While not really my type of book, it might be good to read at this point; to love oneself first...
"Making yourself feel good is not a nothing," Sharon said.
This hadn't occured to me.
For Sharon, the simple act of privately wishing people well has a way of changing the way we relate to them, and to the world.
This equanimity about death lasts maybe three minutes, but each time it happens, it changes me slightly. If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all, these musically bittersweet moments are the closest I've come to experiencing it.
The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death - bitter and sweet - are forever paried. "Days of honey, days of onion," as an Arabic proverb puts it. The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities-the dark as well as the light-is, paradixcally, theonly way to transcent them. And transcending them is the ultimate point.
If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect.
the "wounded healer," a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity's oldest archetypes. In Greek myth, the centaur Chiron was injured by a poisoned arrow that gave him terrible pain, but also curative powers. In shamanistic cultures, often healers must first undergo an initiation process involving great misery. In Judaism, the Messiah's powers derive from his own suffering; he surrounds himself with the poor and the sick because he's one of them. In Christianity, Jesus is the wounded healer who cures bleeding women, hugs lepers, and dies on a cross to save us all. And in Islam, Muhammed is the impoverished orphan who grows up to spread a message of honoring the pariah, the parentless, and the poor.
Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
There is a traditional trope of laughing at how badly our dates go. We think: "I'm a still circle of perfection in a sea of madness!"
"Who in this room wants to be loved for who they are?" he continues. "Put your hands up if you want to be loved for who you are."
The hands raise again.
"Oh, my goodness," chides Alain De Botton. "We have work to do still. Have you not been listening to anything I've been saying? How can you possibly be loved for who you are? You're a deeply flawed human being! Why would anyone love you just as you are? You've got to grow, and you've got to develop!"
People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average. But those who favor "bittersweet" songs listen almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a "deeper connection" to the music than those whose favorites made them happy. They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcedence, nostalgia, and common humanity-the so-called sublime emotions.
The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca collected many of this country's lullabiews and concluded that Spain uses its "saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children's first slumber".
The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by "the pathos of things" and "a sensitivity to impermanence"
We don't actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things-the bitter together with the sweet. We don't thrill to lists of sad words, for example.
The Spanish call it duende, the yearning, burning center of flamenco dance and other art forms of the inflamed heart. Portuguese speakers have the concept of saudade, a sweetly piercing nostalgia, often expressed musically, for something deeply cherished, long gone, that may never have existed in the first place. In Hinduism, viraha - the pain of separation, usually from the beloved - is said to be the source of all poetry and music. Hindu legend says that Valmiki, the world's first poet, was moved to verse after watching a bird weeping for her mate, who'd been making love to her when he was killed by a hunter. "Longing itself is divine," writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. "Longing for wordly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss."
Yiddish word kvelling. It means "bursting with pride and joy for someone you love."
This longing you express
is the return message
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
[Rumi]
It might be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness - of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.
University of Washington business school professor Christina Ting Fong found that people who simultaneously experience positive and negative emotions are better at making associative leaps and at seeing connections.
"If followers mess up on an important project," Schwarzmüller told Ozy Media's digital magazine, "it might be good to consider saying, "I'm sad this happened," instead of "I'm angry this happened." Personal power "motives people to work for you toward shared goals, and because they like you.
Tim [Chang] observed that peopel build companies and teams that reflect not only their values and strengths but also what he calls their "core wounds."
They open up to Susan about all the things they wish they didn't feel. "I don't want my heart to be broken," they say. Or, "I don't want to fail."
"I understand," Susan tells them. "But you have dead people's goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure."
One, the interviews were full of stories of pain and suffering at work: panic attacks, injured relationships, feelings of devaluation. Two, the interview subjects rarely used words such as pain or suffering to tell their stories. They were anxious but said they were angry; they were sad but said they were frustrated. "There's an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace," [professor Jason] Kanov told me. "But we don't feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it's actually doing to us."
Leaders who behave angrily during challenging situations are often assumed to be more powerful than those who react sadly. [...] Yet a 2009 study by management professors Juan Madera and D. Brent Smith found that showing sorrow rather than anger sometimes leads to better outcomes for leaders, including stronger relationships with followers, and a greater perception of effectiveness.
Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers [during daily 20min writing sessions]
As Estelle Frankel explores in her excellent book Sacred Therapy, this is why so amny societies celebrate coming-of-age rituals in religious contexts, and why so many of those ceremonies involve the death of the childhood self and the birth of the adult one. In some cultures the child is buried (temporarily!) in the ground, and disinterred as an adult; sometimes he's tattooed, or maimed, or performs some other feat marking the end of childhood and the emergence of a new, adult self. Sometimes this involves a separate physical space, whether an initiation hut or a body of water, a church or a synagogue. The point of these rituals is that X must always give way to Y, and that this process, which involves both sacrifice and rebirth (the ultimate creativity) belongs to the realm of exaltation.
Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.
compassion literally means "to suffer together"
psychologist Jonathan Cohen found that people asked to consider the suffering of victims of violence displayed activation of the same brain region as a previous study had shown of besotted mothers gazing at pictures of their babies.
processing people you've never met as if their pain is your own... reactions were likely influenced by your vagus nerve, your anterior cingulate cortex, your periaqueductal gray.
Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw" – with the motto "survival of the fittest." But this wasn't actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow "social Darwinists" who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy.
