They May Look Harmless: But these Bok Choy can kill me.Someone is punishing me for my skeptical attitude toward Urban Zen. By someone, I guess I mean God, in the way my mother says “God is punishing you” when I trip after making fun of someone, or rip my pants after ridiculing the tightness of someone else’s.

I was famished when lunch arrived on our table during the break yesterday. A dashing waiter came bearing a beautiful wooden tray stacked with bowls of “living” food—the kind of stuff rich, enlightened, skinny fashionistas are served at every meal. The people at my table—three yoga teachers, an internist, two nurse practitioners and an administrator at the American Cancer Society—snapped them up immediately.

I reached for my bowl with hesitancy, because I have to be extremely careful about what I eat outside my own kitchen. I have severe food allergies to seafood and pine nuts; they make my throat swell and cause what I will refer to delicately as “gastrointestinal distress.”

I knew I didn’t have to worry about seafood. “Living food” is vegan. (I hope!) I unwrapped my chopsticks and started poking around in the little bowl. Beautifully wilted bright green bok choy and dark grey pieces of eggplant lay on top of a bed of black grains, which seemed wild-rice-ish. No pine nuts in sight, seemed safe. I dug in.

“I’m surprised there’s eggplant in here,” I say, trying to make conversation, because I want to kill myself with anxiety when stuck in a silent group of strangers, “It’s a nightshade, right? I thought macrobiotic people didn’t eat it.” I looked around for a response but my tablemates ignored the comment and continued eating. Oh-kay. I am a dork.

I take a bite, avoiding the eggplant as I know some people get a scratchy throat from eggplant that isn’t cooked properly and I don’t want to mistake a scratchy throat for an on-the-verge-of-closing throat as I am not holding any Xanax. The bok choy is all right but it isn’t all that. Everyone is talking about how “incredibly delicious” and “refreshing” the food at this conference has been, how they wish someone would post the recipes on the website. The food reminds me of those little plastic containers of seaweedy mystery you find under the water bottles in a health food store, but I am done commenting on it. I eat a few bites and pass my near-full bowl to a waiter, who looks at me as if I were throwing away a little bowl of gold.

As we work through our lunch—brainstorming strategies for improving the experience of dying in America’s hospitals—I feel myself growing spacier and spacier. My writing is getting messy. Is it hot in here? My forehead is beading sweat.

I know what is coming. The back of my throat is swelling; my epiglottis is irritated too, so enlarged that if I were to breathe in deep and quick you could hear it flutter. I eat a few grapes to try to clear out the bitter taste of histamine from my mouth, test my swallowing reflex.
Michael Beckwith: The fox from The Secret was there. In real life. But even he couldn't save me from myself.
Michael Bernard Beckwith—the handsome African American guy with dreads from The Secret video—is leading a meditation.

He intones, “So that which is eternally going on becomes the object of our awareness…”

The object of my awareness right now is that I might go into anaphylactic shock and barf in front of Donna Karan, Christy Turlington, and Uma Thurman’s dad.

“The realm of everything good is revealing itself through this panel, this conference, this gathering…”

But not through this lunch!

I open my eyes to locate the nearest bathroom. It is located right off the main meeting room, and were I to retch inside it, everyone would hear me. No question embarrasses me more than “Are you OK?” when I am sick, so falling apart in front of this crowd is not an option. Though if I were to fall apart, now would be the time to do it, while they’re all on planet meditation.

“Allow us to become more and never less than our true self…”

I am about to be one lunch less than myself if I don’t get out of here…

I gather up my huge bag and coat and weave through the legs surrounding our table, saying, “Bye! Thank you! I have to run!” Until this moment I haven’t noticed that I’ve essentially lost my voice due to throat swelling. What if I leave and asphyxiate on the fringes of the far West Village? No one will discover me for at least an hour—the conference is scheduled to run until 3 p.m!

Walking outside, the fresh air helps for a second. I run toward the nearest Starbucks, which is two blocks away. Outside, three weird guys yell at me, “Save your receipt for a two dollar Metrocard!” What?

I pray for no line. There’s a line. There’s a woman with a massive wheelie suitcase who has obviously popped in to do her post-flight grooming. Think of something undisgusting. Vanilla ice cream. Disgusting! What if someone asks me if I’m OK? Morning sickness, that’s a good answer. But then they’ll ask when the baby is due. How depressing. If I ever come back to this Starbucks I’ll have to come up with a miscarriage story.Starbucks Bathroom: Worth my $4.50 any day of the week.

