Some people develop their life’s philosophy by studying the great philosophers. You did it by living passionately. Can you elaborate?

I did read many of the great philosophers to educate myself as to what others thought about different aspects of life. However, I tried to go out into the world on my own terms, being my own person despite the consequences this might create…I was a passionate young man with an idealistic viewpoint of the world. I refused to relinquish my passion even as people implored me to do so.

Who was one of the most interesting characters you met?

When I was living in the mountains of Big Sur, California, I met the leader of a notorious motorcycle gang. We became friends. All preconceptions I had about men who would join a motorcycle gang were shattered as I learned about the humanity and vulnerability behind the macho image most of the men projected.

What’s one of the most dangerous situations you encountered?

Getting stuck in a Russian hospital that must have been converted from a prison because it had bars on the windows. It felt very dangerous because I didn’t speak a word of Russian and I felt helpless to be able to leave at my own volition.

Tell us about your impromptu one on one encounter with Indira Gandhi.

In 1978, I was walking through the gardens of a government complex in New Delhi, when she appeared out of nowhere and wanted to speak with me. She was so elegant and bright. Her knowledge of English and the breadth of her worldliness were amazing. When I told her I was a poet, she knew practically every American poet I mentioned.

What were some of the hardships you endured?

Eating strange food was a constant problem in Asia. I tried to be selective and careful, but found my system could not digest a lot of the food without my getting sick to varying degrees. I also felt weak from lack of good nutrition at times.

What food did you eat which you had never eaten before?

There were many Thai fruits that I had never seen before like Mangosteen which is considered to be the Queen of Fruits. The various fruits were delicious and had weird shapes and colors. I loved them. They tasted great and were very refreshing.

 You went to 200 state parks and 49 states.  Which countries did you visit?

 China, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, India, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Croatia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Turks, St. Kits, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Bahamas, Canada, Malta, Grenada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Belize, and Panama.

What was your favorite country?

One of the most intriguing, beautiful, colorful, unique, artistic, spiritual, historic and mind-bending countries I visited in the 1970s was Nepal. Very friendly, the Nepalesewere small in size, but huge in heart. They were so accepting and kind and warm. They also seemed to be grateful for meeting me or any foreigner.

 What was something that shocked you during your travels?

Watching a religious ritual in Indonesia shocked me because the men danced around in a trance until they entered a delirious state. They brandished swords and began to poke themselves hard with these swords. Apparently, they were immune from the sharp blades because of the altered state they had induced. It was shocking to see this because the intensity and energy were so palpable.

You’re not a therapist or counselor, so why do you think folks should listen to you?

 There have been extraordinary pioneers and visionaries who have given the world great insights and wisdom who did not follow the orthodox path to success. A person does not need to have followed the conventional path in order to be an expert in a specific field. My education has been a continuous series of adventures of a highly diverse nature, giving me an experience of life in its most raw and natural state. I hope people will listen to me because I have been on an ever-changing, wild, diverse exploration of life on Earth from which I have gleaned an incredible panoply of knowledge and wisdom. Each person has a wealth of wisdom to share simply by the unique experiences he or she has had.

Why is it important to look within, to be introspective? Isn’t ignorance bliss?

Not only is it important to look within to discover deep truths about yourself, but when you don’t do this you will fall immutably into a shadowy place that will keep you stuck forever. Ignorance is not bliss. It stymies the natural evolution of growth for humans. Self-discovery is the only path to freedom.

Did you learn to become more self-aware during your travels?

Absolutely! Self-awareness gets intensified when you are thrust into new situations and new places. You begin to clearly see your strengths and your weaknesses. When I traveled, I learned so much about myself. I saw things that troubled me that I did not like, but I had to acknowledge these things before I could attempt to modify them. Before I could remove the delusional masks, I had to become aware that I was wearing them. In different cultures, masks no longer served a purpose.

Do we need limitless curiosity to get the best out of life?

Curiosity certainly helps us delve fully into the mystery of life. The more curious we are, the more thrilled we become and the child within us leaps with joy at the discoveries we make. I believe we are all inherently curious at birth. It is just that some of us get so hurt and disappointed as we get older, we lose our natural inclination to be curious. That’s why we all need to nurture and sustain our desire to be curious.

How did you go from being nearly destitute to becoming a millionaire?

Living in the dire state of poverty had some benefits, but it also placed an inordinate pressure on me that would not go away. I adjusted well to the struggle of being poor by not allowing this state to undermine my love of life and adventure.  Yet, eventually, I used my resources and understanding of human nature to help me succeed.

