As a teacher, I immediately recognized the sound pedagogy in Elizabeth Hamilton's <Untrain Your Parrot>. It comes as no surprise to discover, during the course of reading the book, that Hamilton has been a college professor in the field of music. She applies her teaching skills to her writing on Zen. Her years of experience teaching and living Zen make for a truly wonderful handbook that one can consult again and again. The exercises in the book are applicable to everyone. I particularly like the suggestions for journal writing, which are inspiring. Finally, there is also Hamilton's sense of humor. When did we forget that Zen humor has a unique place in history, recognition of the Absurd some 1200 years before the West? Thanks to Hamilton, we may enjoy a revival of laughter as part of Zen practice.
We know how important our self-talk is from the story of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the 201 stories we tell in "[[ASIN:1402207964 Extraordinary Comebacks]]: 201 Inspiring Stories of Courage, Triumph, and Success". After the "failure" of his First Symphony, severely depressed, he stopped composing for three years. Eventually his psychiatrist turned to re-programming his patient's self-talk, prescribing this mantra: "You will begin your concerto. You will work with great facility. It will be excellent." The composer repeated it to himself, over and over. It worked. The result: his Piano Concerto No. 2, one of his greatest works, a comeback concerto, if you will.
Should you need similar counsel, author Elizabeth Hamilton (btw a classical musician herself) may serve as a similar sage and enlightened companion. There are nuggets of diamonds strewn throughout this wide-ranging Zen commentary, one or more will resonate, some may change your life. Particularly interesting: her discussions of "zen ego," yielding or not yielding to anxiety and quotes from notables in fields from American writers to hiphop to physics to Zen masters new and old and everything in between. The chapter titled "Untrain Your Parrot" took up just 10 pages, and could have been developed even further, but takes a bit of a back seat to Hamilton's broader survey of Zen perspectives. Worthwhile volume, and worth re-reading and coming back to.