Come on, lady. I consider throwing up in my coat. I could turn away from the baristas and just hide my face in the black wool, wrap the whole mess up, and toss it neatly into the dumpster outside. But I really like this coat. Once, after a similar anaphylactic experience which, coincidentally, also occurred in the West Village, I threw up into my favorite shawl and tossed it out the window on the West Side Highway. The cab driver didn’t even notice.

Mercifully, the post-flight girl is finished rather quickly. Her makeup looks good. I run inside and no matter how hard I push I can’t get the spring-loaded door closed quickly enough. I do so in just enough time to rid myself of a gallon of black mess—caponata!—and feel better instantly. I splash water on my face, put my sunglasses on, and crash into another Urban Zen participant as I career out of the bathroom. She looks at me sympathetically. Probably thinks I’m bulimic.

I run out of the Starbucks and the weird guys yell, “Didja save your receipt? We’ve got your Metrocard!”

“I didn’t buy anything!” I scream at them in my underwater swollen Disney villain voice. They are frightened of me.

Bounding toward the Christopher Street station I pop into another Starbucks and repeat the experience. For goodness sake, I only ate one bite!

OK, God, I promise to be more openhearted when it comes to Zen fashionistas. I’ve learned my lesson.

But tomorrow I’m going on a purifying fast.

The first panel I attend at the Urban Zen initiative is called “The Path: Doctors, Embracing a New Way of thinking.”

Its goal is to encourage doctors of Western medicine to consider alternative modalities—such as yoga, Chinese medicine, and holistic nutrition—when crafting treatment plans for their patients.

Donna Karan opens the session by welcoming the audience. When she speaks of her late husband Stephan, who inspired her alternative medicine crusade, I am surprised by my own tears. It’s hard not to get emotional—the film that follows her welcome speech features a series of still images of Stephan, and then a gut-wrenching clip of him on a ski trip. In the clip he has longish gray hair and a charismatic smile. He speaks directly to the camera before taking off down the mountain, cheerfully yelling, “Hasta luego!”

But, of course, we don’t. See him later.

Instead, we see a panel of world-renowned experts on health and spirituality, a gallery full of photos being auctioned off to benefit wellness programs, a pop-up “retail experience,” also to benefit Urban Zen. Karan has created an impressive spectacle to honor her late husband—and hopefully a dynamic initiative to help heal the sick.

In the film, Karan says, “The idea that I had an idea and I didn’t do everything there was to be done… I couldn’t get up in the morning. It’s just who I am.” Everyone in the audience looks over to her at this moment, commending her with a head-nod or wistful smile or a thumbs-up. A beautiful cancer survivor and friend of Karan’s salutes her in the film, “What an amazing miracle that you created for me.” (The miracle she is referring to is—presumably—the Urban Zen initiative.) It’s all very Oprah.

All forces at the Urban Zen initiative are conspiring to make Donna Karan feel good about herself, but they can’t give her the one thing she really wants: to bring her husband back. And this breaks my heart. It also makes me feel like a total bitch for having anything critical to say about her or her project.

But the panel discussion that follows her intro is somehow unsatisfying. Yes, there are ten extremely accomplished people onstage trying to solve our country’s healthcare problem. Well, sort of. They all agree that few sick people are getting the care they need, and that multiple healing modalities are better than one. They all use anecdotes of Easternish wisdom to prove their points, saying things like, “Our fears need to be our teachers,” and “Just be there in that calm space.” They want to “bring the healing back to the healers,” they all have “the best job in the world.” But while they are masters of mutual congratulation, they offer few concrete solutions to offer better medical care to more people.

One doctor asserts that in order to change how doctors think, we have to encourage their process of personal transition from mechanic fixing a problem, to whole person treating whole people. But how do you teach someone to care more?

“Medical schools need to become schools of wisdom,” says a doctor who manages an integrative medicine program at a top hospital, “I want my physicians to be part of the dance of life.”

There’s no question that doctors who act like human beings make better company than those who act like automatons. But are they really better doctors? Who can know?

Getting into the first panel I attend, “Doctors, Embracing a New Way of Thinking,” isn’t easy. After I arrive at the Stephan Weiss studio, deep in the West Village, I get in line to check in with one of many frazzled-looking event coordinators in black headsets. While another writer and I languish at the entrance—“The problem is the PR people have never given us a list of press!” growls a pretty blonde—women carrying bags made of ostrich, lizard and snakeskin are waved in right and left.

