The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 6
Many of us suffer from what I call premature death, in that we have turned away from whole portions of our life. We have adapted to a pattern of ambivalence, neither in nor out of life, but living in a state of suspended animation. This stance generates a strategy of caution and avoidance. I have worked with hundreds of men and women who have artfully dodged the call to engage in living with passion and conviction. As Diane Ackerman wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just to the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”31
Several years ago, I was leading a group of men in Southern California in a workshop on love and death. On the second day of our time together, I asked, “What is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make?” This generated intense discussion and a good deal of grief, as men recognized that this longing in their soul was something that had been denied or ignored. They spoke about their desire to be more vulnerable, to take greater risks in love, to hold a commitment to their creativity, and more. This question called forth what was not being lived, the outcast, silenced parts of their soul. After that, I posed a second question: “What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow?” Once again, it became clear to them that they were holding on to strategies designed to keep them safe, living within a prescribed radius where no one could hurt them. We worked with these two questions for the remainder of the day and shared a ritual that night to honor the sacrifice that was being asked of us. Some men released their inability to speak up when they had something important to say, others let go of their addiction to approval and praise, while others released their need to be right.
When we gathered together again on Sunday morning, I had a third question for them. I said, “Imagine that it is some time in the future and you are near the hour of your death. You know this. You look back on your life and see that you have honored your vow and have been able to stay true to the sacrifice you made. For what would your soul like to be remembered? Write your obituary.” What emerged from this time in the circle was deeply moving. Here we felt the presence of what mattered most to these men: to love big, to contribute to their communities, to nurture their children, and to feed their own souls with beauty and aliveness. All of this, however, could not become possible until they stepped fully into their lives, into the river of their full existence, welcoming all those pieces of soul that had been banished through self-betrayal or the fear of rejection from others.
It is important to look into the shadows of our lives and to see who lives there, tattered, withered, hungry, and alone. Bringing these parts of soul back to the table is a central element of our work. Ending their exile means releasing the contempt we hold for these parts of who we are. It means welcoming the full range of our being and restoring our wholeness. Until then, we will continue to carry a feeling of worthlessness and brokenness.
Seen from an indigenous perspective, the grief we experience at this gate is a form of soul loss, a condition that occurs when the desire for life—the feeling of being alive—becomes so blunted that death becomes appealing and depression a way of life. Every day in my practice I encounter individuals struggling with isolation, despair, and meaninglessness. To traditional people, soul loss was, without doubt, the most dangerous condition a human being could face. It compromises our vital energy, decreases joy and passion, diminishes our aliveness and our capacity for wonder and awe, saps our voice and courage, and ultimately, erodes our desire to live. We become disenchanted and despondent.
The idea of soul loss is ancient. This old intuition says that the soul can fragment, be stolen, break, or flee. It happens for a variety of reasons: physical or emotional trauma, a prolonged sickness, extensive neglect and shaming, and (a common modern reason) the chronic assault of a mind-numbing existence that stupefies, dulls and renders our lives empty.
For many of us, the diminishment in our soul life began in childhood. We experienced what is now referred to as developmental trauma, what I call slow trauma. This trauma occurs from an experience of absence rather than from something dramatic that happened to us. There may not have been explosive events in the home, no overt acts of violence, but there were more subtle omissions of attention and care. In those moments when we needed to be soothed or held, the touch often didn’t come, or what was offered was a partial and distracted attention. What we were granted was too thin and didn’t provide us with enough substance to calm the effect of the experience we were having. I see the remnants of this trauma daily in my practice. It shows itself in the inability to regulate internal states of distress as they arise and in feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness.
Gudrun Zomerland has written about trauma as “the shaking of a soul.” “The German word for trauma [is] ‘Seelenerschütterung.’ The first part, ‘Seele’ means soul. . . . ‘Erschütterung’ is something that shakes us out of the ordinary flow and out of our usual sense of time into an extraordinary state.”32 Trauma, then, is a soul-shaking experience that ruptures the continuity of our lives and tosses us into an alternate existence. When this soul shaking occurs frequently and early in life, as a result of prolonged neglect, what was originally an extraordinary state gradually becomes ordinary. It is the world as we know it—unsafe, unreliable, and frightening. This is a profound loss and a lingering sorrow that is difficult to hold. The failure of the world to offer us comfort in the face of trauma causes us to retreat from the world. We live on our heels, cautiously assessing whether it is safe to step in; we rarely feel it is. One man I worked with slowly revealed how he expected less than zero from life. He deserved nothing. He had a hard time asking for salt at a restaurant. His persistent image in therapy was of a small boy hiding behind a wall. It was not safe for him to venture into the world. He was terrified of being seen. I know, because I lived this way for forty years, wary and determined to prevent further pain by remaining on the margins of life, untouchable and seemingly safe.
