Art by @chatsvoid
By Taina Lyons
trigger warning: mention of animal cruelty and suicidal ideation
Growing up, when someone asked me what I was afraid of, I would say, “eternity.” This was my biggest fear—the feeling of endlessness. As a kid it woke me at night to hallucinatory, full sensory night terrors. Sometimes I was tasked with the Sisyphean effort of counting each grain of sand in the universe, into eternity. Or I was falling down a well with no bottom, down, down, down.
Things that triggered my phobia: funhouse mirrors with their endless apparitions, church sermons about damnation, images of suffering, and math class. That’s when I always prayed hardest, when infinite sets were involved.
One night after a particularly terrifying nightmare (I had been so small and everything else just so… big) I sat curled on my dad’s lap and I asked him, “Does eternity end somewhere?” What I really wanted was reassurance that I, and everyone else, would not end up in hell. But if I believed what they said at church, I was already headed there because of what I made my Barbie dolls do with each other in the back of their pink Corvette. But I’ll save the details of that for another post.
Around the time my fear developed as a child, when I was about four or five, I had a baby pool full of tadpoles in my backyard. I’d caught the smooth-bodied, wiggly baby frogs with a butterfly net in the creek behind my house. I cared for them and watched as their tails shortened, and tiny legs grew from wispy appendages to functional limbs. I arranged rocks for hiding around in their bright blue plastic habitat. One day, an older boy who lived nearby came over and began catching the tadpoles and throwing them at the concrete patio. They splattered onto the cold stone, little bloody bodies in metamorphosis. I was horrified, heartbroken, and helpless to stop him.
The memory brings to mind an infamous experiment conducted on rats by American psycho-biologist Curt Richter in the 1950s. In the experiment, Richter placed rats in an inescapable bucket of water to see how long they could swim before they drowned. Most lasted only a few minutes. He repeated the experiment with a new batch of rats, and just before they were going to die, he saved them and cared for them. The next day he put the rats back into the bucket and many swam for days—as if the memory or hope of being saved gave them resilience. (He did not, however, save these rats again and they eventually perished, exhausted in the buckets.) This experiment has been cited in discussions about the role and importance of hope—but what this experiment demonstrates to me, is cruelty and the choices humans are making with their power.
What I’ve begun to suspect is that underneath my Apeirophobia (fear of the infinite or the boundless), is actually a fear of cruelty and torment. We’re exposed regularly to cruelty and violence through images and news related to war and other humanitarian crises. How can we even make sense of this?
Whatever the origins, over time my fear of the eternal fermented into a particular kind of despair, a sort of lurking overwhelm. My emotions and mind felt entrapping.
In a state of pain, suffering, or fear, the mind can fall into the “never-always” trap: This is never going to end, or Things are always going to be this way. This is a hellish state.
AI image of Hell made by my 10 year old son Valo (only ONE pizza for all those hungry demons!!)
So I wondered, what is actually never going to end, and what, if anything, is always going to be?
Possibly: time, existence, birth, death and rebirth. But is cruelty a given? The eternal would not be so terrifying if my experience of it was loving, gentle, merciful and compassionate.
In my early adulthood my Apeirophobia set in as an existential crisis. I grappled with the possibility that there’s no escaping this cycling of reality, even if I were to die, which at times was what I wanted to do. I started to ask myself the question: Can I embrace being here, in this life? How can I choose life?
By all measures I had a beautiful life, with good health and many privileges. This should be easy, I thought. I should be grateful and happy. But I felt tired and collapsed under grief for the world and the impossible weight of personal and collective suffering.
In college I began to study Buddhism and learned the term Samsara, which Wikipedia refers to as cyclical rebirths of “dissatisfying ignorantly desirous karmic mundane existence,” and death. This shone some light on my anxiety. When I was gazing into that terrifying endless chasm as a child, I was coming face-to-face with Samsara and the sheer magnitude of collective suffering. Terrifying.
Author amongst creepy masks, many faces of death, at Meow wolf Denver.
In the Buddhist conceptual framework sentient beings wander through Samsara continually reborn in different realms of existence. These realms often categorized into six types, include heavenly beings (devas), humans, Asuras (demigods or “fighting demons,”) animals, Pretas (“hungry ghosts”), and the hellish beings. The realm of rebirth is influenced by karma, which accrues based on the moral value of an individuals actions. (From “Samsara in Buddhism: Meaning, Characteristics, and More” on lotusbuddhas.com)
Buddhist teachings focus on liberation, or an end to painful cycling of rebirth. Liberated masters may then return as Bodhisattvas, or souls who could end their cycling through Samsara, but choose to be born to aid other souls on their journey.
Now hold up, at this point, you might be saying, I don’t want liberation from existence—I love my life, life is beautiful, I’m living my best life. I don’t want to die! Liberation in my view, is a quality of freedom, ease, and kindness of spirit that we can cultivate in our lives and share with the world. It’s not an escape but deep acceptance and coming into deeper intimacy with our experience.
If you feel grateful for your life, I celebrate the beauty, good fortune, support, and love you’ve received. A true gift. And from this place of overflowing abundance of spirit, I hope you can tend a little more fervently to this world that is both resplendent with magnificence and teeming with cruelty. Who has contributed to your life? These kind ones are benefactors and perhaps supporting you is part of their joy and purpose. Thanks and praise to them.
