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by John Welwood

  No doubt the Dalai Lama’s great popularity stems from his living embodiment of Christ’s injunction to turn the other cheek. Although few of us possess this level of strength and courage, nonetheless the Dalai Lama’s example shows us that human beings can conduct themselves with great dignity in the face of horrendous suffering and injustice.

  After my students finished exploring their personal investment in grievance, I asked them to acknowledge their unwillingness to let it go and see what that felt like. A few people judged themselves harshly for this, but they could also see that this was just another form of grievance—against themselves. Most of the others felt a sense of relief—about seeing the truth. As one woman put it: “It makes me feel hopeful. Seeing how I’m so invested in grievance gives me a concrete sense of what I need to work on in myself. And I see how important that is if I want to have real freedom and love in my life. Understanding this opens up whole new possibilities.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Letting Grievance Go

  I was born when all I once feared

  I could love.

  —RABIA

  The heart is itself its own medicine. The heart all its own wounds heals.

  —HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN

  HOW CAN WE free ourselves from the mood of grievance, which only serves to perpetuate the wound of love by reinforcing fear and resentment of others? There is a powerful teaching from the Tantric traditions of India and Tibet that can help us here: The medicine can be found within the poison. If grievance is like poison, this teaching suggests that the cure lies in the grievance itself. So instead of looking outside ourselves for something to blame, we need to be willing to look within and to face what lies there, in the heart of the grievance.

  What lies at the core of all grievance is deep pain and grief about loss of connection. Because we have never fully and consciously grieved this hurt, it becomes coagulated in our mind and body. What we fail to grieve turns into grievance. To extract the medicine that can heal the poison of grievance, we need to acknowledge and allow this grief, instead of running away from it. This means bringing our grief about loss of connection out of the shadows into the daylight of openness and warmth.

  Melting Grievance into Grief

  At first, of course, we do not know that our hurt is bearable. No one has ever modeled for us how to bear pain in a strong, dignified, or fruitful way. So the automatic reaction is to deny our grief and fashion a cool facade to cover it up. Yet behind the facade, there lies a simple truth, a running sore, a wound we share with billions of other people on this planet: We don’t know in our bones that we are loved or lovable, that reality is ultimately benevolent, or that great love is the ground of our whole existence.

  To turn away from our hurt is to abandon and thus rewound ourselves. The only way to heal the wound of the heart is through freeing up the feelings about loss of connection that remain stored in our body, so that they can be fully digested and move on through us. We first experienced loss of connection in relation to our parents, then again with friends who turned away, lovers who lost interest, or a husband or wife who shut down or left. Yet deeper still is the loss of connection with ourselves that happens when we spurn our own hurt, confusion, or despair. This creates inner division and discord that prevent us from fully recognizing our intrinsic beauty and lovability and establishing a blessed connection with ourselves.

  I am not suggesting that you must go through an elaborate grieving catharsis for your past losses, though that might be helpful for some. What is most important is to acknowledge the truth—your separation from love, and the pain of that—and to open your heart to yourself in the place of unlove. Learning to hold your woundedness in the embrace of your own compassionate presence helps you be present to yourself in a new way that penetrates the thick, defensive shell around the heart. This is what allows the medicine to flow.

  Meeting Yourself in the Place of Unlove

  How to hold your pain in a way that heals? The two dimensions of holding discussed earlier are important here: making contact and giving space, letting be. To illustrate how this works, I will draw on a condensed example of work with one of my psychotherapy clients. Jane’s situation and feelings were classic, and the sequence she moved through was also fairly typical. Following along with this example will help you start to see how you can work with your own wounding in a similar way.

  Jane was with a man who was not sure he wanted to continue the relationship, and his ambivalence had persisted for more than a year. She very much wanted the relationship, and Tom’s ambivalence kept triggering and aggravating her old wound of “I’m not good enough to be loved and wanted.” In that wounded place she would lose connection with herself and fixate intensely on Tom—on how he was treating her or on how she could convince him to stay.

  Jane spent our first few sessions together laying out her grievances about Tom and describing her childhood experience of not feeling seen or accepted in her family. After we had established a groundwork of trust and understanding, I asked Jane to tune in to her sense of not feeling loved, as she experienced that in her body. At first she could only contact her defensive shell: “I feel shut down and guarded.”

  When I asked her to see what was under that, she got in touch with her fear and desperation about being left. After working with this for a while, it became clear she was still entirely focused on Tom and what he might do. Jane still hadn’t made contact with what was being touched and triggered inside her that made her so fearful and desperate. Eventually she said: “I hate feeling like this.”

  “Feeling like what?” I asked.

  “So unloved.”

  “How does that feel in your body?” I was inviting her to make direct contact with her bodily felt experience of the pain of feeling unloved. This direct contact is what I call acknowledging. This is the first step of meeting and inhabiting one’s experience—a process I call unconditional presence. This process can be divided into four closely related steps—acknowledging, allowing, opening, and entering. These steps are a way of defining different moments in a process of ever-greater presence with emotional experience.

