How to handle your life transitions – especially the painful ones

Hello, and welcome to the Kindred Letters - my newsletter for kindred spirits drawn to quiet, depth, and beauty. 

Today, we're going to discuss how to handle painful life transitions.

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In the modern West, we tend to think that narratives proceed in a straight and finite line: that beginnings give way to endings, and endings are a cause for sorrow.

How do you tell your life story? It starts with birth, it ends with death; it starts with happy, it ends with sad. You sing happy birthday in C major, you compose a funeral march in C sharp minor.

But the Bittersweet tradition that I wrote about in my recent book suggests a different cast of mind, in which we expect our lives to thrust us through one transformation after another – and draw wisdom from each one.

Sometimes these transitions will be joyous (say, the birth of a child), sometimes bittersweet (walking that child down the aisle), sometimes they’ll arrive as full-on cataclysms that tear your life apart (fill in your worst fear here). Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings. Your ancestor’s life ended, and yours could begin. Yours will come to an end, and your child’s story will take center stage. Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die off – a job will be lost, a relationship will end – and, if you’re ready, other occupations, new loves, will arise in their place. What follows may or may not be “better” than what came first. But the task is not only to let the past go, but also to transform the pain of impermanence into creativity, and transcendence.

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In fact, my friend David Yaden, who studies altered states of consciousness at Johns Hopkins, has found that it’s precisely during such times -- including career changes, divorces, and the ultimate transition of death -- that we’re most likely to experience meaning, communion, and transcendence. Stop and think about that for a moment!

Also: This is true not only for those whose loved ones are dying, but also for the dying themselves. A surprising number, says Yaden, “experience the most important moments of their entire lives near its very end.”

In psychometric surveys, Yaden and his colleagues have asked people to think and write about their intense spiritual experiences, and then to answer questions about them. This allowed the researchers to sort the experiences into various types. Did they feature a sense of Unity? God? A Voice or Vision? Synchronicity? Awe? After classifying the experiences, the researchers asked what triggered them. And of a very long list, they found two items that consistently appeared as major triggers: "Transitional period of life”– and "Being close to death.”

This research echoes the work of the famous UC Davis creativity researcher, Dean Keith Simonton, who found that creativity seems to move in a spiritual direction during midlife and beyond, as artists straddle the intersection between life and death. Simonton studied 81 Shakespearean and Athenian plays and concluded that their themes grew more religious, spiritual and mystical as the playwrights aged. He also studied classical composers, and found that musicologists rated their later works as “more profound.”

The great mid-century humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow, perceived a similar phenomenon in himself, noticing that he had more frequent and intense “peak experiences” while dying of heart disease. And in 2017, when a group of researchers led by the University of North Carolina psychologist Amelia Goranson asked people to imagine what death would feel like, they mostly described sadness, fear and anxiety. But their studies of terminally ill patients and death row inmates found that those actually facing death are more likely to speak of meaning, connection, and love. As the researchers concluded: “Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems.”

According to Yaden, we still don’t understand the “scientific” reason – the psychological mechanisms and neurobiological pathways -- that apparently painful moments of impermanence, such as death itself, should have such transformative effects. But his research echoes the intuitions of countless cultures which, for centuries, have honored life transitions as doorways to spiritual and creative awakening. As Estelle Frankel explores in her excellent book, Sacred Therapy, this is why so many societies celebrate coming of age rituals (communion, bar mitzvahs, and so on) in religious contexts; and why so many of those ceremonies involve the death of the childhood self and the birth of the adult one.

In some cultures, the child is buried (temporarily!) in the ground, and disinterred as an adult; sometimes he’s tattooed, or maimed, or performs some other feat marking the end of childhood and the emergence of a new, adult self. Sometimes this involves a separate physical space, whether an initiation hut or a body of water, a church or a synagogue. The point of these rituals is that X must always give way to Y, and that this process, which involves both sacrifice and rebirth (the ultimate creativity) belongs to the realm of exaltation. The fundamental progression of Christianity – the birth of Jesus, the sacrifice on the cross, the resurrection – tells the same story. (The very word “sacrifice” is from the Latin sacer-ficere, which means “to make sacred.”)

This is also why transitions from one season to another (equinoxes and solstices) have traditionally been marked as religious ceremonies: from Passover and Easter at the Spring Equinox, to the pagan Yule festival and Christmas at the Winter solstice, to the Chinese Moon Festival and Japanese Buddhist Higan celebration at the Fall equinox. In Judaism, even the transition from day into night is sacred, with the holy days starting at sundown and moving into dawn -- as if to say that the onset of darkness is not the tragedy we imagine, but rather the prelude to light.

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All of this adds up to a profoundly different way to think about your life transitions – including the painful ones. Especially the painful ones.

What are some of the most important transitions you’ve been through, and how have they shaped you?

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If you enjoyed this letter, you can sign up here for my other Kindred Letters newsletter, which has different content from what you're reading now!

Also, the above was adapted from my book, BITTERSWEET, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and an Oprah Book Club pick. You can sign up here to get Oprah's favorite chapter of the book, and the Top Ten BITTERSWEET teachings (at no charge, of course).

See you next week!

my warmest,

Susan

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