humanity

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Letting Go: Beware the Children of Anger

Letting go is truly a difficult thing to do, and yet seems so simple. Human beings, with their human consciousness, are just not that simple.

I’ve written before on how letting go is a process we have to repeat over and over again; it’s not a one-time event. We have to continually make the choice to let go, in order to truly live our lives in the present moment, in the here and now, emotionally responsible for ourselves and finding an ethically sound way of being in the world. I haven’t discussed the finer process of letting go, however, in any great detail and here are a few words from my own experience.

People are going to hurt us in one way or another, based upon expectations, behaviour, upbringing, environment and a whole host of factors that we simply have no control over. Our response to this is what is most important: our response-ability. When we have the ability to respond in a thoughtful, compassionate way then we are truly working to be a part of the world, a weave of the web that strengthens the whole.

Yet it is so hard to be compassionate when people deliberately hurt us, and sometimes even when it’s not deliberate but perhaps uncontrolled aggression from their past experience, current physical pain or more. But the ability to understand that there are more factors involved in any given situation that you are simply unable to perceive is at the heart of compassion. Compassion is a willingness to understand.

People have hurt me in the past, willingly and unwillingly. Colleagues and co-workers, lovers, strangers; there is no telling where the next experience will come from. However, noticing the stages that we go through when we are being hurt can help us on the path to letting go with an awareness that will allow us to not slip into the easy patterns of denial, whether that is of our own behaviour or that of others.

When we are hurt, usually our first response is anger. For most people, anger is something that time heals, though the length of time is relative to the person and their situation. Anger isn’t the most difficult thing to move through, as we can recognise anger much more easily than its children: pity being one of them. Often when we move through anger towards pity, we don’t know that we are still dealing with anger, with an abstract notion of the other person. Pity does not have empathy. Pity does not have anything to do with compasssion. Pity is the result of dualistic thinking, of an Us and Them mentality. We pity someone because we are separate from them. Pity is so often tinged with bitterness and anger that they are almost inseparable. When we have finished being angry with someone, we move on towards pitying them, in a passive/aggressive way of still attacking them. Pity the poor fool.

When we bypass pity through working around our anger, we find empathy instead, which holds no judgement of the individual.

Sometimes pity is replaced with its older sibling: contempt. We have been a victim of someone’s abuse, and though we realise we are no longer going to take their crap, we hold them in high contempt for putting us through that. They may have spent months trying to hurt us in various ways; we are so over that now and could they just get in with their own lives, please? So trapped in their little world, so lost…

Contempt is just as easy a trap to fall into as pity. Again, contempt has absolutely no compassion, no element of trying to understand involved in its process; it seeks only to make us feel better about ourselves. In the web of existence, we can’t just work on ourselves: we have to work on the whole.

We don’t have to stick around for further abuse, but we do have to be on our guard for feelings such as pity and contempt to flag up the fact that we haven’t actually moved on, we haven’t let go of our anger, we’ve only put a new hat on it and deceived ourselves with its shiny new appearance. When we find ourselves dancing with the feelings of contempt or pity, we can stop, untangle ourselves, bow and walk away, breathing into the wild winds of change. We know that we can choose our dance partners, and in that choosing find glorious freedom and self-expression. We know that we are part of an eco-system, part of a whole, where every part is acknowledged and sacred. The flows of the gods of humanity that we choose to dance with, however, it entirely up to us.

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Art of Death Row

My “day job” is working for one of the world’s leading artistic centres and concert halls – I work in the marketing and PR department. I’ve been working there since 2008, and have seen experienced a lot of art in various media. This year as part of the visual arts exhibit that complements the music festival that is currently underway, we have some paintings that I walk past every day. These paintings make me uncomfortable.

The subject of these works is the last meal of various prisoners on death row before their execution in the USA. It is an extremely intimate glimpse into the person behind the prisoner. It shows their humanity, their desires, their need for nourishment and what makes them happy in that context. The fact that it is on public display, however, and for sale, makes me uncomfortable. Why?

On the one hand, if it wasn’t on public display I would never have seen them. On the other hand, I didn’t need to see them in order to have compassion for these human beings. I am completely against capital punishment. The fact that it might make people think about what is happening in so-called First World countries regarding life and death is probably a good thing. And I realise that artists need to eat to, hence the fact that they are for sale. But for every person that doesn’t “get it”, that laughs at the absurd combinations these people have chosen without knowing why: does this trivialise, as well as capitalise the suffering and deaths of human beings? Does it de-sensitise us even further? Or does it raise an awareness of the de-sensitisation that we are experiencing in modern society?

I don’t have any answers. All I know is that every time I walk past them, I feel an ache in my heart and an unease, as well as a wellspring of compassion for all humanity who are in this together.

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Gods of Humanity

Often we relegate things like love and lust, rage and compassion, anger and fear into emotions. If we think of them as just emotions, we may not work with them on a level that is appropriate. In fact, if we do not give them the respect that they deserve, they can sneak up on us when we least expect it and give us a good kick up the arse.

My teacher, Bobcat told us students many years ago that we should regard them as gods. It took me a while to understand what she meant, and only after the experience of years since does it all seem clear to me now. We often have to stumble and fall before we actually pay attention to the ground we are walking upon. The idea of the gods of human tides took a good few years to sink in, but they now sit comfortably within my framework of ethics, living in honourable relationship.

Gods often demand respect. Not because they are seeking power over us and have something to prove, but rather that if we do not respect them we could be swept away on their currents of energy. It is often said that in Druidry we do not sublimate to the gods, but rather work to create a relationship with them that is rich and sustainable, as we do with all things.

The gods of the human tides are treated with the same respect as the gods of thunder and lightning, the sea and sun, the winter’s howling and the spring’s blooming. We must look carefully into our anger, our lust, our greed, our compassion, our generosity in order to understand the intention behind them better. If we are not careful, we can get swept away with them all too quickly. If we do not stand our ground we can jeopardise our entire existence, all that we have worked for, all our dreams and schemes, our morals and our ethics.

It requires a willingness to be soul naked and bare, to look inside the self and see the constructs of it in order to better understand why it works the way it does. It requires utter honesty. How many of us are completely honest with ourselves? Very few, if any.

I am not an exception. I have fallen before the gods of humanity, swept away on various currents and seeing the destruction that is wrought by the giving in to their powerful surge. It has led me to look deeper within myself to find the root causes of why I allowed that to happen, and in doing so ensuring that it doesn’t happen in the future. Creating a relationship with these gods means that I understand them better, and myself more, therefore acting with intention instead of simple reaction. Great doubt and insecurity, great fear and anger all lie within our souls. Facing these requires great courage and strength, great faith in ourselves and in the world around us.

None of us are perfect. But we learn from our mistakes, the tripping up awakening us, making us pay attention to the footsteps we take along life’s journey. Then each step is walked with honour, respect and integrity. Do not dwell on past mistakes, but do not let them happen again. Awake and aware, we walk forward, deeper into the heart of the forest and the wisdom of the oak.