Coming Through the Fire
I underwent a powerful spiritual awakening after working through a decade of intense emotional suffering. It was eastern meditation practices that helped me heal.
Yoga and Buddhism have much to say about suffering, and every day I draw upon the teachings and practices of both traditions to work through difficulties. In his first sermon, the Buddha revealed the “Four Noble Truths,” the first of which asserts that the ordinary unenlightened human life is laced with suffering.
I think of suffering as being of two kinds, even though on a deeper level they are the same and the same healing practices work for both. One kind is direct, head on: injuries, accidents, illness, death. This form of suffering we share with the animals. But the other kind is more uniquely human.
The Buddha helped us see that there is something in human nature that seems to predispose us to feeling dissatisfied. Sam Polk, a former stock broker, in 2014 wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times that began like this: “In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.” While $3.6 million may seem like a lot of money, he explains, when the guy sitting next to you got $10 million, you’re likely to feel slighted and upset.
We rarely get exactly what we want. And if we do, it turns out not to be all it was cracked up to be. Or we lose it, or it leaves, or dies, or more commonly, we get accustomed to it and start looking around at our neighbor’s greener grass, nicer house, newer Porsche or younger partner. To the millions living in the slums of Mumbai, we Americans are all fabulously wealthy. Still, somehow, we suffer.
Yoga and Buddhism have developed powerful strategies for working with suffering, many of them deriving from teachings of mindfulness — keeping your awareness focused on what is actually happening before you right now. One of my favorite teachings says that when you are suffering or struggling with obsessive thoughts, the best practice is to drop the storyline and go into your feelings. By “storyline” we are talking about who did what to whom? — “My coworker got credit for my idea;” “My partner embarrassed me at the party;” “My father criticized me in front of my children, again.” We blame others, or we blame ourselves, or we blame God. But in mindfulness, you put all of that aside for a moment, and direct your awareness to what’s happening in your body. Suffering happens in the body. Emotions take place in the body.
One thing we notice when we fully experience our suffering, or any emotion, is that feelings are not static. Suffering, pain, anger — also joy, happiness, and excitement — are not things. They are more like events that move through us. The word “emotion” points to this movement. When we fully feel emotions, we allow them to flow through us — through and out of us. We often don’t want to feel our suffering because it hurts. So we try to store it away in a deep freeze, compartmentalize it, lock it away. But when we freeze emotions, denying them their natural movement, they can’t move through us. We end up carrying around more and more unprocessed frozen emotions. This becomes toxic.
Sometimes emotions can be big, like those coming after the loss of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, an accident, or a bankruptcy. And these require a lot of practice. Constant practice, perhaps for years. But the practice is the same. As the poet Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through.”
For decades in my meditation practice, I experienced feelings of great peace and bliss. But over time something shifted. When I sat down to meditate, sorrow rose up in my body. I didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. It wasn’t linked to memories or images I could call up. Was this unprocessed sadness from a divorce I had gone through? Frozen emotions from some repressed childhood trauma? It felt old. Ancient. Perhaps it wasn’t even my pain, but just the existential suffering that the Buddha spoke of. I didn’t know. I approached it the way I had been taught to work with emotions. I let myself feel it fully, fall into it. I let it move through me like slow burning lava.
As I went deeper into the sorrow, I also began to notice something surprising. I felt the sense of a presence with me. Not the peace I usually felt, but something, perhaps someone, more particular. As I did this grief work, the presence seemed to hold me, like a mother holding a child. I surrendered into the hurt and into the presence, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.
In this process I learned how to push out the hurt. As I entered the feeling more fully, it began to feel less like pain and more like energy. Voltage. My meditations began to oscillate slowly between periods of sorrow and then of joy, suffering then bliss, hurt then solace. And then one morning, as I moved between these extremes, I realized that the two feelings — sorrow and joy — were the same thing. Different manifestations of the same fierce, fiery energy.
At that moment, sitting on the sofa, through no deserving of my own, a spiritual awakening broke over me like the light of the morning sun. My consciousness streamed out of my body, and, in a universe outside of time, in unfathomable bliss, I witnessed my infinite, intimate connection with all beings — all things — in love.
Looking back, I know this experience arose from pure grace, but I also know that it was through the suffering, allowing it to rend my body, flow through wounds and pain, that grace found its way in.
Michael Sowder is the founder of the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality. He is also a poet, an essayist, and a professor of English and Religious Studies at Utah State University.
Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series that answers the question: “How does your faith help you deal with suffering and adversity?” Perspectives from a variety of religions allow us to better endure the spiritual challenges we all face as human beings.
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