Two Sides of a Coin

As embodied beings, we live in a world of opposites or dualities: hot/cold, success/failure, joy/grief, calmness/agitation, courage/fear, etc. We also live in a world bound by the Truth of impermanence. Everything and everyone in manifestation is subject to impermanence, and because of impermanence, we are always moving between the dualities: sometimes we’re happy, sometimes we’re sad. Sometimes we’re elated, sometimes we’re grief stricken. Interestingly, like two sides of a coin, these pairs of opposites go together and inform one another: we appreciate warmth because we know cold. Because of happiness, we know sadness. In other words, we can’t have one without the other. 

After the spiritual seeker Siddhartha became the Buddha—a fully realized being—the first teaching he gave was on the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. More simply put, suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end.

One of main the reasons we suffer, the Buddha taught, is because we cling to or have attachment to that which is impermanent. We seek permanence where none exists. We crave solid ground under our feet, when at any moment the rug can and will be pulled out from under us. Learning to live comfortably with this uncertainty is part of what we work on developing through our practice. 

Instead of clinging to that to which we are attached, the Buddha encouraged us instead to embrace the Truth of impermanence. In so doing, we cultivate more gratitude, love, and appreciation for the beings, places, and things that we cherish while they are with us. If we wholeheartedly embrace the fact that our beloved (fill in the blank) will one day be gone, then we are more likely to feel gratitude and appreciation for its presence while we have it. And then when the inevitable time for parting comes, we are better prepared to let go. While we will of course experience grief, we will suffer less because we accept and understand that impermanence is the nature of all that exists in manifestation. And because we understand the dual nature of manifest reality, we know that loss and its inherent grief are built into love. It is because we know love that we know grief. 

Ram Dass talks about how the challenges in our lives are the grist for the mill for our awakening, about how the adversities and hard stuff make up the stepping stones on our path to Self realization. In other words, the challenges in our lives can serve to move us along in our evolution toward becoming fully realized and compassionate beings who love unconditionally. Everything in our lives, Ram Dass says, is there to wake us up. Our suffering and our grief can be catalysts for tremendous spiritual growth if we choose to approach them that way. 

In the Hindu pantheon, Shiva is the deity associated with destruction and transformation. He reminds us of the ever changing impermanent nature of reality. But he is also associated with deep states of meditation, sitting in silence and stillness in his sacred abode on Mt. Kailash in the Himalayas. If we can like Shiva develop a steady meditation practice, we will cultivate within ourselves a calm, still point to which we can always return, even as the ever changing phenomena of the material world are always swirling around us, sometimes in calm, gentle ways and sometimes in stormy, challenging ways. From our still, calm center, we can observe all of the changes without getting caught up in them. We can observe the dualities and see how we are often buffeted about by them, and we might begin to be able to respond to pleasure and pain, hot and cold, joy and grief from a place of equanimity. 

In the March Jivamukti Focus-of-the-Month essay “Love (’s) Grief” by Frances Vicente, she writes, “Without going through the lows of life, how can we truly appreciate or even recognize the highs? Without setbacks, what would fuel our hopes and aspirations? And without experiencing grief and sorrow, how can we be fully present and receptive to these same emotions in someone else? As Manorama once said, ‘The one who experiences loss has much to gain.’ From sadness, an appreciation for joy. From life’s obstacles, optimism. From grief, empathy. The depth of our joy, the source of our hope and the expansiveness of our compassion may very well reside in our ability to move through and transform grief and loss. And perhaps, in time, we may come to terms with, and strangely even begin to ‘love’ our grief, recognizing it as love in a different form.”