The Rawness of Hurting

Tuesday, September 10

Today’s post is from Secular Mornings’ guest author, Jack Kelly. 

Today’s text is an excerpt from the book “Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown” by Pema Chödrön:

Can you allow yourself to feel what you feel when things don’t go the way you want them to? When things don’t go the way you hoped and wished for and longed for them to go? Sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. Failure or things not working out as you’d hoped doesn’t feel good; that’s for sure. But at that time, maybe instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself a “failure” or a “loser” or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on. 

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Getting curious about outer circumstances and how they are impacting you, noticing what words come out and what your internal discussion is, this is the key.

If there is a lot of “I am bad; I am terrible,” somehow just notice that and maybe soften up a bit. Instead say, “What am I feeling here? Maybe what is happening here is not that I am a failure—I am just hurting. I am just hurting.

This is what human beings have felt from the beginning of time. If you want to be a full, complete human being, if you want to be genuine and not pretend that everything is either one way or the other way but you can hold the fullness of life in your heart, then this is the opportunity when you can get curious about what is going on and listen to the storylines. And you don’t buy the storylines that blame it on everybody else. And you don’t buy the storylines that blame it on yourself either.

How many here have seen the new Beyoncé music video? Track one is called “Pretty Hurts,” and wow, does Beyoncé capture on this music video what it feels like to feel like a failure, right? It is so raw. She puts it all out there, and you figure she must know what it feels like to feel like a failure, even though she is a roaring success and everything is going her way. Beyoncé couldn’t have made that video if she hadn’t had some real experience of knowing what it felt like to fail to the degree that the woman in “Pretty Hurts” felt. So sometimes you can take rawness and vulnerability and turn it into creative poetry, writing, dance, music, song. Artists have done this from the beginning of time. Turn it into something that communicates to other people, and out of this raw and vulnerable space, communication really happens.

This is the thing: I have been in this space of feeling like a failure a lot of times, and so I feel like a pro in this space actually. And I used to be like anybody else when I was in this space. I’d just kind of close down, and there was no awareness or curiosity or anything.

I carried a lot of habitual reactivity of trying to get out of that space of feeling like I had failed. And then as years went by (and meditation had a big part to play in this), I began to get to the place where I really do become curious when I find myself once again in this space that you can call failing—the kind of raw visceral feeling of having blown it or failed or having gotten something wrong or having hurt someone’s feelings, whatever it is.

And so I can tell you that it is out of this space that real genuine communication with other people starts to happen, because it’s a very unguarded, wide-open space where when you look out your eyes—unless you are getting into the blaming yourself or blaming others—you can go beyond the blame and just feel the bleedingness of it, the raw-meat quality of it. You can’t describe it, but I bet everybody knows what I am talking about. And so in that space, communication with others and all of life happens, and my experience is that it’s from that space that our best part of ourselves comes out. It’s in that space—when we aren’t masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away—that our best qualities begin to shine.

The alternative is that out of that space of failure comes addictions of all kinds—addictions because we are not wanting to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves. Out of that space comes aggression, striking out, violence at others. Out of that space comes a lot of ugly things. And yet out of that very same space of vulnerability and rawness and the feeling of failure can come our best human qualities of bravery, kindness, the ability to really care about each other, the ability to reach out to each other.

(Pages 61-73)

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My personal goal this week was to just practice staying present with the emotion of hurt whenever that emotion surfaced and be as present as possible rather than habitually moving away by trying to problem solve or distract myself. To just sit and be present with whatever I am feeling is easy to do when I am feeling good. And to sit with difficult emotions is hard but doable on the meditation cushion with the hours of practice I have accumulated. But being present in daily life with the emotions of not feeling good enough in some way, with the emotion of loneliness, with the emotion of feeling rejected that requires being curious to pull it off. What would happen if I just felt that emotion instead of running away from it? Why am I feeling this way? Getting curious about the pain, not blaming myself and trying to embrace those feelings with compassion and kindness has been rewarding. 

What would getting curious in the face of painful emotions feel like? Could you just sit with those feelings and be compassionate to yourself instead of trying to fix what you are feeling?