Your Dragon Waits

“Real shadow work does not leave us intact; it is not some neat and tidy process but rather an inherently messy one, as vital and unpredictably alive as birth… Real shadow work not only breaks us down but also breaks us open, turning frozen yesterday into fluid now.”   ~ Robert Augustus Masters

I’ve listened to people speak to me recently about how hard it is for them to be around their aging parents. They feel the rigidity, the brittleness that happens when we keep retreating, hiding, resisting the wild, chaotic flow of life. “I don’t want to end up like that,” one of them said. “I want to keep flowing, letting go, welcoming what life brings to me.” Sometimes this feels like a widening of the river of our life, opening to more and more, protecting ourselves less and less, releasing our attachment to a solid, fixed identity. And sometimes it just feels like too much-the mind wants to shut everything down, turn away from the dragons of fear, despair and helplessness.

There was a day when I went up to our small local hospital, where the daughter of a dear friend of mine was giving birth. I walked in the doors of that hospital, remembering the other babies who had been born there, and the people who had died, had miscarriages, gone through detox, struggled with cancer. I wandered around for quite a while, stunned by the depth and power of all that had happened in that small building. So much life had happened there, and so much death.

When she was about eleven, my daughter said something to me that stayed with me for years. “There are two kinds of pain,” she said, “ the pain of being frozen and stuck, and the pain that happens when we are open, feeling something deeply, when things are flowing and moving through us.” I felt the wisdom in that statement drop into me like a seed. That seed sprouted slowly into an ongoing sense of wonder about all the ways in which we try to protect ourselves from life. And why not? I have great respect now, for all the ways in which we try to save our own lives-even though most of those strategies don’t work.

Human life is so incredibly uncertain, delicate, unpredictable. Anything can happen to us: things we would never ask for. Sometimes these events, these losses and defeats, take years for us to pass through. This is how it is for all of us– the kind of security we dream about, the kind of control we imagine, is not really possible. We cannot discover what it is to be fully human without being willing to experience loss, over and over again. If we are not willing, if we cling to one side of life, and reject the other, then grief and pain get frozen inside us. We feel oppressed by life, as if a fire-breathing dragon is waiting for us somewhere.

Malidoma Some, the African indigenous teacher and shaman, talks about life in his community: “We were a large village,” he says, “ but we all knew each other. Almost every week, someone would die, or give birth, or get married. Celebration and grieving were both part of our everyday lives.” In our culture, it feels as if we have flattened everything out, in an effort to find some comfort, some ease. We flee from the intensity of the moment to the company of our machines– our cell phones, computers, ipods, cars, TV’s. Machines don’t feel anything. They offer us a refuge, or so it seems, from the dragons of our suffering.

I understand, with all the chaos and destruction happening on our planet right now, that the idea of feeling our grief might be overwhelming. Feeling the grief of the parents today, who lost young children last night in the Manchester bombing, has been very hard. I could feel myself tensing up with the weight of their grief, wanting to turn away and find relief somewhere. When I let myself slip into the feeling, I noticed that the idea of the sorrow and the experience of it are so very different. The idea of it is unbearable, the actual feeling, in this moment, is not. We can begin to honour the grief that we carry, simply because it is here. We can begin to transform our relationship with suffering, with the dragons that are chasing us.

If we can allow ourselves to feel whatever is here, not all of it, but just a little bit at a time, something softens deep inside our heart. We can simply sit down for ten minutes, without any agenda, and listen, without expecting anything, to these ragged and tender places in our own being. This is not about moping around and indulging in all sorts of sad stories about how hard it is when we don’t get what we want. That’s not grief, that’s depression, bitterness. Depression leaves no room for the birth of compassion.

Opening to our grief is different. When we make direct contact with it, it’s no longer frozen, it’s fluid and alive. It starts moving, like a small stream, deep in our personal lives. If we open to it, it carries us into a huge river, where we all move together, through birth and death, loss and celebration, without much control over any of it. In this raw, vulnerable place, the last place we would ever choose to be, there is tremendous kindness and gentleness. From that place, we do not strike out, or punish or blame. We are able to simply be where we are, without struggling to change anything. In that place, which is open and without boundaries, it becomes clear that cruelty and violence are what happen when we just don’t know what to do with our own suffering.

Tara, or Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion, is often pictured riding on a dragon. This is a metaphor for her capacity to ride the waves of suffering, grief, anger, fear and loss, to ride these waves by opening directly to their raw energy. It might take us most of a lifetime to learn how to turn and face the dragon who is waiting for us—to realize it is not our enemy, but the face of our own deepest healing.

May we all help each other to find the strength, the love, and the courage we need to turn toward these dragons,  bit by bit, and learn to ride them. Life is asking this of each one of us-nothing more or less.

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
The still surface on the well of grief

Turning downward through its black water
To the place we cannot breathe

Will never know the source from which we drink,
The secret water, cold and clear,

Nor find in the darkness glimmering
The small round coins
Thrown by those who wished for something else.

-David Whyte

with love,
Shayla