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The Ten Things To Do When Your Life Falls Apart
Chapter 1 Excerpt
Cry Your Heart Out
“He who sits in the house of grief will eventually sit in the garden.”
— Hafiz
Hard times, more than any others, reveal to us the truth that the signature of our humanity is our emotional nature. What differentiates us from stones and butterflies is the degree to which what happens to us affects us on an emotional level. We don’t just experience things — get a divorce, lose our house, watch our dog die from eating poison — we have feelings about these events. It is the depth and nuance of our feelings — of our joy, sorrow, anger, and fear — that give texture to our humanity.
Sorrow and grief are the emotions that apply when we experience loss, and crying is the body’s mechanism for expressing grief. It may seem self-evident that we should cry when we’re in pain, but it’s surprising how much we resist our tears. Often it is only when we’ve been overtaken by them that we finally discover how terribly aggrieved we are.
We live in a culture that’s afraid of grieving; we don’t know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them — rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That’s because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve — over anything. It’s almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.
The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.
When life is hard, when you’re in a crisis, you should cry not because you’re weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That’s why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.
Hard Afternoons on the Couch
It has been clinically demonstrated that when you suppress sadness you also suppress positive emotions. What we don’t feel on one end of the emotional spectrum, we don’t feel on the other. As a consequence, people who try to be happy all the time, who suppress what they perceive to be the “negative” emotions of sorrow and grief, actually, over time, become more anxious and depressed. Crying is not a sign of weakness; we shouldn’t staunch our tears. They’re a healing balm, a river to the future.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a bunch of really great cries in my life — days, afternoons, and nights when I took to the couch or my bed and liter-ally wailed about the hardships of life. I’ve cried over sweethearts who left, lovers I couldn’t get rid of, bad decisions, feeling forsaken by God, people who didn’t “get” me, wrecking my dancing shoes, selling my house, feeling isolated, wretched, and unloved, and feeling the impending sorrow of death. I have cried because of my stupidity, my naïveté, and my lack of courage, because of tornadoes and earthquakes, because of money I lost and money that was stolen from me (a lot of both).
At times I’ve been surprised by the magnitude of my tears, by the amount of sheer wailing and letting go that certain circumstances called for. I’ve been shocked, almost worried that such a big cry might have been some sort of hysterical emotional excess, some kind of performance. But the quiet integration, the fragile and yet sublime peace that followed each vintage cry was the measure of the healing power of those tears.
I’ve always felt better because of having cried. I have felt reglued, reborn, strong, silken, vulnerable, permeable, powerful, radical, formidable, tender, pure, loving, exquisite, invincible, clear, new, real, whole.
When you stop and think about it, there are things worth crying about every day. So cry, for God’s sake. Cry your heart out.
Grief as Suicide Prevention
On that note, I used to have a friend who once said to me with envy, “You cry easy.” She was going through a very difficult time, facing the institutionalization of the young Down syndrome son she had hoped to be able to keep at home. When she told me, in vivid detail, about visiting the facility, seeing the room in which her little boy would likely spend the rest of his life, I was moved to tears. I unabashedly wept as we sat together having our nice lunch at a very spiffy restaurant, while across from me she sat stone-faced and brave, “keeping it all together.”
Years passed, and we lost touch. Then one afternoon, she called me from the psych ward of her local hospital. Some very tough things had happened, she told me, and as a consequence, she’d tried to kill herself. When she found herself still alive, the morning after they’d pumped out her stomach, she found herself crying for hours. “I guess the dam finally broke,” she said. “I must have a ton of crying to do. Years’ worth.”
I’ve always told the people I work with that if you don’t cry teaspoonfuls, you will cry bucketfuls, and that’s in part what my friend confirmed. Our bodies and our hearts, the elaborate museums where all our unexpressed emotions are stored, are designed to have experiences, feel what they feel about them, and then release those feelings. If we don’t, they gather like leaves in rain gutters, clogging the downspout until, finally, the rain gushes over the edge and falls in sheets in front of the living room windows.
My friend had to go to the brink of death to find her tears. Maybe you can start crying now.
The Golden Shawl
I have another friend named Mari. After not seeing her for a long time, I ran into her a couple of years ago at a meditation retreat we both often attend. A lovely woman in her forties who is a teacher of the healing arts, she brings balance to everyone around her, but this time when we met, she seemed suddenly, quietly older. There were thickets of lines around her eyes, deep new creases around her mouth.
