A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: What if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that?
While I have addressed the issue indirectly in other blogs (see below), it is time to address it head on. At the heart of the matter is the question of pain: what it is, how we sense it, and how we respond to it.
Pain, together with pleasure, comprise the primary feedback available to our thinking selves about how well the movements we are making in the world are making us.
My aim (or one of them) in writing What a Body Knows was to shift our experience of pain along (at least) four registers, in each case, moving from a mind over body perspective to one that affirms our sensations of pain as resources guiding us along the path of our own unique bodily becoming.
1) Part/ Whole: When we hurt, our mind over body tendency is to identify the pain with one part of ourselves, isolate that part from the rest, and work to make "it" go away. Whether our head hurts, our stomach cramps, our back aches, our hips creak, our heart pines, or our energies flag, we either try to ignore our sensations, or we become obsessed with fixing them. Pain is the problem. "I" must fix "it."
However, when we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement--the movement of creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response (as described in What a Body Knows)--we realize that any manifestation of pain in one part of ourselves always expresses a movement pattern that engages every moment of ourselves, physical to spiritual. A part is part of a whole, and that whole is what is hurting.
The implications are several. Because any pain involves a whole person, any healing must also engage the whole person. Any effective response will involve integrating the part into the whole, understanding the connections among person parts, and discerning as best we can how the movements we are making are creating this pain as a guide to move differently than we are now.
2) New/ Old: When something begins to bother us, we also tend to think of the pain or illness or injury as new--that is, as a departure from our otherwise usual or normal healthy state. Most pain feels accidental. It comes upon us as a surprise that we were not expecting. We experience it as an obstacle to our forward motion.
However, once we understand our bodily selves as movement, we realize that by the time we feel a part of ourselves as pain, the whole-body patterns that that pain is expressing have already been in play for a while and at many levels of our existence. Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and others, the movements we make as we go about our usual activities, our hopes and fears, as well as our general outlook on the world, are all, to greater and lesser extents, bound up in the pain.
The implication here is that healing involves recreating patterns of sensation and response that have been at work for a long time, slowly creating a situation where we feel a particular point of pain. Healing takes time.
3) Read/ Felt: Further, when people acknowledge the importance of "listening" to their feelings of discomfort, they often talk about reading "the" body or listening to "the" body, as if there is an "I" that exists above and apart from the body who can see it, know it, and fix it.
However, the kind of wisdom that our bodily selves have is not a formula or a schema that "we" can read and then impose upon our bodies, so as to make them do what we want to do, and stop hurting.
The kind of wisdom our bodily selves are is an ability to sense impulses guiding us to move in ways that will coordinate our pleasure, our health, and our well being. This is who we humans are--this impulse to connect with whatever will support us in becoming who we are. We can and must connect with other people, with elements, with our own bodily selves, with ideas, activities, and cultural forms in order to unfold our skills and abilities.
In every case, as we connect in life-enabling ways, we learn something more about how to move in ways that will connect us more effectively with what nourishes our well-being. This is what pain teaches us: not how to deal with it, and not to obsess over it, but how to discern and move with whatever impulse to connect it represents.
Pain is a desire to be free from it. Yet unless we allow ourselves to welcome it as offering us vital information about our selves and situation, we will not fully grasp that desire.
Pain is not holding us back. It is calling us to be free from whatever is holding us back.
4) Responsible/ Participating: Where I am moving with this line of thought is far from the all-too-common self-help theme: you can heal yourself. People seem to think that once they acknowledge their pain and admit that their sensations have something to teach them, then any pain they feel is their fault. They are responsible for healing themselves. When the pain persists, self-judgment can weigh heavily.
Once we shift to an experience of ourselves as movement, however, we realize that pain is not our fault, that "we" are not responsible for our pain, and that "we" cannot heal ourselves. Rather, healing is who we are: it is an ever-ongoing process in which our bodily selves are ever and forever active. In this process, our pain is helping us appreciate how and where our healing energies have more potential for creating us anew. What that "we" can do is learn how to align our mental energies with the trajectories of healing already at work in our bodily selves.
