People disappoint and hurt each other, and we’re also what we’ve got.
I was listening to a Jane Siberry song, “An Angel Stepped Down (And Slowly Looked Around).” It’s an interesting kind of song, in its way interrupting itself, looping back, nonlinear. It sounds like Truth embedded in conflict. The process by which Truth moves from revelation to articulation, messy and beautiful and confounding and never emerging quite whole. A story about flailing, seeking comfort, and receiving instead a challenge that would grow us to more than we are. A song as a myth, revealing a deep pattern that repeats and repeats.
There’s a line that keeps coming through the song, “I believe that love is the only thing that can heal us all.”
This is a belief that I’ve held and tested and found both true and wanting. I believe love brings us to our wholeness, and “love” is an inadequate word. Anything I say about it leaves out something important. Words are not enough, but they’re what I’ve got.
That love as ideal, as healing, has felt sorely tested and found wanting these past few years. What does it mean to offer healing love to those who do not want it, or don’t want it from us? Is it possible to offer healing love when there is an agenda beyond simply wanting the best for the other?
Deep, transformative healing takes time, diligence, and hope. We heal in relationship but we have to show up together striving and desiring that healing.
Having seen the scope of healing in an individual life, and the scope of the problems looming for us as a species, love feels like not enough but also all I’ve got.
In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to walk through several cities I’d never seen before. I marvel at the scope of them, the immensity of people, the depth and complexity of history. To change so many hearts seems improbable and perhaps a false goal, a goal that leads to tyrannical thinking. No wonder our most popular solutions keep looking like giving more and more power to a small number of equally flawed humans.
Not that I have better answers to the larger problems, only that we should listen to the voices that remind us of our humanity. Our capacity for love, our limitations, accepting the harm we’ve caused or benefitted from, slowing down, being with our feelings, letting the body and the heart pull us out of the whirlwind of mind and the clashing swords of ideology. To face our enemies and allies heart to heart, even when our blades must meet.
Love is not merely acceptance, though it demands that. Love is not always remaining sweet and kind under the barrage of contempt, mistrust, pushing away, or desperately pulling forward. Love is not always announcing harsh, violent truths regardless of another person’s mental and emotional state. Yet love encompasses these qualities. Love includes kindness warded with boundaries, and accountability softened by affirmation. Love is both firm edges and a soft center.
We may not be able to save our societies with this love, but it may be that in reaching for this love we find that which is worth nurturing and preserving while the garbage and rotting structures around us collapse and give way. We may find the strength to connect to our neighbors, to slow down, to be kind and direct. We may not change the entire world but we may change our own world, entirely. It does not feel like enough, but it’s what we’ve got.
Letting go of anger, hurt, and resentment is tough and it can take a long time. “Letting go” sounds simple enough as a metaphor, but in terms of feelings there are rarely simple straightforward pathways to do it.
And perhaps that’s for the best. There may be things we need to absorb from these experiences of hurt and anger, ways we can better take care of ourselves in future relationships and interactions, and the parts of us carrying this pain need to know we get it before they can set aside the feeling.
Too often that rush to forgiveness is about trying to get back to the status quo, and it makes sense because there was likely a great deal about the status quo that was lovely. But it was also the conditions under which we got hurt.
As I write this, I feel that this is one of the experiences we need in an apology. We need to know that the person we felt hurt by understands and feels remorse for how they hurt us so we can trust both that it wasn’t their desire and that they know how to care for us in the future. And we may need to apologize to our parts for the same reason.
Forgiveness, then, is as much of a commitment to more skillful caring for the self as it is a releasing of anger and hurt. If we’re lucky, we can do that work within the relationship where hurt occurred, but at times it ends up that we need space from the other persons to do that work.
When we commit to knowing and loving ourselves completely, nothing is a waste of time or energy. Everything we experience offers us richer insights and depth of growth. Everyone and everything may be our teacher.
Storm does such an excellent job laying out the merits of boundaries, obstacles to them, and a simple but flexible framework for identifying and enacting boundaries that I’m going to recommend you read the book instead of offering a lot of my own thoughts. But one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is that boundaries are as much about connection and intimacy as they are about safety and separation.
Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” There’s a complex truth in that. Separation allows for connection and greater intimacy. It is scary and uncomfortable to realize everyone else is inhabiting unique subjective and equally valid worlds.
A fence demarcates the line between us, reminds us that we are separate and have separate experiences. A fence reveals the limits of my territory and responsibility, and helps me to focus on cultivating the kind of experience I want to have. I can only care for what is within my territory and you can only care for what’s in yours. If I want to raise a beautiful garden and you want to pave your land and install an Olympic size pool, those are experiences we can have, but if the construction from your pool begins to harm the environment of my garden, we need to have a conversation. I can be accountable to what I’ve done, and give you feedback about how you affect me, but I am still only able to tend my land.
But a fence is not a wall—it is open and permeable, it allows for connection and exchange. Building a wall to shut out everyone around me means losing access to important information, resources, opportunities for alliance. The land does not truly belong to any of us, and we all affect and are affected by each other in our relationship to that land. The fence helps me to have focus on what is within my capacity to tend. I cannot tend the entire land, but I can tend my own territory.
My own tendencies toward conflict and boundary-setting have historically been avoidant, with certain notable times I would set boundaries and would experience them being ignored or overridden as though I’d said nothing at all.
That’s a story I tell about myself but it’s also not entirely true. As I write this, I remember a time in high school—when I was perhaps most fearful and inward—when some random people at a campsite approached me claiming that I’d stolen and destroyed their Confederate flag during the night. Though I was scared, I was surprised by how strongly I stood my ground and told them they had no proof and should leave me alone.
(In retrospect I imagine myself saying “I wish I had ripped up your fucking flag!” There was no reason for them to be flying that flag which wasn’t steeped in white supremacy. We were in Indiana, which fought for the Union. But I don’t think those words actually came out of my mouth. They were a group of older guys who looked in better shape than me, and I was meek enough. )
As I’ve deepened my work around my own needs and boundaries, I’ve learned how much avoiding boundary-setting is its own form of hiding and inauthenticity. For so long I thought it was good to be a person who was easy-going and bad to be a person who got angry or expressed disappointment. I remember adults commenting on how polite and patient I was when people behaved with disrespect toward me, and I built my ego structure around that praise.
But after a while, I realized it was a lie. The disrespect affected me, and mentally I was fully aware of the people who hurt or disrespected me. Instead of addressing it with them, though, I outwardly behaved like everything was okay—reassuring them it was fine—and then would emotionally distance myself. No one knew I was upset, but then people also didn’t know if I cared at all. The distancing manifested as simply withdrawing and not communicating with them, not making further plans, or getting really awkwardly controlling about future plans. At worst, I would find myself doing my innate power move of being really intellectualizing and criticizing the person from a “rational” perspective.
These defenses are very effective at both avoiding conflict and quietly ruining important relationships. There is a behavior punishing a prior transgression, but the person does not know what they did that was upsetting and has no opportunity to correct it or make amends. It also did not require me to take ownership of how I participated in the problem by not stepping up and clearly communicating my wants and needs.
In the past several years, I’ve been learning to tell my important people when I feel hurt, angry, or disappointed, which has felt awful and scary and embarrassing but also made so many of my relationships better.
Setting a boundary communicates that I care about something, reveals myself to the other person. Indeed, it often communicates that I care very much about the other person. That I cleared my calendar to make plans with you tonight and it hurts that you let something else take priority. That I want to be present when I hurt you but I feel flooded and overwhelmed when you raise your voice and criticize me instead of talking about your feelings. That I want us to be closer, but when you dismiss or ignore my feelings I feel shut down and sense myself emotionally moving away.
These are not punitive consequences, things I am saying or doing to hurt you, these are genuine expressions of my experience for you to consider. If you want to keep going in the ways that cross my boundaries and cause these consequences, then I need much firmer and thicker boundaries. If you want us to be closer, you’ll notice the consequences and respect the boundary.
Once, I was in a situation where my lease was ending in one city, and I’d be moving to another city a few months later, but I needed a few more months before I was ready to move. One of my relatives lived nearby, and I called to ask if I could stay with him a few months. He declined, explaining why he felt his space wouldn’t work for me, but out of my mouth spilled an acidic, “That’s disappointing.”
