伤心跟快乐一样都是礼物。
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Making Friends With Heartbreak
What helps more than anything, says Susan Piver, is to be gentle toward yourself.
A few months after my longtime boyfriend and I had broken up, I was charged with conducting a business meeting at a restaurant over lunch. I was pretty sure I was on the road to recovery from the breakup and had been genuinely looking forward to this opportunity to discuss an exciting new project with the other attendees, colleagues I respected and admired. I made a reservation at a favorite restaurant, which we had been to many times before and was always delicious. Yes, I thought, I’m going to be okay. I have a good job. I work with wonderful folks. Our meeting is going to be fun. I am moving on, damn it.
So I drove to the meeting with a lovely feeling of things returning to normal. The seven of us, as I had requested, were seated at the only round table in the restaurant large enough to accommodate a group of that size. We were settling ourselves around the table, waving hello, pulling out papers, and turning off pagers, when everything completely fell apart for me. The waiter had brought us a basket of jalapeno cheddar-cheese cornbread.
Oh no. He loved jalapeno cheddar cheese cornbread. A mere glimpse of those crumbly, orange-y squares flecked with green blotted out all feelings of normality and, once again, my world turned upside-down. Tears stung the back of my eyeballs and I gruffly pushed back my chair to try to make it to the ladies room, but not quite in time—the tears had already begun to fall. There’s no hope, I thought. Just when I thought I was getting my life back, a piece of bread caused it disintegrate once again.
I sat down in one of the stalls and tried to cry without making any noise, which, as anyone who has attempted this knows, only leads to a bulbous nose and a Mt. Rushmore-sized headache. Somehow I soldiered on and made it through the meeting, and when I got home at the end of the day I was too tired to cry anymore, so I just lay on the couch. For about six hours. When I finally dragged myself to bed, I thought, I’ll never get over this. Why? Why do the waves of grief just keep coming? What is happening here and will it ever end?
At this point, I realized that there was very little, maybe nothing I could do to predict, modulate, and manage these unpredictable waves of grief. Trying to fight them would be like trying not to have nightmares by staying awake all night just in case one might arise. It was just too exhausting. I had to accept that these episodes were simply a part of my life for the time being and I was going to have to learn to deal with them instead. But how?
Soon after this, I was attending a talk by a Tibetan Buddhist monk at a local meditation center. He was young, not yet thirty, but already highly respected as a scholar and spiritual adept. After talking about overcoming obstacles such as depression and anxiety, he was asked about how we can manage our emotions in a world of ever-increasing danger and uncertainty, how to cope with feelings of paralyzing dread about our safety and the future of the planet. The monk said, “When you are filled with fear, anxiety, or other difficult emotions, the first thing you should always do is make friends with them.” Rather than fighting off unpleasant feelings, it is always best to soften, open, and invite them. Fighting wastes valuable time. Allowing them acknowledges the reality of that particular moment and makes it easier to address your circumstances intelligently. For example, if you’re walking down a dark street trying to pretend you’re not afraid, you might miss the valuable signals fear offers you when you tune in and open to it.
And so it is with a broken heart, or any other problem, really. You may have been taught to attack a problem when you encounter it, either by trying to fix it right away or else eradicating it. I’m not suggesting that this is never a good idea, but there is another option which is not often thought of, which is to extend the hand of friendship to your situation. This is an extraordinary thing to do. Making friends with your broken heart, instead of trying to mend it or banish it, begins by simply making room for it to exist. You could even invite it to sit down with you, since you’ve probably been hating it or trying to ignore it. When grief and disappointment threaten to overwhelm you, instead of bemoaning them, turning away, or shrinking in fear of them, you could feel them. Instead of trying to shout them down, either by talking yourself out of what you’re feeling (It’s all his fault, anyway), making up a story about what it all means (I always attract the wrong guys), or collapsing on the couch with a bottle of gin (to deaden the pain), invite in your feelings and get to know them.
For example, when you feel grief, where does it manifest in your body? Does it weigh down your chest, close your throat, or make your shoulders ache? How about disappointment or anger or any of the other feelings that have become your companions? If your emotion had a color, what would it be? If your emotion could speak to you (instead of the other way around), what would it say? When you suddenly feel a pang of emotion, whether positive or negative, can you go back and pinpoint the exact moment it arose? These are useful questions. Just like getting to know a new friend, the first step is simply to find out about her.
This process is really, really hard, so you need to appreciate yourself and what you are going through. So many problems result from the inability to simply be kind to yourself. Please develop some sympathy for yourself, which is different from self-pity or self-indulgence. Imagine if you knew that your best friend or your child or your mom was going through what you are experiencing—wouldn’t your heart ache for her? Wouldn’t you feel that if only there was something you could do to help, you would do it? Wouldn’t you think about her night and day with kindness, hoping for her to find peace?