If you're a melancholic type, you might expect to find your deepest stirrings reflected somewhere in the discipline [of psychology]. But other than the "high sensitivity" paradigm, the closest you'll come is the study of a personality trait called "neuroticism," which is about as appealing as the name sounds. According to modern personality psychology, neurotics are fretful and insecure. They're prone to illness, anxiety and depression.
Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they're vigilant types who take good care of their health. They're strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They're good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle.
An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others' sadness–and even to our own. "Your vagus nerve won't fire when you see a child who's starving," says Kletner, "if you think you're better than other people." Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need. They're less likely to experience physical and emotional pain when holding their own hands under scalding water, when excluded from a game, or when witnessing the suffering of others.
But perhaps none of this [noticing suffering in others] is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. This may sound like the opposite of what you'd do to encourage humility. But many of us engage, without even realizing it, in a constant stream of negative self-talk: "You're terrible at this." "Why did you screw that up?" But, as Jazaieri observes, "There's no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in face, some data suggests that this type of crticicism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them."
Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we'll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath–and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you'd extend to a beloved child–literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you'd shower on an adorable three-year-old. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you're not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You're taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.
"The word "loser" is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgement."
Garrison Keillor
But where did this "tyranny of positivity" come from? Why did her father believe that he had to "fight" cancer with blind optimism? And why did his bereaved daughter feel so much pressure to smile?
The answer to these questions can be found in American cultural beliefs about the self. We're encouraged to see ourselves, deep down, as winners or losers - and to show, with our sanguine-choleric behavior, that we belong to the former group. These attitudes shape countless aspects of our lives, often without our realizing it.
[...]
Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys. Many societies believe that expressing happiness invites bad luck and is a sign of selfishness, shallowness, and an uninteresting, even sinister, mind. When McDonald's opened its first franchise in Russia, local workers were bemused by its ethos of employee cheeriness, according to the radio show and podcast Invisibilia. What is this American smile? they asked. "We are all serious about life, because life is struggle," as one employee put it. "We were always a little bit afraid of America's smile."
[Americans] don't turn over our water glasses at night, as Tibetan monks do to remember that they might be dead by morning. We don't write down our wishes and expose them to the elements, as the Japanese do at Mount Inari. We don't weave imperfections into our rugs, as the Navajo do, or bake them into our pottery, as the Japanese practice with the art form of wabi sabi.
a remote tribe required mothers to give up something precious every year, to prepare for their sons' departures at adolescence.
expressive writing exercise: would the people who love you still love you if they knew what you just wrote? Would you still love you? Do you still love you?
A field in social psychology called terror management theory. According to this theory, the fear of death encourages tribalism, by making us want to affiliate with a group identity that would seem to outlive us. Various studies have shown that when we feel mortally threatened, we become jingoistic, hostile to outsiders, biased against out-groups.
Carstensen even found these patterns among healthy people facing social unrest. Young and strong Hong Kong residents who were worried about Chinese rule in 1997, and later about the SARS epidemic, made the same social choices as older people. But when life appeared to settle down after the political transition, when the threat of SARS subsided, these young people started acting "like themselves" again. Again and again, Carstensen's studies showed that the important variable is not how many years since you were born - but how few good years you feel you have left.
When the Romans triumphed, writes Ryan Holiday, an influential author on Stoicism, the victorious commander would be stationed at a place of honor, where the adoring crowds could see him best. But instead of immersing himself in glory, he was followed by an aide whispering in his ear, "Remember, thou art mortal." Marcus Aurelius, too, wrote in his Meditations, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Seneca suggested that each night we tell ourselves that "You may not wake up tomorrow," and that we greet every morning with the reminder that "You may not sleep again."
"I'm not saying that Hindus are happy about death," Ami hastens to explain. "They feel just as much loss. But there's more of a sense that death is part of life. There's a fatalism, a sense that we don't have an ability to change it, that there's a power that's greater than ourselves, even greater than science's ability to find treatment and cures. Things happen for a reason. If this is our time, this is our time."
But the doctrine of reincarnation doesn't solve the pain of separation between two attached souls, Ami explains. "It's unlikely those two souls will meet again. And who knows where one will land and where the other will land. And that is a true loss."
(we don't move on, we move forward)
We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you'll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again... They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on.
Yehuda and her colleagues studied a particular gene, associated with stress, in a group of thrity-two Holocaust survivors and twenty-two of their children. They found that this gene, in both parents and offspring, showed a typoe of epigenetic change called methalation. It was remarkable evidence that "preconception parental trauma" might be passed on from one generation to the next.
not only can pain last a lifetime, it can last many lifetimes.
But evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
"I have poor shock absorbers, and I should just let it pass, because my biology is going to have extreme responses before it calmes down."
Nietzsche, who wrote that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
"Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you," said the ancient Greeks. And this didn't mean literally to reenact their lives; it meant to give them a new life, fresh and clean.
The ancient proverb quoted in Ezekiel: "The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." But the Bible quotes this proverb in order to reject it: We aren't responsible for the sins of our parents, it says. And neither must we bear their pain.
Maybe you're a manager who realizes that sadness is the last great taboo in the workplace, and you want to create a healthy culture, one that's positive and loving yet acknowledges the dark along with the light, and understands the creative energy contained in this bittersweet fusion.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-30458-001?doi=1
