When speaking with a friend who is feeling down, confused,
hopeless, or lost, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong
which must urgently be corrected. We feel as if we must do something, anything,
to remove them from their experience and replace it with another. To scramble
to put them back together, to quickly remind them of all the gifts in their
life, how everything will be okay, and to reassure them that things will be
better soon.
All the while remaining mistattuned to the surging
creativity and integration which may be unfolding in front of our very own
eyes.
Of course it is natural to want to help a friend who is in
pain. But underneath this genuine wish often lurks our own disavowal of the
darkness within, and the impending confrontation with our own unlived lives. If
we attune to this underlying groundlessness – with curiosity, with holding, and
with a fiery, uncompromising kindness – we may discover a previously abandoned
feeling, emotion, symbol, or vision which is longing to make its way into
conscious awareness. Stay close. This is no ordinary moment. You are at the
threshold.
While it may appear otherwise, this very disturbing
material is not a mistake, but is sacred. It is not pathology, but path. It is
a long lost friend that we very intelligently split off from at some earlier
point in our lives, to ensure our own psychic survival. But the orphaned pieces
of psyche and soma are gathering around you, longing for reunion and to resume
their place back in the inner family.
Slow down, come back into the center, and remove the burden
from your friend to change. Free them from the requirement to take care of your
unmetabolized emotional world for you. Recommit to staying embodied to your
surging vulnerability, in whatever form it happens to appear. You are in the
intelligent, creative, rich terrain of the jewels which are buried in the dark.
Stay close.
It is possible the kindest thing you can offer your friend
is to sit in the unresolvable complexity and the hopelessness with them, doing
whatever you can so that they know you will not abandon them if they do not
conform to our cultural fantasy that they be happy, grateful, and full of hope
all the time. What they are is vast and contains multitudes.
Trust in the unfolding of their embodied experience and
dare to no longer pathologize the appearance of the dark, for within it is a
light burning with a billion suns. With the entirety of your presence, make it
clear to them that they need not ‘get over it,’ ‘transform,’ ‘heal,’ ‘raise
their vibration,’ be happy, or ‘awaken’ in order for you to love them as they
are. Stay close.
Love is the totality. It is whole. It is raging and alive
in the darkness, shining brightly in ways the mind and the conventional world
may never understand. Within the confusion, the sadness, the despair, and the
aloneness there is often something very real attempting to break through the
dream of partiality, attempting to clarify what is most important and something
you may have forgotten. There is a richness here – something is happening – but
what that is may never support the consumeristic spell of consistent feelings
of happiness, certainty, and a life without vulnerability.
Here, in the very core of your friend’s experience – which
is utterly inseparable from your own – everything is alive, everything is path,
and everything is holy. The divine is not only the joy and sweetness, but comes
at times as Kali to reorder your world. Let us step out of the trance and into
the fire with our precious friend, hold hands with him or her and keep them
near. We can then turn toward Kali together, create a sanctuary for her
wrathful wisdom-essence to unfold in our hearts, and finally see what she has
to say.
The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now
New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April
