Pain Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Path
What the pattern of everything can teach us about how to grieve, grow, and get from here to there
I started crying on Christmas Eve and, almost three months later, I’m still crying.
A day before Christmas, my lower back began to spasm for the first time in years. I’ve learned what this means: a tremendous amount of emotion was trapped inside me, and it was demanding to be felt.
Blind spots are interesting. You never rid yourself of them entirely, but you get better and better at finding them. It didn’t take me long to locate the emotional pain hanging out in one of my blind spots.
Then, for a few hours on Christmas Eve, I let it flow.
By that evening, the physical pain was almost gone, and I was free to strut the “cat walk” while lip-syncing Right Said Fred’s hit song “I’m Too Sexy” in our annual Christmas Eve lip sync contest. You can’t make this stuff up.
However, the spigot never turned off.
I’ve been crying daily for the last several months. I don’t plan it. I just feel the sadness starting to move up through my body—for instance, when I’m listening to “Exiles” by Max Richter, or reading the news, or looking out the window at a family of deer migrating through our front yard—and I simply allow it to move upward.
And here’s the astonishing thing:
They have been three of the most peaceful months of my life.
The last few months have affirmed a few things I already knew about our emotions, and they’ve taught me a few new things, too. Here’s all of them at once:
There is essentially one kind of emotional pain. We call it sadness. It has many derivatives—loneliness and shame, for instance—but they are all a part of the same family.
Sadness originates in the belly and, like a natural spring, it’s meant to flow upward and to exit the body through our eyes, in the form of tears. There are many animals on the planet with tear ducts, but we humans are the only ones who use them to release sadness.
When sadness starts to move up through our body, we push back against it in the area of our chest. This clash of upward-moving and downward-pushing energies creates a second feeling in our torso: anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion, but it is not pain. It is our resistance to feeling pain.
When our sadness gets past the chest—because it surprised us or was too strong to suppress, or because we’re just not someone who bottles things up—we often convert that sadness into something less vulnerable before it can reach each our eyes. We call that anger. Then, anger exits the body through our mouths or our fists or—if we’re interacting on social media—our fingertips on a keyboard. Anger, too, is an emotion, but it is not pain. It’s the last-ditch impulse to inflict pain instead of feeling it.
Sadness, when allowed to flow unfettered, paves the way for peace. It cleanses you and empties you, freeing all the other energies that were trapped right behind it. This is why trying to feel peaceful never works. Peace is like toilet paper stuck to the heels of sadness—if you want to feel peace, let yourself feel sad, then look down at your shoes.
The Pattern of Everything
Last week, I attended an Ash Wednesday service for the first time.
During the service, you have ashes rubbed onto your forehead in the form of a cross, while the Celebrant looks you in the eye and says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” If you truly take it in, this is exquisitely sad stuff, which is probably why I’ve avoided it for forty-eight years. However, now that I know sadness is the way to peace, I didn’t have to avoid it.
I just let myself fully feel it.
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of a liturgical season that ends with Easter and the resurrection. When I walked out of the Ash Wednesday service, the wind chill was nine degrees and the trees were bare—by the time Easter rolls around, spring may be in full bloom. From winter to spring. From ashes to resurrection. From perishing to flourishing. From sadness to peace.
It’s the pattern of everything.
As Father Richard Rohr says, all things continually cycle through this pattern of order, disorder, and reorder, over and over again. He calls it the “wisdom pattern.” Usually, though, when ash-y seasons of life happen, we think we’ve done something the wrong way. We haven’t. Yet it’s hard to feel like ashiness is the right way, because ashes don’t feel very right when they’re happening. That’s okay. Ashes aren’t the right way, either. They’re simply the only way.
Pain isn’t the problem, it’s the path.
Flourishing can’t follow on the heels of flourishing. It has to get dragged in on the heels of perishing. This may feel like regression at first, but it’s actually the only sustainable form of progression. It’s the only way to walk forward forever.
May we become so surrendered to the pattern of everything that we can already feel the peace in the sadness and sense the resurrection in the ashes. And vice versa—may we soften to the sadness in our peace, and may we sense the traces of soot on our resurrections. May we quit parsing them out as lesser and greater forms of the human condition. May we embrace them as equals, like a left foot and a right foot, working together so we can walk through this human form.
“I want a word that means okay and not okay,” writes the poet Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, “more than that: a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all at once. The heart is not like a songbird singing only one note at a time, more like a Tuvan throat singer able to sing both a drone and simultaneously two or three harmonic above it—a sound, the Tuvans say, that gives the impression of wind swirling through rocks.”
May we become the wind, and the rocks, and the song they make together.
How does this compare or contrast with your experience of sadness? Does the pattern of everything leave you feeling more hope or more despair? What questions about the pattern of everything does this leave you with? Feel free to share your reactions in the comments—I’ll be sure to reply!
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Sadness has been my most faithful and consistent companion for as long as I can remember, Kelly, and this explains so much.
At some point during my childhood, I would periodically sit at the edge of my bed, cry spontaneously, and then lie down. I didn't understand it, but it felt natural, ordinary, and necessary. It was as if feelings and emotions had been building up and needed to be released from time to time. Something was reassuring about it, and I always felt relaxed, at ease, and peaceful (as you put it) afterward.
I'm grateful that you shared your insights about anxiety and anger and their relationship to sadness. I'm looking forward to observing these phenomena in my experiences in this new light.
So elegantly written Kelly. Thank you for this.
Joy in release blended with the sadness of letting go.
To answer your question, I suspect I experience sadness in a similar way to yours, although my words might flow differently. Mine begins by hovering just below my heart, as tho a knife had been plunged there, followed by fists gripping my chest, collapsing my heart under the pressure, up my throat as I am gasping for air, and falls out of my mouth in a mournful ache, as the tears fall down my face. That’s how the true sadness blooms.
There is a different type of sadness that is silent, voiceless, my breath doesn’t move, the tears stream down my cheeks, there is no noise, only a hollow ache of heartbreak.
When the initial tears have paused, I feel hollow, cavernous, in disbelief over what happened or someone else did. Relief doesn’t come for awhile.