New Book Argues Laughter May Be the Most Honest Path to Self-Awareness

The Little Book of Shenpa Grew From a Cross-Country Friendship and a Shared Conviction: Humor Helps Us See Ourselves More Clearly Than Seriousness Ever Could

NASHVILLE, TN, UNITED STATES — Elizabeth Power and Gail Kaplan did not set out to write a book about Buddhist psychology. They set out to make each other laugh.
Power, a writer, lives in the American South, steeped in the picture-talking, front-porch storytelling tradition of Southern Appalachia. Kaplan lives in the Northeast, with a strong ear for exactly the right word and a quick wit to match. Over years of friendship, the two found themselves doing what a lot of people do when life gets hard: finding the funny in it. Naming the patterns. Laughing at the hooks.

Those hooks have a name in Buddhist tradition: shenpa. It is the urge that arises when we feel uneasy — that pull toward relief that so often keeps us stuck in the very discomfort we are trying to escape. Power and Kaplan kept returning to the concept, kept riffing on it, kept inventing words for the hundred ways it shows up in ordinary life. Eventually, those riffs became a book.

The Little Book of Shenpa: Finding the Funny in Being Hooked, published by EPower and Associates, Inc., collects dozens of invented “shenpa-” compound words — each one a small, precise mirror held up to a recognizable human moment.
Shenpaholic: the person who cannot live without drama.
Shenparun: the trip to the store for comfort food when you are feeling low. Shenpapult: when you have held something in so long it finally launches itself at Thanksgiving dinner.
Shenpafam: the family that puts the fun back in dysfunction.

Each entry pairs a definition written in warm Southern vernacular with a pithy quoted insight, sometimes from Power, sometimes from Kaplan. The two voices play against each other throughout — different registers, different regions, the same instinct for where the truth and the funny meet.

“We Southerners tend to take a word and run with it and do all kinds and manner of things to it. Gail has a similar love of turns of phrase. She can’t help it she lives Up There, I can’t help it I live down here. We do have really good times.”
— Elizabeth Power

What Power and Kaplan suggest, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, is that humor is not a way of avoiding difficult self-knowledge — it is a way into it. Laughter lowers the guard. Recognition comes easier when it arrives with a smile. The book is patterned loosely after Ambrose Bierce’s 19th-century classic The Devil’s Dictionary, but where Bierce was cynical, Power and Kaplan are warm. The goal was never to mock. It was to see clearly, and to give readers permission to do the same.

“At least giggle if not guffaw. Sometimes that is the most honest thing you can do.”
— Gail Kaplan

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Elizabeth Power is a professional educator and consultant based in the American South and the founder of EPower and Associates, Inc. as well as The Trauma Informed Academy. Gail Kaplan is a clinician based in the northeastern United States. Together and separately, Power and Kaplan offer onsite, online, and hybrid retreats, workshops, and speaking engagements for groups and individuals.

Elizabeth Power
EPower and Associates Inc.
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