When I asked how she’d been since we’d lastseen each other, Mari told me that it had been a very hard year. Without any warning, her fifteen-year-old daughter had died. She’d had an allergic reaction to an herbal energy potion she’d taken two times before, gone into anaphylactic shock, and died within minutes. Telling me all this, Mari started crying, and seeing her, I did too. We stood there on the paradoxically very brightly colored carpet of the hotel lobby where the retreat was being held, crying together for quite a few minutes. Finally, she reached in her purse, took out a Kleenex, and wiped her eyes. “Thanks,” she said, “it’s so good to cry.” She told me her friends were tired of her crying. The death had been six months ago, and they wondered why she was still “so affected.”
I didn’t see Mari for almost six months after that. When we met again at the next retreat, she looked softer, ravaged, beautiful in a different new way. I could see that in the time that had passed she had somehow become larger than her grief, that she had encompassed it. I was deeply moved when I saw how big she had become around it.
When I asked her how she was doing, she told me that she was doing somewhat better. She told me that while everybody close to her still seemed to think that she should be “over it” by now, she wasn’t. She went on to say that, with several other mothers of children who had died, she’d formed a grieving group; when any of them felt the pain starting to become unbearable, they’d call all the others and get together to have “a crying time.”
She said, “We just sit together in one of our living rooms, and cry our hearts out for a while. And then when we’re all cried out, we say good-bye and go on with our lives again.”
I ran into Mari at the lunch break later that day. There was a bazaar being held in the lobby of the hotel, with vendors selling a lot of beautiful things. Mari had found an exquisite ochre shawl, and I stepped up just as she was trying it on. She asked me if I thought she should buy it. I told her I thought it looked lovely with her brown eyes and dark hair, and that maybe now she could treat herself to something beautiful.
When I saw her later that afternoon, the golden shawl was wrapped around her. Mari looked gorgeous and she was smiling.
Grief is a long and complicated journey, and getting to the golden shawl part of the story always takes a lot of tears. That’s because anything short of real grieving leaves you with the pain still stuck like a chicken bone in your throat. You will never get to
the equanimity that follows grief by avoiding the grief — by thinking the loss will go away, pretending you weren’t affected, rationalizing, trying to talk yourself out of the pain: “I should be over it by now. I don’t know why I’m so upset. What’s the matter with me, anyway?”
We ask ourselves these ridiculous questions because in this easy-way-out culture of ours we’ve been behaving for a very long time as if we could avoid things, as if we could go around our difficulties instead of going through them. It doesn’t work that way. What hurts will not simply “go away.” You will not just “get over it.” Tears are the way you make room for the birth that follows grief. They are one of the true and beautiful pathways through the pain. In fact, they are the royal road to emotional healing.
It’s been said that when we cry, when the tears wash down the sides of our faces, we are brought back into the cellular memory of having our faces bathed in amniotic fluid, taken back to the bliss we felt in the womb. This is one of the reasons why crying is so profoundly healing. We are literally brought back to the state we were in before we were born. When we allow ourselves to be bathed in the cleansing elixir of our tears, we clean the slate, we return to birth. In newness there is always hope. When things are new we know we can begin again.
That is why, once we have cried, we often feel, quite literally, reborn.
For Those Who Suffer in Our Midst
It’s not just for ourselves that we have reason to cry. There is so much suffering in the world that we could build a wailing wall around it and just weep nonstop for the pain of us all, until all of us are healed.
Take, for instance, the fact that the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its incarcerated criminals, and that it spends $68 billion per year on “corrections.” In California alone, the state prison budget is over $11 billion, and it costs more than $50,000 per year to house an inmate, more than the annual cost of an education at Yale, Princeton, or Harvard.
The tragedy of this was brought home to me in a personal way a number of years ago when I made the acquaintance of Roy, a murderer in prison. He had written a letter to a magazine in which he said that as a young man his unaddressed anger had ultimately expressed itself in taking another person’s life, but he now realized his anger had been a compensation for his deep grief over the many devastating losses he’d experienced.
I was moved by his very articulate awareness that, as for so many men, his anger was a cover for his grief. A few days later, using the address he included in his letter to the magazine, I sent him a copy of a book I had written about men and their emotions in which I had addressed this very issue.
Months passed. I hadn’t imagined I would ever hear from him, and by the time he wrote back, I’d practically forgotten that I’d sent him the book. In his note, he explained that prisoners were not allowed to receive unsolicited books from any outside source; since my book had arrived out of the blue, it had required a special hearing to decide whether or not he could, in fact, receive it.
