Writing Process
Blogging & Manuscripts, injecting more hope into a story, and random Bay Area anecdotes...
I have been traveling through Southeast Asia for the past six weeks, and found it hard to get in the headspace to write for this blog. Even though our world is more connected than ever (e.g., how I was able to still do sessions with clients over zoom), one’s actual location and proximity to things definitely matters. Like how I temporarily forgot my office address when filling out a form—it all just felt so far away, as it literally was.
Great timing to start a blog, I thought to myself as I rued this larger-than-recommended time lapse. After all, we are supposed to keep the momentum of the media churn. For SEO and all that. Be a good little netizen, now! Gaw, how it wraps around us and demands obedience and obeisance.
I will tell you my ulterior motive for Natural Born Tripper is to gain more of an audience for any forthcoming books I may publish. There is one more memoir I would like to write, a recounting of my spiritual emergence. I truly believe this memoir would be helpful to others who find themselves in a similar struggle. Freeing myself from my former consciousness was a development in my life that very much took me by surprise and turned a lot of my preexisting notions upside down. I think there’s merit in sharing about that, particularly as a “born again” yet non-religious type transformation.
I have also been working on a sci fi manuscript that sort of riffs on my time as a professional dominatrix and casts it into a near-future cyberpunk dystopia. Unsurprisingly, the more time passes, the more the events of the story seem both contemporary and realistic rather than futuristic and surreal. The thing is, I want to inject more hope into the story. I consider myself a fairly optimistic, balanced and principled individual. And if I can’t find a way to add more of a utopian vision to my story, then how can I ask my therapy clients to embrace more of a glass-half-full mentality? So I am allowing myself the time and space to continue to explore and experiment with this manuscript. I no longer have the urge to just get it out there. I’ve already proven to myself that I can finish what I started by publishing my memoir. Honestly, I’d rather not publish it at all if it’s only going to contribute to nihilism. But I believe I can find a way to expand the story such that it embraces the loving force of the universe. I have found this force acting magically in my own life for years now, so why wouldn’t I be able to access it within the practice of creative writing?
So exactly what kind of blog this will become is still a work in progress, and I sense that has been coming across in these initial entries. Some will be carefully honed treatises, and others will be like this post: tangential musings. My feeling is that until I get more of a firm shape of what this platform will be, a mass of readership may not yet coalesce. But I need it to be organic, the gelling of this entity in the ether. No doubt, it will be a bit of a trial and error process. And just getting more regular with my output. I do love living in the land of words—it sustains me like nothing else, really.
Just putting together the “Source Material” post was some sort of revelation for me: akin to coming out of the cosmic closet as a true believer in the divine, and permitting myself the vulnerability of detailing the core influences in my unfolding spiritual consciousness. Part of me wants to apologize for the patchwork journal-like nature of this current post, and another part knows that all of this is helpful to my own process—and that is sufficient reason to continue. You do not need to be here, dear reader, if such an approach irritates. Perhaps circle back down the road and see what, if anything, this has evolved into. Or read on, if you feel compelled.
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Shifting gears, here are some notes from an introduction I wrote about myself within a different context; feels apt to share here now… I am both a writer and a therapist, Filipino-American who grew up working class in Los Angeles (tested as gifted in grade school; overachiever in high school). In ’96, I moved to San Francisco right after undergrad. I actually wrote a memoir about my tumultuous early twenties called, Adrift in Adulting: My College Coming-of-Age in 1990s LA.
Once I settled in SF, I was a barista at a café on Haight Street before working for start-ups during the dotcom era. Though none of those gigs really fulfilled me. So I kept searching until I landed in the therapeutic realm, which has been even more enjoyable and rewarding than I thought it would be. I believe I was dissociated from my emotions until I trained to be a therapist (I had previously thought my low capacity for empathy was just a part of my neurodiversity). Working with clients was like thawing out my heart. Truly an amazing experience!
Actually, I have always been someone who thought deeply about the, “Why” of existence; to the point where other kids used to call me weird. Eventually, I learned to love my singular perspective as valuable, precious and worthy of protection. It is a paradox, isn’t it? That we are each special and unique while at the same time we are also each mirrors of a unified consciousness; sentient fractals.
Though raised Presbyterian, I purposefully shifted into rational scientific mode starting in college. Yet a spiritual awakening that happened during psych grad school brought me back to a sense of meaning and purpose in life. This revitalization of my life has been empowered, in large part, by the realization that we are each eternal beings disguised in impermanent bodies.
