The Sun Interview

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The Sun Interview January 2008 | issue 385

BARBARA PLATEK is a Jungian psychotherapist and author who lives with
her family on the outskirts of Ithaca, New York.

Also by this author:
The Good Red Road

All selections by this author

Psychotherapist and author Miriam Greenspan was born in a displaced-
persons camp in southern Germany shortly after World War ii. Her
parents were Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, enduring
dislocation, imprisonment in a forced-labor camp, starvation, and the
destruction of their families, homes, and community. Although her
mother and father did not speak to her about these experiences until
she was thirteen, Greenspan remembers sensing their grief from a young
age and knowing there was a story there that needed to be told.

A psychotherapist for more than thirty-three years, Greenspan sees the
dark emotions as potentially profound spiritual teachers — if we can
live mindfully with them. She knows from experience how to befriend
these emotions: fate has brought her the death of one child and the
disability of another. Though she believes firmly in the idea that
conscious suffering can deepen our connection to life and make us more
compassionate people, Greenspan understands our tendency to turn away.
She quotes Carl Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining
figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. . . . This
procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not very popular.”

Greenspan holds degrees from Northeastern University, Columbia
University, and Brandeis University, and she served on the editorial
board of the journal Women and Therapy for a decade. Her first book, A
New Approach to Women and Therapy (McGraw-Hill), helped define the
field of women’s psychology and feminist therapy in the early
eighties. In her most recent book, Healing through the Dark Emotions:
The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair (Shambhala), she argues
passionately that the avoidance of the dark emotions is behind the
escalating levels of depression, addiction, anxiety, and irrational
violence in the U.S. and throughout the world. Her therapeutic
approach encourages what she calls “emotional alchemy,” a process by
which fear can be transformed into joy, grief into gratitude, and
despair into a resilient faith in life. She questions the prevailing
psychiatric attitude toward grief and despair, which relies heavily
upon psychopharmacology to return us as quickly as possible to a
“normal” state. Her focus is on transformation rather than normalcy.

Now sixty, Greenspan has become a spokeswoman for what Jungian analyst
James Hollis calls the “swamplands of the soul.” She leads the descent
into the most-rejected places in our psyches, having spent a good part
of her life learning to navigate this rough terrain.

I met Greenspan for this interview on a sunny day in May 2007 at her
home in Jamaica Plain, a tree-lined Boston neighborhood. She lives in
one part of the house with her two daughters and husband, while her
ninety-five-year-old mother occupies the other. Greenspan led me to
the space where she meets with her psychotherapy clients: a light-
filled room adorned with images and objects from nature and mythology.
Though we talked primarily about the dark emotions, the conversation
was anything but depressing. I was struck by how willing Greenspan is
to be present with what is. She quotes the comedian Lenny Bruce: “We
all live in a happy-ending culture, a what-should-be culture. . . . We
are all taught that fantasy. But if we were taught ‘This is what is,’
I think we’d all be less screwed up.”

Platek: Why do you think it is important for us to pay attention to
the dark emotions, in particular?

Greenspan: Actually I think it’s important for us to pay attention to
our emotions, in general. Too many people have never learned to do
this, because they’ve never been encouraged to do it. We have the
notion that our emotions are not worthy of serious attention.

Naturally we have less difficulty with the so-called positive
emotions. People don’t mind feeling joy and happiness. The dark
emotions are much harder. Fear, grief, and despair are uncomfortable
and are seen as signs of personal failure. In our culture, we call
them “negative” and think of them as “bad.” I prefer to call these
emotions “dark,” because I like the image of a rich, fertile, dark
soil from which something unexpected can bloom. Also we keep them “in
the dark” and tend not to speak about them. We privatize them and
don’t see the ways in which they are connected to the world. But the
dark emotions are inevitable. They are part of the universal human
experience and are certainly worthy of our attention. They bring us
important information about ourselves and the world and can be
vehicles of profound transformation.

