THE BUDDHA POINTED OUT THOUSANDS of years ago that suffering is a fact of life. Or, as I occasionally put it: Some things just hurt. I have jokingly said that I want that as my epitaph, or at least to have a mug or a T-shirt with that slogan emblazoned across it while I’m still alive.
SOME THINGS
JUST HURT
There are those who assert that if only we didn’t try to resist our experience, or have a bad attitude, there would be no pain at all. I challenge that. It’s inevitable that by simply living a life, there will be times of adversity and certainly disruption. It’s not because of our attitude that those times are uncomfortable or heartbreaking. And for the dedicated many who work to make their community or the world at large a kinder, more insightful place, the suffering they aim to alleviate will often spill into their own lives. You may be one of them. That experience of vicarious trauma—which we can also call the shock of witnessing—has all sorts of repercussions: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), burnout, depression, and despair among them. While I believe it’s true that some things just hurt, I also believe that we don’t need extra suffering, and therein lies our work. How do we fully acknowledge the suffering but at the same time not let it define and overtake us?
For a start, it helps to recognize that for many of us, a dominant cultural attitude toward pain is that it’s something to be avoided, denied, “treated.” As a result, it can be particularly tough for people—including me—to acknowledge painful emotions in the context of our efforts toward growth and transformation and social change. Some of us may feel that the cultivation of compassion should be a practice that elevates us beyond feeling those “less virtuous” emotions like anger, annoyance, impatience, and disappointment. But part of the cultivation of compassion is simple recognition—including the recognition of those things that just hurt.
That’s why the revolutionary statement that there is suffering in the world is so liberating. It doesn’t turn away or include a prescription of precisely how we should feel in those times when we suffer. In fact, the most radical part of this piece of wisdom is its simplicity; it is merely recognition of what is. When I first encountered the idea of the truth of suffering in an Asian philosophy class in college, I felt instantly comforted, and the comfort was unlike anything I’d experienced before. No one was trying to make sense of my pain or rationalize it; no one was reassuring me that things would get better soon or reminding me to look only at the bright side—all things we are conditioned to say and believe in the face of suffering. For the first time, I felt permission and freedom to feel whatever I was going to feel.
AT TIMES, PAIN can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss. I learned that in a poignant way from a man who was deeply suffering.
A young soldier who had been deployed in Iraq came to IMS within two weeks of having been released from the army. He was a beautiful person. He had enlisted for a few different reasons: a recent romantic heartbreak, a yearning to get out of town, and deeply felt ideals about love of country. Not only had he landed in an active war zone, he had also experienced massive disillusionment and real horror at actions he witnessed. I had never met someone in as active a state of traumatic distress as he was, outside of an actual traumatic situation occurring on the spot. His startle reflex was extraordinary; he lived on tenterhooks. His need to take measures to feel safe was absolute. His incredibly sweet nature did regular battle with his mistrust and persistent monitoring of others.
The intensive, silent retreat he’d signed up for wouldn’t have been the ideal environment to begin processing that recent experience, so we worked with him on a parallel track—more relational, emphasizing grounding exercises and especially self-compassion.
His later diagnosis was PTSD, but it could equally have been described as moral injury or a soul wound. The lead teacher of the retreat he entered was my colleague Rodney Smith, who had also founded and run two hospices. I was talking to Rodney about the soldier one day when he said to me, “Sharon, don’t you see? He’s grieving.”
Once I understood his mistrust and hypervigilance and alienation as grief, it registered within me as heartbreak, which I, too, have often felt. His pain didn’t seem as distant as a diagnosis like PTSD. Consequently, I was better able to be a friend and teacher to him.
To grieve, whether for a person, a set of ideals, or our hopes and dreams, is to watch reality, once so solid-seeming, become molten. It’s hard to get oneself to take the next step in a dissolving world—where will our foot land when it seems nothing will support us? How do we move toward inner or outer change?
To start with, here are some footholds for our next step, thanks to two insightful writers.
“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them,” says writer Martín Prechtel. “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Seeing grief in this way helps us respect what we are going through, rather than being mired in shame and discouragement on top of the pain we already feel.
What happens if we recognize the love inside of grief? Journalist Dahr Jamail writes about his grief for the planet on Truthout, a nonprofit news website:
Each time another scientific study is released showing yet another acceleration of the loss of ice atop the Arctic Ocean, or sea-level-rise projections are stepped up yet again, or news that another species has gone extinct is announced, my heart breaks for what we have done and are doing to the planet.…
Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing.… My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of my own grief.… I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.
