Grieving

"I've always worn my sadness like a heavy coat. This is the first time it's started to enter into me, pass through me, and change me into something from within."

This was my closing comment on a recent online discussion thread regarding grief and loss.  I think there is a threshold for every person, where the pain in our lives outdoes the amount of mindfulness we have thus far cultivated.  The pain-to-mindfulness-ratio is greater than 1.  Sometimes much greater.  Perhaps some people have trained to the point where they can handle death and loss, injustice, heartache, fear, etc.  But at a certain point it seems like everyone breaks.  Isn't this the idea behind torture?  That there is a point beyond the skillfulness we all have to cope with the pain and difficulty life brings our way.

For the past several months, and far more acutely these past two weeks, I have lived beyond my personal threshold.  I will spare you the details.  Or, more accurately, I will spare myself the process of sharing the details with an undisclosed internet audience.  I do not know if the disparity between my perceived levels of mindfulness and the pain I am experiencing says more about my level of pain or my level of mindfulness.  Probably the most accurate assessment is that the directional arrow points both ways.  There is an immense amount of pain to understand and transform, and the mindfulness I have cultivated thus far in my life also has much room to grow.  I make neither statement from shame or grandiosity.  This is simply is how it is.

Deep grief can be one of the most painful things to bear.  I think there's a reason we speak of having a broken heart.  Not a tired heart, not a wounded heart, but broken.  If we knew how to handle it, it wouldn't be broken - it might be worn down or slowed, it might be aching, but broken means it no longer works in the way it is intended to work.  Something about the heart's ability to love, open, hold space for joy, triumph, loss, hope, etc. has been undeniably damaged.  The heart simply will not work the way we want it to.

Then what?  

Today I am faced with the undeniable realization that I simply do not know how to grieve.  

I know how (as I said above) to wear it like a wet blanket or heavy coat - to be weighed down by the burden, aware of its presence, heavy under its auspices.  But to let grief pass through me - to brave the storm that threatens to overwhelm and drown me - to enter the pain that holds no promise of relief, there is no skill set I have yet cultivated sufficient strength or courage to brave.  Wednesday morning was the first time I cried in months, though every day I've wished I could - every day has been a day when tears are called for.  But the numb ache - the pressing up against the wall of grief and peering in at it - so far it's the only thing I've known with any degree of regularity.  That and distraction, beautiful sweet blessed distraction.  CS Lewis starts his A Grief Observed by saying, "No one ever told me grief feels so much like fear.  I am not afraid, but the sensation is the same.... I keep on swallowing."  Such a mundane thing to notice, but that's how it is, I guess.

I am reminded of a scene in the gospels where a group of men peel back the roof to the home where Jesus is staying and lower a paralytic into the house on a mat.  The man himself lacked the capacity to get up and come to Jesus, but his friends are there to do the work on his behalf.  Jesus cites their faith as the reason for the man's healing, and the man walks.  Sometimes I think - in the darkest times - mindfulness is like that.  Sometimes you just lie on your back paralyzed and hope the people around you know how and where to carry you.  These past few months people have asked, "do you need anything?"  I always think, "Yes, I need everything - I need so much - but I don't know what - and if I did, I wouldn't know how to ask for it."  With time, some some clarity might come.  "Yes, I need a place to go - can I come over to your home if I need to just sit - if I need somewhere other than here to read, or to stare at a wall?"  Mindfulness enters.  But not a peaceful, calm mindfulness.  A different kind of radical mindfulness.  I wonder what it would be to speak to torture victims of mindfulness.  "Focus on the physical sensations of the breath" as electricity rockets through their body to the point that the very fibers of their being feel as if they are being ripped to shreds.  Again, there seem to be levels of pain that eclipse the power of what we normally think of mindfulness.  Perhaps the mindfulness we have cultivated in our practice helps quicken the recovery time, I don't know.  Perhaps the practice lets us move through the grief more quickly.  But oh how difficult it is to dive INTO pain and not run away from it.  Sometimes it's just as well to give yourself the grace to run away for a little while.  I've been a spiritual perfectionist for so long it sometimes takes all the grace I can give myself to sit in front of the tv for three hours and enjoy some laughter and some relief.