You say you can find wealth, well-being and wisdom without taking a step. Why?

Wealth can mean many things, including inner peace, joy and creativity.  What exists within us does not require an outward journey. It only takes willingness, faith, self-confidence and the temerity to travel deep inside the endless world of yourself!

With all the current negativity in the world, how do you suggest we remain positive?

There is a flood of horrors surrounding us. But there is also a sea of beauty and miracles surrounding us at the same time. If we succumb to the negativity, we become its victim and we lose our love of life. When we turn to the light with all its hope and promise and beauty, we become empowered and thrilled to be alive. The negative crushes us; the positive frees us. One is destructive; the other is creative. The choice is ours to make.

Some of your thoughts, such as banning all weapons, have very little chance of ever coming to fruition. Why include them in your book?

The reality of these things materializing is very remote. But it is vital that they be included because people need to start to think about these radical thoughts in unprecedented ways. In order to make movement toward getting some of these things implemented, we need to set high goals. Humanity needs to recognize that some of the things that we take for normal are indeed quite bizarre.

What can readers take away from Fresh Eyes Upon the World?

The only way to free ourselves from delusions, fear and prejudice is self-examination.  Society can heal its darkness only when each of us adopts holistic, compassionate and humanitarian values that will lead to happier and more fulfilled lives.

What is your book about and what compelled you to write this memoir?

My book, The Red Ribbon, A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss, is initially about the aftermath of a sudden and violent event, the lightning strike that killed my husband and critically injured my younger son in July of 1994. My husband and son were sea-kayaking out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when an isolated and freak storm arose. Although they made land and found shelter in a WWI bunker on an island, lightning hit the bunker.

The Red Ribbon ties the death of my husband to subsequent losses. First my father, just a year later, and then other loved ones. Hollis Gillespie, an author and humor columnist, describes my book as “a satisfying chronicle of love, loss, anger, more love, and ultimate redemption.” That pretty much sums it up!

In my chapter, “Stone House,” I describe how a summer workshop leader blurted out, “Sometimes, lightning strikes. It strikes, and a writer has no choice. He or she has been chosen to write.” That’s how I felt. I had a worthy and rare subject; all I needed was to find the courage to share my experiences and to develop the writing skills I would need.

Originally you wrote the book as short pieces, then made them into a book. Can you explain why?

I didn’t have a book in mind when I began writing. My goal was to test myself, to see what I could bear to write about, and to learn to write well and bravely. I took years of classes in memoir and fiction writing, and I joined writing workshops in both memoir and fiction, even one year in poetry. Writing short pieces, 1000-1500 words, was manageable, and the feedback I received encouraged me to keep challenging myself. For instance, I would tackle dialog that gave each speaker recognizable speech patterns. I had fun with the funeral home directors in “The Oak Box” and “Burial at Sea.”  Each has a formal persona that breaks down occasionally making the reader smile.

Eventually, my memoir teacher suggested that because I had a collection of stories about the same theme, I should think about writing a book.

Did you experience any synchronicity or serendipity when you wrote the book? If so, what?

Yes, I had the sensation that many experiences led to the next because of serendipity. My involvement with OLLI/USM, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine, has felt like a particularly fortunate and unexpected blessing. Three teachers, Ruth Story, Denney Morton, and Tim Baehr, began as my teachers, then became mentors, and now are good friends; this evolution was unexpected and a happy surprise. Also, my fellow writers at OLLI/USM have become what often feels like a second family. All of the above have been remarkable discoveries. I consider myself a lucky woman.

Conversely, how do you lead workshops and teach writing? What do you hope to inspire in your students?

First of all, I teach with a fellow writer, and we co-facilitate. Our relationship with the workshop participants is of one peer to another. I have tried to create the kind of environment that I wished for when I was a workshop participant. My first goal was to insure that anyone who wished to have his or her work discussed would be given time. No waiting until the next month. I feel fiercely that my writers deserve respectful attention.

My goal is to inspire hard work, a focus on setting goals for oneself, and honest if well-worded feedback. I try to set a good example and share my disappointments as well as my successes.

Responses to your memoir have been quite powerful. Why do you think you book is striking a chord?