The question then is this: how can we participate in our healing as consciously as possible?
What a Body Knows offers a response: if we cultivate a sensory awareness of how our movements are making us, we have what we need to begin to discern the wisdom in feelings of disease, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.
It is not just a matter of allowing ourselves to feel what we are feeling, though such mindfulness is an important first step. Nor is it a matter of identifying the patterns of mental, emotional, and physical movement that are knotting us. What is most important is being able to open a space in ourselves where we can find in our sensations our core desires, our impulses to connect, and begin to move with them, in ways that do not recreate the pain that troubles us.
Every pain is a potential for pleasure that is yet to unfold.
For more blogs on this topic:
1. about the seemingly pointless pain of the flue: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201008/what-do-you-do-the-flu
2. about the limits of "listening" to your body
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/200909/the-limits-listening-your-body
Showing posts with label pain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pain. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Cycling through Depression
The drag of depression can come upon us at any time. Nagging at our edges, pulling us down. Often we are not expecting it. Clouds roll slowly in over our heads; or form suddenly, at the slightest provocation, and swarm into a massive thunderhead. The storm may build across years, or crash upon us all at once.
When it does, we can’t move. Things we once enjoyed pale; things we have to do weigh heavily. We may feel as if our life is falling apart, or too tightly wrapped in routine. Something is missing; something is wrong. Sometimes we are clear about what that missing thing is; sometimes everything is grey. Sadness soaks in or a lackluster indifference, perhaps laced with resentment. We don’t want to feel this way.
In such moments, the cycle of breaths (see side bar) can be a life-enabling intervention, for it opens up a sensory space in which we are able to discern this pain as an expression of our desire for spirit—we want more. More vitality, more direction, more belonging. And we can also appreciate the wisdom in these feelings guiding us to move differently, in ways that will support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. Really?
*
When depression grips or anxiety wrings, even if we don’t feel like doing anything, even if we can’t do anything, we can breathe. We are breathing, and we can allow our attention to rest on our breathing.
Earth breath (1/29). We can just let go and release the effort of trying to hold ourselves up. We can let ourselves lie down, sink down, touch down, breathing the length of our body into the floor.
As you breathe your cells toward the earth, notice the earth pressing back up at you. The ground is supporting you, holding you, doing all of the work for you. You can learn into it. You will not fall. You don’t have to do anything. You are breathing.
In such moments, the cycle of breaths opens a small safe place for us to affirm that we are. Who we are. Where we are. This is who I am right now. We stop fighting. I can only begin from where I am. I am here. Am here. Here. The earth, pressing back on us, gives us a sense we are lacking of our solidity, our weight, as we give ourselves to it.
Air breath (2/5). We breathe down into the earth, and breathing again, out through our skin into the air. Attending, we follow the breath in and out. Surfaces dissolve. Skin is porous.
As you breathe yourself light, the tight curl of your pain comes into view. Breathe around it, and slowly breathe through it, inviting it to unfold. As your sensation expands, it may grow large indeed, erupting in a cry of exasperation or despair. Breathing out, soften the jagged edges, and sigh with relief as you allow the sensation to be what it is. Your yearning. You want something you don’t have, but what? Possibilities shuffle before you. Food. Touch. Affirmation. Comfort. Security. Purpose. You feel constraints holding you back. You can’t. You won’t. You don’t have time or money. It is inappropriate. It is wrong.
As we breathe our pain open, our sense of it shifts. The movements I am making are making me. Split. Conflicted. At war with my own self. Out of control. Empty. Helpless. There is nothing I can do. We may realize how tired we are. How buried in work. How dazed by the noise and confusion of our lives. How immured in the walls of our dulled senses. We may also feel impulses to respond that flare with frustration at our weakness. We want to clamp down on ourselves or simply give up.
Breathing again, through the heart, down into the earth, up and out into the sky, let that breathe too. Let yourself breathe. I am here. I am doing this. I am breathing.
