Sitting with difficult feelings is perhaps the most challenging task of mindfulness. It’s natural to feel aversion to painful thoughts, to want to avoid them or be rid of them, but denying difficulty can lead to more internal conflict and so more suffering. Perhaps the most eloquent example of sitting with emotional pain is described by Shakespeare’s character Viola in Twelfth Night. The play begins after a shipwreck, during which Viola believes her twin brother to have died. She is stranded with just one other survivor in a place where she is not likely to be welcome, and so, to protect herself, she disguises herself as a man. She gains employment with the Duke Orsino to whom she quickly becomes attracted. He is besotted with another. Viola is now landed with the triumvirate of bereavement, identity crisis and unrequited love; it’s a wonder she’s still standing at all. She describes her sad predicament in third person, but also, in this brief but packed phrase, how she coped:
‘She sat like Patience on a monument
Smiling at Grief’
At this point in the play, Viola has no way of resolving her difficulty, and can see no immediate way to change her fortunes – the only choice she has is to accept the situation as it is. She doesn’t just sit with her pain, but she sits like ‘Patience on a monument’ – in other words, like a statue. To deal with her pain she first finds stillness, just as in sitting meditation, we start with posture – with finding a position that allows us, where possible, to be upright, self-supporting and to sit with dignity. Incredibly, she smiles at ‘grief’ – grief here means all sorrow, rather than grief over loss specifically. This is hard to grasp – and even harder to apply to our own lives, and our own individual suffering especially if that has been caused by wrongdoing. Acceptance is never to condone an event or action, or to absolve anyone of responsibility. In this case it is to accept that a feeling is present. To be ‘Smiling at grief’ we have to be facing it and acknowledging it in its fullness. To smile is not to mock, but to meet those feelings with compassion. Grief is not denied, diminished or resolved; it’s undeniably present, but it is met with kindness. These brief lines encapsulate some key ‘attitudes of mindfulness’: acceptance, patience, and trust. Trust in the practice of acknowledging and giving space to emotions and the possibility of not being overwhelmed by them. So hope and possibility are also conveyed. The still, smiling statue of Patience is the frame of awareness in which difficult emotions might storm – and be cradled.
If you think that Shakespeare did not know difficulty, his only son, Hamnet, twin brother to Judith, died aged 11, before this play was first performed.
