Beyond Broken

Couples

A Japanese Lesson In Sorrow and Joy

切ない (Setsunai): When You Need a Word to Hold Both Sorrow and Joy

My last blog post was back in March. Tom and I had begun an intensive teaching assignment with the Pathwork In Japan. On July 2nd we completed our last teaching module.  It was very rewarding and also challenging,  always wondering what might be lost in translation.

I am now back to writing and it seems fitting that I would begin a new blog with a uniquely Japanese concept discussed in the New York Times and passed along to me by a dear friend. It is one of those wonderful words in another language with no counterpart in English. The word is Setsunai.

Setsunai implies something once bright, now faded. It is the painful twinge at the edge of a memory, the joy in the knowledge that everything is temporary. Perhaps, then implicit in setsunai is the way the passage of time eventually draws a thin line of blood, of pain, across even the roundest, fullest happiness.

I have noticed lately that most people I work with hate sadness. They will do anything rather than feel it.  I honor this fear.  Sadness can be a bellwether for depression and depression is scary.  But sadness is not depression. Sadness is a feeling and depression is a numbness.  When I invite myself and others into sadness it always holds a warmth that expands and begins to actually feel quite good!

Many spiritual paths, including Pathwork, teach that you cannot selectively block your feelings. That if you reject sadness you must also reject joy.  You can feel this in the word setsunai.  In this word the sadness is coupled with the memory of such joy. Buddhists elevate the temporary nature of our existence to a spiritual path.  At times in my life I have had trouble following this spiritual direction. As I age and emerge from the pandemic where so much has been lost it is getting easier to hold the joy and sadness and the temporary nature of life.

Tom and I had a stark experience of this over the past few days. Tom built a wooden row boat several years ago. It is old fashioned, beautiful and named after his beloved grandmother and spiritual teacher, Flora. Best of all it floats!  He made this boat to reclaim a memory of his youth when he rowed old wooden boats along the coast of southern Italy, and it evokes the memory of his grandmother Flora, whose grit and love shaped him in the best of ways.

We take the boat to a nearby bay to row on calm, clear days. The fun begins at the boat ramp. There are inevitably comments from people in awe of the romantic beauty of the wooden boat which stands out among all the the motor boats, plastic kayaks and jet skis. This Saturday night there was a younger crowd and no one seemed to pay us much attention.

We love to row to a beach on a secluded edge of a state park and this time we packed a picnic dinner and settled in to watch the sunset. As we watched the sun go down a large group of kayakers made their way across the bay.

We rowed back as darkness loomed and at the dock we encountered the leader of the kayaking expedition.  He was loading all the kayaks into a trailer.  “Hey”, he said, “you two look like you are straight out of the movie The Notebook.”  We had never watched this movie when it came out in 2004.  We went home and watched it that night.  (A movie spoiler is coming next.)

The movie is the story of an improbable but passionate romance, a girl from a wealthy family in love with a boy who works in a sawmill. The story is told by the couple in old age, with him reading the story that she has written in a notebook as she began to loose her memory to dementia. “Read this to me,” she says, “and I’ll remember.” He reads to her as she lies looking blankly from her bed in the nursing home. As he reads to her, little windows of her memory open briefly and then close again and then she does not know him and is very agitated and confused.  He is living for these brief moments of joy and connection amidst so much loss and pain.  In one lucid moment she asks if their love is strong enough, magical enough that death may take them together.  They lay down and die together.

For Tom and me, this was a moment of setsunai.  We have been together for forty-five years, and much of what was once bright is now faded. There is a painful twinge, the joy and sorrow in the knowledge that everything is temporary. The improbable fantasy of the film, the elderly couple leaving life together in each others’ arms, is not likely for most of us. More likely, someone will be alone and grieving. That night, we held each other and wept a big slobbery mess of feelings — setsunai.

