Disrupt Yourself: The Subversive Spiritual Practice That Changes Everything

By Katie Malachuk

Review

“Katie Malachuk writes with great style and humor. She is accessible and personal, yet she is also a scholar and practitioner with a thorough background in her subject. Quite a rarity. Disrupt Yourself displays all of these qualities in abundance. It is exactly what is needed to stand strong in the current tidal wave of misinformation about mindfulness practice based in Buddhism.”
—Sarah Harding,
Niguma, Lady of Illusion and Machik’s Complete Explanation:
Clarifying the Meaning of Chöd


Product Description

We have had enough. We are depleted from overconsumption—technological, material, environmental, social, physical, sexual. We feel defeated by climate change, political antagonism, social injustice, the pressure to be perfect and the anxiety of being alive. We try spiritual this and that, but shopping for practices and performative spirituality drain us further. We are tired of the way we think, talk and live. We have had enough. We have had enough of ourselves.

Enter Disrupt Yourself—a book that is both a salve and a dare for our time. Using Buddhist teachings and lay precepts, it cuts through our confusion via the oft-forgotten foundational practice of ethics. Disrupt Yourself presents an everyday path that puts us in right relationship with ourselves, each other and our world through relevant renunciation around intoxicants, consumption, identity, communication and intimacy. Through narrative, instruction and experiments, readers will uncover their inherent wisdom and its active expression of compassion. This transforms how we think, speak, listen, act, work, create, partner, parent, eat, shop, vote, govern, perform, protest, play, love, make love—all of it. We disrupt ourselves and this disrupts our world. And the big reveal is how joyful and freeing this feels.


About the Author:

Katie Malachuk—Harvard BA, Stanford MBA, Naropa MDiv—is a Buddhist chaplain, mind and life coach, yoga and meditation teacher, and college instructor. She is also the author of You’re Accepted and Earn It, which use yoga philosophy and life coaching to transform the college and MBA admissions processes into journeys of self-discovery. www.katiemalachuk.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982274849

Katie Malachuk

Katie Malachuk—Harvard BA, Stanford MBA, Naropa MDiv—is a Buddhist chaplain, mind and life coach, yoga and meditation teacher, and college instructor. She is also the author of You’re Accepted and Earn It, which use yoga philosophy and life coaching to transform the college and MBA admissions processes into journeys of self-discovery. www.katiemalachuk.com

Book preview

Summer 2017

The Cool Boredom of Being a Grown-Up

Not Taking Intoxicants

Recently, over the course of one week, I heard the following from fellow humans: It’s just so boring at the thought of life without weed. I was freaked out and bored after stopping mid-binge. I’m scared I’d be bored at the prospect of not being angry with everyone. It got boring about a marriage and resultant emotional affair. And each time I thought, Now this is interesting.

As a meditation instructor, boredom turns me on. In many ways, meditation practice is practicing being bored. Raised as a standard suburban overachiever, Harvard BA, Stanford MBA, I was trained to never be bored. There’s so much to do in this American life! As a well-cultivated product of our just-do-it culture, I learned to equate grown-up-ness with achievement and acquisition. Now in our forties, I look at my cohort and see a job well done. Yet, as someone whose career path leads me into people’s minds, I also see that our American dream comes with painful anxiety and expressions thereof—the pot, binge, anger, affair. In fact, with the slightest reflection, we see that our beloved, relentless achievement and acquisition are not the causes of our anxiety but more expressions of it. Uh oh. It’s all very understandable though. Our primal energetic response to the uncertainty of life is anxiety, that restless unease that something must be fixed or changed. Unskilled at being with this energy, we turn toward doing—we all have well-worn strategies for filling the edgy space of uncertainty. Truth is, we are a nation of anxious addicts in various forms, some we demonize and some we valorize—from drinking and smoking to exercising above and beyond, from sinking into porn to floating away on romance, from burrowing into technology to escaping into spirituality, from shying away in self-loathing to strutting about in self-fascination, from wallowing in fear to reveling in hope. The real American dream is our collective trance of habitual distractions from simply being with what is.

Perhaps there is an alternative model of adulting that deserves our attention—a growing up that emphasizes being or what was pragmatically named cool boredom by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Naropa University where I got a Master of Divinity. Like many of us, I began my education on being via yoga and meditation. And, like many of us, I have watched our consumer culture distort these self-forgetting practices into self-promotional projects—yoga becomes a parade of expensive pants and Instagram posts; meditation turns into a tool to fuel our compulsive productivity. For a while, I’ve wondered if our culture needs to cultivate being in a way that is much more boring.

