Acceptance Archive

The seventh of my posts on Jung has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif. A taster:

Jung believed that we are psychosomatic creatures who must attend to matters of the spirit as well as the body. Further, our psyche is not just our own. It is connected to others, both those with whom we visibly interact, and those who have come before us, via the dynamic he called the collective unconscious. Life goes well when these links are open. Flow brings a sense of purpose. Conversely, blockages can lead to ill-health with possibly physical and psychological manifestations. "A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning," Jung wrote, in an essay wittily entitled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy".

Other observers of the human condition make similar remarks. Bertrand Russell, who could hardly be different from Jung in terms of his spiritual outlook, nonetheless averred that the happy individual feels himself "part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision". Such a person knows themselves as a "citizen of the universe".

Jung preferred overtly religious language – instead of the universe talking of the "soul of the world" or anima mundi – and this was more than a question of taste. He believed spiritual connectedness was fundamental to being human and that, wary of religiosity, modern consciousness was struggling to take it seriously. The default image of secular individuality was, indeed, the billiard ball. Notions such as the stream of life, let alone the soul or the collective unconscious, tend to be treated as poetic fictions, at best, with damaging implications for human wellbeing.

‘The world is made up of givers and takers, and the takers lose every time,’ says Ellen Langer, psychology professor at Harvard. ‘When you give – a gift, a compliment, an offer of help – you can feel generous, competent, connected, empowered, in control.’

Studies monitoring the brain activity of volunteers as they received cash rewards on a computer game, and gave them away, found that donating their winnings produced higher levels of the feel-good hormones dopamine and oxytocin. Jordan Grafman, who led the studies, concluded ‘it definitely seems like you’re going to get more pleasure, if these brain activations can be any guide, when you’re giving than when you’re simply receiving’.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the receiving position, some of us may feel needy, incompetent, weakened, exposed, vulnerable. ‘You may fear showing need, and feel wary of accepting something on someone else’s terms,’ says Langer, author of Counter Clockwise. ‘Are you relinquishing control and accepting some kind of quid pro quo? What are you committing to?’

When you accept an invitation to dinner with your neighbours, you are implicitly agreeing to reciprocate. Does this make you anxious or guarded? When a friend offers to babysit while you and your partner have a much needed night out, you are placing yourself in her debt, which may make you feel resentful. If a parent helps you meet the mortgage on a bad month, you take on the role of grateful, rescued child, which many people find uncomfortable.

Mixed in with disagreeable feelings of debt and duty is, for some of us, a deep-seated feeling of unworthiness, says Tim Laurence, director of the Hoffman Institute and author of You Can Change Your Life.

‘It can be down to a deficiency of love,’ he says. ‘If, during your childhood, affection, attention and praise were thin on the ground, if you didn’t receive enough love, then you don’t learn to receive well. When someone compliments you, it may be so far from the image you carry of yourself that your immediate response is, “Why would they say that to me?” If someone buys you a present, you may think, “I don’t deserve it”.’

Yet learning to receive with grace is important – even fundamental. ‘Essentially, we’re here to learn about the giving and receiving of love,’ says Laurence. ‘We do this in hundreds of ways, including the giving and receiving of support, appreciation, affection, compliments, gifts. Just as we take in breath with no conscious effort, then breathe out again, we should learn to receive and give back with no explanation needed.’

For Langer, it’s about connecting. ‘When someone mindfully gives you a gift, or an offer of support, you’ll feel seen, cared for and known for who you are,’ she says.

To those who feel uncomfortable receiving, Laurence recommends identifying the reason. (‘What would I be committing to?’ ‘I don’t see myself like that.’) If you dread the exchange of gifts at Christmas, examine why. Were past Christmases a disappointment? Perhaps gifts never reflected who you were.

When reluctant to accept an offer or invitation, Langer suggests asking yourself, ‘What is the worst that can happen if I do accept?’ Are you worried you haven’t given enough? Does it bother you that you aren’t willing to give as much? If you fear you’ll be unable to reciprocate, find a sensitive way to explain this. If you are happier as one of life’s givers, reframe your thoughts.

Giving and getting are part of one circuit. ‘Receiving with grace isn’t about taking,’ says Langer. ‘You should see it as offering someone
else the joy of giving.’

