Hide and Seek

I recently shared with you one of my favorite poems. When I first read Rumi's "The Guest House", several years ago, I was challenged by its bold call to embrace all aspects of one's self. "Welcome and entertain them ALL"? Herein lies the quandary: we won't take issue in embracing laughter, delight, joy, celebration. These we deem "acceptable" and "good". But the others? They are intrusive. Sadness, grief, anxiety, depression, anger, and guilt are not welcome and should they force their way in, they are kept hidden in the basement.

“We lose access to our true selves when we numb and deny our emotional reality.”

Whether informed or defined by cultural norms, family rules or past painful experiences, we all have an innate idea of how to "appropriately" present ourselves in order to receive the love and affection we crave. We make vows on how to best navigate relationships with others in order to secure acceptance.

““If I’m angry, they won’t like me. Your anger pushes people away. Hide your anger.”

”Your fear makes you weak. Never let them see you weak.”

”Put on a happy face. Everyone loves a happy girl/boy!”

”When you were crying, they made fun of you. Don’t ever be embarrassed like that again.”

”You need to be perfect to be loved.”

”Your needs will be burdensome and no one wants to be around a burden.””

These and others like this are our internal messages. While they seem helpful, they are actually detrimental to our emotional health and growth. We don't get to pick and choose what emotions we siphon off and which we keep around. We like the idea of compartmentalizing but if we refuse to experience sadness, we are also numbing ourselves from joy. 

We lose access to our true selves when we numb and deny our emotional reality. The more and more we do this, the more difficult it will be to distinguish between what is true and what is false. We respond, "I don't know" to "how are you feeling" because we've legitimately lost touch with our own experience.

Rumi's idea of inviting all guests in is quite bold because it entails high risk. There is a reason we've put up the "no vacancy" sign. To allow painful emotions to surface means we are opening ourselves to feel heartache and loss and those are excruciating. We don't know if we can survive their existence. It seems safer to keep them at bay. But if we want to be people that are whole and true, then we must do the work of learning to welcome and entertain all.

Psychotherapist Stephen Cope describes what occurs, "The "night sea journey" is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness...The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing."

Later this week, we'll look at what it will require to make this agreement and what it can mean to meet ourselves again.

“If we want to be people who are whole and true, then we must do the work of learning to welcome and entertain all our varied emotional guests.”

A Blessing, Hope

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

-Albert Camus

A Blessing, The Guest House

The Guest House by Jellaludin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

A Blessing, Velveteen Rabbit

“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it. 

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" 

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." 

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. 

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." 

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" 

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." 

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. 

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.” 
                                                                                     

                                                                               -Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

Belongingness

“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody. I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

— Mother Teresa

We are a tribal species. No man is an island, you've heard. Studies have proven this inherent pull to be a part of something is crucial to our ability to not only survive but thrive.

In a CNN article entitled, "The Importance of Belonging", Amanda Enayati reported on such consequences, "Isolation, loneliness and low social status can harm a person's subjective sense of well-being, as well as his or her intellectual achievement, immune function and health. Research shows that even a single instance of exclusion can undermine well-being, IQ test performance and self-control." 

It is clear we were wired to belong. But there are many things that can threaten our sense of belonging. Whether through a choice we made with isolating consequences, difficult life circumstances or harm inflicted by another, we find ourselves lost and alone.

How are we to find our way to a place with receptive and open arms? Storytelling. Social psychologist and Stanford assistant professor Gregory Walton found that placing our traumatic experiences in a narrative "with a beginning, a middle and an end" provides "meaning [that] the negative experience is constrained, and people understand that when bad things happen, it's not just them, they are not alone, and that it's something that passes."  Through sharing their experiences, his studies' subjects learned that they are not alone when terrible things occur. It brings awareness that others have also experienced similar things. 

“How are we to find our way to a place with receptive and open arms? Storytelling.”

By withholding our stories, we choose to live cut off which can lead to feelings of isolation and depression. However, by offering our stories, we can discover an emotional connection to another that fosters a sense of belonging which can lead to healing. We are comforted that we are not alone in our struggles. 

