Friday, August 12, 2011

What About Helpless and Hopeless Experiences

I've had a few interesting conversations of late where helplessness and hopelessness came up. As people shared what was happening in their lives and the lives of loved ones I became aware of feelings of sadness and frustration in myself as well as in them. I also had a very strong sense of that when I saw one of the video clips from the London riots where a young man had been injured and it looked like some people were helping him only to see them robbing him in the end. I don't know what it was about that scene exactly but I have to admit that it touched me deeply and I just cried and let the sadness wash over me.
We all have the sense of being helpless from time to time. There are times when we may react with anger, other times by withdrawing or doing whatever we need to do to distract ourselves. Sometimes depression results from prolonged experiences of helplessness and hopelessness. Some people pray and ask for help. I've long known these are experiences that need to be fully acknowledged and felt but I had been caught up in the concept that they were feelings so the best I could do was make peace with them. I still need to make peace with the feelings that show up but yesterday I started to look at helplessness and hopelessness slightly differently. What if they aren't feelings at all but rather beliefs?

There are situations that arise from time to time such as friends or family going through very difficult times or things happening in our own lives where there doesn't seem to be anything we can do to make it better. That's usually where these experiences arise.  Granted there may not be anything we can see to do about what's going on but isn't that really because we're seeing from a very limited point of view? Wouldn't it be truer to say I don't know what to do rather than fall into the trap of believing myself to be helpless or the situation to be hopeless?

Dance of Light
There a distinct and freeing shift in energy when I bring full, gentle, compassionate attention to the sadness and/or frustration in difficult situations and realize the helpless, hopeless bit is what I think, not what I feel. Now I can open to the possibilities that are always there, lurking just beyond the circle of awareness created by limited beliefs. There may still not be anything I can do on the physical level but that is only the grossest level of experience. There are many more dimensions in which consciousness operates that are indeed much more powerful and effective than any physical manipulation. What if the openness to these possibilities itself had an impact on whatever situation we were facing? We simply don't know and may never know what's going on behind the scenes. What if we didn't need to know in order to make ourselves feel better? What if the energy of compassion was what was needed and when we brought it to our inner experience that extended into the outer situation? If there is only Life and it's all connected, how could it not have an effect?

Just wondering....

No comments:

Post a Comment