The DHX: The Doughtie Houses Exchange

By Katherine Shirek Doughtie

I woke up and wrote this to a friend of mine, with whom I’ve been having these great discussions about meditation, Buddhism, and how we get through this thing called life intact. Thought I’d share the words with you all…

The duality of nature and experience is what provides the mechanism for grace. Accepting the fact that light implies dark, and sleep implies awakening, gives us a key for how to navigate between the shores of joy and sorrow. The grace comes in knowing that there is a constant movement between the poles… that suffering will always be mitigated by happiness, and happiness is all the more sweeter because it’s transient.

Joy and sorrow are our biggest concerns because they directly impact our daily lives. We feel so victimized by our own grasping. We want, we need, we crave, we must have: those feelings cripple us with the intensity of our longing. We fear, we worry, we are clutched by sadness… and that makes us feel so powerless that we spend our lives bombarding ourselves with noise and activity so we never have to feel that small, that insignificant, and that alone.

And the worst part of it is… the more we get, the more we fear; the more we feel alone, the more we crave the balm of pleasure. As T.S. Eliot says, the giving famishes the craving. It’s a painful, insidious cycle. And the more we know of it the more painful it is, because we start seeing the patterns and we understand that we can’t get out of it, the harder and more violently we try.

The only way out is to stop trying. To stop using the muscles of our brain, and our day-timers, and our words and our left brains to get smart enough to figure out a way to escape the labyrinth. The only way out is to go through the labyrinth, to accept and understand and embrace the dualities. To learn ways, like meditation, to endure the shifts between heat and the cold.

Because once we are able to withstand the constant movement back and forth, we can not only endure but embrace the duality. We can begin to find the fullness of experience and our highest life expression. We can begin to relax within the constant shifting between our right and left brains. This is who we are. This is what we do. This is what it’s like.

Once that becomes integrated, we can harness the power of both extremes — the joys and the sorrows, the light and the dark — to deepen our experience, enable us to be more fully present on our journey. That’s where the grace comes in. That’s where we find our peace.