Academy award winner Mahershala Ali speaks to the importance of both telling and listening to stories, "When you peel all the layers away, we're all the same. We're all dealing with wanting to be a part of a tribe. We all need to be supported. We all need a presence in our lives." The beloved saint would agree. 

“We’re all dealing with wanting to be a part of a tribe. We all need to be supported. We all need a presence in our lives.”

— Mahershala Ali

Beyond the Beast

As we continue to dive into this notion that compassion gives life to empathy, I thought it might be helpful to pull from another beautiful piece of literature, La Belle et la Bête by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. This fairy tale is better recognized from the Disney film adaptation, Beauty & the Beast. 

“We give shame the authority to be narrator and shame’s theme is that we are unworthy of love, of belonging, of kindness.”

While the Beast's plight is due to his own arrogance and pride, unlike Boo Radley, they both experience the painful consequence of being outsiders. They are dismissed and discarded; they are unseen. When we agree with the narrative that others create for us, we become what it is they believe and cast away any notion that it could be different. We give shame the authority to be the narrator and shame's theme is that we are unworthy of love, of belonging, of kindness. And so our Beast, believing he is unworthy of redemption, remains isolated, ferocious, and terrifying. He relates to the outside world the way he does to his internal world. 

That is, until, a woman steps in to counter the story he has surrendered himself to.

Emma Watson, who plays Belle in the live-action version of the original animated film, describes the power in their relationship, "What's so beautiful about this story as a whole is this idea that Belle is able to see past these extraneous, external, superficial qualities of Beast. She is able to see deeper, and that's one of her special powers. It is her superpower: empathy." 

“She is able to see deeper, and that’s one of her special powers. It is her superpower: empathy.”

— Emma Watson on Belle

She juxtaposes Beast to Gaston, "[Beast] has been damaged and needs rehabilitating. He is just in need of love, whereas Gaston is someone who has had nothing but love and admiration and easiness and because he's never suffered, he doesn't have any empathy." How interesting that she correlates suffering to empathy. But is that not true? If we are unwilling to be affected by hardship and pain, we will remain blind.

Belle's own sufferings have allowed her to see "deeper" and in seeing Beast, she saves him. All it takes is one person to see who we were meant to be and can be that can unshackle us from shame. Empathy is  powerfully healing. Empathy says, "I see you. I see your pain. I see your struggle. I see your hopes and longings. I'm here and I'm with you." We need empathy to find our way to our truest self. 

“All it takes is one person to see who we were meant to be and can be.

Empathy says, “I see you. I see your pain. I see your struggle. I see your hopes and longings. I’m here and I’m with you.””

A Blessing, Wander

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

                                                                                         -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Porch views

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

— Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

One of my favorite pieces of literature is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it for the first time as a freshman in high school as part of our summer reading assignments. The relationship formed between Scout Finch and Boo Radley left me with a powerful example of compassion. At the end of the novel, young Scout stands on the porch of the reclusive town outcast Boo Radley. She looks out and for the first time, sees how he sees and experiences the world. And something within her shifts. 

It is a profound gift to offer and receive the compassion of another human being. Someone willing to step into our skin, to stand on our porch, in order to understand. Compassion begets empathy; empathy is the foundation for authentic relational connection. Without the cornerstone of compassion, we cannot be in healthy, thriving relationship. Relationship is disrupted when we demand others behave as we want and judge their motives. It is only when we choose to see the world as others see can we begin to understand what author Ian Morgan Cron describes, "one's behavior is born out of a singular biography, a particular wound, a fractured vision of life". This is true for our own stories; we all see from our own porch steps. In order to live fully, we must pay attention to the experiences that have shaped us. The more we acknowledge these defining stories, the more deeply we will feel compassion for others and ourselves.  

While we can't change WHAT we see or what others see, we can consider HOW we see. This posture creates a beautiful greenhouse of transformation. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher, explains, "When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can't accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don't make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform." 

As we cultivate a heart of compassion, our vision becomes more clear; our vantage point expands to see what we couldn't see before and something within us shifts.

““Atticus, he was real nice.”

”Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.””

— To Kill a Mockingbird