Anguish without Judgment

The Practice of Conscious Witnessing

Jun 07, 2024

Welcome to this week’s edition of A Different Approach to the Newsletter. Today, we are sharing a gift of an email that we got from our listener Brooke, in response to last Friday’s episode

Hi there -

I have something to share about the episode in which you all discuss how powerless we feel regarding the suffering in Gaza and the pressure to pick a “side.”

I am a therapist and spiritual coach, and I help people sit in the horrible complexity that we experience as witnesses of the suffering of others. One of the most life-changing skills I have learned in my own healing journey, alongside my professional practices, is the practice of mindful or conscious witnessing.

This practice is the center of ancient mystical paths throughout various religions, time periods, and cultures for a reason. Every section of humanity throughout recorded history has had to ask themselves, “How do we live in ways aligned with our values in the midst of horrible suffering that I cannot control?” There is much wisdom to be gained here, and I often find myself lamenting the lack of this kind of practice and education in intellectual and cultural conversations.

All of the people crying, “If you do not come out and condemn Israel, then you are just like the German neighbors who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust,” are REALLY saying…..

“If I do not condemn Israel, then I will be aligned with values that are reprehensible to me, and thus, I will believe I am a bad person. I do not want to be a bad person because being a bad person is associated with rejection, criticism, and shame. I am afraid I will be abandoned if do anything that could potentially put me in the category of ‘German neighbor.’”
“I am terrified by the fact that I do not have control over what is happening over there, so instead, I will soothe myself by attempting to enact control over something else - my community here that I have some level of influence on. If I can control their compliance with the ‘right” thing, then I will be able to rest that I am also a good enough person.”
“If I consciously and mindfully accept my lack of control alongside my deep grief and anguish about the horrors occurring, I am excusing my own agency in the process - which is basically as ‘bad’ as doing it.” (This is a form of survivor’s guilt - people feel guilty that they are not experiencing the suffering themselves and try to reduce that anxiety by projecting themselves into the situation, even though, in reality, most of us do not have actionable influence over the suffering at this time.)

The common thread of human experience running through all of this is that we all feel anguish, and we all feel helpless. The invitation of mindful/conscious witnessing of this is to create spaces where we can sit in and witness our experience of our sense of anguish without judgment and then our sense of helplessness without judgment. Witnessing my own anguish and helplessness without judgment means feeling it fully, allowing it to be in my body without trying to explain, interpret, defend, fix, or control it away. It means witnessing it with curiosity, compassion, and, ultimately, acceptance (which is also how we experience love). Then, we must also do this collectively. So, allow other trusted people to witness your anguish and helplessness with you, and vice versa, without judgment, fixing, or avoiding.

When we practice this, something radically transformative begins to happen. An inner sense of trust that the very people actually experiencing these tragedies also have access to this inner voice of love, presence, honesty, and acceptance begins to develop. That I am actually not needed to fix Susie, who lives in Ukraine’s problems. She is fully capable of being present to the pain of her own life, and the way I can help her is by radically committing to doing so in MY life.

Of course, then we also continue to do that which we do have control over, like Sarah said - voting, donating, advocating. But the sense of anxiety about needing to step in and fix everyone else’s problems fades away, and we become able to hold a deep, grounded, confident belief of trust in the truth that all I can do is BE HERE NOW. And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.

Brooke Lamb, LMFT

Recommendation: Sarah’s Favorite Place to Get Gifts

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The one thing we want you to know this week…

We were going to ask you to fill out our listener survey this week for our advertising partner, Acast. Our goal was to get 375 responses to the survey and we have over 1000 (!!!!!), proving once again that the Spice Cabinet is the best community on the internet. Thank you all so much for taking the time to do this. It means the world to us.

Beth often sends our listeners a “virtual cobbler” to say thank you, feel better, etc. As a thank you from our WHOLE TEAM for your enthusiastic support in making our work sustainable and possible, here are two of Beth’s favorite cobbler recipes.

Peach Cobbler

Melt one stick of butter and place in casserole dish.
Open one can of peaches and pour in with most of the juice.
In a separate bowl, mix one cup of flour with one cup of sugar. Add one cup of milk and stir.
Pour the flour/sugar/milk mixture over the butter and peaches. DO NOT STIR.
Bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes.

Bumbleberry cobbler

The one thing we made this week we can’t stop thinking about…

This week, Beth discussed misinformation, lies, and the challenge of putting toothpaste back in the tube after Dinesh D’Souza’s “documentary” film 2000 Mules was removed from its streaming platform after alleged sources admitted to fabricating claims of widespread election fraud in Georgia.