The Joy of Hanging in There

When Suffering is Held Inside Joy

From the Conjunction Tarot by Ina Auderieth

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. Rainer Maria Rilke

Suffering

I used to think the healing journey was about releasing one false story at a time. Through interacting with circumstances, I’d activate and then release the personal victim stories, the lack of self-worth stories, and the internalized trauma from a childhood home brimming with alcoholism, violence, and sexual misconduct. I’d eat my own shadow until there was nothing left but light. It was a lot of work.

And there’s no end to it. Neither my family nor my culture started with my arrival. Our culture runs on misogyny and worships domination. The violence wasn’t only at my house. Our political, religious, and cultural systems are propelled into the present by centuries of history that bear weight on the individual. Can we get to the bottom of suffering? Is there a bottom?

Joy

About fifteen years ago, I had a big dream. I was in the back garden, painting a life-sized self-portrait of my naked body reclining in white space using only shades of pink, the color of joy. Then, I’m reclining on a couch before a cozy fire. My self-portrait hangs above the mantle. An invisible force jumps into my body. It lifts me from inside and pops, pushes, and reshapes me until my pose matches the painting.

Joy.

Suffering

This week, I watched Lydia Yuknavitch’s 2016 TED Talk about misfits. I don’t know what took me so long. I’m a huge fan, and I’m also a misfit. Then, I visited her website, and at the end of one of the free lessons there, she said, “And then, you are going to submit it. Not to me, but to a publication.”

I froze. Shock waves rippled from my little walnut-heart, creating a parenthesis in eternity. What could be different if I had just done that simple thing?

For twenty-five years or so, I rose every day at 4:00 am to write before going to work. I wrote through the weekends. I never taught summer school. I just wrote. Oh, and while I was teaching full-time, I went back to school full-time to earn two more degrees, one of which was the expensive MFA, which didn’t teach me anything. But while I was in that program, I submitted a few things. Then, I took more and more classes, some quite expensive, both in money and in the currency of self-confidence.

I wrote and wrote and wrote - three books worth, and more. But I longed to share my writing with readers in a way that broke me open, all raw and bleeding on the inside. Longing like this is a kind of grief for something you’ve never had. It comes in waves and contractions, just like suffering the loss of something you did have, like say, the loss of a parent when you are still a teenager. The felt-sense of a tremendous longing to be a real writer was the absence that lasted my whole life. But even if I were as well-read a misfit as Lydia Yuknavitch, would that satisfy my ambition?

I walk around singing that old R.E.M. song, Losing My Religion, only I substitute the word ambition: That’s me in the spotlight, losing my ambition. In my native culture, our religion is dominance - winning. That’s what we worship. Fulfilling your ambition is winning at life, which many see as The Point. But of course, it’s not. I sit with people who are dying. At the deathbed, winning isn’t the point of anything.

Joy

When I surrender my unfulfilled longing, joy becomes me. It’s so full and loud that when I walk into a room, people turn and look for the source of it. I know that it’s not me. It’s coming through me, but I get to feel it as it passes through. That’s the gift. I am so grateful for the respite from all that longing.

When I am in this joy, I just want to melt into my garden for the rest of my life in one long tea party with my plants. That’s my relationship with writing, too, because when it’s a good day, and even when it’s a bad day, this relationship with my inner life bouncing off the physical world and back again onto the page is the absolute bliss of being whole. Time stops.

Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland.

Suffering

But I’m not just an individual. I’m a political animal, a feminist to the core with such strong opinions about the state of our country and the fascists who are blowing up fishing boats, pissing their dominance to start another war over oil… Ahem. My opinions surely add to the choppiness in our subterranean aquifer, so I’ll stop now.

Sometimes, I can rest in the knowledge that we are working out our collective story. Countries do what families do, what individuals do. We work out our story, our mythology, if you will. It’s the same acting out I did when I was projecting my trauma onto the movie screen of circumstances - only bigger. And the U.S. projects a lot of trauma. And yes, people die while our own thrashing minds turn the cascading kaleidoscope of our terrible shadows. We could stop it, but the story tells us that we’re powerless.

Just how dangerous is the world? Don’t we need a strong authoritarian daddy? Aren’t some people more human than others? Isn’t life a zero-sum game with winners and losers? If so, the wealthy must be worshipped as some kind of god-favored geniuses who create wealth rather than extract it. Like all projections, even mine about the publishing industry, it’s a flimsy story. These are the poles we dangle between, the one hand and the other hand, each nailed to a side of Rilke’s cross. We are suffering hard. But the story is not true. The world is not like that. The story, like all myths, is a lie.

Joy

The willingness to suffer misconceptions rather than act them out resolves into joy. Something clicks into place, a key turning tumblers - clickety, click, click. Cascading joy. And then there’s clarity. Inspiration… promptings. Do this. It’s so clear. Say that. Time disappears. Right action is effortless. A breeze. Follow that bliss. It’s possible to allow the shadow to arise inside the container of joy. And joy is not moved.

Suffering

In this, my fallow season, I am reacquainted with my insatiable ambition, my need to be someone else, my projection of a fantasy me, where I’ll be this, and this, and this… and I’ll finally be…

I can’t believe I still run a story like that. But I do. I ache with a longing I have named: Becoming. And that Becommer would push the river aside to walk to the other shore. And yet, I know I must suffer this story in stillness. Any outcome I manufacture out of ambition will only lead to more suffering.

Joy

When the kaleidoscope turns on its own, all the fractals fall into a new pattern. The outcome won’t be what I hope for or what I fear. It will be some third thing, a divine child, a perfect blend of light and shadow. Beautiful, yes, but I am not the pattern. I am the joy pouring through it. Joy like that, so bright and so much… is so powerful that it hurts the eye to look on it directly.

Suffering

My spiritual teacher, who is the most realized person I have met, must have suffered when the community learned that her husband was sleeping with a devotee—that old Svengali bad-man guru trap. Many people left her because she didn’t leave her husband. Obviously, they said, she must be a fraud.

I know how that one feels. That was my impossible task when my marriage was effectively over about fifteen years ago, though the trigger wasn’t sexual infidelity. It was financial.

My family and friends told me to have some self-respect. Trust was over—divorce was inevitable. But marriage, a mini-culture, is created by both people and the full weight of their histories. I couldn’t divorce myself by divorcing him. I filed the papers, but my son was devastated. I watched him break. Having no idea what to do, I fell back on my spiritual practice of stillness.

I swore I wouldn’t move until I had clarity. I waited; I listened inside. I grieved. I walked around for years releasing anger in pluming clouds behind me as I walked the beach. What should I do? Nothing. I begged for clarity. No answer. Then, one day, click, love for him just poured through. He’s beautiful, my best friend and partner. We all are. I started wearing my wedding rings again. And now, I’m so glad I stayed.

Disclaimer: Your results may vary. If leaving were my path, everything would have played out differently. Each person’s fears and feels are a custom fit.

Joy

I still love my teacher, too, though I’m no longer a devotee. Achieving some steady state of enlightenment was never the teaching, which was about being here now… and now… and now. Presence. And that’s how my initial awakening was, too. Presence. It wasn’t what she said. I don’t remember what she said. It was about what she is. Presence. Because that’s what I am. Presence. There wasn’t a process; only circumstances have a process. I’m the joy shining through, illuminating the pattern in the kaleidoscope.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.