Eating Sorrow: A Conversation about Suffering
I was in conversation with two friends when the topic turned to the suffering the world is experiencing right now. I made an observation that I thought they might readily agree with and was surprised when it met with a number of objections. I said something like, “This suffering is like birth pangs; something beautiful and positive is being born.” First, one of my two friends gently challenged my associating birth with suffering. So I reframed my observation without the birth metaphor: “Profound transformation is often accompanied by pain,” I said. But this, too, was something she could not endorse. “Why should change require suffering?” she asked. “Isn’t that an unhelpful mentality?” Behind her response I sensed a belief that suffering is largely unfair and meaningless. Digging myself further into a hole, I began to explain myself some more, only to find my second friend also had objections. He stated flatly that he has never suffered at all. He had a loved one with a chronic illness requiring round-the-clock care who died — his loved one had suffered greatly he said, but he had never suffered. Looking into his eyes I imagined the grief and frustration I would have felt in his place, but I said nothing. Clearly it wasn’t my place.
There was a moment when, looking into their eyes and trying to find some acknowledgement of what I was trying to say, that I felt a pang in my heart and tears almost came to my own eyes. I was silent as the conversation moved uneasily on to another topic, but the atmosphere had changed irrevocably. We were left stranded in taboo territory, despite their efforts to steer us back to safer ground. The conversation limped on for a little while longer, and, as the two of them spoke, they would cast little furtive glances of concern at me. I made half-hearted efforts to join in, but all three of us seemed eager for our encounter to end. A wound had been exposed — whether mine, theirs, or belonging to us all — I don’t know. I had wanted it acknowledged but my friends did not, or simply didn’t see it as having any bearing on them. Yet, despite my feelings of alienation, I came away from that encounter with a sense that something prickly, awkward, beautiful, and profound had just occurred.
Reflecting on it over the following weeks, these well-known verses from the Quran sprang to mind:
Have We not expanded your chest,
and removed from you the burden
which weighed down your back,
and increased your remembrance?
Truly, with every difficulty comes ease:
Truly, with every difficulty comes ease!
So, when you have been emptied strive onward,
and to your Sustainer turn with longing.[Surah ash-Sharh 94:1–8]¹
Looking back on it now, I was essentially trying to suggest to my friends that with every difficulty comes ease. And my difficulty in conveying that paradox in itself yielded me an unexpected ease. Behind those tears I pushed back, that floundering for their acknowledgement, I met a vast, open space. The pang I felt was not simply sorrow; it also contained a giddy joy. Have we not expanded your chest? Yes, You have. And for a moment, perhaps, I was alone with You. There was no one else I could cling to. I was empty, to a degree, and, clutching thorns, I caught the scent of a rose.
So experience tells me there is much to be gained from looking into our darkness, for, if we shirk away from it, we might remain alienated from ourselves and the depth of our own experience. As Mevlana Rumi says:
Life’s waters flow from darkness.
Search the darkness, don’t run from it.²
Rumi unpacks that paradoxical Quranic phrase, with every difficulty comes ease, in a number of passages in his Masnavi. Here is one take he offers to us…
When you feel contraction, traveler,
it’s for your own good. Don’t burn with grief.
In the state of expansion and delight
you are spending something, and that spending
needs the income of pain.
If it were always summertime,
the blazing heat would burn the garden,
soil and roots, so that nothing would ever grow again.
December is grim yet kind;
summer is all laughter, and yet it burns.[Masnavi III: 3734–38]³
But even Rumi’s words could be misinterpreted. “Surely we shouldn’t seek suffering and pain?” someone might object. But Mevlana is proposing something different and more subtle, as the following lines a little later imply:
“Eat sorrow, not the bread of those who increase it,
for the wise one eats sorrow, the child sugar.”
The sugar of joy is the fruit of the garden of sorrow;
joy is the wound, sorrow the plaster.
When you see sorrow, embrace it with a passionate love…[Masnavi III: 3751–53]⁴
In the first couplet, Mevlana is actually quoting his predecessor on the Sufi Path, Attar. We are advised to “eat” sorrow — i.e. acknowledge it, digest it, and be nourished by it — but we are warned away from the “bread” of those who increase it. A perverse desire to increase the sorrow of ourselves or others is not a part of our Path. And yet we are encouraged to embrace the sorrow we do experience with a “passionate love” that implies not only acceptance but appreciation. That’s a profound difference.
Among Mevlevis,⁵ there is a traditional Turkish saying: “Allah derdini arttırsın.” It translates as, “May God increase your trouble.” Obviously, a Mevlevi would only offer these words at the right moment to one who could appreciate their nuance. For many it would be a curse, but for a Mevlevi it is a blessing. Perhaps they also need to be offered from a place of maturity. According to Mevlevi historian Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, these words were traditionally offered by a teacher to a student who had experienced a sorrow of profound spiritual significance.⁶ For, delicately poised between an appreciation of both sorrow and joy, difficulty and ease, beauty and terror, the heart can tenderly open, stage by stage, to tawheed: knowing that all we experience has, and is, a Beneficent Unity.
