Last year when I was really struggling, I read three books that made a huge difference for me. The first was a book of poetry, Keep Moving, by Maggie Smith. It’s a lovely book, born of deep heartache and sorrow, that helped me begin to put myself back together emotionally. It gave me a language to describe my pain and hope that I could heal. The second was Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff, which helped me learn to accept the situation that I was in, to become more conscious and aware of my emotional responses, and how to take better care of myself. The third was Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler. This one in particular put me on the path that I have been following ever since. It showed me that our lives are mostly lived in phases of turbulence and that, when faced with adversity, we have a choice: we can either suffer or we can create a new life for ourselves.
All three of these authors—Smith, Neff, and Feiler—understand that the quality of our lives is directly related to the stories that we tell ourselves and others about our experience. These stories are the threads that we use to weave together our experiences into a narrative tapestry—“I am such-and-such kind of person and I feel this kind of way about it.” As Tolle writes, though, these stories are based on momentary sensory experiences. These events—an emotion, or a feeling, or a thought—have vanishingly short lifespans, like a ripple or wave on the surface of a lake. Normally, they come and go, like clouds in the sky. But when we are mentally and emotionally unwell—or otherwise disconnected from our bodies and sensory experiences—such emotions and thoughts and feelings can survive in us for days or weeks as repetitive patterns that take over our conscious awareness. They can join with other allied emotions, feelings, and thoughts, and merge into a coagulated mass within us that Tolle calls the Pain Body. Tolle calls the Pain Body a parasite that can live within you for years, feed on your psychic energy, cause physical illness and make your life a living hell. All four of our authors agree that we have little control over which thoughts, feelings, and emotions arise in our awareness. We cannot make them go away, especially if they are overwhelmingly negative. But, importantly, we have the ability to change how we relate to these mental-corporeal experiences.
This time last year, I was especially consumed by an overwhelming sense of failure. I was suffering additionally from what Neff calls “overidentification,” where my sense of self had become so wrapped up in my emotional reaction to my life-situation that I couldn’t even step back to witness my that reaction. Faced with my own human imperfection, I was responding with self-judgement and criticism, rather than kindness and care. I couldn’t see that while “failure” may be frustrating, that it is—first and foremost—temporary, nor could I see that it ultimately leads to greater understanding and wisdom.
But, at the same time, I responded strongly to the conditions of mind and body that Neff was describing and, especially, to her diagnoses of root causes. I had noticed—admittedly, with the help of my roommate and my partner at the time—that I was stuck in a ruminative mode. What I learned from Neff is that rumination is often fueled by feelings of fear, shame, and inadequacy. All three of which I was feeling all together, all the time: fear of the future, ashamed of the past, and insecure in the present. What took longer to learn was how to practice her remedies. Neff’s framework of self-compassion is based on three rudiments: self-kindness, mindfulness, and recognition of common humanity. The last of these three is perhaps the most important, but (a) it is the most difficult to deploy when you are really going through it and (b) I have the least to say about it at the moment, so I want to focus on the first two.
Self-kindness is when we are gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than critical and judgmental. It sounds easy enough, but to the person who has carved a deep mental rut for themselves, it can be quite difficult to practice. The best thing to do, as Tolle also advises, is to release ourselves from the cycle of judgment, to name and accept our experience in the present moment: “these are the thoughts and emotions that are arising in my conscious awareness at the present moment.” “I am noticing that I am feeling angry.” “I am currently engaging in negative self-talk.” Simple, but powerful matter of fact statements. When expressed without blame or criticism, this is the first step toward letting of whatever thing that we are holding onto so tightly.
The key thing is to learn that thoughts, emotions, and feelings are neither good nor bad, they just are. Moreover, they are temporary and ever-changing. Success, failure, triumph, disaster—they come and go. They do not define us or determine our worthiness as humans. The only way to free ourselves from suffering is to accept our experience, to comfort and soothe ourselves as best we can, and to recognize that all experiences eventually come to an end. If we can be present with our pain, it will arise, peak, and fade naturally.
Above all else, what I took from Neff is that life is painful and we are all imperfect. Our happiness, in the end, does not depend on circumstances being exactly as we would like them to be, or on ourselves being just how we would like ourselves to be. Instead, happiness comes from having compassion for ourselves and for others, and knowing and truly accepting that both joy and pain, strength and weakness, success and failure are all integral components of a rich and full life.
And lest I make it sound like I read Neff and that it solved all my problems, do not be mistaken! I was subject to what she calls the “tricky middle bit,” where practicing self-compassion wavers and you backslide into negativity. The real shift for me, exactly as she described, is when the motivation for practicing self-compassion switches from “cure” to “care.” What made the difference for me was encountering Feiler.
There’s a lot to say about Feiler’s book, from its much-more-rigorous-than-expected methodology to its hokey but extremely effective rhetorical style, but the thing that stood out for me was the consistency of his main findings. When people experience something that changes the course of their lives—losing limbs, cancer diagnoses, family deaths, sudden homelessness, drug addiction, social ostracism as the result of coming out or transitioning sex/gender—there is often a period of intense suffering. But common to the hundreds of people that Feiler and his team interviewed is a process by which people come to some degree of peace with their new circumstances and begin to build a new life for themselves. Across social backgrounds and experiences, across age, gender, race, sexuality and all the axes of difference, Feiler’s interviewees took up a personal project of some kind, transmuting their suffering into a creative pursuit. By finding joy in doing, they were able to find flow, and ultimately peace. People in transition found that tapping into their creativity gave them a fresh start, a chance to launch a new life.
There’s a lot more to say about Feiler’s findings, but my notes are a bit thin and I did not bring the book with me to Istanbul to augment my annotations. But the big take-away for me was how often these personal projects began with simply writing a journal. As Feiler writes: writing gives context and purpose to problems, situations and negative circumstances. Not only do we have less reason to worry about things once we’ve written them down, but writing forces us to take abstract and unstructured ideas and concretize them. Writing makes your ideas sharper, your emotions crisper, and meaning clearer.
The trick of course, is to not get pulled into looking backward, but looking ahead. Not too far ahead, as Tolle warns us, as too much future-thinking can be just as damaging as too much past-thinking. But to create a new self, we need a goal of some kind, some horizon to orient to, something we want to achieve. Whether that involves claiming a sense of agency, enhancing our sense of belonging, or contributing to a cause—or ideally all three—the best thing to do is to first re-write the story of our lives. And this is in some sense what I have been doing ever since I finished Feiler’s book. Some day I want to come back to the “launch of the new you” framework in his book because I think it is potentially quite valuable for a range of transformative acts, particularly for social and political groups.
But for now, I’ll leave it with an excellent Hellen Keller quote that Neff relates toward the end of her book: “When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” Put this one in the “sounds like a platitude, but is actually profound” pile. I certainly lived this.