We Are Here to Participate in Something Sacred
To live a fulfilled life is to face its emptiness.
Hi,
How are you this week? Did you let yourself become undone?
Our idea of a fulfilled and embodied life is, I find, peculiar. We all want to laugh and play, hold a dear hand close to our hearts, kiss beloved foreheads, do something that matters, surround ourselves with beauty, find a good balance between safety and growth, and, most importantly, know that the short time we get to spend here matters.
When we think of a life lived fully, we often see exactly that: lives filled with something. And yet, when our beings are filled with sorrow, sadness, resentment, grief, disappointment, and worry, we say we’re empty; that our lives are empty.
The language we have for those emotional states is related to the ways in which we envision fulfilled lives. When we say we feel empty, what we usually mean is that we don’t feel joy or happiness; we don’t perceive meaning in our experiences. But in those moments, we are not empty. We are, in fact, very full—full of sorrow, sadness, resentment, grief, disappointment, and worry. At times, we can become so full of those emotions that we find ourselves overwhelmed—and yet, we still say we feel empty.
In our minds, we hold these two concepts as polar opposites: a fulfilled life is empty of sorrow, and an empty life lacks the presence of joy. And that, I believe, is what prevents us from fully experiencing either of them. We never feel completely fulfilled, and we never undergo a total undoing. Usually, we stay somewhere in the middle, at the doorstep of a complete experience of both happiness and sorrow. We limit our lives in attempts to avoid emptiness, and because of that, we sacrifice the opportunity of living to the fullest.
The idea of happiness that we are accustomed to creates a deep expectation of unceasing smiles, energy, passion, and creativity, leaving us unsatisfied until we have it all, and continually. Similarly, when sorrow visits our lives, we claim emptiness, denying the very thing that fills us up in those moments the respect and right it deserves to come into being.
Perhaps a fulfilled life is not one filled only with joy, love, and passion after all. Perhaps, to live a full life means to accept all that it contains and allow ourselves to be filled with the variety of its offerings. To live a fulfilled life is to face its emptiness.
The billion stars that hold us
I have been quite absent here over the past two or three weeks. Or was it a month already? I didn’t plan to disappear, and certainly not without notice. There comes a time when, in order to continue walking forward, one must first step aside and retreat to their innermost corners. There, we visit that which was held hidden and aid it in coming forth, into the gentle and patient light of awareness.
We rarely choose the time for such encounters. Instead, they envelop us in the least expected moments, demanding our undivided attention, a devoted embrace, a caring gaze, and an open heart. The mounting challenges that arise in such times are there to show us where we still need to grow, and what no longer belongs.
Stepping into the light requires wading through darkness. Over and over, unexpectedly and totally. We can never know what this darkness holds, and the length of the journey is not one which offers itself to prediction. And so, I’ve been enveloped, unexpectedly and, indeed, totally.
To honour this calling from within, I had to make the difficult decision to distance myself from outward commitments and interactions. The collateral damage has taken the form of my absence from this platform and its wonderful community. I did check in a few times to see how everyone was doing, but I haven’t shared much myself. My hope and intention now is that I can slowly return to offering my writing here more regularly once again. I appreciate all of you who have remained in the space of Stacking Stones and those who emailed me to ask if everything was okay. There’s no greater gift than such a community! That is a long way to say: I missed you all :)
This process is ongoing. I did think that by the end of the month it would clear out a bit, but it only seems to grow denser. This is the rhythm of the soul, which doesn’t concern itself with our clocks and calendars. It journeys in the timeframe of the earth, following the geological speed, as described by Francis Weller in his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”, where I found answers to many questions which I didn’t even know I was asking. He recalls how this concept was visualised to him by his mentor, who kept a large rock on his desk, serving as a clock in his therapeutic practice—a reminder that for the soul, there is no deadline by which it completes its journey.
