The Many Sides of Tierra Whack

When Tierra Whack released her single “Shower Song” in January 2024, it grabbed and held my attention with its infectious, funky beats, its absurdly comical lyrics celebrating the virtues of singing in the shower, and its wildly eccentric music video showing Whack in a clown suit inhabiting a cartoonish, make-believe world seemingly of her own making. The song was a banger with an irresistible sound, and the video was delightful child’s play. I had the sensation that I was witnessing the appearance of an artist who was not cut from any mold I had seen before. 

That feeling was reinforced a couple of weeks later when Whack dropped “27 Club,” her second single and music video from her forthcoming album, “World Wide Whack.” This second track flipped the playfully celebratory mood of the previous single inside-out, by frankly addressing the heavy theme of suicide in a down-tempo, melancholy way. The video continued to show a clown-suited and wigged-out Whack in her Whack World, but now rather than a happy clown she had become the sad clown, channeling the sadness of everyone who has ever contemplated suicide or been affected by the suicide of another. “I can show you how it feels,” she warns in the opening lyric, “to lose what you love.” She holds up in front of her face a series of paper masks representing the happy faces we put on for other people, slowly pulling away and discarding them one by one as if to reveal the raw and uncontrived grimace of pain they hide. 

With this juxtaposition of wildly different moods and messages in those two singles, Whack announced herself as an artist who refuses to be easily categorized. One minute she’s playful and insouciant and upbeat, making you bop your hips and sing along in the shower, and the next minute she kneecaps you with a sad song addressing a painful theme that few artists dare approach.

The release of the full album “World Wide Whack” on March 15, 2024 further proved Tierra Whack’s range as an artist and her refusal to be easily categorized. Yes, she makes music in the genre of hip-hop (she has collaborated and toured with Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys, to name two influences), and yes, she raps (she got her musical start as a battle rapper in Philadelphia, and she can spit fiery rap lyrics with the best). But to say that Tierra Whack is a rapper or a hip-hop singer is like saying that Pablo Neruda is a writer. That is factual, but it doesn’t tell you anything of value. 

Perhaps this is not a poor analogy, though, because like Pablo Neruda, Tierra Whack is using language (in her case, language structured through performance in a particular musical genre) to make you feel and think more deeply. That is what poets do.

I have found myself listening to the 15 tracks on this album on repeat for three or four days now, and my “favorite song” on the album has already changed several times. While binge-listening to the album, I have been provoked to think many things and to feel a range of emotions. That is what art does.

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears,” wrote Oliver Sacks. “It is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ears.” Sacks wasn’t just making a casual observation or a nice turn of phrase; as a neurologist he extensively studied how music gets imprinted into a different part of the brain than other memories do, and the salvific power of music to restore joy and life when everything else fails.

Whack wields her music to do both things Sacks mentioned. She lifts us out of depression with upbeat grooves and rap-battle lyrics in tracks like “Shower Song” and “Chanel Pit,” and she moves us to tears in tracks like “27 Club” and “Difficult.”

And she makes us think. In “Burning Brains,” Whack seems to point the finger of blame at an ex-lover whose constant complaints and dissatisfaction caused her untold misery, but I wonder if she isn’t talking about herself. Anyone who has spent time in meditation and mindfulness is familiar with the treacherous contours of the mind and will recognize their own restless and insatiable ego here:

Drivin’ me insane

All you do is complain

Headache, my brain, mass explosions

Soup too hot, ice too cold

Grass too green, sky too blue

Ha, ha, ha

You’re never satisfied (satisfied)

Whack is no stranger to the struggles of the mind, and in several of the tracks on this album she speaks obliquely and sometimes overtly to mental health issues and the challenges of living. In “Difficult,” she captures the spirit of depression:

I can’t sleep, I can’t eat

I feel small, so petite

I act strong, but I’m weak

Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)

I was born to survive

See the pain in my eyes

I been stressed and deprived

Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)

It’s part of Whack’s genius and appeal as an artist that she inhabits both spaces with equal authority: she shows us her vulnerability and sadness and dares to explore forbidden topics like suicide and depression, then she turns around and spits fiery lyrics, rap battle-style, about smelling like Chanel while she’s in the mosh pit.

