The Heart Can Take It
El corazón puede soportarlo
A student reflects on a sleepless night after a difficult relationship conversation, noticing how old stories and grief can feel both validating and self-perpetuating, and wonders about the wisdom of opening to pain.
The Heart Can Take It
A student reflects on a sleepless night after a difficult relationship conversation, noticing how old stories and grief can feel both validating and self-perpetuating, and wonders about the wisdom of opening to pain.
I don't know if I have a question. I had a difficult relationship talk last night and didn't really sleep well. I was noticing even during the talk that some of the pain was due to old stories, and indulging those stories felt validating. At the same time, I could notice what was happening: a self-pitying spiral. Sometimes I could pull myself out of it and notice, "Okay, I'm here. These are small motions, but I'm okay." I was tired then too.
It was interesting in that tired state to see myself dancing with these old emotions and old stories, feeling like the pain was real, and that maybe the process of touching in with it was valuable somehow, while at the same time noticing how it was self-perpetuating. When I noticed that, coming out of it felt skillful, like a more mature kind of stabilizing, maybe like an internal parent saying, "It's okay."
I was at a dance event last night and chatting with a friend. I asked how she was, and she said, "I feel like I'm being cracked open by love." Her partner had been doing somatic training, and something there was blossoming and loosening. I asked her what the secret was, and she said, "Opening to grief. An opening to the possibility of loss."
I feel like there's something of the wisdom of the river in that. And it's funny, feeling this tender, sleep-deprived place, how there's pain and also a letting go, a loosening of any smallness I've been holding on to in order to maintain my current form or mask or whatever. I feel in between that and what I'm perhaps starting to feel into: letting the river take it away. So, as I said, I don't know if I have a question.
It's very vulnerable and sweet to hear you. Very genuine. What you're talking about is naturally what this work is at times. It is, in part, about letting yourself grieve.
Growing up and waking up
I find it useful to think of this work as having two aspects that are very complementary, and both necessary. I've adopted a naming for them: growing up and waking up. You could say ultimately it's all about growing up, or you could say ultimately it's all about waking up, because in a sense they're the same thing.
I would describe waking up as seeing reality, seeing what is beyond or prior to thought. Growing up is what we do with that: how it changes us as humans, how we change in relationships, and in a sense, how we live.
You can't fully grow up unless you wake up, and vice versa. You grow up a bit and then hit a waking-up ceiling. Then you wake up progressively a bit more, and you need to grow up to integrate that new understanding of reality into your way of living. So it's progressive: we grow up a bit, wake up a bit. Sometimes waking up can be more total, a big leap. Waking up can happen that way. Growing up cannot. There is no growing up suddenly, because growing up requires changes in a dimension of this reality: the body and the mind. Things need to move that have a different rhythm. The nervous system, the heart, the body, the mind, everything needs to adapt. Waking up, by contrast, is instantaneous. It can be partial, it can be total, but it is instantaneous and outside of time, outside of the mind.
What you are describing is a really genuine deepening in that growing-up aspect. It's really beautiful to see. I actually hold the position that growing up is the ultimate thing, what matters most. Waking up is just a requirement along the way. What matters is being adults: loving, open, and in service to life, to ourselves, and loving in our relationships.
The safety of the heart
What I'm hearing is a kind of maturing, something settling into a deeper, more open, adult, loving heart and relationship with yourself, with your relationships, with your life. If we get too attached to the promise of waking up (and there is no promise, because it's now, never anything other than now), I would say there is no way to realize it unless we can be with our pain, be with our grief, be with our fears. Then that which we are constantly trying to avoid no longer becomes a threat, which is just our feelings and our vulnerability.
I like that you laugh, because it means you see it. In a sense, we make safe our own heart. We find that our home is safe, which is our heart, right now, as it is.
There is a beautiful image in Christianity: Christ with his chest open, parted with his hands, his heart put forward to the world. It has been stabbed, it is bleeding, and he is holding it out. The bleeding heart of Christ. The image communicates a truth of the heart and of reality: there is never more pain than what the heart can take. In that, there is the revelation of a safety in the pain, a safety in feeling. It is a discovery. Before knowing this, we try to protect the heart because we think pain is going to overwhelm it, and in that protecting, we suffer. But the heart can take it. The heart is actually prior to the pain. It exists prior to pain, and so it cannot be harmed. This can be discovered or realized. And we only really realize it when we take the risk of opening and feeling.
