It matters that we're seen, that we see.
And not just sight as connected to what the eyes register, that too, but more what the heart can take, and how we meet its needs, our needs. By tending and attending. In places, spaces and among people who can take it, reflect something back, hold our energy, gift their own. Show us how to feel. Sangha, in a word, and in a feeling if and once we find and then tiptoe or march our way into a space where we figure out that we belong.
Show yourself, when you're ready, speak up.
Because it's also true that it takes time to get here. There. To this. I knew this. But I needed to remember. To feel it. To show myself. To be okay with what happened after I spoke, regardless. To care for how I'd be received a little less, so that I could speak up a little more.
I've spent my time sitting in the silence, the doubt, the judders and the jitters. The frustration and flagellation. All that comes before. That gets us here. That this is built on. The rubble, the weeds, the dust and the strain.
"O children, lift up your voice, rejoice." Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
It's taken me years to feel that I belong. Intellectually, I knew it, read about it, read so much about it, thought about it, analysed it, wrote about, created it for others, tried to manufacture and control it, resisted it. But it's only since I've let myself go, into spaces that I've finally begun to feel safe and able to be seen in, that I actually feel it. So much so that now the emotions I held back, out of self-preservation and learned behaviour, are gushing forth like a torrent, potentially a tsunami. That's the fear, that this will flood me. That's an old fear.
"I can't flood others, swamp and drown people in my trouble, because who am I to say I suffer, I don't suffer, this isn't suffering, this is nothing compared to other people." That's the monkey mind, the inner critic, and it's powerful.
A very dear friend, former colleague, psychologist and South Asian with her own understanding of trauma and patterning, once told me that I don't have to be a martyr to my pain, that my pain is legitimate and worth processing. I took that on board, and swiftly parked it before getting on with my work of helping people to tell their stories, writing about other people. Other people matter, truly.
We worked together at a human rights charity at the time, advocating for the rights of people from across the world who had survived the worst imaginable tortures. Their suffering, their stories mattered - for the sake of survival and to allow them to build new lives, in spite of the culture of hostility that has disgustingly long been the UK government's take on immigration. She provided psychological support. I supported our clients working alongside therapists, to tell the stories that they wanted and needed to share, so as to impress upon the authorities the inalienable right to life we should all have, and to share with everyone who cared to know the realities of the best and the worst of our common humanity.
"I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel." Johnny Cash
I've always been told I'm a good listener, possibly the first time was listening to a relative when she would call my old family home in distress. I would have been about 13, maybe younger. She was suffering and hiding behind - drowning her demons in - alcohol. Only at those times did she feel compelled to speak, when she wasn't fully aware of what she was saying, when the inhibitions melted her steely guard, when the urge to hide gave way. It was her rage, more than her suffering that came out; the wholly legitimate rage at the injustices and cruelty she witnessed and felt. But she didn't complain, ever. She wanted fairness, justice - she wanted love.
She was another person who was praised for their strength and bravery. All the while silently battling with the open sores and tears on her heart, feeling alone. I would listen and advise, reflect back her wisdom, doing what I thought and learned was the way to help - help people be strong, don't show emotion, because emotions and stories will get you stuck in a loop and drag you asunder. Although I had a sense from an early age, from seeing the unspoken and unexpressed pain of my family, that something else needed to come out, that the pain and the loss needed to be told and witnessed. Because it was making them hurt.
"How did you become so wise so young?" she would say. I didn't consider myself to be, but I absorbed that message. Be strong, that helps. So I hid my suffering, wouldn't even consider naming it as such, masked it, made myself strong in mind and body to build my own steel barricade through which nothing could get out. I could let it all in, but never let it out.
I am not apportioning responsibility to anyone but myself for this, and the long chain of cause and consequence that means unhealed and unprocessed pain gets passed along until none of us really know where it came from and haven’t got the time or support or awareness or heart or strength or self-belief to consider asking why. All that we know is we can't go under, we must keep going.