I am not particularly bothered by what some might consider a snub—this scene is no different from waiting for backstage access to a fashion show, which I did for years covering beauty and fashion trends for glossy magazines. The VIPS there and here came from the same guest list—in order to attend this series of panels and workshops, one has to be a patron of the Urban Zen initiative; sponsorships range from $6000 to $250000, roughly the same price range as a piece of couture. According to the Urban Zen website, sponsors help fund the attendance of nurses, medical students, and other healing practitioners who would otherwise not be able to attend.

After about ten minutes of waiting outside, my fellow press buddy and I are ushered inside the building to wait some more in the gallery, where a silent auction of serene art photographs is being displayed. In this corral with all the other seatless people I have a good view of the audience, who seem to be getting to know one another, eager for the panel to start.

“I am meeting with Donna next week to discuss strategy,” says the woman I met outside, who is getting anxious that everyone seems to be getting seats but us, “They obviously don’t know who I am.” She is the publisher of an established alternative medicine newsletter, and her sense of entitlement is sort of charming. She may have been to Washington to lobby for universal healthcare, but she’s obviously never been to an NYC PR extravaganza.

Harboring no delusions about my own importance in this crowd, I settle into a conversation with another woman who’s waiting to be seated, a doctor of Chinese medicine. She is in her mid-thirties, Asian-American, and so fashionable and pretty I might have mistaken her for someone from the W magazine society page. She tells me she left corporate America to practice Chinese medicine and I second-guess my assessments of the other people I saw whiz past me at the door. Maybe they were all in the healing arts, too?

Five minutes after the scheduled beginning, we’re still not seated, but a hush comes over the crowd as the panel moves toward the stage, the actor Michael J. Fox, who is living with Parkinson's Disease, at its tail end. Everyone is trying to stare out of the corner of their eye. He is magnetic. With the layout of the room—the stage at the very front, mics, photographers—it is easy to pretend we are attending a press conference for some new TV show. But this is not TV, it’s real. Fox’s gait is a little shaky. And when he gets to the stage, he’s seated next to his neurologist and a melanoma survivor and the head of integrative medicine at Beth Israel medical center—not Meredith Baxter Birney or Justine Bateman. This is real.

No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that celebrities are regular people, it’s deeply disturbing when they become sick. I could offer some pat explanation about the secret sense of satisfaction we feel when the mighty fall, but I don’t think it’s that simple—or that heartless. Once illness or trauma penetrates the placenta of celebrity, affecting those who dwell in our fantasy worlds, it seems, ironically, much more real and threatening to the rest of us. Plus our sense of empathy for them is artificially inflated. We feel as though we know them, so it’s like a good friend or relative is in danger.

Because of this, celebrities can—and should—bring awareness to their diseases by speaking openly about them. This can lead directly to progress, both medical and sociological. Think what Christopher Reeve did for paralysis—he humanized it, brought a real sense of strength and dignity to the wheelchair, and he did more for stem cell research than any other individual.

So why does this who’s who of Hollywood healthcare at the Urban Zen Initiative make me a little uneasy? Why, when the session opens with a moving film featuring Donna Karan, her husband (who passed away), and other famous cancer patients such as Edie Falco, do I catch myself doing an inner eye-roll?

More on this later.

Choose Your Guru: This photograph of legendary yogi Sting (by Karin Catt) is being auctioned to benefit Donna Karan's Urban Zen Initiative.I am taking notes on a pad designed and provided by fashion guru Donna Karan. Sitting in her studio on an overstuffed floor pillow, Fiji water and raw walnuts within reach, I am admiring scores of taut, burnished individuals dressed in asymmetric, scapula- and clavicle-bearing organic cotton ensembles. Coldplay and Sinead O’Connor’s plaintive melodies emanate from hidden speakers and Donna Karan’s image is projected on white walls in the massive space.

But I am not at a fashion show.

I am at the Well Being Forum, the first event being put forth by Karan’s Urban Zen Initiative. This project began as a legacy for Stephan Weiss, Karan’s husband, who died of cancer in 2001. Its goal, according to Karan, is to “connect the dots” between eastern and western medicine.

For this conference, Karan has summoned a who’s who list of doctors, yoga practitioners, nutritionists, healers—and their famous acolytes—to address an audience of philanthropists, patients and health professionals. Dean Ornish will talk nutrition, Rodney Yee will do yoga. Mehmet Oz—Oprah’s doctor—will discuss patient care. Michael J. Fox and his doctor will discuss living with Parkinson’s. Lou Reed—yes, that Lou Reed—will teach Tai Chi. His longtime partner, artist Laurie Anderson, will lead a meditation. The model Christy Turlington will serve on a women’s health panel.