Later, another relative called to make sure I was okay and not mad, sharing that my words had unsettled the relative who wouldn’t house me. That was when I realized that saying I was disappointed was one of the sharpest arrows I could have pointed at my relative, and that I’d always known this on some unconscious level. Now I tell myself a story that on that side of my family, to disappoint another is one of those unspoken things one does not do.
Which, simultaneously, made the threat of being disappointed a highly successful piece of leverage for manipulation. I remember one year there was an event my grandparents and the rest of our family was attending that I’d decided wasn’t interesting to me. I received a birthday card in which my grandmother wrote, “So disappointing to hear you won’t be joining us.” Almost immediately I bought my plane tickets to go home for the event. That weekend, at dinner with my grandparents, I mentioned this to her. “You knew exactly what you were doing,” I said, and she smiled at me with all the gracious humor of an elderly Irish woman who had won.
While I began to notice the foundational role disappointment played in my personality, it wasn’t until years later that I saw how deeply afflicted I was by the fear of it. I was sitting in my spiritual community as we dealt with the aftermath of our founder retiring from teaching and leading us. We were engaging in a conflict, and I realized I felt both resentment and body-shaking fear.
I could sense a scared part of me, saying, “It’s all going to fall apart!”
I could sense a guilty part of me that felt, “I have to do something to keep us from falling apart.” That part of me truly felt if I did nothing I would be a disappointment to others, and blamed for the community’s collapse.
I could sense an obligated part of me wanting to volunteer to take on more tasks and make it work.
And I could sense the part of me that felt deeply resentful of the whole group and burnt-out. That part said, “Why isn’t anyone else stepping up? Why is it always me?”
In that moment I saw a pattern of movement from Fear > Guilt > Obligation > Resentment. They nested within each other like Russian dolls, with Fear at the core and Resentment as the most recent layer. Everything in my life had begun to feel like an obligation, and thus sapped of joy. Whenever someone wanted something of me, I felt afraid of hurting or disappointing them, and either felt obligated to do it or tried to find a passive aggressive way of avoiding it. This relation extended even to my own desires, which quickly became tedious “to-do” items as soon as they were recognized.
With no reprieve, no inner permission to take a break, no sense of safety and trust in others to hold things together, my life had become permeated with resentment. Going home, I realized I even resented my dogs for wanting attention and care.
And the threat of disappointment was the unnamed ruler of this state of affairs. As long as I kept pushing and holding things together, I imagined no one could be disappointed in me. As long as I was too busy to know what I really wanted, I would not feel disappointment.
Yet seeing resentment appear told me this pattern had become a death sentence to my soul. It was telling me I was way past my limits and not doing what brought my life meaning. Because I was terrified to say no, resentment was stepping in to alienate me from my perceived sources of obligation.
The cycle failed myself and the people I loved. When I thought that sense of obligation was righteous, it deprived my community from the opportunity to take responsibility for itself. And without considering, I kept pushing what I believed the community needed and resenting them for not stepping up, instead of seeing the flow of energy as a sign that the community did not need what I pushed.
Though it terrified me, I started practicing saying no to obligation and stepping out of responsibilities. I started to decide it was okay if things fell apart when I stopped holding them together. If it depended solely upon me, then it was not sustainable. If it truly needed to exist, others would help. Over time, my relationships have grown stronger, I have witnessed my community rising to take on the work, and I have learned that I am still lovable even when I have boundaries. I feel calmer, happier, and more loving because I have permission to take the time I want to nurture myself and my interests. My boundaries are stronger and clearer as I become more familiar with my limits and needs.
And I find myself disappointed from time to time.
——
Photo by Warren Wong, courtesy of Unsplash.com
Disappointment is a co-walker on the spiritual journey. Those of us who come alive with visions of the beauty and potential of humanity, of the richness of nature, of the joys of the body or the exaltation of the soul, of the transcendent experience of loving and being loved, eventually have an experience in which our experience falls far short of what we’d expected.
The spiritual vision is always in tension with material reality. Yet our practices call upon us to accept this world as it is, the soil in which we plant our beautiful, inspiring dreams and visions.