My ancestors didn't have access to, time for, capacity to heal. I do. So I must. That's the messy inheritance of loss, of being ripped apart, from place and space, land and heritage, culture and joy, love and community, inside and out.
"With a little bit of love, we can make it through the night." DJ Luck and MC Neat
Now I know that communities are built on honesty, on love that allows space for honesty, for authenticity. When we see and feel the love, even when it can't yet penetrate our own walls, we gradually soften. And so this weekend, I spoke up, let myself shake through the sickening sense of exposure as I shared my rawness and my determination to say what was on my mind, what was eating at and healing my own hurt.
It was fucking hard, coming out of the safety of the dark in the back. I had a vulnerability hangover afterwards. But I felt more free. I feel more free. Strangely so.
As one sangha member said, thanking those of us who had talked of our experiences in spite of how hard it clearly was to do so - we feel less alone in our suffering when we share, when we hear, and then we grow, alongside each other. All the reasons I went into the lines of work that I did - journalism, human rights, mental health and wellbeing.
We show each other how to feel, that it's okay to feel, to show what we feel. Without fear or maybe in spite of and in the face of the nerve jangling and shaken sense of whether we matter or anyone cares. It does. We do. Care and matter. Care to matter. It matters to care.
I share all this, emboldened by those who remind me, and anyone else who needs a nudge to recognise that our healing is paramount. As Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior, says:
"You are here to learn, learn how to listen, how to walk into each challenging story without fear, fearless.”
My good friend and wise teacher Ekta told me once, assured me by way of emboldening and encouraging me, pushing me, that hiding is our cultural inheritance. Ours being our shared and parallel heritage, our different but similar experiences of ancestral wounding and trauma. So I try not to hide. I do, I have, but I don't need to. It doesn't help. It makes matters worse. And I'm not here for that.
"Don't get stuck." Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
I remember many painful experiences when I was asked to share my views, my thoughts, my emotions. I could and can easily facilitate conversations, interview people, console and listen, hold space, offer guidance. But when it comes to personal revelations, that's one big fat no no.
I refused to be seen for a long time. To one point, shrinking my body as a parallel pained twisted expression of wanting "to be so skinny, that I rot from view", to take from the Manic Street Preachers’ soundtrack to my younger years.
I played small. And yet. What this was really revealing was an unmet need. To be seen, recognised, comforted. But I couldn't ask for it. I couldn't be seen as vulnerable, wouldn't admit that to myself. I was stronger than that, had to be.
“There’s enough pain in my family, in the world, I am not going to add anymore.” Monkey mind again.
Of course, the lack of irony being that in turning away from myself, I have been spinning the samsaric wheel of suffering rather than stopping it. This nature of hiding, as I believe Ekta was telling me, and as I realise thanks to persistent Dharma study and practice - and experience - causes the continuation of suffering.
If we do not speak our truth, if we don't let anybody know, how can they help, how will we get the help we need, how will we heal? We won't, we don't. And that way, nobody wins. We all keep going with the facade, sleep walking through a half life, denying ourselves the joy and the freedom that comes from letting that shit go. I’ve seen that happen, and I don’t want that for anyone - and not me. I want better. Hence I’m asking for more, speaking up.
I've dedicated most of my life in every aspect to understanding why. Why people hurt. Why they, we, are the way we are. In the pain and the glory. Though the pain is often, has been, the heaving hulking bulk of the heavy stories, come as I do from a legacy of love and loss, of forced migration and the subsequent litany of life-threatening mental anguish and heartbreaks that result. The stories matter, the narrative is important, documenting it is vital. And it's true that getting stuck in it can deepen the wounded grooves, keep the scars a little more raw than is helpful for healing.
So I see why and how we suffer. And I see how we get stuck - when we can't, don't know how, to let go. Spinning wildly bleary eyed and raw to the touch, circling around and repeating the story. Not for posterity, but to bleed openly, keep bleeding. Scared, like a beaten animal that dare not accept help because it cannot and doesn't know how or whether to trust.
