Grief and Joy at the Same Time
Duelo y alegría al mismo tiempo
A question about the confusion of experiencing grief and sadness alongside joy and awakening, and whether contradictory feelings can coexist.
Grief and Joy at the Same Time
A question about the confusion of experiencing grief and sadness alongside joy and awakening, and whether contradictory feelings can coexist.
I was wondering if you could speak a little about this process of waking up and my experience of more grief. It feels confusing at times because, as you say, it feels like something is dying. But it also feels like I'm becoming more aware, experiencing more truth. Sometimes when I'm relating to something that might be very joyful, it feels very sad. Or maybe that's just me getting confused. Can you speak to that a bit?
The grief. When any shift in waking up happens, something changes between the before and the after. We are no longer able to push things away to the same degree. Being asleep is, in a sense, a way of pushing things away, a way of not feeling.
The cost of not feeling
What can happen is a kind of conflict between resisting what's happening and not wanting to feel. At any moment there's something we don't want to feel, and we pull away into thoughts. We go into believing that we are this image of ourselves. That's a way of managing to control what we feel, of avoiding what we don't want to feel. But it's like being between a rock and a hard place. It's a no-win situation. It's useful for a time, like a crutch, and it happens to all of us as part of the nature of being human.
But at some point, we are faced with the challenge and the opportunity to engage with what we feel. And there are some things we simply can't engage with unless we, to some degree, wake up. When we do, especially when it's a sudden glimpse, it often comes with this outpouring. Everything we've been pushing away and keeping down starts to come up.
The paradox of waking up
So it can seem paradoxical: I'm waking up to something true and beautiful that at moments feels better than anything has ever felt, and yet what comes is grief, sadness, even fear and despair. That's a very natural process. Things that feel completely contradictory at the level of feeling, like joy and sadness at the same time, which is what I think you were speaking about.
I don't know if I've ever had those two feelings together. It just feels so contradictory.
We are multi-dimensional, and the more we wake up, the more it becomes vastly multi-dimensional. It feels contradictory to what you're used to as a way of thinking about yourself, your reality, and your emotional world. But the reality is that was just a belief system: that you couldn't feel joy and sadness at the same time.
My teacher always spoke about Narnia, the world from a series of novels. Narnia is described as a world where everything can be terrible and wonderful at the same time. He loved using that as a metaphor. He spoke about reality being Narnia. And I think you're tasting a bit of that. You've come out of the world of your mind into a deeper, more real reality of you, of life. And you've found: "Wow, I can be joyous and sad and heartbroken and happy, grieving and enjoying."
Maybe I was interpreting that as two parts of me.
That's fine. The problem is when you interpret it as something being wrong, or as something that shouldn't be this way.
Perhaps it's not two parts of me dancing back and forth. Maybe it's just what it is.
Simultaneous and real
Yes, and they're simultaneously present. Only to the mind can you have just one type of feeling at once, one place on the positive-negative spectrum. That's really just a mental map. "I can only be happy. I can't be sad." That's only true from a very limited mindset. You can feel many things at once, and all of them can be real, true, and deep.
I can understand the confusion, especially for somebody who is a scientist, who is rational, who has had a lot of love for rational process, which I relate to. From that perspective, it's very confusing. But it's real. It's true. It's what's happening.
Nothing to do about it
You can shift the way you interpret it, and also realize you don't have to do anything about it. Often we think, "I'm feeling good, so I need to make sure I stay here and avoid everything that's going to change that." Or, "I'm feeling bad, so I have to change that so I can go back to feeling good." And then when you feel good and bad simultaneously, the mind goes into a short circuit: "What am I going to do now?"
Riding that wave can be so multidimensional.
Even that word, "multidimensional," is a mental map. The reality is, I would say, one-dimensional. There's only this. And also it's multi-dimensional. But those are just maps.
It's like I'm still trying to use a map to interpret something I don't understand, or haven't allowed myself to experience.
Dropping the old belief system
Yes. And there's likely going to be an intention to figure it out. It's confusing, so the impulse is: "I need to understand it so I'm no longer confused, so I know how to choose and function and live according to this new thing." All of that analysis is worthless. It's just: "Oh, wow. I thought I couldn't feel two things at the same time. This is really quite interesting and beautiful." There's nothing to do about it. Just drop the old belief system that things can't be this way.
Definitely a habit of trying to interpret everything and put a label on everything. That's my habit.
You're not special that way. It's a human condition. Don't make it a story about yourself, that you have this particular way of being. Every being with a mind will have a tendency to use the mind to label things, try to figure things out, and control things. That's what we can see and learn how to be with differently.
I think I'm realizing how much energy I put into all of that, which is a lot, instead of just being with it.
The unusual insight
I don't think there's a person in this room who doesn't relate to what you just said. That's just the human condition. What's actually unusual is to have the insight that that's what you're doing. Very few people arrive at that. "Oh, I'm putting so much energy into mental processing and controlling, and it doesn't really help much." That's the part that's unusual. You see that.
Thank you. I really appreciate having this time with you and everyone.
It's very lovely.