Healing Suffering with Self-Acceptance and Presence

 

“I surrender myself to everything. I love, I feel pain, I struggle. The world seems to me wider than the mind, my heart a dark and almighty mystery.”

—Nikos Kazantzakis


The Light and Dark of Creative Inspiration


When we voyage into the darkness and meet it with all of the strength and determination of all of the awareness that we can muster - when we meet darkness with love, we are deeply changed. Meeting the darkness within is just as important and creative as meeting the light of creative inspiration.

 

In fact our deepest inspirations and connections to life often come only after meeting our darker forces inside. We can choose to make every attempt meet our deeper, darker suffering with a trusting presence. We can try to be still as we ache and in doing so, once the intensity of the darker feelings come to their own conclusion, we are profoundly deepened and we are made "larger" by being able to sustain our presence through our difficult feelings. After meeting our suffering with faith, we are always rewarded with a new energy and a fresh creative lease on life. The presence that it takes to meet a darker feeling with stillness becomes a part of us and allows us to meet life with more strength, compassion and responsibility.

 

We find out phenomenal things about ourselves when we explore our personally disowned and our more universal, unfathomable difficult feelings. Mostly we find inner strength and our true humanity. In our humanity, we find love for our families, our friends and our whole humankind. I know by looking at the darker corners of my own psyche, by holding space for my own suffering, fears and tremblings, I cannot rightfully judge anyone for anything. I have every possibility inside of my self.

 

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

Young Spirituality Tries to Be all "Positive"


Years ago when my creativity felt blocked, I became a "spiritual person" in the youngest sense of the word. I turned to spirituality in the interest of controlling my thoughts and moods. Early spirituality can often go this way. The books we may read early on in our spiritual journies encourages us to use positive affirmations, and to visualize exactly what we want to create our lives. As I meet more people in therapeutic settings I can see that it is common for people in the early stages of their self growth to believe that they are "responsible" for their every thought and feeling as if they should have, or do have utter control over every aspect of themselves. So often people say, "I am grateful for my life" as a kind of spiritual cover-up for the darker, more instinctual feelings that need to be voiced and honored.

 

What has struck me profoundly is the essential nature of being human and how it calls us to express and acknowledge both the dark and the light. It is a cultural myth and it is humanly impossible to feel good all of the time. We are dichotomous creatures of light and dark, and we all suffer.

 

We all have darker feelings that we must meet within with an uncommon depth and courage in order to evolve spiritually. My experience is that it is often through meeting my own darkness that I access my greatest creative inspiration because on the other side of buried pain is inspiration. We need to face all that lives within us - with great accountability and awe.

 

Richard Moss says it so beautifully in his new book, Inside-Out Healing:

"How can you tell if your ego has appropriated a dark feeling? You find yourself compulsively thinking. Your mind will spin with story after story about what is wrong with you, what strategy to pursue or why your situation is hopeless, why your life is ruined or meaningless, or how you can save yourself. It will find every way to attack you, judge you, blame others, or even attack them. It will make you guilty resentful, terrified, hopeless, impulsive, and aggressive...one after the other. It is frantically trying to create a known (albeit terribly amplified) misery in a desperate attempt to be in control of an unknown and ultimately unknowable feeling that doesn't even realize what it is reacting to.


But the ego can never control what comes from a deeper ground of consciousness....The more your ego spins stories in the face of an abysmal feeling the more miserable you become....Until you can understand what is happening to you and can instead turn your full awareness with focused, spacious attention directly toward the darker feeling, you might as well be in hell."


"After a siege of the Dark Night, when you go back to what can be called normal or ordinary consciousness, you find that your heart has broken open, fear has evaporated, love flows more spontaneously, and you have become more compassionate and forgiving. You have entered previously unknown levels of your being, and it has made you a little more humble and a bit wiser."  - Richard Moss


The Thoughts that Torture and the Feelings that Cleanse 

 

Over the years I have come to understand that some difficult feelings we bring onto ourselves by our own self-torturing thoughts. Usually however, the emotional pain body is active and it incites the thoughts that trouble us. Gradually we have had to disassemble our negative thought patterning and as we let go, gradually we succumb less and less to self-sabotage.

 

There is a suffering that arises from a more primordial place. Even though the dark intensity of it invites the familiar overlay of thoughts of self-sabotage, it begs just to felt all the way through to completion without thoughts - without words. These kinds of darker, difficult feelings deepen our humanity and when held, accepted and embraced until they are over, they engender a more powerful presence and compassion for others. They invite a deeper creative connection to life.

 

Joel Rothschild, one of the longest living survivors of HIV/Aids contemplates suffering in this profound way:

 

"We do all suffer in this life...and I began to wonder if suffering were part of some universal cleansing process. In time I began believe it was. If we are all a cell in the body of God, all connected in this universe, perhaps our suffering functions the way the liver functions in the body: perhaps suffering cleanses the greater being."