Dear kindred human Sara,
This December I experienced a new low point. There had been some health and financial challenges, and after the US election results, I descended into a significant depression. During this time, I was also being taken on tours of the underworld in dreams that showed me truly terrible things in our world.
It felt like a dark night of the soul and then my intuition told me that I was witnessing and experiencing more like a dark night of the collective whole.
Also during this time, I was privileged to be able to take some weeks away from work, and that's when I became more aware of the many difficult feelings I had been resisting feeling. I knew that these feelings wanted my attention, but I had been resisting in every way- even though I knew that my feelings of suffering were because of my resistance!
All my life, I've been acutely aware of how bad things can get and be, especially during the many years I was being abused in my family.
I became very familiar with the feeling of despair, and lived intimately with it.
Despair is not a popular feeling, and almost no one willingly wants to feel or experience it- including myself.
Yet the medicine of despair lives in the feeling of it.
So when I emerged from the depression, I finally turned towards despair and said its name out loud,
"Despair, I see you, I hear you, I acknowledge you."
I felt a slight easing of the feeling of despair as I repeated the acknowledgement.
If despair had shoulders, I could feel and see its shoulders soften and come down.
And so we sat, despair and I.
As other painfull feelings arose, I was able to similarly acknowledge them also, and I began to feel joy return.
And I was reminded again that joy doesn't leave during passages of difficult feelings- it steps aside to give the less popular feelings a chance to be felt. It always surprises me how quickly healing happens when feeling can occur.
And so, I keep practicing feeling. Join me if you wish.
I know you join me in being human and sometimes going through terrible things- I believe that more we can express openly about these kinds of times, the more we can help each other.
(Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy)
 P.S. If you would like this healing art print, you can find it here.
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