that something had cracked inside me and that I wouldn’t be able to stop crying. I’ve never felt closer to a complete mental breakdown. In a panic, or perhaps a moment of clarity, I pulled out the Yellow Pages to find a psychologist. I closed my eyes and pointed blindly at a name, then called the number. She saw me two days later. Once a week for six weeks we talked, mostly about my parents — something I hadn’t done in the nine years since they’d been dead. I shared and cried and raged and cried some more. Those six sessions were all I could afford at the time, but they grounded me again. They marked a beginning. They opened me up to the possibility of talking about my parents without going crazy, something I think I subconsciously feared during all those years in denial.
It took breaking down to open up. Reaching out to go within. Losing my resistance to find my strength. I had finally started digging up the pain I’d buried so deeply, for so long. In fits and spurts, at times casually, at times relentlessly, I’ve been digging ever since.
Not long after I stopped seeing the therapist, I started a job at New Moon, an unapologetically New Age gift shop in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco. New Moon looked like a hippie art show, smelled like Indian incense, sounded like African drums, tasted like free-trade chocolate, and felt like home.
Conversations that reached well below the surface weren’t just welcomed at New Moon, they were expected. I quickly befriended my coworkers, many of whom viewed their spiritual path — especially the pursuit of enlightenment — as the most important part of their lives. I had never even heard of enlightenment or considered my spiritual path at that point, at least not consciously. That changed fast. I adored these new friends, and I couldn’t get enough of their peace-and-love vibe, so I asked them lots of questions about consciousness and enlightenment and what it took to grow spiritually. Among the many responses, one idea stood out consistently: along with a committed focus on love, a necessary component of spiritual growth was a direct and honest confrontation with your pain. You can’t live in denial and expect to grow. Smiling through life only gets you so far.
Between these new, deep friendships and my instant obsession with the self-help and spirituality book sections of the store, I opened, for the first time, to working on my healing in an active way. Which basically meant just being honest about my pain and not too afraid to face it some of the time. I welcomed the long-overdue reflection on my parents’ death and how it had impacted my life. I invited a good cry much more often than once a year. I read about self-love and loss, acceptance and surrender, forgiveness and personal responsibility. I talked openly with my closest work friends about my life, my parents, my fears, and my insecurities. We shared everything with each other. I learned how important it is to share your story with those you can trust to listen without judgment, and to listen to the stories of others with compassion and understanding. This open dialogue reminded me that we all have lives marked by struggle, and it helped me to keep digging into my own pockets of pain. My friends supported me as I faced my past and helped me to feel I wasn’t facing it alone.
My experience at New Moon, along with the connection I developed with a local spiritual teacher, opened me up to living my life differently, with compassion and love as primary goals, with spiritual growth as my purpose. I began to long for enlightenment, and enlightenment, as I came to understand it, didn’t happen without diving into your pain. Not keeping it buried, not skirting around it, not denying it’s there, but heading directly into and through it, as courageously as possible. We can’t honestly address what we’re not willing to honestly face. It’s common sense, really. And a hard truth, for sure.
I was interviewed for the Home podcast recently, and one of the hosts asked me if it was still difficult to talk about what happened to my parents, all these years later. I told her, “Usually no, but sometimes, yes.” It depends on the context of the conversation and how I’m feeling right then. Even today, at times, more than thirty years later, I’m heavy with grief over the fact that they’re gone and the way they died. I mourn for the brutality of their deaths and the fear they must have felt in those final moments. I mourn for the relationship I never got to have with them as a teenager and adult, and for everything they never got to experience with me. I mourn being an orphan. I mourn the unfairness of it all.
What’s so much different now that I’m older is that I allow the grief to enter, and stay as long as it needs, even when it’s darkening my mind and ripping at my heart. Even when the pain of it scares me. I don’t pretend I’m not feeling it, and usually (but not always) don’t distract myself to keep from taking in its fullness. Eventually, it moves through me. That’s how emotions are designed. They let go of us when we stop holding on to them. And I don’t live my life anymore as though I’m keeping a big secret or running from a deeper truth. I’m no longer ashamed of my past. That freedom alone makes feeling the pain worth it.
We’re all living with emotional pain — often deep pain — and whether or not we do it consciously, many of us bury much of it inside. Where it feeds freely on our potential for happiness. Where it keeps us from opening up to the breadth of our truth. Where it prevents us from living within the beauty of our freedom. Buried but present. Always present.
Maybe it’s time to dig some of it up?
We all have our reasons for burying our pain, but at the core it comes down to fear. Fear of facing the truth of what we’ve done or endured, the truth of just how dark our darkness is, and the fear that we can’t survive it. That it will destroy us. But it won’t. Whatever it is, we can survive it; we’ve already survived it.
But what if now is the time to do more than simply survive? What if now is the time to live in a more conscious, deliberate way? What if now is the time to let the healing begin, for real?
Healing isn’t possible within denial and fear. It’s only possible within openness and honesty, within our willingness to look at the truth of our reality, past and present, and to accept it for what it is without letting it define who we are right now. We are not our struggles, or our heartbreak. We are not the actions we’ve taken, or the assaults we’ve endured. Yes, our experiences influence how we grow and who we grow into. But ultimately, who we are is who we decide to be, because of and despite everything we’ve been through. Our power lives in choice. We can choose to face our pain without judgment, without letting it shut us down to our growth. If we decide to. And we can commit to loving ourselves through it all. As much as possible, no matter what. Love — self-love — transforms. This is how we create a safe place inside ourselves, to heal.
When I started to allow for the pain of losing my parents, I didn’t just awaken to profound levels of grief that needed to be felt so that it could be released. I was also able to see how their death — by far the most tragic and transformative event in my life — has helped me grow into a more independent, compassionate, and loving man than I might have been otherwise. I’m not at all thankful they died, and I could never view their murders as a blessing, but I am grateful to have grown stronger because of their death. And I hope that my resilience helps others to see that growth and healing are possible, regardless of circumstance. There are gifts in even our greatest sorrows, if we’re willing to acknowledge them. If we’re willing to work at seeing them.
As a guy who posts lots of pretty pictures with quotes about being yourself and seeking happiness and love, love, love, I need to be clear about something: it’s easy to say just be or just love, and my experience with those realities — though still more limited than I would like — is powerful beyond measure, but getting there is difficult. One of the hardest things we’re likely to attempt in our lifetime. Staying there is even harder. It takes more than just wanting to be blissed out on peace and love, or we’d all be gurus. It takes work. Hard, important, necessary work.
Much of that work begins and ends with our pain. It begins and ends in those painful truths we try to ignore, the ones so many of us have masterfully buried. The sooner we take out our shovels and start to dig, the sooner we invite into our lives a new kind of hope, a new taste of freedom. It’s not easy. It hurts, but it’s