AN ACTIVIST I greatly admire is the late Myles Horton. Among other accomplishments, he co-founded the Highlander Folk School, a center for education and social action now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center. Horton established Highlander in 1932, when he was in his late twenties, and by the 1960s, it had evolved into a site for leadership training for advocates of civil rights, labor, voting rights, and the environment. Early on, Horton determined that Highlander would operate as a racially integrated institution; he claimed that by doing so, it held the record for sustained civil disobedience, breaking the Tennessee Jim Crow laws every day for over forty years, until the segregation laws were finally repealed.
In the 1985 documentary You Got to Move, Horton shared the outlook that sustained him: “I think the future is … well, as somebody said one time, ‘It’s out there.’ But it’s not only out there; it’s ready to be changed. It’s malleable, and there’s nothing fixed that you can’t unfix. But to unfix things that appear to be fixed, you have to not only be creative and imaginative, but courageously dedicated to the long haul.”
Social justice activist Chenjerai Kumanyika wrote about resilience from his experiences of working for change: “I’ve seen so many people and coalitions break down partially due to an inability to detach from the brutal vicissitudes of passing moments. I myself have foolishly tried to stand like a rigid oak against the winds of struggle, failing to bend and dance where necessary. The fights we need to fight are long and we have to sustain our capacity.”
Creating change requires enduring energy, but so much can get in the way of that energy. Therefore, it’s helpful for each of us to explore the landscapes of our lives and try to discover what comes between us and that long haul.
How do we lose energy? For one thing, we get overwhelmed in our own feelings of loss or grief or pain. We become rigid, like that oak, instead of bending and dancing where necessary. We demand perfection of ourselves in this highly imperfect world, and we don’t honor the fact that maybe we can take only one step at a time. We feel our bodies changing, our emotions become unstable—rapidly cycling through one mood after another. Relationships fade, goals recede, we are pressured to perform, pressured to stand out, pressured to disappear. We try so hard to help someone, and it seems like it’s going nowhere or taking longer than forever. Can we beat the clock ticking away, marking entropy and despair? Sometimes the thought goes through my head, I’m so tired I could cry. Sometimes I am so tired I do cry.
Many of us are familiar with the spectrum of depletion: we just can’t catch up, we feel overwhelmed and exhausted, we no longer find meaning in what we’re doing, we burn out, or we are actively traumatized as we absorb the trauma of those we work with or live with or deeply care about.
Emmett Fitzgerald is an Irishman who grew up in London. At age twenty-five, he deployed to the war-torn Congo to do humanitarian aid work. Despite how intense and unsettling the work was, Emmett kept re-upping, returning to Congo again and again for six-month tours. For the next chapter of his life, when the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, he went there to run a camp for displaced persons and ended up dealing with local storms that wrecked the camp and prompted an outbreak of cholera. Emmett just kept diving into disaster after disaster, almost like a “disaster tourist,” he said, but all the while putting his emotional life on hold. When he would travel from home to his next tour, he said, “I’d be visualizing a cardboard box and I would put the emotional stuff, the relationship stuff, the personal stuff in it and then that would be put away while I was in work mode. I found it very hard to align the two pieces of myself.”
Eventually, after Haiti, Emmett collapsed.
I lost a bunch of weight. I was smoking for the first time in my life, and I got back [to London] and found that I really had a taste for whiskey even though it had never been my thing. I now had a taste for sitting alone in my apartment smoking cigarettes and listening to music and just not wanting to engage in any effort. I didn’t want to be in the same room with anyone. That was frightening because I’d missed everybody so much. And then, the panic attacks started. I had one on Christmas Day in my parents’ home. I was surrounded by my big Irish family, by everybody I love, on my favorite day of the year, and yet I found myself deliberately excusing myself from the room, trying to be away from people because I couldn’t stand the effort of being sociable—trying to be what my family remembered me as and expected me to be. The amount of control it was taking to be in the room was so much that I would just need to release it. I couldn’t be surrounded by everybody I loved. My heart was racing. I could hear the blood in my fucking ears. It was cacophonous. It was like trying to have a conversation and being screamed at, at the same time.
When we are in the darkest night of our soul, grieving for the person and the life we seem to have lost, at that point we need to acknowledge what is, not how we would prefer it or what we would settle for. This is how things are, despite our protestations or laments or great yearning to look the other way.