Our culture has been poor about supporting the grieving. Even health and mental health professionals have been impatient and insensitive to the grieving. The expectation that grief be resolved after one year is absurd. My readers tell me that they carry the effects of losses lifelong. At my book launch, a fellow writer shared that she was particularly touched by my call for more kindness. I don’t ever come out and say that, but it must be part of each story. I am proud to be a voice for the needs of the dying and their loved ones.

You worked as a therapist for years. How did that inform your writing process?

Much of my work as a psychotherapist and a psychiatric social worker was with individual adults, couples, and adolescents who were grieving losses. As I look back, I see that those years prepared me to write my memoir. My patients faced a great variety of losses—the loss of loved ones, the loss of innocence, the loss of safety, and the loss of hope, perhaps the worst. My patients needed to tell their stories over and over until they experienced less pain. There was no hurrying them along. And each one needed something different.

The process of therapy is intimate, and full of both silence and careful words. Often, what worked was listening and empathizing rather than giving advice. In my memoir, I try to avoid coming to conclusions but leaving them to the reader.

My memoir is also intimate, full of interior conversations, prayers, and dreams. These elements are my signature.

Your memoir describes many losses. Were you writing through all these losses? Did writing help your healing process?

No, I was in no shape to write for many years after the lightning accident in 1994 and my father’s death in 1995. However, by the time my mother-in-law, my mother, and my friend, David, died, I was writing about my experiences as they occurred.

I began writing pieces that are part of The Red Ribbon with “The Emptying and Filling of the Drawer” written for a class at USM in 2001. I conclude the story with the line, “Art sustains us.” My focus in this piece is not upon my loss, but upon my son’s progress in creating an assemblage and the role of art in allowing him to express his grief.

At first, I was unaware of my progression through grief, but now I can look back and see how each time I wrote a memoir piece, the degree of my pain diminished. Once I set a piece aside, I could move along to the next.

Losses remain with us lifelong, and one loss reminds us of others, but writing has been therapeutic for me. I recommend it. And I am assured that my book is helpful to others grieving their own losses, their own “lightning strikes.”

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Additional information about The Red Ribbon, A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss can be accessed at:  https://nancybills-memoir.com/

What is Perfect Practice about and what inspired you to write the book?

Perfect Practice is about realizing that we can shift our perspective and change our world. I was inspired to write the book because I found this to be an absolutely consistent path to freedom. I found that through the awareness of my perspective I reclaimed my natural and effective ability to choose how I see things and how I respond to the things I see. This offered me freedom from my own inner feelings of inadequacy and separateness.

I first became aware that I had a choice of perspective through my sincere love of animals, specifically horses. All my life I adored horses and when I was finally able to buy my first horse, knew I was home. I learned from horses all that I needed to learn about life. I sensed a rich authenticity in the relationship I had with them. The magic in the connection was that all thoughts of right and wrong or good and bad went away. I have never met a bad horse. I could see the horse as a horse not as its behavior. I soon found that levelof acceptance within myself as well. But back then, it was only when I was with horses. My life’swork was to bridge that gap inall my relationships. And that is what Perfect Practice is to me.

The judgments I felt from the externalworld melted away. I realized that when thehorse and I were together I didn’t feel separate, as I often felt with people. This was my early education in acceptance. I could clearly see that the horse and I both wanted the same thing—peace through unity.

This connection is what inspired me to reach again and again for that perfect awareness. I wanted what feltso natural with horses to expand into my entire relationship with life. This heart-led, lifelong study is what inspired me to write Perfect Practice.

You say you don’t settle for anything less than perfect. Does that mean perfect practice is about being perfect?

Not settling for less than perfect is not about being perfect, though it is about the awareness of what we practice. When I heard the quote, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfectpractice makes perfect.” I realized the value of being conscious of all that I was practicing in my life. I looked at my relationships, habits, reactions, as well as all the cultural and psychological beliefs that were operating behind the scenes of my mind. I realized that if I practice what’s ineffective, my life felt heavy and burdened. I soon realized that I feel like a victim of my life rather than the creator of it.

Perfect practice comes from my willingness to grow, and to learn from my mistakes. As I became aware that I was settling for what I didn’t want, I became free to turn my life around from painful to purpose-filled.  I learned that I can understand life on life‘s terms. So you might say that Perfect Practice isabout being in a state of grace or presence, and lettingthat perspective shape the life we live.

How does changing our perspective alter the world we live in? Can you give an example of this?

 I feel that our perspective does create the world we see. We can see the world as a hostile place or we can see hostility as a pathway to peace. The choice is ours.

