I am hurting all the time. Sometimes it spills over but mostly I keep it inside. I’m learning to hold it with tenderness and compassion instead of resist it with criticism, judgement, and subjugation; to shine a gentle light on it and invite the possibility of healing. It’s possible that if I had compartmentalized this hurt (if I even could have) half my life ago and made different choices, I would have become a ‘success’ of the kind the Colonel expected, my mother hoped for, society defines, with some great career as a writer or a scientist or even a world-renowned mindfulness teacher. But there are times I think that if I hadn’t landed here, in this little patch of forest where I found the leading edge of peace, that I might have killed myself by now.
Don’t worry. I never would have back then, if only for the suffering it would have caused others. And I never would now (except possibly in a case of M.A.I.D.) because I’m too curious to see what happens next. And even when I touch the depths of despair and self-loathing I’m capable of, I remain grateful for this life, for waking up alive each day in this world whose natural beauty exceeds its human depravity. And there are enough people around me who embody the basic goodness the Shambala tradition posits, and I know that some of them love me. But I do understand now why people end their lives, in a way that I never did in younger years. There but for the grace of God… I have no more judgement; I have compassion.
This isn’t a treatise on suicide though maybe there will be one someday; this is simply an acknowledgment that I empathize with what it is to hurt deeply inside where no one else ever sees it. And I feel how difficult it is to show it to anyone, to clamber out of the shame spiral, brave the inner critic, and admit to profound, seemingly inexplicable, existential suffering. There’s an unfortunate and unrealistic stigma to vulnerability. For the few hundred people who read this who don’t know me, it’s no risk to share my struggle. But considering the students and friends I live among daily who may read this, and the human propensity to judge, I’m sticking my neck out to reveal that sometimes I go to such dark places inside.
Sometimes. Most of the time I’m functional, content, engaged, in fact now more than ever thanks to meditation and mindfulness practice. I suffer less than I used to. But just touch the right blade to my surface and the darkness wells up. Do I have mental illness? Is my brain different than “normal”? Or is this normal? Am I simply a highly sensitive person in a world that grows more confusing by the hour? I’m grateful that I’ve always had the resources, financial, familial, social, and/or internal, to find a way out of the pit when I tip into it. As Calamity Jane said, “Every day takes learnin’ all over again how to fuckin’ live.”
I wrote about this once years before there was a blog, and I was shut down by an editor whose argument seemed to be that if I wasn’t serious about killing myself it was insensitive to say that I could understand it. That response seems like part of the societal problem, to me. I’ve not written or spoken of it since, having been told by an authority figure that, essentially, I had no right to write about it. But now, in the blogosphere, mental health is no longer taboo, as exemplified in the writings of a brave new friend. Also now, for me there’s only the internal editor, and she’s given me permission to share my compassion toward myself and others.
“For people who practice it’s not about eradicating the darkness,” a dear friend concurred today. It’s about how you relate to it. From the venerable Thich Nhat Hahn to my beloved Catherine Ingram, all dharma teachers advocate allowing the full range of human emotions: the ten thousand sorrows along with the ten thousand joys. Skillful living is about holding them all with tenderness, loosely, not clinging to the joys and not rejecting the sorrows. It’s about opening your heart to your self as well as to others.
For whatever reasons, Americans seem particularly prone to suffer low self-esteem. The Dalai Lama famously couldn’t comprehend the question when a student asked, “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?” It’s a vicious circle that requires steely intention to step outside of. And it requires education, exposure to opportunity to access the knowledge that there’s another way to think. Self-compassion is one reason I turned to gratitude practice five years ago, and committed wholeheartedly to mindfulness practice the year before that after dancing around it for a couple decades.
Sharon Salzburg writes, “Seeking to punish ourselves endlessly will leave us exhausted and demoralized. Caring about ourselves allows us to renew our efforts and continue on. This is the love that the Dalai Lama had tried to explain to me during our talk about self-hatred many years ago.” These are great reminders that it’s important to care about yourself, to care for yourself: your body, heart, and mind, your relationships, your own suffering. It’s said that in order to truly love another you need first to love yourself; in order to be fully compassionate with others you need first to be compassionate with yourself. I can’t argue. These are some more reasons I’ve committed to these spiritual practices, so that I can one day truly, deeply love this living being, this unique incarnation of energy I call ‘myself.’
When I let slip to a friend the other day that I, too, suffer from the kind of emotional distress she was sharing, she was surprised. “Really?!” she said, “I think of you as having it all together.” Whatever that means. Nope. I don’t have it all together but I turn my attention every day to practices which help me hold it mostly together most of the time, and that enables me to experience moments of joy, days of genuine happiness, weeks, even months at a time of contentment. I know objectively that I am fortunate in this world where billions of humans lack the animal necessities of food, water, shelter, and space; where billions of humans are unable to read, lack education, lack basic healthcare. Anger arises when I consider that more Americans than ever are falling into those lacks due to the billionaires’ takeover of our country.
I know some people who have it all together, who seem to lack inner demons–but not very many. Getting through a day without despair must come easier for those with a higher genetic set point for happiness, for those who were raised by skillful parents, or those who’ve found the right therapy, or those with a trajectory of purely serendipitous conditions shaping their lives, or for those who just don’t think or care much beyond their own desires. But just as the leopard can’t change her spots, I can’t flip a switch and be someone I’m not. I can only learn and grow moment by moment, experience by reflection, day by day. I’m grateful that the life I inherited from my ancestors and the choices I made as I’ve muddled through it thus far have brought me to exactly where I am today.