Emmett began to discover resilience after he found his way to yoga and mindfulness. “You’re thinking it’s all your fault and you need to be able to deal with this on your own,” he said, “then a yoga and mindfulness teacher releases the pressure. It was a little shaft of sunlight. A little moment of clarity in your head and the anxiety stops. Meditation just helped me to acknowledge and just sit with how I was feeling and not constantly try to change it or do something that would justify it.”
I WAS ATTENDING a talk of the Dalai Lama’s on an early anniversary of 9/11, that day in 2001 that marked the largest terrorist attack on American soil in history. I had known people who died in the Twin Towers. I was in New York City within a week of the attack and stayed there for two months to teach. Several people came to my classes right from volunteering at ground zero. I will never forget the look of pain in their eyes as they came in to lean, exhausted, against a pillar. Through the meditation and with one another, several told me privately, they longed to find something beautiful that had not been destroyed.
During his remarks, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said something that could be easily misunderstood or seen as overly simplistic but which had a profound impact on me. He said, “About 9/11. It happened.”
Hearing that, I felt a sense of relief, like something awry had just clicked into place. I already recognized 9/11 had happened, certainly. But with any traumatic event, we might well need time to more fully integrate, in body, mind, and spirit that “it happened.” It’s easy, along the way, to want to overexplain a shattering situation or take refuge in abstractions. With the Dalai Lama’s statement, I dropped a subtle tendency to interpret or try to fabricate what I was feeling—and more directly recognized what was simply true for me.
In a similar spirit, Zen teacher Roshi Joan Halifax cautions against trying to convince ourselves to regard childhood traumas as gifts. She suggests, “Think of them as givens, not gifts.” That way there’s no pretense or pressure to reimagine painful experiences. If something is a given, we don’t deny it or look the other way. We start by acknowledging it, then see how we can make the best life possible going forward.
Lynn Nottage, the playwright we met in chapter 1, talks about a breakthrough coming for her when, as she said during a public dialogue we had in New York City a few years ago:
I had to go inside of myself in ways I was not prepared to do and confront my own sadness and my own sense of loss, and then figure out a way to translate those emotions to the page. I chose to do it through metaphor, but it was a very difficult process. I describe it as being like that moment in [the film] Like Water for Chocolate when the young woman is preparing dinner and all of her tears are mixing with the ingredients, and when people finally eat the food, they can’t help but be overcome with emotion because they recognize something that’s truthful in those flavors.
THIS ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF the need to truly touch our sadness, pain, and loss is where real change is born, where we begin to build resilience. As we respond to our own pain with more presence and compassion, the energy we have for responding to the pain of others increases dramatically, as does our sense of connection and care.
Resilience is something that accretes over time as we develop a habit of courageously responding to or being with pain without freaking out. At some point, you notice you bend but don’t break. In fact, even mighty oaks can bend in the wind without breaking. After Samantha Novick suffered the Parkland shooting, as we saw earlier, she described it as a giant crater, a gaping hole in everyone’s lives. Over time, through working with others, “having a clear purpose, meditating, spending time with her family, and in nature,” and having a renewed sense of the preciousness of life, that hole in her life, which will never disappear, is nevertheless not as big.
In working to make change in the world, there will always be setbacks. We have to be able to get back up off the floor. We need to be able to bounce back. Sure, we get caught up in the heat of the moment or in a sense of failure or are attracted to the shiny object that grabs our attention, but then we start over. If you come at an effort toward change with great rigidity, then any challenge feels like the end of the story, and you’re sunk.
I was working with a physical therapist recently, and one of the exercises he had me do was to stand on one foot. When I did, I would teeter, or sway, or my hand would reach out to grab the countertop in front of me. The physical therapist loved this! “Look at how your body is working to recover balance,” he’d say. “That’s the really important part.” Instead of seeing all that wobbling as a failure, he saw it as an essential skills training—my body recapturing the intelligence of how to come back to balance. That was more important than doing the exercise perfectly. “Good job!” he’d exclaim.
Joel Daniels, the storyteller/activist who wrote A Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter, talked to me about how to cultivate resilience in the face of frustration:
For me, it starts with being able to relate to how I respond to the world. And I need to recognize that I’m not always going to respond with love. Sometimes I respond by being a dick. And I have to remind myself to forgive myself for not responding in the way I feel I should. What’s really helped, though—it always does—is coming back to the breath. It’s the foundation I can work from: I can lean back into it and go, “Okay, in this present moment in time, this is the way that I know I need to respond because I’ve been here before.”