The world in which we liveis full of contrast—good and bad, right and wrong, and us and them. When we are unconscious of our perspective these very separating factors can and do create conflict. It is easy to see how conflict has affected our world since the beginning of time. Conflicts between cultures, religions, political beliefs, and even within our own biological families perpetuate a sense of separation. This perspective creates a hostile world.

I see that shifting our perspective about our problems can in fact open possibilities for success. If what we have done is ineffective let’s do something different. I feel it is more effective to educate than eradicate what is undeniably a part of life.  I realize that I, forone, can learn how to use conflict to achieve confidence, or turn fear into curiosity. To me this is utilizing what’s natural in our world to benefit our world.

To me this is a grand example of shifting our perspective to change our world.

What do you mean by “transparent authenticity”?

What I mean by transparent authenticity is that I come from a place within me that is not conditioned or created by the judgments or opinions of others, my past, or even my own fear. I learned about this through one of the most important relationships in my life.

When I was a little girl my father moved away, out of the country. I saw him so infrequently that when he did come to visit I felt that I only had a few short hours to prove myself a worthy daughter. At a very early age I acquired a habit of being the daughter I thought he wanted me to be, rather than being who I truly was. I couldn’t have known what my father wanted, because I didn’t know my father. Eventually, later in life, I had the opportunity to have a real relationship with my father. I saw him much more often, though that habit I created as a child was still in place. I would even find myself altering my voice on the phone when he would call. Eventually he passed away from cancer. In my grieving process I wrote him a letter. I wanted to say all the things that I wish I would have said. The opening of that letter is what really brought me to understand transparent authenticity. It read, “Dear dad, I’m so sorry I never let you know me.“ When I looked at those words looking back at me I realized the habit I created so many years before still got in the way of our true relationship. He never knew his daughter and I never got to know my father. I felt so sad and I realized what a great loss that was.

Not long after that realization, I made a dedicated decision to be authentic and transparent and allow myself to be known by others. In doing this, I realize that I also create a space for others to be authentic and transparent. This was a great gift in my life. It was one of those lessons that, although difficult, proved to be life-changing and beneficial. To me, transparent authenticity is allowing you to know me.

Many people are afraid of failure, yet you say we can overcome self-judgment and the fear of taking risks. How?

I think the fear of failure is one of the greatest fears that humans take on. I think this really came from the original separation of feeling that we are not enough or sensing a dependency or a need for scarcity. All of these things feed into the fear of failure. I have a very effective shift of perspective that helps to overcome all fear, and that is that we work from a success to a success. I see that when we can work in small increments and have an awareness of the smaller successes, that we slowly build confidence. Much too often our idea of success is the end-all. So we make each task a means to that end, without recognizing that there are successes in every day. Yesterday was a great example of this in my life. My husband and I had an enormous workload and we were working very hard to get it done so that we could leave on a trip. It seemed that one thing after another kept breaking, or not working out, even right down to while I was writing these words. My dog knocked over my laptop and broke the power port. It would’ve been very easy to see this day as disastrous. But there was a beauty in it. My husband and I both recognized how every time something went terribly wrong we supported one another. We realized that, that was a greater success than anything of material form. Because everything that is material—all our “doings“, all things that we make or have on this earth are temporary. But that deeper wisdom and unity that my husband and I experienced, that was the greatest success of all. There are times that you have to draw back and look from a broader perspective to see what the real success criteria is. It isn’t always what you see before you. There are opportunities in every life, in every day and even in every breath, to find a success. How we overcome the fear of failure is by shifting our perspective and seeing the greater purpose.

What is the biggest thing horses have taught you about life? How can all of us apply that to our own lives?

Horses have taught me everything that I need to know about life. That would be a broad spectrum to discuss here. I can say what is at the fundamental core of all that they taught me. That word would be acceptance.

I loved horses in a way that was not conditional. I didn’t see their behavior as good or bad or right or wrong. I saw their behavior as effective or ineffective. That perspective is what offered me the bridge that filled the gap between denial and control. I think that it’s often misunderstood that acceptance means you accept it even though you don’t agree with it, or in some way that acceptance condones bad behavior. Neither is true. If I am working with a 1,000 pound animal it is best that I have a very clear understanding of what is effective and ineffective. But if I try to control or micro-manage that animal, I have often found that fear takes over and the very thing that I want to change becomes even more advanced and even more volatile. This is a great lesson that horses can teach us.