Someone reminded me recently of a quote from A Course in Miracles, which I will probably misquote, but it says something like: "That which is real cannot be harmed. That which is not real does not exist." It's a different style of communicating the same thing. I like the image of the heart because it's less abstract.
It's funny. In between sensing that, like when I laughed after you said we're afraid of feeling pain, immediately after, I felt pain. I like the idea that there's never too much, in the same way that I like the idea that life never hands you more than you're capable of dealing with. And maybe in both cases it's a stretch goal. It doesn't feel easy.
The belief that it's too much
I understand that. It doesn't mean it's going to feel easy, because it only feels that way until you fully realize it. In a sense, there is an end to that struggle, because it is the ending of the belief that it's too much. We only come to the end of that belief when we question it and allow ourselves to feel when it feels like it's too much.
There's a fear that this is going to overwhelm us. When that fear is happening, it's because we're questioning that belief. Otherwise, when we're fully in that belief, we have activated our avoidance mechanisms. We've shut down. We've closed our heart because it's too much. But something, a deeper instinct, calls us. It calls probably all of us, but some of us for some reason become more in need of listening to this calling to explore: what if I can go there and it's okay? We will often feel like we didn't have a choice, that we were forced, that we just couldn't avoid it, that it was harder to be shut down, harder to avoid, that life just didn't give us a chance. But it's all a kind of wisdom.
I think that's a lot of what's happening. I'm feeling echoes of times in my life where it felt like too much.
Cycling through edges
Yes. And we cycle, right? We come to a point where something activates and we just want a break. We come to an edge, but then we revisit it. That's this cycling of growing up: stepping back from an edge, waking up in a sense, looking at our beliefs about that which feels threatened. There are many different ways to talk about this across different traditions, but it's basically seeing through our beliefs, seeing them as beliefs versus as reality. From that newer, deeper understanding, we can open up to flow in life, trust the river, until we may hit another edge of distrust and fear. Then we can look at the beliefs there. What is it that's actually at risk? What's the real danger?
Ultimately, it's the imagination of what we think we are that's in danger. But we don't experience it as an imagination. We experience it as "I, what I am, is in danger," and the body and the mind react with all the activation of fear of the end of "I." There are extreme versions of that and more subtle versions: the ending of a relationship, being told something difficult, a big change in life.
Seeing through what we thought we were
The full revelation is to see that what we thought we are isn't real, that what we thought we were was an imagination, a thought construct. Then what we are is impossible to put into words because it is beyond words. You could say we are nothing, we are emptiness. It has been talked about in a million ways. But what can be said directly and more accurately is that we realize we are not what we thought we were. Then that which we thought we were can no longer be threatened, because we have seen through its unreality.
This is the same thing that Advaita talks about, that Buddhism talks about, that Christianity at its essence points to. Buddha nature. The kingdom of heaven. Non-duality. Parabrahman in Advaita. The more traditional Advaita approach is actually very rational. They say the first realization is "I am atman," and atman means self, but you could equate it to consciousness. It is to say: I am not thought, I am consciousness. The second realization is that atman equals brahman, which is totality, the universe, everything. What I am is not separate from everything. That's the kingdom of heaven.
I don't typically use those descriptions because my experience is that heaven and hell kind of disappeared. They seemed to be imagination. There is something beyond that kind of description. But I understand the language. It is peaceful beyond understanding. It is more satisfying than anything. Safety isn't even a question. It doesn't matter what the thoughts are doing or what emotions are happening. It is completely untouched.
So when we're in a state where we're not feeling that, there's some concept, perhaps associated with pain and fear, that's between us and that experience?
It's tricky to point out, because it's not an experience. You could say it's what experience is made of. It's not a state, not an experience. It's the most obvious thing, because it is prior to experience, prior to thought. It's not hidden. It's this, always, all the time. And it's completely incomprehensible, even to me, how it happens that it seems so obscured or veiled, and then it's not. Nothing changed, but everything changed.
I remember in the darkest times of suffering. I had a really dark personality: a lot of pain, a lot of terror, a lot of grief, suicidal in my teens. Really dark. And I know that what I'm talking about was completely unavoidable, unmissable, even then. It's not something that began, not a shift where before there was no peace and after there was. There was always peace, to call it something. I describe this just to possibly help question some ideas about it. How it can be communicated and transmitted is a mystery to me, but I try.