Khalil Gibran. Wrote,

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I'm Stacey Wheeler. 

I have been sitting with that line, and also arguing with it. Some scars do deepen a person. Some just leave them on the floor. And I don’t think we help anyone by treating those as the same thing.

So today I want to talk about suffering, and about the two very different jobs it can ask of us. One is a stretch. The other is a lie-down – a pause. And then there is a third place, the one we don’t name often enough: the lie-down that quietly turns into a story that you should never get back up.

I keep coming back to a simple picture. Imagine a film where someone wakes up, has a pleasant day, and nothing is at stake. No loss. No recovery. The first time you saw it, it might be a relief. The second time -disinterested. The third time, you would not go. Or consider a game you can't lose. At first the it feels good. Nothing but winning! After a while the wins stop feeling like wins, because it was always going to end the same way. A certain kind of enjoyment needs contrast. It needs the chance that it might not work. Something at risk. 

We already know this from the stories we love. The story of Robinson Crusoe -taken from the true story of Alexander Selkirk alone on an island for years, surviving to be rescued. I told his story here once before in season 4. The episode is called The Island Within, so I will not retell it. Shackleton, later, with the crew of the Endurance, crushed in the ice, and the long boat journey that got every man home. Even the film, Cast Away: a man talking to a volleyball because silence would be worse. We watch because ordinary competence disappears into a normal week. On the ice, or the island, it becomes the whole plot. We get to see someone stretch past what they thought they could do. Past what we think we could do.

That stretch is real. It is also a poor instruction manual for every hard thing. And the difference showed up for me in a much smaller story than a shipwreck. Challenges that take us out of our comfort zone are powerful spaces for growth. We don't need to be stranded on the ice or an island to grow.

A woman I know lost her father in early spring. The first weeks she did what a lot of us do. She answered the texts. She sorted the papers. She kept saying she was fine, which mostly meant she had not fallen over in public. Around week four the paperwork slowed down, and the house got quiet, and she stopped going out. Friends called that rest, and for a while they were right. Then the rest took on a story. If I go back to ordinary things, I am saying he did not matter. The grocery store felt like betrayal. A walk around the block felt like forgetting. She was no longer lying down because her capacity was gone. She was lying down because the story said that getting up would make her a bad daughter.

That is the turn I want us to be able to see.

I use a philosophy for my own life that I want to name honestly. A life as a soul’s passage, with a lot of the learning tied up in love and in suffering, and in how those two keep turning into each other. I am not sure of that as a belief. I use it as a rudder. A way to steer when the water gets rough.

People have always done some version of this. When something hard happens, the mind reaches for a larger frame. A story, a ritual, an image that says this event is inside a life, not just a blow that landed. Carl Jung thought that reach was old. Meaning an spiritual reach are a part of our curriculum. Part of who we are. If we shut down our deeper search for spiritual meaning it does not go away. It comes back wearing something thinner. We might throw ourselves into a cause, a habit. Sometimes it leads to seeking a leader, or a theory, that has to explain everything so we can feel something resembling a rudder in our lives. I am not interested in settling the metaphysics today. I am interested in the practical piece. 

The rudder only helps if it can tell one kind of difficulty from another. Some hard things are inviting us to stretch. Some are asking us to lie down. If we cannot tell those apart, the larger story becomes another way to miss what the moment actually needs.

So here is how it sorts out.

Some challenges sit in a sweet spot. You still have spare capacity. You can sleep, mostly. You can eat. The thing in front of you can be met by effort, or skill, or a change in how you conduct yourself. A project just past your edge... barely out of reach, but within sight. A conversation you have been avoiding. A standard you said you would keep. That is growth-load. Stay with it. The stretch is the point. Shackleton is useful here, not because your week is as challenging as the Weddell Sea, but because the story makes a stretch imaginable. He did not get off the ice by deciding the ice was meaningful. He got off it by the next small competent act, and then the one after that. And by knowing that he would only be saved by the belief he could achieve something that would take others down.