I think the message of the horse is best stated in these words, “Horses are spiritual enough to hold the presence of forgiveness for the world in which they live and powerful enough to show us the value in harmony.”

To touch on some of the additional wonderful attributes that came from my relationship with horses, I would say I deepened my compassion, empathy, understanding, tolerance, patience, and absolutely my own exploration of forgiveness-forgiveness for myself as well as forgiveness for others. Horses modeled all of that for me. They made it necessary for me to gain a deeper understanding. Just as pain in our society and in our world creates the need for change, my relationship with horses created the opportunity to learn the greatest gifts of life. Acceptance of what is, is the pathway to understanding and understanding is how we unlearn the habit of fear. I’m not sure what else is more important than that.

How do we transform conflict into confidence? And fear into curiosity?

Well I might say that it is a wonderful experience when we can transform conflict and create something that is not only beneficial but is also life-changing.  I feel strongly that the elements of life that we resist such as pain, conflict, fear, anxiety, separation and grief give us the opportunity to explore a different way of seeing. These struggles are what shift our perspective and offer us new ideas. They are the experiences that knock us right out of our comfortable mediocrity. It is during pain and conflict that we reach deeper into ourselves for answers. Although at times the pain brings us down to the point that we don’t reach at all. We can become victims and just allow life to take over.

I have a very effective way of shifting perspective that creates opportunities out of hardship. I have lived my life with the absolute dedication of learning how to transition my pain into purpose. I have done this by the willingness to look into the difficulties of life and understand that they are showing me their exact opposite. Sorrow shows me joy, fear shows me confidence, and anger shows me acceptance. The problem with so many of us, myself included years ago, is that we don’t look past the resistance. Our intellect stops at escape. We want to get away from the thing that is offering our greatest lessons. I say we end up shooting our guru. Pain is our guru. We can learn from it if we are willing. Curiosity is a spiritual trait. It is what brings answers that we have not yet uncovered. When we pause in our fear, and we are willing to look deeper with curiosity at the message in the fear, we find answers we never knew existed. This takes practice-perfect practice. The world initiates the survival responses of fight, flight or freeze. Those habituated responses take us away from the answers. It’s absolutely natural to feel the responses but the difference is not to let it control our lives. To take our life back is to bring the willingness and the curiosity into the things we are trying to get away from—education over eradication. This is the key element for growth. We have fabulous minds that we can use as tools but nothing is more valuable than our open clear awareness. This is our consciousness and it is who we are at our core.

We can change conflict into confidence by broadening and deepening our perspective.

• Step one is the willingness to pause.
• Step two is the ability to see that we have a choice.
• Step three is the willingness to try something we haven’t tried before.
• Step four is to realize the incremental successes.
• Step five is recognizing that the change came from within and not from without.

This is true and lasting change. If a change in our lives comes from outside of us we will always be dependent on things to change for us to “be”. But, when change comes through us from the wisdom we gained through pain, that awareness it is something we will always have within us. And, it is always accessible. When we are willing to make these shifts in our perspective we can indeed change our world.

How can we learn more about Mary S. Corning? Where is your book available?

Well, you can learn an awful lot about Mary Corning in my book Perfect Practice. The entire book is full of the stories that brought me to the wisdom. It is a journey through life on life‘s terms. You can also find out more about all that is coming up, such as speaking, book-signings, and podcasts on our website MaryCorning.com. We also have available there, on the website, special-edition signed copies of Perfect Practice ~ a philosophy for living an authentic and transparent life. If you prefer we also provide links to amazon.com and other online bookstores. We have placed links to various radio talk shows and there are some blogs that I have written. You will find links to our Facebook and Instagram pages as well. It’s a wonderful journey through Perfect Practice and it is the best way to find out more. Mary Corning.com.

You can learn more about Mary S. Corning at Marycorning.com and on the usual social media platforms. Books are available wherever you like to buy your books, including all the online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnsandnoble.com, plus regular bookstores and libraries.

The title of your book is Edna’s Gift. What is the nature of that gift?

Like no one else in my life, my sister Edna loved me unconditionally. I was her wonderful “sister Susie” no matter what.  She gave me my earliest experience of what it means to be accepted the way I was, no matter what.  And more than that, this was Edna’s way of being in the world with everyone including herself. As a child when she went to a recreational club for handicapped children, she chose one of the most severely challenged girls as her best friend. Fritzi could barely speak, and was wheelchair bound. But that didn’t matter to Edna. They sang show tunes, and played records and had a grand time!  And while others judged her as “handicapped”, a word I learned at a very young age, she was okay with herself.  Oh, she knew there were things she was unable to do, but these were merely facts, not attributes to be used to judge someone. She saw herself as “differently abled” about 60 years before the term was coined.  I like to say she held me in wholeness. There is no greater gift!!!