Fire breath (2/13). The fire breath sinks a deeper charge. We breathe down into the ground, out into the skin-touched light, and then into the cradle of our bellies. We follow the breath deep into our sensory folds and squeeze—pumping awareness through our flesh. We activate an inner sense of movement.
I am breathing and this pain is telling me that there are movements in me waiting to be made—movements crying out in frustration at being boxed in for so long. There are capacities to give—limbs of myself that are languishing for the relationships that will support their fruit. I can move. I am moving.
Water breath (2/19). As you squeeze and release, energy pulses through your self, up through your vital core. Subtle at first. Ripples then waves. It can be terrifying. For as energy flows, your feelings of depression, anxiety, or despair may grow stronger yet again. Clearer. This is what the movements I am making are killing in me.
So too, along with the terror comes an even stronger sensory awareness. The movements I am making as I breathe are making me into someone who wants to move differently, who can move differently. I am giving birth to myself as someone who is more than this pain. Who can find in this pain an impulse to move.
*
When we practice the cycle of breaths, the shift in our experience of our pain happens instantly. Always. But sometimes, when the hurt is thick and layered, it can take time for the cycle of breaths to sink through and open up the possibilities for movement that lie within. We learn from our pain and pleasure how to give birth to ourselves as the people we are and want to be. It is the work of a moment, the work of a lifetime. This play is serious.
Next week: How and why the cycle of breaths (and religion) works.
When it does, we can’t move. Things we once enjoyed pale; things we have to do weigh heavily. We may feel as if our life is falling apart, or too tightly wrapped in routine. Something is missing; something is wrong. Sometimes we are clear about what that missing thing is; sometimes everything is grey. Sadness soaks in or a lackluster indifference, perhaps laced with resentment. We don’t want to feel this way.
In such moments, the cycle of breaths (see side bar) can be a life-enabling intervention, for it opens up a sensory space in which we are able to discern this pain as an expression of our desire for spirit—we want more. More vitality, more direction, more belonging. And we can also appreciate the wisdom in these feelings guiding us to move differently, in ways that will support us in becoming who we are and unfolding what we have to give. Really?
*
When depression grips or anxiety wrings, even if we don’t feel like doing anything, even if we can’t do anything, we can breathe. We are breathing, and we can allow our attention to rest on our breathing.
Earth breath (1/29). We can just let go and release the effort of trying to hold ourselves up. We can let ourselves lie down, sink down, touch down, breathing the length of our body into the floor.
As you breathe your cells toward the earth, notice the earth pressing back up at you. The ground is supporting you, holding you, doing all of the work for you. You can learn into it. You will not fall. You don’t have to do anything. You are breathing.
In such moments, the cycle of breaths opens a small safe place for us to affirm that we are. Who we are. Where we are. This is who I am right now. We stop fighting. I can only begin from where I am. I am here. Am here. Here. The earth, pressing back on us, gives us a sense we are lacking of our solidity, our weight, as we give ourselves to it.
Air breath (2/5). We breathe down into the earth, and breathing again, out through our skin into the air. Attending, we follow the breath in and out. Surfaces dissolve. Skin is porous.
As you breathe yourself light, the tight curl of your pain comes into view. Breathe around it, and slowly breathe through it, inviting it to unfold. As your sensation expands, it may grow large indeed, erupting in a cry of exasperation or despair. Breathing out, soften the jagged edges, and sigh with relief as you allow the sensation to be what it is. Your yearning. You want something you don’t have, but what? Possibilities shuffle before you. Food. Touch. Affirmation. Comfort. Security. Purpose. You feel constraints holding you back. You can’t. You won’t. You don’t have time or money. It is inappropriate. It is wrong.
As we breathe our pain open, our sense of it shifts. The movements I am making are making me. Split. Conflicted. At war with my own self. Out of control. Empty. Helpless. There is nothing I can do. We may realize how tired we are. How buried in work. How dazed by the noise and confusion of our lives. How immured in the walls of our dulled senses. We may also feel impulses to respond that flare with frustration at our weakness. We want to clamp down on ourselves or simply give up.