Platek: And if we don’t pay attention to them?

Greenspan: Well, the Buddha taught that we increase our suffering
through our attempts to avoid it. If we try to escape from a hard
grief, for instance, we may develop a serious anxiety disorder or
depression, or we may experience a general numbness. It is difficult
to live a full life if we haven’t grieved our losses. I also think
that a lot of our addictions have to do with our inability to tolerate
grief and despair. Unrecognized despair can turn into acts of
aggression, such as homicide or suicide. The same is true of fear.
When we don’t have ways to befriend and work with it, fear can turn
violent. We see too many examples of this in the world today.

Platek: You refer to our culture as “emotion phobic” but suggest that
we are also drawn to “emotional pornography.” What do you mean?

Greenspan: By “emotion phobic” I mean that we fear our emotions and
devalue them. This fear has its roots in the ancient duality of reason
versus emotion. Reason and the mind are associated with masculinity
and are considered trustworthy, whereas emotion and the body are
associated with the feminine and are seen as untrustworthy, dangerous,
and destructive. Nowhere in school, for example, does anyone tell us
that paying attention to our emotions might be valuable or necessary.
Our emotions are not seen as sources of information. We look at them
instead as indicators of inadequacy or failure. We don’t recognize
that they have anything to teach us. They are just something to get
through or to control.

But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all
these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we
suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch
horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor. We seek out
emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb,
we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So
emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz
emotion — it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world.

Platek: Other societies seem to have ways of acknowledging the dark
emotions. Hindu images come to mind, in which Kali, the goddess of
death and rebirth, is sometimes depicted with her mouth dripping
blood. Why do you think we are so unwilling to face the dark side of
life here in the U.S.?

Greenspan: We have lost our connection to the dark side of the sacred.
We prize status, power, consumerism, and distraction, and there is no
room for darkness in any of that. Americans tend to have a naiveté
about life, always expecting it to be rosy. When something painful
happens, we feel that we are no good, that we have failed at achieving
a good life. We have no myths to guide us through the painful and
perilous journeys of the dark emotions, and yet we all suffer these
journeys at some point. We have high rates of depression, anxiety, and
addiction in this country, but we have no sense of the sacred
possibilities of our so-called illnesses. We have no god or goddess
like Kali to guide us. Instead we have a medical culture. Suffering is
considered pathology, and the answer to suffering is pharmacology.

Platek: So instead of Kali we have Prozac?

Greenspan: Exactly. Our answer to serious pain is a pill that will
take it away as quickly as possible. We have no sense that death and
rebirth are parts of life. Rather than let suffering expand our
consciousness, we succumb to feelings of victimization or treat
ourselves as sick. For example, psychiatry has no concept of “normal”
despair. We speak only of "clinical depression,” an illness that can
be reduced to a neurotransmitter deficiency. Even grief after a major
loss is diagnosed as a mental disorder if it lasts more than two
months. Our culture tells us to get over our pain; to control, manage,
and medicate it. Contrast this with the Jewish practice of “sitting
shiva” after a death. For seven days following the burial (shiva means
“seven” in Hebrew), the mourners stay at home and sit on low chairs
and receive visitors. People come to comfort and console them, to
bring food and drink, and to give the mourners a chance to remember
their dead and express their grief. Mourning is then gradually stepped
down. The seven days are followed by a thirty-day period of mourning,
followed by an eleven-month period in which the mourner’s prayer is
said twice a day. After that, the dead are remembered once a year.

Instead of making us feel we must “get over it,” these types of
rituals allow us to stay open to our grief. Rather than being directed
to jump back into our routines, we are given permission to move more
organically through the grieving process. After my father died, for
example, I sat shiva with my mother, brother, and aunt. When the shiva
was over, the rabbi told us to go outside and walk around the block.
This was to remind us that the world still turns and life goes on.
After the intensity of sitting with our grief for days, there was a
sense of renewal, of gratitude for the continuity of life. I was
struck by the emotional intelligence of this process. It’s very
different from the notion that grief is something we suffer in
private, by ourselves, and that it becomes an illness when it goes on
for too long.

