The end of my world

An update

“'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.”

You probably didn’t notice, but it’s been a long time since I’ve last written publicly. That’s because I’ve had a lot going on in the last five months - specifically:

• My co-founder and I shut down the startup we had been working on for the last 5 years.

• My dog died suddenly and tragically.

• My marriage of 16 years ended.

I’ve seen a number of Buddhist authors talk about the radical shifts that can happen on the spiritual path. Of course many people experience a kind of polycrisis at some point in their lives - old age, sickness, and death are ubiquitous. And a person in their 40s undergoing a midlife crisis is maybe the most cliched story in our culture. Still, when it actually happens to you, it still feels surprising. I never thought leopards would eat MY face. And yet here I am, face consumed¹.

Having now had a lot of time to grieve and work with these events², I’ve come to much better place - in fact, my baseline happiness is now the highest it’s ever been in my life.³ Since grief and love are two sides of the same coin (the bigger the love, the bigger the grief), my contention is that these two facts are related. When faced with the possible upending of one’s life, there are two pains to consider - the pain of things staying the same, or the pain of changing. There isn’t a path free of pain in this life, but for many people, the known pain seems easier to bear than the unknown pain, even if there is the possibility of something better on the other side of the unknown. No spiritual practice can guarantee change will be for the better; maybe the known really is the lesser of two evils. However — and I can only speak from my own experience — these events have been a sacred unfolding.

In Near Enemies of the Truth⁴, Hareesh expounds on the kernel of truth contained in the false bromide that “everything happens for a reason”, explaining that it is incumbent upon us to co-create that reason, that the reason isn’t a given. He calls this “extracting the blessing energy”:

I like to put it this way: all events contain potential gifts and blessings, and the more intense or challenging the event, the more potential blessing energy it contains. The events we call painful or challenging are, from the spiritual perspective, more accurately called “events that require work to extract their blessing energy.” Imagine if you were able to see all painful or challenging events in this way. Wouldn’t it be an incredible paradigm shift to experience all challenging events as neither bad nor wrong but simply events that require some work to extract their blessing energy? Note the word experience here is carefully chosen: it’s usually not enough to simply see a blessing in a painful event because that is often nothing but a conceptual overlay, a form of mental self-soothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we must do deeper inner work if we want to experience the palpable felt-sense and clear perception that the painful event is in fact a blessing.

Christopher Wallis. Near Enemies of the Truth: Avoid the Pitfalls of a Spiritual Life and Become Radically Free (p. 76).

Moreover, the key mental move in extracting the blessing energy is to fully feel the painful emotions that is associated with these events:

How do you do this inner work? That depends on the person and on the event in question, but my general guideline is this: first, feel all the emotions triggered by the event fully, pushing none of them away, while at the same time taking care to lay aside the associated stories or mental constructs that attempt to explain why you’re feeling these emotions. Allow the emotions to surge through you like a rushing river of energy—or drip through you like a dribbling stream, sink through you like a stone moving through mud, or whatever’s authentically happening. Be intimate with the emotional energy, without making a self-image out of it. When it has finished moving through (at least, for the time being), feel into the center, the still point at the innermost core of your being, and let yourself rest in that stillness for a bit. Then you can ask the inner wisdom to reveal the blessing(s) or the gift(s) in this challenging circumstance. Be careful not to jump to a comforting thought or platitude that may or may not be true in this case; feel your way, carefully and honestly, organically and vulnerably, into what your innate wisdom reveals to you—patiently waiting as you would for the slow opening of a beautiful rose.

Now that enough time has passed and I’ve felt these emotions in great depth, I feel ready to write about the last six months in a way that may be of benefit to others. That’s part of extracting the blessing energy for me — transmuting the pain into wisdom⁵ and sharing that in a constructive way with others. Although my prior writing might have been of some benefit, one thing that I noticed when I went back and read my posts from the first half of this year is a kind of narrative distance, a reluctance to speak from my personal experience. They read as if someone else wrote it about someone else. One consequence of experiencing so much grief is feeling scrubbed clean, of feeling open and vulnerable in a deeper, more immediate way. My hope is that this vulnerability can be helpful. My life truly is my practice - especially during challenging times. While there are some things I can’t share out of respect for others, I will be much more direct. This is just the start.

1. This is a nice metaphor for the shedding of the layers of identity that happens in the course of events like these. When patterns break, it becomes very obvious that we aren’t who we think we are.

2. Being unemployed and financially stable during a major life crisis is pretty convenient and extraordinarily lucky.

3. I promise this isn’t spiritual bypassing - I’ve got the tears and the therapy bills to prove it. But you’ll have to take my word for it.

4. Amazing book. Probably the clearest / most direct explication of the tantric philosophy of life.

5. More prosaically, turning my pain into art.