[video transcript]
I remember some years ago reading something where the Dalai Lama spoke about the purpose of life as being happiness. At the time I was very serious and this really shook me, because I felt I was failing at happiness. (This was during a time in my life when I had a lot of underlying sadness as a fairly recurrent mood experience).
I’m bringing that in now because I think there’s a certain shame associated with states of lowness and sadness, and a feeling of failure. And that can actually prohibit us from doing the mourning or grieving or regretting that we may need to do.
I’ve brought in this theme early in the course because most of us who struggle to feel the future hopefully are in some way or other preoccupied by what has already happened. For some of us, that may be that we think about the past, but for others its more abstract. There may be a sense of congestion or frozenness or anxiety because of cumulative difficulty, disappointment, grief or loss.
I want to acknowledge the truth of that for many of us and to highlight the importance of making space for tending it. And hopefully tending it with less shame and more warmth and the understanding that if we are sensitive creatures these fluctuations and visitations of big and little griefs and regrets, swathes of mood are part of our experience of being human.
There’s a lovely quote from James Hillman where he says ‘the real revolution begins in the person who can be true to his or her depression. That’s a master to learn from, as old people sometimes can be.’ I’m not quoting that to advocate that we all go hyper-bleak or to suggest that clinical depression is a gift of any kind. I am including it more to draw our attention to the skill of being more available and inclusive to the moods we’re in and the losses that trouble us.
For most of us it can be really helpful to calibrate between giving some attention to pain, loss or difficulty and also some attention to what is fresh, emergent and hopeful. As we get older, if we put some energy into that calibration, we learn how our particular system moves through life; what do we need? For me, I know that the more fully I acknowledge my grief and give it some attention and space, there’s a happy toddler side of me that gets revived and comes to play later on. So though out of habit I might resist feeling bad in reality that resistance doesn’t serve me.
This is a reminder to all of us not to expect sadness or grief to go away, not imagine that we’re on a linear track toward an upbeat feeling state. Thomas Hubl speaks of how ‘the digested past is presence’. I find that quite inspiring, because it really catches the value of digesting what has happened to us, because ultimately that integration actually enriches and deepens our presence. Leonard Cohen speaks beautifully to this. (I’m going to include a link here to a piece to I wrote about his song Heart with No Companion, because it’s about the transformation of the heart in moving through difficulty and loss with a certain generosity and fullness. Cohen sings about this forming ‘a love so vast and shattered, it will reach you everywhere...’).