For many of us, and especially those whose lives have been in large parts swallowed by the darkness of depression, prolonged grief, anxiety, or trauma, it can be difficult to open up and allow new periods of upheaval. I know that it can sometimes be challenging for me too. In those times, it’s easy to grow impatient and even frustrated when things don’t seem to be improving, or perhaps they even appear to get worse, despite our offerings of patience and tears.
When the pain of change swells within me, and I long for the days of ease and sweet contentment, I remind myself that just because I don’t see progress on the surface, it doesn’t mean my soul’s labour is not bearing fruit. When an experience ripens within us, it opens up to let its contents spill onto the absorbent canvas of our lives, initiating a time of healing. And for that, there is no timeframe. It obeys rules known only to itself.
To honour this process, we must resist the urge to be “healed already” or “fixed”. We must let it dismantle our image of self and the idea of success or a fulfilled life day by day, until there’s enough room for deep transformation to take place. It is a strenuous soul work, as it demands from us trust and openness to a process which has no base in outer reality and can perhaps only be sustained by the silky voice of our inner knowing, which recognises and orchestrates the grand happening of change.
It is not easy to offer patience to such transformations because the urgency we feel to quickly overcome the confusing, chaotic, and painful times doesn’t come from our own expectations only but is brought to us by the many hands of society. We, as a collective, struggle to accept anything short of happiness, because we all carry the same wound, and we all equally try our best not to look at it.
Restoring a rightful place for sorrow and pain in our shared lives would demand each one of us to face the grief and pain we carry within. It would require ceasing attempts at mending a hole in us with distractions and compulsiveness and allowing it to become large enough so we can admit reality, as Maria Popova writes.
Each of us, at various points in life, is called to become naked and soft, letting fall off that which no longer serves us and making way for something meaningful and sacred to come forth. Allowing such a dismantling to occur is tremendously challenging when we are not held in a safe and strong container of community. When we are expected to be efficient in our jobs, entertaining in our friends’ circles, and accomplished in our families, we might feel like there is no room for us to become completely undone and unprotected. And at times, indeed, there might not be space for it.
I’d wish to say we can always create this space for ourselves, that it is within our potential to hold our own hearts in times of all-encompassing, all-remodelling upheaval. But it wouldn’t be true for everyone and everywhere. This privilege is something we’ve lost as we moved from village life filled with ritual and song, operating in tune with nature, to nuclear families, individualism, and industrialised lives, as Francis Weller explains:
“We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experience the depths of life in the same ways that our deep-time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual, and circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known—losses, defeats, grief, pains, joys, births, deaths, dreams, sorrows; the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected, what it is we need today.”
We’ve grown estranged from each other, which compels us to uphold a facade of success and unshakable happiness even when our wounded hearts bleed, our souls calling for vulnerability and softness.
But we’ve designed our environments and lives in such a way that denies them the luxury of space and time. We create thick layers of invulnerability in hopes they’ll make us feel safe. Many of us don’t cry at all, and if we do, we only let the tears flow in hiding—embraced by the darkness of our bedrooms, bathrooms, or cars parked away from public spaces or homes.
What we try to hide from others are the parts of us which long to be held the most by many loving and warm hands. We all fear the same thing: to be seen for what we are, with all that we haven’t yet figured out, all that is still too tender to touch, and all that we perceive ugly or shameful.
This is the emptiness that haunts us—the wound that we all carry, the pain that unites us all.
When we say we feel empty, what we really say is that we need others to come and hold us, to reassure us of our own worthiness and importance so that, in their embrace, we can find the courage to face that which fills us in those challenging times. We need the love of others to sustain us when we feel too small and vulnerable to face the world—both within and without. We need warm and strong hands to hold our hearts when life has broken them open yet once again.
In times of undoing, I found myself feeling pulled to hide in my grandma’s loving hands, like a small animal seeking warm and calm shelter amidst the outpouring. With my heart shattered by boys or men as I grew up, when friends left, or when nothing worked out as I hoped it would, I’d crawl to her lap, crying huge tears, and lay my head upon it, and find peace. She would caress my hair for hours, speaking softly: “It is all going to be well, my little kitten, it is all going to be well. You didn’t deserve any of that, it is not your fault, they didn’t see what you can give, they weren’t ready to welcome it.” She’d repeat it like a spell, and, indeed, it worked magic.
