SHAPES OF TRUTH: DISCOVER GOD INSIDE YOU Neal Allen & Anne Lamott in Conversation
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n June, Naropa Extended Campus welcomed Neal Allen and Anne Lamott for a conversation about Allen’s new book entitled Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You. Allen is a coach and writer who studies and practices traditional and contemporary spiritual traditions. His private coaching practice blends standard psychodynamics with AH Almaas’s Diamond Approach and Eastern practice and methods. Shapes of Truth presents a method of spiritual inquiry based on a set of thirty-five divine objects found within the human body and provides step-by-step instructions for encountering them yourself. His wife, Anne Lamott, is the best-selling author of numerous books of essays, novels, and long form nonfiction, including the classic writing manual Bird by Bird and the child rearing memoir Operating Instructions. Lamott’s most recent book is Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage published in March 2021 by Riverhead Books. Following are some excerpts of their conversation.
On Writing as a Contemplative Practice Lamott: I don't consider writing a contemplative practice. It's just always hard, and I’d almost always rather be watching MSNBC, but I get these things inside of me—they're actually like a tug on the sleeve by something that wants me to help it get itself written…. I have an idea usually for one thing that I might possibly be able to do, and I just do that. In Bird by Bird, I talked about just looking through an empty one-inch frame and seeing one passage, one essay, one vision, one conversation, and just letting myself do it really badly. I sit down every day…. I don't wait for inspiration or particularly believe in it. Allen: I don't think of myself as a particular kind of writer like a contemplative writer. I actually think of myself as a hack writer, because I spent most of my career writing for daily newspapers and popular magazines and then for corporations. During that time, I learned about the beautiful feeling of writing when it was working. It took years for it to start to
work for me. It took thousands of newspaper articles before I had the experience of finding my voice. Up to that point, it was all about learning the rules and trying to get at the truth of something…. I enjoyed doing that as a craft more than as a way to understand myself or understand the bigger world…. But I learned how to write and, eventually, I entered into an appreciation that there might be a world beyond that materialist empiricist world. Sometimes Anne and I use the experience of writing to expand on our own understanding of more abstract and spiritual things—phenomenologies or concepts or feelings or perceptions or existences or whatever we want to call them. Lamott: I might say to Neal, “Do you have a minute,” which means “Do you have 45 minutes?” and I’ll say, “Can we talk about spirit?” And then he'll start saying what spirit means to him, and I'll say what spirit means to me, and then we'll start jamming, and it takes us to places that are so far
Naropa Magazine | 2021–22 | magazine.naropa.edu
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