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.
The True Meaning of Faith
Belief, in its original, 17th century sense meant, "an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions; I commit myself, I engage myself." In other words, trust in God was not something that one simply decided. It was through committed action that rendered one's relationship to God. Belief was something that was discovered through practice.
Years ago I came across a talk by Karen Armstrong on the Golden Rule. What stayed with me was a side point about the word belief.
In its older sense, belief did not mean agreeing to a set of propositions. It meant something closer to commitment: I engage myself. Trust in God was not something you decided. It formed through practice, day in and day out, and the doctrine only made sense once you were living it. Armstrong's point was that religious teachings are a summons to action, and you understand them only when you act on them.
The Yoga Sutras work the same way. There is a worldview under the text, but it is barely described, and it does not much matter whether the yogi believes in it. The text is organized around practice, the doing. What comes out of the practice is a kind of insight you can trust. That is belief in the old sense. You did not take it on. You arrived at it.
Once, I tried to open a debate with an orthodox Jewish friend about his interpretation of the Torah. He told me we couldn't have the discussion because he understood the Torah to be written by God, and I understood it to be written by men. To talk with him, I would have had to disbelieve what I knew. That is the modern arrangement: a comprehensive account of the world that asks you to override your own sense of things. Blind faith is claiming to know a subject you never studied.
Practice can turn into the same trap. I've seen yoga and meditation teachers whose whole lives are dedicated to a severe version of a tradition, even when it injures them and the people they teach. They can contort their bodies. They stopped growing a long time ago. The adherence became the point.
Whatever discipline you keep, its job is to put you in contact with something you could not have seen otherwise. Stay with it long enough, and what forms is different from blind faith. It is the kind of trust you know in your bones, even in the moments you've lost your way.