Avoiding the Blame Game February 7, 2009

We look through the newspapers or watch the sickening stories on the six o’clock news about the horrible grief that has struck someone else’s family.     How someone else’s child got sick or was badly injured or murdered.    We say, “Thank god it wasn’t our child or our family,“ and then we change the channel.    Eventually, we become immune to other people’s pain.    We find ourselves desensitized to the grave issues that seemingly affect everyone else.    We act like this could never happen to us.

But the truth is that it could. It only takes a second for tragedy to strike the hearts of those we love.      We need to reverse this by becoming sensitive to other people’s plights. This sensitivity and compassion that we share with our brotherhood will ultimately come back to pave the way for success in our own lives.    It could also be used to teach compassionate lessons to our children.    By teaching them that these kinds of problems are real, that they affect average people just like us, we set the groundwork for teaching them more valuable lessons.     We can teach them the proper kinds of behavior necessary to avoid such calamities.    By recognizing problems and their solutions in others, our kids will learn what it takes to shield similar problems from their own lives and how to protect their family from it ever happening to them.

The Ugly Side of Sorrow December 30, 2008

What is it about grief and loss that upsets people so much?   Is it the heavy duty emotions and that people have to do to get through the suffering?     Why the suffering?  Answer me, Mr. Dalai Lama.  Answer, God.  Are you there? 

For me, it is the fear of opening myself to the pain.     I must admit, my heart is broken.    For weeks and beyond, I have been burying myself deeper in work so that I don’t have open my wounds and deal with the pain and suffering of a broken heart.     I believe this is totally true for most human beings and even the ones who claim they don’t have those feelings. Let’s face the real facts – the pain is very hard to endure – especially in our hearts. In the land of grieving, where all of those emotions toss us around like the strong forces of nature.

Although, I understand that the affects of grief and loss is necessary at the surface level; the awareness of those emotions is what really counts.   It’s  grief and the loss— this excruciating pain is what dominates our lives and subsequently causes some of us to behave erratically.     In my reading and the discovering the truths according to the Great Dalai Lama, the awareness of our pain and the suffering is the paramount of all that is great.       Most people find this very difficult to comprehend that the suffering is what makes us rise beyond those who have never experience true suffering.

For me, I have suffered many times in my life – and feeling the pain is all too well. I visit the tragic kingdom of pain and grief is because I have to, though I really want to escape from it all, as soon as possible and as long possible.     Why? For me, the rawness of these emotions sometimes decomposes my soul to the point that it’s difficult to mend it.

I am at the point to where I am so aware of the process that it eats me up so much internally; that I am wondering how I am going to through all of this grief without going completely insane?      Is it a matter of toughing it out? Or do I have to dig six hundred feet below my soul and pummel myself along the way?

I have gone to all of those professionals who claim to heal and help, or so they say. All those therapeutic experts always have invalidated opinions on handling the grief and loss, “…do it this way or that way and free yourself”.     I always wonder – are these therapeutic experts capable of handling that same type of pain themselves?     Or have they ever experienced emotional pain so excruciating that even 19 hours of hard labor doesn’t even compare?

I’ve always been a “survivor” in so many ways. I inherited those traits from my parents and their ancestors who have suffered tremendously through grief and loss as result of the economics and politics in Vietnam.    As a survivor, going through my own grief and the suffering from the broken heart, I want to know if these professionals are just living vicariously through their patients or through what society establishes in the books on the shelves of Borders?     Just the thought of false advertising of “never having to experience it” makes these professionals untrusting.

This past holiday season has very empty for me, I really missed my family very much and them living so far away;  thus the reason for my broken heart.    My brain has entered this familiar landscape called grief and loss.      My sorrows have been so ever present that it has become reality and I know I have to feel this great sorrow to end the long silence of suffering.     It’s painful, and extremely ugly down there.     My mind and body aches from the emotional suffering, and deep down in my gut, I know I will be able to survive from all of this, eventually.

Why must I let my guard down and feel the raw pain?   I   n all my years of suffering and watching my mother, father, and ancestors suffer in their own right, their own discovery of truth and awareness lies in their hearts.      The answers are in their hearts, especially when the truth resurfaces from beneath the ugliness of sorrow.    I feel will feel better, tomorrow I promise.