Because we get what we ask for, I was recently treated to a surprise graduate seminar on cool boredom in the liminal space that followed leaving a relationship affected by substance abuse, which we’ll get to in just a bit. My extended time in space highlighted that, in our ever-busy existence, there are many daily shots of space—brushing our teeth, standing on the subway platform, walking to the store, sitting at school pick up, going to the bathroom, driving home—where we can not only gain perspective on our addictive patterns but also evolve beyond them just by being a bit bored. Usually we start with meditation and then apply it to daily life. But, in this time and place, maybe we need to flip the script and start with small shots of presence that aren’t susceptible to promotion and productivity. Because, in a world where we are exhausted by doing but then stuffing our minds and schedules with classes and apps and podcasts on being, where we complain that there’s no solitude and stillness, where we long to hear the quiet voice guiding us along, there is tremendous spiritual growth waiting for us in the cool boredom of liminal space.

In the spirit of such spiritual growth, in this chapter, we’ll look at dropping the distraction of intoxicants—the pot, binge, anger, affair, achievement. My teachers teach not using intoxicants as the first ethical precept because our troubles usually stem from there. Unable to simply be with ourselves, we turn to intoxicants. And, when we are intoxicated, we are more likely to cause harm to self and other. This cycle becomes all the more interesting when we consider that our root intoxication is our self-interested mind—we’re addicted to thinking about ourselves. To work with not taking intoxicants, we’ll look at the ethic in three ways. First, we’ll use the ethic as a path to cultivate humility and compassion around the ways that we habitually hide. This is like trimming the weeds. Next, we’ll explore the ethic as a contemplation on liminal space and how it invites us to release anxious, self-absorbed self-interest. This is like pulling the weeds out at the root. Finally, we’ll expand on the ethic to reframe life as an opportunity to evolve spiritually as human beings. This is like giving water and sunshine to our inherent seeds of wisdom, compassion and joy.

Before going further, let me say that this chapter is the most storytelling-y of the chapters. It’s heavy on the narrative because the only effective way to talk about intoxicants and addiction is to own one’s stuff. Addiction is intimate and universal. We’re all hooked in one way or another, and the healing begins when we come clean. That’s when we start our spiritual journey for real. And that journey begins anew each day, each moment. So we’ll begin this book with a relapse on my part—after a decade-plus of doing this work, I discovered how deep those roots of self-pity can go. Here I am again with this mind, these thoughts and that craving to not be here at all. As we recover, we pick up some tools to save ourselves. However, no tools can help us if we miss the moment of intervention in precious liminal space.

Not Taking Intoxicants—How We Hide

I initially and accidentally became a student of liminal space when I was eighteen. I started college at Northwestern University and was miserable from the get-go. I got very sad and very skinny, using undereating and overexercising as a way to avoid my feelings. I was committing slow motion suicide, and I was good at it. Because I was good at being good at things. My mom suggested transferring schools, but that seemed like something for weirdos, not good girls. Eventually, the natural life-death-life cycle found me. I mentally broke down and dropped out of school. With no plan, I moved home to suburban Maryland, happened upon an internship with the National Organization for Women, waited tables at Rio Grande and saved enough money for an Outward Bound trip in Utah. In that liminal space, I did completely unexpected and messy things for the first time in my life and grew from broken to brave. I applied to a few schools to transfer, got into Harvard and had a beautiful second college career. Moreover, I learned that the life-death-life cycle is actually life-death-space-life. Something valuable happened when I took a break from my life and spent some time in undefined space.

I picked up my study of space in earnest during my thirties when I dove into meditation and Buddhism. From the very first breath in meditation, it was all about space—the gap at the end of the exhale, the pause between thought and action. Meditation is essentially forced liminal space. It is a moratorium on doing. As such, it is death to habitual patterns, aka our addictions. We sit. Now what? Our initial reaction is fuckity-fuck-fuck. In the sudden space, we freak out in the face of our thoughts and feelings no filter. We desperately want to run to familiar distractions—the pot, binge, anger, affair, achievement. Chögyam Trungpa called this panic hot boredom. However, this too shall pass. With courage and discipline, we learn to hold our seat. Eventually, we find the equanimity of cool boredom. We stay present with the fluidity of experience, breathing our way through various mental and physical states. In this spacious boredom, there is room to release autopilot addictions and instead make conscious choices around our thoughts and behavior on the cushion and once we resume daily life.

Buddhists practice the little death of meditation to prepare for the big one—physical death. In the Buddhist teachings on life and death, death is a precious opportunity to make spiritual progress between lives. Of course, now we see that it isn’t death per se; it’s the grand scale of sudden space following death. We die. Now what? Usually, it’s fuckity-fuck-fuck supersized. In the liminal space post-death and between lives, known as the bardo, we freak way out at our mental display without the grounding reference of a body. If we met the extremes of the bardo with the equanimity of cool boredom, we wouldn’t be drawn back into the loop of autopilot addictions—we would spiritually evolve beyond the cyclical existence of beings consumed by craving. Because most of us are unprepared for the bardo, we crave the familiar and begin a new life with our old patterns. Once a student asked Chögyam Trungpa what reincarnates, and he replied, Your bad habits. Even if we aren’t into these teachings at the level of multiple lives, we see the parallel of how we run to familiar habits in this life all the time—going back for the pot, binge, anger, affair, achievement whenever we face uncertain