What it gave me was the reassurance of my own worth, the right to admit that life can be painfully unfair despite my genuine efforts, and the safe container to open up and let the rivers of sorrow flow out of my heart onto her dress, which, at the end, would always be wet from my tears. Often, I’d fall asleep on her lap, and she’d continue holding me until I became strong enough to lift my head and face the world once more.
Sometimes, we just need one person to represent the village for us. Sometimes just two hands lovingly stroking our hair are enough medicine to mend our broken hearts. Just two hands—and yet, for many of us, it is a number as abstract as a billion stars.
Most of the times, I had to face my sorrow alone. When the oceans of grief washed over my shores, there were no hands to help me remain standing, preventing me from being swept away. So I’d fall to the floor, where I’d cry myself to sleep or curl up into a knot in a bathtub, immobilised by the tight grip of fear and sorrow.
When we are left to face the grand undoing on our own, the suffering becomes prolonged. We can’t open up completely to the transformative potential of pain, since doing so would require us to submerge in it totally—a task so demanding that we wouldn’t have the strength to swim back to the surface on our own.
When there’s nobody to assist us, parts of this pain break free from our consciousness and go subterranean, as Weller writes, getting stored in our psyche to protect us—a trauma which we are later called to return to when the vessels of our beings grow strong enough to dive into this darkness, or when the billion stars find place in the two or more hands ready to hold us.
The emptiness which sustains and fills us
There is yet another way to perceive emptiness, one that is spoken of in Buddhist tradition. In this understanding, emptiness doesn’t mean the absence of objects, emotions, or thoughts; it means the presence of everything—all of the elements that build our lives. What is empty, however, are our hands, which cease grasping for something solid and defined, and instead allow all to coexist and act according to its own intelligence, in its own time.
In Buddhist teaching, we’re shown that emptiness is the realisation that things do not exist independently but arise and exist due to their relationships with other things. This means that experiences are devoid of inherent characteristic—they are neither negative nor positive. Of course, some are painful and others are pleasurable, but all, at their core, remain neutral.
Pema Chödron, in her book “When Things Fall Apart”, uses the term “openness” interchangeably with “emptiness” when referring to the natural, innate, all-encompassing, unconditional, pure state of mind. I find this parallel helpful in deepening my experience of this state and inviting it to aid me in walking through the terrains of sorrow when I’m far from the hands of others I could lean on.
Through openness, we can begin dismantling our multi-layered attachment to all aspects of life, including our ideas of happiness, success, or meaning. And then, indeed, we get to experience (at least occasionally) the state of true emptiness, which makes us fulfilled and content. This approach helps us welcome the difficult emotional states that come to our door over and over, and invite them to initiate the process of undoing.
By steadying ourselves in those times through meditation and other mindful practices (such as mindful eating, walking, etc), we exercise the state of emptiness that holds all of our emotions together in the container of consciousness, shining the light of awareness equally on each of them. We might then find that even amidst the sorrow, we can still catch a glimpse of joy, and even when we laugh, there might be a hint of sadness underneath it. This observation slowly begins to open us to the fullness of life.
Experimenting with this approach, we might soon discover that to be open means exactly “neither lack nor presence of objects”—it’s an acceptance that they might be or might not be there. It’s the understanding that if they come, it is okay, and if they go—it’s alright too. We are open to whatever comes or leaves us, and to the experience that arises as a result.
Every aspect of life—both light and shadow—contributes to the richness of human experience. To know happiness, we must know sadness too. Fear and sorrow cannot be denied or hidden from; they’re a natural and integral part of our lives, just like joy, love, and fulfilment are too. We can’t exile parts of ourselves and look away from them, hoping they’ll never call our names. They demand attention and are as worthy of it as the joy and happiness our culture worships. By opening up to them, we open up to all that is homed within ourselves—and, by extension, to all of life.
