Sometimes things really don't work out as well as you think. It's true, no? You can buy the latest must-have gadget, find it marvellous for a few days and then it breaks, leaving you with a sour taste in your mouth.
Life can be even worse. You work hard on your career, or on a relationship or in changes to your lifestyle, but still you are not as happy as you assumed you would be "if only" this or that happened. Or someone who you thought you could be safe with can let you down. Our family stories can be complicated and painful. Or we may have a setback or rejection, and feel our hopes and dreams dashed. We can come to understand that something we always thought possible is never going to happen: a change in some behaviours, making peace with a difficult part of our history, realizing all the dreams and potentialities that we think we have.
One first step toward dealing with disappointment is to understand the forces that drive disappointment in our own view and in that of the culture around us. One is the deep seated belief that life can be free from disappointments and suffering. This is ingrained in today's society which needs us to think we deserve all the toys, thrills, and pleasures we can get, and that our fulfillment is linked to that. However, the teachings that are the basis for mindfulness tell another message, namely that life is challenging, even unsatisfactory, for everyone. Our physical bodies, our health, our plans, our relationships, all the elements in our story are fragile and subject ot change. This is a basic reality. The cause of our disappoinment, our suffering, is not the change in itself, but the mind's struggle in reaction to the change. Mindfulness proposes one way of dealing with suffering - training a non-struggling, peaceful mind.
A second step is to work directly with the sense of disappointment as it arises. We firstly stop being surprised when our internal life is not as smooth as we would like it to be, and simply try some practices gently and kindly. One practice is to say to ourselves, "I feel disappointed. I have made a desire such and such expectation so solid that I have let myself be identified with it. That is now causing me to suffer." Once we recognize this, we have a moment to choose between two possibilities - whether we want to go back to our story and wander around in it, and feed it more, or whether we can rest in the felt sense of disappointment and simply acknowledge it for what it truly is.
If we do the first we often notice that the disappointment can trigger our core beliefs, such as, "I am not good enough", "They always leave", "I'll never be happy". If we choose the second way it can help us gently break through the defensiveness and armour by looking at the distress directly. Maybe seeing that it is not as solid as we first thought. Although difficult, we try to begin by saying "I am disappointed. What does it feel like at this moment? Where is it in my body?" Thus, instead of maybe contracting into our disappointment, we allow some space for a broader picture to be seen.
From a worm's cocoon, silk.
Be patient if you can,
and from sour grapes will come something sweet.
Rumi
