“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye
On the day this column is published I will be seeing my first clients in my 29th year of private practice. I was 29 years old when I saw my first client on October 1, 1987 in my Red Bluff office. She suffered with chronic schizophrenia, was disabled and had MediCal insurance, which back then paid $29.42 an hour. She was client number one. I used to keep track. Somewhere along the line I quit. But I could still count them if I wanted. I have every name written neatly on reams of yellow papers in a closed file list.
Every single human who has brought their concerns to me in the last 29 years is or will be listed. I am guessing the total lies somewhere between five and ten thousand spread out over 40 or 50 thousand hours of therapy. Lots of sitting, listening and talking. Lots of crying. I keep a box of Kleenex next to each chair. There are three. They get used. Tears and suffering go together.
Six names stand out. Six names that even now make me bust out crying as I type these words. Six names of shame. My failures. My shame. Not theirs.
I used to take pride that I was such a good therapist, that I never lost a client to suicide. That changed around Labor Day in the late 90s when I got a call from client #189. I first saw her in 1991 and over the years, had worked with her individually and with her family, an unruly but beautiful bunch of teens who were struggling with their share of fear and guilt from a shared tragedy years before. The oldest never recovered. He tried to move on. He quit seeing me, became an adult, married, had his own kid. And for reasons, I will never understand, took his life.
In all my years of clinical work, he was the only client I watched graduate from high school. I had high hopes for him. We all did. When his mother called, it was late but I got her address and drove right over and along with her minister and a few others, sat with her while she lay in her rumpled bed and wailed in pain. We prayed. And hugged and cried and sat together with our collective suffering.
A few days later, during the viewing at the funeral home I sat alone in the back of the room quietly crying while I watched the family comfort one another with extended hugs as if their love could patch up the giant hole in their lives. The father noticed me and came back and stood next to me, his hand softly resting on my shoulder and said, “I guess even therapists hurt” as if the thought had never occurred to him before. I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.
The hardest sessions are the ones with the family after. My personal pain is not part of that equation. You must remain dry-eyed and stare into the abyss of a family ripped apart by suicide and not look away. You must dig deep into all you know and find the courage and strength to sit with them and explain exactly how they are going to survive what feels like an unimaginably dark chasm stretching into infinite blackness. They desperately need hope so you give it to them.
In Falling into Grace, Adyashanti explains that suffering has two components involving the mind and heart. We feel the wrenching pain in our body while our mind gives us the words. Together they create the cup in which the bitter drink is poured. The story in our minds creates and maintains the pain. Can we feel our feelings without the story? Can we experience the emotion without framing it with meaning? Can we experience our pure emotions without judgment or blame? Can we have them without defining them? Can we have our feelings without looking or running away? Can we see how easily we get lost on the mind-train circling the mountain of our own misfortune? What unconscious conclusions are we clinging to that maintain our suffering?
Adyashanti writes, “If we allow these stories to live underground, in the unconscious mind, all the painful emotions will continue to regenerate.” We make up stories to explain our pain and then we believe them and make them real.
When we get what we don’t want or fail to get what we do want, we experience the pain of loss. It feels natural to “turtle in.” It feels right to pull back from pain like it’s a hot stove. Who wants to burn? The more we contract and avoid, we turn to words to mortar up the bricks that wall us off from our own emotional truth. We pay a price for our avoidance because “anytime we contract from direct experience and spin a story, we have gone unconscious.”
Crying is good. It is how our bodies try to “purify us by washing away painful and toxic emotions.” But while our bodies are naturally cleaning up our system, our minds interfere and maintain the trauma with stories and justifications.
When we question the stories, we can separate what is or was from the editorials in our mind. And we can grasp the stark truth that judgment and blame are our enemies, not self or other. We forgive, not for the other’s sake, but for the self. When we forgive self and other, we let the light flood in. Healing holds us like warm hands.
The more we cling to our stories, the more we resist what was or is or will be. The more we resist, the more we suffer. It turns out that “the people who deal with pain the best do not believe anything they think about their pain.” In other words, we may have experienced suffering “but when we add on top of that what we believe should or shouldn’t be, that mental position literally locks the painful emotions into our systems.”
When I was a kid, I remember being fascinated by my own suffering. Even when I was crying because my older siblings had been mean to me, I would sometimes sneak into the bathroom to look at myself crying. While I wailed away in complete self-absorbed sorrow, another part of me was marveling at the look of pain on my face. “Wow,” I thought. “Look at that face!” It may come as a surprise to some but there is always a part of us that has no difficulty even while another part is in pain.
“Even if it feels frightening, there is an underlying sense of well-being that is always with you and fully available, even if you don’t feel well.”
Our peace is bigger than our pain. Our love is bigger than our fear. Before we can make peace with the enemy without, we must make peace with the enemy within. There is a state of stillness that sustains us, even when we are not still. Whether we are awake to it or not, it is awake to us. It is a permanent, patient presence that provides us with all the peace we need.
We can identify with the solitary stone, carelessly tossed into the vast sea. Or we can see that we are the sea. When we discover we are “a deep well of awareness,” we can settle into the silence of our expansive, spiritual self.
“Stop for a moment, breathe, and begin to notice the you who has no difficulty, the inner presence and stillness, the field of awareness.”
Wandering lost in the reality marketplace, we fall into the dream our small minds seek to sell. But is it true? The stories we tell ourselves. Are they true?
“So much of life, from the egoic state of consciousness is easily interpreted as proof that we’re actually quite alone, and that there really isn’t a complete end to suffering, or a true relief from it. But by relinquishing our need and desire to control, explain, and believe the way that our minds talk to us about what was and is, we find a capacity to open to a new state of consciousness.”
We “can begin to see that there really is no justified reason why we should be at war with what is. There’s no way to win this war.” The only way we win is when “we see that it’s all imaginary.” It’s just not real.
We can’t stop suffering. We can’t end pain. We can, however, relate to pain and suffering in a new way. When we encounter life and all it brings with an open heart and mind, we realize “we have a capacity…we never knew was there.”
“We come to know…a great reservoir of well-being even in the midst of incredible grief and loss.” It is in you. It is in me. It is around us. All around us. Surrounding our pain is something bigger, something more. Like opening a skylight from an underground lair, we can connect with a reality as expansive as the sky and as eternal as the universe beyond it. Can we touch that now?
