Being Fully Alive and Fully Human

* * *

People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

In the midst of emotional pain, it's difficult to imagine ever being happy. It's difficult to see anything positive or hopeful. The world looks bleak, dark, and dreary. Our heart hurts with a deep, relentless ache. All we want is to have our life, our body, our heart returned to fullness, to have our loved one back ... to heal the hurt ... to heal our wounded heart.

We wouldn't ask for experiences that hurt so much. We wonder what kind of God would create a Universe where such sadness is possible. But these experiences are an inevitable part of being human.

* * *

We live in a culture that has sought to protect us from sadness. But we live in a world where sadness is inevitable. So we have a problem.

Every time people have said to us, "Don't cry." "Be strong." "Keep a stiff upper lip." "Don't think about that." "Let's talk about something more pleasant." "Here, have a drink, you'll feel better," they have taught us not to grieve.

These messages have come from our parents, our siblings, our teachers, our friends, and, for the most part, they have been given with the best of intentions. They have been given with the hope that our lives will be happier if we distract ourselves from sadness.

But, inevitably, we find that isn't possible. And we usually find that out when something cataclysmic happens — when we suffer a loss that is greater than all the other losses. A loss we can't ignore. A sadness we can't subdue. Then the buried sadness from all the other losses in our lives rises to the surface like an endless emotional volcano.

We quickly shift into numbness. The feelings are too overwhelming, too big. We fear we can't contain them all. So we turn them off. We stagger around in an emotional stupor, only partially alive, filled with sorrow, anger, confusion, and despair.

The numbness is a natural process. It is similar to the state of shock our bodies go into after serious physical trauma. But when we turn off our sadness, we also turn off our joy — if we turn off our feelings at one level, we turn them off at all levels. Then we don't feel fully alive. Eventually, our challenge is to come out of the numbness.

This is difficult to do. Each time we let down the barrier and allow ourselves to feel, we move right back into sadness, despair, and anger. It seems that joy is nowhere to be found.

But peace, love, and joy exist — always — in the heart, just Being Fully Alive and Fully Human 3 beneath the despair, confusion, and anger. The perplexing reality is that the only route to joy is through the despair, confusion, and anger. Being fully alive requires us to be willing to feel it all.

The world's great religions offer us some extremely helpful images. The Christian tradition refers to "The Sacred Heart of Jesus." And what is that "Sacred Heart"? It might be seen as a vast nurturing womb of love and compassion, an immense, infinite fountain of healing and forgiveness for all human suffering, all human failing — the sacred space where love and compassion meet suffering.

Those beautiful meditative statues of Buddha, so common in people's homes and gardens, provide another useful insight into the real challenge of human life: He is peaceful, still, meditative, sitting cross-legged in the lotus posture, quieting to hear the inner wisdom, to experience his full awareness.

In that state of quietness, peace, and inner awareness, a subtle smile radiates on his face. His smile is known as "the smile of unbearable compassion." It is the smile that radiates from the depths of his being. He sees it all. He is fully aware of all of the world's suffering. Still he smiles.

Nothing is hidden. Nothing is ignored. Nothing is overlooked. He sees all of the suffering clearly. He drinks it in. He understands its root cause. He experiences unending compassion. He has made it his life's purpose to alleviate human suffering.

And still he smiles.

His joy exists within the fullness of the human experience. And this fullness includes both joy and suffering ... both loss and gain ... both sadness and laughter.

These elements of our beings are not mutually exclusive. We do not have to push one away in order to feel the other. The full experience of being human is to feel all of them existing within us at all times.

The challenge of being human is to find that "Sacred Heart" within ourselves, to smile "the smile of unbearable compassion," to give ourselves and others love, compassion, and forgiveness no matter what happens ... even in the midst of devastating loss and grief.

In seeking to protect us from that which is unpleasant, our society has left us completely unprepared for loss and sadness. Our work now is to begin learning that which our society hoped we wouldn't have to learn — how to be whole, to be loving and happy living in a world of unpredictable, often uncontrollable, change.

The Teachings of Loss

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

After more than twenty-five years of counseling people Who Are Dying And People in grief, one thing has become abundantly clear: Most of us spend much of our lives sleepwalking.

Even when we are frantically active, a part of us is usually asleep. The part we keep asleep is our full awareness, the awareness that observes and absorbs all of life, in its totality ... both the joy and the sadness. The part of us that sees it all, all the time. The place inside us that knows everything. We selectively filter out that which we don't want to see, that which we don't want to acknowledge. We close our eyes to everything that frightens us.

At some level it is the frantic pace of our modern lives that forces us to keep that part asleep. At another level it is the result of decades of cultural training.

Our culture encourages us to avoid looking squarely at the realities of human life. We live our lives on "autopilot." We busy ourselves with "the...