Perhaps the worst disappointment is when we do experience exactly what we dreamed of, and then it falls apart. The dream job turns out to be filled with backstabbing, busy work, and leadership who undermines every constructive effort. The time wasn’t right for love to blossom. Seemingly random forces ate away the foundations of joy. The person we thought was the love of our lives turns out not to be who they said they were. Or they were exactly who they said they were and we weren’t listening. We experience betrayal and manipulation by our revered spiritual leaders. We discover our best was not enough, or learned too late we took for granted something that needed more loving care.
Disappointment occurs when we become conscious that our experiences do not match our expectations. When we cannot tolerate the feelings of disappointment, we’ll engage in our favorite avoidance strategies to stave it off as much as possible. In part, we sense that disappointment could crush us and spiral us into depressive meaninglessness and nihilism. If this experience was so crushing, then why try again? Why open ourselves up to more hurt?
Yet both avoiding and being crushed by disappointment begins to make us inflexible. If we tend to blame ourselves for our suffering, then avoiding disappointment results in routinized action, sticking with the known, avoiding risks, and detachment. In a sense, we live lives of perpetual low-grade disappointment because we never consider or pursue what we want.
If we tend to blame others for our suffering, then avoiding disappointment results in blame, anger, cut-off, refusing responsibility for our expectations or behaviors, and looking for a new object of desire without having done any self-reflection. In a sense, we live lives of sporadic, intense disappointments because we keep thinking we have what we want in this new object but not learning how to discern whether it’s an appropriate object.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven core emotional systems that exist across species. One that he called SEEKING is one of the most primary, and it is the experience of excitement and anticipation that drives us to pursue what we want or need. This system is, in a sense, without specific object, and in another sense attaches to several objects. SEEKING arises when we need to look for food, or a partner to mate with, and may be implicated in our experiences of longing for more abstract desires around family, career, and spiritual enlightenment.
One suspicion I take away from learning about Panksepp’s work is that SEEKING is a pleasurable sensation that drives us toward what we imagine will make us happy, but in a sense it can never be satisfied. Once we get what we want, we are no longer engaged in the pleasures of anticipating it, hoping for it, imagining how it will be to experience. We are instead dealing with reality, and reality is never as exciting as the fantasy. It was the experience of SEEKING itself that infused the desire with feeling.
This understanding of SEEKING reminds me of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, that all existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is craving. SEEKING may be a construct describing the fundamental nature of craving that informs our animal psychologies. Even when I am fully satisfied and have manifested everything I want, that part of me will become dissatisfied from disuse and cause me to desire something new. Yet if I were to shut down that SEEKING altogether, I would become depressed.
When we allow ourselves to experience disappointment and grieve the expectations we had, I believe we refresh and refine our SEEKING system. We gain more clarity on what it is we truly want and need. Our expectations become more workable. We may stop seeking a spiritual community of perfect harmony and freedom from human flaws, and start appreciating how our spiritual frameworks help us make sense and work through the experience of simply being flawed humans. We may stop seeking a partner who knows our every desire before we do and start appreciating a partner who simply washes the dishes before being asked.
To disappoint is not always a sign of having done something wrong. There are times when others appear to have expectations we didn’t want or don’t agree to and there is no way to set a clean boundary without disappointment. It was not wrong, for example, for my relative to tell me I couldn’t stay at his place, and might have been better for our relationship in the long run rather than taking me in with resentment. Neither was it wrong of me to admit that I felt disappointed, though I suspect I could have been less bratty about it.
Telling the truth of our feelings and experience brings adjustments in our relationship. If you need me to be a certain kind of partner and I am unable or unwilling to do so, it is wise to move away from me. If you value the relationship more than the expectation, working through our expectations will likely let us come closer together. Whether the expectation or the relationship is more important tells us a lot about ourselves and each other.
Some of us will go ahead and do our best to meet those expectations even if we don’t really like them—we may not even know we’re able to question or disagree with the expectations. Authoritarian leaders expect, and expect their expectations followed, often when they’ve failed to even articulate the expectation. Those who experience authoritarian parents or leaders learn to intuit and uphold expectations and, depending on how deeply ingrained they are, may even think the leaders are always right and trustworthy in their expectations.