Also the words broken and whole appear in your title. What is the importance of these words to you? How do they apply to your life? And what is the connection with a spiritual path?

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”  Rumi

The intention and driving force of my book is the exploration of brokenness and wholeness and how they are profoundly and inescapably related. It is a complex multi-layered subject.

On the most basic level if a chair leg breaks, we consider the chair to be broken and we either throw it away or fix it, and then it is whole again. But what happens when we apply this view to people who are challenged or different? Are they broken? Do they need to be fixed? Yes, we can put a cast on a broken leg. Yes, we can have speech therapy to correct a lisp.  But our society then goes a step further and devalues and stigmatizes those who are different.

Growing up with an all-pervading experience of this, as Edna and I were so close, only a year apart, I was drawn to other ways of understanding, which led first to psychotherapy and then to other spiritual paths.  So in Judaism, Moses smashes the first tablet with the ten commandments on it, when he comes down from the mount, and sees that people have been living in an unethical way. He receives a second one. And all through their wanderings in the desert, the Jewish people carry both the broken and the whole tablets. Brokenness is part of who we are. In the Buddhist perspective we are all intrinsically whole, lacking nothing. Our belief systems may keep us from this truth, but this is our true nature. Through a practice of moment-to moment-meditation we can access this experience of wholeness.

Ultimately, and paradoxically, it was Edna herself and her way of being that became my first model of understanding. And that brings me back to Rumi. Quoting from my book, on the deepest level we are “always broken, forever whole.”  The two are inextricably interwoven.

What was difficult about growing up with your sister?

I grew up with a kind of survivor’s guilt. There were so many things I could do that she couldn’t. I had friends, she didn’t, I could ice skate, skip, jump rope and play the piano, all of which were beyond her reach. I felt so guilty that I could enjoy these things and she couldn’t. The result was that although I didn’t stop myself from participating, I often would suppress my excitement and joy, so as not to make her feel bad.  (That she would feel bad was mostly in my head, not hers.) I wouldn’t talk much about my experiences or triumphs. But worse, over time I didn’t feel much about them.

As an adult I have learned to allow myself the full experience of life. But sometimes I still bend over backwards not to offend or have people feel badly, when I’ve accomplished or experienced something they haven’t.  Publishing this book has been a wonderful journey towards experiencing the joy of actually finishing a monumental ten-year project! And this is even though some people close to me might have wished to do so, but as yet, have not.

Society often misunderstands, labels and undervalues people with disabilities, seeing only hindrances instead of a whole person. How did you and your family deal with this as your sister and you were growing up, and what were the lessons you learned from it?

As a family we judged people by whether they were kind to Edna or not. If they were kind we were grateful, and they could enter our gates. If not, we turned our backs.  Looking back it was like we were a handicapped family. We were sailing on different kind of ship than the families around us. And certainly while I was growing up I internalized that label and felt inadequate.  But later on I learned to feel compassion for anyone who walks through life loaded down with labels. My ability to feel empathic is in large part what has made me a good psychotherapist. In a way I have spent my life learning not to label people or myself, not to think in terms of hierarchy or comparison, not to see the world in a polarized, black and white, or have and have not way.  There is so much scarring and suffering that happens from this way of thinking.

How has being Jewish, and first generation American been a part of your life?

On the one hand I had parents with thick accents, who didn’t understand some of American culture. And in addition to my sister, that was just another way that I felt different and marginalized. I just wanted to be American and do things like drink coke and get a permanent for my hair, things my parents disparaged. As a child one aspiration I had was to be a drum majorette, and I convinced my mother to let me have baton twirling lessons in addition to my piano and dance ones.

But on the other hand I was fiercely proud of my parents who had the wisdom to leave     Germany in the early thirties, because they saw the writing on the wall. They had a long refugee journey, which ended in NYC, where I was born.  I grew up with a strong Jewish consciousness and a pride in being part of a group of people who has survived for thousands of years, and in the process made so many contributions to the well being of humanity. While we didn’t belong to a synagogue when I was a child, as an adult I have been a member of two wonderful synagogue communities, where I have always felt welcome.