 

Real But Not True

 

According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche,  a most beloved contemporary Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters, to have an open heart and open mind we must develop a deeper understanding of the patterns that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Then we will not so easily surrender to the impulse to blindly follow them.

I happened to be reading his book, Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of the Essence Love, as I was crossing the International Dateline around the Bering Straits on my way to Tokyo to teach a class on Images. (The Pathwork terms for false beliefs and conclusions formed in early childhood.)

Tsoknyi Rinpoche continues to say that patterns are hard to change, especially the ones that are embedded in our unconscious or even our pre-verbal nervous systems.   This reminds me of Pathwork Lecture #201, which I am preparing to teach. It talks about the negative force field that images create as they go unexamined. The lectures defines images as a “force field of distorted ideas”.  “… it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and change the negative force field into a positive one.”

After going through the hard work of uncovering your patterns or images, Rinpoche suggests a mantra, which is a time honored method of talking to your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes called prayer, it is a means of opening up a conversation between the heart and the mind.   His mantra is a simple four word phrase: Real, But Not True.

What I love about this prayer is that it acknowledges the young one in us who came up with this group of distorted ideas and conclusions.  To this young one our conclusion about ourselves, about life, about God are absolutely real.  But as we shine a light on them with our adult consciousness they are also absolutely not true.

To find images we have to look back on our lives, the ways we define ourselves, the pressures that were applied by the people around us and the culture in which we were raised.

In the process of teaching Images in Japan my husband and I find our intertwined images, which are always at work in relationships.  My image:  “If I am sick and suffering then I will get the attention I need.”  This comes from my young one who watched my mother, sick and suffering and sucking all the attention and energy out of our household, leaving none left for me.  It seems so clear to my little one if I can be sick like my mother then all that attention will be mine.  Of course the attention I want the most is from my husband.  His image: “My attention does not matter or will be used by others to manipulate me”  I try desperately to get his attention and he tries desperately to avoid being manipulated by me by withholding it.  And round and round the negative force field we go.

This is a spectacular example of the truism: we teach what we most need to learn!

Sometimes images or patterns help us avoid feelings like being alone and neglected in my case or being invaded and used in my husband’s.  But I also learned while teaching that sometimes images are put in place as a sacrifice to try and save our families.  One student took the blame for everything that ever happened in his family.  He sacrificed his need for fairness and justice.  This was a huge sacrifice. When he realized what he had done he wailed with grief.  We all know how important fairness is to children.

Tara Brach has more to say about Real, but not true. “What this means is that, while thoughts are really happening and there is a real biochemistry that accompanies them, they are only representations in our mind. They are not the experience of this living moment. We can begin to identify and challenge limiting beliefs by starting with the simple question: What am I believing right now? And then: Is this true? Is it possible that this is real but not true? Our beliefs fuel our sense of separateness. Uninvestigated, they are a veil between us and reality; they actually prevent us from seeing truth.”

 

 

 

 

AWAKE

 

“I just realized something important”

My husband and I recently taught a workshop in Vermont about the Spirituality of Relationships—the title of a Pathwork Lecture—but the workshop was really about love.

I was walking in the woods a few days later with nothing particular on my mind and started to think about a woman I know who wanted to become a mother about 10 years ago. She told me she was going to manifest this.  She was older at the time and I was cynical.  By that point I had had many failed attempts at having a child.

I will tell anyone who will listen that not having a child is my biggest disappointment or regret in my life.  As I walked through the woods I began to think about disappointment and regret and my story about it began to turn upside down. A new truth emerged.  My friend had  approached being a mother with a full open heart. My approach was different.  I had conditions.  I had wanted a baby of my own with my husband, Tom. I could feel the constraints I put on my heart.  And therefore I could  feel that I had created different results than my friend whose son is now nine years old.  There was no judgement about the different results I had created and I do not wish for my friend’s life, but my sad story seemed to vanish in the light of the truth of my own creation.

