Some Thoughts on Transforming Our Pain Into Our Greatest Strengths

These are times of great individual and collective trauma and challenge. Perhaps one of the hardest things is to not get swept off in the tsunami of what is swirling all around us — the hatred and rage, the distractions and distortions and delusions, the blaming and shaming and dehumanization, the fear and despair and deep, deep sadness.

Sometimes it is too much to hold. And this is one of those times. Just look at what is happening right now, and this is only a partial list:

• We live in a time when we are unable to simply hug each other. Illness, isolation, unemployment, poverty, addictions, depression, violence, and more are growing day by day.
  
• America is comprised of 4.2% of the world's population, but is suffering 20% of the global Covid-19 deaths. This was preventable.
• In the midst of a global pandemic, the American leadership has consistently failed to lead and has instead fueled deadly disinformation. Our population cannot even agree that the most simple but vital need to wear masks is real and without question the right thing to do.
• While thousands in the United States continue to sicken and die of the coronavirus, and while we pay more for our profit-driven healthcare than anywhere in the world, our nation remains the only developed country to not ensure healthcare as a human right.
• While millions are without healthcare and are increasingly joining the ranks of the homeless and hungry, the mantra of the status quo — which demonizes anything other than predatory capitalism — remains the norm. 
• In the midst of record breaking after record breaking wildfires and hurricanes and floods and other catastrophic climate disruptions, our country continues to be the only developed nation debating the facts and reality of climate change — leaving the devastating impact of our failure to act to protect the life support systems of the Earth to our children and grandchildren.
• Even given the sixth major extinction and the climate and ecological crises which are destroying the planet, the late stage deadly addiction to fossil fuels and to the poisoning of the Earth continues to be perpetuated and normalized.
• Despite the overwhelming evidence of systemic racism and inequality, millions of Americans still deny this reality and remain tragically oblivious to the suffering and pervasive injustice, inequity, and violence that our Black brothers and sisters — and Indigenous and other marginalized peoples — have endured for the past 400 years.
• We have in the White House the most dangerous president in our nation's history — a deeply wounded human being who suffers from pathological narcissism and the compulsion to project his self-loathing outward. Donald Trump's mental illness largely mirrors that which my own mother suffered from for most of her life.
• The continued justification to prioritize funding for the military and worldwide militarism over "programs of social uplift" has ensured that Martin Luther King's words remain true today: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government." Dr. King goes on to identify the "Three Major Evils — the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war" — which certainly plague our nation just as much today as when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words over 50 years ago.
• We have governmental, political, economic, military, media, educational, and criminal injustice systems which have contributed to bringing us to the precipice we find ourselves at today. 
• The American people are indoctrinated into the demonetization of the Other. Divided we are a conquered people, unconscious of our deep and abiding interrelatedness and the empathic awareness of the suffering and violence brought about through the illusion of separation. 
• Our population has long been propagandized to not know the truth and to unknowingly be out of alignment with our deepest values, which has greatly contributed to all of the above. 

So, yes, there is much to be heartbroken and horrified over. Even for those who are consciously unaware of much of what has been unfolding in our nation and beyond, it is my belief that at some level we still do know. We know because we are intimately linked to one another, to all of life, to the Earth. Our numbness, distractions and denials, shaming and blaming of others, addictions and disinformation, and more may appear to blind us to larger truths, but under all that we have buffered and fortified our hearts with is the truth of our sacred being and the sacred thread which is woven through the heart of us all.

The great challenge, I believe, is how to be awake and stay awake? How do we not succumb and be swallowed up with bitterness and resentment and outrage, hatred and dehumanizing and name calling, disconnecting and unfriending and building our own walls instead of bridges? 

It is hard to be human! It is. It is a true heroes journey to not be sucked down, down, down when so much around us is going down. How, instead, do we keep our hearts open? How do we add to the peace amidst so much violence and suffering? How do we embody balance — balancing all of the injustices and pain in our world with the remembrance and experience of beauty, joy, gratitude, and love?

