The Woman Beneath My Skin

The woman beneath my skin is alternately ravenous, elated, grief-stricken, bored.

The woman beneath my skin is sometimes at peace and sometimes dissatisfied with everything, thinking, what else, what else, what else??

She wants company, she wants solitude. She wants to write, she wants to simply be. She is bursting with stories, she has nothing to say.

She is profoundly selfish, she would do anything for her kids. She tries to be kind to everyone, always. Sometimes she fails.

She wants a new relationship. She wants to get back together with her wasband*. She starts conversations with strangers on dating apps, gets excited, loses interest, all within a couple of days, or hours, or minutes.

She determines to invest more in her friendships, then fails to return calls.

Sometimes I get so sick of her.

Doing Yoga with the Buddha

(A Poem)

“Don’t hurt yourself,” he says, as he sits beside me on his mat,

His legs spread out before him,

His arm curved over his head, reaching toward the far wall.

I can’t help noticing his t-shirt, stretched tight over his rounded belly,

Rising up and exposing an inch of jiggling flesh.

He might have chosen sweatpants over spandex, too,

but there he is in shiny blue tights,

a huge grin on his face, a sheen of sweat already gleaming on his brow.

Buddhism, PoetryTanya ShafferFebruary 5, 2022Buddhism, yoga, health and wellness, poetry, humorComment

Get Out Into It

February in Michigan is thirteen months long. - Bob Hicok.

That’s why I don’t want dogs! said a friend. You have to take them out every day, no matter how crappy the weather.

It’s a gray Monday afternoon, and the temperature outside is a bone-chilling 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I have fetched my offspring from school and walked the 29 steps from my heated car to my heated home. As I sit by the fire, clutching a cup of Bengal Spice tea in my hands, inhaling its cinnamon steam, the last thing I want to do is to go back outside. But within the hour, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Being the mama of three energetic canines means that every day of the year, whether there’s rain, snow, icy sidewalks, gusting gales or, for that matter, scorching sun and humidity to rival the rainforest, I walk.

I do this because, although we have a fenced yard where they can chase squirrels and deposit their bodies’ waste, I know that this ritual of the daily walk, when they get to go beyond that chain-link fence and bask in the wider world’s infinitely varied smells for an hour or so, is the highlight of their day. I know this because the closer I get to the spot where their leashes hang, the more wildly they dash back and forth, wagging their tails and prancing with glee. I figure it’s the least I can do for them in exchange for all the unconditional love they shower on me and my family with their exuberant greetings, licks, snuggles, empathetic gazes and rollicking joy.

But here’s the other thing : As much as I long to stay hunkered by my cozy fire, as soon as I suit up in boots and coat and balaclava and gloves and step out the door (after four and a half years in Michigan I can tell you with absolute conviction that your well-being in winter is all about the clothes), something unexpected happens: I fall in love with the world.

The Silver Revolution

When I was in preschool, I asked my mom how old she was. Over twenty-one, she said. Intrigued by the mystery, I kept asking, but no matter how many times I repeated the question, that was all the answer I could get. Finally, when I was six, she told me: She was forty years old. I had no idea why this was such a big secret, but I felt very grown-up to be entrusted with it.

Almost three decades later, I was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle about my solo show Let My Enemy Live Long!, which was playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The article revealed that I was thirty-three years old. When I showed it to R, a fellow solo performer who was about to launch her own show off-Broadway, she responded with horror, Never tell a reporter your age!

Why not? I started to ask, but her look stopped me cold. Did she really have to tell me about our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty? Obviously a woman in our industry had everything to lose by revealing her age.

Not Buying It: My Date With Marketer Bob

A lot of artists I know hate marketing. They know it’s necessary, but they’d give anything for a fairy publicist to appear in a glittering puff of smoke and promote the hell out of their latest project with a wave of a wand, so they could forget about websites and email programs and social media and keep right on making stuff.

Personally, I’ve long had a more positive relationship with this aspect of the business than many of my peers. When I started my career as a solo performer fresh out of college, I was filled with energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of the job, including promotion. I finagled friends into taking photos of me in costume. I wrote my own booking brochures, blurbs and press releases. I printed the text for my flyers on my printer, cut and pasted the images (literally, with scissors and glue — we’re talking 1988) and went to the copy shop to duplicate them. I walked every commercial neighborhood in San Francisco and the East Bay armed with flyers, tape and a staple gun, posting my image in spots both legal and il. Anyone I chatted with about my show for even a moment walked away with flyers in hand. I, on the other hand, usually managed to walk away with their address scribbled on a piece of paper to add to my embryonic mailing list. When I mailed out postcards for my upcoming shows, I added personalized notes in ballpoint pen. I felt like my audience members were my friends, and indeed, many of them were and still are.