Permissive parents and leaders, in contrast, may have few expectations or avoid conflict by not acknowledging when they have expectations. Yet those who experience this style of leadership may find expectations communicated in oblique, confusing ways that cannot be clearly named and discussed. A child may realize they’ve disappointed their parent somehow, sensing frustration or distance, but not have any language to understand and discuss it.
An authoritative style of parenting and leadership would identify and name clear expectations and, if those are disappointed, talk through what happened that got in the way of the expectation being met. Perhaps there was a failure of communication and understanding, a circumstance, or perhaps the expectation was not correct for the situation. Authoritative leadership negotiates accountability and disappointment to make expectations fairer and more workable.
Remember that at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope. When we avoid opening up our box of expectations and airing all that shit out, we lose the possibility of hoping for an experience that is more aligned with what we want. We open up more space for a different, fiercer, more enduring, earthier truth to emerge.
When the wooden sword cuts toward me, I reach mine out and catch the impact, gather it close, and then open for the next attack. We are practicing a simple exercise of stepping forward, cutting, and my receiving the attack without harm to either of us. My partner is newer. Where I’ve been practicing for almost two years, I’ve only begun seeing them around in the past six months. Not the biggest gap in experience but enough that I can recognize both the eagerness, insecurity, and tension mirrored in his attacks.
“Can I offer you a suggestion that helped me?” I ask. I’m hesitant to offer advice or corrections since I still feel like such a beginner, but today I feel the urge, and he’s open to it. “Don’t look at the swords when you strike. Look at me. It’s weird, but it helps.”
He’s open to it but seems mistrustful of his ability to try the advice, and I get it. My instinct has always been to stare at the perceived imminent threat, tension building in my body. An internal fight wants to occur when I see the threat coming—the sword cutting toward my face, the melting ice caps, the erosion of protections of women and queer people, the increasing polarization. One part of me wants to turn rigid, feeling safer, as though by becoming tense my body will absorb and negate the damage. Another part of me wants to completely collapse in cynicism and despair—resistance is useless and laughable, there is nothing to be done but watch the destruction.
Practicing a martial art is one of the ways I’ve learned to notice and step out of that battle. Learning to calmly receive a sword blow teaches me much. When I stare at the sword, too much of my mind is active. I am hyperfocused on the threat and my beliefs about the threat. My body tenses and doesn’t know what to do. It’s like all my focus is in my brain, on the thought of being in danger. When we’re driving and we become hyper-focused on something dangerous—an accident on the side of the road, for example—our bodies begin to subtly start to move toward it. It’s a strange paradox of the human threat response system, to move toward the feared outcome.
But when I am gazing at the person attacking me, eyes soft, taking in everything that is happening, my body feels more engaged and able to respond. In part I see that I am not in danger. I am practicing with another human being who instinctively does not want to hurt me, especially when we’re looking each other in the face. We are connected. Humans have an instinctive aversion to directly causing harm to another human, it’s something that has to be trained out of us, or else we have to be convinced other people aren’t humans, depending on the reason we are being encouraged to kill and harm.
In the Tarot, Swords represent the realm of thought, intellectual processes, and analysis. The suit of swords tends to be a rather gloomy, painful affair, full of grief, indecision, paralysis, and conflict. Yet my first Tarot teachers spoke of the capacity of the sword to “cut through the bullshit.”
When we are too fixated on our thinking, on our certainties, and we focus too much on each other’s swords, then we lose that capacity for discernment and cutting through bullshit. Our fighting is about whose ideology is the most correct, the most pure, the most evil. We stop seeing the human on the other side, holding the blade, and then we lose a great deal more. So much damage occurs when we forget about humanity. We create restrictive laws that create suffering for real people. We hurt the people we love most because we are fighting against an imagined monster.
Kendo Competition, by Bernd Viefhus at Unsplash.Com
Instead of fighting enemies, I like the somewhat antiquated word of “adversary.” An adversary is simply one who is on the opposing side, a person who challenges me, who brings attention to issues I wasn’t considering, who points out the holes in my logic, who provokes me to understand my position in a deeper way.
In life, this feels deeply threatening, but if we can look at our adversaries and remember their humanity, perhaps we have the possibility of simply practicing together. At the same time, it is not merciful to allow myself or others to be harmed if there is anything I can do to defuse and end the attack.