We all suffer. And there’s a way out. It takes a leap of faith. To stop reeling. The Buddha's core teaching. Acknowledge the suffering, face it, don't hide from it, then go on. Because the suffering brings the confusion to the surface that we don't want to admit for fear of what people will think or because it's too painful. But its precisely the suffering that can be the gateway, once we can be caring, compassionate enough and maybe even just sick and tired of the way we suffer, to fully commit, to surrender, to let go.
"Nothing ever lasts forever." Echo and the Bunnymen
How wonderful that nothing lasts. That cracks finally give way, to release and relief, to the soaking from the torrent. That beneath rubble is gold, that weeds nourish flowers, that interminable dusk gives way to inevitable dawn. That we wake up, those of us who get to do. From the night, and from the dark.
It may not always, in fact it may rarely feel that way. The deep sincere gladness can feel so far out of reach as to be an unreal dream. And still we keep reaching. Because deep down, call it Buddhanature, innate goodness, whatever rings true, deep down, we are okay, we just need to be reminded.
I lay on my partner's chest last night as it got late and we decided to watch another episode of a programme that had drawn us in. This has long been my happy place, with him, wordlessly comfortable, held, easy. I could feel and hear his heart beating. One day this will stop. This life, this moment, this feeling, I thought. You will go. As will I. We hope we’ll go together but none of us know.
Life is gladly ordinary and breathtaking, it will take our breath away as we ride the last one out. Hopefully in peace but none of us know. All we can do is keep trying, keep going. Seek to see clearly. To do no harm. To heal and pass on the love, not the hurt. Though that will happen. Because there is suffering in life. Too much of it. And there is joy and ease and relief too, if we can find it. It doesn't happen for enough of us. But all each of us can do is keep trying.
Keep going.
And so we wander into the garden, plant our beans, feed the chickens with lettuce and grapes, treating them kindly; we pause and rest often, sit on the grass, stare at the clouds, take in the view with utterances of gladness. We made a life. Built on the gifts and causes and consequences of all who came before us, laid the early parts of our paths, brought us together. All of those who showed us how, and how not to. It all matters. We matter.
Joy Harjo again:
“Let the Earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters. Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.”
Someone who lived close by that we had just begun to connect with didn't wake up this week. Didn't see the night through. Their heart stopped. Broke. Someone else earlier this month. Another last year. We love and lose over the years. And we're here, tending tenderly to what we attend to.
Amen. Ameen. Allhamdulillah. Inshallah. Mashalla. Blessings. Gratitude. Om shanti shanti shanti. Ati sarwa mangalam. May auspiciousness increase. Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. May all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may my life in some way contribute to the good of all.
With wise hope, sincere intention, persistence, faith when doubtful, and practice practice practice. May we all feel it. Rise up. Show up. Slow down. And may we all be free to feel we can be who we are, whatever that looks like, whenever we're ready. Onwards. Ever more.
Finally, I leave you with a poem that has been dripping its way through me, like rain falling after a heatwave, penetrating the cracked Earth, slowly at first, as though nothing is getting through, until finally, as it ever does, the Earth heals and goes on:
Becoming free
Witness: uncut grass reeds blown by the breeze hint of hope of a coming storm the cat gingerly padding across the fence above the meadow waiting, watching the swallows playing in the sky, diving for water Life happening Sandalled feet scrunching the rain soaked grass a little touched by wetness Given the right distance you can see the clouds reflected in the window there then gone, gone beyond the distance we can't know nor does it change anything to know the root of the sounds of other's speaking the state of the heart nudging at their words mine our brokenness breaking through confusion giving way to insight Loosening up Lightening the load becoming free
I couldn’t peel my eyes, mind, and heart from your writing till I was done. And it’s like a rainstorm has washed over my night sky and it’s become like space - empty, transparent, and glittering with stars of insights. Thank you ♥️
This is so so beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you always!