Heart Threads

From Menletter September 2002

By Tim Baehr

We are all born with an essential inner core. I call it a heart, but I'm not referring to the meaty muscle that pumps our blood. The way I envision it, it's the essence of who we are; it's paradoxically both what makes us individuals and what ties us to the infinite, the divine, the oneness that unites us all.

This heart has (metaphorically speaking), four spinners of thread to wrap itself in.

The first spinner is joy. The joy of a baby or young child spins outward and bends gently back, enveloping the heart in a glowing, gossamer skein. It cradles the heart, lets it bounce around a bit. It's impossible for the spinner to produce so much joy that the heart is obscured; the skein simply expands to accommodate it.

The second spinner is grief. This comes usually from pain, from injuries and wounds to the heart. Even babies experience some of this: hunger, thirst, fear of abandonment, and so on. In boys it may include circumcision. Unless the baby or child is abused in some way - by its parents or by war, poverty, or the like, the grief threads are vastly outnumbered by the joy threads.

But one characteristic of grief threads (and of all the other threads) is that they grow up through the other skeins of threads. Joy still enwraps the heart, and the threads of grief grow up through the wrapping of joy and eventually can surround it.

Life provides many opportunities for grief, because life can be painful.

For some people, the source of grief is sudden and severe: Abandonment - physical or emotional - by our parents. Outright abuse. Loss of a loved one through illness, accident, or violence. Severe illness or injury.

For some people, the source of grief is slow and grinding: Dull routines. Living with an uncaring spouse. Repeated disappointments in love, work, friends. Gradual decline in health. Ongoing, pervasive racial or gender discrimination. Poverty. For women, the grief may come from feeling undervalued - increasingly in both the workplace and at home. For men, the grief may come from feeling undervalued - as a replaceable cog in the commercial machine and as an open wallet at home.

In any case, a skein of grief can envelop the joy, and the heart is lost inside.

The third spinner is anger, or rage. Anger is very useful. It propels us, activates us, makes us want to change things. And it is certainly efficient in covering over the skein of grief. The sources of anger are similar to those for grief, and sometimes the threads don't make neat layers; the two skeins become intertwined.

If the skeins of grief and anger are allowed to cover most of the joy, the situation becomes intolerable. Anything that rubs up against them sends painful shocks to the heart it has covered, irritating or reopening old heart-wounds. Joy, once a gossamer cradle, shrivels up against the heart as grief and anger press in.

So a fourth spinner has been active almost from the beginning: numbness. Sending threads up from the core of self, this spinner attempts to protect the heart from the things that rub up against grief and anger by weaving a sturdy, impervious shell around the whole thing. That way, further insults to the skeins of grief and anger can't get in.

We all have this protective shell, thick in some places and a bit thin in others. A child turns away from abuse and builds a fantasy world inside the shell - or simply goes inside and forgets. A wife turns away from her husband because his shell seems to shut her out. Men - and now many women - turn away from the world when they discover that they cannot show rage, grief (or in some cases even joy) and still keep their job.

Our society puts a very high value on this numbness. It takes a certain amount of numbness to do repetitive work, or even simply to show up at work every day, day after day, away from family and home. It takes a certain amount of numbness to live amid pollution, destruction of the environment, injustice, and war.

Historically, men have been most encouraged to spin this skein of numbness. That way, they can be ordained into - or honored and flattered into - being the protectors, the stalwarts, the danger workers. Even salesmen and office workers have bought into this ethic. When women in the past twenty years or so told us we had to get in touch with our feelings, we just stared blankly (didn't we?) and thought, "What the hell is she talking about?" Now more and more women - single moms and executives both - are finding out what men have faced since the beginning of the industrial era. And their shells are getting almost as thick as men's.

The shell has another great economic value. Because of this numbness, it becomes harder to activate any remaining joy, so we're willing to pay more and buy more things, just to give joy an occasional tickle.

Some of us even try to get numb from the inside, soothing the heart directly. We use drugs, alcohol, television, shopping, and a myriad of other devices. Society promotes this, too: numbness from any source has its utility. The problem with the internal numbness is that the heart eventually shrinks, and the skeins of grief and anger wrap themselves tighter around it, crushing even more joy.

These attempts at numbness can look very pathological. But the heart shows a kind of loving wisdom in this. It is making a desperate attempt to preserve its joy and its connection to the divine. But the numbness can become so complete that worthwhile aspects of our lives - spiritual practices, creation or appreciation of beauty, loving relationships - become distorted or impossible.

Every once in a while, a thread of anger, maybe intertwined with grief, works itself up through the shell. It whips around, slashing at anything in reach. A parent roars at or hits the children for a minor infraction. A boss belittles a valued assistant at a staff meeting. A cop clubs a homeless person sleeping on a bench. Sometimes the thread breaks loose and does its damage unconnected to its source; shrinks call it passive-aggressive behavior. Sometimes the thread turns on its host. Then we have car accidents, insomnia, depression, physical ailments up to and including heart attacks and cancer - and suicide. If we manage to stuff the anger-thread back into the shell, it's a bit thicker and a bit stronger.

What happens when we start trying to undo the layers? Some of us have done this in therapy, some in men's groups. The first thing that gets exposed is the anger skein. One of the great dangers of the early men's movement was that it stopped at that point. Having liberated their rage, some men went home from retreats in silent seething or open rebellion.

A lot of the rage was against women, or against one particular woman. Sometimes, after a short outburst, a man stuffed the anger back into the shell and went on with his life, a little more depressed than before. Sometimes the outburst lasted long enough to cause great harm, savaging a relationship or ending a marriage.

If some grief threads started poking through the anger, men were both angry and raw. Many men struggled along, covering their anger, living with grief, and hanging on to relationships any way they could.

I think the men's movement has been maturing a bit over the past decade. We've been discovering that rage and grief are intimately entwined; if we want to unravel anger, we have to deal with grief. We've discovered we can, with the right group of men, release the anger and grief and grab handfuls of joy - through fellowship, play, zaniness. This isn't the touchy-feely stuff of the seventies, which seems to have tried to weave yet another skein - of gentleness and softness - over the numbness, the seething anger, and the grief. Men today are discovering the wisdom of going down into the anger and grief, fully experiencing it, and finding and releasing joy as a result.

Without a safe place to do this work, the anger and grief would be unbearably painful. Retreats like the annual Men's Wisdom Council, and other men's retreats, create a place and a community of men to give the work a sacred context. The work involves some specific techniques: ritual, music, breathwork, dance, poetry, discussion. Gingerly at first, and then with increasing boldness, men unwrap their numbness, and then their anger and grief, exposing deep wounds. With brothers as witnesses, the work takes on a joyfulness. Wounds, once hidden in shame, are displayed as healing badges of courage and survival. There may be tears, but to me they've always seemed to be tears of intensity, not despair.

It would be impossible to unwrap everything all the way to joy - or to just the heart and ultimate union with the divine. Life just doesn't work that way. But I've seen how much joy can be exposed in the space of a week or a weekend, and how enduring that joy can be over time. We benefit, of course. So do our families and colleagues. Our communities, from our home towns to the entire planet, benefit when, out of joy and confidence, we begin to right some of society's wrongs.