In your teen years, you discovered your own invisible disability.  How did that affect your relationship with Edna?

Yes, just short of my 16^thbirthday, when I hadn’t yet menstruated, my mother took me to a gynecologist and I learned that I was born without a uterus, and would, in fact never menstruate, and of course not be able to have birth children.  At first, I felt like I was now with Edna in the deficit pile. I was now damaged goods just like her.  Later in life I found out this syndrome has name: MRKH, and there are other women like me. For an inexplicable reason the doctor never gave me the actual name, and I grew up feeling like a complete anomaly. But in fact, how lucky I was to have Edna. It was her way of being and love for me that became the core of my strength and ability to find my way to self -acceptance.

What is the meaning of the kaleidoscope metaphor that emerges in your book?

A kaleidoscope has a fixed number of colored stones that create a pattern. But if you    turn it even the tiniest bit, the stones rearrange themselves into another pattern. This is a metaphor I use in various places to illustrate the possibility of seeing the same situation or issue from another perspective that actually changes your reality. For example, toward the end of her life, because of health reasons, Edna needed to leave the spiritual community where she had lived for almost forty years, and move to a nursing home. I was horrified. But after awhile it turned out that with the 24 hour 7 care she got, she actually could live more independently than she had in her previous life.  She arranged her own activities, took cabs to the local town for its greenmarket and went to concerts by herself. The kaleidoscope turned and I saw it all another way.

When your sister died you say it was a transformative experience for you, and led you to write the memoir. Can you say more about this?

After Edna died I really missed her, and although I had always known she was important to me, I didn’t quite realize how significant she really was. Writing the book was my journey of finding out. As I wrote I kept discovering more about how she helped me, just by being who she was.  Also, like many challenged people, her life and accomplishments are not as visible as those of so-called normal people. Even friends and colleagues of mine didn’t know much about her.  I wanted to honor her and make her life and its impact on me palpable and visible.

This is a very unusual book in that we go behind-the-scenes and see not just you with your patients, but you as a patient with your own therapist. Most therapists keep their personal lives very private, so what made you decide to include your own story?

One of the themes of the book is that our stories form the core of our lives and give them deeper meaning. Sharing these stories is essentially about one person saying to another: This is who I am? Can you understand me? As a therapist, I hear stories all day, and I’ve come to realize that no matter people’s circumstances, we’re far more alike than we are different. We all struggle with the daily problems of living—nobody is immune. As Joseph Campbell put it: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts.”

So while I could have hidden behind a veil of professionalism, I felt it would be disingenuous to share my patients’ stories without sharing my own. I didn’t want to portray myself as an expert from up on high, but as a person just like everyone else. I say in the book that despite my degrees and years of training, my greatest credential is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race. In my view, the most important job requirement for being a good therapist is to be first and foremost a human being. So that’s where I start the book—with my own humanity.

The book begins with a personal crisis and you don’t seem to hold back. Yet you’re also an accomplished clinician. Were you afraid of how you might come off?

On some level, yes, of course—it’s scary to be that exposed. Our patients don’t see our vulnerabilities and I think sometimes they imagine that we don’t struggle in the ways they do. But there’s a distinction between therapy and a book about therapy—which is to say, a book about how we heal. I’m very real in the room with my patients but there the focus is always on them. Here, I’m pulling back the curtain and saying, “Hey, come this way—let’s go backstage.” So in this context, I’m willing to let my freak flag fly.

I was surprised to see that there’s so much more to a therapist’s world than two people in a room. We see you bantering with your colleagues in the office’s kitchen, discussing your cases (and how you really feel about them) with fellow therapists in your weekly “happy hour” consultation group, we peer in on your family life at home as a parent and your interactions with your own parents and your friends, and we even follow you to your haircut appointments. Of course, we’re also flies on the wall while you work with your patients. How did you choose the patients for this book?

I deliberately chose people who seemed very different from one another on the surface in terms of gender, life stage, background, and the issues that brought them into therapy, not just because that’s what makes my work so interesting, but also because I wanted readers to see how these people’s struggles overlap. Essentially, they (and I) are all grappling with what the eminent psychiatrist Irvin Yalom calls our “ultimate concerns”: death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. And in that sense, this book is about all of us. At first glance, you may not look like any of these patients, but you’ll certainly recognize aspects of yourself in all of them.