The “aha” moment of my awakening actually came by way of so-called “channeled” text, specifically Jane Roberts’ The Nature of Personal Reality. I know that stuff is too New Age for a lot of people. Believe me, I was surprised as anyone by this development! I too used to believe that channeling information ostensibly from a higher source could only be some form of false performance; that people who believed were silly and not using their brain. The thing was, wherever Roberts was getting the information from, it was so very helpful. It was all about examining one’s core beliefs to impact positive change in one’s life. This was published in the ‘60s, around the same time Psychology began to look at core beliefs via cognitive behavioral therapy; and I do not think that is a coincidence, that’s how influential I think this book is. In any case, it should not be radical to think that reason and acknowledgment of the metaphysical can coexist.
One development that I have been so happy about is the secularization of mindfulness as a scientifically proven technique for greater wellness. Actually, when I started my clinical training in grad school in 2009, this was still semi-taboo, as evident in the hushed and reticient tones of the professors. As if they couldn’t yet quite believe that we were taking meditation so seriously, being that it had been formerly relegated to the woo of religion (what else do we unthinkingly dismiss? no coincidence that they tend to fall in the realms of the feminine, the dark-skinned, the queer). Indeed, the meditative practices I have extensively trained in revolve around Vipassana techniques, which were preserved in Southeast Asia as the original method used by Buddha himself. Is it spirituality? Is it science? We are in both/and territory again, and lovingly so. There is only contradiction if you insist on either/or polarity. If it takes scientists fMRI-ing monks’ brains to prove the power of meditation, so be it.
I am currently reading An Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. I’ve had it in my ebook reader for years, but only found a calling to read it while bedridden with illness in Vietnam. My body was in such physical discomfort, every time I tried to zone out on my phone my head just throbbed even more. Yet reading this book brought me to another dimension, and reawakened a connection to my dreams. I could not deny the consciousness activations it catalyzed, and am now applying to learn the Kriya Yoga meditation techniques. I have been searching for decades now for another method to augment my current practices, and feel reassured by this promising new path. I believe the inner worlds of our consciousness are as expansive as the universe. Like the Tardis, we are bigger on the inside than the outside.
“Accelerating Change” was the name of a couple of futurist conferences I attended at Stanford a little over twenty years ago. When most folks didn’t know what the Singularity was, when AI still seemed a fantasy, and you could still attend a small reception to schmooze with the likes of Sergey Brin. Google tried to recruit me a couple of times back in the day, though I refused to work anywhere outside the City for quality of life reasons! I still stand by that decision too, when all is said and done.
Even more interesting than those conferences was the academic debate I witnessed live at Stanford in 2000. It was sponsored by the Foresight Institute and was a discussion about the ethics of machine intelligence and technological progress in general. Perhaps you’re familiar with Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy’s famous Wired magazine essay from that same year, entitled, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Joy had concluded that the risks of robotics, genetic engineering and nanotech as well as other technologies were too great to keep unthinkingly moving forward in the way that we were. Instead, he advocated what he called, “relinquishment.” On the other side of the debate at the symposium was Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly and other notable scientific thinkers. You just had a feeling that you were watching a momentous meeting of the minds, like electricity in the air. It’s interesting that this is not known as a more historic moment. After all the tech we have come to rely on, this 25 year old event was a rare occasion where the magnitude of the unfolding implications of our increasingly pervasive technological reality was openly discussed. Too bad this was before the ubiquity of phones with cameras or social media, as I have not been able to find much online documenting the event except a broken link to a video on Foresight.
Anyways, I guess I’m just sharing some bits of Bay Area lore that you might resonate with. Like, when I first moved to San Francisco in the mid-1990s, a sort of bohemian Burning Man-adjacent robotics team called Survival Research Labs aka SRL used to put on giant robot shows in vacant lots, complete with smoke effects, colored lights and sound system (this was way before any of the current robot battle media existed). Or how I used to go to these Anon Salon parties where this Chinese American kid named Justin walked around with a video camera constantly recording himself live—the very first streamer! He sold his idea and it became Twitch. Back then, the internet still felt like the wild west. We all looked edgy—I had dreads at my first startup! And working for a startup actually seemed radical, like we were all cyberpunks from a William Gibson story. Go figure. Fast forward a few years, I’m at a café down the street from my apartment, and I hear these 2 guys discussing how they are going to create a bitcoin startup. I ended up buying some at $300. Just another illustration about the powerful mojo in SF. There’s a fountainhead of manifestation in the Bay Area not just for tech, but creativity and sociocultural movements too. I am sure it has always been here, since even before the Gold Rush days of the Barbary Coast. Did you know the Financial District is filled in Bay, mostly composed of the abandoned ships of eager goldseekers? The vessels were tied together and filled in circa the mid-19th century. Yes I am biased about my love for my adopted City (lived here longer than anywhere else), and find it slightly hilarious all the bad press it has gotten as of late.
Alright, I’ll stop here for now. More to come soon. Thanks for reading!