PART
FOUR
Surrender
is a form of deep acceptance.
Your
ordinary ego wants relief, wants out, wants escape.
Emotional
intelligence is a bodily intelligence, so if you want to do emotional alchemy,
you have to know how to listen to your body.
To practice emotional alchemy, you have to be acquainted with the
story you are currently telling about your emotional suffering and recontextualize it in a broader social,
cultural, global or cosmic context.
Just
as physical pain alerts you to pay attention to the body, emotional pain has a
purpose for the soul.
We
grieve because we are not alone, because we are interconnected; and what
connects us to one another also breaks our hearts.
Grief
is an opportunity not for “resolution”, as in the popular parlance, but for
transformation: a wholly new awareness of reality, self, beloved, and world.
What
people in grief need most is to be compassionately accompanied, to feel that
those who care about them are willing and able to tolerate the pain that they
are in, to be there with them, to be present.
The
ego is a natural-born victim. Why me? is its central question.
The
spiritual fulfillment of redemptive grief is the capacity to feel a vibrant
gratitude for life.
Even
when the gates of heaven are shut to prayer, they are open to tears.
Despair
is profound dispiritedness, a fatiguing emotion that saps the life force.
When
despair is in full sway, there is a overwhelming sense of futility.
When
we’re in the throes of despair, a metamorphic process is at work. The call for spiritual death and rebirth in
despair can be easily mistaken for a call to suicide.
Despair
asks us to make meaning out of apparent meaninglessness; to grieve our
unmourned losses; to examine the unexamined life; to legitimate our anger at
the world; to struggle out of the cocoon and be reborn.
When we hate ourselves for the “weakness” of despair, for the
experience of helplessness that is so much a part of it, and when we panic in
response to it, these reactions
sink us into the condition we call depression.
In its
density, despair brings us to the experience of existential emptiness.
Transform
yourself or be damned, the voice of despair seems to say. This call to transformation is the despair’s
message.
Despair
comes with an urgent call to grieve our losses and to examine the meaning of
our lives. The agony of meaninglessness is at the heart of despair. Recovering
faith in a meaningful universe is central to its alchemy.
Meaning-making
is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human.
Spirit
suffocation is the bedrock of the emotion we call despair.
Despair,
mindfully held, brings us face-to-face with the darkness within ourselves and
our world.
As you
breathe, become aware of where despair lives in your body. acknowledge its
presence without trying to change or eradicate it.