Another reason I chose these patients is that one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned as a therapist is that there’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked. When I first started seeing Julie, the young newlywed with breast cancer, I imagined that it would be hard going from hearing about her CT scans and tumors to listening to “So, I think the babysitter is stealing from me” and “Why do I always have to initiate sex?” But those problems mattered too: betrayal by the person who’d been trusted to watch your child; feelings of shame and emptiness when rejected by your spouse. Underneath the details these people were asking the same questions Julie was: How do I feel safe in a world of uncertainty? How do I connect under these circumstances?

Often people keep their pain inside because they worry it’s not “big” enough, and we have a mental health crisis in the country partly because people don’t feel comfortable talking about their pain so they act it out in dangerous ways. I want to give people permission to pay attention to their inner lives—our emotional health determines the quality of our lives as individuals and also the quality of the society we live in.

Your sessions with Wendell are so raw and moving and yet so many times you go from something terribly sad to laugh-out-loud hilarious. What was it like being a patient to another therapist?

When a friend of mine, another therapist, suggested that I see someone, she said, “You need to find a place where you’re not being a therapist. You need to go someplace where you can completely fall apart.”

And I did fall apart, but it was also hard to take off my therapist’s hat. I didn’t want to become the equivalent of the backseat driver thinking, If this were my patient, I would have done it this way. It wasn’t easy to let go of that voice in my head. But at the same time, being a therapist didn’t prevent me from responding to Wendell in the ways that patients respond to me. I’d get frustrated with him. I resented being charged for a cancellation when I was sick (even though I have the same cancellation policy). I didn’t always tell him everything I should have, and I unwittingly (or sometimes wittingly) distorted what he said. I even Googled-stalked him and then when I was talking in session about my own aging father, I edited myself because of what I’d discovered online about his father. I was so consumed with shame about what I’d done that I pretended not to know what I’d learned, and it took months before I fessed up. If the job of being a therapist is hard, the job of seeing a therapist is doubly so. Being in the patient’s seat gave me even more compassion and admiration for my own patients.

Seeing Wendell also highlighted the fact that no two therapists are alike. His style was so different from mine—at one point he literally kicked me!—but there were also times when something he said worked so well for me that I’d leave his office and say the same thing verbatim to a patient in my office an hour later, as if Wendell were my Cyrano. It felt like magic—most of the time. Only once did it completely bomb.

You also write the weekly “Dear Therapist” column for The Atlantic. How is being an advice columnist related to what you do as a therapist?

In both the column and my therapy practice, I try to bring people’s attention to the things they aren’t seeing, rather than simply telling them what to do. Taped up in my office is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” It’s a reminder that I can help people sort out what theywant to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.

This is especially true because in both the column and therapy there’s always missing information in the dilemma that people present. I’m aware that the person made a choice about what to leave in, what to leave out, and how to frame the situation in the way they want me to hear it. And yet in the book, you’ll see me in Wendell’s office doing just that: gunning for him to support a particular choice, to take my side, and even to make my decisions so that I don’t have to take responsibility for them if things go badly. Once he said, “I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,” and instead of absorbing his meaning, I replied, “Okay, then, just tell me—what would you do?”

Of course, the differences are that with the column I have one letter to work with, and with therapy I have more context and time for the story to evolve.  But in both cases, I believe that the most powerful truths are the ones we arrive at ourselves, so I try to nudge people in a direction that will help them arrive at those truths. Just like Wendell did for me.

Everyone in the book changes so much from beginning to end, but you write too about why we resist change even if it’s good for us. What makes it so hard, and how much change can we realistically expect from therapy?

The problem with change is that it’s scary to give something up—even something negative or problematic—without knowing what you’ll get in its place. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but then stay exactly the same.  It’s why people often need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they’re ready to change—and so in the book you see my patients (and me) go through this maddening process. “Insight is the booby prize of therapy” is a tenet in the field—you can have all the insight in the world, but unless you make changes, you’ll remain stuck.

Therapy helps people change largely because we grow in connection with others, in the I-thou relationship that’s often lost in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture. But there’s no magic bullet.

Even so, the payoff is life-changing. Most people change by becoming more aware of their patterns and getting out of their own ways. And it’s never too late—as Rita, the 70-year-old patient in the book who’s full of regret shows us, tremendous change is possible at any age. Ultimately, therapy is about taking responsibility for our own lives, shifting from the idea that Hell is other people to the reality that sometimes—often—Hell is us. Wecan change our circumstances.

There’s a saying that we get one coin in this life—spend it well. I hope that this book helps people to figure out how to spend their coin well.