Platek: A recent Forbes article named cognitive-behavioral therapy as
the most effective treatment to date for depression and anxiety. By
changing our thought patterns, the article suggests, we can eliminate
our negative feelings and free ourselves from “long-winded wallowing
in past pain.” How would you respond to this?

Greenspan: I think there is great value in becoming more aware of our
thoughts and the ways in which they trigger our emotional states. If I
am always thinking that I am a horrible person, chances are I will
feel depressed. If I think instead, I am a human being, and I am not
perfect, and that’s fine, it will inspire more compassion for the
self. On the other hand, there are certain experiences that slam us
with emotion. People we love die or suffer illness or trauma. We need
to learn how to tolerate the emotions that accompany such experiences.
We can’t — nor should we try to — simply eliminate these feelings,
because this will just entrench them further. Cognitive therapy is
great for becoming more aware of our self-destructive thought patterns
and how they affect our emotions and behavior, but it doesn’t really
address how to befriend intense emotions in the body. If I am awash in
grief after my child has died, I need to go through that grief
journey; I can’t simply think my way out of it.

Platek: Is there an appropriate amount of time for a person to grieve?
When do we cross the line into “wallowing”?

Greenspan: It’s always a mistake to designate an “appropriate” time
allotment for grief. Everyone has his or her own way of grieving, and
the important thing is not to be afraid of grief and to let it unfold,
to open up and allow it to bring you on its journey. “Wallowing” is
not healthy grief but something else altogether. It’s when we get
grandiose about our suffering, get caught up in a victim story, or
indulge our emotions without awareness.

Platek: What suggestions do you have for people struggling with
depression or anxiety?

Greenspan: Well, first of all, they need to accept the fact that they
are feeling depressed or anxious. That may sound simple, but it is
actually quite hard. It goes against the grain. We are taught that we
should not accept these states but rather do whatever we can to put an
end to them. But we need to become friendly with the beast, so to
speak. We need to be curious: What are these states we call
“depression” and “anxiety”? What do they feel like? How do we
experience them in the body? This allows us to be moved and
transformed by them. It is not the same as “long-winded wallowing in
past pain.” I think that depression often eventually lifts of its own
accord when we let it be. Most people don’t know this about
depression. When we fight depression, it becomes entrenched. There are
forms of entrenched depression that are life threatening and do
require medication. I am not against medication when necessary; I just
believe we too often overuse or abuse psychopharmacological substances
for so-called mental disorders, and we don’t search for other ways to
deal skillfully with these afflictions.

As for anxiety, we are probably all suffering from heightened anxiety
right now if we’re the least bit aware of the problems in the world.
I’m not saying that we should allow ourselves to be constantly
anxious. We need to know how to soothe ourselves and our loved ones
without avoiding the darkness. A simple daily practice of conscious,
relaxed breathing is often an antidote for anxiety. Some kind of
gratitude practice is also helpful: that is, bringing to mind all that
we have to be grateful for every day, and feeling thankful. Even if we
don’t feel thankful at the time, it helps to be aware of our
blessings.

Platek: How would you teach someone to “befriend” his or her
suffering?

Greenspan: Emotions live in the body. It is not enough simply to talk
about them, to be a talking head. We need to focus our attention on
emotions where they live. This willingness to be present allows the
emotion to begin to shift of its own accord. An alchemy starts to
happen — a process of transmutation from something hard and leaden to
something precious and powerful, like gold.

This is a chaotic, nonlinear process, but I think it requires three
basic skills: attending to, befriending, and surrendering to emotions
in the body. Paying attention to or attending to our emotions is not
the same as endless navel gazing and second-guessing ourselves. It is
mindfulness of the body, an ability to listen to the body’s emotional
language without judgment or suppression.

