My life as a slug
How the inner critic distorts perception
photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann
There was a night in my 20s when the best I could do for myself was to walk to the corner store for solace in the form of a pint of ice cream.
On the way, a couple approached, the woman laughing. I lowered my eyes as they passed so they wouldn't see that I wasn't human.
I was a slug.
No friends. No agenda except a pint of ice cream. No chance of finding a girlfriend, let alone a buddy. That was the hell of my mind back then.
Except when I was playing guitar.
In Seattle's Pike Place market, I played Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Pink Floyd and my own original grunge folk sound poems.
I once made friends with a homeless Vietnam Vet named Lamar. We traveled to a music festival with another young street performer named Christ (pronounced like Chris, rhyming with "wrist") and his German Shepherd Gideon.
Later Christ was living in the apartment building I lived in during my slug days. One day, following an argument with his girlfriend, he jumped out the window.
For many years I couldn’t figure out how to move in time with the beats of society. That changed when I stopped thinking of my body and the world as separate entities.
It’s a way of listening we don’t learn in school - unless we get gaslit for “daydreaming” (as if being bored isn’t a natural response to cookie-cutter education).
This is how other people’s stories creep into the doors of perception and steal away our magic. These days, memes pulse from every device we interact with. They echo in our brains long after, even if we're walking in nature.
This is the rhythm of history in 2025.
Yet we can still learn to shape our bodies into resonators to find the groove within the chaos. When we know that all sound arises from a silence below that never ceases - even the sounds of our own thinking - then we can rediscover the steps to the dance.
This way of listening isn't new, it's older than all of us.
It is your ancestry and your birthright.
For me it was also a rebirth.
How do we shift into a new kind of listening without the static of the inner critic?
It’s easiest when we do it together. I'm hosting intimate small group sessions on Tuesday May 27 at 7:30pm EST and Thursday May 29 at 2pm EST. Together we’ll explore the embodied journey ‘From Self-Critical to Self-Confident.’