And if you are here to support others in service, how do you find (choose) purpose and joy in a realm that can be so painful and unjust?
How do you cultivate a beautiful relationship with the eternal?
It’s been a long journey for me to feel spiritually well. The main contributors: receiving love from dear loving and kind people, soul-aligned partnership, grieving with deep release, meditation, therapy, dancing Contact Improvisation, self-reflection, ancestral practices, mothering, supplements for hormone balance, sleep and mood, and psychedelics.
Author in grief ceremony in the woods of southern VT summer, 2022
Wellness is a state that is cultivated by a group not just an individual. It creates refuge in the self for fear, pain, and grief—one’s own and others’. It creates resilience and ease—a spiritual well that draws on the eternal Well. It’s heavenly. Nowadays I feel this most when I’m dancing in my community—when I and others are joyfully, safely and vulnerably connected with our bodies and hearts. Or when I feel deep and easeful connection with my beloved. Or when I have a fun outing with my children.
I’m also grateful for the healing experiences that have been available to me—healing would not have been possible without guidance and support from others and I would like to affirm the importance of healers in community.
Tending the eternal is work of healers and medicine people of all cultures, who, through their spiritual practices, see and feel the immensity of the living universe for humanity. They develop the capacity to hold the long timeline of human growth, learning, and evolution. They look directly at the deeply tender reality of human life, with all its attachments, losses, physical and emotional pain, and death. And they process and clear energy that otherwise would stagnate and toxify. Healers and medicine people offer this service, and hold this responsibility, so that others can enjoy the lightness of being and joy of the material realm. They are healers and holders of wisdom. They are witches, artists, sensitive souls, bodyworkers, teachers, elders, energy workers, lovers, bodhisattvas and more.
Mundo Icayari by Luis Tamani
And healers have been systematically oppressed and eradicated through the spiritual whitewashing of our human experience.
Without the tending of deep layers, I do not believe the wars, small internal ones and large scale ones, will end. I do not see an end to the trance of cruelty. Without tending the deep layers, I believe people will not break free from the cycles of righteous fighting and pain avoidance. But they could. So let’s go a little deeper.
Collectively it feels as though humanity is nearing a fever pitch of conflict, as the impact of industrialization and colonization as the primary existential strategy for coping with impermanence catches up to us, and as more people are displaced due to violence and climate change. The eternal is sorely in need of some housekeeping. We are existentially weary.
So what do we do about it?
This crisis, to me, feels like a crisis of human memory. We are stuck between the need to forget past hurts and the need to remember. In order to be present and responsive, people need to heal their past. Forgetting is medicine for the time-weary soul. So is remembering.
In order to forget personal, ancestral, and collective horrors—to move on, to integrate, to let go, to fully die, to heal, to be renewed—we need to remember, to Re-Member ourselves by seeing deeply who we are in our soul and touching the pain there. Then remembering what came before that pain.
Trying to forget by numbing, avoidance, consumption, and addiction is not real forgetting. We must go through our pain to let go. And we need to let go in order to embrace what’s here, what’s left, and what’s begging for our attention here-and-now.
What supports forgetting? Moving on? Letting go? Renewal?
Death, for one. Physical death of the body and smaller spiritual-ego deaths are connected to the thread of aliveness, to grace that is rooted in the eternal. In some ways, escapist suicidal ideation may be the longing for this renewal and forgetting. (Note: Suicide rates in the US are highest amongst Native Americans groups who are carrying an unsolicited weight—the un-remembered, un-resolved trauma for the collective. They are the terror-bearers. And LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers. Stats from The Trevor Project and the CDC.). We need to develop right relationship with cycles of death and regeneration, by holding fears, letting go, grieving, and by praying over the dead and helping them to move on.
And joyful embodiment is the renewal and the way forward to creating more peaceful conditions in the world. We need to be joyfully in the body like our lives depended on it, because maybe they do.
I used to want to understand the “why” of suffering. I’ve learned a lot about myself and other people exploring this question. Now I hold the question, how can I live in alignment, choosing the life that I want to create here again, again, and again?
I remember years ago I was crying in a session with my therapist, a sharp, intuitive badass woman named Paula. And she said, “Now I’m just going to say this to you and I hope it doesn’t land the wrong way: Fucking choose.” And those words resonated right to the core of my fragility. Step in, step up, be here, fucking choose this life, your life, do it now. So I pass these words along to you: fucking choose.
What creates the conditions for you to choose to carry beauty with you wherever you go? Is it children? flowers? community? singing? dancing? sex? making art? doing nothing/ feeling easeful in the body? These are all possible pathways to bring peace.
Author (in purple shirt) and her partner Moti (crawling) with dance community taking an “urban dance walk,” in Burlington, VT September 2024
If the conditions of a situation elicit violence in you, move away from them. The conversation, the workplace, the marriage, whatever. Then engage where you can with wisdom, and fucking choose the world you want to be part of creating.
Thank you and may you be eternally well.
Author with her children at the ocean, summer 2024
Comments