Breathing again, through the heart, down into the earth, up and out into the sky, let that breathe too. Let yourself breathe. I am here. I am doing this. I am breathing.
Fire breath (2/13). The fire breath sinks a deeper charge. We breathe down into the ground, out into the skin-touched light, and then into the cradle of our bellies. We follow the breath deep into our sensory folds and squeeze—pumping awareness through our flesh. We activate an inner sense of movement.
I am breathing and this pain is telling me that there are movements in me waiting to be made—movements crying out in frustration at being boxed in for so long. There are capacities to give—limbs of myself that are languishing for the relationships that will support their fruit. I can move. I am moving.
Water breath (2/19). As you squeeze and release, energy pulses through your self, up through your vital core. Subtle at first. Ripples then waves. It can be terrifying. For as energy flows, your feelings of depression, anxiety, or despair may grow stronger yet again. Clearer. This is what the movements I am making are killing in me.
So too, along with the terror comes an even stronger sensory awareness. The movements I am making as I breathe are making me into someone who wants to move differently, who can move differently. I am giving birth to myself as someone who is more than this pain. Who can find in this pain an impulse to move.
*
When we practice the cycle of breaths, the shift in our experience of our pain happens instantly. Always. But sometimes, when the hurt is thick and layered, it can take time for the cycle of breaths to sink through and open up the possibilities for movement that lie within. We learn from our pain and pleasure how to give birth to ourselves as the people we are and want to be. It is the work of a moment, the work of a lifetime. This play is serious.
Next week: How and why the cycle of breaths (and religion) works.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Why Religion?
Understanding is overrated.
A Jungian therapist said it to me once. She was referring to my desire to understand my pain. At first I was horrified. I mean, I was a scholar of religion, keen on perfecting my ability to understand everything about everything and everyone, including myself. The comment struck deep, and my edifice of ideas trembled.
So what is the value of understanding? Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart and spirit?
*
The question brings us to the ghost haunting our discussions of desire for spirit up until now: religion. In western culture, we tend to think of “religion” as referring to a system of beliefs and practices shared by a self-identified community of people. (Thank you, Emile Durkheim, and others.) When we want to know about a person’s religion, we ask, “What do you believe?” The implication is that religion is about people’s beliefs—what they think is true and good and beautiful. The implication is that being a part of a religion is a matter of understanding. It is a matter of deciding to believe that what its authorities and documents and history teach is indeed an accurate representation of what is. Choose it or lose it.
Here lies the trouble. An accurate representation. When religions make claims about what is absolute, infinite, transcendent or just plain true, they are making claims that cannot be proved by standards of scientific reason. Yet, we still operate with a sense that we can and should make rational decisions about participating in our religions based on whether or not they are true. If they are true, we believe, they will work to make us happy. They will satisfy our desire for spirit. We will know who, how, why, and for what we are. We will understand why we suffer.
This situation presents our rational minds with a conundrum. How are we to make a rational choice concerning which picture of what lies beyond reason is the best and truest?
*
The situation can be unnerving. Not only is so much—if not everything—at stake, but there are so many competing possibilities, all marketing to us their visions of how happy and saved and right we will be if we believe what they do. The sheer bounty of options can provoke despair. It seems easiest simply to stick with what is familiar, dabble in many, or reject all equally. Thus we avoid the problem of having to choose what, in the end, cannot be chosen.
Or can’t it? Perhaps, when it comes to religion, understanding is overrated. Perhaps the reason why religion endures in our hearts and minds and cultures (if we can call religion an “it”) is not that it provides us with explanations for our suffering or for the origins of creation. Perhaps what we choose when we choose religion is not an understanding of the world, but something else.
Perhaps the value of religion—its purpose and efficacy—lies in the way it helps us discover and exercise our human bodily capacity for making and becoming who we are; for bringing into being the world in which we want to live—a world we love that loves us.
