In speaking recently with a friend, I was reminded of the
great bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness. When we
meet with someone who is down, hopeless, empty, or otherwise not beaming and
joyful, we can become quickly convinced that something is wrong, that they are
“broken,” and that we must act urgently to “fix” them.
We scramble to put them back together, to remind them of
all the gifts in their life, impart spiritual techniques and advice, suggesting
that they just “focus on the positive,” letting them know that everything will
be better soon, and that it will all turn out okay. Or, in an even more
aggressive way, we admonish them to “get over it” (this can often happen very
subtly in our communication or body language), to stay in the present moment,
to immediately forgive the one who has hurt them, or to just be grateful for
the “opportunity” that their suffering is providing to them.
It is so natural to want to help another and to lessen
their suffering and pain. It is a noble intention to help and to use whatever
skillful means we have at our disposal. But we might also begin to see the
subtle aggression in our strategies, this insistence that they come out of
their immediate experience and into the one we believe they should be having
instead.
We can start to see how much of this “fixing” activity arises out of
the disconnection with that which remains unmetabolized within us. For it is to
the degree we are out of embodied contact with our own rage, heartbreak, lack
of meaning, and the looming shadows of our unlived lives that we will remain
misattuned to what is arising for integration in the life of our sweet,
precious, suffering friend.
It is possible the kindest thing we can offer our friend is
to sit in the darkness with them, conscious of what their suffering is evoking
within us, and removing the burden that they change, transform, feel better, or
heal in order for us to stay near. As we turn to embrace our own unmet sadness,
grief, and despair, we remove the projection of our unlived lives from them.
And by doing so, we lift the weight that they take care of our unresolved
anxiety for us.
As we learn to trust and to rest in the wisdom-field of our
present, embodied experience, we see that love is a movement of the totality.
It is whole, never partial, and is raging and alive even in the darkness. In
the core of the fire, the sadness, the grief, and the despair is something very
real, making an attempt to break through the thick forest of partiality. But
what this is may never support our cultural and spiritual fantasies of a life
of invulnerability and endless happiness. The psyche is always attempting to
reach us and to remind us of what is possible.
May we stay close to our own suffering and to the suffering
of others, careful not to cut it too quickly, curious and available to the
wisdom as it unfolds in unexpected ways. May we open our hearts to the golden,
full-spectrum nature of love, as it shines out of the dark, and stay open to
the mystery and the wisdom of the one in front of us, daring to know them for
the very first time.
Photographer unknown
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