Simply Alanis Morissette
Maranda Pleasant : All of the above!
Alanis Morissette : By the way, they work, too, temporarily. I was going to a therapist to recover from my eating disorder for years. At one point, in this one particular exchange, I said, “I feel so badly because I was really overcome with these feelings, and I just went and ate.” She said, “What’d you eat?” I said, “I ate a bagel.” She said to me, “Well, that’s so great that you ate that bagel—was it delicious?” I’d had so many people try to show how I was wrong for moving toward food to comfort, when really, on a very basic level, and in a way that I think Byron Katie would chuckle about, these things that we move to, these addictive substances and processes and people, they really do temporarily help us step out of that despair. They release us from this grip that cortisol and stress has on our body. I am a firm believer that one way to become enlightened is to be so relaxed, as relaxed as you possibly can be.
Maranda Pleasant : I’m in trouble. You talked about meditation. I don’t know if you do yoga. But how do you maintain your center in the middle of chaos? Do you have some sort of practice?
Alanis Morissette : I have two answers to that one. One is that sometimes I just don’t. I don’t always maintain my center and then I feel the effects of that. As an attachment parent and a wife and a friend and a writer and a performer—the many hats that we wear, a modern woman these days wears about twenty hats on any given day—some days I just don’t. Some days I’m not centered and that’s just how it’s going to be. Other days, when I’m really losing it or I need to return, I have altars all over my house. I have a very special one in my room. I literally just sit down and light a candle. I have a couple of books around, journals, pens, markers, crayons, incense, sprays, and oils that I’ve collected. I’m a bit of an alchemist sorceress. I’ve collected probably 1500 oils from around the planet over the last ten years. I’m kind of obsessed with the sensuality of it. Elaine Aron, who wrote all the Highly Sensitive Person books, she super validated my temperamental predisposition. I was able to come to see that my temperament and my approach and the lens that I saw life through was actually quite lovely and not freakish. I’ve been enjoying my own identity in a way that I was definitely taught not to.
