A Genuine Heart of Sadness
"Grief requires us to know the time we're in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to know things for what they are.
"Our time requires us to be hope-free -- to burn through the false choice of being hopeful or hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed." (Stephen Jenkinson)
"The depth of your grief is the measure of the your love." (Joanna Macy)
Going beyond the surface to what is real, genuine, authentic.
For many years I’ve been going deeper into what life is all about.
Life itself compels me to keep going, digging and working my fingers to the bone, so often leaving my heart and soul tattered and torn by what I see and feel. Reality isn't happy. Happy is a façade, a story we tell ourselves.
Many ask why. And say that everything I need is right here on the surface. Just be happy. Don’t worry about the deeper things. As we hide that which is deeper in life, we also hide that which is deeper within ourselves. The journey of life doesn’t go miles or distances, it spirals deeper within and without, outward and beyond.
It is true that everything I need is available to me. But it cannot be found scurrying around on the surface. That is just another form of busyness, another facade to hide behind.
Abundance is a fountain that can only be tapped at the source, and that which is real lies at our Source, our Ground of Being.
The Surface is nothing but the scurrying around of busy-ness, chasing scarcity mindlessly like a dog chases its tail. If we stay on the surface, we can never go within, deeper, to the Source.
"There’s this sadness in you. It’s in all of us, but you walk with it as a companion, I think, more openly than we’re taught to do."
(a statement by Krista Tippett to David Whyte) Here is part of his answer:
"This is another delusion we have, that we can take a sincere path in life without having our heart broken."
So many people refuse this journey and busy themselves with the pretty things, the glitz and the glamor, the noise and the clamor that is on the surface of life. Are we afraid of what might be down there in the substrata of the psyche, or heart, or soul? It is there that we hide our monsters, our shadows, and that little black box with the big iron lock where we put those things that must never escape and disrupt our lives of comfort, security, and certainty. We want to look good and feel good and strive after being comfortable and content with personal peace and affluence.
“Aren’t we troubled by our culture’s overemphasis on happiness? Don’t we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?” (Eric G Wilson, Against Happiness: in praise of melancholy)
We forget that the problem is this: the surface is the facade, the mask we wear for the world to see. The plastic face that is always on; happy, smiling, and nodding like a bobble head. A never ending story that is never really told because the real story is within; the interior landscape that we so rarely know or care to know. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just keep smiling.
Be fake and stay unreal. It’s easier even though it is not real. It is nothing but an illusion.
In my own experience, after my first divorce when I was 30 years old, I found that as I struggled and grieved with such excruciating pain from my deep sense of loss, I became numb. It would take a few weeks for me to realize the feeling of numbness that was eating away at my life force. I began to notice that I wasn’t sad and I wasn’t happy. I was nothing. Numb. Comfortably numb. Intuitively (being quite emotionally intelligent all of my life) I knew I had to do something just so that I could feel again, so I could feel something, anything. And my most powerful numbness-buster was pain and sadness. I would go to places where I’d feel the most pain from the best memories and make myself remember, make myself feel again, by making myself cry and cry and cry.
As I write this, we are in the pandemic of COVID 19, locked down in our homes with no public space to go to interact and socialize with others. Fortunately, I do live with others in a large home where I can socialize with those most familiar with me. But I have noticed that I have found great peace knowing that for now, this is my time of stillness and contemplation and isolation. I think my experiences in life have helped me ride out these strange times politically, religiously, environmentally, and economically. During this time, I am very grateful for the solid foundation of a genuine heart of sadness.
Sadness is a reality check: “Deep sorrow comes from realizing everything we previously took to be lasting and real is actually just about to disappear.” (Chogyam Trungpa)
When you hit the ground: what is there? What constitutes the interior landscape? What is real? What I have found is this.
Basic Goodness. A sacredness and beauty at the heart of all things, all people, all of creation.
From the ground of basic goodness, we step out into the world bearing an all encompassing gentleness, first toward oneself and then toward all people. Our basic goodness, when embraced, begets tenderness, toward myself and toward others. And tenderness begets gentleness. From this ground we begin to see through the eyes of the brokenhearted; both the eyes of those that are brokenhearted and also from the eyes of our own brokenheartedness. And we truly see that blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the brokenhearted. Blessed are the meek and humble in heart.
This is the stance from which we see,
from which we see all things, all people, all creation,
from which we see beneath the surface to the heart.
