From Suffering to Peace

by Mark Coleman

  If you have experienced your own dark nights, look back with the perspective of time and reflect on the gifts they have bestowed. Maybe they opened you to a greater alignment with yourself, moved your heart to feel your common humanity, or strengthened your capacity to endure hardship. Perhaps they woke you from being asleep to yourself and the wounds you carry. Navigating such hard experiences can support us as we take greater risks, giving us courage to face our deepest fears and to make the most of this one wild and precious life.

  Whatever your experience, everyone at some point grapples with loss, heartache, and confusion. What is necessary then is to reflect on what will help you meet your own struggles with compassionate presence, to see pain as a gift or an opportunity and not an enemy, to give yourself love and understanding, not rejection and judgment. Only when we can soften into pain, with tender arms of loving awareness, can we really heal and grow.

  On a recent trip to England for the Christmas holidays, I had an unusually frank talk with my father. We were in a lively English pub, full of holiday cheer, and after chatting about various things, he began sharing how much pain he still carried inside. My father had a wretched early childhood. He was born out of wedlock in 1939. Unable to be raised by his mother, he was fostered by a multitude of families until he was seven. He said he lived with so many foster parents that he forgot the names of his caregivers.

  All this happened during the six years of World War II, when England was focused on surviving the war against Germany, and there was little attention or time to spare for a little fostered child. As children do, my father internalized his miserable predicament by assuming something must be fundamentally wrong with him. He developed scars of unworthiness and shame. This left him hungry for love that he hoped would mitigate the hole of deficiency that lived in his heart. Being so young, he had not learned the skills and coping mechanisms needed to deal with such pain.

  The tragic pain from those early years remained with him all his life. He had found many ways to hide it, to ignore it, to drink it away. But like a shadow, it was always close to hand. Now, in his later years, the pain was tugging even more on his heart. He felt a desire for resolution and healing, and he felt remorse for the ways he had acted out from the pain. Yet he was unsure how to resolve the painful emptiness inside.

  During our conversation in the pub, my father took the risk to reveal this vulnerable hurting place to me. It was a beautiful moment of intimacy, and I had tears in my eyes as he talked of the pain he had held in for so long. I reflected to him from my own struggles that the only way forward is through pain. I reminded him that he had to turn toward that scared, lonely, rejected boy inside and give him the same love that he was clearly able to give to his family, children, and friends. To heal, I suggested he hold his wounded heart with compassion, feel the tender pain, and meet it with kindness and forgiveness.

  I also offered him resources to begin that work. One suggestion was to do an eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion training, developed by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. Coincidentally, and unbeknown to us, that exact class was being offered by a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher the following week in a nearby village in southern England.

  Courageously, my father leaped at the chance and began a profound self-healing journey. Afterward, he spoke to me of the powerful practices of mindfulness and compassion he learned from the course. He felt less alone, and he felt empathy for his fellow participants, who were also going through their own difficulties. He understood that healing a lifetime of pain, rejection, and unworthiness would take time, understanding, and patience, but he had taken the important first steps on that journey. His heart was beautifully tender and open in a way that it had never been. This is the gift of our wounds, in which healing them opens us like nothing else can.

  • PRACTICE •

  Developing Self-Compassion

  Holding our pain with compassion, rather than judgment, is a landmark when it comes to finding peace in our life. It is a calming salve for our emotional wounds. When we can access this attitude of self-care in times of distress, the experience of pain can shift from being unbearable to being tolerable and workable. This meditation will help you learn to meet your pain with compassion and care.

  Find a place to meditate where you can be undisturbed. Sit in a chair, with an upright yet relaxed and comfortable posture. For a few minutes, close your eyes and feel your breath in your heart center, in the middle of your chest.

  Now call to mind any stress, pain, hardship, or suffering you currently feel. It may be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual distress. It could be a stressful life circumstance or relationship difficulty. Take some time to explore the particular challenges and suffering involved in these experiences. With kind, caring attention, feel the pain or the struggle. If judgments or other thoughts arise, acknowledge them and try to let them go.

  While holding the pain with this kind, caring presence, say these phrases slowly and meaningfully to yourself, as if you were consoling a dear, distressed friend:

  May I be free of pain and suffering.

  May I hold my suffering and myself with kindness and ease.

  Repeat these phrases slowly and as genuinely as you can, taking time to connect with the meaning of each phrase each time you say it. Don’t seek any particular feeling; simply offer these kind, caring wishes to yourself. You may add your own phrases or use ones that speak more directly to your pain and the wish for relief.

  If this practice accentuates the pain too much, then let go of focusing on the pain, take some slower, deeper breaths, and open your eyes until you feel centered again and not lost in the pain. Then resume saying the phrases while kindly holding your suffering. When you feel ready to end this meditation, slowly open your eyes and gently move and stretch.

