Something Beautiful

Making decisions (inherently sacred)

Once again I am going through some very unhappy times with my family. In reaching out to art, philosophy and spirituality for some comfort, I came across a book called Decision Making and Spiritual Discernment, by Nancy Bieber.

Nancy Bieber is a Quaker and a very interesting lady. I've found comfort and nourishment in reading just the few pages at her website.

I've also ordered her book. Here are two sentences from its early pages:

Making decisions is inherently sacred work, even when we don't recognize it as such. Through our decisions, we shape our unique and sacred lives."

To me, those two sentences are truly beautiful.

"I imagine I am about to die"

There is some important way in which this quotation from Pema Chödrön is beautiful:

At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my entire life, I give full attention to the things I wish hadn’t occurred. Recognizing these mistakes honestly but without self-recrimination, I try to rejoice in the innate wisdom that allows me to see so bravely, and I feel compassion for how I so frequently messed up. Then I can go forward. The future is wide open, and what I do with it is up to me.

(From the book No Time To Lose) At first I thought that she was saying she does this once a week. That might be even better?

Sadness

I'm feeling sad today and so have just looked up sadness at Wikipedia. The article there is brief but rather helpful.

Sadness, it says, is emotional pain associated with loss. The loss may be smaller or greater, involving simple disappointment or actual death of a loved one. People experiencing sadness usually are more quiet and have less enthusiasm and energy than their ordinary selves. It represents a lowering of mood, usually temporary.

Sadness is viewed as one of the four main emotions -- sad, mad, glad and afraid. (Some would add disguested and surprised to these basic four.)

Sadness is regarded, somewhat surprisingly, as a useful emotion. (I suppose they are all useful? at least at times?) According to Wikipedia, for actor John Cleese, 'the idea that sadness was actually useful was probably the most important, and for me the most surprising single thing" that he learned in therapy.

A main function of sadness is to help the person experiencing it to adjust to the very loss that has given rise to the feeling. The associated drop in energy is accompanied by an introspective withdrawal. The latter creates the opportunity to mourn the loss, and to grasp its significance and consequences. Once those are absorbed, the experiencer can begin planning a new phase of his or her life.

As a result, sadness can represent 'a healthy and appropriate response to experiences of loss and diappointment, whether personal or global'. (K. Masman, The Uses of Sadness, pp. 1-2.)

Dr. Left Foot & Dr. Right Foot

Somewhere yesterday I came across this saying: "I have two doctors, my left foot and my right foot." It struck me as wisdom worthy of becoming proverbial. According to at least one source, these were actually the words of historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. According to Trevelyan's grandson, "His idea of a day's walk was 25 miles." Even at a good clip, that's about 6 hours of walking!

Trevelyan considered that poetry, history and solitary walks were among the most important things in life. Truly a man after my own heart! (our own hearts?)

Doing what we can

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  -- Theodore Roosevelt:

Feminine Tao (and other)

I came accidentally upon this site offering a Feminine Tao. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but its quality seems obvious and its worth equally apparent.

The Feminine Tao is hosted at Early Women Masters. Again, I don't think I really understand the intent or organization of the site. And yet it's so appealing that I think it well worth mentioning here.

The importance of truth (cont'd)

I feel I've stumbled on a beginning to the end of my pain by focusing on truth. If something is not true, I need not fear it. If something is true, my pain will cease only when I grapple with it, confront it, deal with it. There is nothing terribly frightening in that, although I might need some time and patience in order to be able to do it.

I'm casting about on the Web looking for helpful statements about the truth. So far I haven't found much. There's this:

     ". . . and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32)

There is my post on how the law of the Lord, in its perfection, restoreth the soul.

There are these two other quotations, that I have quoted earlier in this blog:

     "Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality." (Frank Herbert)

     "Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I have a glimmer of a sense that, if I can pursue this line of thinking, I just might be able to come to grips with things that happened decades ago, with what happened yesterday, and with things that happened during all the intervening years. It is just possible that a heavy dose of sunshine might disinfect the whole lot of them.

That is another truth-related quote, I suppose:

     "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." (Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis)

A related theme is that of invalidation. I haven't looked up the etymology, but I'm pretty sure that the words "valid" and "invalid" have something to do with truth.

