"Teaching From the Mud": Wandering, Witnessing, and Awakening with Melanie Landau

Bad Rabbi Media

Early in my conversation with return guest Melanie Landau, I told her that she is one of my favorite wanderers, and she responded that I'm one of her favorite witnesses. Of course, it's an honor to witness such high-level wandering with the intensity of introspection and the commitment to translating insight into practice that Melanie brings to her wandering path. We talked a lot about the deep grief she has worked through since the breakup of her marriage, the host of realizations that emerged from that process, and the work she has done to leverage those realizations into growth. "Like, how I'm co-creating reality in my habitual responses to things...Like a reflexive victims mentality about things it shouldn't apply to, like my kids leaving their toys out even after I've told them not to. Or I'll take it to the other extreme: deny my reactions, deny my desires." For Melanie, these realizations have had applications both personal -- she's currently producing a film about the intimacy of couples (whom she interviewed in their homes) where one is a couple's therapist, and political ("Each side is similarly acting on triggers and exacerbating the situation by their responses.")

"The path I'm learning is to be aware of the reactivity and slow it down, but not by denying the realness of how I'm experiencing it...by being able to hold myself and soothe myself enough that I don't have to be reacitve to it."