Exploring all of our emotional states, not just the pleasant ones, opens and deepens us. The more we get in touch with uncomfortable emotions, the more we unlock our capacity to experience those pleasurable ones. “Facing our emptiness is key to our freedom. Until we do, we are driven by lifelong patterns of avoidance.” explains Francis Weller.
Remembering and practising this kind of emptiness helps us, paradoxically, to feel less and less empty in our common understanding of this term. Welcoming the full spectrum of life experience we were gifted (even when it, at times, can feel like a curse) with attention, patience, and readiness to become undone, and refraining from judging them as desirable or unwanted, opens us to the fullness of living.
Then, once we unseal the forgotten well of our sorrows, we can deepen our human experience, having walked its width and breadth, so that when we continue walking its length, we’re not limited by our own fears but we step daringly and joyfully, embodying our potential. Eventually, we enter a new kind of emptiness, which sustains and fills us, so that we don’t feel empty anymore.
Something sacred
When we ask ourselves what kind of future we’d like, we often tap into the longing that has lived within us since our birth. We can sense that the lives most of us live do not give justice to our deepest potential, the sacredness and acute beauty within us. When we take this longing and share it with others, we might discover that they, too, have felt it.
“We human beings are not just here to survive and reproduce. We are here to participate in something sacred, in something meaningful, in something precious that we believe in. That’s what our creativity is for. And if we don’t have a collective narrative that can help us answer the question ‘what is a human being for?’ then we start to wither on the vine and disengage and not care, become cynical and nihilistic. And really what we need from our leadership now is a vision of where we can go that actually inspires people. A vision of the future that people want to live for,” writes Charles Eisenstein
What we need is a safe container of a community to hold us when we participate in our own undoing, the role of which is to enable us to embody the sacredness within us. This is the potential each of us holds. This is what our souls call for. But how do we do this when most of us live in radically individualistic societies?
We can’t change society overnight, but we can create ripples around us that, with time, will spread and touch the hearts of many. When we feel strong and steady enough, we can share our vulnerability with others. When we open up to others, they feel invited to do the same—or to hold us. We can work together to reimagine our everydayness, holding each other close when walking alone suddenly becomes unbearable, and reminding each other that we belong, that we’re worthy, and that our existence matters just as it is.
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence,” said Erich Fromm. This is a gift each of us can offer, both to ourselves and to others. This is soul activism that can bring us all closer to participating in something sacred, meaningful, and precious—something we believe in.
Love is sourceless. It’s equally available to each of us, whether we walk solo, as a couple, or in a group. You can stand alone, with bare feet and empty hands, and still feel your existence overflowing with love. It is something that connects us all. Deep down, below all the human-created layers of social and cultural formation, beneath our wounds and fears, our core is a free flow of love. We always have access to it. It is our default state of being. A human being is a loving being. Love is, as Willow Defebaugh of Atmos describes, “not something we fall in or out of, but something we remember we are part of;” something we find ourselves returning to upon knocking on the door of our innermost beings.
Simply remembering that love is always at our core, always accessible to us in abundance, can help us overcome the times when we lose the expressions of it from others and more balanced in moments of adversity. We are not lonely planets floating in the loveless universe. We are all connected. And that connection is love at our core.
By offering love, we offer light to the parts hidden within us, allowing that which is sacred and vivid to raise its head and come forth, and become embodied.
“We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation.”
— Francis Weller
Question to you, dear reader:
How do you envision a fulfilled life?
Thanks for sharing yourself in the oneness of this space you have so beautifully created.
The enigmatic strength of vulnerability through which and into which, the universe flows light to the darkness so that colours may arise.
Beautiful, wise, and timely... thank you for this, Justyna! And yes, to openness and emptiness being one and the same. Thank you, Pema, and thank you, Justyna, for bringing your meaning to this insight.