*
Think about the religions you know. Yes, there are beliefs—one god, no god, many gods. Life is now; life will be then. Life as we know it is to be embraced, or then again rejected. There are also practices—physical actions people make with their bodies in prayer and worship, in song, and sometimes dance. There are also communities—groups of people who gather together to share in the same beliefs and perform the same actions.
However, “religion” is not any one of these things. Nor is it a simple sum of the parts. Something more is at stake here and must be to explain its stubborn persistence in human lives, especially given a world that forces it to defend itself constantly.
Religion is about making movement. Religion describes patterns of sensation and response—a complex weave of physical, emotional, intellectual movements that spur us to discover our capacity to make these movements. When we sing out or bow deeply, when we mediate for hours or twist our bodies into novel shapes, we are discovering our capacity to do so. We are feeling the pleasure—or pain—of making movements that make us able to think and feel and act as we do.
And when the movements we find ourselves making are ones that release us into a sense of greater power—when they help us to a sense of ourselves as capable of making them—then that religion works. It succeeds. We believe in it, because we know that we are different because of it. The proof lies in ourselves. In who we are becoming as we make the movements it encourages. We like the world that opens in and around us as we feel like this, sing like this, act like this--and yes, think like this.
In this view, religion is not about a picture, practice, or community, as much as it is a training ground for helping us learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for spirit.
*
Religion is a vital and inevitable part of human living. For what we do in religion exercises the creative reach of our bodily becoming as no other dimension of our society. It engages our full sensory range in the act of naming and making real our most remote and intimate horizons. To expect from religion that it provide us with answers is to limit our sense of our own bodily becoming to a matter of understanding. We are much more.
In religion we dream our dreams. We envision the world as it is, would be, could be, and should be. And as we do, we make it so. We participate in creation. And it is when we participate actively, in ways that unfold our potential to do so, that we feel the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that lets us know that life is worth living. Worth loving.
*
I remember a moment when Jordan was four years old. I was having a difficult moment and just blurted out, “You know, sometimes life is hard. And when it is, you just have to love it. You just have to love life.”
Jordan paused for a moment and replied, ”Yes, you gotta love life, for if you don’t love life, it won’t love you back.”
Next Week: Using the cycle of breaths to discern wisdom in our desire for spirit
A Jungian therapist said it to me once. She was referring to my desire to understand my pain. At first I was horrified. I mean, I was a scholar of religion, keen on perfecting my ability to understand everything about everything and everyone, including myself. The comment struck deep, and my edifice of ideas trembled.
So what is the value of understanding? Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart and spirit?
*
The question brings us to the ghost haunting our discussions of desire for spirit up until now: religion. In western culture, we tend to think of “religion” as referring to a system of beliefs and practices shared by a self-identified community of people. (Thank you, Emile Durkheim, and others.) When we want to know about a person’s religion, we ask, “What do you believe?” The implication is that religion is about people’s beliefs—what they think is true and good and beautiful. The implication is that being a part of a religion is a matter of understanding. It is a matter of deciding to believe that what its authorities and documents and history teach is indeed an accurate representation of what is. Choose it or lose it.
Here lies the trouble. An accurate representation. When religions make claims about what is absolute, infinite, transcendent or just plain true, they are making claims that cannot be proved by standards of scientific reason. Yet, we still operate with a sense that we can and should make rational decisions about participating in our religions based on whether or not they are true. If they are true, we believe, they will work to make us happy. They will satisfy our desire for spirit. We will know who, how, why, and for what we are. We will understand why we suffer.
This situation presents our rational minds with a conundrum. How are we to make a rational choice concerning which picture of what lies beyond reason is the best and truest?
*
The situation can be unnerving. Not only is so much—if not everything—at stake, but there are so many competing possibilities, all marketing to us their visions of how happy and saved and right we will be if we believe what they do. The sheer bounty of options can provoke despair. It seems easiest simply to stick with what is familiar, dabble in many, or reject all equally. Thus we avoid the problem of having to choose what, in the end, cannot be chosen.
