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  Praise for Zen Bender

  “I laughed and related to every page of this crazy mission to fix everything…that didn’t need fixing. A wise, witty, and thought-provoking book that ends in just the place you’d hope it would. A great read whether you have a Reiki healer on speed dial, or, well, not.”

  —Marianne Power, author of Help Me! One Woman’s Quest to Find Out if Self-Help Really Can Change Your Life

  “Inspiring and hilarious, Zen Bender perfectly captures our misguided quest for perfection, as well as Stephanie’s amazing spirit. I face the same daily struggles, so her writing really hit home with me, as I’m sure it will with everyone who has tried (and laughed about) all the fixes out there.”

  —Patricia Velasquez, actress on Arrested Development and The Mummy, author of Straight Walk, supermodel, and UNESCO Artist for Peace

  Copyright © 2019 Stephanie Krikorian

  Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

  Cover, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

  Author Photo Credit: Erin Turner Photography

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  Zen Bender: A Decade-Long Enthusiastic Quest to Fix Everything (That Was Never Broken)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019941762

  ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-029-5, (ebook) 978-1-64250-030-1

  BISAC OCC010000, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Mindfulness & Meditation

  Printed in the United States of America

  This story is factually accurate to the best of my recollection. Still, at times, I’ve changed a name, or a situation, or been intentionally vague, so no story or conversation should be taken as exactly correct or that there is an exact person with the name given.

  I’m also a truth seeker who goes out of my way to give credit where credit is due. My biggest panic when writing this book was that I inadvertently repeated an idea that I read somewhere else. Most of this book is what I have gleaned from my own experience. As you’ll see from the pages you’re about to dive into, I read and read and read and read a lot of articles on self-help and books on self-help. I’ve tried to give credit where due for thoughts that inspired me, but no one but me is responsible for the content of this book.

  Stephanie Krikorian

  To Julia and Donald Krikorian for: Every. Single. Thing. This great life of mine and all of its joy is 100 percent thanks to you both.

  To my mom’s late brother, Billy Harvey, for the most important introduction of my life. Without you, I might never have met and fallen for the bright lights of the Big Apple.

  Table of Contents

  Note to Reader

  Prologue

  Part 1: Reeling

  Chapter 1

  My Gateway Drug: The Vision Board

  Chapter 2

  The End of Everything

  Chapter 3

  You Can Eat Your Dinner or Drink Your Dinner, But You Can’t Do Both

  Part 2: Dealing

  Chapter 4

  Fat Women Don’t Get Frenched

  Chapter 5

  Numerologists, Clairvoyants, and Healers, Oh My!

  Chapter 6

  The Melrose Place of It All

  Chapter 7

  The Life-Changing Magic of Tapping into an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder You Didn’t Know You Had

  Chapter 8

  Never Judge a Clairvoyant by the Lampshade on Her Head

  Chapter 9

  No Diet Left Behind

  Part 3: Healing

  Chapter 10

  When A-Types Spa

  Chapter 11

  Any Direct Flight

  Chapter 12

  The Beginning of Everything

  Chapter 13

  When Your Healer Jumps the Shark

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Note to Reader

  A New York magazine cover story in the summer of 2018, simply entitled 2008, examined what’s happened in the United States since the financial crisis, including a glossary of terms that have emerged as a result of the Great Recession. Along with One Percent, the Sharing and Gig Economies, Millennials, Occupy, and Survivalism, the term Wellness went mainstream.

  The World Health Organization defines wellness as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” According to the Global Wellness Institute’s website and various studies they have conducted, the global wellness industry was a $4.2 trillion market in 2018, up from $1.9 trillion in 2010.

  While I was on my decade-long Zen Bender, I made a generous contribution to this sector.

  Prologue

  When I look back at my childhood, I feel nothing but profound happiness and gratitude. My upbringing was simple and uncomplicated, but pleasant and warm, thanks to my parents.

  My mom, Julia, was born to be a mom. My dad, Don, is a man of few words, but they are usually potent ones, with lessons buried within. Both have always been incredibly supportive.

  When I told my dad at a young age that I was going to be an actress, something that many parents might find objectionable, he simply said, “First learn to waitress.”

  My dad was outnumbered. He (mostly) patiently put up with three yappy, opinionated, and strong-headed girls—Jackie (older), Jennifer (younger), and me in the middle. He carefully navigated our all-female household. Briefly, my dad had another guy in the house, my male tiger fish, Otto (I assumed he was male, not sure why). Otto was the only pet I ever had.

  Rarely did my mom or dad interject in the bickering of the three of us. We were left alone to settle disputes on our own, probably in an effort to teach us to get along with other people later in life. While we didn’t fight a lot, there were all-out wars over what we were watching on the television in our brown-wood-paneled rec room with wall-to-wall teal rug and textured plaster ceiling. Skilled at TV warfare, we would pull the knob off the wood-encased television set to prevent anyone else from changing the channel (long before TV’s had remote control), thus preserving our viewing choice for as long as we wanted.

