by Chris Grosso
Sharon showed me the answer by taking it beyond the spiritual realm and out into the world at large—things like economic and environmental consciousness. She shared a story about how she grew up in a time when the world was much more compartmentalized—what happened to someone in the Amazon had nothing to do with a person in the United States. “To think something in the rain forest might affect the rainfall on my head in New York was ludicrous. Now we live in a time where the interconnectedness of things is much more apparent, but we don’t often stop and pay attention to what that means. We get into this thing of sink or swim alone, but we’re truly more together than that. That’s just the reality of things.
“Sometimes if I go into an office or some workplace to teach, I say, ‘Here’s a thought. How many other people have to be doing their job well for you to be doing your job well?’ And most people don’t stop and think about that, but if you’re a surgeon in a hospital and have a lousy housekeeper, you’re in trouble. We’re counting on each other, all of us. Sometimes I’m in a car coming up to one of those mechanical arms at a tollbooth that’s reading my E-ZPass, and I wonder, what if the mechanic who checks on these things didn’t do a good job and it doesn’t work, and then there will be fifty cars behind me and the whole system falls apart?
“We live in an interdependent universe—that’s just how it is. We don’t often take that in. We often don’t give others enough credit or think about their lives. We don’t often look at our own actions and how they’re going to ripple out and affect other people. There are some odd connections between restorative justice and interconnection. Imagine if somebody shoplifted from my store and thought it was nothing, but because of it I couldn’t help my sister with her rent and she got evicted, and a chain of events was set off by that one action. That’s not something we often think about, but when it’s brought to consciousness, that’s often a big wake-up call. That action rippled out to all those people.”
We truly are all interconnected and dependent upon one another in ways many of us overlook daily. There is a saying that “Hurt people hurt people,” but on the flip side of that, healed (or healing) people help people, and for true healing to occur, we must begin within; and from there, we can let it ripple out into this crazy interconnected world of which each of us is an integral part.
PRACTICE
Loving-Kindness Meditation
One of the most profound ways I’ve experienced inner healing is through a meditative practice called loving-kindness. With her life-changing book aptly titled Lovingkindness, Sharon was one of the first people to make this practice accessible and popularize it in the West. I especially like to use it when I’m experiencing feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness, or when I feel disconnected from others—family, friends, or the whole goddamn world. It’s a way to cultivate a deeper sense of joy, compassion, equanimity, and friendliness toward others and yourself. Here are some basic instructions to help get you started.
• Begin by closing your eyes and taking two or three long, slow, deep breaths into your belly. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Take a moment to relax and bring your awareness to what’s right here and now.
• Loving-kindness originates with you and then spreads out into the cosmos. I’m good with the “sending love out into the universe” part, but beginning with myself can be tricky, and it might be for you as well if you’ve struggled with self-love and self-worth issues. Stick with it!
• Begin by bringing awareness into your heart center, located in the middle of your chest. Don’t think about this area, but rather, be attentive. You may feel it begin to grow warm or tingle or both, or nothing (and that’s fine). Just hold your awareness there for a moment. I like to place both my hands over my heart center, as I find it helps me go deeper as an added act of self-care and compassion.
• Next comes the aspiration or intention, like a mantra: “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.” If this language doesn’t work for you, make up your own.
• After you’ve had a taste of loving-kindness toward yourself, move on to someone you love. This can be your partner, a child, a spiritual teacher, an artist who inspires you, or even your dog—any being you can love easily. With eyes closed, send this person loving-kindness from your heart to theirs. Again, state the aspiration or intention: “May you be safe. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.” Or whatever words you feel most comfortable using.
• Move on to sending loving-kindness to a positive person, someone you feel goodwill toward—perhaps a friend or relative. I usually picture one of my friends who has seen me through some difficult times or someone whom I may not know personally but who has inspired me to be better in one way or another in my life. And from your heart to theirs, mentally send them loving aspiration.
• Then think of someone neutral. This can be a barista at your local coffee shop or maybe the person next to you on the subway. Perhaps it’s the person you pass from time to time in your apartment building but have never spoken with, or anyone else you’re impartial toward. And again, from your heart to theirs, send them loving-kindness.
• From the neutral person, move on to a difficult person. This is where it can get fucking hard. For example, this can be a boss or coworker, an in-law, the president, a neighbor who leaves his dog in the backyard all day, or generally anyone who is a source of irritation in our lives. Because this can be such a challenging part of the meditation, I like to suggest taking a moment to contemplate how this person, just like you—in fact, just like every single person who’s ever been here on Earth—has experienced some form of pain and suffering. I have a friend who likes to remind herself that we were all once someone’s precious infant. Then take a moment to remember a time when you’ve experienced pain or suffering. It doesn’t have to be the worst experience of your life—just something to help you soften your heart toward this difficult person. From there, as best you can in the moment, send loving aspiration.
• After you’ve sent loving-kindness to yourself, a loved one, a positive person, a neutral person, and a difficult person, picture all of them standing together in a room with you. Say their names and your own, and then state: “May we all be safe. May we all be happy. May we all be healthy. May we all live with ease.”
