How the Light Gets In

Mar 12

STAYING PRESENT IN A MOMENT OF DESPAIR

Leonard Cohen

**There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.**

This post personally explores the question so many people ask me, “How do I feel my feelings?” Please know this post includes reference to violence against women and girls, an incredibly hard topic for many of us. And that there is a hopeful message by the end.

Story

How do we stay present and feel our feelings, even in moments of despair?

This is a question I explore often with the people I sit with in my work. In honor of them, I wanted to write honestly about what that process looks like in my own life.

Recently, I found myself hitting a wall of despair. What follows is a reflection on how I worked through that moment — and how I moved the energy of those feelings toward meaningful action.

It was around 8 PM on Friday night. A long work week had finally finished. I had just turned off my computer after sending the last email.

It had been one of those weeks where I could not handle the news and serve the people in front of me at the same time. So I did what I know to do in those moments. I stayed very present within the boundary of my small life and helped the people right in front of me. One human story at a time.

I wearily made my way downstairs, began my nightly ritual of winding down with a steaming cup of tea, and sat at the kitchen table with my husband. He looked at me and said quietly,

“Did you hear about the girls?”

I could feel it before I even knew the story. Something in his voice - the anguish, the anger. The heaviness that permeates a room every time we don’t know how to process the tragic thing.

He told me about the girls’ school that had been hit in a U.S. strike. What we now know to be almost 200 girls killed.

It was devastating, landing on an already saturated, tender state. A state I’ve been navigating for weeks (months? years?) now — this growing weight of story after story about violence toward women and girls. The assaults. The trafficking. The snide, dismissive ways powerful men talk easily and without reprimand about women as if our lives are somehow lesser and worthy of violence.

And while all of this is unfolding — both inside of me and out in the world — I spend my days supporting women who are grappling to understand their lives in the context of this moment and their lived experience connected to it. Reviewing stories they thought were over, making meaning where they can, mapping how to live with integrity and dignity in a world that has rarely treated women with either.

The numbers alone tell the story. In the United States, a sexual assault occurs roughly every 68 seconds. More than 80% of women report experiencing harassment or assault in their lifetime. (Source)

Which means most of us.

And when I share those stats with other women, the most common response is shock that it’s not 100% of us. That everyone they know has a story. The women you see at the grocery store, the women at your dinner table, the women you play tennis with or see dropping off kids at school. The girl on the basketball court, the girl quietly reading in the library, the girl going off to college. We have grown up in a culture of violence against women that is so normalized, most girls know by the time they reach driving age to carry pepper spray or hold their keys in a way they could attempt to protect themselves in a parking lot.

And when the news cycles fill with stories of men (and women) in power who have committed or dismissed these harms and continue to hold authority, it lands in women’s bodies in a particular way.

Because those stories aren’t abstract. They are reminders.

For some women, these stories are reminders of experiences they have worked hard to process and integrate. For others, reminders of experiences they packed away long ago, hoping never to revisit.

But cultural moments like this have a way of taking away that choice.

With the next news story or social media post, the past can enter the room uninvited.

(I hesitated to write this piece for this very reason. But honestly, we are already submerged in these stories, and it feels important to name them so people do not feel alone.)

So during the week, I hold the container.

It is a huge honor that I get to do this — to be a safe person and to help create a healing space for others. There is not a day that I don’t drive home with gratitude pouring out of me for this sacred work I get to be part of.

I’m still human, and, like everyone else, I get tired by the end of the week. That night, when work had ended and the quiet of the weekend arrived, I could feel the carefully held spaces of my own experience starting to unravel. “Healer, heal thyself” is real. And how it should be….no one is immune to suffering. It is part of life.

It was about 9 PM now. My husband went to bed. I did the best I could to steady myself and practiced the things I always encourage other people to do in moments like this - I moved my body. I meditated. I laughed with my kid. I read a good book. Eventually, I went to bed and slept deeply.

And then I woke up Saturday morning sobbing.

Not quiet tears.

The kind with shaking and snot. The kind where your whole body is involved and something deep inside is just saying, this is too much.

I dragged myself to the kitchen table where my husband had already been up for hours. Our teen still asleep. Back to the space from night tea to morning coffee - I sat there with a box of tissues while he lovingly held space for me as I cried.

When he asked what I was feeling, the answer didn’t first come out as an emotion. It came as a sensation, then an image. An impenetrable massive wall of stone that seemed endlessly high and wide.

And I kept crying and saying,
“I cannot find the light.”

It felt 1000% true in that moment, like this heaviness would never end. And I got caught on despair with an edge of panic, “How am I supposed to help other people when I cannot connect to the light within myself or out there in the world?”