  Acknowledging means recognizing what is there, recognizing that it is, without trying to assess whether it is good or bad, or whether it should be this way or not. Seeing and touching a feeling that is there, as it is—this is what I mean by acknowledgment. In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that this simple act of acknowledgment possesses far greater power than any self-help strategy or mental analysis.

  “How does it sit in you right now, the feeling of being unloved?” I asked.

  “There’s some soreness here,” Jane said, touching her chest.

  “Can you let the breath touch that soreness? See if you can just let the feeling be there, without trying to fix or change it.” I was inviting her to take a further step—to allow the feeling: “See if you can soften around it, holding the soreness very softly and spaciously, like the sky holds the earth.” Allowing means giving the feeling plenty of space to be there just as it is, while continuing to stay in contact with it.

  Often we unconsciously compress or constrict painful feelings as a way of trying to keep them away or make them smaller and less consequential. Allowing is a form of decompression or unstuffing: letting the energy of the feeling be as large as it is, without either identifying with it (“this pain is me, it means something about who I am”) or rejecting it (“this pain isn’t me, it shouldn’t be there”). When Jane could give her pain room to be there, this provided an immediate sense of relief, because she was no longer in a struggle with it. She was meeting and connecting with the wound of love as a simple human feeling rather than as a big melodrama.

  Occasionally Jane would drift off into mental judgments or stories about the pain. It is important in this process not to become caught up in these mental interpretations or dramas (“This feeling is too much, it’s bigger than I am, it will swallow me alive”) because they interfere with meeting your
experience directly. This is especially true with harsh judgments (“If I feel so unloved, it means I’m no good”). I helped Jane to recognize these judgments as stories she was telling herself, and then to gently put them aside and come back to sensing the present feeling in her body.

  Next I encouraged Jane to see if she could open herself to the painful sense of not feeling loved. Opening in this context means opening one’s heart to a feeling, letting oneself fully experience the sensations stirring in the body without maintaining any struggle against them. After spending some time opening to the feeling, she said, “I feel more calm. The ache is still there, but I can let it be there.” Opening herself to the pain had allowed her to settle down with it, so it no longer felt so threatening.

  After a while I invited Jane to go a little further, to enter into the felt sense of unlove and inhabit it fully. Entering means bringing one’s awareness right into the core of a feeling, so that one is at one with it, no longer seeing it as something apart from oneself. “Can you let your awareness enter into the ache, as if you’re moving right into the center of it?”

  “It feels really sad and vulnerable,” she said.

  “Yes. . . . See if you can be one with the sadness; don’t remain separate from it. See if you can soften into it.”

  She fell silent for a few minutes. Eventually she said, “The sadness is still there, but it’s not so heavy.” In a little while she sat up straight and looked at me. “It’s shifting. I still feel the vulnerability, but there’s also more tenderness and warmth.” Her face had totally relaxed and she was obviously more settled in her body.

  “How are you experiencing yourself now?”

  “It’s strange. . . . There’s some sweetness there,” she said, with a tentative smile. “With that sweetness there, do you still feel disconnected from love?” I asked. Jane considered this quietly for a while and then said, “Not right now.” No longer focused on Tom or their relationship, Jane was feeling her own heart, which ushered her into a lovely sense of sweetness in the body. Meeting herself in the place of unlove and opening to her pain and vulnerability had kindled love within her—as a subtle presence of sweetness and warmth entering into her darkest corners.

  What had clouded Jane’s access to her own heart was her fear of the pain of unlove and her attempts to convince Tom to stay so she wouldn’t have to feel this pain. She now realized that trying so hard to get Tom to love her had only separated her from love by turning it into something that was in his hands to confer upon her. As a result, whenever Tom would turn away, she felt cut off from her very heart. And that disconnect from the blessed flow of love within herself was the greatest heartache of all.

  So whenever you feel unloved, instead of looking for some external remedy, you could take this as a sign that you’re disconnected from your own heart. That disconnect is the poison. Letting yourself open to the pain of that disconnect puts you in touch with a certain tenderness or vulnerability, which is a signal that your heart, with its natural longing and capacity to connect, is close at hand. This brings you back to yourself—which is the medicine for the disconnect. The pain of unlove is thus much more than just pain. It is a direct cry from the heart: “You’ve lost touch with me, please come and find me, your life’s blood.”

  Of course, feeling unloved is usually the last thing we want to experience, because we associate it with deficiency: isolation, emptiness, shame, or inadequacy. Why on earth, you may wonder, would you want to let yourself feel unloved? Yet if this feeling is there, there are only two choices: avoiding and denying it or facing it directly.

  If you flee from the wound, you only give it more power over you. Eventually your emotional body becomes like an abandoned, haunted house. The more you flee the pain of unlove, the more it festers in the dark and the more haunted your house becomes. And the more haunted it becomes, the more it terrifies you. This is the vicious circle that keeps you cut off from and afraid of yourself.