Fast-forward thirty-plus years. My mailing list is now an email list. I have a website and the requisite trinity of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, though I definitely prefer a discursive warble to a succinct tweet. My creative pursuits have evolved too over the years. In addition to writing plays and prose and hosting a podcast and taking photos and even still acting and singing once in a while, I’ve been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops for the past three and a half years.

The Intimate Realm of I Don't Know

A few months ago, I had a discussion with a dear friend that turned into an argument. It started when he told me he was an atheist, and I told him I was an agnostic.

Same thing, he said.

Is not, said I.

Is too, said he. You don’t believe in a deity; therefore you are not a theist, which makes you an a-theist.

I neither believe nor disbelieve, said I, which makes me an agnostic.

From there things got a bit heated, which seems kind of silly in retrospect, but that’s the way we roll.

Reflecting on the conversation later, I asked myself why this was important to me.

More than twenty years ago I heard the Theravadan Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro speak in Golden Gate Park. He said something that struck me so deeply I wrote it down and have thought of it often over the years: Not knowing is most intimate.

Although I’ve been turning those words over within myself for decades, I never thought to research them until after my friend and I had this argument. With little memory of the context in which Ajahn Amaro used them, I’d always assumed he’d come up with them himself. But when I searched the phrase, I learned that it is foundational to many Buddhist thinkers. It comes from an ancient Chinese story in which a monk named Fayan goes on a pilgrimage and stays at a stranger’s monastery. The master at that monatery, Dizang, asks him why he’s making the pilgrimage. I don’t know, says Fayan, to which Dizang nods approvingly and responds, Good.Not knowing is most intimate.

The sentence strikes a powerful intuitive chord, but what does it mean?

When I think of the word intimacy, the first thing that springs to mind is sexuality. Nakedness. Trusting someone enough to reveal yourself, literally and figuratively. Showing the parts of yourself that others don’t see — the tender, delicate parts — and facing down the fear that your most exposed, vulnerable self might not meet with acceptance or approval. (Which isn’t to say you can’t have sexuality without intimacy. You can approach sex — as you can approach anything in life, really — from such a great emotional distance that your innermost self barely feels a thing. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferSeptember 5, 2021Buddhism, spirituality, agnosticism, religion Comments

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

For much of my adult life, I longed to be one of those people who procrastinate by cleaning, rather than snacking, clipping toenails, or surfing the web. If I were a procrastinate-by-cleaning type, I reasoned, then whether or not I got any writing done on a given day, at least I’d have a clean house to beat myself up in. Then recently, more than half a century into my tenure on Earth, a strange thing happened: I became one of those people. If ever there were proof of the Buddhist theory that there is there is no solid unchangeable self at the core of our beings, my becoming a neat person is it. If you don’t believe me, ask one of my former roommates.

Of all the Buddha’s ideas, the one about not having a self is the hardest for me and most of my compatriots to wrap our heads around. After all, the cult of self-actualization was our national obsession long before social media gave rise to the age of selfies. Plus, we feel like we have selves. And if we aren’t selves, what are we? Who looks out through our eyes? Who holds our memories?

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferDecember 20, 2019 Comments

Does Ego Get A Seat At The Table?

Twenty-odd years ago, I raised my hand in the large hall at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and asked the renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield a question.

“Is there a role for ambition in the Buddhist cosmology?”

“That’s a good question,” said Jack, and silly as it sounds, the memory of that compliment warms me to this day. Jack said I asked a good question!

He had been talking, as Buddhist teachers do, about the fact that according to the Buddha’s teachings, desire—alternately translated as grasping or clinging—causes suffering. This concept, one of the Four Noble Truths at the core of Buddhist philosophy, had resonated with me ever since I picked up Sharon Salzberg’s book Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness in my early thirties and plunged headlong into Buddhist teachings. Desire or grasping as the root cause of suffering spoke directly to my experience.

At the time, I was working as a regional theatre actor in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the West Coast. I related intimately to the pain of desiring to snag a particular role or work with a particular company. The desire itself was painful—I could feel it in my body as a visceral ache. Often the waiting period following an audition—the days, weeks, or even months when I didn’t know if I’d gotten the job—was worse than the disappointment on the occasions when I didn’t. And the feeling never stopped. Even when I had an acting job that I loved going to every day, I would hear about roles others were playing and feel a stab of envious longing. I felt it even when the shows they were in conflicted with my own. I wanted to be every place at the same time, and because I couldn’t, I was never satisfied.