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been able to lean into being vulnerable, because it feels most honest to me. I see pain for what it is. I’m resting with it. I acknowledge it. I’m a next-door neighbor with it. I know this pain is eventually going to move away.
IN 2010, I attended a discussion at Emory University with panelists, including the Dalai Lama, called “The Creative Journey: Artists in Conversation with the Dalai Lama on Spirituality and Creativity.”
The first question for the panel was: “In the West, many people believe that creativity comes from torment, while in the East, there is more of a tradition of great art coming from balance and realization. Do you think you have to be in great suffering to create great art?”
I have been asked that question countless times, for many years and in many places. I’ve seen well-known painters sit in intensive meditation retreats, all the while quite torn about being there because they feared the end result would be losing their edge. I’ve seen writers equate balance with dullness and peace with torpor. I’ve known actors and musicians who feared ease of heart because that seemed to them the last step before being asleep.
The Dalai Lama had quite an interesting response to the question. In his view, beautiful art was beautiful because of the inner transformation artists went through during the act of creation. Had they become more enlightened, kinder, more deeply aware? To him, that’s what made a poem or a sculpture or painting more valuable, worthy of being held in higher esteem.
Because I think of making art as social action, I began to wonder whether the same principle could be applied to caregivers or those seeking societal transformation. What if we could regard our lives—our bodies and minds and work—as our fundamental creative medium?
This is a very different view of creativity from one that posits that all great art needs to come from immense torment and suffering. What I think we actually want (and rely on) from those in creative or transformational roles is not their misery. It is their courage: the courage to break through boundaries, to see things differently, daring to not conform.
As Lynn Nottage has said, “Great art comes from the truth. There’s a difference between a piece of art that is impeccably crafted because the artists are skilled technicians—the work may be beautiful but somehow it doesn’t move you—and a piece of art where the lines may be a little sloppy but there is an undeniable truth reflected back. It becomes great art not because it is perfect but because the artist has successfully conveyed their own truth.”
Suffering may bring some of us to that place of courage and truth, for sure, but so, too, might a profound connection to another or to life itself. When we aren’t so lost in the grasping and craving and mindless consumerism and aimless competition that conventional society invites, we can step away from the dictates of the ordinary to see and express reality in a fresh way.
Tasmanian comedian Hannah Gadsby creates performances that exemplify the connection between art and social change. In her remarkable monologue Nanette, she talks about Vincent van Gogh and offers up the theory that we don’t have the painting Sunflowers because of his brokenness, his mental anguish. We have Sunflowers because Van Gogh and his brother Theo loved each other. “Through all of the pain [Vincent] had a tether, a connection to the world,” she says. The art was born of connection.
As a society, we’re phobic about looking at pain, but it’s also true that happiness can seem superficial, a mere escape rather than something fundamental. Through practices like generosity and lovingkindness, which lift your spirits, you can come to look at pain without being overcome by it. You’re not destroyed by it. You have more spaciousness, more lift. That ability to face pain without crumbling is sometimes seen as the same as being oblivious or being protected by privilege. I see it as a profound potential of the human heart.
IN THE BUDDHIST tradition, suffering is not considered redemptive; it does not equal grace. Everything depends on how we relate to that suffering, our attitude: we may emerge embittered and isolated and self-absorbed, or connected and caring and not feeling alone. One ingredient in a transformed relationship to pain is to have enough light to surround the darkness, openness big enough to hold the pain and not collapse into it. A heart as wide as the world. Suffering is, it hurts, and yet we have the capacity to not add shame, or rage at not being able to control it, or conviction we will never feel anything else, ever.
My colleague Sylvia Boorstein tells a funny story about her granddaughter Honor. While preparing for their Passover Seder, Sylvia asked then-nine-year-old Honor to help set the table and gave her the following instructions: “Take a teaspoon of horseradish and put it on top of each piece of gefilte fish.”
Honor agreed to follow the instructions, but didn’t hesitate to offer her personal reaction to the traditional Seder menu item: “I never knew you could take a truly terrible thing and make it even worse!”
If we can put aside the fact that Sylvia makes delicious gefilte fish and the fact that I love horseradish, Honor’s comment could be used to illustrate how many of us deal with difficult feelings.
When we feel like we’re experiencing a truly terrible thing, we often don’t let the feeling exist on its own. Instead, we make it worse. Perhaps we judge ourselves for not being able to let go of the negative feeling; perhaps we ruminate extensively about the past and stew in regret or guilt; perhaps we allow ourselves to start projecting into the future, convinced the pain will never go away or even abate. Regardless of the details of the situation or the particulars of how we make it worse for ourselves, this is a common reaction coming from the sheer force of our conditioning.