  After practicing this meditation a few times, you can offer these phrases to yourself at any time, whenever you feel pain or distress. You can also offer them to others whenever you encounter their suffering.

  • • •

  Chapter 25

  Developing the Kind Heart

  Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.

  — ROBERT BRAULT

  One modern epidemic that plagues most people I know is the scourge of the judging mind. This is the constant negative self-talk that relentlessly reminds us we are not smart enough, not good enough, not enough in so many ways. This habit of negatively critiquing everything we do and say erodes our well-being and thwarts our ability to accept and love ourselves just as we are. This voice condemns our all-so-human foibles and fosters chronic low self-esteem and unworthiness.

  Many people I work with don’t even notice the presence of the inner critic. They are so accustomed to that negative voice in their heads that it is part of their mental furniture. This means it gets a lot of airtime. Worse still, we tend to believe everything it has to say. We think it is the voice of truth, and we allow it to dictate what we do and what we believe. It alters how we view ourselves and our accomplishments, so that we focus mostly on our shortcomings and dismiss all the ways we are good, kind, human beings.

  When we allow the inner critic to measure our worth, we don’t need to wait for St. Peter to pass judgment at the pearly gates of heaven. The inner critic banishes us to a hellish place right now. Listening to that judging narrative day after day, year after year, our sense of our own value plummets, until we feel worthless, without any goodness or merit. We question why anyone would like us or love us, and we doubt our own skills and smarts. We may develop the “impostor syndrome,” which is the fear that if people really knew who we were, they would fire us from our jobs or avoid any relationship with us. All this can lead to chronic depression, self-hatred, anxiety, and in the worse-case scenario, suicidal thoughts.

  If all this is true, why would any sane person give the judging mind any attention whatsoever? Why would we listen to such an unkind, harsh, critical, and inaccurate self-percepti
on, one that only makes us miserable?

  One answer is that we are conditioned to believe this voice. For example, I met Jodie in England on a meditation course. She is a smart, accomplished doctor, working with children in poverty-stricken neighborhoods in London. She cares deeply about the families and children she works with, people who live on the margins of life and suffer hardship and malnutrition. On the surface she comes across as a naturally good person doing compassionate work in the world. However, that isn’t the story she tells about herself on the inside.

  Jodie was born out of wedlock. As teenagers, her parents, both Roman Catholic, had a brief affair in the 1960s and never intended to marry. Both had plans to go to college and pursue careers in medicine. The pregnancy changed everything. Her mother abandoned college, and her father took a restaurant job so they could rent an apartment and raise their daughter.

  However, this was not done with joy or openness. Jodie’s parents eventually married, but they felt bitter resentment for the way having a daughter impacted their lives and restricted their dreams. Unexpected, unwanted pregnancies are not uncommon, and in Jodie’s case, her parents never got over their negative feelings, and they did not mince words. They regularly and painfully reminded their daughter that she had ruined their lives, their careers, and their hopes of travel and what could have been a happy marriage.

  Sadly, Jodie, like countless others in her situation, internalized the experience of being unwanted and turned it into a deeply held view that she must be unworthy of love. To make sense of marital conflict, children commonly believe their parents’ pain and unhappiness is their fault. This results in deep feelings of guilt and shame and a free-floating sense of wrongness. Planting such seeds in a child is like planting a virus that spreads and seeps into every part of their being.

  When children are regularly blamed and criticized by their parents, this becomes internalized as the inner critic. As she grew up, Jodie’s inner critic repeated her parents’ cruel words, time and time again. This is a misguided attempt at self-preservation. The inner critic tries to minimize the threat of rejection from caregivers. It attempts to ensure their love by shaming us into conforming to their needs. For Jodie, her inner critic scolded her anytime she risked her parents’ disapproval, in the hope of trying to find morsels of kindness in a barren field.

  Today, fifty years later, those words and their scars are still playing themselves out for Jodie. Despite a life of service, helping those who have been neglected and downtrodden, she still hears those tunes of unworthiness in her head. For years she lived alone, feeling unlovable and avoiding romantic relationships. She still distracts herself with food and overwork to try to drown out the negative voices. Fortunately for Jodie, she found meditation and has begun to address her feelings of shame, to cultivate a genuinely kind self-regard, and to gain an objective perspective on her goodness.

  Mindfulness practice is an invaluable tool for working effectively with the inner critic, as it gives us the capacity to know our experience just as it is. Without that clarity, we will be unable to know our own minds and identify what is helpful and what is harmful.

  When we bring that laser quality of awareness to our judging mind, we see how unconstructive and painful those thoughts really are. Awareness identifies when judgments occur and gives us the choice to release them or shift our attention to something more constructive. We can also track the impact judgments have on our heart and our well-being. Once we see the harm they cause, we are more likely to release such patterns. However, being aware of this process is not enough. A compassionate response to the pain is also required.