Ask yourself honestly: have you felt these things about yourself?
If you have, that is wonderful; you are a great friend. If you haven’t, you could try to offer kindness to yourself. You know that the ultimate kindness, the best thing you can do for a friend is simply to be there with her and for her when she’s falling apart. Offering advice is not helpful unless you’ve been asked directly to give it. You know that trying to talk her out of what she’s feeling or convince her that it’s not a big deal is unkind. Telling her to buck up already is certainly not helpful. What helps more than anything? Simple, unquestioning, ultra-patient companionship. Be by her side. Take her to a movie to get her mind off the situation. Check in with her throughout the day just so she’ll know someone is thinking of her. Listen to her patiently, no matter how many times you’ve heard the story; feel sad with her when she cries and relieved when her spirits begin to rise.
What helps more than anything is to be gentle toward yourself. Gentleness doesn’t mean being all “poor baby” or coddling yourself in any way. Real gentleness has way more precision and intelligence than that. Gentleness means simply that you acknowledge and embrace your own experience from moment to moment, without judgment. Without trying to fix it. Without feeling ashamed of it or, if you do feel ashamed of it, you do not feel ashamed of your shame! In this way, gentleness is actually an advanced form of bravery. You aren’t afraid to take on your own suffering, even though you don’t know how or when it will end; still, you agree to feel it. Somehow, this acceptance begins to calm things down. In this way, on its own timetable, gentleness begins to pacify even the most raging emotions. Gentleness is the spiritual, emotional warrior’s most powerful weapon.
The best way to cultivate gentleness toward yourself, thought by thought and moment by moment, is through the sitting practice of meditation. In fact, meditation, which is sitting with your self, your thoughts, emotions, and yearnings and simply allowing them to be as they are, is the practice of gentleness itself. There is no better teacher than this.
Most likely, there will be only a few times in your life when you’ll reach the limit of what you can bear. It may be from falling ill, the death of a parent, or even the loss of a most precious possession, such as your home, and of course it can also be because of a broken heart. To face these extraordinary times, you need to take extraordinary measures. Most of the tactics touted as “extraordinary measures,” however, are really ways of escaping the reality of what we must face, our emotions. Certainly drinking, drugging, random sex, and sleeping all the time are ways to avoid emotional pain, but even healthier means, such as positive thought, physical exercise, therapy, or simply forcing yourself to move on, are also methods of stepping away from what ails you, rather than toward it. And stepping toward it and going into it do not just mean lying around crying all the time. It means meeting your emotions and relating to them, not as enemies to be conquered, but as wounded friends from the front, needing your loving attention. As Zen teacher and poet John Tarrant says, “Attention is the most basic form of love. Through it we bless and are blessed.”
- posted on 12/11/2009
It Would Be a Pity to Waste A Good Crisis
Zen Student: “When times of great difficulty visit us, how should we greet them?”
Teacher: “Welcome.”
The new world looks surprisingly like the old one, except that it’s different. A year ago housing prices fell off a cliff and mortgages went underwater. Today, the hardware store is still quiet and the busy suburban hairdresser is empty on a Friday. Phobia about spending makes other people phobic too—a great university declares a hiring freeze, and a clinic is threatened with shutting down because it can’t afford to replace a receptionist who earns $9.00 an hour. The construction sites have filled with water and the bulldozers are silent.
We are now in the new world. In the new world, winter is still cold, summer is still warm, bread, cheese, pickled onion, and a glass of ale is still a ploughman’s lunch, the sky still has windows of translucent distance at sunset after rain, and a wet dog still smells like a wet dog. Perhaps it’s fine in the new world. Perhaps we don’t have to waste this crisis in wailing and gnashing our teeth. - posted on 12/11/2009
Forced to Sit
By Scott Darnell
A prisoner's story of finding compassion on the inside.
After thirteen days inside a cell, all I wanted to do when I got outside was look up at the blue sky. It would have been nice to enjoy a passing cloud, a bird in flight, or the wind rustling through the trees on a distant hill. But I was one of more than a hundred inmates—for us, looking up was forbidden.
We had our hands cuffed behind our backs, and for every pair of us there was a tactical team member dressed in riot gear, carrying a heavy stick. “Keep your eyes on the ground,” these tact members barked as we filed out of the cell house. Then, outside, we were escorted through a gauntlet of even more tact members who were stomping a black-booted march all the way to the chapel at the far end of the institution.
Just ahead of me I could hear the labored breathing of my fifty-eight-year-old celly as he half shuffled, half limped along, trying to keep up with the line. I could only imagine the pain he was in, forced as he was to keep his eyes glued to the ground despite a broken neck for which the institution had done nothing in the past five years except give him ibuprofen and a neck brace. Would he actually make the walk to chapel? And what if he didn’t? Would he be dragged off to the side of the line or left where he lay for the rest of us to step over? There was no telling.