“World Wide Whack” is Tierra Whack’s first full-length album. She released a previous, more experimental project, “Whack World,” in 2018, with a range of songs that were each one minute in length and were released first on Instagram, shaped by and for the world of social media. Some of those tracks would get a hot groove going and then end abruptly at one minute, leaving you hanging and wanting more. With the new album, Whack has delivered more and has emerged as a more mature artist who has things to say. She is conjuring into existence a mini-universe — Whack World — full of bright colors and clowns and music and wigs and bold fashion statements, and she is inviting us inside to share in all the poetry and sadness and laughter and beauty and tears of a human being's inner life.

Confessions of an Anxious Meditation Teacher

In my role as a meditation teacher I often feel like people don't get a chance to know the real me. They see a curated persona who speaks with a calming tone of voice, someone who spent two years living in a Buddhist monastery and has written two books on meditation and spiritual life. I can imagine those things might give them certain misleading ideas about me.

Behind that persona, the truth is that I struggle a lot with anxiety. I don't mean regular garden-variety anxiety, I mean the kind that I see a doctor about, the kind that has a diagnostic code in the DSM-V. Anxiety is something I have experienced for most of my life, going back to childhood. It can flare up along with insomnia to affect my sleep, my relationships, and my work. Many people might never suspect this about me, because I'm good at keeping it under wraps and showing the outside world an exterior facade of calmness and serenity.

I've been practicing and teaching meditation for 16 years, and while I can say truthfully that meditation helps me regulate my anxiety and work with it more skillfully, I cannot truthfully tell you that meditation cures it. Meditation alone, practiced in solitude, doesn't address the underlying structural issues in my personal psychology. I stopped expecting the practice to do that for me quite a while ago.

I share this confession because in the world of yogis and meditators and people walking various kinds of modern spiritual paths, there's a pervasive misconception that anyone who's been practicing for a while — and especially anyone who has stepped up from practicing into the role of teaching -- is supposed to have it all together.

In my observation, and in my own personal experience, nothing could actually be further from the truth. And this misconception creates some really toxic dynamics between teachers and students.

One of the great ironies about people in the helping professions is that they are often among the ones who need the most help. I know a psychiatrist who has borderline personality disorder. A lot of therapists and social workers I know are depressed. The suicide rate among doctors in the U.S. is two or three times as high as the general population. There's a powerful stigma that prevents us from talking openly about how people whose job is to help others may themselves need help addressing their own mental health issues.

The world of yogis and meditators and spiritual teachers is no exception. But you wouldn't know that from looking at the marketing hype.

If you're that sort of teacher, it's often assumed that you've wrestled with your demons, and vanquished them. You've worked out the kinks and foibles in your human nature, so you stand a cut above the rest of us. Your inner light shines through at all times, unclouded by ordinary human neuroses. Traumas? Shadow material? You're beyond all that. This must be why you look so beatific and well composed in your Instagram photos.

My personal advice? Run as fast as you can in the other direction from any teacher who presents a highly manicured image of having it all together. Run from any teacher who looks down at the world from a superior perch and appears to have it all figured out, or who claims to have packed away all their emotional baggage.

In the past few years I've seen a lot of teachers who projected that sort of image fall from grace — exposing suddenly and almost violently their humanity, their struggles, and the demons with which were secretly wrestling. I've learned not to project too much of a sacred aura onto any of the cows roaming about in the contemporary spiritual pasture. If you spend much time around cows, sacred or not, you'll find most of them are full of something. I know I am.

My struggles with anxiety, among other things, are part of what initially drew me to the path of meditation, and they're still part of what keeps me practicing — and, perhaps just as importantly, part of what keeps me teaching. I may not always reveal to a room full of students what's roiling beneath the surface of my own psychological waters, because it's generally bad decorum to appear like a basket case when you're sitting in the teacher's seat. But within the inner sanctum of my own mind, where no one else goes, I'm never far-removed from a lifetime of roiling waters, or from the wellspring of shadow material that percolates just beneath the surface.

There's a famous quote from Richard Bach: "You teach best what you most need to learn."