  In my own journey working with a harsh and punishing inner critic, one thing that helped me find space from it was feeling the hurt those judging thoughts caused. Feeling the bruising of my heart each time a negative thought landed helped me realize how painful it was to talk to myself like that. This fostered a sense of self-care, a warm tenderness to both ease the pain and thwart the impact of such words. That flowering of self-compassion, the shift from self-harm to kindness, eventually allows us to shift away from supporting and engaging with the cruelty of self-judgment to relating to ourselves as we would to a loved one, with care.

  The desire to free ourselves from the inner critic is the same self-protective force we draw on to protect a child who is being harmed. That compassion can be fierce, refusing to listen to or tolerate the inner critic’s harshness. Such healthy defensiveness allows some inner space or distance from the wounds caused by judgments. Once that space is established, we can inquire into whether such critical comments are useful, accurate, or true. When we examine them in the clear light of awareness and see their folly, they begin to lose their grip and we can let them go more easily.

  From that more spacious place we can cultivate a more positive and appreciative attitude toward ourselves. We can take note of our strengths, good qualities, and other positive attributes. This helps balance the ledger that has been skewed by the negative lens of the inner critic.

  Over time these expressions of kindness establish a sense of worth and authentic value as a human being. They provide a genuine bulwark against the years of negativity from self-judgment. Such a warmhearted embrace of ourselves is what allowed Jodie to slowly find a way back into her own heart. You can do the same.

  • PRACTICE •

  Shifting from Judgment to Kindness

  Transforming judgments is key if we are to truly find peace. To do this, we must become aware of how we meet these painful thoughts and how they affect our heart and body. We can shift away from listening to these harsh critiques to sensing the pain and negativity of such words. The next time you are self-critical, hearing self-judgments, register how this is experienced in your heart. Reflect on these questions:

  •How does it feel to talk to yourself this way?

  •Do you feel the residue of those judgments in your body?

  •How does your heart feel in response to such criticism?

  •What is the emotional repercussion of the judgments?

  •How do they impact how you perceive yourself?

  When you notice the impact of judging thoughts, feel into the tenderness for the pain self-criticism causes. Transformation comes when we are vulnerable enough to open the heart and feel the impact of the inner critic. Also notice the pain that is driving these critical thoughts. Judgments of the inner critic are often a misguided attempt to help or protect, but they do so in a hurtful and often destructive way.

  From this soft but strong place, sense the voice that lovingly but firmly says no to these judgments. Find the compassionate strength that cares for you and for the parts of your psyche that feel young, vulnerable, or overwhelmed. When you do, you are less likely to feel like a victim. Instead you can begin the slow but important work of self-protection, which is an expression of love for yourself.

  Finally, an important antidote to the critic and a powerful force for developing self-compassion is the practice of loving-kindness. A simple way to develop this practice is to wish oneself well. So each time you hear your critic’s judgments you can replace them with a phrase of loving-kindness for yourself, a phrase that expresses your deeper aspirations. Such phrases could be: May I be happy. May I be peaceful. May I be free from self-judgment. May I love and accept myself just as I am.

  You can also do this as a formal meditation, in the same way you offered yourself phrases of self-compassion in the previous chapter’s meditation. You can offer yourself these wishes of kindness, repeating them slowly and meaningfully to yourself. As simple as this practice is, when cultivated over time, such expressions of self-kindness can have a profound impact on our well-being and be a truly effective counterpoint to the negative messages coming from the critic.

  • • •

  Chapter 26

  Embracing Loss

  Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is le
arn to swim.

  — VICKI HARRISON

  Freeing the heart entails learning to navigate the storms of life and the shipwrecks that can follow with skill, clarity, and kindness. Mindfulness and kindness are essential tools that build the life raft that brings you to shore. One of the core challenges we face, particularly as we age, is the tender arena of loss. It is impossible to go through life without losing things, people, and experiences that are precious to us. How we handle this loss determines how much we suffer. The Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye speaks of the inseparability of loss and heartfulness in her beautiful poem “Kindness.”

  Before you know what kindness really is

  you must lose things,

  feel the future dissolve in a moment

  like salt in a weakened broth.…

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

  you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

  You must wake up with sorrow.

  You must speak to it till your voice

  catches the thread of all sorrows

  And you see the size of the cloth.

  Sarah, a Canadian psychologist and single mother, attended a course I taught in the Rocky Mountains. She was motivated to come because a tornado of loss had ripped through her life, leaving her exhausted and washed up on the shore of despair. A year before, her only son, a competitive athlete and an avid heli-skier, had been left paralyzed from the neck down by a tragic skiing accident. Sarah felt as if her world had been stolen from her, which in some ways it had. She had to quit her job and move back in with her parents in Ontario so she could attend to her son full-time and care for his needs.