(Added later: The word "valid," as I have used it here, appears to mean "supported by facts or authority." Invalidation would then presumably mean something like: "denying the existence of facts or authority.")

Here's a definition of (emotional) invalidation:

"To invalidate is to reject, ignore, mock, tease, judge, or diminish someone's feelings."

In order to continue, I'm going to have to announce some truths, I suppose, or at least say what I accept as true. One proposed truth: It is wrong, morally and ethically, to invalidate another. A related proposed truth: It is both wrong and cruel, i.e., profoundly immoral, to invalidate while pretending to "love" the invalidated person.

Just now, as I investigated invalidation, I came across a set of suggested responses to invalidating statements. What interests me, apart from their possible effectiveness (at least for the speaker) is that they are all essentially truth-oriented!

Now, a bit later, I have come across an entire pamphlet that deals with the question how to think about, and respond to, criticism. I haven't studied it yet, but it looks wonderful.

The importance of truth

As I attempt once again today to understand and address and heal my pain, I come once more to the power of truth. From time to time, I find myself trying out a notion so radical (for me) that I cannot quite believe it: that perhaps there is no pain, but only the temporary acceptance of falsehood and the postponed effort to seek the truth.

Yesterday's email, which has given rise to so much pain that I have contemplated shutting down this blog, was full of falsehood. The fact that someone I trusted would insist on so many pernicious falsehoods, deliberately and with malice aforethought, has caused me so very much pain yesterday, last night and still this morning.

It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that I can cause that pain to diminish, and even cease, only by examining the statements that were made and making a full and complete effort to discover their degree of truth. My inclination is, in part, to do the opposite -- to run away from the pain they have caused, and therefore from them as well.

I'm thinking, however, as I work my way through these multiple hours of twisting and turning and attempting to find surcease, that "the only way out is through." The only way to make pain stop is by going to its source, examining it honestly, discovering the honorable way to deal with it, and then following through.

Grief

I've been grieving a loss, with little let-up or relief, for the past seven months. Yesterday I suddenly remembered a passage in a book that has sometimes comforted me in the past, as to previous losses.

The book is I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven, set in an Indian village of the Pacific Northwest. The passage comes near the very end, when the villagers are mourning the death of a young priest. He had ministered to their parish for the previous year, and earned their trust and affection. Marta, an elderly woman, is particularly saddened by this loss.

On the night of the day Mark died, she prays by speaking to his spirit. She uses the words of her people's tradition:

Walk straight on, my son. Do not look back. Do not turn your head. You are going to the land of our fathers.

It puzzles me, to some extent, why I should find this passage so comforting. I think it is because the passage suggests that the person whom we have lost still has a road to travel, and that he or she is on it. There is comfort in that. And it suggests that they have not so much left us as gone on before us, that they travel a road we will ourselves one day traverse. There is comfort in that as well.

I do seem to feel somewhat better about this most recent loss since remembering Marta's prayer.

What our whole self knows (focusing)

I've been reading about, and to some extent utilizing, a psychological technique called "focusing" for quite a few years. Tomorrow I will take an online workshop in focusing and so it's very much on my mind.

Focusing has many uses. It can be used to make a decision, to answer a question, to understand how one feels about a given person or problem. It first came to prominence more than thirty years ago through the book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, the discoverer and primary proponent of this method of gaining knowledge of our inmost selves.

It's likely I'll write more about focusing during the coming week. For the moment, I'd like just to record these key observations in this space, where they will be easy for me to re-locate.

Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped, it has the wisdom to deal with your problems. . . . Your body always tends in the direction of feeling better. Your body is a complex, life-maintaining system.

Gendlin explains that a bad feeling is just a symptom, much as pain or a fever is --

The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

Here is my single most favorite quotation:

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

He continues:

The very existence of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.

And finally:

Your body, with its sense of rightness, knows what would feel right. The feelings of "bad" or "wrong" inside you are, in effect, your body's measurement of the distance between "perfect" and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction.

Focusing is a way of gaining access to this knowledge - the knowledge of what the bad feeling is and where it comes from, and the knowledge of how to make it better.