myself. I was alone. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but it was so compelling that I went deeper and deeper into it. I noticed things: how repetitious the mind can be, how to dive below discursive thinking, how to use the details in front of me to ground myself. I didn’t call it monkey mind then, but I was meeting it. I saw that certain things helped me write and other things didn’t help me write. This timed practice gave me a structure; I wasn’t going to go crazy. Whatever came up, I kept my hand moving, and I stayed there until the time was up. Just as in meditation, whatever comes up while you’re meditating, you keep the structure of the posture until the bell rings.
When I met Katagiri Roshi, he said, “Make writing your practice” at a time when I never listened to anything he said. I was arrogant. So I said, “Oh, that’s ridiculous, Roshi.” And I didn’t pay attention to it because writing seemed antithetical to Zen practice at that time. I thought he was just trying to get rid of me. You know, “Get out of here, Natalie, we don’t want you in the zendo.” I said, “No, I’m going to keep sitting.” But over the years I began to refine my understanding of my writing. I knew I had grasped something powerful and was riding its wild back. Eventually, over many years, I called it writing practice. I began to understand what Katagiri had told me. It was actually in the writing of Writing Down the Bones that it all came together, that a great “ah” occurred. About two years after the book was out, I went to see Roshi. I asked him, “Why did you tell me to make writing my practice?” He looked at me very nonchalantly and said, “Well, you like to write. That’s why I told you.” I said, “You mean that simple?” He said, “You just like to do it.” So way back then he understood where my passion was. If you really want to be a runner but you think you should meditate, make running your practice and go deeply into it at all levels. But he also said it’s pretty good to sit too. So my heart was into writing, but I also sat to keep myself honest. And to somehow develop my back, my spine. You know, my front was all energy. You have to have quiet peace at your back. Otherwise you burn up.
Q: What if someone is afraid of losing control?
To be alive, we have to deal with a loss of control. Falling in love is a loss of control. When we die or someone we love dies, it’s a tremendous loss of control. And what’s nice about writing practice is it’s a measured way to dip yourself into that huge vast emptiness, that loss of control, and then pull yourself out so you can feel safe again. You put down your pen for a while and go take a walk. Then you dip yourself in. Sort of in degrees. That’s really what the East gave to the West. When they gave us meditation practice, they gave us a structure to go into the emptiness of the mind without going berserk. So for anyone who is afraid of losing control: Write with other people. Don’t worry, there are people around you. And we’ll support you. And we’re all in the same boat. Keep your hand moving. Don’t worry.
Q: How do I choose the right topic for a book?
It has to come from a deep place, and it’s not an idea or “topic,” like a school composition. It’s a longing that comes from the bottom of the well. For instance, my body is preparing to write a book that I probably will start soon, but it’s been years in the making. I wasn’t aware of it, but I have been living it. When it dawned on me that I wanted to write about it, for six months it composted in my belly, and I know that soon I’ll start it. I’ll sit down and say, “Go,” but you have to make sure that a book comes from a deep passion or even obsession. Because a book takes a long time to write, and you can’t burn out after you’ve written only ten pages. And it’s not good to start a book and then quit, because you’ll build up a pattern. I know many people who start books and never finish them. So
it’s good to sit with it for a while and let it burn deep. Do a lot of writing practice around it. Make sure you really care enough. Because I’ll tell you, when you start writing a book, you go under for a long time.
Q: What would you say to Natalie when she was working on Writing Down the Bones?
I couldn’t tell her anything. She was who she was. She wouldn’t hear me. For instance, one of the things I’d say now is you don’t realize that getting well-known and being successful can be pretty hard and pretty painful. I could say that. I say that to my students. They don’t want to hear it. They want what they want. Natalie at thirty-six years old wanted to burn through. I don’t know why, but I wanted to be famous. I think I unconsciously thought it would save my life. Of course, it didn’t save my life. But I couldn’t tell her any of that. I just look back and I feel tremendous love and compassion for her. She was so earnest. She worked so hard. And she was so innocent. And in some ways she was smarter, she hadn’t been broken as much, and I think we see certain kinds of things more clearly when we’re not as broken. There’s nothing in the way. We don’t have fear. Of course, we don’t know what the consequences and results will be. The results will come when they come.