On doing hard things & feeling our feelings

I love second hand books. I love all books in fact. But there's something uniquely special about a book that's been leafed through, pondered over and passed along. A sense of which, if you're lucky, comes through from the marginalia and love notes within the folds.

These are the words on the inside cover of my pre-loved copy of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche's The Joy of Living: "To Zach, If it's hard....do it! All the best, Wyan". My 11-year-old niece and I were sat reading our separate books in the garden recently when she asked me what my book was about. She noticed the inscription, which sparked a conversation about doing things that challenge us, and how navigating life's undulations does indeed, like the subtitle suggests, unlock the secret and science of happiness.

These personally penned words have since become a frequent exchange between me and my niece; she'll tell me about a difficult experience at school, at football practice or when impatience strikes when she's crafting, and how she resolutely overcame the struggle, inspired by this shared understanding around the things that cause us to stumble. Or I'll encourage her to be bold when I know she is facing something uncomfortable. She'll do the same to me, making me smile and swelling my heart with her humorous and wise invocation - "Aunty La, if it's hard....DO IT!"

Love spreads

That's the ripple effect of pithy, potent wisdom, shared from places of experience, between people who have encouraged each other's boldness, helped each other to overcome the self doubt and fear that makes us human, as much as the fierce determination and bold belief that inspires us to unpick and transform our limiting beliefs.

I've been thinking about this lately during and after several difficult conversations. Conversations that I haven't want to have, because for me, talking about myself, my feelings, is what I find the hardest thing of all. The irony isn't lost on me that this is a large part of my raison d'etre when it comes to the work I do and the people I work with, a heartfelt purpose that has its origins in having seen how people suffer when they hold things in, and the massive release and relief when they are able to let go.

I've had cause to ponder and touch into the invaluable power of love, sisterhood and friendship to wrench the sinking heart out of a soul-crushing quagmire. I'm glad to have people in my life who care to keep asking what's going on when I keep insisting, unbelievably and half truthfully, that I'm fine. This is my limiting belief, that I need to keep going and that my feelings aren't worthy of attention.

Embracing the Second Spring

It's a misperception that I've done a lot of work to disentangle in my middle years, perhaps reflecting the real essence of "the (perimenopausal) change", the reason to embrace rather than resist the hormonal shifts of "the Second Spring"*. For me, this change has come with an uncharacteristic tendency to feel a lifetime of tears falling at seemingly random moments. It's as though an iceberg (something I have been called in my time for my somewhat rigid stoicism) is melting and a trickle has started. I fear the potential for a torrent. An irrational fear born of a lifetime of cultivating said stoicism.

I'm exploring how I might, and what might happen, if instead of resisting and holding my shit in so tight to the point of potential internal combustion and mental engulfment in the flames of my brain that burns more brightly, and the heat of my heart that feels pain more intensely, if instead of that, I allowed this to positively change me. This is nerve-jangling stuff for someone who learned the impact that human sorrow can have and decided that I didn't want to be the cause of more of that, so buried and numbed my feelings away out of guilt, shame, and an idea that I was protecting the people I loved. While my capacity for empathy was and is strong, my ability to feel my own feelings was scaled down, as though there was only room in my heart for so much and I nudged myself into a corner.

No-one told me explicitly to hold back. Growing up, I saw the emotional labour that my parents were compelled to give, out of love, necessity, survival and a commitment to the friends, family and communities that found themselves navigating the shitstorm rained down on them by regimes, agendas and systems toxified by the inhumanity of colonialism, Empire and imperialism. I saw their hearts repeatedly battered, torn and scarred from witnessing and trying to prevent the continual cascade of more pain, sorrow, death and upheaval than any person should have to contend with. But such is the gross injustice of a world where suffering prevails and is meted out unfairly due to systemic inhumanity and largely upon people who neither had/have resources or support to copy any other way.

Healing the wounds of inhumanity

My Mum modelled for me how to care, how to tend to the broken heartedness of a world where, as she would tell me each time someone in the family died, "this is life". Hers was a stoicism born of her own need to keep going, because she couldn't well do otherwise with a family to raise and siblings to worry over. Hers was and is a boundless capacity to offer care, love and understanding. She does it still. It's her lifetime's work. She didn't choose it, as many don't, but it became her role and she embraces it with equipoise, faith, determination and infinite, fierce love.

My Mum showed me how our hands are the messengers of our heart, how they give, heal, exchange, offer, feed, soothe, hold, bathe, cleanse, and generally do the work that matters between humans, especially when humanity fails those who need it most. Likewise my Dad's hands have been toughened through countless excessive hours of physical labouring during the skin-tearing work he did for all our sakes, out of compulsion rather than choice.

When I endured my own struggles, teenage anxiety, depression, disordered eating, escaping into a wrong relationship and a marriage that failed after causing all manner of emotional upheaval and familial strain and tears that jabbed my heart with more guilt, I kept it all in. I felt it was too much to release, too much to pile on to an already heavy pile. And these were ways and mistakes I "shouldn't" have made. Ah the shoulding, the curse of consciousness.

Looking back I am sad for former me, I offer my child, teenage and young adult self understanding and show her that things changed. And maybe this is that change in continuation. Maybe that's old me releasing what I didn't feel able to do then. Maybe this is the transformative wisdom of the Second Spring, the fuck-it mentality that is done with pretence and concern for perception.

Stop resisting, start feeling

While once I refused to feel, resisted the tears, and denied the feelings, as though to toughen the connections between the vessels and the rivulets that go from my blocked heart to my clenched throat to my dry eyes, now all I can feel is throbbing, pulsing, tensing, and the rising of a tidal wave. What if I just let it come? What if I stopped stopping it?

What if this amplified sense of feeling is a reconnection, a remembering, a return, a reawakening to full humanity? What if this is in fact the heartbreak that will lead to cracking open, to stretching wide, so as to open more fully to the spirit of life? Maybe this can fuel rather than floor me. Open me to an experiential and embodied wholehearted understanding of the Dharmic principles and practices of compassion, of feeling deeply the suffering of others, of opening up to the sorrows of the world, and to keep doing the work I do, only now, from a place of greater depth and raw connection between my whole (rather than partially repressed) self and others. Perhaps this is the reunion of a once split mind and a dissolving heart.

This shit feels hard. And it also feels liberating, now that I've begun to resist less and embrace it more. To let some of those tears fall, held by the hands of other women who feel and know how. Plus I have a niece to model behaviour for. I can tell her, and I do, to talk, to express, to share. But to give reasons is one thing, two-dimensional and conceptual and thereby limited, whereas to show how to feel is entirely another, filled with the full scope of our multidimensionality.

This is the hard stuff that I can make the wiser choice to do. And this is the power of words and the transformative potential of sharing from the heart. Never underestimate the impact of exchanging wisdom, pithily, potently, scrawled on inside covers or otherwise.

*In Chinese medicine, the menopause is called "the second Spring", a reframe that I was glad to be introduced to by a dear friend when my own experience was feeling like the bleakest Winter. In words and sentiments happily different to the miserable and marginalising notions that stain the perception and treatment of women in the Western world, the Chinese perspective is that this transition is a positive turn and a natural shift away from the demands, impositions and expectations that typify the earlier years of figuring who we are, what we do with our lives and for whose benefit. Now we get to, because we have to, take care of ourselves.