As we learn to see our basic poverty of spirit, we can then live out of the abundance we are given.
From this standpoint comes a genuine heart of sadness. We see others without pomp and circumstance, laid bare before us. We see with a heart of tenderness. No one better than another. No one richer than another. No one poorer. No one greater or lesser. No one bigger or smaller. Except that the greatest among us will be the servant among us. And out of this shared poverty and seeming scarcity comes neverending abundance of simplicity, peace, compassion, and gentleness. And love casts out fear.
And it is out of this ground springs fearlessness,
Fearlessness to live in the face of the forces in life that are
tearing us apart
trying to make us build walls,
trying to plow us underground,
trying to make us construct facades of protection
so that we again hide rather than stand up, be seen, and live.
Through the storms
Through the chaos
Through the mindlessness
Through the meaninglessness
Through the meanness
Through the absurdity
We stand up and live.
During my second divorce, I came across a rather strange book with the name: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, which gave me pause. I like things that give me pause to think and reflect on life whether books or movies or whatever, especially when they have a bent toward that which is counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. I’m also quite emotional most of the time, so I even cry at hallmark commercials and their equivalent these days. That flow of emotions is healthy, life-giving, and nurtures creativity. It is often when I am saddest that I can write most prolifically, profoundly, and deeply. Below are a couple of quotes from this book.
“Surely some of you have felt the same way that I do. You have turned sullenly from those thousands of glowing, perfect teeth lighting the American landscape and slouched to the darkness—the half-lighted room, the twilight forest, the empty café. There you have sat and settled into the bare, hard fact that the world is terrible in its beauty, indifferent much of the time, incoherent and nervous and resplendent when on certain evenings, when the clouds are right, a furious owl swooshes luridly from the horizon. You feel that sweet pressure behind your eyes, as if you would at any minute explode into hot tears. You long to languish in this unnamed sadness, this vague sense that everything is precious because it is dying, because you can never hold it, because it exists for only an instant.”
“Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life.”
― Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
Out of a foundation of Basic Goodness comes Tenderness from which we develop Gentleness toward oneself and to all others. Opening the heart to fully feel the world of suffering gives us a Genuine Heart of Sadness.
We then can go into this world with Gentleness and Fearlessness
"Basic Goodness is good, (not because it is not bad,) but because it is unconditional or fundamental. It is there already in the same way that heaven and earth are there already."
We do nothing but recognize it and embrace it. Basic Goodness is there just like the sunlight, always there for us. We are what we are. We have what we need. We are exactly where we should be. How do we know this? Because we would not be here otherwise. Trust the natural order of things. Inherent in Basic Goodness is Abundance.
"We should look further and more precisely at what we are, where we are, who we are, when we are, and how we are as human beings, so that we can take possession of our basic goodness."
From the deep realization of our own basic goodness we develop a tenderness toward ourselves. This then awakens our heart, an empty heart. "If you put your hand through your chest and feel for it, there is nothing but tenderness. You feel dizzy and sore, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of Sadness does not come from being mistreated. You don't feel sad because someone insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There is no skin or tissue covering it; it is pure, raw meat. Even if a mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched. Your experience is raw and tender and so personal.
"The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart's blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you hit them back. However, we are not talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others." (Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala: the Sacred Path of the Warrior. pp. 33,34)
Sitting with Sadness & How it Can Lead to Awakening
Eric Wilson writes that “Sadness reconciles us to realities. It throws us into the flow of life,” because “When we are forced to face the fact that our existences are but mere blips on the scale of cosmic time, we realize how absolutely precious every instant is.” In the same way, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche writes that, “The profound sadness that overwhelms us when we understand the impermanent nature of all phenomena opens us up to the world around us.”
Maybe awakening is a kind of sorrowful joy, maybe it is a melancholy bliss. Sometimes it’s sorrow that opens us up to the love of the world. Sometimes it’s sadness that leads to an awakened view of the way things really are.
One more reflection from Against Happiness: “Now, at least in my eyes, the numerous churches devoted to Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterian, Lutherans and the like are basically happiness companies, corporations that focus on how one can achieve blessedness while living in this world.” Hmmm...
"It is not sufficient merely to see that sentient beings are suffering. You must also develop a sense of closeness with them, a sense that they are dear."
—Jeffrey Hopkins, “Everyone as a Friend”
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