When I discovered the Buddha’s teachings, I immediately recognized myself in the image of the Hungry Ghost, a voracious apparition with an enormous belly and a tiny pinhole mouth, who eats and eats but is never full.

Buddhism, Creativity, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferNovember 7, 2019Buddhism Comments

Give It All, Give It Now: A Manifesto of the Creative Life

Confession: I still doubt myself. A lot. Even though I’ve lived more than half a century, even though I’ve been putting pen to paper on an almost daily basis since I was nine years old, even though I’ve made the arts my profession throughout my entire adult life, as actor/writer/solo performer/producer at various times, I still ask myself why I do these things and what makes them worth doing.

There’s an ebb and flow to this inner questioning—there are periods in which I’m so utterly absorbed by the work itself that the existential dilemmas blessedly recede and I’m carried along by the current of pure doing. Love those times. But when the Muse takes a call on her cell, leaving me with the ditherings of my own mind and the eternal struggle for a more disciplined daily existence, the doubting voices return. The most persistent of these is the one that says Why bother in the face of…fill in the blank: mortality, climate change, humans’ abhorrent treatment of each other, violence, racism, poverty, greed…

A year ago, I added regular teaching to the list of creative endeavors that comprise my professional life. Leading others in the act of writing has been an incredible gift, but it’s also ignited a blazing new round of self-doubt. Who am I to take the lead? Am I capable of holding a room? What do I have to give? And accompanying all of that, the old underlying refrain: why why why why why…

Since this inner Why has been with me for so long, I’ve developed a litany of responses, drawn primarily from the work of other artists: songs, poems, passages from favorite books. So when the questions arise within me, these alternate voices rise up to answer them. Together they form a kind of Manifesto of the Creative Life, a buttress against despair. This is why. And this. And this. I share them with you today, dear Reader, in the hope that they may help you through your own moments of darkness. And if these things don’t resonate with you as they do with me, I hope the examination they sprung from may inspire you to develop a Manifesto of your own.

A Place Where All is Forgiven

Earlier this month I traveled to Iceland with a group of differently wired teens from my son D’s school. Iceland is an extraordinary place: traversing its starkly magnificent terrain, you have a vivid sense that you’re standing on planetary crust, its transformations unfolding before your eyes. D’s school—I’ll call it A3—is an extraordinary place too.

A3 is described as a school for kids who learn differently, but in reality it’s not just about learning differently, but about thinking differently, acting differently, being differently. Or just being different. Some of the students are on the autism spectrum, some have attention challenges, some have sensory issues or social anxiety or gender dysphoria or learning disabilities of various types. Some have no diagnosable condition but are there because it’s the first place they’ve found where they feel comfortable and welcome.

Paint Your Scars With Gold

The other day I was reading about an ancient Japanese art called Kintsugi, in which, if a ceramic object such as a bowl breaks, it’s repaired using a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Once repaired, the fault lines are illuminated, making the object increasingly beautiful as it ages. The philosophy behind Kintsugi treats the process of fracture and repair as part of an object’s history, something to be celebrated rather than hidden or disguised.

This got me thinking about marriage.

I’ve been with my spouse for seventeen years now. And though it’s not easy to share this, I’m going to summon my wobbly courage and tell you: My marriage is not perfect. There have been deep fissures, gashes, cracks that are difficult to repair. In the complex soup of a shared life, the flavors of laughter, tenderness and delight are liberally seasoned with rage, frustration and tears.

Memoir/Personal Essay, RelationshipsTanya ShafferFebruary 5, 2019marriage, memoir, kintsugi, therapy Comments

My Special Needs Kid Got Kicked Out of the Social Justice Club

This is the story of how my high-functioning autistic son was unceremoniously ejected from the Social Justice Club at his pricey private San Francisco Bay Area school. I know—no irony there whatsoever.

D attended our local public school (School #1) through the end of sixth grade. Challenges that year prompted our district to offer him placement for the following year in a non-public* middle school (School #2) geared specifically toward kids on the autism spectrum.

School #2 was an unmitigated disaster for a multitude of reasons, not least of which was the staff’s inability to stem a series of anti-semitic slurs, culminating in a group of kids following D around his classroom chanting “Hitler Hitler Hitler.” When I asked the principal whether they educate the kids about diversity, she said, Of course. We tell them it’s not nice to point out when someone is different. Ummmm…no.