• Now picture your love as a glowing white light extending out from your heart center, gradually engulfing all the people in the imaginary room. Marvel at the light as it spreads out to include the entire Earth, the moon, and the stars, and continues on to the farthest reaches of space, until all that is left is a radiance of loving-kindness and compassion. From this place that is no place, state your final aspiration or intention: “May all beings be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings live with ease.”
10
WRITING AND FIGHTING FOR FORGIVENESS
CONVERSATION WITH J. IVY
I met J. Ivy at the 2016 Sun Valley Wellness Festival, where we were both presenters. We connected over our shared admiration for conscious hip-hop like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Black Star, and immediately became friends. I was interested in talking to J. about relapse, because his life was impacted by addiction—he grew up with an alcoholic father who became his greatest life lesson in forgiveness. I wanted to explore living with addiction from the other side (the effect on a family member), and to learn how to recognize and release the wounds it creates, as well as how to forgive ourselves and others. I knew J. was the man to go to for guidance, because his book Dear Father: Breaking the Cycle of Pain had resonated for me. In it, he described his dad like this:
I don’t remember him saying “I love you” when I was young, but he showed it by cooking us Malt-O-Meal or pork and beans. He showed it thru his smile when he would take us to fly kites, and when he would sing me happy birthday. Or when he would surprise me and pop up at my school to see how I was doing in class. I felt the love when I would drive around the city with
him and be proudly introduced as his son Jimmy.1
Things changed for J. when he was around twelve or thirteen and his father lost his job as a DJ. Alcohol and drugs became a factor. I wondered what kind of effect that had on him: seeing a loving parent turn into someone unrecognizable.
It made sense that there was a radical change in J.’s world. His home life got crazy. J. told me that as he reflected on that time, “The word that kept popping up in my head was ‘confusing’—it was so very confusing. There were lots of laughs and jokes and good times, and then the shift happened, and being a child, you don’t know what to make of it. You don’t know what’s happening. I heard things like ‘Stay out of grown folks’ business,’ and it was exactly that—it was grown folks’ business. I remember being confused, scared, and wishing that I was bigger and able to stop the fights and the arguing. I also remember becoming very shut off. I became the true definition of an introvert. I was so closed and quiet, and I lacked confidence. I wasn’t aware of it. I was going through the motions. I’d go to school, come home, a fight would break out or my mother would wake us up in the middle of the night and we’d pack things up and leave for my grandmother’s or my auntie’s house, where we would spend Christmas or Thanksgiving, and it was an awkward adventure.” J.’s mom had finally had enough and filed for divorce. They moved to the suburbs south of Chicago.
Many of my friends and I are introverts (surprise, surprise—we tend to stick together—separately—at home), and I have experienced bouts of deep depression in my life, so I knew where he was coming from. My first real memories of this were during high school after giving up sports to focus on skateboarding and learning to play guitar, bass, and drums. I lived in a small town, and being a punk-rock skateboarder made me an outcast. I did my best to live up to the anarchist creed of not giving a fuck, but inside, a part of me did. It wasn’t easy often being mocked or blamed for things you didn’t do (though, sure, sometimes I did do them), but I remember feeling “other than” so much of the time, as well as empty inside, which I later understood was what depression felt like. This is where the self-cutting came in, and later, the drugs and alcohol. Isolation can be debilitating and a risk for anyone who engages in self-destructive behavior, because depression—like fear—is often at the root of it. J. had some great insights into how to pull out of it. Like so many of us, he turned to his art, to self-expression.
“A big help was knowing that things get better with time, but that was centered around hope. I could have all the time in the world, but if I didn’t have any hope, I would continue down a dark road. One of the things that allowed me to get through was writing poetry, which I was introduced to in high school when I was dealing with depression and anger and sadness. I had a teacher named Ms. Argue, and I always joke that what I learned is that I can’t argue with somebody named Ms. Argue. She introduced me to the stage. She introduced me to writing. Later, that became the vehicle, the tool I used to get to know myself. In some ways, writing is what opened the door for the depression to heal, because writing was my way of getting to know myself. I would tap into my creativity, and thoughts would flow onto the page. I was always amazed by them, and the more amazed I was by the writing, the more I became inspired to write. I kept writing and writing and writing. The more I looked at my life, the more I got to know the things that I did like, the things that I didn’t like, the things that I loved and hated. I saw that the huge gap, the huge hole in my life, was that my father wasn’t there. But high school had a lot of positive distractions. I had my friends, my family, and schoolwork. I was doing shows and chasing girls. I had sports and was playing football and running track. I was hooping with my boys.”