We’ve been together for twenty-five years. We’ve done a lot of deep growth work together. He knew not to fix it. Not to ask probing questions. Not to make a plan. Not to try to cheer me up.

He just calmly sat there as a safe support as I rambled around in the dark.

Words just started pouring out of me. My mind jumping everywhere, trying to understand the wall. Trying to get to the understanding that would break me through to the light. News cycles. Elections. War. A Women’s Studies class at Vanderbilt. A research article I read last week about well-being since Covid. My brain was trying to organize IT ALL, taking the monolithic wall of stone and reworking it into a wall constructed of bricks and mortar. Maybe if I saw the parts, I could see how to heal the whole.

And then it hit me.

I could name one hundred bricks in that wall.

I could name a thousand.

Probably a million.

Human greed. Fear. Violence. Power. Systems built on domination instead of cooperation. Ego. Trauma passed down through generations.

I can name it, but I can’t heal the whole…not by myself. This story cannot be individualized. Every part of it, every brick, is about all of us.

Until human beings learn how to work together instead of against each other… this wall will keep building.

Until we learn how to feel our emotions instead of acting them out on one another. Until we learn how to talk across differences without immediately feeling threatened. Until the ego softens enough to allow collaboration instead of domination. Until we look into the eyes of a child across the world and see our own child, our own little self. The wall will keep growing.

There was a surrender that began as I recognized how little of this is actually within my control. As my body slowly began to calm and the crying softened into a gentler release, my awareness started to shift.

I found myself saying, “I feel so incredibly sad. I feel scared. I feel anger. I feel rage. I feel grief.”

More breath, more space…pause…more tears came, I placed a hand on my heart as I began to feel the sensations rolling through my body. And then another truth surfaced:

“I feel so much love.”

I felt deeply the truth that our lives are not like a static wall. We are a living breathing interconnected system of constant co-creation. Part of the cycles of transformation and change that dance with us, our consciousness, our free will. We have choice for many of the decisions in our lives.

We are part of a bigger system that forms and reforms constantly. It moves and shifts like tides. Like tectonic plates. Like storms forming and dissolving. Like the way planets are born. Sometimes it explodes open. Sometimes it rebuilds itself.

It’s chaotic and evolving and far bigger than any one of us.

And as I sat down with my journal on my meditation cushion — a tiny speck in the scale of the universe — I could feel the dropped-in softening.

When we feel fear, our minds narrow. We hone in on the thing that feels most threatening. This is how the brain protects us.

But eventually, if we are safe in the moment and allow the feelings to move through, the nervous system recalibrates. The whole brain comes back into integration, and perspective returns.

Perspective isn’t a single answer that suddenly makes everything okay. It’s a mental capacity — the ability to organize what is happening in relationship to our lives, our knowledge, and what is realistically ours to engage with.

From this wider view, we regain the ability to hold more than one truth at the same time.

Right now, many of us are struggling with this. Our culture easily pulls us back into a narrow developmental state of polarities — what I frame to clients as the life as afootball game mentality. One side wins. One side loses.

But this moment in history is asking something more of us.
It is asking us to grow our capacity for complexity.

Knowing I was not in a state to solve anything, and that I needed space to recalibrate, I let the day unfold.And something interesting happened.

At one point I heard myself ask quietly,

What now?

And a soft voice inside responded,

Make breakfast. Make it with love.

A little later the question came again.

What now?

Make a grocery list. Nourish your family this week.

Later again:

Move your body. Get out into the sunshine. Breathe fresh air.

I remember thinking,

But I’m tired.

And the answer came back gently,

It’s okay to be tired.

You are strong. You are healthy. You will sleep tonight.

Then later:

Go to your mother-in-law’s house and help your child with his French project.

Then:

Go to the school play tonight.

Be surrounded by your community. Hold your husband’s hand.

Feel the joy of children who worked so hard to perform something meaningful.

Be proud that you are part of a community that asks hard questions and doesn’t pretend the world is simple.

Later still:

Hug your child.

Tell him you love him.

Help him grow into a good man.

And finally, at the end of the day:

Go to sleep. You did your best today.

Before falling asleep, I checked back in with my wall metaphor. What was happening to it? Slowly, I started seeing cracks of light bursting through the wall. Then the image began rapidly cycling through changing images.

An egg cracking open with life inside.

Sunlight breaking through tree branches.

Lightning tearing open the sky.

The sun rising over a pile of stones that had crumbled apart.

Eventually the wall disappeared entirely.

Above it was sky.

Bright blue expansive sky with fluffy light-kissed white clouds gently floating, reminding me of endless summer days on a picnic blanket with my kid, finding animal shapes.