This makes me ponder what it means in practical terms to “eat sorrow.” For me, it must begin with a self-reckoning of our “negative” states (an aspect of muhasabah in Sufi terminology). How am I feeling right now, and what is it that is bothering me? This can be done non-judgementally, without blame or shame; just an honest acknowledgement that this is how I feel, justified or not. I may wish my feelings could be more elevated, but beating myself up about it is not constructive. There is a liberating humility in simply acknowledging our human weakness.
Perhaps the next stage involves an attempt at objectivity: what might be the origin of these feelings, and are they justified? So often my hurt, anger, or resentment stem from my self-absorbed ego. Some of my sorrow and suffering can be gently dissolved away with this recognition, being essentially self-imposed, unnecessary, and even illusory.
This leaves me with the suffering that might be described as more authentic or real. We all inevitably face hardships and sorrows which are not the result of our own self-centredness. Life has been designed to challenge us:
Every human being is bound to taste death; and We test you through the bad and the good by way of trial: and unto Us must you all return.
[Quran 21:35]⁷
The astringent taste of such verses can be paradoxically comforting (and it is interesting that the Quran states we are tested as much through the “good” as the “bad”). It’s easy to unconsciously slip into the assumption that we are simply here for our own pleasure, to be good consumers of whatever takes our fancy. Much in society encourages us to think that way. But we can turn to sacred scripture and the wisdom of the sages to escape such thinking, digesting what would otherwise remain “unfair” and stubbornly indigestible.
But still there is some suffering that is overwhelming, or difficulties which we don’t feel we have the resources to bear. But here is the opportunity of recognising our need, our dependency on God. Wisdom as diverse as the Psalms of David to the “Twelve Steps” of the AA is surely built upon this insight. It might take the form of a complaint, a cry, an argument with God — this is surely better than no conversation at all, better than a stubborn clinging to an illusion of self-sufficiency. Our supplication may take many forms, probably all good, many felt at the same time: from “I can’t bear this — why are you doing this to me?” to “Why is this sorrow so sweet?” Finally perhaps, we bow low, we zhikr, simply repeating the Divine Names of our Sustainer, melting into them.
It seems to me this “eating” of sorrow can be done on one’s own, though some might prefer to do at least some of the stages with a friend, with a therapist, or in a group setting, much as we often eat in company rather than alone. A friend or community who can truly listen and mirror our inner state back to us can be of benefit. Yet there is the Friend within us, waiting to be our mirror if we can create the inner space required.
It also seems to me that art and creativity can be part of this process; in fact one of the essential functions of true art is surely to “eat sorrow,” to feel into its shape and meaning. Much of the beautiful art of the Mevlevis has an aching sorrow to it, and no other art I have encountered has so powerfully delineated the meaning of suffering:
Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
how it sings of separation:
Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,
my wail has caused men and women to weep.[Masnavi I, 1–2]⁸
Of course, Rumi and Attar call it “eating” sorrow because it is truly nourishing for the soul, but I suspect this goes beyond superficial metaphor, for sacred symbolism sometimes seems to blur the neat distinctions we like to make between the literal and the figurative. It’s remarkable that simply dwelling on the thought of chewing or eating in the midst of our sorrow can be strangely comforting. Likewise the reverse is true: gently holding our sorrows as we mindfully eat a nourishing physical meal can also be comforting. “Eating” our sorrow like this can ground us in the body. Our suffering — even that which appears to be largely mental or emotional — can often manifest in various ways there. It also reminds us of the processes we go through during and after eating: ingestion, digestion, and excretion. Might not the best handling of our sorrow involve a similar process? Much like the gradual, unconscious process of digestion, doesn’t our psyche work in hidden ways to heal our trauma and grief over time, especially if we have taken care to consciously taste and chew them before swallowing? I once observed to a friend, only half in jest, that the peristalsis of our bowels can really teach us how to approach life! Sub- or supra-conscious forces will take us where we need to go without too much effort from us — if we let them. And once that mysterious, unconscious process is over, perhaps there is benefit in consciously acknowledging what no longer serves us, what we can let go off…
The Quran tells us that our Sustainer does not consider a gnat too lowly a symbol for our education (2:26), so why not look to the miracle of our bowels? Doesn’t the base intermix with the sublime, as much as the difficulty with the ease? Mevlana Rumi think so:
See the unity in creation and know that
autumn and early spring are intermixed.
Even though all these opposites seem to clash,
as an arrow needs a bow, all are intermixed.
Stop blaming. Be silent and chew some sweet candy!
As in the mouth, sugar and censure are intermixed.
Thus does Shams of Tabriz grow in the heart.
No one is intermixed like this.[Divani Shamsi Tabrizi 2381]⁹
- The Light of Dawn, Daily Readings from the Holy Qur’an, translated by Camille Helminski.
- The Pocket Rumi, translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski.
- Love Is a Stranger, Selected lyric poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminski.
- Adapted by the author from Nicholson’s translation.
- The Mevlevis are a Sufi order founded on the teachings of Mevlana Rumi by his son Sultan Veled. It is a living tradition more than 700 years old.
- Mevlevî Âdâb ve Erkâni by Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı.
- The Message of the Qur’an, translated by Muhammad Asad.
- The Pocket Rumi, translated by Kabir and Camille Helminski.
- Translated by Kabir Helminski, appearing in slightly earlier form in Love’s Ripening: Rumi on the Heart’s Journey.
