A Winter Sinking Feeling

Amid all the expectations and excitement of the New Year, many at this season experience a sinking spell—especially as those of us in the northern hemisphere go deeper into January.

The coming of winter’s depths sometimes has a way of focusing our attention on the sadness, the disappointment, and the things that didn’t work out in life in the way we hoped.

It’s as if New Year’s, because it symbolizes bright new beginnings, spotlights all the ways in which the brightest doesn’t seem to be happening for some of us. Hence the sinking spell.

At such a moment, it’s crucial to recognize that sinking spells have a purpose. They intend not the mere punctuation of our lives, but our transformation.

Sinking spells temporarily suspend our enjoyment of the sensory experience of the world. If we don’t resist this, but allow it to do its work—in the same way that winter does its work in nature—it can lead to the realization that lasting joy doesn’t reside in material things, events, or other people, but in ourselves.

Such times awaken us to the fact that beneath our sadness, disappointment, or disillusionment, there resides a reality few humans are acquainted with at this stage in our evolution as a species—our true being, which is grounded in the divine Presence.

There’s a difference between allowing a sinking spell, a dark night of the soul, a winter, to do its work in us, and indulging in melancholy. The one hones us, sharpens us, deepens us, redirects us. The other saps the soul from us.

Wallowing in misery, self-pity, melancholy, a sense of “how unfair” everything is, and “why is God doing this to me,” isn’t helpful—at least, not in the short term. In such melancholy, there’s no productive “wintering” going on. The darkness isn’t fruitful, it’s just miserable. The long night of melancholy fails to give rise to the celebration of life that is the coming of spring.

In sinking spells we naturally ask, “Why is this happening to me?” There are two ways to ask this question. We can ask it with a resentful tone, which only makes us feel worse. Or we can ask it with inquisitiveness, and discover that there is purpose to what’s happening.

In the eighteenth century, an American writer by the name of Lydia Sigourney realized, “Life has, indeed, many ills, but the mind that views every object in its most cheering aspect, and every doubtful dispensation as replete with latent good, bears within itself a powerful and perpetual antidote.”

Have you discovered the “powerful and perpetual antidote” to life’s disappointments within yourself?

If your life isn’t too pleasant right now, this is the moment to realize that your situation at this very instant is “replete with latent good.” Replete—complete, filled, overflowing. In other words, things are exactly as they are meant to be, with the intent of awaking you to the Infinite Presence deep within you that wants nothing for you but the very best.

How can you access this Presence? How can you find the “latent good” in your situation?

The year 2006 will go down as a year of transformation in my life, for it was both the worst moment of my life and simultaneously the best. As the year draws to a close, I find myself suffused with peace and filled with joy. It’s as if everything that had happened to me leading up to 2006 was preparing me for a life-transforming breakthrough that excelled all previous leaps in my spiritual development.

Out of great pain emerged an awareness of Presence that is greater than I had ever known. It’s an awareness I had already been entering for some time, but not to the depth that 2006 made possible.

What facilitated this was the book The Presence Process, by Michael Brown. In this illuminating book, Michael enables us to get in touch with the latent good of every situation we are experiencing that seems to be against us, and to find within it the seed of new life.

Virgil, the Roman poet of long ago, advised, “Whatever may happen, we master fortune by accepting it.” Embarking on The Presence Process enabled me to accept what was happening to me. I was able to receive the pain of 2006 as a gift, instead of resenting and resisting it—and this was transformative.

Michael Brown shows us that dark times transform us only when we are willing to accept them as life’s gift. Then, we choose to go through them—right through the middle of them—consciously.

That’s the key word, “Consciously.” When you bring real awareness to what’s happening to you, there’s no resistance, no trying to run—but no wallowing either. The sinking spell of your winter does its job then bursts forth into spring.

When we either resist sinking spells or wallow in them, we’re not going through them. In this case, they will have to be repeated until we are thoroughly sick of the grief we bring upon ourselves by reacting to such times instead of receiving them as a gift. Ultimately, we will get the message—divine Presence assures us of this. As Michael says, “It’s all good.”

But how much pain do you want to go through before you awaken to the infinite peace, unbounded joy, and measureless love that Presence seeks to express in your life?

Perhaps 2007 can become for you what 2006 was for me, with the help of Michael Brown’s The Presence Process, both the book and his CDs.