Fainting at the sight of suffering
Cultivating loving awareness in a world gone mad
Listen to this article on The Motley Mystic Podcast
Spiritual speaker and author Mirabai Starr lost her 14-year-old daughter in a car accident in 2001. Starr describes it as a profound, shattering loss, and anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one – maybe in particular a child – can understand that.
In the midst of her grief, she turned to the spiritual tools she had honed over the years. She tried meditation, contemplative practices, and mindfulness. None of them worked. In fact, she said, “they all pissed me off.” She’d spent thousands of hours on the cushion, doing her inner spiritual work. In her grief, in that moment when those tools should have been the most effective at healing her soul, she found them lacking.
In a recent podcast interview, she said of her mindfulness practice at the time: “This doesn’t make any sense to my shattered heart that I’m going to, you know, cultivate curiosity and be present with this experience. I mean, I want to do anything other than feel this unbearable anguish, but right behind that was this sense of, ‘But I don’t want to turn away from Jenny. I want to stay right here as an act of love.’”
It was that shattered heart that taught Starr the true power of spirituality, which is not to break our hearts – or even to prevent our hearts from breaking. Spirituality’s purpose is to break us open so that we can be a source of love, light, and strength to those around us who are suffering – so we can stay present with them as an act of love.
We’ve seen a lot of suffering over the past few weeks as the waters and winds of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton have wreaked havoc from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and beyond. The footage from Western North Carolina alone is enough to break your heart as homes were washed away, businesses were destroyed, livelihoods obliterated, and lives lost.
There was devastation and death in my state of South Carolina, too, and many of us went without power for days. We were without power for four days, but we suffered no property damage. We’re blessed beyond belief, even as others have suffered in ways we don’t even want to imagine.
It breaks your heart … but the question is, will we allow it to break us, to shatter us? Will we allow our sorrow to move us beyond performative thoughts and prayers and into that place of utter surrender that will transform us – and turn our very lives – into the healing balm that the world needs not just for these recent disasters but in every moment where there is suffering?
As Starr discovered, we can’t simply sit and “ommm” our way to this place of ultimate surrender. Sometimes, it takes the breaking down of every spiritual practice you know to finally move you into a place where all you can do is stay with the pain because you want to stay present with those who suffer as an act of love.
That place of surrender, though, isn’t an excuse to become complacent. It isn’t a reason to remain in despair. One day, I told a dear, wise friend of mine of the grief and pain I had felt for years after leaving a long-term relationship just as my ex-partner was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In the years after our breakup, her symptoms progressed. She finally ended up in a nursing home, paralyzed from the neck down until her death. I was wracked with guilt that I had not stayed to help take care of her.
My wonderful friend said these healing words: “You cannot make yourself sick enough to make anyone else well.”
This is sometimes how we react to the suffering around us. We make ourselves so sick about it that we become incapable of being any help at all. Teacher and author Michael Singer gives the example of a person who comes upon an accident and wants to help but faints at the sight of blood. If you’re busy making yourself unconscious of the suffering around you, mainly by making it about how sick you feel about all the suffering around you, then you’ll be of no help at all.
To help those in need and end the suffering we see, we must become and remain conscious. Spiritual practices are helpful in these times, but only to the extent that they help us accept what is in this moment – not just so we can mourn it, such as a natural disaster, but so that we can be part of the force that changes it for the better.
If we’re spiritually fainting at the sight of suffering, we won’t help anyone. But, if at this moment, before the suffering washes over us like the flash flooding of a hurricane, we can get in touch with that higher, Divine Love that lives within us, then we can cultivate that love by rooting out our feelings of fear, hatred, greed, complacency, or selfishness. If we can do that, then when suffering does touch us, we will be ready to respond with the kind of Love that genuinely changes things and heals the suffering around us.
I believe that the only world we have full control over is the one within. Whenever we put that inner world into chaos with fearful, judgmental, angry, harsh, or unloving thoughts and beliefs, we create a world of chaos around us. If we can remove (or fully integrate) the fearful ego that goes unconscious at the sight of suffering, then we will be a powerful force for love and change in this world.
