My Year as a Spiritual Gangster: Going with Your Gut
Lisa Lampanelli is a professional comedian, writer, and actor who lives primarily in New York City. She began to call Kripalu her second home in mid-2014, when a family crisis led her on a quest to bring new meaning into her life. Since then, Lisa has attended programs and R&R Retreats at Kripalu on a monthly basis. In her series for Kripalu, Lisa chronicles some of the lessons she’s learned as a result of her time here and her own personal-growth work.
All my life, I’ve been someone who consistently tried to “force” things. I forced romantic relationships, I pushed friendships, and I even tried to barrel my way through two or three careers with sheer will. But recently, I had a revelation: I’m not a person who can force things. I have to let things happen organically and go with them. In other words, I am the horse who can be led to water, but I definitely can’t make myself drink—until I’m ready. Then, I can take nice, big healthy gulps.
Perfect example: When I was eight or so, I made my first joke. Well, it might not have been my very first joke, but it was the first one I remember making that got a laugh from an entire roomful of people. It happened one night when my family was having dinner at the home of my father’s favorite relatives, Aunt Rose and Uncle Dom.
As we all sat around the huge table they had set up in their living room—big enough to accommodate 16 people on rickety folding chairs—I commented that someday I would love to go to the famous Thanksgiving Day parade at Macy’s & Bamberger’s (that was the iconic store’s name back then). But because I was only eight years old, I mistakenly called the store Macy’s and Hamburger’s. Well, that table exploded with what can only be described as guffaws. And believe me, from the second I heard that laughter, I was hooked. I can honestly say that was the exact moment I KNEW in my heart that I was a comedian, even though it took me the next 22 years to summon up the guts to try stand-up.
And that is probably why I have been successful as a comedian and not in the other careers I tried to superimpose on myself. Stand-up comedy was the first thing I remember not trying to force. I just KNEW when the time to try it was right. It wasn’t when I was eight when my family laughed, it wasn’t in high school (like it was for Eddie Murphy), and it wasn’t right out of college like a lot of my peers. The time for me to try came when I was driving past Exit 41 on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut on an overcast winter day in February 1991. I can see the stretch of road I was on when I breathed into the decision to become a comedian. It was just north of the entrance to the I-95 connector and before the rest area. Right there, the voice deep inside me came to the surface and said, “I’m ready.” And I was.
The same thing happened last year around the beginning of the holiday season. At the beginning of October, something just told me that my family’s traditional Thanksgiving celebration had to change. Thanksgiving dinner had always been held at my parents’ home, but since the previous May, when my father passed away, I had known in my gut that Thanksgiving had to be held elsewhere that year, to give us all a new beginning without our beloved dad.
I wasn’t the only one in my family who sensed that we needed a change of venue, because the moment I offered my home on the water for Thanksgiving, they went with their guts, too, and I heard a resounding “YES!” My house is on the water and full of windows, so the calming, restful views of the Long Island Sound would give us new memories to add to the ones we had made for years in my parents’ suburban home. Plus, to inject some new blood into the mix and lend a youthful tone to the celebration, I encouraged my nephews to bring their girlfriends. And I announced that dinner would be followed by a full-out game night—Apples to Apples, Headbanz, Bingo. We were gonna do it all—and we were gonna do it LOUD!
And, you know something? It worked. Yes, we all spoke fondly of my father throughout the day, and looked at his artwork, easels, and self-portrait displayed around the house. But the simple change of place and addition of less traditional fun felt like a a joyful beginning to a new chapter without my dad physically being there, but where we could remember him as we looked out at the seagrass behind my home, where he had walked less than a year earlier.
As the end of the year approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve decided the right time to make those promises to ourselves isn’t necessarily January 1. The right resolutions will stick if they come from your gut, whenever and wherever they surface. So, go ahead: resolve right now to do what your inner self tells you to do, all year long. Like my dad always said, “You know it when you know it.”
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