Grief can be the garden of Compassion if you keep your heart open throughout everything. Your Pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for Love and Wisdom. -Rumi Grief, whether for a an actual death or illness, or for the end of a relationship, job, home, dream or hope, can feel life-shattering. Loss, and its accompanying fear and pain, can be extremely difficult to face. It can be hard to imagine how you will ever pick up the pieces of your life. Life may become difficult as depression (a suppression of feeling) and/or anxiety take over. Some people turn to substances or other addictive activities as a way to escape the overwhelming pain inside.
Yet healing and growth come through keeping your heart open, through feeling the pain and going with it, instead of shutting down and turning away from it. The only way out is through; there is no true avoiding of this. This can feel difficult or scary as it may seem that the pain will engulf you, or that you won't be able to tolerate it. Therapy and meditation/mindfulness can be helpful in this process: both in telling your story and being witnessed and accompanied in your grief and pain, and in learning to be with the emotions without running from them. When everything is going well, life can be on cruise control, but when there is a loss, suddenly routine and a sense of safety and complacency are thrown out the window. Grief then becomes the doorway into a deeper and richer understanding and experience of life. As the Rumi quote says, pain can be your greatest ally in the development of love, compassion and wisdom in your life. As you are able to stay in your heart, despite the seemingly unbearable pain of grief, there is an opening, a softening, an expansion, a new depth in your experience of yourself and of life.
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Not to Feel is to Stop the Heart from Breathing -Mark Nepo This culture emphasizes thinking over feeling. Consequently, many people are much more comfortable staying in the "rational" or "logical" realms. where there may be more of a sense (or illusion) of control. Often people feel afraid of the "irrational" world of feelings. In fact to call something "irrational" in our culture is to devalue or dismiss it.
By nature feelings ARE irrational, ie not of the thinking mind. We are born with feelings and later learn how to think, and how to think about feeling as we grow and develop. Feelings are an essential part of our Being, though they are often treated as a wild beast that needs to be subdued, controlled or ignored. Often there is a fear of our feelings as they are out of our conscious control. Feelings are often felt to be the problem rather than how they are expressed or judged. They can cause a great deal of pain, and reactivity and at the same time they can give us a great sense of well-being, joy and happiness. As the poet Mark Nepo says so beautifully in the quote, feeling is essential to the heart. Without feeling, our heart stops breathing, we become less human and more machine-like, more like the ultra-rational Vulcan Mr. Spock from Star Trek. This may seem appealing at times, but ultimately there is a high price to be paid for ignoring such an essential part of who we are. Feeling is the lifeblood and inspiration of poets, artists, dancers and people who fully live their lives ( and those of us who attempt to do so as a daily, imperfect practice!) The heart needs to breathe for us to be fully human. And for the heart to breathe, feeling must be allowed and invited, given an equal place at the table with thought and logic. What do you need to feel today for your heart to breathe fully and openly? Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion. ~ Martha Graham Just as EQ (emotional intelligence) is more important than IQ for a successful and happy life, passion is more important than technical ability in life's endeavors. Passion is that ineffable feeling of intense drive, motivation, or connection with/to something ( or someone). It may feel like a sense of oneness, of rightness, of absolute symmetry or perfect alignment with who you are. When you are doing whatever you are passionate about, you may temporarily lose track of time; the time/space continuum dims as you are truly present and open to a flow of inspiration and one-pointed attention.
What are you passionate about? What takes over and transports you away from your daily concerns, from your wandering mind or swirling emotions? What truly connects you to yourself? What feels like it is truly aligned with your essential self? The answers to these questions may come readily to some, while to others, passion remains elusive, buried under layers of shoulds, shouldn'ts, fears, self-doubt, and feelings of inadequacy. Can you allow yourself to dream, to imagine, to explore where passion resides within you? Can you allow yourself to journal, to draw, to dance, to work with clay, to look at the sun or stars or moon and explore where passion may burn, like a small flame? Can you begin to fan the glowing ember with your attention and actions into a larger flame? Can you allow yourself to fully enjoy whatever you are passionate about even when you don't think you are "good" or "good enough" at it? The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity. ~ Erich Fromm From the moment we are born, we need and seek a sense of safety and security in a world that is not reliably secure. A baby is completely helpless and has no choice but to trust it's caretaker for a sense of security,(available to greater or lesser degrees), since it's very life depends on it.
As we grow up we continue to seek a sense of safety and security, through our parents and family, our teachers, our friends, our signficant others, our jobs, our homes, our community, our country and our world. These are some of the things we come to rely on to feel safe. Many of us like the security of a regular routine, the safety of knowing what to expect. We feel safe within our comfort zone of the familiar and seemingly secure. But are we, and is life ever truly secure? Or do we simply create this illusion to keep ourselves from feeling the existential angst of the often arbitrary and uncontrollable nature of life? Despite our most carefully constructed lives, so much is out of our control. How do we deal with this? Do we hang on for dear life and try harder to control things and feel secure? Do we avoid reading the news, not take risks, feel afraid of people who seem different from us? Or can we learn to tolerate insecurity? Can we make space for it, can we learn to step, cautiously or boldly, outside our comfort zone? Can we be in that space between the two trapezes ( see previous blog post)? Fromm is suggesting that a primary psychological task is for us to tolerate, to endure, you could almost say, to befriend insecurity. To be able to hold the tension of the opposites of longing for security while acknowledging the essential insecurity of life. To love another fully, knowing that there are ultimately no guarantees. To follow your heart's desire even when it takes you into shaky terrain. Ultimately by learning to tolerate or even sometimes, embrace the essential insecurity of life, we live a life that is more present, more in the moment, more aware and awake. We give up the trance of security that can numb us into a very small life. When we can find a place within us that can withstand and tolerate the shifts and ups and down of life, that can surf the waves that life brings us with balance and at least attempts at grace, we have achieved a certain freedom that makes life more interesting and less threatening. Psychotherapy and mindfulness practices can facilitate and enhance this process. · The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings - Gita Bellin In a way, the above quote is obvious and at the same time, it is often the thing we resist the most. Or we want to be selective about the feelings we are willing to experience: only the "good" ones and not the "bad" ( ie painful or uncomfortable ones).
Yet true freedom is indeed having the courage to feel whatever feeling arises, trying not to judge it as good or bad, simply experiencing it in all ways. How does it feel and where do you feel it in your body? What thoughts arise as you have this feeling ( or sometimes, what thought caused the feeling) ? Is this a familiar feeling or something you haven't felt before? If it's familiar, what do you know about it? In what circumstances does this feeling arise? If it's new or less familiar, can you allow yourself to be curious about it? And maybe most important, practice allowing yourself to simply "ride the wave" of emotion. If you truly allow yourself to feel whatever is arising, if you can tolerate it and not distract yourself from it, it will pass, just as a wave swells, crests and dissipates. This is real freedom! |
AuthorPeggy Handler, MFT, is a psychotherapist in San Francisco's Noe Valley Archives
December 2020
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