Thinking About Wearing My Jewish Star Necklace

It’s been more than a year since we moved across the country, but there are still boxes that I haven’t unpacked. Last weekend I came across a delicate bubble-wrapped packet inside a small jewelry box. When I carefully pulled back the tape and unfolded the bubble-wrap, out fell a tiny gleaming Star of David on a slender silver chain. Made of iridescent glass, it shimmered when I moved it back and forth.

My first thought was, I’ll wear this today.

My second thought was, Maybe I shouldn’t.

Death Crashes In

I was celebrating my son’s birthday on Mackinac Island when Death crashed in.

Death was not invited. The clear blue sky with its scudding clouds, the bright yet tender sun, the gentle breeze, the crunchy tang of deep-fried pickles, the waves, the rocks, the lighthouse, the bikes: all of these were on the guest list, but Death was not. Nevertheless, Death showed up.

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferOctober 25, 2018friendship, mortality, buddhism, Buddhism Comments

The Hardest Thing

As a parent, the hardest thing I do is witness my children’s suffering.

Four months ago the Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro—an elvish man with protruding ears, a wicked grin, and a British accent—came to speak in Ann Arbor. He spoke of three principles, espoused by an ancient sage:

1. Don’t push; just use the weight of your own body.

2. Don’t diagnose; just pay attention.

3. Don’t try to help, but don’t turn away.

Since then, I think of these principles regularly with respect to parenting.

As I said, I find my children’s suffering excruciating. So if they’re crying wildly, claiming people don’t like them, or they don’t like themselves, or they don’t like their lives, all I want to do is fix it, as quickly as possible. I want their suffering to stop, and I want the expression of it to stop. Because I can’t stand it.

After the Giddy Plunge

How to describe the beauty and challenge of that day? How high and steep the dune, how fine and bright the sand? How the ocean—no, Lake Michigan (ha, I wrote ocean!)— spread out below us, an impossibly pure colorscape, gradations of aqua, turquoise, teal leading out to a deep true cobalt?

We were at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the Northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. We were traversing the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive when we stopped at #9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

At first I tried to stop D and E from rolling down the nearly vertical dune, fearing they’d lose control, plummet over the edge and disappear. They started rolling anyway, tentatively at first, stopping and starting, looking back. I glanced uncertainly at my husband—I’ll call him H—and he, ever the cautious one, shook his head. I called, half-heartedly, Boys, come back. They ignored me, of course, and I discussed with nearby adults whether it was safe to go down. A couple with toddlers shook their heads and left. But then a man with two young kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old, appeared on the horizon as if by magic.

Sometimes Lines Are Blurred

As a mother of two boys, one of whom is on the autism spectrum, I experience the stories of the #metoo movement from a multiplicity of perspectives:

As a woman in the world, I’ve had encounters ranging from the frightening (a man locking me in a room with him and pulling out the key) to the sleazy (a professor intimating that he’d sponsor my project if I’d pose nude for his art class) to the merely disgusting (a guy jerking off in front of me in a public park). I’m relieved and cautiously heartened to see the culture finally begin to shift.

As a mom, I take every opportunity to alert my sons – ages 10 and 14 - to sexism and gender discrimination in its many forms – through language, media imagery, externally imposed constructs of masculinity and femininity, etcetera. We’ve discussed consent and the right of each person to decide if, when, and how they want to be touched.

As the mother of a person with autism, however, there’s an aspect of the whole conversation that frightens me. My older son, D, by virtue of his neurological difference, has trouble reading non-verbal social cues. Because of this, I’m terrified that he’ll make some mistake that will get him into trouble.

The Me Who Stayed

When I was younger, I was judgmental about the use of anti-depressants. I thought that unless you were so depressed that you couldn’t get out of bed, taking anti-depressants was a cop-out, a refusal to engage with your own darkness. When a college friend started taking them, I was disappointed. I thought she was depriving herself of an essential part of the human journey, that facing whatever arose unadulterated was part of what was required to season the soul.

I was judgmental about meditation too: I thought it was a waste of precious time that was better spent taking practical, concrete action to make the world a better place.

It seems I am doomed to do everything I judge.

Tell Me A Story

In December of 2016, less than a month after the elections (yes, those elections), I traveled to Taiwan for a production of The Fourth Messenger, the musical I co-wrote with the incandescent singer-songwriter Vienna Teng. It was as bleak a historical moment as I could remember, and I was in deep need of inspiration. Fortunately, I found it.

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Photos and text © Tanya Shaffer, 2018.