The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
The Guest House by Jalaluddin Rumi
Hello Sadness
It isn’t always easy to be with our sadness. It isn’t easy to be with any emotion or strong feeling.
The invitation is to trust that, over time, the feelings (and the stories they come packaged in), will soften. Sadness doesn’t need to define us. Sadness doesn’t need to last. When it does, it is called depression. This is another topic. Sadness can be experienced and can be learnt from but it doesn’t need to become a fixed part of our personality. When it does, it becomes addiction (or suffering). This too is another topic.
Wisdom Premise
This was the nub of the “wisdom premise” we introduced in our last Alive Wire Wisdom Circle.
Here is the premise for those of you that missed it.
There is wisdom in identifying sadness but not identifying with sadness.
As we heard from each other, sadness can spring from loss, grief, disappointment, confusion, aloneness, not having our needs met, misunderstanding, or the sense that we are powerless to help or positively influence one another. We also heard that happiness arises from movement towards a vision, a sense of fulfillment, creativity, time for/with self, simplicity and completion.
Both happiness and sadness co-exist.
Our habit as humans, however, inclines us towards seeking happiness and avoiding sadness.
When we let sadness define us, we make it personal. What if sadness were very real and not personal? Sadness paradoxically, is not an imperfection or flaw. It makes up the octaves of life.
We can feel sadness for what we didn’t get when we were little and regret (a type of sadness) for what we haven’t done or achieved when we are old. We can carry experience but it doesn’t have to be in charge of us. We can feel sadness and drop the stories.
Sadness invites us into the tender places. It asks to be met with tenderness.
We can’t do this on our own.
We need to be in relationship. With ourselves. With others. With an intimate other. With the Divine. We need community.
Jesus
In some circles, repressing authentic emotion is considered a virtue. In some cultures, repressing authentic emotion is taught to us and modelled from infancy. We learn to deny anger, ignore pain, numb sadness, run away from loneliness and avoid doubt.
This is not the model we see in Jesus. He freely expressed his emotions without shame.
He shed tears
He was filled with joy
He felt overwhelmed with grief
He was angry
He was troubled and spiritually overwhelmed
His heart was moved with compassion
He felt forsaken
He was anything but frozen emotionally. He was fully human.
So where did we get this idea from that it is somehow Not OK to feel our emotions or be emotional?
Job
And then there was Job, the richest man in the world. As you may know, the unthinkable happens. He is reduced to poverty, his children are killed in a natural disaster. He has boils all over his body. He finds himself alone, isolated and living in a garbage dump. He must have felt the fullest range of emotion: sadness, bitterness, betrayal, doubt, disappointment, anger, rage. He contended with God. He threw his feelings at God. He expressed the whole lot.
David
David, in the Psalms, holds nothing back. He freely pours out his sadness, shame, despair, anger and fear. I recently re-read the Psalms not long after my mum died. I was struck by the wide range of his emotional ups and downs. It was almost shocking. Yet David was a man after God’s heart.
Sadness in the world
There is so much sadness in the world. We feel our own sadness. We feel the sadness of the world. So many are suffering. This sadness can be overwhelming. We may feel unspiritual expressing our sadness.
But here’s the thing, we can’t grow in spiritual maturity without growing in emotional maturity.
Perhaps, in your family, sadness was seen as inacceptable. Most of us were rewarded for our smiles from a very young age. As adults we ignore our sadness and hope it will disappear. We may “other” the part of us that is sad. We push it away. It is not welcome. We don’t want to entertain sadness in the guesthouse.
It is not a surprise then that we neglect or don’t know how to create a loving space to meet our sadness. We feel we will be seen as deficient for our sadness. If we reveal the depth of our sadness we risk being rejected for it. In the end our spiritual growth is stunted.
Aliveness
and unconditional acceptance is about experiencing the whole range of our emotions. As we shared in the Alive Wire Wisdom Circle last Sunday, underplaying sadness is like having a piano key that does not play.
The answer is to feel emotion without labeling it as negative. This puts it into a category. It brings in the mind. Bring the body in. Feel the sadness in the body. Create a field of loving space in your body. Witness your sadness. Allow sadness. Let the sensation be without labeling it.
Let it pass. This too will pass.
This is love. The reason we don’t do this is because we attach to an opposite. We do a thing in order to feel a thing. We think that if we deal with the sadness we will feel joy. Perhaps, the secret is to celebrate sensation without preference. The invitation is to slow down and be still enough TO feel all and any of the unexpected visitors. Even the repeat visitors. Even the ones that have outworn their welcome.
