Recently, a friend in great despair reached out for help. His life seemed to be in utter darkness. I wrote him an email. After sharing the contents with two friends, they remarked on how it could help others in similar situations, as it had helped this friend. Its not a message with extraordinary eloquence or one soaked with quotes from the spiritual practices, but rather an attempt to share from own experiences of learning to yield to the perfection of Life, which we can hardly comprehend, when it seems the hardest to do so. Thank you to my friend who gave me permission to share the letter.
Dear dear --,
First of all, I just want to reach out and give you a big big big hug. You have been braving a wilderness seemingly with nothing to lean on. I am not sure if anything I am about to write will give you hope--or even a spark of it--but even if it doesn't maybe it matters that you can know I am here for you and that I more than understand what you are saying. I will do my best to walk beside you through this seemingly dark time until you find the light. Of course, I will also be there when the light dawns again. I hope you feel no shame or fear in sharing what you have with me, especially because I know how hard it is to share our deepest pain when we feel entangled and isolated. To emerge can be a process of much struggle and valleys. Ultimately, the heart needs to re-awake and re-learn how to see goodness. Especially if it got used to seeing best in darkness and despair.
Maybe this is what your heart is going to be learning as well. It is not going to be easy, because you have adjusted to seeing the world a specific way and your conclusion has been that it is either your fault or the fault of life. But, what if there is no blame at all? What if there is shadow and light and once we walk into the light, and we get closer and closer to it, the shadows slowly disappear and we realize they never were? Relationships mend, broken hearts heal, community emerges, paths are cleared up, injuries bound up and wholeness restored. It is not just possible for you, but it is the necessary outcome of life, because light is what life is about.
The challenges and the circumstances you find yourself in are colored by your deepest held beliefs. When they originate in fear, that is what we experience, see, what shapes our decisions, what isolates us, what misinterprets situations, breaks apart connections. Fear upends and puts upside down what is good in our lives. But love does the opposite, it opens our hearts again, shifts the scene into light and heals, no matter what circumstances we are in.
While being entangled in a pernicious sense of depression, it can feel like a constant struggle to prove your own worthiness. But all the hustle overlooks the fact that we are seeking what is already there.
I want to share two mental shifts with you that I witnessed can make a tremendous difference. Firstly, misery is often the outcome of ruminating over the fact that life is not the way it was supposed to be, in other words, the way we think it should be or believe we deserve it to be.
So, the first step often is to stop wishing that life was different. We are exactly where we are because in exactly this moment we are being given all the lessons needed to get out. This can be hard to see, and yet it is true. Our lives present us with endless opportunity to lay down self/ego in favor of accepting Life's plan for us. But it starts by truly surrendering our outline about what should be. This becomes increasingly easier when we wake up to the fact that LIFE (GOD) LOVES US very much. It wants you to have a smashingly, beautiful, rich, deep, connected, fulfilled life. But without God-Love, we cannot become who we are supposed to be or get the life we are able to live. God stays forever our highest possibility.
The second step, I feel, is often giving up the self-inflicted pain from a constant sense of self-pity, "the excessive sadness over one's life circumstances". That requires leaving behind a perspective that life is ruthless and unfair and full of struggle.
There is a fundamental difference in between thinking spiritually and worldly. It is this: the worldly thinker thinks his problems are in the outside world and need to be fixed in the outside world; the spiritual thinker knows, problems in the outside world are reflections of his inside world and need to be fixed inside. Nothing can change in your experience if your thinking stays the same, because you live in a mental world. Your experience is the reflection of your thinking. This does not mean you are at fault of the terrible and difficult things you are going through, because the feelings and thoughts that isolate, pull you down are actually not really yours; you have just become so accustomed to believing that they are yours that their effects in your life seem awfully real.
I want to invite you to look away from the outside and really truly go inside. Take up what is going on in your heart and take nothing more seriously. Work on opening your heart. Start doubting the voice that tells you it's too hard, that your life is lost. Intuition guides you unfailingly and this guidance becomes apparent when you are ready to let go of how you are seeing your life right now. I know how hard it can feel to let go, even if it is letting go of what hurts you the most.
It can take time to believe that full transformation can happen. When we are in the middle of the dark it can seem like it will be our home forever, or that even when it gets lighter a sliver of dark will always remain as a memory or a possibility. But actually it is only dark until we turn to the light with a radicalness that comes from really wanting to be healed and knowing that it is possible.
God has held you in Her hands for all this time, all these years that you have felt yourself slipping more and more into disconnection, even during the lowest moments, She loved you with an "everlasting love". The darkness, the doubts, fear, despair is not the truth about you. You are not these thoughts. This mental darkness is trying to take away the beautiful light you are. But you belong here in the light! Reach out to, really stretch towards, the light! Your true home! Every day a little bit more. When we get closer to Life, life gets closer to us.
You also spoke about having lost time. But it doesn't matter what you have done in the past, what choices or decisions you have made. You have lost nothing, because your life is not the victim of your past or a specific timeline. It will all turn out alright. Forgiveness, clarity and progress are a result of surrender. It is not possible to find lasting peace, solutions or love in people, circumstances, places or events. We can only find that in our intimate and close connection to Life. Only then, people, circumstances, places and events grow to express that love that we already have within. When we think something is lacking, our focus is on the lack, and the lack is what we think we experience. But even that experience is just a mistaken sense of life, until we find out we have never been separated from the stream of goodness and love in our lives.
You have suffered for a long time under the circumstances of the past years that you have found yourself in: a picture of disconnection from friends and family, a struggle to find purpose, to really feel loved and seen, to be held in a community. Take a break from the outside circumstances, take a break from wondering how you could fix them, how to fix yourself or from what's not working, what is failing, and instead.... just go inside. Don't be afraid of what you will find. Be brave to have a conversation with God, to have a conversation with yourself and to ask what you can learn, where you can grow. Your heart really needs a friend, really needs a hug, and it needs you to be that friend. All of these situations will adjust, all of them will be healed and rejuvenated, when you align yourself with the light, with Love. I know and trust that God can do the impossible. I have seen it being done.
I am here for you! You are not alone. And again, thank you for entrusting me with your words and thoughts and your feelings. You are so brave and I know it must have taken courage to even write to me in the first place!
Love,
Z
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