A former downtown club fixture, rocker, self-described 24/7 junkie—albeit a stylish one—and all-around magnificent disaster, Biet Simkin may seem like the last person you’d turn to for spiritual advice, meditative healing and, well, guidance of any kind.
Maybe that’s the point: While some yoga instructors and spiritual guides fall into the vocation as a “what-now” option—like trust-funders and failed actresses taking the real estate test, something to do—the 41-year-old, New York City-born author of Don’t Just Sit There! went through one hell of a healing process and spiritual journey on her way to becoming one of the world’s leading meditation lecturers and founder of her own “center of the cyclone” process: a tapestry of self-acceptance, arrogance, music (her own) and art. It’s an anarchic approach to meditation—more ballsy, less lotus-y.
To hear her tell it, though, she’s not as radical as it would seem. “I am sober today,” she says, “and honestly that’s the most radical, crazy thing I have ever done.” Growing up in poor tenement buildings with her father, an awakened Russian-immigrant shaman (although a “drinker and womanizer too—he was human, which endeared me to him,” as she puts it), Simkin still managed to land a recording contract with Sony records when she was only 19. For some that would have been a trajectory; instead, it led her on a downward spiral into addiction (“you name the drug, I’ve done it”) through most of her 20s.
While she was her own tragic rabbit with a smoky-eyed, Joan Jett smile—assuming that everyone her age blew rails of cocaine in insider-y club bathrooms until the wee hours, she says—real-life tragedies kept piling up. Friends died from overdoses. Her Santa Monica house burned down (from an electrical fire), her first child died from sudden infant death syndrome. Her father died around that time, too.
Perhaps it was time for reflection and sobriety. From one seminal female healer, and the teachings of her late father, she began practicing meditation, eventually taking on personal clients, while finding her own worth and enlightenment. Her client roster grew and grew, to the point where she finds herself now, sober for more than a decade. It’s a path made even more rewarding by nurturing a healthy attitude, a practical perspective. “To face reality without substances and have to learn to navigate communicating with life without numbing out all the pain,” she says, “is such a fun pursuit…such a radical pursuit.
“I still have addictions,” she adds, “but they are more cerebral: like thinking I am a worthless piece of crap…or being jealous of others who seem to have more than me.” That makes her laugh. “A colossal waste of time, both.”
Acceptance, Simkin reasons, is not about making yourself feel better. That, to her, would be smug. It’s about accepting the worst aspects of who you are, some of which can’t be changed. “Murder the old you. Carry the miserable.”
Typically candid, when asked to offer advice on coping, not moping, during the coronavirus epidemic, she responds, “Prepare for some changes to your usual routine. Hope that you don’t die, be OK if you do…breathe, yes, and meditate. Repeat.”
