Don't Lighten the Burden

Sometimes, instead of trying to make life's challenges easier, it's more beneficial to fully acknowledge the weight of our burdens until we're compelled to put them down. How we often carry impossibly heavy  expectations, work ethics, or people-pleasing behaviours, thinking these will lead to success or belonging, when instead they multiply our difficulties.

The importance of compassionately recognising both the good intentions behind these burdens and the suffering they cause, and the role of coaches and loved ones in helping people see alternative ways of living that honour their true selves without abandoning themselves. And the transformative power of imagining and articulating different "styles" of engaging with life's challenges, whether in parenting, work, or relationships. Who can we be, we wonder, when we learn to envision and offer new possibilities and narratives for relating to life that honour other people’s aliveness and wholeness?

Hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here’s our source for this week:

Don't Lighten the Burden 

The British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett [...] said of her teaching style that her goal wasn’t to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that, in the basement shelves of Watkins, the ‘esoteric’ London bookstore. Tears pricked behind my eyes. The relief! To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life (and I had been slogging through life) trying to ‘get on top of things’, trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden’, and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort. But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you’ll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you’re free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life’s mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun. 

Oliver Burkeman
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