Doubt x Resistance = Suffering

I made a stupid teaching mistake the other day: I got into a power struggle with a student…and lost.

Due to her repeated misbehavior, I had had to move a student to a new seat the week before this particular day. When she came into class on this day, the student intentionally sat in the wrong seat. I asked her to move to her correct seat. She said she didn’t want to. I reminded her that we all go to our seats when we first come into music class, so she needed to go to her seat, too. She didn’t move. I realized she may not have remembered where her new seat was, so I reminded her that her seat was #14. She looked at me. I told her to move to seat #14. She told me no.

By that point, I realized that the entire class was listening to us and that they were watching me back myself into a corner where I wouldn’t be able to do anything but witness the student remain in her seat. We were all watching a student disrespect an adult and get her way, and I knew that students didn’t need to think this acceptable. So, I told the student that she would either move to her seat or I would have to write her up. She crossed her arms, set her mouth, looked right at me, and did not move. I, then, had to write her up. While I was writing her up, she quietly moved to seat #14 and gave me no trouble for the rest of the class…

Later that night, I had a friend write and tell me that she was having a bad night. She said that she felt like sadness was creeping in and sucking joy into a black hole. Two trains of thought went through my brain at this confession: 1) The characters Sadness and Joy from the movie Inside Out and 2) Something Joe said to me in counseling over two years ago:

“Don’t forget to greet your feelings when they come. ‘Oh, hi, doubt. Hi, inadequacy. Hi, disappointment. I see you’ve come back to visit. Would you like to sit with me for awhile?’ Remember: Doubt times resistance equals suffering.”

Before I knew what I was writing to my friend, I wrote, “What does your sadness look like? Does it have a name?” Remember: I was imagining Sadness from Inside Out. She responded, “Jim. His name is Jim. Jim the Black Hole who sucks away everything good.” For some reason, I laughed when I read this description. I probably shouldn’t have laughed. It’s really a vividly sad description. But instead of it looking menacing in my mind, I imagined this Jim as a mopey, angst driven cartoon teenager, exaggerated features, big chin, open mouth, dressed in black, hands in pockets, not smelling too great like the character from Charlie Brown, just lingering in the background with no energy, not hurting or harming anything, wanting to be recognized so he could complain, but not really wanting to be seen. With this in mind, Jim seemed less like a monster trying to fight my friend and a kid who desperately needed compassion and/or permission to just wander away and be by himself again.

So I asked my friend if she’d greeted Jim. “Oh, hi, Jim. I see you’ve come back to visit. Are you going to sit with me for awhile tonight? Come on. Come on and sit down. And then you can leave again.” I’m pretty sure that my friend thought I was a little crazy. But I could see the whole thing in my mind. And, suddenly Jim’s power seemed much less menacing than when he was a vortex of a black hole, sucking in everything in his path.

Friends: If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety or depression, then you know that being in the middle of an attack feels like that vortex of a black hole. Its power is great and it is difficult to step outside of it, much less to greet it in a calm, rational fashion. More often than not, we battle against it, just as I battled against my student, and try to force it into submission. And then we lose. We judge ourselves for how we’re feeling, we resist the feelings, we battle against them, we don’t let them go, and then we end up suffering, in a power struggle against ourselves and our demons.

But maybe somehow, and I don’t know how, just having an image of something that isn’t as menacing as a monster, of something personified like Sadness or Joy from Inside Out or Jim the pitiful cartoon character, takes away some of darkness’s power and lets us know that we’re going to be okay…because just as my student eventually went to her seat and gave me no more trouble for the day, Jim and Sadness and Anxiety will eventually wander away and let us be.

Don’t forget to greet your feelings when they come, friends. And try to be nice to them. For, as Joe also says, “Kindness and compassion go a long way.”