In Dear Father, J. writes candidly about a deep depression he experienced later in his life, which led him to isolate—to stop going to class and work. “By the time I was in college, I hadn’t seen or heard from my father for close to ten years. I’d wake up in the middle of the night punching the walls, and it had a lot to do with him not being there. During college, it was as if I was on an island surrounded by people, but I felt alone. My pen and paper became my companions. I stopped going to work and classes. The only thing I found joy in was writing. And maybe with girls, smoking a little weed, or playing a video game, but they were only temporary help. When I got home from college, I opened up to my cousin and told her how I was feeling. She said, ‘You need to learn how to forgive. If you don’t learn how to forgive, you’re going to carry that pain around with you for the rest of your life.’ ”
All of the wisdom around relapse, recovery, and almost every kind of human suffering is contained in J.’s cousin’s words, so let’s repeat them:
You need to learn how to forgive. If you don’t learn how to forgive, you’re going to carry that pain around with you for the rest of your life.
“That was the first time I was ever introduced to the idea of forgiveness. It never crossed my mind that I needed to forgive somebody who wasn’t even around to forgive. Through writing and through exercises in creativity and forgiveness, that’s how I eventually became able to write my way through this pain.”
I was feeling inspired by this talk of forgiveness, because it’s something I’ve worked so hard on in my own healing. I wanted to hear J. speak about this, and he did.
“Forgiveness frees you from whatever negative power has been holding you down and has shackled you in the depths of the ocean—that heaviness on you. I was taught that when you’re able to forgive someone, you take the power back. People confuse forgiveness with forgetting—some small details may fade from your memory, but you don’t forget. A television show will come on or you’ll drive through a certain intersection; the wind will blow a smell from a restaurant; there are so many things that can trigger the past.” This was something I could certainly relate to in my own experience with drugs and alcohol. A certain song would come on or I would drive through an old neighborhood—almost anything could trigger memories. For those who’ve struggled with depression, anxiety, and various kinds of addiction, those memories often aren’t for the better.
J. explained that he got through those flashback moments by remembering, not forgetting. “You remember the lesson instead of the pain. You remember what the pain felt like, but you allow yourself to not go through it again. I like to say, ‘If you don’t deal with your emotions, one day your emotions will deal with you.’ ”
After J. had that talk with his cousin about forgiveness, he was performing at a youth revival at a church on the South Side of Chicago. “There was a buddy of mine giving testimony about how his sister had passed. Seeing his void, that hurt, that pain, that loss that couldn’t be filled by anything reminded me of my void. I broke down, and it was in that moment that I prayed to God and said, ‘God, I forgive my father. I want to see him and tell him I love him and I miss him.’ It was overwhelming. Two weeks later God answered my prayers, and my father, after over ten years, called me up out of the blue! I was overwhelmed. Again. Some time went by and we reconnected, and then some more time went by and he passed away.
“When he did pass, I found myself going through it all over again. I’d forgiven him before. I got a chance to see him, love him, hug him, talk with him, sit down with him and watch football games, but then I was back in it. It was even worse than it was before. I was depressed. I was living in Nashville with my girl, Tarrey. We broke up, and I moved back to Chicago with plans of going to New York. Then I fell into the deepest depression. I was at my mama’s house and I didn’t leave my room for the whole summer. I was just in this room. I came out to eat, but then I’d go right back into the room. I was reliving it all over again. Those voices and those feelings were all taking over.
“When I finally got to the point of truly forgiving my father was when I had a conversation with my mother. She asked me what was going on. She mentioned how I hadn’t been talking to her or Tarrey. I talked to my mother about my father for the first time. She listened, and after a few minutes she lit into
me, saying, ‘Look! Your father was a good man. Let him rest in peace.’ This was my mother telling me this. One, I was going to listen because I love my mama. And two, she’d been through the most with him; if anyone had the right to say anything negative about him, it was her, but she never spoke negatively about him, and I did know he was a good man.
“At the end of it, I know he was a good man who had been hurt as a child. He grew up with his pain, and he didn’t know how to cope with it or deal with it . . . and then he passed on. The compassion I could find in that moment, the understanding, and even the wisdom of my own life experiences and knowing what it is to be an adult with real-life issues, real feelings—all those things came together, and I heard her. I could hear Tarrey telling me that I needed to break the cycle. I could hear my cousin telling me I needed to learn to forgive, and it was in that moment I decided to finally, truly, truly forgive.
“That’s when I wrote the poem ‘Dear Father.’ I was able to get down those feelings, thoughts, ideas, pain, and years of heaviness and feelings of being lost and devalued. I put it all on the page. There were tears on the page when I wrote the poem. I wrote it, and immediately I felt this weight lift. I put everything into that, as many of my memories and thoughts as I could think of. It was ultimately forgiveness that let me see the lessons from that. I took the lessons from those moments, but I left the pain. I took the lessons and was willing to learn from the pain, but I want to be happy. At the end of the day, I want to be happy. Forgiveness to me is, again, finding that freedom.”
I too had found freedom in writing. It has been a very cathartic experience for me, one I’ve often suggested that others try. But after hearing multiple times that people felt intimidated by the idea because “I’m not a writer,” it made me wonder what advice J. had for people who shared that concern. Or even for those who were open to the idea but just didn’t know how to get started.