The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path

by Jay Michaelson

The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path explores the counter-intuitive insight that sadness and joy are not opposites -- and that human capacities often suppressed or rejected can, instead, be gateways to deep joy, creativity, and liberation. Its eighty-two short, poetic, sometimes epigrammatic chapters draw on contemplative traditions, art, even pop songs. They are reflections on the path of surrender, alchemy, and the sacred. Written over a ten year period, and completed in the mourning period after the death of the author's mother, The Gate of Tears is not a self-help book. If anything, it is a self-helpless book, discovering a happiness deeper than transitory joys that emerges precisely when the resistance to sadness is released. As the contemporary Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das says in his foreword to the book, "the only thing that prevents happiness is searching for it."

The Gate of Tears draws on Jay Michaelson's fifteen years as a student, and now a teacher, of Buddhist and Jewish contemplative paths. Michaelson is a rabbi, and holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought, and has taught Jewish mysticism in and outside the academic world. Yet he is also a longtime teacher of insight meditation in Western Buddhist and secular mindfulness contexts, who has sat many months-long silent meditation retreats. With his usual blend of erudition and accessibility, Michaelson weaves together Hasidic tales and Dharma teachings, Leonard Cohen and Langston Hughes. The Gate of Tears is not a New Age book with easy answers; it is infused with a contemporary sensibility, skepticism, and humor.

All of us, if we are to be fully human, experience pain. The Gate of Tears is about how the embrace of that experience ennobles, empowers, and liberates us.

Advance Praise

"Jay Michaelson's incisive and exquisitely profound insights into our human condition come in full force in The Gate of Tears. Here we have an antidote to mindless feel-good ideology, and gentle instructions in attending to the fullness of our experience so we see the value in the downs, not just the ups. Our inner world will never seem the same."
- Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence

"The Gate of Tears is a beautifully written, transformative book. Jay Michaelson guides us, instead of denying, avoiding, explaining away or resisting sadness, to go right into the heart of it. There we find open space, true love of life, and, perhaps most redeeming, one another."
- Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness

"Jay Michaelson's writing is always bracing and brave, but The Gate of Tears has particular power. He guides us to explore -- and accept -- the truth of what he calls "ordinary sadness," and stop looking for happiness so that we might actually find it. Every chapter made me feel as if he was seeing me personally. This book will change your perspective and ease your load."
- Abigail Pogrebin, author of Stars of David

About the Author

Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of six books, including Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism and the Next Generation of Enlightenment (North Atlantic, 2013) and the bestselling God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2011), as well as over 300 articles in The Daily Beast, Atlantic, Tricycle, The Forward, and other publications.

Genres: Spirituality, Judaism, Buddhism, Psychology, Philosophy, Religion

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the author of ten books, most recently "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth." He is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and holds a Ph.D in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Dr. Michaelson is also a regular contributor to New York, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and other publications. His journalistic work primarily focuses on the Supreme Court, religion, law, and sexuality. And he is a senior editor and podcast host at Ten Percent Happier, a meditation startup.

Reviews

[Michael Sasson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LOVE that the author calls out the Law of Attraction (pp 15-16)
The author is also particularly good at synthesizing world-view/outlook/theory of multiple spiritual teachers/traditions & creating brief synopses. Compare "love" to Welwood.

