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    The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
    Unavailable
    The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
    Unavailable
    The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
    Ebook171 pages3 hours

    The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth

    By Natalie Goldberg

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of America's favorite teachers, Natalie Goldberg has inspired millions to write as a way to develop an intimate relationship with their minds and a greater understanding of the world in which they live. Now, through this honest and wry exploration of her own life, Goldberg puts her teachings to work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061856778
    Unavailable
    The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
    Author

    Natalie Goldberg

    Natalie Goldberg is a poet, painter, teacher, and the author of twelve books, including her classic, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (which has sold more than 1.5 million copies) and Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. She has been teaching seminars for thirty-five years to people from around the world and lives in New Mexico. 

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    Reviews for The Great Failure

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Natalie Goldberg is at her best as a teacher of both writing and zen and of writing as a spiritual discipline and practice. I first encountered her books around 20 years ago. Writing Down the Bones was all the rage in writing groups and of course, being contrary, I avoided it for a few years and then read both that one and Wild Mind (basically a re-run of Bones, but enjoyable). I found them invigorating, and loved the spiritual aspect, though her favourite methods didn’t work for me.The Great Failure, however, isn’t about writing nor is it about failure as a path to success. It’s a memoir about the two important men in her life and their failure to maintain appropriate boundaries, resulting in abuse of their positions, one as father, the other as teacher. It’s a divided book, not only in its subject matter, but in the success of the portraits.Her portrait of her father is nuanced and vivid. He was, as one would say in Yiddish, “a grober yung,” a boor (literally “a gross boy”). He had little boyhood himself, and was little cared for. As a man he was crass and oblivious to his crassness. He commented on his pubescent daughter’s body, he held her too tight, he made her uncomfortable enough to avoid being alone with him. A bartender, he had no understanding of his adult daughter’s career as a Buddhist teacher, but he was earthy and without pretension.During a visit to her home in the southwest, he sat outside to watch the sunrise at her command. When she asked him what he thought of it, he was nonplussed; it was a sunrise, it happens every morning. On another occasion she tried to teach her parents to meditate. After ten minutes of silence, she asked him if he’d noticed how busy the mind was, how many thoughts flit through it. He said he hadn’t thought at all, not a single thought. What was it like for him, she asked. It was like it always is when nobody is talking or doing anything, he said.He was loud, he was busy, he was vigorous, he was insulting, a grober yung who loved his daughter with all his heart. His simplicity, his complexity, and her forgiveness for all of it comes through vividly.It stays with me. And I envy her this possibility of forgiveness because, although her father failed in many ways it was out of ignorance, not intention, and there is all the difference in that.Her portrayal of her teacher, Katagiri Roshi, a zen master and founding abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, while sincere lacks the vibrancy and understanding she has for her father. Katagiri’s motivations and feelings in carrying on secret affairs with students are unknowns that Goldberg tries to fill in with guesswork. Her guesses are sometimes plausible and sometimes, for me, dubious. And the situation is different in another way; he was her teacher not ever her lover. The wounds are wounds of disillusion, and as disappointing as the disillusion is, it is a surface wound compared to what she experienced as a daughter.Perhaps better writing comes out of deeper wounds. I wonder what, as a teacher herself, she would say about that.
    • 5/5
      Another great memoir from Natalie Goldberg. She makes gold from everyday life.
    • 3/5
      This memoir was interesting, and I was curious about the relationships Natalie had with both her father and her teacher. Unfortunately, the book read like she was trying to work through her personal problems while writing it, so it did not connect well with me the reader.
    • 2/5
      This was my first encounter with Natalie Goldberg, and I found her intolerably whiny. I'm a big fan of stories about people realizing that their religious leaders are schmucks. However, Goldberg's guru barely qualifies in big scheme of things, and Goldberg's emotional reaction seems completely over-blown. There are some really interesting stories about her father.

      1 person found this helpful