Befriending follows from focusing our attention and takes it a step
further: it involves building our tolerance for distressing emotions.
When I was giving birth to my first child, my midwife said something
that has stood me in good stead ever since: “When you feel the
contraction coming and you want to back away from it, move toward it
instead.” The feeling in the body that we want to run away from —
that’s precisely what we need to stay with. A simple way to do this is
to locate the emotion in the body and breathe through it, without
trying to change or end it.

The third skill, surrendering, is the spiritual part of this process.
Surrendering to suffering is usually the last thing we want to do, but
surrender is what brings the unexpected gifts of wisdom, compassion,
and courage. Surrendering is about saying yes when we want to say no —
the yes of acceptance. This is what really allows the alchemy to
happen. We don’t “let go” of emotions; we let go of ego, and the
emotions then let go themselves. This is “emotional flow.” When we let
the dark emotions flow, something unexpected and unpredictable often
occurs. Consciously experienced, the energy of these emotions flows
toward healing and harmony. I’ve found that unimpeded grief transforms
itself into heightened gratitude; that consciously experiencing fear
expands our ability to feel joy; and that being mindful of despair —
really entering into the dark night of the soul with the light of
awareness — renews and deepens our faith.

Platek: If someone is feeling deep depression or despair, it might
feel dangerous to them to “surrender” to what they’re feeling. Is
there ever a danger?

Greenspan: “Surrender,” as I’m using it, means a radical acceptance of
our emotional experience. We can simply say, “I’m feeling despair
right now.” How can that be dangerous? If anything, this acceptance
makes it less likely that we will act out of the emotional intensity.
The danger comes when we can’t tolerate the discomfort of an emotion
and so lose our awareness of it. That’s how emotions overwhelm the
mind or impel some kind of impulsive, destructive behavior. It’s not
the emotion per se that’s destructive; it’s the behavior that comes
from not being able to bear it mindfully.

It sounds odd to us, but what we call “depression” can be a creative
process and not just a destructive one. My sense of this probably
started to develop when I was a child. My parents are Holocaust
survivors, and they were grieving the genocide of their people when I
was growing up. Psychiatry would, no doubt, have diagnosed my mother
as “depressed.” But, as I see it, she was doing the active grieving
she needed to do in order to find a way to live after the enormous
trauma of being the sole survivor of her family. She is now ninety-
five years old and the most resilient person I know. She’s legally
blind and mostly deaf but goes about living her life with an almost
Buddha-like acceptance. My father, who died five years ago, came
through the Holocaust and still had this amazing and innocent zest for
life. I’ve learned a lot from both of them.

Platek: You speak of an “alchemy” by which grief can ultimately be
transformed into gratitude, fear into joy, and despair into faith. How
does that work?

Greenspan: Let’s begin with grief. There is a kind of shattering that
happens with, say, the death of a child, or any death, but perhaps
most of all violent death. Not only is your heart shattered; you lose
your sense of who you are and what your life is about. So
reconstruction is needed. But first we need to accept that we are
broken. This initiates the “emotional alchemy.” If we can hang in
there with grief, it changes from a feeling of being “hemmed in” by
life to a feeling of expansion and opening. We will never get back to
the way we were, but eventually we reach a new state of “normal.” I’m
not talking about the mundane kind of “getting back to normal,” in
which we find ourselves doing the laundry again (although that is
important too), but the deeper kind, which is a process of remaking
ourselves and how we live.

Grief is a teacher. It tells us that we are not alone; that we are
interconnected; that what connects us also breaks our hearts — which
is as it should be. Most people who allow themselves to grieve fully
develop an increased sense of gratitude for their own lives. That’s
the alchemy: from grief to gratitude. None of us wants to go through
these experiences, but they do bring us these gifts.