Here we find the agonizing convergence of trauma and shame. The failure of others to adequately attend the painful emotional experiences we have as children is translated as a reflection on our being inherently bad and outside the embrace of love. “Surely if I mattered, if I were good enough, this need, this pain would have received attention and holding by someone.” Recall my son’s immediate conclusion that I didn’t want to be his father any longer. These ruptures in the holding space between children and caregivers are nearly impossible to hold neutrally.
In his brilliant book The Trauma of Everyday Life, psychiatrist and Buddhist scholar Mark Epstein addresses the pervasive nature of trauma. He says that trauma is inherent in being human, but “when painful emotions and unpleasant feelings are not picked up and handled by the parents, the infant, or child, is left with overwhelming feelings he or she is not equipped to deal with, feelings that often get turned into self-hate.”33 Here trauma remains a source of ongoing suffering, eating away at our worth and undermining our ability to step fully into our lives. It lingers in our soul as a primitive agony, an idea that Epstein draws from the work of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Primitive agony remains in our psyches as a gravitational field, pulling us downward toward anxiety and dread.
Epstein shows us the way out of this maze, drawing on the teachings of Winnicott and the Buddha, both of whom stress the need of creating an internal holding environment that resembles that of a caring and attentive mother. Mindfulness becomes the soft space within which the agony of our losses can be held. It is an approach of reverence, of compassion, granting us a spaciousness that helps to untangle the knot in our souls. This is the core of my work in my practice.
This approach reminds us of the importance of remaining in our adult selves when working with grief states. The adult is the only one who can offer this holding space for our sorrows, pains, and suffering. It is too easy for the child self to get pulled into his or her primitive agony and dissociated parts or complexes, when sorrow knocks on the door. Turning toward the suffering and into the marrow of our grief with the attention and attunement of a caring adult helps to dilute and transmute the trauma and shame into the kind of sensitivity that can inform our compassion for others.
There are times, however, when the caring presence comes from outside of ourselves. The community can be the holding space for our most painful stories. I remember one young woman in her early twenties who attended a grief ritual in Washington. Over the course of the three days that we worked to turn over our grief and compost those pieces into fertile soil, she continuously cried quietly to herself. I worked with her individually for some time and heard her lamentations about her worthlessness through gasps and tears. When it was time for the ritual, she rushed to the shrine, and I could hear her crying out over the drums, “I am worthless, I’m not good enough.” And she wept and wept, all within the container of the community, in the presence of witnesses, alongside others deep in the process of releasing their grief. When it was over, she shone like a star; she had finally realized how wrong the stories about her worthlessness were and how precious were these pieces of her essential self.
A BRIEF NOTE ON BLAME
Having worked with people for more than thirty years in my practice, it is clear to me that finding a target to blame is effortless. Nothing is asked of us when we simply assign fault to someone else for the suffering we are experiencing. Psychology has colluded in the blame game, pointing an accusing finger at our parents. While many of us suffered mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents. They needed a village around them—and so did we. Of course we were disappointed with our parents. We expected forty pairs of eyes greeting us in the morning, and all we got was one or two pairs looking back at us. We needed the full range of masculine and feminine expressions to surround us and grant us a knowledge of how these potencies move in the world. We needed to have many hands holding us and offering us the attention that one beleaguered human being could not possibly offer consistently. It is to our deep grief that the village did not appear.
Archetypal psychologist James Hillman offers an image that speaks to the work of bringing these rejected aspects of soul back from the wasteland.
The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in and day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly and disguised.34
It is in the inferior parts of our life that we will find redemption. This is, however, hard for us to accept in a culture driven by the demand for perfection. Still, it is in the outcasts, those parts of us that we have sent to the edges of awareness, that we will recover our true humanity. It is within our “secret inside flesh” that we will touch our weakness, inadequacy, failure, dependency, and the host of experiences that undermine our culture’s heroic ideal. This is where we find our healing. The “least of our brothers and sisters” are the ones that require us to reveal our wounds. In so doing, we are freed from the obsession with measuring up and getting it right. And it is through grieving for these despised pieces of life that we restore our humanity. It is here that we begin to recover the unlived life.
