Amanda Palmer talks meditation, Zen… and “mindful stripping”?

Amanda Palmer performing in 2008. Photo by Mykal Burns!

In a new piece for The Quietus, Amanda Palmer — she of the "Cabaret Punk" act Dresden Dolls, and more recently a solo artist — talks about mindfulness meditation and also one of her favorite books, Only Don't Know, the first collection of letters between Korean Zen master Sung Sahn and some of his students: "I've probably bought that book a dozen times and gifted it to people who were in need. I don't give them [a copy of] How To Understand The Music Business; I give them the Seung Sahn letters. [...] These are kids in the sixties and seventies. The problems are all the same.  It takes no intellectual stretch to read these letters that these kids wrote to their Zen teacher, or a teacher they saw at a talk. And he writes back these beautiful, considered, really great, no-bullshit answers about what's important."

Palmer also addresses her former employment as a stripper. She wasn't just stripping, she says, but mindfully stripping. "I went in there thinking, 'I can do this because I am a feminist and I can do this job compassionately.'"

See the whole thing, and see what you think, here.

For more on Amanda Palmer from the Sun, see this SunSpace post from last year and her article from the magazine, "Melody vs. Meditation."

And to get a taste of the teachings of Seung Sahn, see "You Already Understand!", a teaching as published in the Shambhala Sun.

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