I felt incredibly empowered and knew that something really important had happened that was going to change the dynamics in my family.  I began to feel into the subtle tension I bring to our family gatherings—a vigilant, focused attention on “who is getting how much of what”.  I feel that I must get my share (especially of the grandchildren) given that I did not have children of my own.  The tension contained a demand.  By Friday of the same week our family was assembled for our last birthday party of the summer.

The change was amazing.  I was able able to relax and just be with everyone.  I noticed how much attention I did get, how much joy and love was present in our family without needing anything extra.

This made me think about what the Pathwork teaches us, that cause and effect only seem spread out over time because of our time/space relationship on this plane of existence, and that it is actually immediate in the reality of greater unitive conscious.  Cause and effect collapse into all cause.

In another example this week,  the woman of a couple I work with wanted to unpack what happened to her on a family trip.  One day she was letting in the love of her family, especially the love of her niece, and the next day it felt like she lost it.  Her niece let her in and then shut her out.  She went from blaming and shaming herself to blaming her niece (which is what we do—we go to the hard pain) when we do not want to feel the softer pain.  I asked her to track what she was feeling back to the softer feelings and she was feeling a broken heart.  This creates an apparent dilemma for her as she has a real need to love and it comes for her naturally.  In that moment the time/space continuum collapses again and I realize that needing to love and having our hearts broken are not separate.  They go together.  Her partner says, “we think we will love at one time and then sometime in the future we might get our hearts broken but actually it is all going on at the same time.” “Exactly,” I say, “it is all cause—the future effect is an illusion. She realizes how love and heart break are inseparable.  In this place there is no duality, there is no victim or perpetrator.  The world is truly benign, as the Pathwork Guide promises us, and we are truly mini gods creating all our experiences in every moment.

The Spiritual Significance Of Relationships

August 22-25 in Burlington Vermont

Our deepest human relationships ask a lot of us. We must meet our partner with honesty and humility, physically, mentally and emotionally.  We must accept both our own imperfection and theirs. To do so exposes our deepest vulnerability. When we can muster the courage, take this risk, for ourselves and with our beloved, we may experience a profound deepening of our well-being and sense of fulfillment. We grow closer to our real selves, we grow closer to spiritual fusion – we grow closer to God.

In this 4-day workshop, our hope is that each of us will —

  • Deepen our understanding of what we bring to relationships, from wounds of the soul and of childhood, and the unconscious choices and beliefs that follow. We will hold them with compassion and re-align them with real love and connection.
  • Experience the truth that we are designed to reach out to another and to a greater consciousness than our own; that we are designed to love.

This workshop is open to individuals and couples familiar with Pathwork. Interviews may be required.

To Register online: https://pathworkvermont.org/workshops
For more information, if you have questions, and/or to receive a registration form, contact Jeannie at awakeningheartvt@gmail.com or 802-793-1552 – Deadline is August 12th.

Wendy Hubbard – has been practicing the Pathwork for 21 years. She is currently a Helper in the Mid-Atlantic Region. She is also trained in Hellinger Family Constellation Work, and Somatic Experience Attachment and Trauma Work.

Tom Hubbard became a Pathwork Helper in 2003 following ten years of intense Pathwork study. He has taught Pathwork at every level, from the first year of the Transformation Program to Helper Training. Tom has had careers in social services and business.

Wendy and Tom’s marriage has thrived as a result of Pathwork study and practice. They are now passionate in helping people find meaning in the patterns that arise in them in relationship, finding their way to joyful connection emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.

 

 

 

Our Investment In Our Grievances

“Holding on to my grievances give me a sense of power, which protects me from feeling vulnerable. It’s a way of standing up for myself and defending myself from being hurt, disappointed, or rejected again. It keeps me vigilant”

This hardening of our hearts is the ‘beast’ in us. It is the wounded beauty that has lost faith in itself because it was never fully seen or recognized.

“What keeps the wound and hardening from healing is not knowing that we are lovely and loveable just as we are while imagining that other people hold the key to this.”

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