How Losing Joy Brought More
I have a confession to make. I honestly do and it’s not one that I make lightly. One might ask why confess at all—I’m not Catholic; I wasn’t raised in the tradition of formal absolution for my transgressions. I could keep it to myself and you’d be none the wiser but what sort of teacher would I be if I didn’t share some of my less than moments, some of my epic fails, and point out times when I valiantly tired to hide my pain because, well it was how I was raised. A cornerstone of my upbringing was this saying, “If you didn’t have anything pleasant to say, then stay silent.” That was elevated in my family to include anything of a negative nature. Anyone raised with that one too?
At face value it makes some sense. The archaic admonition has value because it can prevent a pile on of negative words that can lead to deeply hurt feelings. It’s gives us a chance hold our tongues, and take a few cleaning breaths to reflect away from the heat of passion. But overtime, taken to heart it can become a tradition too, one that can inhibit our power to speak our minds, and in the worse case scenario it can hinder our ability to speak at all.
This is where my tale begins. I don’t know about you but joy wasn’t something that I really thought much about until one day I realized that I had been bled out of joy—it was gone and I was empty. I felt as worthless and breakable as a hollow crab shell on a hot sandy beach. Not a pretty image yet painfully accurate.
I was driving down the main street of my town when I noticed I was crying. From how damp my cheeks were I gathered that I’d been quietly crying, basically leaking for blocks. It wasn’t one thing I was crying about, it was everything I was crying about. For example, there was no anger, no tangible bulls eye of an emotion that I could use to direct my attention in hopes of healing, beyond abject despair. And I came to realize that my abject despair was so intangible and all encompassing that it was like pushing off a cloud—I couldn’t gain any purchase so I floundered.
Not that my students would know. When I taught, I reemerged for those blessed hours, four days a week. My relief and salvation was teaching. Each class I taught from my heart. The words flowed cogently and freely in the moment and doing that gave me glimpses of my joy again. But as I drove away, the tap of tears would turn on like a sprinkler timer and the void would deepen.
It’s somewhat ironic that meditation is the secession of thoughts—depression does that too. Word of advice, I highly recommend meditation over depression to calm the vrittis. Anyway, what did I have to be depressed about? That’s too complicated to explain fully here, but as I mentioned earlier, I’m going to thread this needle through the tradition I was raised with regarding kind speech, and I’m going to broaden that to include kind listening, meaning listening as a form of caring.
Beyond teaching, I recognized that I had been systematically silenced in my family, by not being heard. Unkind speech is damaging, while unkind listening is diabolical. Unkind speech is like pushing against anger; you have something to work with, while unkind listening is like pushing off that afore mentioned cloud. Over the years I suffered, and my ability to speak diminished to the point that I could only speak to certain people, making me invisible and valueless to others.
Truly believing that I had little value turned that crack into a chasm from which my joy drained away. In order to fill that unholy crater, I had to gain distance from those who seemed more intent on having the last word then letting another have one word at all. It was an act of desperation but the little voice inside me that I did listen to urged me on—in that little voice, I do trust. (Love you little voice. Insert high five and heart emoji).
That was at the end of 2019, a time when I was also tasked to meditate on joy. Over the past year I’ve rediscovered my birthright to joy and embrace it as a deeply felt sensation as well as a powerful spiritual dialogue between self and love for all else. I won’t turn away from any form of this conversation. I will continue to practice the art of speaking and listening with kindness to the augmentation of joy, which means sometimes I’ll hold my tongue in order to gather my thoughts and speak from the heart for the greatest good. I still cry from time to time. I’m human, hardly invisible (thank God) and I do make mistakes. The teacher in me is willing to divulge these less than story’s, so hopefully we can bond through our common birthright of joy and honest storytelling.