Thinking it was the key to enlightnement I used to suppress strong emotion. So as a result, it’s been a long time since I’ve pined anything.
Pine:
To feel a lingering, often nostalgic desire.
2. To wither or waste away from longing or grief: pined away and died.
v.tr. Archaic
To grieve or mourn for.
n. Archaic
Intense longing or grief.
Hmm. Upon rereading the definition… I don’t really know what this is that I’m feeling.
I need a word that means I experience intense sensations within my body that I don’t have names for. I feel a dull ache by the heart. And a feeling in the throat like a slight inflammation. My eyes are full of a sad energy, but I do not want to cry. My belly is full of gravity like the fear that stops you in your tracks when you look into the abyss. But I’m not stopped. I wander in.
A cold runs over my feet and my hands. It creeps up my legs. There is a slight stinging to the flesh of my legs, like they’ve fallen asleep, though I know that they haven’t... and the energy has been sapped from my arms.
And as I sit with this intensity that periodically washes over me, I wonder if this is permanent. Am I to forever be experiencing these sensational waves in her absence? I’d like to think not. But I am left wondering what has become of our friendship.
There was a time when the sensations were an energizing hum in the belly. A warm glow by the heart. A blossoming in the root that sent a warm steam up the spine. And in these moments in a text or a call or-... at one point gazing into her eyes, I could confirm that she might be feeling this, too.
But here I am today. And I’ve had these moments before, you know, of intense... grieving, perhaps? But I did not know where they would have originated. And I thought, “I should call her. No, I should give her space.” and occasionally I would see something she had written about grieving or pulling out roots and I would wonder if I was feeling her, like we used to seem to.
Why am I writing this?
I suppose I want to talk about the act of manufacturing certainty in order to make progress or move forward. I suppose I’m tackling the experience of being uncertain of the consequences of my actions. I suppose I also want to talk about what it is to become spacious:
A younger version of me would try to make sense of these intense emotional experiences. Trusting that the parts that felt good meant that I was doing something right… and that this discomfort is a sign that I’ve done something wrong. When that “me” felt depressed they shut down. When they felt frustrated they would try to solve it. Either with action or attempting to shut the feelings out. That version of me would chalk this all up to grief of my uncertain status with a person that I love. A person with whom, at the height of our friendship, I used to say I shared a psychic link with. That version of me would dream of retreating away from the struggles that come from connecting to and being attached to others. That version of me would be in absolute agony at the mere thought that my existence was causing pain or even discomfort to the people I love. I would be looking for a solution, probably tonglen meditation, stoicism, or asceticism. I’d try to transcend both emotion and thought.
But I’m not that younger self. That younger self was much more aware of what everyone else was feeling. Everyone besides me. And I had space for everyone and they mattered more than me. And in my little idealist heart, if everyone just acted like everyone else mattered more, we would all take care of each other and the world would be perfect. That’s what I told myself. I became a martyr and suffered nobly… But since I was suffering I couldn’t be enlightened. And when you’re young and trying to prove yourself, reaching the end of the path is everything. Especially when the literature says special people get it instantly. I’m pretty average I would say.
So -..
to be enlightened, counterintuitively I cultivated that space by armoring my heart. I learned to protect myself. I desensitized myself to my own needs and my own suffering. And then to my surprise when I developed the skill, I thought that perhaps this ability I had to turn off attachment and to disconnect was the superpower that meditation had given me. Really I had just become good at compartmentalizing and dissociation. In reality I was not transcending. This was not buddha nature. I was trying to escape suffering with every tool I could find or invent. I was not making peace with its reality. I was just bypassing it
And it worked well enough for a long time… And so this took a long time, but now I embrace suffering. I am not not concerned with whether or not I am enlightened. I’m concerned with whether or not I live the light of my own truth. And this is important.
Suffering is sometimes a truth. Whether it is your own or someone else’s. And that part doesn’t really matter as long as you can sit with it. Because if you can sit with it, it’s not forcing you to do anything.
Sometimes suffering is the truth.
But it doesn’t have to be the only truth… But in each moment in life, there is endless opportunity for suffering, just as there is endless opportunity for gratitude and joy. Sadness or anger. It does not matter if you are a refugee or a Rothschild. Every second contains empathy and entitlement, triumph and tragedy, birth and death. We are humans having a human experience. And if you’re willing to embrace it, we are all divine beings having a divine experience. And all the armor I put on my little heart to protect me from the bad experiences were actually the walls that kept me locked out of the fullness of each moment. Of the spaciousness of my being. Of the beauty of my softened heart.
And that’s where I am today. Unafraid of confusion and pain. Unafraid of and unattached to judgment. Without a need to control my emotions, because the only need we have to control our emotions, comes from the fear that emotions control us.
And they do, but that’s not anything to be afraid of.
You don’t have to control anyone’s suffering.
You don’t have to be controlled by it either.
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