All I know to do is share glimpses into my own personal journey through hell and out the other side into a place where my capacity to love strengthens rather than is diminished.

This is among my many profound lessons: "Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart." — Rumi

In my own personal years of therapy, I've also learned the truth and wisdom of my therapist's words: Whatever we reject in ourselves and try to make go away only strengthens. I've come to recognize that kindness can't be forced and that holding myself with contempt and blame and shame only makes me more vulnerable to projecting those unheld places within myself outward. And I really don't want to do that. And I don't want to hate anyone.

So I've needed to be mindful enough to catch those infuriated judgments that I can wield onto others, and then onto myself for having them, and make different choices. I could continue to cling to my rage and justify directing it at those who are causing so much harm. I could choose to shame and blame myself for feeling so much outrage and yelling FUCK YOU! at my TV. Or I could take a step back and... hold myself.

And in the holding comes the pain under all the anger. And I feel that pain, the grief of our suffering world, the fear of not knowing if my five tiny grandchildren, ages 1 to 5, will be able to live on a habitable planet when they are my age, and the trauma of consciously knowing how very high the stakes are. As I've written again and again and again, everything — truly, absolutely everything! — that we love and cherish is at stake. And I grieve for the pain and uncertainty and suffering of our hurting, beautiful planet and all of life.

Every time my heart breaks open, more space is cleared for love. 

And I remember with compassion that we humans all fall somewhere on a continuum with ignorance on the one end and consciousness on the other. And I am then drawn to reflect on the wise words of Carl Jung — “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” 

I don't know how to make the darkness conscious without this holding, this deep and abiding compassion that we can bring to ourselves and to each other again and again and again whenever we find ourselves slipping into our old places of fear, shame and judgment, and the deep pain that is yearning for our attention.

I've had to be learning how to do this over these past 37 years or the trauma and bitterness and rage of once having a severely narcissistic mother — who was very much like Donald Trump — would have eaten me alive... as it did my twin brother, who committed suicide in 1978. John couldn't find any other way out of hell.

And it is hell to hold hatred, bitterness, resentment, and rage towards ourselves or anyone else, no matter the circumstances. It is hell, and I know this hell first hand. And today I know a path through and out the other side. And it's something that I need to practice each and every day as best as I can, knowing full well that I won't do this perfectly. And remembering that I am also a recovering perfectionist.

So I'll have slips, relapses into fury and shaming and fuck you! and the old voices of my inner critic... which is something else that I've long been in recovery for. The difference for me today is that I can catch this damning critic and stop and breathe and wrap my arms inwardly around myself, or ask Ron for holding, and I can hold this pain I am feeling with tenderness and compassion. 

And that is the antidote, this gentleness and tenderness of our hearts. It truly is our greatest strength.

One of my many prayers is that more and more of us will use these exact times to strengthen our hearts, to strengthen our spiritual practices, to remember gratitude and beauty and love, to increasingly intervene on ourselves when we slide into the old triggers, and to cultivate more and more of the gifts of the alchemist — finding the gem hidden in dark places.

And, truly, what greater gift is there than cultivating the skills to bring light to dark places and love to where there has been hatred? This, I believe, is what we are here to remember and learn and deepen, and what our world hungers for — Compassion, Kindness, Truth, Generosity, and Love.  

It comes to me to affirm what I hold as meaningful and true that I wrote when I first birthed my blog: I am passionate about being a part of a revolution in caring and kindness. I am passionate about peace, beauty, joy, compassion, love, laughter, truth, healing, and growing in consciousness. My personal experience has been that as I have embraced, healed, and opened my heart, I have discovered the sacredness in myself and all life. It is my belief that the ripples of the strong and sacred heart energy in us all is what will awaken and heal our world. 

What I've been learning along the way is that it isn't as much what happens to us as how we're able to respond. My deep prayer is that more and more of us will use the great challenges life brings us individually and collectively to awaken us to who we most truly are and our great capacity for compassion, courage, generosity, kindness, wisdom, and love. 

 Bless us all, no exceptions...

Molly