Meditation and Crying by Marcus Antebi
It’s possible to begin a meditation with the thought that everything in life is easy. You can go into a meditation saying to yourself that everything in life is easy if you wish to. I’m scared to say this because I never want to be tested with the most frightening things. I want to make it to 100 and never experience illness and pain until the lights go out and I’m going into the next dimension.
It might be possible to achieve that, but you can’t be too attached to that result because you never can be sure of what will happen. But personally I think it’s important to have the goal to live to 100 and to create the circumstances that will help make it come to pass.
What a beautiful life you live if you have the perspective that nothing can make you ungrateful, if nothing that you experience can make you not want to have a consciousness. In such a state, not any form of pain to the body could break your will to remain conscious and present. But you might become tearful and frightened.
Physical pain can supersede emotional pain. Emotional pain can be blacked out, even by a child. Our psyche is born with tremendous gifts of denial and shutdown mechanisms. Those entities repress mental breakdowns that would otherwise cause us to lose our minds completely. And our bodies are blessed with the gift of killing pain, but only to a certain degree.
Physical pain can be terrifying. But sometimes it is an initiation to deeper levels of consciousness. There are times in life during which pain bears this fruit. An example is when a woman has to give birth to a child. The pain is an initiation into motherhood. If births were easy, we might take them for granted, and we might discard an imperfect unwanted child. The pain of birth can create a deep connection to the glorious newborn baby.
Physical pain can be dreadful. Although that’s the case, pain can bring on the next stage of our comprehension and development. It can bring us the tools we need to face physical and emotional pain. It can provide tools to help foster courage, mental strength, gratitude, compassion, and love. While we are in dire pain, we must allow the physical pain to take us through the journey of our emotional pain. We must reflect on the things that hurt us. We must remember them, feel them, and include them in the healing process.
When we are in physical pain it is time to go into a mental journey. It is time for us to look within for support from the divine creator of this universe. It is time for us to remember and record how much the pain hurts. When we are free from pain and suffering, we might remember how to empathize with others. We may think about the homeless person who is lonely, perhaps mentally ill, perhaps addicted to drugs, or perhaps living an immoral lifestyle.
But he suffers. He experiences pain and hunger and cold. He experiences loneliness. If he were able to lift himself up by his bootstraps and create a fantasy reality where he is living in a castle, he would do it. But he does not know how.
Or perhaps he has chosen from his subconscious to struggle. Maybe he has a different problem to solve. Maybe he has a solution that he can’t necessarily see. Could his choice to suffer be the best thing? I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that the best version of myself would choose to reach out to that person and give him different options without forcing anything on him. Perhaps I could give him some knowledge that might illuminate him. Maybe he’s not in the darkness. Maybe he is in light. Maybe he sees me as being the one in darkness, and he might have a message for me.
All of us will experience forms of pain and suffering. We will experience physical pain and emotional pain. To what degree will be different for each of us. There’s no point in creating anxiety over the fact that this will happen. Illness and death will surely come to all of us. Some of us get more time here. Some of us don’t care that much one way or the other. Others find every moment to be precious.
When I think of the people that I’ve known in this lifetime that have died long before their time, I have no words to express how it makes me feel. The thought desensitizes me. I can’t really make it real. I think of a couple of friends that I knew who died from drugs, a friend who died in a motorcycle accident, a couple of friends that died in skydiving accidents, and a few people who died from cancer.
I don’t know how to cry when I think of them. I cannot feel grief. I don’t have the mechanism of morning. I had to shut down my ability to touch sadness as a child because it wasn’t safe. And I wasn’t taught the mechanisms to grieve and heal all of my losses to completion. When my grandparents died I barely shed a tear, although I loved them dearly and had fond memories of them throughout my life.
I don’t know where sadness was. I was afraid for many years to look for it. The times in my life that I found myself on the verge of crying, I heard a voice in my head that said, “If you feel this pain now, you will never stop crying.” I have to trust that I have the wisdom now and that my mechanisms are no longer broken.
To cry is a show of absolute power and strength—not a sign of weakness. Men in our cultures since the beginning of time have been taught to repress their sadness because it indicated weakness to their tribes. Tribes of extremely stupid people, I must add.
The smarter people would say, “Our leaders and our men cry because they’re connected to the great essence of the spirit. They are linked into their emotions and they’re able to process their emotions and their thinking. That makes them reliable and trustworthy.”
People who cannot grieve cannot feel as much empathy because they block it out. People who cannot see you and feel your pain are difficult to trust because they might act out.
There should be an imperative in human societies that we encourage men to cry. I’ve said it before and I say it again now: The most dangerous creatures on this planet are males of the human species ages 17 through 45.
We have to create a massive campaign of awareness around the subject of how unbelievably masculine it is to sob. How beautiful it is to see a man with great power who can relieve his pain through the normal cleansing emotional process of crying. It’s no different than laughter, it’s no different than anger, and it’s no different than being startled. Crying is a great reaction. And when men learn to do it again, the world will be changing for the better.