David Whyte offers a beautiful poem on the ways we are invited to welcome back the outcast parts of our being. This stanza from “Coleman’s Bed” is filled with self-compassion.
Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.35
His imagery is generous, inviting us to approach the fragments of our life with curiosity and humility. He then offers a surprising revelation: every part of us longs to reveal its voice to the world. We must welcome back all we have sent away and, in so doing, become a new annunciation. Imagine seeing ourselves this way. What a wild and freeing image, like Gabriel and Mary in the secret conversation about what is most holy. Invite them in, feed them, and be hospitable.
Regrets are another part of the second gate, those choices we made that hindered or harmed others or ourselves: the unlived life of abandoned dreams, friendships that withered and died, or the decision to withdraw our hearts from the world and neither receive nor offer love. These things we regret are sources of deep and abiding loss. To live with regret is a heavy sadness. It is like walking through a graveyard of loss. Regrets require the soft hands of self-compassion. It is easy for us to judge and shame ourselves relentlessly for past mistakes. We chew these bones over and over in the vain hope that some new perspective might arise, freeing us from the sorrow attached to our actions. That won’t help. Instead, what is asked of us in the quiet terrain of our inner conversation is to hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who we were at the time we made those choices. What part of us might have come to the foreground of our life in that particular moment? Kindness and mercy are soothing medicines in the room of regret. Forgiveness cannot be willed. We can, however, create the conditions within which the grace of forgiveness can arise. When our regrets are polished by self-compassion, they soften and release the life trapped inside.
Sometimes the grief we carry for these lost pieces of soul comes out in the language of outrage. Many of us were taught to be nice boys and girls, to not speak up when we are injured or shamed. Those of us carrying this oppressive weight need the support of the community to encourage us to find our voice, to speak out against the internalized silencing. During our grief rituals, we use writing practices that help to free the voice that yearns to tell the truth. One of our practices includes what we call protest shuttles, phrases that grant us permission to enter the forbidden territories of resistance and outrage. Some participants find the phrase “It is not all right with me . . .” to be liberating; others, “I will not shut up . . .” or “I will not live small.” Sometimes the simple “Enough!” does the work. Each of these offerings encourages the long-held grief around these rejected parts to rise and put an end to their exile. It is important to remember that grief does not appear solely through tears; it is also expressed through our anger and outrage. Through acknowledging our grief, we begin the process of being made whole again.
We held a grief ritual shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Many stories of violence and violation were being evoked by the tragedy. As we listened to the intensity of the stories, we realized we needed to offer a secondary shrine for this event. The normal shrine at these rituals is a water shrine. Water is the element of healing and renewal in many traditions. On this occasion, however, the element of fire was also being called in. Fire is the energy of passion and ignition, and it is often associated with the ancestors. People needed an energy field large enough to fully receive their protests. The site where we were holding this ritual had an immense old fireplace in it. At one end of the room, we created our water shrine, and at the other, surrounding the fireplace, we built the second shrine. Once the ritual began, people spent time weeping at the water shrine and shouting their outrage to the fire. Many of them migrated back and forth, from shrine to shrine. At times, rage would trigger tears, and at others, tears would evoke rage.
Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts. When we can truly weep for ourselves and those places of shame, we have invited the first soothing waters of healing to wash through our souls. Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth. I am worth crying over; my losses matter. I can still feel the grace that came when I truly allowed myself to grieve all of my own losses connected to a life filled with shame. Pesha Gertler speaks beautifully of the compassion of a heart opened by grief.
THE HEALING TIME
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin and bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them,
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.36
The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World
The third gate of grief opens when we register the losses of the world around us. Whether or not we consciously recognize it, the daily diminishment of species, habitats, and cultures is noted in our psyches. Much of the grief we carry is not personal, but shared, communal. It is difficult to walk down the street and not feel the collective sorrows of homelessness or the economic insanity revealed in commercialism and consumerism. It takes everything we have to deny the sorrows of the world. At nearly every grief ritual people share their profound sadness for the earth. One woman shared her gratitude for finally having a place to acknowledge in community this grief. They feel what psychologist Chellis Glendinning calls Earthgrief. She writes, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.”37
