Sarah Court

Suffering comes in many forms. Sometimes it is emotional pain, sometimes physical, and sometimes your whole world literally comes crashing down around you (if you haven’t already, please donate to the Red Cross or another reputable relief organization working in Haiti, and re-count your blessings).

For the most part, we are fortunate enough to be sound in body and mind, and to be surrounded by a fair amount of creature comfort. It is easy in the midst of a crisis on Haiti’s scale to dismiss our individual sufferings as unimportant, and perhaps some of them are overblown, but as Daniel Stewart reminded me the other day in class, “It is not our feelings that are wrong, but our judgment of our feelings.”

I want to write about denial, because it strikes me as possessing a powerful, serpentine ability to wrap itself around any situation and squeeze the truth out of it. When a person undergoes a great tragedy on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake, the mind often enters a state of shock as a way to protect itself from the horror of its surroundings. In a less dramatic situation, denial can be our mind’s way of protecting us from a painful truth that we are not yet ready or able to deal with. We may convince ourselves that our partner’s excessive drinking isn’t a problem, or that our credit really isn’t that bad, or that the one that got away is still in love with us.

In my late teens and early twenties I grappled with an eating disorder, helped along by both a modeling career and a pretty fragile sense of self-worth. Eventually someone convinced me to go to a therapist, and at our first session he asked me what was going on with my eating. I gave some long-winded, run around answer about not having a choice because of work, and that I knew what I was doing, and how I had everything totally under control. I’ve never forgotten how he just looked at me and replied, “Wow. I should’ve given you a cane and a top hat to go with that tap dance you just did.” His brutal honestly was a great gift, because I knew he was right, and on some level I had been waiting for someone to call me out on what I was doing. It wasn’t the end of the struggle, but it was the start of my way out.

Like many coping mechanisms, denial works until it no longer works. As denial leaves the body, we feel the suffering we have been avoiding. As it loosens its grip on the mind and on the heart, and truth flows back in, we are flooded with feeling, just like the prickling sensation of blood flowing back into a limb that has fallen asleep.

We must be gentle in this process. We must commend our bravery, our willingness to look deeply and honestly at how we are in the world. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali tells us that future pain can be avoided, but the catch is that it’s not by trying to avoid it. Instead, as we slowly and steadily awaken to the truth of who we are and allow that truth to determine our future behavior, we will eventually and inevitably no longer need to go down that river in Egypt.  

YS II.16 heyam duhkham anagatam

Pain that has not yet come is avoidable.

(translation from The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Sri Swami Satchidananda)