After two years of practicing martial arts, and more than fifteen years of practicing sitting meditation, I am beginning to find I have enough expertise to be very clear about when I’m doing things wrong. In my dojo, the teachers often say the expression, “Perfect practice makes perfect,” and I feel a sense of despondency at the belief that my body has not learned all the skills necessary to even engage in perfect practice.
Yet I see that now I can feel when the movement is not working correctly. I am beginning to sense the corrections I need to make instead of needing people to point them out to me all the time. I still encounter the judgment and expectation that, during sitting practice, one is supposed to be able to entirely clear one’s mind of all thought, and I find those moments exquisitely rare.
Attachment to perfect execution or perfect outcome seem to me another way of setting myself up for rigidity and despair. What has been far more workable for me is a goal of becoming better at returning to center, as my teacher T. Thorn Coyle often taught. When I am knocked to the ground, I have learned how to fall gently and safely and get back up ready for another round of practice. When I find myself mired in cynicism and despondency, it takes me less time to remember myself and recommit to my work.
There is no end to work or the cycles of history, though practice helps us begin to see that what we encounter are not cycles but spirals. Instead of circling through the same issues and problems in the exact same way, we begin to notice how this iteration of the cycle feels different, more expansive. We see more nuance in the problem. We spend less time being stuck in the outcome. The damage is less severe. We find more capacity for joy even when these problems exist.
Heartbreak and loss knock the best of us onto the floor. We become humbled by the absence of those who made our lives full, who lifted us up, who helped to us feel loved, desirable, and worthy.
That deep loving connection and acceptance is the greatest gift of loving relationships. To be the focus of someone’s heart, to feel like the most special person in the world, is a deep longing many of us carry. It is one that we are conditioned to expect to experience with parents or love relationships.
And it may also be a hook that keeps us tethered to a bad relationship. In abusive and controlling relationships, the giving of that kind of loving attention may inflate us with euphoria. And then, when the abusive partner withholds that love, it may feel like an existential threat. After several cycles of inflation and withholding, we lose our autonomy and ground.
The fear is, if this person is not in my life, I will never have this feeling again.
What I am learning, and remembering, is that once we have this experience of being so deeply loved and accepted—it is ours. Our body learns and remembers that feeling. We can return to it and access it and nurture its expression.
It is perhaps much like a campfire. If you are building a fire in the woods and have no matches, flint, or lighter, it’s not impossible but it takes a lot of effort. You have to work hard for that first spark, scraping wood against wood or stone against stone. It is far easier if a kind and helpful person who already has a strong fire burning brings over a coal or lighted branch for you.
Once your fire is burning, though, you can continue to feed it. You don’t need that person to keep bringing you new wood.
A person’s hands forming a heart shape around a setting sun. Photo by Mayur Gala.
Take a moment and, if you have ever had a moment of feeling deeply loved, deeply seen, deeply valued by another person, remember that moment. Remember what you were wearing, where you were, what the person smelled like. Remember what led up to the moment and remember the moment itself.
For some people, that feeling of love and admiration comes not from a lover but from somewhere else, even pets. That is totally okay for this exercise.
Sometimes these moments of deep love get tarnished by painful events that occur with or immediately after. For this practice, keep your memory at the moment of feeling that love and connection.
Notice what happens in your body as you sit with that memory. Imagine that the love and attention you received from the other person emitted from them as a color, as an energy, as a sensation that fills your body. Imagine that to be like a spark of energy that you can grow with slow, steady breathing.
Breathe into that feeling and imagine it saturating your body. If there are parts of you afraid or unwilling to take in that experience of being loved, acknowledge that. Imagine that feeling can surround and support these parts, and let those parts know they can take it in if they wish, but do not force it.
Spend a few minutes being with this. Know that this feeling may have begun as a gift given by another but it is yours now. Your sense of love, admiration, worthiness. Thank yourself for showing up, and go be in love with yourself.
Whatever causes you grief, let yourself grieve. It is healing and necessary to feel the pain of the loss, whether we understand the fullness of its dimensions or not.
Perhaps the grief seems misplaced or remote, but in truth we may be grieving a deeper change that this incident only symbolizes. We are grieving what was once possible, what we once took for granted. We need to grieve to unhook our attachments to what was. We need to grieve so that we can, when we are ready, make something new.