This is why meditation can help to alleviate suffering. Despite popular myths, meditation doesn’t cleanse us of thoughts and feelings, but it does support us in having a more direct relationship to our experiences. For some, meditation is most supportive simply because it enables us to become more aware of the source of our pain. As a result, we rely less on reactions like denial, self-judgment, or precariously looking for happiness in transitory places. By experiencing suffering more directly, yet stepping back from being overwhelmed, we can learn to respond to our situations thoughtfully, rather than react immediately.
As the CEO of the END Fund, Ellen Agler is someone who has to make many hard decisions in the midst of great suffering. The END Fund is devoted to controlling and eliminating neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). NTDs are a group of infectious diseases, such as river blindness and intestinal worms, that affect more than 1.5 billion people globally, including over 800 million children.
Ellen said to me that she tries to take a step back before making big decisions. “It’s okay to pause before responding,” she said. “It’s okay to just be with what is and see how it might be a different ‘what is,’ if you just wait a day or two and try to access wisdom and see a deeper truth that may be what really needs to be responded to.”
Ellen’s comment parallels so much of what meditation training offers: the ability to pause rather than rush headlong into action, the opening of space so we can see options perhaps hidden from us in the ordinary clutter of our reactiveness, the greater ability to be with the suffering we feel without recoiling from it.
Accepting suffering doesn’t mean it will disappear. Instead, we can learn to feel discomfort in a far purer and more direct way, without the additional burden of feeling humiliated by it. A woman who recently underwent a major loss asked me for advice, as she was feeling pressured by friends to get better, to let go of the anguish, to heal. Their impatience was making her feel entirely alienated from them; she was convinced her suffering made her fundamentally different. “My friends have golden lives,” she insisted. I didn’t believe that for a moment, knowing how much goes on behind closed doors and how much pressure there is in today’s world to present as “perfect.” Hearing her describe her tough situation, these words spilled out of my mouth: “I think you need new friends. Maybe you need to meet mine. They’re all wrecks!”
I don’t really think my friends are wrecks. I do think, however, that they and I tend to talk more directly about our suffering, whether it stems from family issues, work stress, or free-floating anxiety … the list goes on. It’s the self-critical add-ons we layer onto pain that make us struggle terribly in response to tough situations. This perspective makes an enemy of our suffering, when dealing with the pain itself can already feel like quite a lot.
Social entrepreneur Anurag Gupta, founder of Be More America, deliberated about his journey to a more workable relationship with suffering:
Starting when I was in law school, for about ten years, I spent at least thirty days every year in silent retreats. I did that because I felt so judgmental of myself. As someone who was an advocate for social change in impoverished and marginalized communities, who was also coming from a place of woundedness, I was very much out of my body. I was in my head, which was creating a lot of judgments. Immersing myself in the practice of yoga has led to grounding. So regardless of whatever the stories, the mythologies, the biases that are out there about what my body is supposed to be—its color, size, background—I was at least able to experience real embodiment.
SOME YEARS BACK, I was invited to participate in a gathering of close to fifty Buddhists and Christians that took place at the Cistercian (Trappist) Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. The Dalai Lama suggested and encouraged this unique meeting of monks, nuns, and other practitioners, and he proposed the site as well. (It had been the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s monastery.)
The first few days were cordial, well intentioned but awkward. Dignitaries from both religions read out their lists of monastics who were going to make extended visits to their counterparts’ monasteries or nunneries to learn something of the other tradition up close. The Dalai Lama insisted on being treated like any other monk and so came down off his throne and sat among the people. We chatted with him during tea—that was an unexpected treat.
But apart from that, the dialogue was formal, exceedingly polite, and somehow not igniting much passion, which was odd given that most people in that room had passion enough to commit decades of their lives to Buddhism or Christianity. This went on until one of the participants, Zen teacher Norman Fischer, posed this question: “Now that I am in this monastery, when I see all the crosses with the figure of Jesus on them, I find it quite sad. The cross itself I do not find sad, but when there is a figure of Jesus on the cross, I find that quite sad. And so I want to ask the question, and I mean this very sincerely: Do you Christian participants feel sad, too, when you see this? And how do you practice with this image? I would really be interested to know.”