Why the “negative” emotions of grief, fear and despair are essential to achieving a positive state of mind.

 

 

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” said Carl Jung, “but by making the darkness conscious.” Originator of the psychological concept of the shadow—the unwelcome parts of ourselves that we hide from conscious awareness—Jung cleverly added, “This procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not very popular.”

A culture that prescribes the quick fix for any discomfort isn’t likely to find enlightenment through the darkness very appealing. It’s striking, for instance, that as the multitude of 21st-century threats to the planet grow more ominous, positive psychology has risen to the top of the pop psych chart. With its emphasis on the feel-good emotions in an age of skyrocketing epidemics of anxiety, depression, addiction and a host of other emotional ills, positive psychology seems to be good medicine for what ails us. And for milder forms of emotional distress, it often works well.

But there are times when “staying positive” hits a wall, and adversity (the Latin root of which means “to heed or pay attention to”) calls us to attend to darker realities we’d prefer to avoid, ignore or deny. At such times, putting on a happy face merely spreads a thin, fragile patina over our hidden sorrows. The shadow emotions grow rather than diminish with these attempts at suppression. Sooner or later, the feel-bad emotions will have their way with us.

The worst of these feel-bad emotions—the most distressing, the most difficult to experience mindfully, the ones that get us into the most trouble when we can’t bear them—are grief, fear and despair. I call these the dark emotions. Universal markers of our vulnerability to loss, pain, illness, death, uncertainty and violation, the dark emotions are unwelcome guests when they arrive, but they’re as much our human birthright as love, joy and wonder.

We grieve because we’re not alone and what connects us also breaks our hearts. A fully experienced grief brings us the unexpected gift of gratitude for the lost ­beloved, and for life.

While we think of fear as an obstacle to action, it’s just the opposite: fear alerts us to threat and impels us to act to preserve life. In consciously befriending fear and accepting the sense of vulnerability that comes with it, we expand our capacity for joy.

Despair (a discrete emotion, as opposed to depression, which is a chronic condition of stuck despair) too has a purpose. As a signal of our human hunger for meaning, despair calls us to cut through illusion, repair our souls and find a sense of meaning that will sustain us through hard times. The hard-won gift in this journey through despair’s dark night of the soul is a sturdier, more resilient faith in life.

Of course, this isn’t generally how we experience grief, fear and despair when they befall us. The last time you felt sad, scared or despairing, did you think: How human and courageous of me to make this darkness conscious? Or: Why am I so screwed up, so weak, so sick?

As a culture, we see the dark emotions as symptoms of impairment and pathology, rather than as the darker colors of our rich emotional palette. We call them “negative.” But it’s not really the emotions that are negative—it’s our attitude toward them.

The dread and devaluation of emotions in general, and “negative” emotions in ­particular, are aspects of what I call emotion-phobia. When we don’t honor the dark emotions, we end up experiencing their powerful energies in displaced, irrational and destructive forms. We become addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping or the Internet. We get chronically depressed, anxious and phobic, emotionally numb. We’re more prone to self-destructive or violent behavior. These emotional epidemics of our time escalate the more we relegate the dark emotions to the shadow bin of our consciousness.

In the banquet of human emotions, we all want to be selective and eat only the luscious light foods. But life has its ways of serving up our portion of grief, fear and despair from the dark side of the table. The question is: Can we find nourishment in the unpalatable?

The key to whether dark emotion becomes destructive or transformative is whether we can do what Jung says: Make the darkness conscious. Emotional mindfulness—the ability to stay fully attentive and befriend unwelcome emotions where they live, in the body—is essential to emotional alchemy, the process by which the lead of our worst feelings can be transmuted to golden spiritual power and wisdom.

My first child, Aaron, was born unable to suck or swallow and died in my arms 66 days later, never having left the hospital. Nobody, least of all the doctors, understood why. I’d had a gloriously healthy and happy pregnancy. Somehow Aaron had suffered oxygen loss in my womb before his birth. I had anticipated arriving in the serene meadow of new motherhood but the road took an unexpected turn and I found myself in grief’s deep abyss.

