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Vanquishing Despair

To understand the highs, we must also understand the lows. Sometimes, especially after disappointment and failure, we may find ourselves in misery and despair. We may feel as if we are drowning in a sea of despair and we are unable to claw our way up to the surface and away from this intense unhappiness. The intensity of our misery comes from the deep frustration of our inability to change our circumstances both outwardly and inwardly.

There is a way to conquer this despair, but it seems completely counterintuitive, in fact it seems like complete and total nonsense, and the worst possible course of action that we could take. In order to conquer despair, we should embrace our despair and try to become even more depressed than we are. We should accept that there are times to be happy and there are times to be sad and in despair, and if it is a time to be in despair, then that is where we should be and we should try to sit in that place, stop trying to claw our way to the surface and completely accept our fate.

When we do this, we find that the thing that was making us miserable and really causing us pain was not so much being in despair, as it was the frustration that we felt because we desperately desired to be somewhere else, and that desire was being frustrated. It was our futile attempts to claw our way to the surface, a slave to those desires, that were making us miserable. Once we choose to embrace despair, we find that it is transformed into a state of low energy that is not the least bit painful, and it actually becomes an odd state of ecstasy. We find ourselves floating comfortably in a state of low energy. It turns out that the enemy that we vanquished was not despair at all, but rather our desperate desires.

After a few times of practicing this technique of overcoming despair by embracing it, it begins to dawn on us that the place that it takes us, the ecstatic place of no desires whatsoever is no different than the ecstatic place we go when we cry at weddings. It is a place of profound peace and joy that is completely free of all desires.

Empowered by the knowledge that our desires tend to make us miserable in order to motivate us to accomplish something that is the focus of our desires, we may experience desire and rather than simply act on it, we might decide if the object of our desires is really and truly important and worth pursuing or simply the next thing or bauble that our ego wants to motivate us to pursue. If we determine that the object of our desire really is worth pursuing, then we may decide to acquire it while simultaneously choosing to let go of the desire for it which is only going to make us miserable in the meantime.

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