  Jackie loved Little House on the Prairie reruns. I remember, vividly, walking in as she sat two feet away from the TV set, sobbing over Laura Ingalls Wilder and family. Jennifer loved The Love Boat, and the soap opera Santa Barbara—the latter so much that she viewed the Capwells, the Lockridges, and the Castillos basically as family. I couldn’t get enough of Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman.

  Eventually, of course, that knob used for changing the channel got lost, probably slipped down the side of the textured green-and-blue-striped couch. My father replaced it with a set of pliers that he set on top of the TV, but that required some seriously fine motor skills to hook onto the internal prong inside the
broken channel-changing mechanism. He urged us not to lose them. We did not—they were too critical to our lives—but those pliers, in a pinch, doubled as a weapon when hurled across the room. Nobody lost an eye.

  In the summers, we went on big camping vacations. To me, it always felt high-end, even though it was not. Even when camping, the lessons and skill-building continued. One in particular was in confidence, and lumberjacking, I suppose. My dad, much to my mother’s horror, during a summer trip to Western Canada, handed me an axe at age eight, and offered me a few bucks to chop a big log in half. I did.

  Later, with the cash stuffed into my blue and red patent-leather snap wallet, I stopped to fold T-shirts at the local tourist shop in Banff. Don’t ask me why—I just did. Satisfied with my impromptu clean-up, I left the store, and my wallet and my cash behind. We all quickly ran back in; the wallet was there, but the money was gone. I was never big on folding laundry after that.

  Every family has its own brand of humor, which might at times seem totally off the mark to other people. Ours was no different. When my sisters and I reminisce about the crazy things my dad used to say to us growing up, we always have a good laugh. We used to laugh when he said them back then, too.

  When we were kids and we finished eating dinner, if we asked, “What’s for dessert?” my dad would say, “Close your eyes.”

  We would.

  “What do you see?” he would ask.

  “Nothing,” we would say, eyes closed.

  “That’s what’s for dessert.”

  We eventually got savvy.

  He taught me, in his own ultra-direct way, to “use my head” and think through a problem or a task. If I did something ultra-stupid, which I did from time to time, he would tell me with a chuckle, “For a smart girl, you’re pretty dumb.” (Prime example of us thinking something was funny while other people might think “Uh, child abuse.”)

  And there was his very unique way of teaching me the value of a dollar. Once, when I spent fifty dollars on a Ralph Lauren button-down denim shirt (which was on sale, half price, okay?), he told me I had “more money than brains.” That sentiment has proven correct many times over.

  Despite ours being an ordinary middle-class upbringing (my dad was a high school teacher and my mom a secretary), I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything, not a toy or an outfit or an experience. I begged them to name my younger sister Ronald McDonald; that appeal was foolishly denied. But there was a Lite-Brite under the tree the year that it was the hot Christmas item, and a Cabbage Patch Kids doll named Ivy Marlene for me when they were all the rage (and people were fighting over them in the toy store). Everything was wrapped by my mother, so meticulously and perfectly; I have to this day never seen such professional wrapping skills.

  One of my most vivid memories of sheer joy was when I was four or five and my dad drove up, home from work, and pulled a red, used, rusty bike from the back of the cream-colored VW camper. I watched as he walked it to me. It was mine. He had brought it home for me. My heart swelled with pride because he had gotten me something all my own, not for my birthday or Christmas, and not something that had once belonged to my older sister.

  Of all the things I learned growing up, the one that started to ring in my ears later in life, was, perhaps, an early lesson in gratitude, not that I saw it as such then. Once, I desperately wanted a toy called a Lemon Twist. It was a black plastic cord that you attached to one leg, then whipped it around in a circle, repeatedly jumping over it with the other leg, while the lemon on the end swirled. I begged for it and eventually got it, but I remember my dad’s initial response to my request.

  “Why can’t you just be happy you have two arms and two legs?”

  Good question.

  Chapter 1

  My Gateway Drug: The Vision Board

  kaboom

  I’m not going to say I quit a secure and well-paying job in news after working insanely hard to find it because of my vision board, but I’m not going to not say I did.

  I’m kidding. I didn’t.

  Well, not really. But I did remain stalled at the intersection of Common Sense and the Universe (and all of its magic) for a long time while I debated my move. My career had ended, then it was briefly resuscitated. But it was hanging on by a thread, I knew that, so I needed to figure out what to do.

  The Universe seduced me; the vision board was its Cyrano.