Each day Aaron was alive I knew it might be my last day with him. Gradually, I began to understand that I had only this present moment in which to be his mother and to love him. My sorrow and joy in Aaron’s presence were conjoined and inescapable, so to be with him I had to accept both. In this way, Aaron became my Zen master, teaching me how to be mindful in the midst of radical vulnerability.

At the time, I wasn’t a spiritual seeker nor a true believer, but a social activist and agnostic. So what happened on the day of Aaron’s funeral couldn’t have been more unexpected. Throwing handfuls of earth on Aaron’s small casket just after it was lowered into the ground, I heard a voice say: You are looking in the wrong place.

I looked up then, and saw Aaron’s spirit, a magnified and even more radiant version of the light I’d seen in his eyes, telling me he was okay. The devastated landscape of grief opened up into an expansive vista of limitless blue sky.

Aaron taught me all kinds of things I wouldn’t have been open to learning ­before: that spirit outlives the body, love is stronger than death and the world is charged with the sacred—even in a cemetery while burying your baby. His blessing was the gift of an abiding gratitude for his ongoing presence in my life, and for life itself.

In my 35 years as a psychotherapist, I’ve been privileged to witness and accompany thousands of people as they navigate the rough waters of grief, fear and despair, and to help them discover the surprising gifts in these journeys.

When Diane came for therapy, she was fed up and tired. “My husband treats me like a sex slave,” she told me. “And, believe me, this is not as sexy as it sounds.” For the first several years of her marriage, she was as eager for sex as Dick was, but her desire dimmed the more demanding he became. She was expected to be available whenever he was, regardless of her own needs or feelings.

In 17 years of marriage, Diane had molded herself to be pleasing and put satisfying her husband over everything else that mattered to her. All the while, an internal defiance burrowed deep inside her, saying: I am not here just to please you. I am not here just to serve you. I deserve a relationship in which you care to please me too.

Because she couldn’t utter these words, or even let herself think them, her defiance took the form of not wanting to have sex with him at all. Grudgingly, Dick consented to come with her to couples therapy. But he had little patience for the work. He wanted his wife to be fixed in a hurry. After about six months, he announced, without having discussed this decision with Diane: I’m out of here. It’s divorce time.

From then on, Diane’s therapy consisted largely of grief and despair work for her lost marriage. She saw herself in a dark underground tunnel. With my encouragement, she gave herself permission to get to know the tunnel’s terrain rather than to claw her way out prematurely. Her experience of herself trapped in this dark, narrow place changed over time. From a choking sensation of being buried underground in excrement, she began to see the tunnel widening, like an inverted funnel. From here it became a kind of birth canal.

Diane gave birth to herself through this canal. With her emergence came a change in her self image. The shy, self-negating “mouse” with a compulsion to please everyone metamorphosed into a more true version of who she was: a ­gentle, ­compassionate and dignified woman whose yearning for mutuality in relationship reflected her own wisdom.

By consciously surrendering to being in the dark tunnel of her despair, Diane hadn’t been buried but reborn. No longer ­feeling like her husband’s victim, she began to understand that his departure, with all its agony, allowed her to go through this arduous passage to find an abiding faith in her life and her ability to love.

Jenny was terrified of deep water. The very idea of taking a dip in the ocean filled her with panic—so did delving into the deep waters of her inner life. As we worked in therapy, Jenny discovered the connection between these twin fears and her fear of her father, who led the family the way a drill sergeant leads his platoon. Everyone was expected to keep up the “family name” by being fearless and displaying no visible signs of emotion. Those who couldn’t ­conform were ­routinely humiliated, especially Jenny, the family “wimp.”

Jenny told me she needed to “let go” of her fear and wanted me to help her. Okay, I said. The first step in letting go of your fear is letting it be—not judging yourself for it or even trying to change it. Jenny wasn’t keen on the idea. I think she thought I was a bit of a wimp myself.

It took many months before she got to the starting point of emotional alchemy: forming a new intention for her fear. ­Instead of “I’ll make my fear go away by manning up and wearing a mask of ­invulnerability,” her intention became, “I’ll let myself feel fear and not run away.” This felt at first like “sinking into” the ­emotion and drowning. I helped her ­reframe the drowning metaphor by ­naming her intention to befriend this emotion an act of courage. Disowning her fear had, in fact, led to Jenny’s phobia. Perhaps she could heal it by learning to swim with fear rather than submerging it.
The second step for Jenny was to affirm the value of this emotion that had been so shunned, shamed and silenced in her family. The affirmation Jenny ­repeated (though she didn’t at this time really ­believe it) was that fear is an acceptable ­human emotion.