Norman struck me as a particularly guileless person—he wasn’t trying to be provocative, but really was troubled at the sight of the crucifix and was struggling to understand. In the face of his sincerity, whole walls came crashing down. There was a broad spectrum of responses, but in each response there was a common thread—that of sitting face-to-face with the truth of suffering.
People were so eager to address the topic, they began talking over one another. Some spoke of the “demons” within that one faces during contemplative practice. Some spoke of their intense frustration with tradition-bound hierarchies. Some Buddhists spoke about living in exile and cultural dislocation. (One Tibetan monk felt comfortable enough to bemusedly ask, “Is it true you believe in some kind of original sin?”)
Some Christians spoke of their shock and horror when colleagues were murdered while working overseas. Finally, we were actually recognizing ourselves in one another, finally, we were willing to be vulnerable and truthful and offer our deepest faith and our honest uncertainty and our unacknowledged fear, and it all came from openly talking about suffering. The dialogue we had come together in Kentucky to have, it turned out, was about this.
The dialogue became about sitting face-to-face with that truth and not turning away, however much we wanted to, not strategizing for a quick fix to cover over the pain and not adorning it with romance or ballads or glitter. Suffering hurts, and here we are.
IN AN INTERVIEW for this book, Michael Kink, an advocate for a fairer economy, talks about finding his way through suffering and grief:
My practice began because I was an out-of-control alcoholic. I went to a program where they encourage you to use meditation as part of your recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. So my meditation practice has literally always been grounded in this community of people of wildly diverse backgrounds. What has helped me with grieving is just having the perspective that suffering is part of life, and that it’s not a separation of life, and that our practices in our communities are intended to allow us to hold suffering as part of our human experience. Before I came to Buddhism, I knew suffering was part of life, but I had not acknowledged it at the deepest level as part of what we have and who we are.
When we are honest about pain, we see, as so many in this chapter have said, that it is a deep and inevitable part of life, an ever-recurring companion, and there is no immediate fix. But we also find that we are not alone.
During a panel discussion at the 2019 Wisdom 2.0 conference, Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter, Jaime, was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, told the crowd of two thousand people:
On February 14, I found myself part of a club I never expected to be part of with seventeen other families. I didn’t know them beforehand, but I’ve grown to love them. We don’t all agree on everything, but that’s fine. We all need each other now, and they have been a very necessary part of our path forward. My wife and I know—and the other families always talk about—how much we hate the fact that we know each other, but we love each other anyway.
South African bishop Desmond Tutu makes clear that there is a strong relationship between pain and intimacy: “We don’t really get close to others if our relationship is made up of unending hunky-dory-ness. It is the hard times, the painful times, the sadness and the grief that knit us more closely together.”
We don’t all share the same degree or type of pain, but we share the vulnerability of loss, of change. We can lie in bed feeling helpless and unseen. We can feel as if we don’t count, can “scratch the walls for meaning and hear no echo anywhere,” in the words of John O’Donohue. This calls forth compassion.
Compassion doesn’t mean we don’t fight; it means we find strength in connection and understanding more than we find it anywhere else.
Paco Luagoviña, the Zen Buddhist priest we met in the previous chapter, has been trying to start a substance abuse clinic in New York State, a holistic wellness clinic to deal with the opioid epidemic. “There is an epidemic in the U.S. that is particularly afflicting the middle-class, mostly white community,” he says. “These kids are dying of overdoses for a lot of reasons, including that there is no clinic to take care of this particular population. I sit in front of a government group, where there is a supervisor and a council. And I make my pitch about opening up a clinic in their area. And they say, ‘Not here. Not in my neighborhood,’ even though you’re dealing with their own kids. How do you deal with that, you know? How do you bring in your meditation practice?” Paco said he tries to re-center himself by looking at workers in hospice care, people who bear daily witness to other people’s deaths day after day, aware of their own emotions but also mindful of whose emotions are center stage. He needs that reminder, he said; otherwise, he will be frozen in sorrow. “Because it breaks my heart. Sometimes I wanna cry. I lost a grandson at the age of twenty-two, twelve years ago, to an overdose. Just a beautiful, beautiful kid. A part of me died when he died. So when I go before these communities, I have to be non-judgmental and really understand their fear, their ignorance. I still hurt. I still cry inside, but it’s the only way to deal with it.”
ONCE WE’VE AWAKENED to an issue or cause and we take action, how do we sustain our response over time?