The same is true for fear. We think of fear as an emotion that
constricts us and keeps us from living fully. But I think it’s really
the fear of fear that does this. When we are able to tolerate fear,
and to experience it consciously, we learn not to be so afraid of it —
and this gives us the freedom to live with courage and enjoy life more
fully. This is the alchemy of fear to joy.

We are all living in a heightened fear state now, and being able to
tolerate fear is a true gift. Those of us who can live mindfully amid
the chaos are doing something for the world as well as for ourselves.
It’s essential to be able to bear fear and not go off the edge with it
— not allow it to impel us to engage in one form of aggression or
another.

Platek: It sounds as if you’re saying we need to metabolize the fear
somehow.

Greenspan: Yes, that’s a great way to put it. Fear that is not
metabolized threatens to destroy us — and perhaps the planet. I’m not
saying we need to be in a constant state of anxiety, but we need to
know what it is that we are afraid of and not turn our fear into
destructive power. My third child, Esther, was born with numerous
physical and mental disabilities of unknown origin. She is at risk for
all sorts of physical injuries and is in pain a good deal of the time.
One day she severely dislocated her knee at summer camp due to her
counselors’ neglect, and she came home in a wheelchair. She said,
“Summer camp was great — up until the knee-dislocation part!” When I
marveled at her cheerfulness and asked what her secret was, Esther
said, without missing a beat, “The secret of life is ‘Love people.’ ”
She is an amazing soul who lives with fear every day. And every day
she has the courage to laugh and love. She teaches me that it’s
possible to live fully with pain and fear — which is what courage is
all about.

Platek: You tell a story in your book about a man whose fear actually
informed him of an otherwise invisible and silent danger.

Greenspan: You’re thinking of Adam Trombly, director of the
environmental organization Project Earth. Trombly was out walking
through a cow pasture on a beautiful day in Rocky Flats, Colorado,
when he was suddenly seized by a sense of dread. He regarded his fear
as evidence that something was wrong, so he took some soil samples
from the area and had them tested. It turned out that the level of
plutonium oxide in that spot was thousands of times higher than the
acceptable standard. A fire at a nearby nuclear installation had
released plutonium oxide into the atmosphere. The accident had not
been reported, but Trombly’s fear alerted him to the problem and the
coverup. It carried information from the earth. Of course, most
scientists would consider this ridiculous or, worse, certifiably
psychotic. We don’t honor information brought to us by our feelings,
and therefore we don’t learn how to develop our intuitive ways of
knowing.

Platek: The alchemists had a saying about “finding gold in the dung
heap” — literally in the shit. In many ways you are mining the dung
heaps of our lives for spiritual and psychological gold.

Greenspan: Yes. “Shit happens,” as they say, and it will continue to
happen! I think the hardest thing is to feel that the shit is
purposeless. This is at the heart of the emotion we call “despair.”
Despair is an existential emotion. It occurs when our meaning system
gets shattered and we have to construct a new one. But our culture
does not value this process. We don’t see any value in the shit. We
want to flush it away. It takes courage to allow our faith and meaning
to be dismantled. Despair can be a powerful path to the sacred and to
a kind of illumination that doesn’t come when we bypass the darkness.
As the poet Theodore Roethke put it, “The darkness has its own
light.”

Platek: You went through a very difficult time with the death of your
firstborn son. Did that experience bring about a process of emotional
alchemy in your life?

Greenspan: Aaron was not just an ordeal; he was a blessing. His birth
and death were my initiation into the ways of the dark goddess and the
occasion of a radical spiritual awakening for me. He was born with a
serious brain injury and was destined to live only sixty-six days.
There was no apparent reason for this. I was healthy, and I’d had a
healthy pregnancy. When he was born, I was an agnostic, a social
activist, and a humanist, not a “spiritual” person. My life was
centered on the women’s movement. I had no ideas about reincarnation
or life after death. I could never have predicted what happened with
Aaron.