Step three was allowing herself to begin to tolerate the feeling of fear rather than to run in a panic the second the feeling arose. I call this step “sensation” to underline the fact that emotions are palpable ­energies in the body. It’s common for people to ­mistake their thoughts and ruminations for genuine feelings because we’re unfamiliar with the sensation of e­motional energy in the body, much less with ­allowing it to flow.

Contextualization, the fourth step, ­required Jenny to widen the focus of her attention from fear in the body to the larger context of fear in her family. The family culture of fear-denial, reinforced every day by her father’s macho take-no-prisoners attitude toward any sign of emotion, had led Jenny to see herself as an irredeemable coward, unworthy of respect or love. With her awareness of this larger context came a revelation: Jenny was the “carrier” of ­emotion for the family—and punished for it. But she didn’t have to punish herself. She could finally let herself off the hook for being such a “wimp.”

The fifth step was the “way of non-action.” This is what psychologists call ­building affect tolerance. Jenny had set a goal for herself: to swim across Long Pond on Cape Cod as a final proof that her phobia was “cured.” I taught her to imagine herself swimming in this pond and to breathe through the fear consciously as it arose. It was only after a lot of work with this step that she was ready for step six: the way of action. For Jenny (as is the case with many people suffering from phobias), the action was clear: to do the thing she feared.

Jenny did swim across Long Pond—with fear accompanying her all the way. She worried this meant she hadn’t conquered her phobia and was surprised to hear me say: This is what courage is all about—feeling the fear rather than disowning it, and not letting it stop you. All you need to do now is let yourself continue to swim with your fear and you’ll find that the fear will change, as you will.

A year later, Jenny sent me a note telling me that she had taken my advice. “For the first time, I feel free,” she said, “not only to swim, but to enjoy myself in the deep water and to appreciate who I am.” She signed the card, “No longer a wimp, Jenny.”

Jenny had discovered the seventh step of emotional alchemy: surrender. Swimming with her fear, she had opened to and reclaimed the full range of her emotional sensitivity. The gift in this journey was the joy she found in the water and in herself.

There is nothing so whole as a broken heart,” said Jewish sage Menachem Mendle Schneerson. “The dark has its own light,” wrote poet Theodore Roethke. Albert Camus notes, “In the depth of winter, I found that there was in me an invincible summer.”

The art of emotional alchemy is ­perhaps best understood through poetry. The dark emotions have an intelligence and ­transformational potential largely unknown in emotion-phobic culture. Experiencing these alchemies depends on cultivating three basic skills: attending to emotions, befriending emotional energy in the body and consciously surrendering to their flow (even when the flow is so slow it feels static).

Speaking of the seven “steps” of this process in Jenny’s story is a way to systematize an essentially non-linear, often chaotic process. In the throes of grief, fear or despair, the sense of “going nowhere” and the attendant anxiety it raises can abort emotional alchemy. That’s why the capacity to surrender is perhaps the most difficult and critical step of all. This is the sacred or spiritual aspect of the dance of dark emotions: trusting that what feels like emotional chaos has the potential to be creative and purposeful if we’re able to relinquish our need to know how it will all come out.

Creative projects and prayer are two powerful ways of surrender that we can all practice, requiring no particular talent or religious faith. Sing your grief; dance your despair; drum your fear. Chant, write, paint—any open creative channel is a way to surrender beyond the rational mind. It’s here that we discover the vast intuitive gifts of the emotions and learn to trust them, even when they hurt.

As for prayer, anyone can pray in a simple, heart-centered way. The three basic prayers are essentially: help me, thank you and I surrender. You don’t have to believe in a religion to ask for help from a resource or power outside your ordinary ego or to express gratitude for what you have in your life.

Or to practice the art of open-hearted surrender that comes with saying “So be it” when every bone in your body tells you to scream, “No!”