And if something does not cause you grief, but it does for others, that is okay too. You can be the one who listens and supports this time, who cares and witnesses while they do their work. And hopefully when it is your time to grieve, others will be available to you.
Grief is deeply painful and we can at times feel lost in it. Yet grief is also the cool well of refreshing water when we have been moving through an arid and hot land. Sinking into the grief refreshes the soul, makes us ready to create something new.
We are in dire need of grieving the old and embracing the changes that have been thrust upon us. We don’t have to like the changes that are occurring and being demanded, but fighting them is a waste of our power. Grieve, remember love, and still make time for joy.
It’s useful to remember that people are paradoxical creatures and that the advice that works for one person may be unhelpful for another.
There are people who are almost perpetual people-pleasers, who will prioritize others’ needs and comfort above their own, and who struggle to accept and validate that they have boundaries. There are other people who put their own needs and hurt above everyone else’s, who will cut people out of their lives before they even try having a sit-down conversation about the problem.
In a sense, both strategies are responses to the same core problem of how to balance having a Self and being in relationship with others. Neither is really wrong, but both have limitations, and both strategies could learn a lot from each other to bring more wholeness to a person.
So telling a people-pleaser who is finally getting angry and setting boundaries that they need to think about others… maybe not helpful. Telling a self-prioritizer that they don’t need to worry about others’ opinions… maybe not helpful.
The other paradox is that the more we judge and resist our strategies, the more entrenched they become.
When that people pleaser starts thinking about putting themself first it becomes tempting to start judging that pleasing tendency, or on the contrary to judge that self-interested tendency.
What is strange and confusing is the importance of gratitude and appreciation. When we make the effort to really understand what these strategies are trying to do for us, and appreciate how hard they’re working, and have gratitude for what they’ve given us, then these parts begin to relax.
It’s hard to do, because we can easily start thinking of all the harm we’ve experienced because of the strategy. The fear is, if I have gratitude or appreciation that is basically saying the harm is okay and it’ll get worse.
But most of us have spent years judging and shaming ourselves without much improvement, so it might be worth the risk to try gratitude and appreciation.
When I notice an anxious or worrying thought these days, I take a moment to thank that part of me. “Thanks for bringing that to my attention. It’s a valid concern.” Rather than exacerbating the anxiety, it feels soothing. It’s like that anxious part of me really wanted me to hear them, and once it knew it was heard, it could relax.
This is an essay that is personal and dear to my heart. I attended a Jesuit high school, and in one class I was assigned a paper to write about religious perspectives on a controversial issue, and to find a religious perspective for and against the issue. I chose suicide at the time, and had to look hard to find in Shinto a perspective that condoned suicide.
As an adult practicing in neopagan traditions, experiencing the suicide of a person in my life, that young me lifted up his head and wondered, “What do pagans think of this?” This essay is the result.
Spiritual bypassing can look like ignoring the pain and discord in the world and retreating to my comfort, my meditation, my transcendent spiritual practice.
Yet simply succumbing to despair, only listening to the prophecies of doom, and surrendering my will feels like another kind of bypassing.
To live in this world and continue to make efforts, knowing how challenging it is and yet believing what I do matters, is both liberating and heartbreaking.
Recently a friend shared with me a quote that I know now is by Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian Communist imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist government, ostensibly from a letter written by him in prison: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
Context aside, this quote came after a session of working with the intellectual, emotional, and willful parts of self with a client, in which I was surprised to hear the potent energy and optimism of the willful parts of self restrained by the fearful and suspicious protections of the intellect.
Gramsci’s summation cuts to the heart of a human psychology that I see in clients and myself, I am saying. The will only focused on the work and the effort, taken out of the personal and social meaning. To be will-driven is to be indifferent to what this effort means to me, who is against it, my personal story about it. To be intellect-driven is to be wholly ruled, often by fear, by a removed and totalizing belief that one knows everything and thus should not bother trying anything.
All of these, in a sense, are forms of bypassing the experience of the heart, which cares for others and experiences the personal impact of life. And yet it is the heart which may gather the insights of the intellect and the power of the will and direct it in ways both life-affirming and socially conscious.
