The medicine of turning towards.
We are tasked, over and over, with turning towards.
Turning towards loss.
Turning towards hard conversations.
Turning towards hunger.
Turning towards opportunity.
Turning towards anger.
Turning towards the truth.
And, don’t roll your eyes, turning towards joy.
Turning away offers us an intoxicating respite, but it only makes things stickier. We all know when the truth is in the room. The longer we turn away from it, the weirder its dance moves get as it tries to win our attention.
Our only job is to turn towards what life hands us and ask: “what is the lesson you have for me?”
When we turn away from the lessons, they lodge themselves in our bodies and minds in ways that stunt us and stunt those we are in relation to. Things get funky when we do this. We start feeling enraged about small matters and apathetic about betrayal. When we don’t turn towards pain we often end up causing pain to others in our odyssey of avoidance.
Turning towards is an act of honesty and integrity. It is also wonderfully simple. We just have to ask it about its lessons and then let it be. This saves us from the delusions of ignoring. I think of it as forming scar tissue. When we look away from the truth we have to then manage the layers and layers of protection and denial that we wrap it in in order to carry it. Rather than carrying around a heavy, spiky mass of avoidance, we can instead set it down, make it a cup of tea, and invite it to share its wisdom with us.
Turning towards is also a serious task when life is presenting us with joy. With levity. With clarity. We can build trust with those experiences by letting them be joyful and light and clear. Choosing to turn away from joy doesn’t make you noble. It doesn’t mean you are discounting the suffering of others. Choosing suffering in the face of joy adds to collective suffering. It doesn’t add to collective liberation in the ways we are sometimes brought to believe. This can be challenging in seasons of grief. A good friend of mine died some years ago, and I remember turning away from joy when it became available to me again. It felt like betrayal. Then, I reminded myself that honoring his life involved honoring the complexity of my life after he died.
Once upon a time a terrible thing happened, and the next weekend I went sailing with friends and allowed it to be nice, funny, and filled with music. That didn’t make the terrible thing go away. Allowing the joy put fuel in my reserve for when the terrible thing had other lessons for me after we got off the boat. It will do the same for you, each time you turn towards it.
When we turn towards life, we stop punishing ourselves and the world for what it is presenting. Instead, we greet it with curiosity. Then, we follow that curiosity until the lesson has revealed itself. When my garden beds have weeds, looking away from the weeds allows them to grow and entangle. When I pick the weeds, the nourishing foods have a chance to grow and thrive.
We are intelligent beings and we know when we are deluding ourselves. To live in integrity we have to let go of those delusions. We have to let things be as they are. It is the resistance to them that makes them so unbearable.
We aren’t setting off on an easy task here. We are setting out on a necessary one that wants us to engage with life as it is, rather than life as we think it should be.
The true medicine of this practice is how liberating it is. Things become much lighter and clearer when the truth is allowed to sit in the driver’s seat. It is easier said than done, and it is easier done than not done.