In the end, the prison officials had allowed him to accept the book. He’d read it, he told me, and wept, wishing that as a young man of seventeen he had heard about or understood the things it said. He wrote unself-pityingly to me about his life. His own father died when he was four, leaving him alone with his mother, a slightly dull-witted but very pretty woman. She went through a series of boyfriends, the first of whom raped her. This led to the birth of a little sister, whom Roy came to adore, but she died of meningitis when she was three and he was seven. There was a series of other stepfathers after that, each of whom hung around for a while before taking off. Finally, one stepfather chose to stay with the family and provide for them, and Roy started to find solace and direction with him. Then, during a family picnic at the lake one summer afternoon, Roy watched helpless from the shore as, flailing and screaming for rescue in the distance, his stepfather drowned.
Wild with the loss of her daughter and her husband, Roy’s mother leaned on him to become the provider. He was by then fifteen. Dropping out of school, he became an apprentice carpenter, and one night two years later, the second time he’d ever been out drinking in a bar, a gang member six inches taller than he was roughed him up and threatened him with a knife. When the gang member hurled the knife in his direction, Roy grabbed it from the floor, and with the tragic irony of uncalculated precision, stabbed his assailant between the ribs and directly into his heart. Within minutes the other young man was dead; within a year Roy was sentenced to sixty to ninety years in prison.
Roy has become a writer and a Buddhist in prison. He tells me that his cell is his monastery, that life “inside” is his spiritual path. “Unlike you,” he wrote to me humorously once, “I always have plenty of time to write.” In the several years I’ve known him, he’s started a periodical and finished two books.
Once when I was flying across the country to make a speech, I took a few side flights and stopped to visit him. I stayed overnight in a plain, small visitors’ motel not far from the prison. It was a sunny day when I awoke the next morning, and I decided to take a walk before the afternoon visiting time. As I walked through the town I realized that the streets were lined on either side with prisons. Young men, many of them high school age, mostly brown and black, but among them a smattering of white, were playing ball in the prison yard, the arc of their lives already drawn, their chances, for the most part, already over.
It was late afternoon when it was time for my visit. I wore a white dress. I was early, and before I went in I walked twice around the barbed-wire, razor coil–encrusted prison yard fence, weeping with each step and waving at the prisoners who stood outside on the steps here and there, waving poignantly back at me.
As I walked, I wondered if they had ever cried for themselves, or if anyone had ever cried over them. I thought, too, what if we could create a ministry of tears? What if we consecrated some time in each of our days to weep, first for ourselves, but then also for each of these ones whose lives have been broken — who in the vast wholeness that is all of our humanity have been assigned the life’s work of being criminals, while we are privileged to have been born of parents and in circumstances that, in spite of our individual rations of pain, allow us to live as free men and women? What healing would happen? What peace would reign? How much would our differences dissolve? And what would we learn about the true nature of love?
You and Your Tears
Here are some questions to answer as you contemplate the healing role of grief and tears in your life. Perhaps you’ve never been aware that crying, along with being a spilling over of feeling, actually has a curative effect. It is not a mistake; it is a necessity. Bearing this in mind, you can use these questions to help shepherd you on your own healing journey.
• What’s the old ache in your heart that you’ve never wept over? Something that happened in your childhood, that you’ve talked yourself out of crying about? Something other people told you that you shouldn’t cry over? Something that happened last week? The death of your dog? The loss of your job? Devastating words from your boss? Cutting remarks from your son or daughter? The $200 raise in your rent? The client who just ripped you off?
• What is unbearable in your current circumstances that you’ve tried to solve and get a grip on, but if you stop and think about it is really so unbearably painful that you should just have a good cry over it? Who would you choose to be with you when you shed these tears? Where would you go to cry — to the ocean? To a listener, a priest? To the cathedral inside your own heart? Wherever that place is for you, I urge you to name it now, and go there, and let your fine tears set you on the journey of your healing. And if one good cry doesn’t do it, how can you give yourself the time and space to cry as often as you need to?
• If you were to offer your tears as a ministry of compassion, for whom would you offer your tears? For what cause? Is there anything else, once you have finished with crying, that you’d like to do on behalf of these suffering others?
From the book The Ten Things To Do When Your Life Falls Apart. Copyright © 2010 by Daphne Rose Kingma. Reprinted with permission of New World Library.