Once we were inside the chapel, the tact team officers led us single file into the main auditorium and into our waiting seats. Then they bellowed at us to sit back—a particularly sadistic thing to order, because leaning against the backrest meant the steel cuffs binding our wrists dug mercilessly into our flesh. Since the cuffs had not been double-locked, I quickly realized that as powerless as I was to loosen them, it was regrettably easy to tighten them if I sat back too fast. “Look at your feet,” the officers barked again.
For the next thirty-five or forty minutes we sat there uncomfortably, with the chapel fans pointed away from us and toward the clusters of officers. Within minutes my shirt was soaked through with sweat. The poor guy next to me was so badly off that he was trying to wipe his eyes with a raised knee—an exercise in acrobatics that did not go unnoticed by the officers who belted out an order for him to “sit the fuck back!”
Several thoughts rolled through my head. First was the fact that none of us being put through this ordeal had actually done anything to warrant it. The Department of Corrections was simply grandstanding in response to an incident for which those responsible had long since been taken to segregation or transferred out of the institution.
The second thing I thought—which I often think at times like this—was that, whether I directly deserved it or not, the very fact that I’d committed a crime that landed me behind bars meant I’d have to go through things like this from time to time. Like it or not, this was part of the life I had earned for myself. Welcome to karma.
And lastly, I thought about how I had an obligation to live what I had earned as fully as I could. At the moment, it happened to be rather difficult. So I decided to sit with the difficulty, opening myself as fully as possible to my situation, whether that was the numbness growing in my fingers due to the cuffs, or the almost jovial banter of the officers as they picked several inmates out of the crowd for a strip search, or the groans, coughs, and covert attempts at shifting positions that everyone was making around me.
The irony of being forced to sit motionless in the chapel with my eyes cast down to a spot on the floor was not lost on me. Without the cuffs and with a bit of shifting, I could have been sitting in lotus position. I quickly realized, in fact, that my years of meditation practice were making this exercise in “sitting” far more tolerable for me than it otherwise would have been.
I found myself empathizing with the plight of those around me who hadn’t had the benefit of practice, and I was once again reminded that the pain and suffering of others is my pain and suffering as well. None of us is separate from any other, which means we can’t separate ourselves from each others’ trials and afflictions either.
The question was, what could I possibly do in my present state to ease the suffering I was privy to? If I’d had my way, everybody’s cuffs would have been taken off. People could have moved freely in their seats and talked quietly amongst themselves. Unfortunately, I could do nothing physically to alleviate the discomfort of those around me. My cuffs were as tight as everyone else’s.
But what I could do was face this moment with them, exercising clarity, awareness, and compassion. In this way I hoped that at least their pain would not go completely unnoticed or be dismissed out of hand. After all, like everyone else, the men sweating their way through yet another institutional shakedown deserved to have their plight recognized.
All too often, one’s humanity gets forgotten on the inside. People become “inmates” and nothing more. When that happens, it gets much easier to treat someone badly. An officer doesn’t have to think twice about making someone walk with a broken neck, turning the fans away on a hot summer day, or cursing and shouting orders at people already outnumbered and subdued by cuffs. Sadly, whether it’s an inmate or an officer, when we forget another’s humanity we end up giving up our own as well. Victimizing becomes ever easier.
By sitting with difficulty, however, we get an honest and unbiased look at the situation we’re facing and, by working with the compassion engendered by our practice, we can acknowledge and perhaps do away with some of the suffering of those around us. Perhaps as I experience the suffering of others through my practice, others may on some level experience the merit of that practice. Perhaps my awareness of others may begin to heal at least some of the suffering I have witnessed.
When we got back to our cell after another long march, my celly and I spent a good hour straightening out our property boxes and putting away the stuff that had been messed up during the shakedown. He was tired and in pain from his exertion, and while he described the pain and the frustration of going so long without treatment, I sat and simply listened.
It was all I could do for him at the moment. The act of listening, of allowing myself to really hear what he had to say, became another way to acknowledge his situation as a human being. While it wasn’t the surgery he needed, it was at least a chance to speak his mind and to know that someone cared enough to be present for him. If I accomplished nothing more that day, chapel was worth every moment. Sitting with difficulty always is.
- RE: Making Friends with Painposted on 03/03/2011
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- RE: Making Friends with Painposted on 09/22/2016
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- RE: Making Friends with Painposted on 09/22/2016
Reply #4 mayacafe“When you are filled with fear, anxiety, or other difficult emotions,
the first thing you should always do is make friends with them.” - 我一直在用这个办法。非常有效。首篇文章是你写的吗?
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