When our hearts are most broken, they’re most open. It’s the openness that makes us whole. This is the way we become enlightened through the darkness.

Or, as Leonard Cohen sang it: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

Issue: Spring 2011

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Tauriq Moosa: What I’m asking is a change. Because when we stop talking about meaninglessness from a cosmic perspective, we can start talking about meaning from a human one. It is from here, and only here, that we can derive meaning. ...Life is absurd and boring and strange, or perhaps hard and difficult and painful. Whatever it is for you, I can offer you no advice on how to make it better except perhaps to realise whatever the solution no god is helping you and the universe really doesn’t care. But does that make your life meaningless? Hardly.

Imagine what could happen if instead of focusing on worst-case scenarios and fears, we put our attention on what we deeply desire and are working toward?

Welcome to my new blog about empathy – the art of stepping into the shoes of other people and seeing the world from their perspective.

I believe that empathy can help us escape from the narrow confines of our own existence and guide us towards more adventurous and fulfilling lives. Empathy is also a radical tool for social transformation that has the potential to bring about change not through new laws, policies or institutions, but through a revolution of human relationships. Barack Obama has said the most fundamental problem in modern society is ‘the empathy deficit’. Harnessing the transformative power of empathy is the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

This weekly blog will contain my own thoughts on empathy, the stories of empathetic adventurers, interviews with key empathy activists and thinkers, and act as a global portal for empathy news from around the world. I also hope it becomes a place where people can share their personal experiences of looking at life through they eyes of others.

I would like to launch this blog with a story that I hope you find as inspiring as I do.

The Locket

‘It was a sight I will never be able to forget, and it changed my life completely,’ remembers Rami Elchanan, an Israeli graphic designer. On a Thursday afternoon in September 1997, his daughter Smadar, a vivacious fourteen-year-old who loved modern dance and dreamed of becoming a doctor, had gone shopping for new school books with friends on Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem. At three o’clock Rami heard news reports on his car radio of a Palestinian suicide bombing nearby that had injured hundreds and left several people dead. He immediately went looking for his daughter, frantically running from street to street, from hospital to hospital. Finally he found her. Smadar’s body was laid out in a morgue.

Rami’s immediate reaction was rage. ‘When someone murders your little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death.’ Gradually the anger subsided and his life became enveloped by an unbearable grief for the loss of his child. A year after the bombing Rami was invited to a meeting of the Parents Circle – also known as the Bereaved Families Forum – which brings together Israelis and Palestinians whose family members have been killed in the conflict. Initially reluctant and sceptical about the usefulness of such an organisation, he eventually agreed to take part. He watched with detachment as other Israeli families began to arrive. And then he witnessed something extraordinary. ‘I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women, children, coming towards me, greeting me, hugging me and crying with me. I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old. A singer sang in Hebrew and Arabic, and suddenly I was hit by lightning. I can’t explain the change I underwent at that moment.’

Until then Rami, who was forty-seven at the time, had never shaken hands with a Palestinian, let alone embraced one. The meeting, for him, was a new beginning. He realised that there were Palestinians who had suffered the same sorrows as him and his family. They were united by a shared experience that allowed them to understand one another’s lives. ‘What connects us is the pain,’ he says. ‘Our blood is the same red colour, our suffering is identical, and all of us have the exact same bitter tears.’ Through his involvement with the Bereaved Families Forum, Rami was able to humanise the enemy, to see that Palestinians, not just Israelis, were victims of the conflict. ‘I had gone through a long process of demonizing them,’ he admits. ’By meeting the Palestinian bereaved families, I saw Palestinians as human beings, not caricatures in newspapers or articles or history items, but real people, crying with me. That was my turning point.’

Since that first meeting Rami has dedicated himself to the cause of Israeli -Palestinian reconciliation and the pioneering work of the Bereaved Families Forum, whose membership comprises over five hundred families. He took part in a unique project where bereaved Israelis travelled to a hospital in Ramallah and donated blood for Palestinian victims, while bereaved Palestinian families went to Jerusalem and donated blood to the Israeli Red Cross. Another initiative, called ‘Hello Peace’, is an unusual form of answering service. You dial a freephone number and if you are Israeli you can speak with a Palestinian, and if you are Palestinian you talk to an Israeli. Since it began in 2002, there have been over a million conversations between the two sides. While some calls begin as screaming matches, others have led to lasting friendships.