Trauma, disappointment, exhaustion, and overwhelm saturate our emotional lives, our identities, and our beliefs. Not long ago, May Krukiel was a faculty member at the Garrison Institute wellness program in New York, as was I. She pointed out how we might carry and communicate these effects bodily—in our posture, our facial expressions, and our overall body sense. During a program that offered tools of meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers, May led an exercise to explore that somatic phenomenon, which she adapted from a workbook called Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization (New York: Norton, 1996).
In this exercise, people worked in pairs. As May read a script aloud, person A and later person B sculpted their bodies into a posture or position that best expressed their response to the reading. May’s script detailed a typical day for people who work at shelters. With a few adaptations, it could easily apply to other stressful and demanding environments.
May read:
The phone rings. It is the district supervisor, saying the budget you submitted had not been approved. You have to find more places to cut, without disrupting essential services. Your assistant suddenly seems depressed and isn’t communicative. Your office mate has become belligerent and is too communicative. A crisis has erupted between two residents who are frustrated, stressed, and nearly hopeless. And on a personal note, your health insurance company, having assured you they had all the paperwork they needed to process your claim, writes to tell you they don’t have all the paperwork. The doctor’s office says they sent it. The company says it never received it. What more can you do?
And on it went.
Participants listened to the vignette, took a moment to settle into their feelings, and then used their bodies to convey their reactions: posture, facial expressions, eyes … a full-body response. Once they found the right manifestation of the reaction, they were asked to freeze for a moment or two and allow themselves to really feel their pose.
Time and again, I looked out over a room of people curled over, trying to push away what they were hearing and feeling with arms spread, muscles rigid, and eyes squeezed shut or holding themselves as though they could ward off the pain and keep from fragmenting … not breathing and not ready to hear one more thing. It was so honest. So powerful. So sad. I couldn’t help but think, What if we were all walking around this way, as literal representations of how we are hurting or simply so very tired within? A symbolic exercise maybe, but also very real.
As the exercise of working with vicarious trauma continued, the person who had not molded themselves to the mood brought up in them by the script would look at their knotted-up partner and gently begin to unwind them. Clenched fists were invited to open. Hands that blocked seeing or hearing would instead start signaling an embrace. Between these gentle urgings and self-guided movement, you could see people uncoiling out of that fetal position and standing in a form that was empowered, calm, and whole. Their posture conveyed balance, harmony, groundedness, and dignity.
The newly unfurled person was then asked to form a body memory of this new, open posture and to consider using it in the future whenever strength and hope were needed.
We look at our habitual reactions to pain and consider whether they serve us well anymore, even if they once did. If those reactions are rejecting, denying, or trying to not feel anything so as to soldier through, I’d suggest acting them out in this kind of body sculpture to see if that’s the posture you want to maintain in your life. Then, unfurl, open, feel the greater balance in your stance, honor your body’s innate knowledge of how to wobble in coming to balance if that’s what happens. Breathe deep. Remember resilience just demands we respond in this moment for this moment. It’s not the same as a long-term self-improvement plan. Open to what is. Let go of those add-ons we’re conditioned to pile on with: don’t be afraid of what you are feeling. One way or another, we need to process the tension, either as a torturous experience or something we can open up to.
As Joel Daniels said about being present with pain, “It comes down to my trying to come back to my body. Am I sitting up straight? How am I breathing? Am I breathing shallowly? The more I’ve done this, the easier it has become to catch myself when I’ve gone off. No one is always present.”
YOU CAN TAKE one small step toward a different relationship to what is by reaching out to someone or allowing someone to reach out to you. Create—with words or images or food or the way you pay attention to strangers or a new way of relating to your body or those you work with and for. Listen. Take one small step toward the unknown, toward acting without depending on an immediate result, thereby relying on a different sense of meaning. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,” Václav Havel, the Czech dissident, writer, and statesman, said, “but the certainty that it is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”
Some things just hurt. And no matter what, we are not alone. Take one small step to allow whatever helping hands are coming toward you to reach you or to extend a helping hand to someone else in some way.
As the Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “So you must not be frightened … if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.”
When I’m in some kind of pain, I’ve found that this can be one of the worst components of what I experience … feeling that I’m all alone, my nose pressed up against the window looking into the space where everyone else has gathered, to enjoy a moment or comfort one another, to be a part of life. I’m somehow excluded, unaccounted for, and no one even notices I’m outside. It’s the worst and most habitual add-on I use.
I’ve been experiencing this since my childhood, when the habit of feeling different and excluded got acculturated, and working with it since college, when in my Asian philosophy class that habitual reaction was challenged upon hearing the Buddha’s statement, “There is suffering in life.” The subtext was, “It’s not just you. You’re not weird and different and totally cast aside. You’re just hurting.”