And today, without community, without the people in my world who help me grieve - who lift the roofs off of houses and lower me into the presence of the sacred, I don't know where I would be.  More lost.  More angry.  More overwhelmed.  A week ago Monday I needed the presence of two people I knew and about 7 strangers in order to sit for 20 minutes in Centering Prayer.  Without them I could not have done it.  As much as I wanted to have it in myself without help, my sangha gave me the space and the grace to be with myself for more uninterrupted time than I had spent in weeks.  And I survived.  Maybe that is what mindfulness is all about (if mindfulness is all about anything at all) - learning how to bear the stark reality of being nakedly with ourselves.  And for the past few weeks I've had to give myself a world of grace as I have "failed" time and time again in knowing how to be with myself.  My skin is the last place I want to inhabit.  My grief is the last thing I want to feel.  The torrent that threatens to overwhelm.  I never knew mindfulness was so bound up with faith.  Not faith in a deity, per se, but faith that the rip tide will not suck you under completely - faith that you can surface from a pain that feels like it won't let up - not soon, perhaps not ever.  Maybe the goal isn't to fill the emptiness, but to make such radical peace with it that it is no longer an enemy, but a friend.  In Hannah Hurnard's Christian allegory Hinds Feet on High Places, the main character Much Afraid journeys up the mountain with her two companions, Sorrow and Suffering.  They do not seem like good or desirable companions, but as she climbs and learns to trust, she begins to realize that they are trustworthy helpers, who will indeed see her safely to the top if she lets them.  

In my own direction session last week (I see a spiritual director anywhere from 1 to 4 times per month), I came to relate to Heartache as if it were a personified presence in my life.  And I realized that this Heartache is here to help me - to lead me somewhere I don't know - and as much as s/he feels like a radical enemy, I can in fact embrace her/him as a friend.  And here is where fear begins to dissipate, just a little.  Because when the reality of your life seems to be heartache - and that heartache seems to be an inescapable enemy with whom you must contend - there isn't a lot of hope in that.  But when I can turn to Heartache and embrace her... or him... or her - and realize that though she might hurt me, she is still a friend - then I can find peace, even amidst sorrow.  Then I am less afraid of myself, because mindfulness is not supposed to get me away from this heartache.  Mindfulness is really there to teach me how to lay down my defenses and become friends with this scary helper.  I don't want to, but there is no other way.  Our world doesn't always praise things that slow us down and make our goals and agendas more difficult to reach (or nullifies their validity altogether).  But sometimes things come into our life precisely to shatter the agendas we carry with us and open us to a deeper wisdom.  Or perhaps being open simply is the deeper wisdom.  Perhaps there's no "thing" to "learn" from all this - perhaps it's just about simply being broken open - to have a heart torn open and left that way, without designs to "fix it," and all the grace that comes from that just comes, just from being open, just from learning to be kind to oneself amidst this pain and loss and heartache.  To let the grief rivers flow through me instead of just weighing me down like some kind of heavy mat pressing against my unyielding body.  

I can honestly say I don't know if anything I've said makes rational sense.  There's not a lot of rational sense to make these days.  It's just one day at a time, learning to embrace the heart's center - learning to live with loss and pain and know that it's okay, even if everything just feels horrifying.

Kindness to oneself might just be the most important thing some of us will ever learn.  And to me, now, it might just be the only thing worth learning.  On the in breath, and the out - whatever I feel - wherever I am.  In.  Out.  Present moment.  Wonderful moment.  Maybe our ideas of "wonderful" get a little fucked up sometimes.  It's good to remember that mindfulness isn't about keeping the pain out.  Thousands of people just lost their lives in the Philippines.  Thousands upon thousands more lost their homes, their livelihoods, everything they knew and held dear.  Devastation.  How do we breathe through that?  Hopefully, with grief choking us on the in breath, and tears flooding us on the out breath.  Reaching into our hearts as we step with our left foot, reaching into our lives and resources as we step with the right.  There's this moment where Jesus hangs on the cross, at the end, when his breath is almost gone from him (crucifixion kills you by asphyxiation).  "Into your hands I commit my spirit," he says.  Pneuma, I would guess the word is here.  The word that also means breath.  Into your hands I commit my breath.  

I really don't know what that means to this post - or if it means anything, but somehow it felt worth mentioning.  And hey, I told you from the beginning, I have no idea how to grieve - I'm just making this up as I go along.  Maybe we all are.  Maybe that's the whole damn point.  I guess it makes it just a little easier when we can offer each other immeasurable amounts of kindness as we go along.  Because we are all doing the best we can.  Even when we're not.  Even when the best we can really sucks.  I think it also makes it easier if we can offer that same kindness to ourselves.  Over and over and over again.

Amen.