Just turn on with me and you’re not alone

Woke up feeling low and blue down in my belly. Head full of it too. Made a mug of tea and returned to bed. Meditated on body sensations, just body sensations – most of which flowed out like an overlooked tide. I didn’t want any of this; today’s stuff or tomorrow’s plans and outcomes either. Didn’t want to be leaving and didn’t want to stay. Where’s the fucking point anyways? The lower half of my mug went cold and forgotten.

And this is self indulgent because look at all I have. But it still rises and lingers. I don’t want to look at it, so I find well worn escape paths. Messaging friends too much – but never even fractionally about this pain, playing word games, watching online crap, checking the cricket score, eating chocolate.

This morning I also thought I’d try reading this book I started earlier in the week. It is so entrancingly written and speaks of place and the occasional ethereal-ness of place in a way that hooks in my heart. Only this morning, as I read on this morning, Kerri Ni Dochartaigh also reflected on the pain and darkness we can bring with us to the places we are in.

“ There is untold darkness to the world that we have been given, and after many years of battling against that darkness I have learned to be still in its presence. To lay a place for it at the table, to sit with its black feather-tips, to let its echoes dance across the landscape of my insides when the sadness comes, silent like a fox.…

… There are places that are both hallowed and hollowed all in one. They have wounded us, but we must return to them if we want to try to loose their tight hold on us. The places watch as we lose our way, as we are sent away, as we run away; they wait in stillness for us to find our way back.”

I scribbled messy biro notes. Next to the first paragraph “sitting with the untold darkness we are given.” And to the second “be still with the ‘ebony crow feathered, glistening like oil’ crow” (a crow as companion is how Kerri’s darkness appears to her). I wasn’t writing anything I didn’t know already, that I hadn’t been told many times over. But what I inhaled from these pages was a path into someone else’s feelings which, although far more traumatic and life changing than mine, were also not a million miles from my own gloom.

Crucially this alleyway into her experience reveals that we all have this. Sadness is in us all. There are no exceptions. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction and hurt and sorrow are part of the human condition. So none of this is personal. This isn’t my fault. I haven’t done anything wrong. This is how it is. There is suffering.

And the same goes for you. Your imperfect life and your imperfect experience are how things have always been. So the self-critical voice and commentary we each layer thickly on top of our feelings is not only unnecessary and harmful, but is also based on nothing factual or true whatsoever. If we can see that, then we can see how we are beautifully merged and tied with everyone. This suffering is for all of us; from the personally inconsequential and fleeting to the globally traumatic and historic. We are in this together. to sit and look around the room at strangers or loved ones and know this profound inescapable union is to see our suffering turn to love.

Later today this realisation had of course worn off. The protracted and unfaltering feelings of low self worth and future anxiety had sidled back in. There is no quick fix or maybe indeed there is no fix at all. It is too glibly dismissive to believe pain will simply disappear on the wind just because I read a few paragraphs in a glorious book. But what is true and what we can bathe in is that there exists a way of living where we can be alongside the hurt and worry whilst looking outwards to all the people (and it is ALL the people) who feel the same way.

Thank you Kerri Ni Dochartaigh.