Rami Elchanan, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, is regularly abused and ridiculed in Israeli circles for fraternising with the relatives of suicide bombers. But he knows that there is no hope of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without mutual understanding, without conversations between strangers that erode the distance of ignorance: ‘We must be prepared to listen to ‘the other’. Because if we will not listen to the other’s story we won’t be able to understand the source of their pain and we should not expect the other to understand our own.’

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Paul Martin of Original Faith. Thanks Paul!

Today I’m mostly bedridden – in my sixteenth year of a rare, incurable disease. On 9/11, although seriously disabled, I was still employed as a school counselor at an elementary school just up Columbia Pike from the Pentagon. The day began as follows.

Explosion

In Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington DC, the morning of September 11, 2001, was one in a string of clear, mild days that almost felt like the return of spring. As usual, I clicked off the news on my radio shortly before 8:30 AM and headed for Patrick Henry Elementary School, which stood almost directly across the street from my apartment.

I’d been scheduled to speak to a class first thing that morning and had just returned to my office when our principal made a quick detour to step inside my door. With a roomful of second graders at her back, Cintia spoke quietly. “Have you heard the news?” she asked.

“I was listening to the news before heading out this morning…” I didn’t know what she was referring to.

Cintia started to tell me something about a plane crash in New York when she paused in mid-sentence: “Did you hear that?” she asked, looking at me intently. I played it back… I had — a low rumbling sound that had lasted two or three seconds. We would soon learn that a plane had just struck the Pentagon a couple miles away.

The rest of the day was a blur. And in the days, weeks, and months that would follow, my longstanding feelings of anger and indignation around my personal situation, as well as those that initially flared up in reaction to the terrorist attacks, were blown into oblivion – and many things fell into place. Things I’d had intimations of for years and, at one level or another, all my life.

Forms of Asymmetry

During the months prior to 9/11, my condition had been deteriorating more rapidly than ever. I had been doing everything in my power to resist the gathering darkness – but there it was.

Four fiery crashes – and there it was again. Reality. Reality that featured immense and undeniable darkness. The darkness of witnessing explosions shatter a beautiful morning. The darkness of the terrorist mind and the social injustices that helped shape it. The darkness of the deaths of victims and of their families and friends facing lifetimes of loss. The darkness of senselessness, with its outraged and unanswerable, “Why?”

It was as if the fireballs that had instantaneously affected so many other lives as they glittered across a planet’s television screens had publicly proclaimed the undeniable existence of a darkness that I had been experiencing in private for so long. Yet the nation’s life would go forward. And so would mine.

Not many things are black and white, but this is one:
Own the darkness when it comes
Or see the light extinguished.

Own the darkness of your unfair share, for there is one world that is strewn and streaked with darkness and light. Great pain brings us to see that we are no exception. What happens happens. The spinning world is streaked and dappled. A single shifting shaft or shadow can make our little lives appear specially blessed or specially cursed. Neither is true, and each of us should be prepared for change; for the streaks and patterns move and morph like clouds over a weather map, bringing both calm and chaos.

Allness

Accept the darkness and accept the light – and lean toward the light. Lean toward what you feel but cannot see, like a plant under the sun.

There is only One whole world, and it is dark, it is light, and it is leaning slightly and always toward the light. It is All inexplicable.

There is deep darkness – terrible, painful, haunting shadow. It can even overshadow our greatest dreams, and yet faith tells us that the World’s dream is so much greater: like a far-off dawn just now touching the tips of our tallest trees, illuminating little, but just enough for us to run toward light.

Lean, look forward, and run. The shadows may even swallow your last chance on earth for what you call success or happiness, and which may indeed have been a good thing. But there is such a thing as darkness, and none are exempt from either its certain eventualities or worst possibilities.

Indignation and resentment do nothing except make us lose our forward poise and balance, that asymmetry which is the measure of our humanity. They only rob us of the good things that are left, the helpful inclinations that may otherwise have been possible for us, including possibilities that we may not foresee. Our outrage only slams the door on God. Our violent protests only shut out the Allness of our owness.

