“For one person to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.” Rilke
Over the weekend I was feeling unmotivated and uninspired after a burst of writing several magazine articles and working on my memoir about moving to France. I had come to a difficult chapter and felt completely stuck. The Buddha said that what we dwell on becomes the shape of our mind. If we dwell on ill will, either inwardly or outwardly, all that we see is broken, flawed, and imperfect.
The current political climate in the world, and in the United States in particular, didn’t help my mood, nor did the actual weather. It’s been unusually gray and rainy here. Even my three cats haven’t wanted to go outside. I found myself staring out the window over my desk at our pond, full to the brim. The poule d’eau (water chickens or moorhens) have almost lost their home as the water continues to rise, not unlike some of the islands around the world that have recently all but submerged due to climate change.
I have found the only way to snap out of such a mood, which rarely occurs, is through movement, so I drove to the nearest village during a brief pause in the rain and walked around, camera in hand. One step at a time I began moving, stirring and shifting the weight that I’d been carrying in my heart. When we let our shadows emerge, we step into the Bardo. Tibetan Buddhists use the word Bardo to describe the place where we linger when we’re in between worlds. It’s a sign that there’s something to heal and, hopefully, learn from.
In a radio interview I’d recently listened to, transpersonal psychologist John Welwood commented, “…All of the wounding we carry with us is relational in nature. It has to do with not feeling fully loved. What lies at core of every relationship problem, whether between two or a multitude, is a wound of the heart that not only affects our personal relations, but the quality of life in our world as a whole.” Fixing the separations between us begins with talking about where we agree, not where we disagree.
The French spiritual teacher, Arnaud Desjardins said it best. “There are no bad people, only badly loved people.”
If we don’t heal ourselves first we will continue to project our wounds onto the world.