In life, we are always burdened by two kinds of weight – the weight of gravity, of course, but also the far more exhausting weight of all our psychological baggage. Over the years of our lives, most of us accumulate volume upon volume of painful experiences. Buddha said, “life is pain”, and he was right – life does include pain, and much of our success or failure in life has to do with how we deal with that pain. Many of us, unfortunately, are not very adept at dealing with the failures, disappointments, and frustrations we encounter in life. Instead of dealing with them directly and experiencing them fully and immediately as soon as they occur, many of us try to just ignore them, sweeping them under the rug and denying those feelings are there at all. Like little babies playing peek-a-boo, we seem to think that if we don\’t look directly at those pesky feelings, then they aren’t really there at all. Of course, this doesn’t work; all this tactic does is allow these feelings to build up inside us more and more, forming an inner mountain of grief and pain.
We usually try our best to ignore this mountain, but every so often it catches us off-guard, sneaking up on us when we’re not looking, and we find ourselves staring in surprised amazement and horror at this looming emotional darkness inside us. At such times, most of us bury it again as quickly as we can, and try to forget we ever saw it. Our grief, however, doesn’t disappear just because we ignore it. It sits tight inside our unconscious minds, continuing to silently accumulate over the course of our lives, like plaque in the arteries of our souls. The unconscious is the perfect preservative – anything deposited into the unconscious is perfectly preserved in its original condition. As the years go by, this grief just builds up steadily. It weighs us down and inhibits us, in many ways too imperceptible for us to realize. The weight of this inner grief leaves footprints in our lives; the more grief we are holding inside, the more grief we are holding back inside, the more grief we are hiding from, inside, the more we become cut off from our own authentic feelings and emotions. The more we become cut off from the immediate feeling of being alive, of feeling human. And the more difficult it is for us to feel and act free, and spontaneous, and wild and crazy, in life, and the more artificial, and robotic, and control-freaks, we end up becoming. All these are but symptoms of that inner grief.
