When the World's Suffering Becomes Your Own
Cuando el sufrimiento del mundo se convierte en el tuyo
A student struggles with feeling paralyzed by the suffering in the world and asks how to bring practice to such overwhelming pain.
When the World's Suffering Becomes Your Own
A student struggles with feeling paralyzed by the suffering in the world and asks how to bring practice to such overwhelming pain.
I'm having a hard time dealing with the suffering of the world. It's paralyzing. I don't know how to contextualize the practice with what's happening. I find myself overtaken by thought and emotion, and it's very hard to ground myself and not be taken into that whirlwind.
Nothing changes at the level of the practice. In fact, this energy can push you to deepen, because when there is more suffering in the world, it is our suffering. The way to be with that is to go through our own personal suffering. You take this energy, which you experience as the suffering of the world, and you let it come through you.
I'm definitely trying not to avoid it and to consciously open myself to it.
The door opens both ways
Only half of it is your job. In a sense, you just have to meet something halfway. It is as if you come to a door and something comes to the door on the other side, and you open it together.
I feel like that door will completely annihilate me.
Yes, that's how it feels, because what we experience ourselves to be is just one part, just what's on this side of the door. When that door opens, that separation ends. Suffering is what brings us to that door, if we approach it consciously. There is no real distinction between our suffering and the world's suffering.
That is in a way even more painful, because to me that is clear. But it's hard to see people fighting and not realizing it. It feels powerless. That's the word.
Powerlessness as part of the pain
Powerlessness is a form of pain. When you say you find it hard to deal with this or bring your practice to it, that experience of "hard" is itself part of the suffering and pain that is happening. Instead of interpreting it as something you could do better, see it that way, and that will give you more room to feel more deeply. It is not a doing. It is not a doing better. It is a letting, more.
Yes. You said it's a letting go. A kind of surrender.
Surrender, not effort
Exactly. What we need to learn is to surrender into our feeling. Through that learning of surrender, we can learn to commune when there is pain, trauma, and hurt. Through that surrender, our heart opens. But it is not a doing. Surrender happens when we stop controlling what we are feeling. Putting a lot of effort in is a form of control, sometimes trying to do something right.
I suggest you try moving with what you feel. Try dancing. Try music that might help you feel more deeply. Explore it creatively. There is a kind of approach that is focused and pointed, and another that is movement. My sense is that what you need now is more of the movement.
I feel like I could say more, but I have this huge knot in my throat. I just don't understand people.
Madness is incomprehensible.
Why is it so hard for people to get along? I think so much. I resist. And I don't know what to do or how to be.
Touching what we cannot
You are being exactly what you need to be. I understand your sense of helplessness and powerlessness. What we need to learn is to touch those places that we think we can't. That is what you are doing.
I feel so much resistance in myself.
And that's okay. The resistance itself is something you can touch and learn from. Do you know what you feel resistant to?
To feel what I fear will annihilate me.
Lead into gold
This process, what you are doing right now, is like the alchemist turning lead into gold. It is under that pressure and that burn that the transformation happens. That is the metaphor of lead and gold.
It almost feels tangible, the resistance being that lead.
It is a direct, raw sensation. It's hard.
It comes in waves sometimes. I come from a Jewish family, and it's one thing when you read about it in history books. But when you feel it in your bones, it's very hard to explain.
It probably is in our bones.
It's generational. Epigenetic. This has highlighted something for me that maybe I had felt more subtly before, but now it's on the surface. I'm afraid of being Jewish. And then I think about what that means in terms of identity. It's a hard place to be, having a fear of being hated so much and also not wanting to be part of something that causes other people pain.
You have a beautiful heart.
Why does it feel like it's not enough?
The ripple beyond the individual
That is just part of the powerlessness. We are powerless as individuals. But the consciousness that we are, when we feel so deeply, it is not just you who is feeling. What you are doing sends a ripple effect.
I don't even know what I'm doing.
You are being honest. Your heart is open. You are vulnerable. You are feeling.
This almost highlights for me how afraid I am to die.
And meeting that fear is what can free you. Sorrow is something we move through by feeling it, by going into it. All of it.
It's strange, but I feel so peaceful now.
Beautiful. It doesn't take much to just deepen. We often just lose the direction. That depth is always available, and it is not far. You will probably need a lot of time and space for cycling through this in a similar way. Some of it is going to feel very personal and some is going to feel more collective, because there is no divide between the personal and the collective. Some is personal trauma, personal genetic, family. And then collective. We can hold all of it.
Be gentle
Be gentle. With tenderness, give yourself room, space, time. Some music. Explore just feeling, just letting. Let everything come up and dance with it, or lie down, or breathe. Thank you for being so vulnerable. Thank you, my friends.