Changing our perspective on suffering
“Changing our perspective on suffering allows us to respond to it differently… Changing our mind isn’t only an intellectual or metaphysical exercise. Changing our mind about our trauma affects every aspect of ourselves, because as we now know, the mind and body inter-are.” - Sister Dang Nghiem, "Flowers in the Dark”
“Mindfulness is the bridge that helps us arrive at the other side (of suffering) safely. It allows us to bring about the transformation of suffering into healing, insight and wisdom.” - Sister Dang Nghiem,“Flowers in the Dark”
Flowers In The Dark.
Sometime last year, I bought a book called Flowers In The Dark. I had started using the Thich Nhat Hanh app more and more throughout the pandemic after a friend recommended it. I found that I really loved the simpleness and strength of the meditations. And eventually came to a section in the app called Flowers In The Dark - a series of meditations on healing trauma and grief, performed by Buddhist nun, Sister Dang Nghiem, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh.
I bought the book and started doing some of the meditations and overtime have slowly increased them. But it took me a while to actually start reading the book I had bought. Finally, this week I picked it up. I’m only about 20 pages in or so but I already find myself underling passages and saving quotes to come back to and journal on or write about later.
On Being Positive.
There has been a lot of writing and research over the past decade or so on neuropasticity, healing from trauma, “becoming our best selves”, and being more positive as a way to find happiness. Some of the text and dialogue around this truthfully feels toxic to me and after many years entrenched in the new age, thought and self help movements, I wound up taking a back seat completely about 10 years ago. There are some wonderful texts and teachers out there but overall, I got so tired of being fed small little lies on how to be happy. Mostly because those methods didn’t work for me. I checked out because I felt like I was constantly trying to “manifest” things and when those things didn’t actually come into fruition, I become sad and wonder what I was doing wrong, why I was wrong and why I was bad. Positivity without a mindfulness approach to it only helped to cement my own trauma into my body even more.
I didn’t understand why these people who were advocates of change and help and self improvement would tell me that I needed to do things their way. There was never any mention of trauma or over coming grief and if there was it was presented like licking a lollipop, easy and delicious. When I tried their methods I didn’t feel like they made sense or would work for me. They made me feel like I would never heal and that because of this, there was something wrong with me. I soon began to feel like there really was something wrong with me too, a feeling I had become used to and knew well. My trauma had already told me, I was a bad person, I was evil, I was no good and there was something wrong with me. These methods I was trying to live by cemented those feelings even further.
Changing my mind didn’t feel possible for such a long time despite numerous efforts because I was still in the middle of my trauma, living with my abuser and unable to get out of the cycle due to how much trauma I had accumulated. For many people like myself, this becomes a never ending cycle, or it can feel like one until something changes.
The inability to change my mind had nothing to do with how good of a person I was or how much I “believed” in myself, as I had previously thought it was. Those assertions came to me after so many people I had come across who said toxic things such as I had to “forgive” myself and family in order to heal or I had to be more positive, or I had to do this one method of theirs, bla bla.
I never understood these ideas or the ideals they come from and therefore felt stuck to this concept of trying to be somebody I wasn’t and would never be able to embody. The truth is I am not always positive. There are many days that I’m just trying to get by, like everyone else. When I started meditating more and reading more texts on mindfulness, I realized that changing my mind was not going to come from someone else’s process, a book, a piece of writing or an doctricination.
I recently read one of Joe Dispenza’s books. I initially loved it, but as I made my way through it, I realized I actually didn’t love it at all. It had done more harm than good by asserting that his method of meditating for 90 minutes a day was the only way to change my mind. I put it down.
On Changing Our Minds.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mind change lately. There has been so much work down in this field and some of the findings are tuly extraordinary. But, I don’t believe there is only one way to do so and I also don’t believe that changing one’s mind has anything to do with being positive or “believing in yourself”. I had a coach tell me last year that I wasn’t successful because I didn’t believe in myself. Can you imagine? I was like umm… I do believe in myself. That’s not it. I quickly unfollowed her and removed myself from her reachings.