Other moments are not that. A death. An illness that will not resolve on your schedule. Odds that don't give way to your competence. In those rooms, asking what this is here to teach you, on day one, often adds a second injury as you throw yourself against the unyielding wall of things outside of your control... Your demand to be improved by something that is still only loss. 

This is healing-load. The better and truer move is the one a wounded animal already knows. Get still. Reduce demand. Let the system stabilize before you ask what it meant. Animals do not narrate the injury as a curriculum while they are still bleeding. They lie down and allow the recovery to come to them. No story. Just rest.

We all have our own individual ability to carry loads. Capacity matters. Knowing when you're past your also matters. That's when you pause and rest. Capacity is the question, not the size of the event. If there is spare attention, and effort can meet it, stay. If attention is gone, or no action changes the outcome, lie down. Strength is strength. And knowing when to rest is also strength. Rest recharges us. Let's us take stock of the big picture, rebuild our strength before making our next move. 

My friend, in those first weeks, was in the second room. The lie-down was correct. The trouble started when the lie-down hired a philosopher. 

Rest is medicine when it matches the body. It becomes something else when it starts matching a story. And the story is usually total. 

This is who I am now. 

Nothing will change. 

Getting up is pointless. 

The loss proved the life was already empty. In her case it wore a loyal face. 

If I resume anything, I am leaving him. 

Rest removes demand. That kind of story removes the exit.

The event and the story of the event are not the same thing. Her father had died. That part was not optional. The story was that ordinary life would now be a kind of disloyalty. Healing-load care takes the fact seriously and treats the story as revisable. The slide into not getting up usually comes from welding them together, so that resting from the fact becomes agreement with the story.

While you are still down, don’t argue with the story, and don’t obey it. Both ask too much. Keep one or two small things that are not about meaning. 

Food. 

Some body movement. 

One person who knows you are on the floor. 

Those are not a comeback. They are evidence that the sentence “I cannot move” is not yet the whole truth.

What finally moved her was smaller than a revelation. A neighbor asked her to accept a bag of oranges and put them in a bowl. Not a walk for healing. Not a tribute. Oranges. She put them in the bowl because refusing had started to feel like its own performance. The next day she ate one. The day after that she washed the bowl. She told me later that nothing about her father changed in those three days. What changed was the claim that any ordinary act was a verdict on her love. The fact stood. The total sentence did not.

When a little spare attention comes back, that is the work. Not extracting a lesson from the blow. Separating the fact from the total claim. He died can stand. If I keep living my life I am forgetting him does not have to.

I want to say one plain thing here. Some depressions are not a story problem. Sleep, appetite, and the wish to continue can drop for reasons a philosophy will not touch. If the wish to get up has been gone for weeks, or the story includes not wanting to be here, that is past this rudder. That needs another kind of help. A person. A clinician. Please get that. Then, when you return to your rudder, come back to the smaller work.

What I hope you leave with is short enough to remember on a bad afternoon.

Spare capacity: stay with it. 

No spare capacity: lie down, and do not turn the rest into a theory of your life. 

When the rest starts serving the theory instead of the body, interrupt the theory with one ordinary resumption. Don't stay down. Go to the orange bowl. And if you cannot interrupt it from the inside, get help from outside.

Your soul’s journey, if you want to call it that, can include the stretch and the lie-down. It does not require you to call every wound a lesson. It does not require you to stay down because the story says the lesson is that you are finished. 

Meaning can wait. 

Counterfeit meaning usually costs more than the wait.

The rudder is not proof that the blow was assigned. It is a way to tell growth-load from healing-load, and a healing-load from a story that has become the heavier thing you are carrying. Sometimes the next right act is endurance. Sometimes it is stillness. And sometimes it is putting the oranges in the bowl, before the story convinces you that the bowl itself is a betrayal. That is enough for one episode. It might be enough for the week you are in.

Thank you for walking with me today. 

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