sitting with our woes
much has been said about the best way to manage feelings of discomfort, sadness, sorrow, and grief. these emotions are aplenty right now, for myself and in my community and probably for you and in your community as well. as the new year approaches there is a lot of hope for what the new year may bring. looking forward to better days is human nature. as i look to 2021 to bring about transformational change for myself, my loved ones, and my practice, i am reminded of the necessity to sit with my woes.
today was a difficult day for me, nothing bad happened that i can point to and blame for my feelings. my world hasn’t changed much from yesterday nor the day before that. but i felt so much sadness today followed by waves of bliss. the ebb and flow has been confusing as i gage what it is all about. when i was at my saddest today i felt like i wanted to die, like i was holding more suffering than my fair share. the bliss felt like a delicious heart opening, expanding beyond what i thought my heart could hold. experiencing these polar opposites reminded me to open up to all of the emotions within the entire plane of the human experience. how could i not? my emotions were swinging from one extreme to the other. they did this all day and every opportunity i had i would tell myself to open up more, ‘sit with your woes’. the practice of sitting with everything that we are feeling is a practice of compassion, understanding, enlightenment, curiosity, and wonder. that is why it is so effective at alleviating the suffering; the practice is about expansion.
the practice of sitting with our woes is not easy. it is so easy to distract oneself with work, social media, and entertainment. its as simple as opening an app like TikTok. before you know it you’ve buried your emotions in hours of videos. the emotions don’t just disappear, they’re hidden or compartmentalized only to manifest in weird and seemingly unexpected ways. sitting with our woes is seems messy; why would i want to bask in the shadow? escaping feels like the easy thing to do as we experiencing feelings of dread. but escaping is tantamount to contracting and in doing so we encourage ourselves to get small. the problem is that by encouraging ourselves to get small we take our own power away, we convince ourselves that being small is safe. this unfortunately has ripple effects and changes the way we think of ourselves. what were essentially saying to ourselves by contracting is that we are not ready to engage with this emotional experience. creating limits for ourselves in this fashion keeps us from engaging deeper with life and finding new experiences that create expansion: moments that move us, moments that inspire us, moments that tell us we are here in this body right now having a human experience that is nothing short of a miracle.
the only way to cast out a shadow is to shed a light on it. and the only way to do that is to allow your inner light to do its work. be still and present with everything you’re feeling. let your higher self organize a life for you that moves you. expand beyond yesterday, expand beyond this morning, expand beyond a moment ago. opening up to what is before you is the key to move beyond the suffering and to unlocking magnificence. so don’t run or hide from any part of your human experience. stand tall and welcome what comes with a courageous heart. flex this muscle as often as you can and life will unfold in ways that surprise you. along the way you’ll find out just how strong you are.
always remember that the only way out is through — and what a delightful thing that is.
— sitting with your woes is an essential tool in the tool belt for plant medicine ceremony. if there is any advice that i offer to first time sitters it is that surrender is the way out. being present with suffering is the most gracious and humbling experience —