And I’ve come to see, even in the worst circumstances, that life has not forgotten me, it has not forgotten us. No matter how despairing or cut off we can feel at any given time, we are not actually severed from the essential flow of life or from one another. If we get quiet for a while and pay careful attention, this is what we realize.
LOVINGKINDNESS MEDITATION BEGINS with a suggestion to sit comfortably. Sit comfortably physically, sit comfortably emotionally. This isn’t a practice where we strive to make something special happen, or seek to fabricate a state, or manufacture anything, but rather we get in touch with a more natural space within us.
You can close your eyes if you feel comfortable; if you are accustomed to meditating with your eyes open, that’s fine. And if your eyes are closed and you start to feel really sleepy, it’s a good idea to open them, then continue with the practice.
Once your posture is established, begin by actively taking delight in your own goodness. Because so much of our time can be spent remembering the mistakes we’ve made, our negative actions, that here we consciously point our attention toward something good that we’ve done. It may be a small thing, but bring it to mind. And if no particular action comes up, think of a good quality that’s alive within you. We do this not to be egotistical or conceited but to rejoice in the potential for goodness that we all share in.
We then silently repeat phrases that reflect what we would wish most deeply for ourselves, not just for today but in an enduring way. Phrases that are big enough, that are general enough, so they can represent a gift we would give to ourselves, and also ultimately to others. This is what we would wish for all beings everywhere, beginning with ourselves. The feeling tone is one of generosity or gift-giving, like handing someone a birthday card and saying, “May you have a great year.” It’s not pleading or even asking. We are offering a quality of attention and care that is different from our usual way of relating to ourselves.
Some of the traditional phrases we use:
“May I live in safety. May I be safe,” which relates to everyone’s desire for some basic security and protection from harm.
“May I have mental happiness,” which refers to peace and joy in our minds.
“May I have physical happiness,” which means health and freedom from pain.
“May I live with ease,” meaning may the elements of daily life like work and family, relationships, go easily, not be such a struggle.
Pick the ones you want to use and bring them together.
“May I be safe. May I have mental happiness. May I have physical happiness. May I live with ease.”
You can use these phrases or any others that are more personally meaningful to you. Just gather all of your attention behind one phrase at a time, as though you were planting a seed in the ground, and then let it go. Keep repeating the phrases. Find a rhythm that’s pleasing to you, with enough space and enough silence so the phrases are emerging from your heart.
May I be safe.
May I have mental happiness.
May I have physical happiness.
May I live with ease.
Whenever you find your attention has wandered away from the phrases, gently begin again. No matter where your mind has gone, no matter how far away it has wandered, it doesn’t matter. You can actively practice kindness in that moment. Gently let go, gather your energy together, begin again.
“May I be safe. May I have mental happiness. May I have physical happiness. May I live with ease.” Or whatever phrases you may be using.
Now visualize yourself sitting in the center of a circle. The circle is made up of the most loving beings you’ve encountered in this life, or maybe they’re people you’ve never met but who have inspired you in some way. Perhaps they exist in the current time, maybe they’ve existed historically or even mythically. That’s the circle. It’s like a circle of love, loving energy. There you are in the center. You can experience what it’s like to be the recipient of that quality of attention, of care, as you gently stay in touch and repeat the phrases of lovingkindness for yourself. “May I be safe. May I have mental happiness. May I have physical happiness. May I live with ease.”
Many emotions may arise. You may feel joyous, you may feel grateful, you may feel embarrassed, like you’d just like to duck down and have them each offer lovingkindness to one another, forgetting about you. Whatever emotion it is, you can let it come and let it pass as though it were washing through you. The touchstone is the repetition of the phrases. And here, too, whenever you find your attention wandering, it’s fine. That is the magic moment of the meditation. We practice letting go; we practice beginning again.
May I be safe.
May I have mental happiness.
May I have physical happiness.
May I live with ease.
To close the session, you can let go of the visualization, dissolve the circle. Keep silently repeating the phrases of lovingkindness for a few more minutes. You’re making the offering at the same time you’re receiving the energy.
For all the time we usually spend judging ourselves, putting ourselves down, we are recapturing that energy, that force. Let it fill your body. Let it fill your being.
When you feel ready, you can open your eyes. Pay attention to whatever effect the meditation may have had and notice throughout the day whatever quality it may be cultivating.