I remember looking in the mirror on the morning of Aaron’s burial and
thinking, I am going to bury my son today. There was an absolute
clarity to this. So much of the time our consciousness is not grounded
in reality, but at that moment I was able to accept reality. Then, at
the cemetery, when we buried Aaron, I heard this clear voice that
said, You are looking in the wrong place. I had been looking down at
the casket, and when I heard the voice, I raised my eyes. And, looking
up, I saw Aaron’s spirit, which I can only describe as a magnificent
radiance — like the energy I’d seen in his eyes, only magnified. And
the message was that he was ok. I was flooded with a sense of peace.
It’s hard to describe because we have no language for these kinds of
experiences of spirit. I wouldn’t wish this kind of grief on anyone,
yet at the same time, experiencing a baby’s death in your arms and
then seeing his spirit leaves you profoundly changed: I became a more
grateful person. What I know about emotional alchemy grew from this
ground.

Platek: I have a friend who recently underwent intensive treatment for
cancer that involved a period of isolation — to protect his immune
system — and massive chemotherapy. During that time he prayed,
meditated, read spiritual writings, and generally stayed “positive.”
He felt a great deal of gratitude for his life and for his family and
friends, and he kept his mind focused on uplifting things. His
approach was an inspiration to me. It was also in keeping with the
latest research that suggests negative emotions can make us sick. How
does this fit with your idea of healing?

Greenspan: The sacred path of the dark emotions is certainly not the
only path there is. It is the path we are on when we are on it, which
is usually when we can’t avoid it. But journeys through dark emotions
aren’t incompatible with the ability to focus on the light. My
daughter Esther went through two spinal-fusion surgeries within one
month. If she hadn’t had the surgeries, she would not have lived, but
there was no guarantee that she would survive the procedures either.
While she was in the hospital, my husband and I tried to be a source
of positive energy for her, because it was not the time or place for
us to be communicating fear and sorrow. It wasn’t that we didn’t feel
scared, but we needed to keep her spirits up. There are times when
connecting with “positive” forces, whether through friendships, or
reading, or prayer, or simply keeping your sense of humor, is
essential. There really is no duality here.

The ability to journey through the dark emotions brings with it the
benefit of being more open to the emotions we call “positive,”
including joy, pleasure, wonder, awe, and love. When I teach
workshops, participants cry, but they also laugh. There is a
surprising amount of laughter and humor and just plain fun that comes
out of this work.

Platek: Do you think negative emotions can make us sick?

Greenspan: Yes, I do, when they are unattended to. When we don’t know
how to handle their intense energies, they can become stuck. Research
shows that depression and anxiety have a connection to heart disease,
immune disorders, cancer, and other ailments. This doesn’t mean that
emotions cause cancer. Thinking so makes it easier to ignore research
on how environmental contaminants, for instance, are linked to cancer.
But stuck emotions do put stress on the body. That’s one reason why
mindfulness and the metabolism of emotions are so important. If we
don’t digest the emotion, it just sits in our bodies and contributes
to ill health.

Platek: Is all depression a result of avoiding the dark emotions?

Greenspan: A lot of it is, I think, but certainly not all. Depression
is a complex biochemical, psychological, social, and spiritual
condition. We call it an “illness” because our culture favors the
medical model of explanation. Though it’s perfectly true that
depression is correlated with a drop in serotonin levels, this doesn’t
mean that serotonin deficiency causes depression. This kind of
scientistic reductionism is one of the main drawbacks of our culture’s
way of thinking about human problems. Depression is correlated to a
lot of things — including gender and a poor economy. It’s also
important to make a distinction between despair and depression.
Despair is a discrete emotion that, like all emotions, comes and goes;
depression is an overall mental and physical state that we might say
is chronic, stuck despair.