Or can’t it? Perhaps, when it comes to religion, understanding is overrated. Perhaps the reason why religion endures in our hearts and minds and cultures (if we can call religion an “it”) is not that it provides us with explanations for our suffering or for the origins of creation. Perhaps what we choose when we choose religion is not an understanding of the world, but something else.
Perhaps the value of religion—its purpose and efficacy—lies in the way it helps us discover and exercise our human bodily capacity for making and becoming who we are; for bringing into being the world in which we want to live—a world we love that loves us.
*
Think about the religions you know. Yes, there are beliefs—one god, no god, many gods. Life is now; life will be then. Life as we know it is to be embraced, or then again rejected. There are also practices—physical actions people make with their bodies in prayer and worship, in song, and sometimes dance. There are also communities—groups of people who gather together to share in the same beliefs and perform the same actions.
However, “religion” is not any one of these things. Nor is it a simple sum of the parts. Something more is at stake here and must be to explain its stubborn persistence in human lives, especially given a world that forces it to defend itself constantly.
Religion is about making movement. Religion describes patterns of sensation and response—a complex weave of physical, emotional, intellectual movements that spur us to discover our capacity to make these movements. When we sing out or bow deeply, when we mediate for hours or twist our bodies into novel shapes, we are discovering our capacity to do so. We are feeling the pleasure—or pain—of making movements that make us able to think and feel and act as we do.
And when the movements we find ourselves making are ones that release us into a sense of greater power—when they help us to a sense of ourselves as capable of making them—then that religion works. It succeeds. We believe in it, because we know that we are different because of it. The proof lies in ourselves. In who we are becoming as we make the movements it encourages. We like the world that opens in and around us as we feel like this, sing like this, act like this--and yes, think like this.
In this view, religion is not about a picture, practice, or community, as much as it is a training ground for helping us learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for spirit.
*
Religion is a vital and inevitable part of human living. For what we do in religion exercises the creative reach of our bodily becoming as no other dimension of our society. It engages our full sensory range in the act of naming and making real our most remote and intimate horizons. To expect from religion that it provide us with answers is to limit our sense of our own bodily becoming to a matter of understanding. We are much more.
In religion we dream our dreams. We envision the world as it is, would be, could be, and should be. And as we do, we make it so. We participate in creation. And it is when we participate actively, in ways that unfold our potential to do so, that we feel the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that lets us know that life is worth living. Worth loving.
*
I remember a moment when Jordan was four years old. I was having a difficult moment and just blurted out, “You know, sometimes life is hard. And when it is, you just have to love it. You just have to love life.”
Jordan paused for a moment and replied, ”Yes, you gotta love life, for if you don’t love life, it won’t love you back.”
Next Week: Using the cycle of breaths to discern wisdom in our desire for spirit
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The Ends of Life
“The Urge to End it All” is the title of an article in New York Times Magazine on suicide this past weekend. The article focuses on the difference between passion and premeditation, arguing that the people who choose the most fatal means—such as jumping or guns—tend to be the most impulsive. They are the least likely to have exhibited signs of mental illness. Rather, they tend to be overwhelmed by some acute blast of inner pain and unable to imagine a way out. If a ready method for ending the pain presents itself in the moment, they choose it. However, if the means is not easily secured, or made less accessible, they are not likely to find another means. They will, instead, find a way through.
One psychiatrist reported, after interviewing nine people who survived leaps from the Golden Gate Bridge: “What was immediately apparent… was that none of them had truly wanted to die. They had wanted their inner pain to stop; they wanted some measure of relief; and this was the only answer they could find. They were in spiritual agony, and they sought a physical solution.”
*
The article reveals a crucial insight about our desire for spirit: learning to discern its wisdom, just as with our desires nourishment and physical intimacy, involves learning how to sense and respond to our own pain. For these feelings of life-threatening pain are our desires—in this case, expressions of our desires for life, for more life, for the life we want to live. It is because we want so much that we both hurt so much and want the pain to stop so much.
