A plain has crashed, a school has been attacked, a boat has sunk. No chance to find anybody alive. The hope is gone.
In front of such a tragedy, what we feel is grief, fear, despair. How to cope with that? Is there any way of getting through it? The disaster may not touch us directly, but we are aware that it is a part of human life to experience this kind of happenings. It applies to everybody. So we also have other feelings connected to that: gratefulness that it hasn’t touched us yet, fear that it could. This panic, despair and anxiety feel so bad and uncomfortable that the only thing we want to do with it is to cut it off, avoid it and remove it.
We look for a rational answer, rational explanation or some kind of distraction, diversion or tranquilizer. We escape into the stream of stories about the guilty, the victims and their families. The stories can multiply to an infinitive number. But does the story alleviate the pain and the anxiety we feel in the body? I am sure that we all have our own ways of coping with the uncomfortable, difficult feelings. I would like to suggest one more way of approaching them. Meditation! I admit that it takes some preparation and training to meditate on uncomfortable feelings, but there is a gentle way of learning that and it brings real compassion, forgiveness and liberation when it is done. LEARN MEDITATION.