114: How to Despair

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. Yeah. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we sit hair down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey everybody, welcome back to How to Make Love. I'm Laura and this episode is called How to Despair. I am not here today to give you hope. I'm not here to tell you that it's all going to be okay. It isn't okay. What we're going to do today is we're going to practice despair together.

Speaker 1: Not to drown in it, but to learn how to hold it, to face it honestly, to live with it without running away. Because despair comes from seeing clearly. And today in our world, there is a lot to see. I have to talk about Palestine right now, the genocide in Palestine, not in headlines, not in abstractions, but in reality right now, there are parents digging through rubble for their children. Right now, there are children with no parents left. Hospitals are overflowing, some are running without electricity. They're treating the injured on the floor because there are no beds. People are drinking unsafe water. If they can find water at all, food is running out. Medicine is running out because it's all being strategically withheld and bombs keep falling. This is not a war between equals. This is a trapped population being starved and killed strategically. While the world argues about what to call that and what words to use, if you are paying attention, it is unbearable.

Speaker 1: And Palestine is not the only place. The world is bleeding in so many directions, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Ukraine, climate disasters are displacing thousands of people who were already poor and vulnerable and all the quiet suffering too. All the refugee camps that never make the news or the prisons or the borders or the people that we're never going to know about. This is why we despair, because the world is breaking. It is on fire, and we are awake enough to see that. So let's talk about what despair really is. First, despair is not weakness. It is not a failure of will. Despair is what happens when we are honest. When you despair, it means you've stopped lying to yourself. It means you are letting in the truth. And yes, it really hurts. Maybe your chest feels tight, maybe your stomach is heavy. Maybe you feel nausea, maybe you feel frozen or numb or angry.

Speaker 1: But despair isn't the end of the world. It is the world landing as a sensation in your body. It is love in pain because you can't despair for a world you don't care about. So first, you let yourself feel it. You stop scrolling, you stop running, and you just let the tears come or the anger or the numbness. You just let it be there with you. You let yourself sit in the room with despair. So take a breath with me now. Take a nice big breath in and hold it. Let that breath out. This is what despairing well looks like. You allow it to exist. You honor it. You don't try to crush it or fix it or explain it away. You don't treat it as an enemy, but it is a signal that your heart is alive and paying attention. But if we don't know how to hold despair, it can swallow us up.

Speaker 1: We can get stuck in doom scrolling or panic or numbness or self-blame. So I want to teach you how to despair well, how to feel the weight of the world without being destroyed by the weight of the world. And this is a practice. And like any practice, it takes time and work and it's something that you can get better at. So there's a few steps I'm going to share with you. The first step is to notice despair in your body. Despair tends to live in the body before it lives in the mind. Maybe your chest feels really heavy, maybe your jaw gets really tight. Maybe your stomach feels like it's twisted in a knot. I want you to pause and notice where does despair live in your body right now? If it had a shape, what would that shape be? If it had a temperature or a color, what would it look like or feel like?

Speaker 1: Don't rush and don't intellectualize it. Just name it for yourself. See if you can describe it. Naming a feeling doesn't make it worse. It actually makes it safer. It makes it more work with a bull, for lack of better phrase. So see if you can give it a name and a texture and get a little more familiar with the qualities of your unique despair. The second step is to allow despair to exist. So our first impulse is often to fight despair or to numb it out. We keep scrolling or we start to problem solve or get into solutions, or we tell ourselves to be grateful or stay positive or try to change our mindset. But despair needs to be felt not fixed. And so I invite you to just let it exist. You can breathe into the place in your body where it lives, and if tears come, you're going to let those tears come.

Speaker 1: If anger rises, you're going to notice that and be with it. Try to befriend it. You're not trying to get rid of your despair, you're just making a little more space for it to move through you and be what it is. A reflection prompt that might help you. Here is what part of this despair is mind to feel, and what part is the world moving through me? The third step to despairing well is to give the despair a container so that we don't drown in it. So despair is sort of like a wave. It rises and it peaks and it ultimately passes. So the practice is to sort of let the wave move through without being pulled under by it. And here's how you can try to do that. The first thing is to anchor your body. So when you feel despair coming on, try to press your feet under the floor or touch the ground, touch a wall, touch a tree to touch something, and remind your nervous system.

Speaker 1: I'm here, I'm safe. This is just despair. This is a part of being human. The second thing you can do is set a really gentle boundary with your imagine putting your despair in a bowl in front of you. You're holding it, you're seeing it, but it is not all of who you are. And then the third thing to do is just let it move. Some of us might cry, some of us might tremble, we might sigh. We might have a big exhale, we might need to rage. Some people may even hum or rock gently. This is just your body digesting the unbearable, being with it and trying to move with it. A couple of reflection prompts that might help you for this particular step of giving despair. A container you could ask yourself, if my despair could speak, what would it say right now? Or you could ask, what does it need from me, this despair?

Speaker 1: Does it need my attention or my stillness? Does it need a witness? The fourth step to trying to despair well is to ideally witness despair together. Despair grows heavier in isolation. At least that's my experience, and it tends to soften in witnessing. So if you can share your despair with someone safe, you could say out loud, I feel like the world is completely broken and I can't stop it and I don't know what to do. Or you could call a friend and you could just sit in silence together. Or you could light a candle or you could say a name, or you could tell the story of the suffering that you're holding or that you're bearing witness to. And if you don't have anyone to share with, that's okay. You can still bear really powerful Witness yourself. You can journal without censoring yourself. You could record a voice memo of what you're feeling.

Speaker 1: You could speak to a photograph or a tree or the night sky. A couple of weeks ago, I went and I just sang out loud. I was in a little chapel all by myself and I had a good cry. And then I just sang and let the despair move through me and move through my voice. A couple of questions that might help you here. Who could I allow to witness my despair even for just a few minutes? And what small ritual might honor the grief that I'm feeling today? So the last step of feeling despair. Well, and not that these are linear boxy steps. These are just sort of like how to help you chew on despair without being totally consumed by it. But the last step that I find helpful is to just kind of be mindful of closing the practice. Remember that you are practicing.

Speaker 1: You are practicing working with despair, witnessing despair, and it needs some gentle closure. So after you've allowed the despair, after you've allowed it to move, you need to close the door really softly so that it doesn't follow you all day. Here's how to close a despair session. I recommend taking a few slow deep breaths. And then I recommend thanking your body, thanking your body or your heart for carrying the weight, for bearing witness, maybe thanking a person if they're with you. And then I think it's important to do something to ground yourself, to mark the transition. So drink a cup of water, wash your hands, step outside. Take a breath of fresh air. Do something to shift this and let yourself, let your heart let your body know, okay, I'm ending the practice for now. I'll come back to it again later. Remember, despair is a part of our human experience.

Speaker 1: And when you practice despairing, well, it doesn't to crush you. It can move through you. It can deepen your capacity for care and for love without turning into numbness or rage. But it takes an awful lot of mindfulness. So if you're still here, thank you for not looking away. Thank you for sitting in despair with me. The world is still breaking and our despair does not fix that, but despairing well is how we stay human in the middle of it all. So take one more nice, deep, big breath. Feel your chest rise and fall, and you're here. You care. You have a heart that cares, and that really fucking matters. So take care of your heart, my friends. Take care of each other. Take care of your despair. I will meet you here again in the dark next time, my friends. And until then, may you despair fully and well. Bye for now.