The longer I teach, the more truth I find in that statement. When meditation students tell me how calming my voice and my presence are, or how much a certain practice or teaching I shared helped them reframe their perspective on a difficult situation, I know that sharing it with them probably helped me twice as much. I needed just as much as they did, if not more, to be reminded of the teaching by sharing it with them.

I think what I'm learning is that it's not in spite of my imperfections and human foibles, it's not in spite of my ongoing struggles with my own inner demons, but because of those things, that I have something genuine to offer as a teacher.

I'm coming clean here about my struggles with anxiety because I think coming clean is necessary. In the world of spiritual teachers and students, we need fewer sacred cows and more transparency and disclosure. Without an honest and open relationship to the more troublesome aspects of myself, I would be just another one of those slick Instagram gurus trying to sell you the path to happiness, as if I had it all figured out.

If you ever catch me doing that, feel free to slap me, and bring me back down to earth.

Assessing Childhood Developmental Trauma

The ACE Quiz ("ACE" stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences) has become a standardized way for psychologists and those treating trauma to assess some of the major factors that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. You can take the ACE quiz here.

The simple 10-question quiz gives you score on a scale of 0 to 10, with points being assigned for exposure to a number of commonly recognized sources of childhood trauma, from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse to physical or emotional neglect to various forms of household dysfunction such as parental divorce or having a parent or family member who is mentally ill, incarcerated, or addicted.

If you score high on the ACE quiz, it means you had numerous factors in your upbringing that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. In turn, childhood developmental trauma is known to contribute to other problems later in life, including increased risks for stress and depression, substance abuse, heart disease, and more.

However, it's important to understand what your score on the ACE quiz means and what it doesn't. If you have a high score, it just means that a lot of those commonly recognized adverse childhood experiences were present in your early life. It doesn't take into account other factors that might have helped you build resilience and overcome these adverse childhood conditions, such as the love and support you received from a certain family member or outside figure.

Some people with high ACE scores show few signs of developmental trauma, while others with low ACE scores go on to develop major depression, addiction, and so forth. So your score is not, strictly speaking, predictive of any particular outcome as an adult.

By contrast, the opposite may also be true. The ACE quiz looks at commonly recognized adverse conditions for developmental trauma, but some possibly traumatizing adverse conditions are glaringly absent.

When I took the ACE quiz, I was at first surprised at how high my number was. The quiz helped me to frame and understand some of the root causes of my own childhood developmental trauma. But over time, I came to realize there were other traumatic adversities in my childhood, too, that the quiz didn't even touch upon, such as sexual orientation and religious upbringing.

What about the fact that I was and am gay, and that I struggled throughout childhood and adolescence to suppress the growing evidence of my own sexual orientation in a homophobic culture that harshly forbade me from being who I was? There's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for internalized homophobia. There should be, because it's a widespread and very damaging form of developmental trauma.

What about the fearful hellfire-and-brimstone sermons I was subjected to as a child in the Southern Baptist Church in Oklahoma, the intense atmosphere of homophobia in that church, and the religious delusions and existential terror I suffered as a result of my indoctrination in that religious culture? In retrospect, I consider what I was subjected to by the church to be a form of child abuse. But again, there's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for religious manipulation and brainwashing. And there should be.

What about complex factors like race and socioeconomic status, which can feed into so many other adverse childhood experiences? There are generational traumas, and traumas that you may be born into because the color of your skin isn't the one that's privileged by the society you live in. No ACE checkboxes for those either.

For now, the ACE quiz is a stepping stone that can help you begin to get a handle on some of the Big 10, as it were. Knowing where you come from in relation to these 10 factors can be helpful in assessing the roots of your own childhood developmental trauma. But you also need to put your ACE quiz results in perspective, and look at the larger picture of things the quiz never touches upon.

The causes and effects of childhood developmental trauma are highly complex, and no standardized test can really give you a complete or accurate reading on the origins or effects of your own childhood trauma. We need better ways of assessing a wider variety of adverse childhood experiences, as well as traumatic social conditions that extend both inward, deep into our hearts and psyches, and outward, beyond the walls of the houses we grew up in.