Platek: I think we all want to believe that if we do things “right” —
eat the right diet, follow the right spiritual practice, choose the
right mode of living — we will be protected somehow from the
calamities of life. I have a number of clients in my own therapy
practice, for example, who were shocked and hurt to find themselves in
the midst of a breakdown even after having done everything right. It
was as if life had betrayed them somehow.

Greenspan: I think this is a particularly American mindset, this
notion that if we get it all right, we won’t suffer at all. We have
even assimilated some Eastern practices through this lens, using them
as a strategy for avoiding suffering. We have a hard time tolerating
uncertainty. And there is so much uncertainty in this age of terror
and environmental crisis. We want to believe there is something we can
do that will guarantee a positive outcome and keep us safe. This is an
illusion, of course, but sometimes we need our illusions to get us
through the day. The illusion I’d had before my son was born was that
if I had a healthy pregnancy, exercised, did yoga, and ate well, then
everything would turn out fine. I’d even lived with the illusion that
because my family history of genocide had involved so much suffering,
somehow I would be spared any extreme suffering myself. But my child
died, and nobody knew why. I wondered why for a long time. But at some
point I realized that “Why?” was the wrong question. There was never
going to be an answer. Instead the question was “How?” — how was I
going to live now? Illusions are a false way to feel safe. But there
is no guaranteed safety. Life is inherently risky, and all we can
really do is live well.

Platek: For those of us who pursue a spiritual practice, there can be
a sense of shame or failure when we feel sad or afraid; if we were
enlightened enough, we think, we’d always approach life with a calm,
loving heart.

Greenspan: Yes, we carry this mistaken belief that enlightenment means
we do not suffer anymore. But it is possible to suffer with a calm,
loving heart. These two are not mutually exclusive. Enlightenment for
me is about growing in compassion, and compassion means “suffering
with.” Enlightenment has something to do with not running from our own
pain or the pain of others. When we don’t turn away from pain, we open
our hearts and are more able to connect to the best part of ourselves
and others — because every human being knows pain. I’m not sure what
enlightenment is, but I’m sure it has something to do with turning
pain into love.

People with a spiritual practice sometimes try to “transcend”
suffering. I call this a “spiritual bypass.” It’s different from what
your friend did: focusing on the positive while going through
chemotherapy. That was essential to his survival. A spiritual bypass
is not a conscious choice; it’s avoiding difficult feelings by “rising
above” them, when we are really not above them at all: To truly rise
above, most of the time, we must go through. I think there is such a
thing as genuine transcendence, but in my experience it is most often
a form of grace; we can’t make it happen. A spiritual bypass is a kind
of false transcendence. Some New Age ideas carry this flavor: they
deny the evils of the world and claim that only love and light are
real. This amounts to a dismissal of the pain of millions of people.

Platek: Psychologist James Hillman has said, “We cannot be cured apart
from the planet.” You point out that our psychological theories — and
perhaps some of our spiritual ones as well — emphasize individualism
to the point that we have become myopic. Our world is suffering while
we struggle to fix ourselves.

Greenspan: One of the main aspects of this myopia is that we don’t see
the connection between our “personal” sorrow, fear, and despair and
the pain of the world. We think that we are totally alone in it. And
the isolation makes our emotions useless to us. There’s a connection
between not being able to tolerate our own pain and wanting to look
away from other people’s pain and the pain of the world. But the world
is always with us. Emotional energy is collective and transpersonal;
our seemingly private pain is connected to the larger context that I
call “emotional ecology.” I think many of us have a profound emotional
sense of global crisis, of the brokenheartedness of the world, and it
affects us in ways that we don’t discern.

