By Noura. Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
It’s during our darkest times that we can discover how truly amazing the people in our lives can be.
Grief is deep sorrow which is a response to the loss of someone or something we care about. We sometimes think of grief in relation to the death of a loved one. However the spectrum within which we can experience grief is much wider. For instance, we could experience grief from loss of a job, financial security, identity, belief, or anything else that’s important to us. Click on the following link to read more about grief in this insightful article: Four Types of Grief Nobody Told You About.
Sometimes we assume that depth of someone’s grief is determined by our interpretation of the importance of what they’ve lost. We might think that losing a pen is not nearly as painful as losing a pet. However, it could be that the pen has a deep meaning for me. Maybe my wife of forty-years who passed away two years ago gave this pen to me as a gift for my birthday. This pen was one of my last connections to her, and losing it was like re-opening a wound that has not yet healed. It’s like losing her all over again. The grief itself has nothing to do with the pen, it has to do with the meaning behind the pen. Part of being compassionate to those who are grieving is to never assume that we know how they feel. It’s about the humility not to assume that we understand the meaning of a particular loss in their lives.
Each one of us is going through the unique and personal journey of our individual lives. There’s no way for anyone to know for sure about the meaning of an event in someone else’s journey. This mistake of looking at grief in terms of the form of what was lost instead of the meaning behind it, can lead us to be insensitive to people who are in pain. We might tell them to get over it, that they should be better by now, or that they are being overly emotional and so on.
We are at different stages of our journey of growth and healing. As we go through the healing process, sometimes we encounter situations or events that trigger our pain. Such a trigger could be being in the presence of someone who is suffering. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel our pain so we can process it, we might end up pushing it away out of awareness. If someone comes and triggers this pain, we might experience this as problematic. Then we might try to fix the other person as a way of preventing them from disturbing us further. Since we’ve not allowed ourselves the freedom to feel our pain, we can’t extend this gift to others.
Being compassionate is not about agreeing, disagreeing or having all the answers, it’s about letting other people know that we hear them, they’re not alone, we are here for them. We are willing to listen and let them tell us what they need rather than us telling them what they need. When we’re not aware of our issues and needs, we can’t get them out of the way and simply be present to others in a non-judgmental or demanding way. Instead we end up unconsciously using them to meet our needs. This is why good intentions are not enough even though they are a good start. We don’t have to be perfect or healed to be with others who are in pain, but we need to have enough self-awareness of what’s going on inside us, so we can get ourselves out of the way and be truly kind and compassionate. Whatever tool we can use to increase self-awareness is helpful. We can use meditation or mindfulness. Click on the following link to read this article I wrote about meditation: The Purpose and Meaning of Meditation.
Meeting ourselves where we are and making peace with that is the foundation that enables to meet other people wherever they are, which could be acceptance, denial, anger or any other aspect of their grieving process. Sometimes we get to a point where we are ready face our pain and even share it with the people in our lives, but they are not ready to meet us there. For example, I share my pain with someone and they tell me “don’t be negative”, or “stop complaining” or some other kind of remarks that might make me feel guilty for having these feelings. This happens when people are not yet comfortable with facing their own pain. When I bring mine up, it starts to trigger their pain which they have probably buried through denial. They see me as problem because I am triggering painful emotions they don’t want to feel. We discussed this a bit more in the following article: The Challenges of Emotional Burn Out.
I could interpret their reactions to mean that it’s wrong for me to allow myself to experience my feelings. But actually, it’s a step forward. It takes a lot of courage to face our pain and even more courage to share it. Denial is not a spiritual state. The danger of a culture of positivity is that it denies people the experience of feeling their emotions by telling them that they should be positive when they clearly don’t feel that way. Here is link to a great article which discusses this in more detail: The Tyrannical Culture of Positivity.
If I can see that someone’s reaction to my pain is not a reflection of me, but a reflection of where they are on their journey, rather than being offended, I can be understanding. I will not internalize their reactions and I will simply continue with my own healing process. Part of the healing process is allowing ourselves to feel our unpleasant feelings, otherwise, we go into denial and we end up being controlled by our emotions because we no longer see them, even though they are still there.
For example, let’s assume that I am jealous of you. I judge this feeling to be an unacceptable feeling I can’t have because I am too spiritual for this. So I deny it. I go out of my way to avoid looking at your achievements or anything that could trigger this feeling. I try very hard to pretend that it’s not there even though it’s burning inside me. The problem is not the feeling of jealousy itself, it’s the judgement I’ve made about it in terms of who I am. If I resist it, I can’t look at it, and I can’t get past what I don’t see. If instead, I make peace with it being there, I can let it speak to me and teach me about myself. This non-judgmental approach is non-dualistic because it doesn’t create conflict by creating an opposite into which I escape. The opposite is “I should not be jealous”. The fact is “I am jealous”. Rather than escaping into the opposite. I stay with the fact, I face it and resolve it through understanding.
Maybe the feeling of jealousy doesn’t go away but the meaning changes. The first meaning may have been “I am a useless person who will never amount to anything in my life”. Then I correct this and it becomes “I am someone who has a deep burning desire to add value in life. I admire all the people who have done so and I see them as role models of what I want to be. It’s not wrong to have this feeling. What’s important is what I end up doing with it. It’s not the feeling itself that matters, but its purpose. The purpose is positive and therefore it is positive.” What makes something what it is, is not what looks like but the purpose. Anger is neither good nor bad. I can use it positively to better myself, or I can use it destructively to hurt other people. I might not have gotten rid of the feeling of jealousy, but I’ve taken control of it by changing the purpose. It no longer controls me by having me modify my behavior and going out of my way to avoid you so I don’t get triggered. Instead it has become a tool I am using to continue to grow into what I want to be.
Ultimately, being kind and compassionate to others is no different from being kind and compassionate to ourselves. In a sense, there is no other because we can relate to people only as deeply as we relate to ourselves.
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