Will we do it right every time? Of course not. I was incredibly frustrated and grumpy two days into our power outage. I am a creature of routine, and any deviation from that routine is a recipe for crankiness. Even though I knew I was among the lucky ones to be spared the worst effect of the storm, I still didn’t like being inconvenienced.
But, as I watched the videos of people who have lost everything, something deep inside of me broke open. I cannot change what happened to them. I cannot go there and help them. But I know the last thing that will help them is for me to make myself physically, mentally and spiritually sick over it. That would make me go unconscious to their suffering (because then I would be focusing on me and not them), even though my ego tells me that being emotionally wrecked FOR them makes me super spiritual and compassionate. It doesn’t. It just makes me spiritually numb and unconscious.
If you want to end suffering in the world around you, work constantly on ending your own suffering. Don’t insist that you can’t be happy just because someone, somewhere, has it worse than you do because they’re in a flood zone or even a war zone. If you want to help the world, you have to stay conscious. You have to stay awake. You have to stay in your true power, and that is the power of love.
If you cultivate a spirit of love, a spirit of joy, a spirit of loving awareness in every moment that you are capable of doing it (and there are moments when you’re not capable, and that’s okay), you will change the world, by alleviating suffering wherever you go. You can do this right where you are without ever setting foot in that flood zone or war zone.
That doesn’t mean you do nothing out in the world. You do what you can. You donate to aid organizations. You work to elect peacemakers. You volunteer in places where you can be of service. But you do your work – the work of staying conscious even when the suffering around you wants to make you so sick you faint into unconsciousness, believing that you can make yourself sick enough to make someone else well. When you can stay conscious in the midst of suffering, you will be broken open in the best possible way because you will realize the power of community to alleviate suffering.
A friend of mine in Asheville posted several stories on Facebook about the amazing community she experienced in the days following the hurricane. People sharing their food and other resources. Restaurants cooking food that would otherwise go bad and feeding people for the cost of tips. Supermarkets giving away water. Breweries becoming distribution centers for food, water, cat and dog food, and other necessities. Spontaneous music jams break out in neighborhoods as people gather together. Everywhere my friend went, people were generous, giving from what little they had to make sure those around them were taken care of.
Ultimately, it is the joyous sense of presence and loving awareness that brings peace to any of us. The difference between being conscious enough to tend to suffering, whether it arises in ourselves or others, and becoming unconscious is whether or not we’re willing to be joyous in the work we do in the world. Not that we’re laughing and shouting hallelujah while we do it. Instead, in our hearts and souls, we are joyously grateful that we can remain conscious in loving awareness while doing the hard, heartbreaking, and sometimes soul-crushing work of alleviating suffering. If we can do that, we’ll be truly helpful in the world.
We, my friends, are called to live in joy – to live in that loving awareness that ends the suffering for ourselves, which ultimately ends the suffering around us. This is how suffering breaks us open and awakens us to the oneness of us all. When we can orient ourselves toward love – toward community and the recognition that we are all in this together – then we will never be tempted to go unconscious again because, like Starr with her daughter, we’ll want to stay right here, with one another, as an act of loving awareness.
Music for the journey:
“We’re All in This Together” — Ben Lee
About the Motley Mystic:
The Motley Mystic is an online community for people who have realized that the truth speaks with many voices. There is no one religion, philosophy, institution, or dogma that captures the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. No one needs to swear allegiance to one line of thought or belief to discern Truth because Love is the only thing that’s real. That’s what we explore at the Motley Mystic - all the tools and strategies we need to remove our barriers to Love and live fully as our true Divine Self.
Candace Chellew is the founder of Motley Mystic as well as Jubilee! Circle, an interfaith spiritual community in Columbia, S.C. She is also the author of Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians, published in 2008 by Jossey-Bass, and the founder and senior editor emeritus of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for LGBTQ People of Faith. She is also a musician and avid animal lover.
Wow. Even this far removed from the current natural and humanly caused disasters(Oregon), this message hit home today with sacred accuracy.