Of course, we are only human, and sometimes we need to look away,
because the pain and chaos are just too much. We numb ourselves — all
of us do — to get through the day, to protect ourselves. But psychic
numbing is not pleasant — we don’t really feel alive — and it deprives
us of our ability to act. Each of us has some gift to give the world.
When we become numb, we lose that potential, and the world loses out,
too. Staying open-hearted in this era of global threat is really a
challenge. Again, my parents have been my models. During the
Holocaust, they saw firsthand the worst that humans can do. My father
lost eight of his eleven siblings and the rest of his family. But the
Holocaust did not destroy his extraordinary openheartedness. He told
me once that, after the war, he considered killing some Germans and
then killing himself. This was shocking to me; he was such a gentle,
loving, and generous man. He had his demons to deal with, but, in the
end, he chose to live and raise a family, to put his faith in life. He
knew how to maintain a strong connection to the life force even in the
midst of a maelstrom of hard emotions.

Platek: Even if we’re convinced of the connections between our
emotional states and the state of the world, many of us would feel
embarrassed to say, “I feel sad today because of the bombings in
Iraq,” or, “I’m depressed because of the shrinking ice in
Antarctica.”

Greenspan: True, there is no public forum in which we can make
statements like this. For that matter, there is very little private
space, either. This really is a hindrance — that we do not have an
acceptable way to express our sorrow on behalf of the world. We can
speak about specific events, like 9/11, but only for a short time, and
then the topic is exhausted. There is a taboo about revealing one’s
personal emotions about the world — even in a presumably receptive
setting. I once took a yoga class in which we were encouraged to state
our prayers at the beginning of class. Many people prayed for inner
peace. One morning, after having read about the hole in the ozone
layer, I prayed for the world. After class, someone angrily said to
me, “Why are you bringing the world into the room?” I was baffled and
told her that, as I saw it, the world was already in the room, and the
room was in the world.

Platek: Does the world need us to have feelings about it?

Greenspan: I think so. When I was in retreat at Kripalu Center for
Yoga and Health years ago, I had this mystical experience with a
beautiful tree. I call myself a “reluctant mystic,” by the way,
because I’ve had so many mystical experiences, clairvoyant dreams, and
visions that have come to me unbidden. Some of them haven’t been
welcome, and none of them can be understood with the analytic mind.

Anyway, at Kripalu, I was walking through this lovely meadow, and I
felt a gentle tapping on my shoulder. When I turned around, there was
no one there, but I found myself gazing at this spectacular Camperdown-
elm tree. I felt as though the tree was calling me, so off I went to
it. I touched the tree and had a kind of erotic experience of
interspecies communication — of exchanging life forces with it. I felt
nourished by the tree and felt that I was giving nourishment in
return. After a while I noticed that many of the tree’s leaves had
holes in them. I was concerned that the tree might be sick in some
way, so I went in search of the groundskeeper, who told me that the
elm trees on the property had gotten sick and died. The community had
prayed for this tree, because they loved it so much, and it was the
sole survivor of the elm disease.

I grew up in the South Bronx and haven’t had extensive experience in
nature, but I can tell you that communion with nature is more than
just a poetic phrase. One of the most tragic things about our age is
that we have lost this communion, and its wonder. With each
generation, we lose more of it, and that loss is making us more and
more anxious and depressed.

Platek: In your book you use the word intervulnerability.

Greenspan: When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer
together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called
the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.”
Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an
“inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to
escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process
diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our
intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the
mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole,
rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible
individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either
destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.

Platek: Just after 9/11, the New Yorker devoted its back page to a
poem by Adam Zagajewski titled “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.”
I’m sure I am not the only one who had that poem taped to the
refrigerator for months after the attacks. In many ways, the path you
propose mirrors the poem’s sentiment: we must try to love the
mutilated parts of ourselves, just as we must try to love the
mutilated parts of our world.

Greenspan: Our mutilated parts and those of the world are interwoven.
If we have a child who is crying and needs our attention, we don’t
just tell her to “stay positive.” We turn our loving attention to
what’s hurting her. We may also try to distract her with an ice-cream
cone or a toy, and that’s ok, too. But it’s important that we tend to
the parts that are crying. There are so many wounded parts of the
world right now, and they keep telling us that they need our loving
attention.