What came through when I asked, and why the hard part you're in is not the end of the story.

Most of us go looking for the meaning of life from a low place. Not from the middle of a good day, not while we are laughing with people we love, but when we feel disconnected from ourselves, or sad, or frightened, or full of a grief or a rage we do not know what to do with. That is when the question gets loud. And there is no shame in that; it is honest. So I asked my guides what to tell you, and their answer was simpler than I expected.

The meaning of life, they said, is to enjoy it. To enjoy being alive. There is a paradox underneath that, the one that keeps it from being a bumper sticker: you are a single human being living one human life, and you are also a part of the great mystery, the one source, the love-light that everything is made of. You came here, as a piece of that vastness, for the whole of the experience, the bright parts and the hard parts both. But do not mishear it. You did not come to suffer, and you did not come to enjoy your suffering. You came to be alive, and the meaning is in learning to enjoy that, and in finding your way back to enjoying it when you lose the thread.

One

Here is what they did not mean: that you should paste on a smile and be grateful for your pain. You did not incarnate for a pain fest. But pain will come. If you live long enough, bumping around this planet with billions of other people, you will meet things you did not want, grief and loss and fear and sorrow, and that is not a sign your life has gone wrong. It is part of being human. I am a big believer in steering for the open water rather than the rocks, in pointing your attention toward what you want, but even the steadiest captain hits some rough water. What matters is what you do once you are in it. And the first thing to know, the thing that changes everything, is that it is temporary. Every hard feeling passes. So do the good ones, which is its own kind of ache, but the point for right now is this: the darkness you are in is not permanent, even when it swears to you that it is.

Two

That does not make the hard feeling comfortable, so here is the move they gave me. When a painful feeling has you, let your curiosity about it grow a little louder than your urge to be rid of it. That urge is strong; we want the bad feeling gone, now, completely. But since it is going to pass anyway, you do not have to stew in it while you wait. There is no rule that says you must marinate in the worst of it to prove you are taking it seriously. You are allowed to nudge yourself toward a little relief. You are allowed to point your attention somewhere kinder. None of that is bypassing; it is simply refusing to make the hard part last one minute longer than it has to.

Three

There is a way to be with a hard feeling that helps it move, and it is not what you might think. It is not staying in the story of the feeling, replaying who did what and what it all means. It is dropping into the body and finding where the feeling physically lives. Where is it lodged? The throat, the chest, the pit of the stomach? Can you locate the actual sensation of it, and then, gently, can you shift around it, move it a little, and notice whether it changes? You can also ask it something: what is your message, or do you just want to be held, loved, allowed to be here for a moment. When you can meet a feeling that way, often the mystery simply takes it, lifts it out of your system, and recycles it into something new that goes off and serves someone else. I will say this plainly, because it matters: I am not a therapist. If your pain is deep, or stuck, or has been with you a long time, please get real help, and a good somatic, body-centered therapist can be a gift. This gentle practice is for the ordinary existential aches, not a substitute for care you may genuinely need.

Four

And then, come back. Put down the phone, turn off the screens and the endless scroll, because that glowing rectangle is not your real body, and not the real bodies of the people you love. Come back to this, your actual physical self, to nature, to trees and animals and living people, to the grounded, present, embodied center where enjoyment actually happens. Remember that this is everyone; every single person you pass is doing some version of exactly this, so you are not alone in it. And when you are the one who is resourced, when you feel steady and glad to be alive, offer that to someone who is hurting. You do not have to fix them. Just be the calm, present, witnessing company that lets them have their hard feeling without carrying it alone. That kind of presence is one of the most valuable things we can give each other, and every one of us is a little starved for it. Say yes to what arrives in you, and then point your attention on purpose, toward music, toward art, toward the people and the beauty that remind you that you are alive, rather than toward the feeds that quietly steal you out of your own life.

So when the question gets loud again, and it will, try to remember what the mystery keeps telling me. This life is a gift you gave yourself. This exact moment, hard as it may be, is going to pass, and a new one, with laughter in it, and love, and the plain wonder of being here at all, is closer than it looks. You do not have to force it. When the hard part moves through, the enjoying will be there again, the way it always is.

Join the Community

— Juli Martin, The Love Lady