Facing Negativity
Our experience of difficulty depends entirely on the meaning we bring to it. Some perspectives empower us and some render us incapacitated. How we hold the circumstances of our lives can either grow us or take us down.
Mary was 48 and had spent her whole life driven to make it big in the corporate world. She arrived at my office and said, "I am totally burnt out and am just going through the motions of my life." She wasn't sleeping. Her relationship was suffering. She'd already been to a psychologist, and that work had shown her why she felt stuck. Knowing why hadn't moved anything.
When I asked why she didn't leave the job or change it, she said even the thought felt like torture. Her sense of self rose and fell with her work. She'd spent decades getting to the top, and now that she'd made it she was looking around asking, is this as good as it gets.
She said the money was why she couldn't move. She also knew, when she looked at it, that her family would be fine on less. The money was the cover story.
Underneath it was this. Her mother drank, and was sometimes present and sometimes gone altogether. Mary had built a life of professional accolades so she would never again feel the way she felt as a little girl: scared and destitute. That was the deal. Keep achieving and you never have to feel it.
Most of us carry a version of that sentence. I never want to feel that again. The stories that run our lives are not just about succeeding. They are about not feeling something.
So the work with Mary wasn't reframing her situation. It was meeting the feeling the whole structure was built to avoid. When she turned toward it, it showed up in her body: fluttering in the chest, queasiness in the stomach, a knot in the throat.
Clients ask me, "Why would I want to be with this shit?" Fair question. The answer I keep coming back to is that whatever you refuse to feel gets to run things. The fear of ending up destitute had been making Mary's decisions for forty years. She had never once looked at it directly.
When she met the terror instead of managing it, it loosened. Not gone. Loosened. She stopped being afraid of feeling it, and the job question got simpler. Over the next six months she found her way to work that looked, from the outside, like a demotion. She sleeps. She has dinner with her girlfriend. She is not going through the motions.
Staying Open
Circumstances don't make the light dim within us. At each threshold, no matter what we face, we have a choice, to stay open or close.
My aunt Jeannde came to my yoga classes at 87. She bent and twisted and breathed next to the twenty-somethings in the room. When I told her a few of my students found her inspiring, she couldn't understand why. Age meant nothing to her, except that her body answered less easily than it had in her years as a dancer.
There's a photo of her with whipped cream smeared across her face. She was playful right to the end.
Melissa and I said goodbye a few days before she died. She was somewhere between this life and the next, in a lot of physical pain, and not scared. We managed a few words. We told each other what we had meant to each other. We said I love you. Then we said goodbye.
I've thought about that room a lot since. Not because she made dying look peaceful. Because she stayed with what was happening, including the parts that hurt.
Most of the people I work with have learned the opposite move. When something hurts, or turns uncertain, or doesn't fit the calendar, they close around it and keep going. You override the part of you that is tired or afraid, and you perform through it. It works for a long time. That is the problem with it.
Jeannde didn't perform anything. She was in pain, and she said I love you in the same breath. She didn't leave herself to get through the moment.
At each threshold, there's the same choice: to stay or to close around it and go. She was in a lot of pain, and she stayed.