“There’s a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. ”

— from The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron

It’s late in the night when I rise from my bed, realising I’d fallen asleep putting my three year old to bed. I turn on the green lamp on the writing desk and notice birds singing outside, surprisingly active and joyful for this time of night, perhaps revelling in the freshness of recent rain. As I sit to write and begin my search for words, a fly buzzes around aimlessly, around and around in circles. It would appear much more annoying if my mind weren’t so foggy. I have a sense that the story I’m searching for lays just beneath the surface if I can find a way to reach in and delicately reel the words outward as if on the end of a fishing line. The image of someone fishing on a foggy lake fills my mind.

The third song I’m sharing is a new song, but perhaps years in the brewing as I have dived in and out of making sense of beauty and pain. I consult an online dictionary for stimulus. Beauty: the qualities that give pleasure to the senses or that pleasurably exalt the mind or spirit. Pleasant thoughts spring to mind: this evening’s sunset of orange and blue, my new favourite song that I’ve been listening to on repeat, the warmth of my three year old’s breath against my skin as he falls asleep. It’s easy to lean in to beauty.

Pain: mental or emotional distress or suffering. I recall a tough year when both my parents received diagnoses of different forms of cancer. The relationship I was in ended abruptly and badly. I felt betrayed, hurt, angry, scared. I cried, I screamed, I threw tableware at walls to hear them smash and see them break into hundreds of scattered pieces. I started running again. I listened to mindfulness teachings and found that my body needed to move, to walk as I let these teachings enter my mind and my body. Like most people, when pain and suffering come calling my impulse is to escape, but as Brene Brown points out in her book Daring Greatly, ‘if I numb the dark then I also numb the light.’ Pain is harder to lean in to, but it seems that if we hide from it then we also close ourselves off to everything else.

Pema Chodron, in her book The Wisdom of no Escape, similarly points out that beauty and pain, light and dark, are really two sides of the one coin. You can’t have one without the other as they are part of the messiness and wholeness of being human. I find comfort in her teachings that remind me to not strive to do better or get better or even be better, but to learn to be accepting of the wholeness of me just as I am and my circumstances just as they are – the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the expected and the unexpected. The beauty and the pain.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how I got through that tough time, other than I found ways to keep showing up as much as I could and as best as I could – whether it be with family and friends, or work, or just getting through the day even when it was hard getting out of bed in the morning. For me running helped, journaling and music grounded me, while mindfulness based teachings calmed my racing mind and helped me piece together a new lens through which to look at life, at a time when I could have easily disappeared into the scattered fragments. Coincidentally my tough year was also the year I joined the small women’s singing group that has continued to be a consistent thread in my life over the past eight years. How grateful I am to have this open-hearted group of singers that I can fall into circle with each week, no matter what life is presenting me with at the time.

“I love that saying, “The center will hold.” I believe that in the midst of struggle, the center will hold if, and only if, we can feel the edges. ”

— From Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown

Through my work on a health and wellbeing project, I’ve looked in to ways that we as humans learn to regulate our minds and bodies – the ways we show resilience through stressful situations, and the way we calm ourselves in everyday situations that test and stretch us. Dr Dan Siegel has presented talks and written books that share practical ways we can “feel the edges” as Brene Brown would say, and find a way to stay anchored to the centre. In particular, the Window of Tolerance (Siegel, Levine, Ogdon) visually shows how we all at some point move into hyperarousal in which we become overwhelmed with stress, a traumatic experience, or loss. And many of us will also, at some point, experience hypoarousal when we become numb and shut down, often from being in a state of stress for too long.

When we’re starting to cross into those states of hyperarousal or hypoarousal, one of the ways that we can feel the edges, but not get lost or stuck in them is to name them - to be able to notice them, have an awareness of them, and name them. The power of being aware of how your mind and body responds in different experiences, and naming our responses, underlies why Brene Brown delves into naming and unpacking 87 different emotions in her book The Atlas of the Heart. It is also echoed by the likes of Pema Chodron and teachers of mindfulness who encourage us to learn to sit in awareness, noticing what arises in each moment in our life, without being swept away by it. This art of awareness and non-attachment is a lifetime in the learning!

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”

— From the poem ‘Lead’ by Mary Oliver

Lean in to the beauty and pain

The sky gets too heavy

You slip into overwhelm

Keep feeling for the edges

Anchor the centre to be held