Hope

I always struggled to relate to the experience of hope. It was not a feeling or emotional experience that was familiar to me. Thinking back to my childhood, it was not safe to be hopeful; it was safer not to have hope. As a child, to hope was to be let down, disappointed, hurt, and abused. A childhood with little hope is a dark one. The thing about darkness is that the darker it is, the easier it can be to see the light. 

I was blessed to experience spiritual hope for the first time as an adult. I say blessed because there was a benefit to having my first experience in adulthood; I have more awareness, wisdom, and emotional literacy to describe the experience. 

So, what is spiritual hope? How does it feel? Just like to know love, we have to experience love; to know hope, we have to experience it. I can only explain hope from my personal experience. To do that, I have included a passage from my private meditation journal:

"Spiritual Hope - It's like falling in love for the first time. It's terrifying, exhilarating, freeing. It's the raw vulnerability of being seen mixed with the sheer bliss of really being known fully. It's having your heart be broken open and held in pure, compassionate, loving-kindness. It's free-falling and floating at the same time. It's knowing and feeling the experience of fear and love coexisting like yin and yang; distinguishable but intertwined and inseparable coming together to form this experience we call hope." 

To know this hope, to experience this hope, is to know the courage it takes to surrender. Courage is often thought of as being heroic or performing self-sacrificing, impressive, or dangerous feats. However, the word courage comes from the Old French word "cuer" or "cor" in Latin, which means relating to the heart. Therefore, having the courage to surrender is not a heroic, dangerous act of self-sacrifice, but an impressive feat of kindness, an act of heroic love and self-compassion. Hope takes a self-compassion strong enough to hold the parts of ourselves we deem most shameful in loving-kindness. 

Self-compassion, the ability to meet our personal suffering with loving-kindness, is part of our true nature, who we are at our core. However, when we are stuck in the illusion of unworthiness and become disconnected from the truth of our courage and compassion, we can find comfort in a more general hope. General hope is rooted in the egoic mind, also referred to as egoic hope, and often gets a negative reputation in our culture. However, the ego can be a great teacher for showing us what is false, where we are giving away our power to external attachments, and how fear might be holding us back from living the abundant life we deserve. 

Without a deep connection to self-compassion fostered through practice, our hope will likely be limited to the tangible, physical, and material world. This more general hope can feel safer and more comfortable because there is less uncertainty. For example, if you hope to get a specific job, there's about a 50/50 chance you will get what you hoped for because there are only two options; you get it, or you don't.

On the other hand, to feel authentic spiritual hope at our core, to feel it bursting through every cell of our being, we must host the discomfort that comes with it. For example, if you hope for a job that aligns with your purpose, core values, and intentions, there are infinite options. The implication of this is one of immeasurable uncertainty, and that can feel very unsafe! The saying, "the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward," is accurate regarding hope. When I mention "bigger," I have to caution you, as the reader, because many of us have been conditioned to think bigger is better. While the nature of spiritual hope does allow for "bigger" rewards than egoic hope, one is not better than the other. We can learn and receive just as much from egoic hope as we can spiritual hope.

To have any hope requires an acknowledgment of uncertainty that, by its very nature, is uncomfortable. Our ability to hold space for the discomfort of uncertainty directly correlates with our ability to feel hope. The irony is that hope is also what helps us deal with uncertainty. Therefore, to experience hope and be with uncertainty, it is vital to work with our ability to hold space for discomfort, also known as our window of tolerance or distress tolerance. 

Affirmation for working with the window of tolerance to invoke hope:

"I am the awakened heart. May the pain I feel break open my heart and reveal the cracks where my light can shine through. I give myself permission to look inward and see the truth of my inner light. May this light, my light, be the hope that guides me out of the fog of illusion. I now choose to let the light from within show me the way."

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