Your Struggles Are Still Legit!

Dealing with a Common Psychological Side Effect of Caregiving

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When you have a loved one who’s struggling with a genuinely life-threatening illness, there’s a tendency to sublimate your own struggles and difficulties on the grounds that they don’t measure up. I mean, yeah, you may be busting to make a deadline or dealing with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in your life. But it hardly rises to the status of cancer, heart disease, or (fill in the blank here), does it? You may feel guilty for even countenancing these things as problems, considering the magnitude of what this other person in your life is going through. As a result, you shove them down into your subconscious and try to proceed as if they aren’t there.

The problem with this strategy, of course, is that buried anxiety has a tendency to come back--in a more virulent form--to bite you and your recovering loved one.

Ever since Freud’s groundbreaking work on the subconscious mind went mainstream, more and more people have come to understand the remarkable power this region of consciousness exerts over body, mind and soul. Anxiety and depression buried beneath the surface do not disappear; rather, they tend to fester and have deleterious effects on one’s mental and physical health.

When your mind and body are under attack from virulent strains of small, buried griefs, your ability to be of any use to that person who’s fighting a disease is compromised. So it only makes sense to embrace your problems and struggles, to talk about them, to let them heal through communication with other people. And that includes the person you’re most concerned about! If she’s a compassionate, understanding person (and suffering can have that effect on people who are open to finding the good in the bad), she’ll be just as interested in what’s eating you as what she’s up against. In fact, serving as a listening ear for you may have a healing effect in itself: her mind can focus on someone else for awhile, and that can be great for one’s health.

So don’t be afraid to talk about what’s bugging you, just because someone you care deeply about has a “more important” problem. As James Taylor said, “Once you tell somebody the way that you feel, you can feel it beginning to ease.” Great advice, worth taking to heart!

Everyday Epiphanies

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We’ve all experienced them: those flashes of recognition in which we suddenly perceive
something familiar in an entirely new light. Simply by being open, sensitive, and receptive, we can make these epiphanies--­­usually understood to be rare phenomena­--­ nearly everyday events. And experiencing them on a regular basis need not by any means cheapen their significance.

There is probably nothing quite like a mindfulness meditation practice to place us in the
receptive mental state that leads to these deeply life-­affirming realizations. Meditation turns down the noise in one’s mind, allowing these wonderful experiences to occur frequently and with clarity.

Probably the most significant epiphany I’ve experienced recently is the deep realization of the fact that we are literally made of the remnants of exploded stars. When stars die, they explode, sending out in all directions the elements that make life possible. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the electrons that form thoughts in our brains; these all once resided within the stars. Carl Sagan used to refer to this as our being “made of star stuff.” Such a beautiful and profoundly poetic idea:­­ that we are indeed one with the universe at a molecular level!

This epiphany leads naturally to another: that we are all part of the web of nature; that
everything is interconnected. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn gave his monastic order the name The Order of Interbeing; he explains the concept as follows:

"In Buddhism the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what
is going on…to be aware of what we do, what we are, each minute. When we are totally mindful—in direct contact with reality, not just images of reality—we realize that all phenomena are interdependent…endlessly interwoven."

You and I are parts of exploded stars as well as parts of one another. There is no such thing as a completely independent self;­­ all selves are composed of non-­self elements. When we come to understand the oneness and interwoven nature of all things, compassion for other selves becomes as natural as breathing. Concern for the environment grows out of the deep realization that we are the environment, and the environment is us. If we poison it, we poison ourselves. When we nurture it, we nurture ourselves, and all other selves as well.

Living in a state of ongoing mindfulness, which is the natural, everyday outworking of our
meditation practice, produces these flashes of insight in the midst of the ordinary and the
mundane. They can come while we are preparing food, washing dishes, caring for our
families, doing our work, and enjoying our free time. Everyday epiphanies are what I am
most grateful for in this, the season of gratitude.