It is a paradox. Because we want more from life, we consider ending it. Without the desire for more, we wouldn’t care. Without the feeling of impossibility, we wouldn’t be willing to end it. Our pain is double—both desire and its impossibility—and in this double nature lies the secret to its wisdom.
*
In learning to discern that wisdom, as in the case of the other desires, it is helpful to first debunk some myths. The first is that our desire for spirit will be satisfied by some thing—whether it be a promotion or an award, a piece of property or gadget, a second home, enough money, a passionate relationship, or a lean physique. We tend to believe that we will be happy if something happens and happy when something happens, hinging our happiness on that happening.
Happy if. Happy when.
But study after psychological study has shown that once we get what we think we want, our desire simply shifts to something else, and we find ourselves wanting again.
Our tendency then, if we tire of shifting objects, is to blame desire for being so fickle and transient, so restless and unsettling.
Desire is not the problem. The problem is that we make desire the problem.
*
A second myth to debunk is that all we need to do is find the right answer, the right belief system, the right explanation for our suffering, and then we will be able to live happily. We turn to religious teachings and self-help gurus, to spiritual practices and paths in search of that worldview, the overarching picture of what is, that will enable us to make sense of the pain that dogs us. If we can secure such a meaning, whether political, religious, or scientific, we imagine, then we will be happy.
But there is no indication that true believers, the religious or spiritually inclined, the politically engaged or socially active, are any less prone to mental illness, depression, or suicide than those who are not.
Our desire for spirit wants more. But what?
*
Before me on the floor is a vast array of blocks and figures—big mega blocks, small mega blocks, wooden blocks, organized in squares, and buildings, populated by tiny animal figures, carefully lined, arranged, settled in their enclosures. Jessica and Kyra have set up a horse farm, in line with their dream of having 150 horses each, mostly thoroughbreds, and being jockeys. Or veterinarians. Jordan has a dairy farm featuring cows of all shapes and sizes.
We live on a farm. My kids play farm. When I had first noticed this, I had chuckled, especially when I had to interrupt their play at farm to get them to do farm. Time to feed the chickens! But I had quickly learned. This play is serious.
For my kids are not merely playing. They are acting out their visions for the future, but not any future. They are creating the world in which they want to live—a world that will provide them with everything they need to unfold their interests, use their skills, and become what and who they want to be. They are creating a world in which they are the ones with the power to name the animals and barns, their values and goals.
I look at the spread before me. Jordan, Jessica, and Kyra, crouched together in the middle, are surrounded with manure bunkers and watering troughs. They are setting up chore schedules and gathering appropriate tools, plowing fields and planting crops. Certainly, they are not “really” doing these things—they are pretending—but don’t tell them so. They feel as if they really are doing these tasks, and in some sense, they are right. For they are practicing the bodily patterns of thinking and feeling, planning and problem solving—the patterns of sensation and response—that they will need in order to be farmers. Their movements are making them into people for whom this desire for a farm is real and possible; they are testing and refining that desire at every turn. They do not want to be interrupted. For anything.
*
The play of these children offers a clue to what we desire from our lives. They are children, yes, entertaining themselves in an imaginary world. They are also human beings, naming and bringing into being for themselves a world in which they can thrive. Their pleasure is palpable.
Just as our desire for food is a desire for an experience of being nourished; just as our desire for sex is a desire for an experience of giving and receiving a life-enabling touch; so it is time to consider that our desire for spirit is a desire to participate in the acts of naming and making real a world we love that loves us. It is the pleasure of participating in our own process of bodily becoming, creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and respond that will guide us in unfolding what we have to give.
This play is serious.
Next week: How our physio-spiritual pain teaches us to find the play in the moment.
One psychiatrist reported, after interviewing nine people who survived leaps from the Golden Gate Bridge: “What was immediately apparent… was that none of them had truly wanted to die. They had wanted their inner pain to stop; they wanted some measure of relief; and this was the only answer they could find. They were in spiritual agony, and they sought a physical solution.”
