How do we work with ambivalence in our caregiving?
Many of us who have caregiving roles have trouble using our negative emotions to help us deliver better care. We are taught in our social setting to value optimism and resilience. The roadmap to clinical success makes little space for wandering in deep darkness, depression, and despair. And this holds across genders, though men have it worse often in that we are not allowed to admit we are vulnerable, sad, or in deep despair.
The paradox is that our difficult and dark emotions are one of the greatest sources of meaning for us. They give us a rich resource to use in connecting with others and caring for others in such a way that our lives matter more to us. So, the teachings from various religious traditions that encourage us to sit in the darkness are especially important at this time of the year when so many of us are reminded of grief for those we have lost. In the practice of Zen, we attend to the mud of our murkier experiences, so we can cultivate the right conditions for the lotus bloom of mattering and deep joy to emerge. We have to calm ourselves enough to be open to the mud to see what value it has for us.
Like this orchid that a group of hospice nurses that I trained on the mindfulness of touch is teaching me. As many of you know already who grow orchids, they lose their flowers after you buy them and then need their stems cut back. I asked my mother, sage of flowers, to instruct me on how to care for this precious gift. After they lose their petals, you continue to feed the plants with a few ice cubes each week. You attend to the dying stalks and cut them back a little bit. And like a Phoenix from the ashes, the stalks will grow new leaves and produce new blooms. The dried petals themselves symbolize the painful beauty of death that frames the joyous meaningfulness of life.
In this season of new birth, that also reminds us of death, invite you all to ground in your own bodily experience in this very moment. Wherever you are, I invite you to feel the sensations of your body sitting on a chair, walking as you read on your phone, feel planted or moving, breath coming into your nose and down into your airways and lungs.
Maybe you can feel the rise and fall of your chest … Maybe you can sense the wisdom of your gut and heart space … Maybe all the messages of your enteric nervous system (gut brain) and thoracic nervous system (heart brain) full of all those interneurons and parallel processing networks can help your brain recognize that sorrow and despair are the deeply nourishing soil of growth.
May you and I be free of suffering and its causes by not running away from the suffering we experience.