Think of it as Vogue’s editorial staff taking over the New England Journal of Medicine.

While the motivations behind the project are undeniably good, the concept of an incredibly wealthy celebrity inviting her friends and their gurus to brainstorm in front of a studio full of people either wealthy or powerful enough to get on the guest list is complicated.

Over the next few days, I am going to attend some panels and report back on them. Some questions I’m already asking myself:

Who has access to “spirituality” in our society? What happens when our health and wellbeing are contingent on our ability to pay for guidance?

How can any movement transcend preaching to its own choir?

What’s behind the creative impulse that arises when a loved one passes away? Is it about trying to resurrect the lost person, or satisfying the living person’s narcissism?

How can a room full of like-minded people avoid getting mired in sanctimonious self-congratulation and challenge each other to move forward?

And, finally, if we believe people are capable of healing themselves, doesn’t that assign a cruel and irrational sense of responsibility to the terminally ill?

Feel free to respond to any of these questions now, or later. And do propose any others you think I should be asking.

To check out the Urban Zen Initiative's website, click here.

The Secret is no secret.

Everyone—including my most intellectual, pop-culture-deprived friends submerged in academia—has heard of it. I think it's safe to say The Secret has reached its saturation point. Which makes me think, if the whole planet knows about it, it can't possibly work anymore. There isn't enough room in the world for everyone to build their dream house.

The Secret is exhausting.

There are gratitude lists to write, vision boards to collage, imaginary checks to forge—not to mention the constant exertion of active self-delusion. Investing this much time and energy, The Secreter convinces herself that it works in order to preserve any remaining dignity. (My paycheck is here A DAY EARLY? Must be The Secret.)

Not everyone thinks The Secret is dumb.

I spend my days consulting for an Internet company. When I told our CEO—a boy wunderkind Faith Popcorn-y sales genius—that I was blogging about The Secret, he said, "That's a great movie." Ironic smile? Not so much. In fact, an informal survey I've conducted has shown that most extremely successful people I know personally think living The Secret is a given—the way they've always conducted their lives (the ever-humble Oprah said this on her show). This leaves me wondering about the difference between me and them. Will I concede that certain tenets of The Secret can lead to success? Absolutely. Will I ever be able to practice the Law of Attraction sans irony or self-deprecation? Nope. It doesn't look like I'll be facilitating any Fortune 500 team-building retreats anytime soon.

The Secret gets boring.

It's been three weeks since The Secret came into my life, and while I was giddy from all the positive self-talk in Week One, my enthusiasm dropped off soon after. I stopped looking at the Vision Boards on the back of my front door, I ripped the 125 Post-It off the scale, I decided pretending my bills were checks was too stupid even for an experiment. I tried visualizing the opposite of what I wanted just to test the theory. And I got it. What does that prove again?

The Secret doesn't go deep enough. Just ask Oprah.

The other day, Russell Simmons was on her show promoting his new self-help book, which is all about seeing yourself as connected to a higher power. His is the god of yoga, but yours can be whatever. It's a personal choice. Anyway Oprah really liked this metaphor he used—we are all cups drawn from the river that is God, I think ("Which means we are made of God!" she gleefully explained to the studio audience). Then she sort of dissed The Secret. (I know, how Benedict Arnold.) The problem with it, she said, is that it doesn't connect us to any higher power.

Oprah and I agree on a lot of things and it just so happens that I also have this problem with The Secret. In fact, looking for books to expand my understanding of the philosophy a few weeks ago, I came upon a book called The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham. Eureka! I thought. Finally, a way to connect this Secret stuff to something concrete, sacred. I tried to guess the connection while I waited for the book to arrive. Abraham uses the Law of Attraction to father the people of Israel! He believes he's going to help God populate the world… and so he DOES! Abraham totally lived The Secret!

When the book came I put down the X-Acto knife I was using to cut the head off a naked picture of Heidi Klum (I was going to replace it with my own—Vision Board) and tore into it. Well, um—it turns out this Abraham is not that Abraham. The Abraham husband and wife authors Esther and Jerry Hicks are talking about is a group of otherwordly beings, who collectively call themselves "Abraham" and speak through Esther. When she channels him, Esther / Abraham addresses skeptics with phrases such as ""We are not so much interested in that you believe in our existence, as we are interested in that you come to adore your own." So yeah, not the same Abraham as the one in the bible.

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