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The article reveals a crucial insight about our desire for spirit: learning to discern its wisdom, just as with our desires nourishment and physical intimacy, involves learning how to sense and respond to our own pain. For these feelings of life-threatening pain are our desires—in this case, expressions of our desires for life, for more life, for the life we want to live. It is because we want so much that we both hurt so much and want the pain to stop so much.
It is a paradox. Because we want more from life, we consider ending it. Without the desire for more, we wouldn’t care. Without the feeling of impossibility, we wouldn’t be willing to end it. Our pain is double—both desire and its impossibility—and in this double nature lies the secret to its wisdom.
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In learning to discern that wisdom, as in the case of the other desires, it is helpful to first debunk some myths. The first is that our desire for spirit will be satisfied by some thing—whether it be a promotion or an award, a piece of property or gadget, a second home, enough money, a passionate relationship, or a lean physique. We tend to believe that we will be happy if something happens and happy when something happens, hinging our happiness on that happening.
Happy if. Happy when.
But study after psychological study has shown that once we get what we think we want, our desire simply shifts to something else, and we find ourselves wanting again.
Our tendency then, if we tire of shifting objects, is to blame desire for being so fickle and transient, so restless and unsettling.
Desire is not the problem. The problem is that we make desire the problem.
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A second myth to debunk is that all we need to do is find the right answer, the right belief system, the right explanation for our suffering, and then we will be able to live happily. We turn to religious teachings and self-help gurus, to spiritual practices and paths in search of that worldview, the overarching picture of what is, that will enable us to make sense of the pain that dogs us. If we can secure such a meaning, whether political, religious, or scientific, we imagine, then we will be happy.
But there is no indication that true believers, the religious or spiritually inclined, the politically engaged or socially active, are any less prone to mental illness, depression, or suicide than those who are not.
Our desire for spirit wants more. But what?
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Before me on the floor is a vast array of blocks and figures—big mega blocks, small mega blocks, wooden blocks, organized in squares, and buildings, populated by tiny animal figures, carefully lined, arranged, settled in their enclosures. Jessica and Kyra have set up a horse farm, in line with their dream of having 150 horses each, mostly thoroughbreds, and being jockeys. Or veterinarians. Jordan has a dairy farm featuring cows of all shapes and sizes.
We live on a farm. My kids play farm. When I had first noticed this, I had chuckled, especially when I had to interrupt their play at farm to get them to do farm. Time to feed the chickens! But I had quickly learned. This play is serious.
For my kids are not merely playing. They are acting out their visions for the future, but not any future. They are creating the world in which they want to live—a world that will provide them with everything they need to unfold their interests, use their skills, and become what and who they want to be. They are creating a world in which they are the ones with the power to name the animals and barns, their values and goals.
I look at the spread before me. Jordan, Jessica, and Kyra, crouched together in the middle, are surrounded with manure bunkers and watering troughs. They are setting up chore schedules and gathering appropriate tools, plowing fields and planting crops. Certainly, they are not “really” doing these things—they are pretending—but don’t tell them so. They feel as if they really are doing these tasks, and in some sense, they are right. For they are practicing the bodily patterns of thinking and feeling, planning and problem solving—the patterns of sensation and response—that they will need in order to be farmers. Their movements are making them into people for whom this desire for a farm is real and possible; they are testing and refining that desire at every turn. They do not want to be interrupted. For anything.
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The play of these children offers a clue to what we desire from our lives. They are children, yes, entertaining themselves in an imaginary world. They are also human beings, naming and bringing into being for themselves a world in which they can thrive. Their pleasure is palpable.
Just as our desire for food is a desire for an experience of being nourished; just as our desire for sex is a desire for an experience of giving and receiving a life-enabling touch; so it is time to consider that our desire for spirit is a desire to participate in the acts of naming and making real a world we love that loves us. It is the pleasure of participating in our own process of bodily becoming, creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and respond that will guide us in unfolding what we have to give.
This play is serious.
Next week: How our physio-spiritual pain teaches us to find the play in the moment.
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