In desperation and love, through the fearful sense of falling backward and losing ourselves, and the loving desire to find our balance in the wider and more truthful World, we seek union with the asymmetrical, forward, lightful bent of life’s dark soul in us.

Accept the fullness of what you cannot understand. Allow the Allness of your owness to settle over your shoulders.

Being Here

What is, is. Let me be a piece of that,
Amid the horror, explosions, shatteredness,
The strands of sense and beauty, the irresolvable whole.
WHAT IS is, and I shall be myself.
Contradictions are not resolved, yet I begin to resolve
The contradictions. I do not feel the tension any more.
The Whole is doing what it does, and I
Am wholly doing what I do.
In the crosshairs now, I see WHAT IS.
I cannot miss!
Desiring nothing for my splintered self,
I am being every inch something.
I care, but do not care.
I let go of my stake in all former aspirations;
Aspiring to nothing, I am occupied, every inch, with being something.
The worst cannot undo the act of what I am doing, and the best
Cannot change it. I am here. I am desperate, wise, strong
And live now beyond the land of my own dreams.
None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them
As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself.
Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is.
Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.

Where Do You Stand?

Once, long ago, I knew a way of great and growing joy. For many years now, I have known a way of great and increasing pain.

Suffering, we become empty. Joyous, we find more space. Either way, a new identity surges into the void that opens us up far beyond the borders of what we once called self.

On the way, there is an ego to outgrow and, eventually, a life to give up for a greater.

Where do you stand?

About the author

Paul Maurice Martin is author of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You and blogs at www.originalfaith.com. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire.

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One of my happiness-project resolutions is to Meditate on koans. In Buddhist tradition, a Zen koan (rhymes with Ken Cohen) is a question or a statement that can’t be understood logically. Monks meditate on koans as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment. The most famous koan is probably: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”

I'm haunted by my own koans – lines that flicker through my mind and evade logical thinking. One of my koans is from the Bible, Mark 4:25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

This doesn’t really sound fair, on first reading! I think the meaning of Jesus’ words is something like, “Those who have sought to understand divine truth will learn more, and those who haven’t tried won’t even remember the little they’ve learned.”

But whatever Jesus meant in the context of that verse, I find myself thinking about it in the happiness context, and I’ve often reflected that this statement sums up one of the cruel truths about happiness, and about human nature generally: you get more of what you have.

When you feel friendly, people want to be your friend. When you feel sexy, people are attracted to you. When you feel confident, others have confidence in you.

This truth is cruel because so often, you want others to give you what you feel you’re lacking. It’s when you’re feeling isolated and awkward that you want people to be friendly. When you’re feeling ugly, you want someone to tell you how sexy you are. When you’re feeling insecure, you wish someone would express confidence in you.

During my happiness project, I’ve been startled to discover the efficacy of the third of my Personal Commandments: Act the way I want to feel.

This commandment is important for two reasons. First, although we think we act because of the way we feel, often we feel because of the way we act. So by acting the way we wish we felt, we can change our emotions – a strategy that is uncannily effective.

Second, the world’s reaction to us is quite influenced by the way we act toward the world. For example, in situation evocation, we spark a response from people that reinforces a tendency we already have — for example, if I act irritable all the time, the people around me are going to treat me with less patience and helpfulness, which will, in turn, stoke my irritability. If I can manage to joke around, I’ll evoke a situation in which the people around me were more likely to joke around, too.

Life isn’t fair. People with a propensity to good cheer will find themselves in a friendly, cheerful environment, while people who are already angry or crabby will find themselves surrounded by uncooperative, suspicious people. “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Which leads, as always, to the same conclusion: that even though it’s tempting sometimes to think that I’d be much happier if other people would behave differently toward me, the only person whose behavior I can change is myself. If I want people to be friendlier to me, I must be friendlier. If I want my husband to be tender and romantic, I must be tender and romantic. If I want our household atmosphere to be light-hearted, I must be light-hearted.

Goethe wrote: “I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.” And he that brings a sunny day will find a sunny day waiting for him.

* The folks from the terrific site Wise Bread have done a great new book, 10,0001 Ways to Life Large on a Small Budget. It's an excellent resource, and the information is presented in an attractive, accessible, and even funny way. I got a lot of great ideas from the book.

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