  The vision board came into my purview around the time the book The Secret was picking up steam. Before I read it, I watched a discussion about it on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was my church back then. When I watched Oprah and her guests talk about this book, I was transfixed. I had dabbled in yoga up until that point, but that was as New-Agey as I’d ever been.

  The Secret was something different. It was out there, but not too out there. Out there in a way that made it make sense to at least consider its possibilities.

  One practice The Secret made popular was the visualization notion upon which a vision board was based. Stare at a picture of a Ferrari, and soon enough, it will materialize. Its concept—that I could will something to happen with positive thinking—seemed interesting. Initially, I was mostly fascinated by the book’s principle that, if you don’t worry that a burger and fries will make you fat, then it won’t, but scientific and exhaustive personal study had proven otherwise.

  But this big idea: Letting go and allowing myself to be swept away by the power of an unseen force—that felt like something I could actually get behind. Jump, and the net will form.

  People were anxious to cede control in order to get control of whatever was spiraling in their own lives. It was an interesting contradiction, but The Secret was, in a way, an adult magic wand.

  And it, and all the self-help and spiritual books that followed, gave us all something to do.

  I wasn’t alone in pondering all that The Secret was offering up. The book became a pop culture phenomenon. It brought self-help and spirituality to the masses, perhaps thanks to Oprah, perhaps based on our need to believe. Years later, Goop picked up where Oprah and early adopters of the Universe and alternative fixes left off, blowing the lid right off the wellness market, making putting jade eggs in one’s vagina basically conventional practice.

  The Secret was a moment in time, a defining one indeed, that put what I called hocus-pocus into the mainstream.

  All that I learned from that book initially got tucked away in that part of the brain that is filled with seemingly useless information that occasionally comes in handy at random times. I went on my merry, non-spiritual way and on to absorbing whatever else Oprah was talking about.

  Any Self-Help Port in a Storm

  It started out innocently enough. Right around the time things sort of got tough. That’s often when and why we seek out self-help, because in a way, it’s comfort food for our spirit. It’s a life preserver when nothing else seems to help. Looking back, that’s why I was drawn in.

  At 10:30 a.m. on October 31, 2008, my career fell victim to the Great Recession. I was a news producer and journalist and had been working as such for almost eighteen years. After graduation from college, I wrote for a small newspaper, and then, after a year off for graduate school, dove straight into TV news. Until that fateful day when the show I worked on was abruptly canceled.

  A year after I lost my job, I found another—albeit less exciting—one, but the damage had been done. “Frayed” would probably best describe my state of existence then. Initially, solace came in an interesting form: that vision board made popular by The Secret a couple of years earlier.

  Desperate to find my way back to wherever it was that I was supposed to be, on the back of the steel door in my Harlem apartment, I made a very ad hoc, not-exactly-perfect-in-execution, first-timer’s vision board. I didn’t put a lot of back into it, to be honest—just slapped a few pictures up there, hoping for the best.

  On that bo
ard, in full view, I used magnets to hang a cutout magazine picture of two Adirondack chairs with pretty pink pillows on them, facing out at a body of water (a.k.a. my future beach house that I would own because renting one wasn’t enough), and a sleek city co-op that was, in my head and on my board, one hundred blocks downtown from the marble-countered, Kohler-fauceted two-bedroom I had just bought uptown. A tear sheet of a handsome male eyeballed me from the back of that door. He was my future husband. And a fit and thin woman working out was never going to be me, but a girl can be delusional, and staring at a skinny person would most definitely make me one, too. Right? Obviously, there was picture of a stack of cash, which I figured I needed to make all of the above materialize.

  My vision. My perfect life, as told through magazine cutouts.

  It was my starter vision board, the first time I had made one. (I’d later go on to make more.) At the time, I didn’t know it, but I had a stronger vision-board game in me; this vision board was just a surface-scratcher.

  Still, I believed that staring at those pictures every day as I left the apartment would surely make them a reality and therefore improve my life dramatically. It was easy to believe.

  Believing in unseen forces, of course, meant ignoring that nagging and logical voice in my head that had always served me well. But then, if I could suddenly blame the Universe for a poor life decision when things got tough, I most certainly didn’t have to blame myself.

  AFOG (Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth)

  There was, of course, more to my frayed self than just the end of my career. That same year, I was also about to turn forty. Plus, I was still single. My middle section had gotten a little thicker than it had been in the past. Like rosé in the Hamptons in August, self-doubt was pouring non-stop into my head.

  As my career came to a screeching halt and forty was looming, it increasingly felt like I was walking through waist-deep mud, slowly, unable to get anywhere. Stuck. As I struggled to gain my footing on all fronts, I wondered why everything almost but never quite seemed to happen for me. I worked hard not to compare my life to others’, but I started to feel like I was on the local train and everybody else was on the express.