The most effective way to transform difficulty and pain is by shedding light on the feelings and associations of this pain, to shed light and increase understanding. The same can be said for most emotional and physical pain — greater understanding leads to more choice and more freedom.
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I’m still often asked: Why do executives and companies work with you? What motivates them to explore mindfulness?
I usually answer this question with two words: pain and possibility. It can be painful to step outside of our role and to be more in touch with our vulnerability, with the tenderness of our heart. Additionally, we usually sense when our values, aspirations, and work are not in alignment or when we are not living up to our full potential.
CONNECT TO THE PAIN OF OTHERS: KEY PRACTICES:
• Remember that a leader’s job, by definition, is to cultivate community and connection.
• Recognize the “Four Horsemen” that seek to avoid connecting to the pain of others: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
• Practice seeing similarities and offering kindness.
• In conversation, look under the hood of others by asking about difficulties and challenges.
• Practice tonglen, or giving and receiving meditation.
• Foster empathy in order to inspire, and lead with, acts of compassion.
But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things
beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.
A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.
Throughout this chapter I’ve been trying to emphasize how physical emotions are, that becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise; it is training your body to respond in open and interactive ways. To recover from painful traumas, people need to live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives. Someone who has been abused has to experience intimacy that is safe. Someone who has been abandoned has to experience others who stayed. This is the kind of knowledge and learning that is held at the cellular level. The rational brain is incapable of talking the emotional body out of its own reality, so the body has to experience a different reality
firsthand.