  But when you can meet yourself in the place of unlove, this starts to open the doors and windows of the haunted house, letting in sunlight and fresh air. Gradually the house becomes more livable. Through learning to tolerate painful or vulnerable feelings, you develop a new muscle. With your growing capacity to handle your pain, the wound that once seemed so huge, so monstrous, so overwhelming, becomes tolerable.

  By meeting yourself in the place where you feel unmet, something new and powerful happens. Something so simple yet so radical: You start to inhabit yourself. You reinhabit your lonely heart and bring it back to life.

  Owning Your Anger or Hatred

  Allowing and inhabiting the grief at the core of grievance reconnects us with the feminine tenderness of the heart, releasing healing medicine that softens the hard-heartedness of grievance. Yet there is another resource we also need to tap if we are to stop investing in grievance: masculine power and strength. This power stems from standing in our truth—what is deeply true for us. Standing in this power frees us from regarding others as a threat.

  Nursing grievance promotes a certain hardening that masquerades as strength but that actually keeps us in the disempowered victim stance of “they did me wrong.” In this mind-state, our strength is locked up in impotent rage and hatred about how we’ve been treated. Yet there is also potent medicine—vital power and no-nonsense clarity—hidden within the poison of aggression. In order to extract this medicine from the poison, we need to relate to the anger and hatred dwelling within us in a more conscious, deliberate way.

  My work with Jane eventually led in this direction. After a few weeks of working with her grief, Jane came in and said, “I notice that I still feel like a victim when Tom doesn’t hear me.”

  “What actually happens inside you when he doesn’t hear you?”

  “I used to erupt in anger when that happened, but that went nowhere and was too painful. So now I just shut down and become cold.”

  Freezing like this cut Jane off from her power, keeping her stuck in the victim position. I encouraged her to let her anger come forward, and we worked with it in the way we had with her grief—acknowledging it, giving it plenty of room to be there, and opening to its intense energy.

  Making friends with her anger was helpful. But after working with her anger like this, I could also sense a deeper frozenness in her. So I asked her if there was something else there, something more like hatred. At first Jane didn’t want to go there, because of a strong moral belief that it was wrong to hate. So we talked about hatred as a feeling, which, like any feeling, is neither right nor wrong in itself. And Jane could see how hatred became particularly problematic when it went underground, where it coagulated and became converted into a toxic story about the bad other.

  In a little while Jane said, “Yes, I do hate Tom when he refuses to listen to me.” I said, “See if you can feel the energy in the hatred itself, without focusing so much on Tom or what he’s doing. Let yourself feel it as an energy, rather than as a grievance story. Give the feeling plenty of breathing room, let it expand and radiate, and see what happens.”

  After sitting with the energy of hatred in her body and breathing deeply, she began to speak of how she had felt like this when her father would come home from work and not pay attention to her. She recognized how she had taken that personally, imagining she was unworthy of his attention, and how this had left her feeling helpless and at his mercy.

  “I’ve never been able to admit this hatred toward my father before,” Jane said. Uttering these words with some force seemed to lift a weight from her shoulders. “I’m glad you can feel this now,” I said. It was clear that her hatred had frozen up inside and become turned against herself, and that owning it like this was an essential step in releasing herself from it.

  Jane straightened up, and I asked her what was happening. She said, “I feel more solid, more contained.” I invited her to describe this more. “There’s an upright feeling, like I’m in my core. That feels powerful.” It was clear that she was inhabiting he
rself more fully, and I encouraged her to stay with that sense of power in her body.

  “There’s a firmness in my belly and lower back. My mind is clear and the helplessness is gone.”

  “And how about Tom; right now, are you still hating him?”

  “Tom?” she said, as though she were having a hard time remembering him. “I’m not even aware of Tom right now.” When settled in herself, Tom’s behavior wasn’t such an issue.

  Consciously experiencing her hatred instead of keeping it buried allowed Jane to unlock the power that was sealed up in it. And connecting with this power helped her start holding her ground when Tom wasn’t there for her, instead of collapsing into resentful victimhood. This allowed her to speak her truth with him more directly, without the blame that usually triggered a fight.

  At the end of all this work, Jane said, “I’ve been craving the experience of Tom being open to me, but now I realize I haven’t been open to myself, especially in the places of hurt and fear and anger and hatred. It’s amazing how when I do open to myself in these places, the urgent craving for Tom’s love subsides. Because at least I have myself. And that’s a lot.”

  It’s important to recognize that acknowledging anger or hatred does not mean “Yes, it’s right to be angry. I should feel hatred; I’m justified in feeling this way or in taking it out on someone.” Instead it means “Yes, anger and hatred are there, stored up in my body and mind.” And since they’re there, “Yes, I can acknowledge them, give them room, and consciously experience them.”