I had a night of very active dreams — the kind that feel like they are quietly integrating and tending to the deeper places of the psyche where old wounds live. Even with all that movement, I woke up feeling brighter. Refreshed. More open.

And throughout that Sunday I could feel my energy returning with renewed purpose… or maybe it wasn’t returning so much as the cloudiness clearing and I felt a greater spaciousness to my inner alignment.

Little glimmers of insight kept tapping gently at my mind throughout the day. Not big revelations. Just small, steady reminders of life continuing to unfold. A good idea for work. A fun thing we could plan as a family. A journal entry to share with my best friend. A gathering with friends to look forward to. A podcast to listen to. An organization to join. It felt like a quiet stream of good news and meaningful action moving through my thoughts — gentle nudges reminding me that even in the midst of a broken world, there is still so much goodness weaving its way through our days.

There is something breaking open in the world right now.

In our personal lives and in the larger human story, something is cracking. Something new seems to be trying to emerge. I don’t know if humanity will take the invitation. But I do know there are enough people who believe in it to begin shifting the tide.

I think about the people I’m in community with. The real influencers in my life. The ones doing the quiet work of bringing people together, raising thoughtful kids, volunteering their time, tending to the spaces around them.

Not just talking about love.

But organizing things. Building things. Creating lives and structures that slowly move the world forward toward peace — the kind of peace that Jesus and all the prophets of love were actually pointing toward.

When I step back and look at it that way, it starts to feel like a living organism… a growing network of people who believe in a more collaborative way of being. And I have hope for this wondrous world.

A world where girls can go to school in the morning — kiss their parents goodbye — skip into classrooms full of curiosity and possibility without fear that they will die before the day ends.

I do not believe that vision is naïve.

The world is complex. War is complex. Human systems are complex.

Most of us will never sit at the tables where these decisions are made. But we still have a role in the kind of world that gets built. Complexity does not absolve us of responsibility. If anything, it asks us to support the people, leaders, and communities who are willing to engage it with wisdom and care.

I admit when I have these overwhelming, hard feelings, it’s so tempting to stay in my bubble and hope someone else figures it out. But engaging, feeling, allows me to open my perspective and see how I want to show up in this world and where I can contribute to this broader vision.

Thoughtful leadership matters. Compassionate intelligence matters. Careful nondualistic consideration matters. And people everywhere are practicing these things every day on both small and large scales. My action of teaching my kid to be a good human can be as much of a contribution as running for a public office.

It is not up to Shelly to save the entire world.

But it is up to billions of people like me — people who believe in the sanctity of life and the possibility of a collaborative, connected, peaceful world — to live our small corners of the Universe with integrity.

Meaningful action, rooted in love, ripples outward. One person. One family. One community at a time. And over time, those ripples become something larger. Maybe even large enough to change the world.

Sunday was a lovely day.

When Monday morning arrived, I got out my journal, poured another cup of coffee (yes, I love coffee), and called my dear friend to connect about our weekends, the full moon, updates on our kids, the latest spiritual book we’re into… and to tell her honestly about my experience.

If this blog post is about pulling back the curtain and sharing how I care for myself when I feel big feelings, then I have to end with this step.

Because the growth that comes from feeling our feelings isn’t meant to stay locked inside our own minds. It moves outward — into conversations, into relationships, into the way we show up for one another.

It’s part of the co-creative experience I mentioned earlier. We are weaving this world together, in part through the sharing of meaningful experiences and real feelings — the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.

Honesty and authenticity are what help us grow and find clarity in our daily actions. And right now, we are all needing to do what we can where we can in the most sustainable way. We help no one (including ourselves) if we are burned out.

My actions this week have been doable:

Lighting a candle for the girls.
Praying for everyone impacted by war.
Joining a couple of organizations I feel aligned with.
Checking in with friends who are hurting.
Writing this post.
Playing a video game with my kid.
Writing a letter to my representatives.
Cooking healthy food for my family.
Showing up with love and a courageous heart for myself and my people.
Circling election day on my calendar in bright pink marker.

And now, stopping here.
Turning off the computer.
Because it’s date night.

And steadily, through these moments of working through with honesty and connection — within ourselves and with the people we love — the light finds its way in, and it grows.

So grateful to be building a mindful life with you.

May you be well.

Shelly

Practice

Story Reflection

What do you hear in my story? What are the small steps that took me through feeling my feelings? Reflect on your own process for working with your own feelings. What do you want to add to it? As I ask my teenagers, “What is one thing you can do today that will help you have a better tomorrow?”

(For a snapshot of what helped me, check out the photos at the bottom…and add journaling, called my best friend, took my vitamin D…and the rest is in the story.