Changing one’s mind has everything to do with one’s willingness to do so and one’s ability to stay consistent with whatever method feels good to them. That is all. Truly. I am still working on changing my mind about many things but the things I have learned to change my mind about did not come because I was being positive or negative. They came from my ability to just show up, every damn day for myself no matter how I was feeling.
Some days my mind is a tornado - lifelong depression, stress, anxiety, and worst of all hormones, make my mind a place that is sometimes just trying to scrape by and not give in to the whirl and spiraling hormones and thoughts.
I haven’t changed because I’m more positive now than I was before. I’ve been able to change because I’ve been more mindful and aware. So when someone says you’re not being positive or you don’t believe in yourself and that’s why you’re not ________ (healing, achieving, etc) - that’s bullshit. Because everything is connected. And you do believe. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this and if I didn’t I certainly wouldn’t be writing this either.
Learning To Change My Mind. Inter-being.
When I’m suffering, the last thing on my mind is positivity. And often telling someone to just be positive, to just forget about it, to just move on, to just whatever is very unhelpful. The times I have heard those phrases from others has made me even more sad and depressed. Instead of trying to “just be positive”, which truly has never worked for me, I just bring awareness to my current state of mind. The more I can bring awareness to how I’m feeling from moment to moment, the more mindful I am being and the more mindful I am being the more easily I can notice the thoughts that no longer feel good and the feelings that have been repressed or unacknowledged. Then, I can either try to choose a slightly better feeling in that moment or just continue to notice how I’m doing.
Changing my mind in this way has proven to be much less stressful, more open and more nurturing. Trying to be more positive and monitoring every single thought, makes me anxious and usually puts me into a spiral. Staying present and noticing my feelings rather than my thoughts has worked to change those thought patterns naturally, when my mind/body/inter-being are ready for them.
Endings & Beginnings.
“Within the worst sorrows may lie the greatest joys and the opposite may also be true". - Sister Dang Nghiem, "Flowers in the Dark”
Back in my days of working in TV, I worked for the production company that now makes Queer Eye on Netflix. I saw that Bobby Berk, the design gut was fired from the show due to some queer drama with Tan, the fashion guy. I watched Tan’s side of the story on Tiktok as he sat against a white background smiling, but serious. He didn’t mention Bobby by name or Jeremiah Brent, who will be taking Bobby’s place in the final season of the series but instead referred to Bobby as “his colleague” and Jeremiah as his “friend” while he stated that he was happy his friend would be joining the show. To me, this felt like a run-around avoiding his part in the drama and trying to be pleasing for the cameras by really not saying much of anything about it which makes me think there is some validity to the rumours.
Then, I watched Bobby’s side on his Tiktok. He didn’t mention the drama once and barely spoke about the show. Instead, he told a story about how before getting onto the series he was a manager of some sort at a furniture store working on displays etc and one day his boss fired him. Then, he said that if he had never gotten fired, he would have not had the opportunity to star on the Netflix series, essentially stating that when one door closes another opens.
I loved this perspective and it made me wonder how many times I’ve resisted the door closing or resisted my own method and ways of healing instead of listening to my gut because I was listening to someone else’s message that was telling me I had to do things their way. Or simply because I didn’t have another way that felt good to myself yet. If there is one thing in life that is constant, it is change. Yet changing our lifestyles or our minds or the way we have operated for a lifetime can feel like a tremendous feat of accomplishment. As it should!
Crossing the bridge to joy.
Crossing the bridge and walking to the other side of trauma or a mindset should be celebrated as an accomplishment because it is!! It’s hard to do this shit. Period. It just is. And explaining your own traumas or the things we’ve been through to a person who has not experienced something similar, I have found, is not always worth it. Like attracts like and for me healing with like minded people who have experienced similar hardships to mine, has felt empowering, comforting, soothing and caring in a way I never received as a child. I don’t want to live in a world where I overlook my own accomplishments even if they are invisible to the naked eye. I want to celebrate them and continue on the path of finding joy!