vii Even though the gates of prayer are closed, the gates of tears are open. -- Talmud Berachot 32b
xvii. And although spirituality today is alleged by its critics to be narcissistic and escapist, anyone who takes contemplative practice seriously finds instead an uncovering of that which was hidden -- and as a consequence, a confrontation with pain.
Ironically, religion is often quite the opposite. Religion often promises the erasure of sadness, perhaps in some future world after death, or perhaps in a life of everlasting joy lived in the light of God.
xviii [...] sadness is a secularized sin; America is about the pursuit of happiness, after all [....] Perhaps counterintuitively, it is the surrender to sadness that causes it to pass -- not the suppression of it.
xix. The art of being with sadness, and other unwanted houseguests of the mind, brings about an intimacy with what is -- what the mystics call the One, the Divine, the Beloved. Crying out in sadness is an expression of holiness and of art.
xxi. On retreat after retreat, I confronted, wrestled with, and finally allowed myself to be defeated by, the sadness and loneliness that would often arise when the chatter of my mind subsided.
xxiv. I'm not interested in ontological discussions of God, but I am enriched by experiential encounters with a love that seems to transcend our finitude. This experience is the result of a choice, a personalization of everything and nothing.
[...] The Buddha, it is sometimes forgotten, was called by his contemporaries "The Happy One." Not the dour one, or the detached one -- but profoundly, abidingly happy.
xxv. My conviction is that one may have the direct, intimate experience of painful emotions -- even grief, loss, and lack -- as they are, as flavors or contours or tones of simply what is. And from that simplicity of coexistent presence there arises an underlying peace that lovingly accommodates the tears that fall.
1. The only thing that keeps us from happiness is searching for it. -- Lama Surya Das
4. The kernel of the Buddha's four noble truths is that it is possible to accept pain, coexist with it, create a mental spaciousness large enough to contain it, and surrender the effort to be rid of it. [...]
Similarly, in contemplative Judaism, Jacob's amazed utterance that "God was in this place --- and I, I did not know," has become a watchword for perceiving the sacred in all aspects of life, event those that are challenging, crushing.
5. When the desire to banish sadness is released, sadness cohabitates with joy, and gives birth to holiness. [...]
To try to explain suffering is to attempt to escape. But when explanation is no longer sought, the deep joy of the contemplative arises.
9. Meditation, in the forms I've taught for several years, is generally less about having a certain kind of experience than relating to any experience in a clear, compassionate, non-judgmental way.
10. To understand deeply and intuitively, that even in moments of our greatest separateness, aloneness, or pain, there is nothing but God taking place -- this is what lies through the gate of tears.
11. A popular podcast recently said, "Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you."
18. But at some point, most of us find ourselves broken -- and hopefully broken open.
19. My mind thirsted for truth, my heart for love, my soul for experience, and my body for delight. Below the surface, there was a lot of suffering, but on the surface -- if I'm honest -- was a kind of hedonism.
24-25. If I can't "trust my gut," what can I trust?
Actually, I knew what to trust. With calm and equanimity, it was easy to see which views led to more love and more compassion, and which led to more greed, hatred, and delusion. I didn't have to rely on the mystical movements of the soul; just reason and discernment [...] the process was clear.
[...]. although it wasn't quite Buddhist equanimity to lust after beautiful sunsets, I did it anyway.
26. [...] as it is written: The messiah is the one who unites the world in song.
27. "This is sadness" rather than "I am sad."
28. Notably, sadness is not among the traditional hindrances to meditation, such as anger, restlessness, and doubt. [...] "It took me 15 years of misguided meditation," Shinzen said, "to finally realize that you can't hate your limited identity. You have to love your limited identity -- love it to death."
30. As long as I persist in thinking my sadness, anger, and dissatisfaction ought to stop, it is unlikely to stop. The engine turning the wheel is nothing other than the desire to escape from it.
31. It's hard feeling rejection, or loneliness, or loss. But we do not have to also feel bad about feeling bad. That extra layer -- that can be unlearned.
40. Equanimity is not the banishment of sadness. It is the acceptance of sadness for what it is, and the letting go of the desire for it to end.
42. You can learn to become intimate with your internal emotional enemies.
Not just wisdom and peace arise as a result, but also compassion for oneself and others. [...] Redeemed Sadness is Remembering
46. Sadness and other painful states of being are a gate because they offer the opportunity of coexisting with everything, of making peace, of ending the war with experience. [...]
This is quite different from the spirituality of pleasant experiences [...]
54. My impact is real, and limited.
57. But by inhabiting my own pain, I find myself sincerely able to wish that the people around me be free from suffering. I feel myself healed, not by being mended, but by being open, raw, human.
59. In a sense, to "forget your perfect offering" is to mirror the world into which the offering is sacrificed.
60. [...] it is easy to fall in love with one's own woundedness, with the longing and the sorrow. That is not quite the path I want to walk. There is a sacredness to the wound and to the longing, but they are not wounds to be licked, over and over again. These shadow aspects are generative, but not when they are coddled and overly cherished. I prefer to imagine them as reservoirs, or perhaps springs; I am less interested in diving again to the source than in the abundance it brings forth.
61. Priests demand perfect offerings, but I have none to give.
65. It is a small thing, really, this redemption of ordinary sadness. [...] what might previously have led to a spiral of fruitless soul-searching and desperate efforts to change what has naturally come to pass is instead an occasion for a quiet celebration.
[...]. I would let this be my communion, my kiddush: the sanctification of the ordinarily despised, the blessing of a heart no longer in search of its mending.
66. In a sense, the redemption of sadness is the truth of truthfulness itself. Merely the absence of deceit is itself a source of joy. [...]
maybe there's a moment of communion that can happen, an instant of empathy that will remind me that I'm not alone in being alone, that in fact, aloneness is the only thing we all share. And in that communication, connection.
67. "You're at your best when you're most connected," one of my meditation teachers once told me, "and you're at your most connected when you allow yourself to be sad."
68. I don't mean here the self-transcendence of ecstasy, those moments of glorious drumming and dancing and singing and pounding, in which the heart leaps out of its confines. I mean the second-person language of yearning, pining, wanting, needing. Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker. Searching, not finding; desiring, not consummating. This yearning love, the Sufis say, is the very last of our tools to be set down on the path to oneness -- the very last. Sometimes I reach out, and nothing reaches back.
And yet there is beauty in reaching out. I want to love. I prefer to live; I prefer to love even if I will not be loved back, even if doing so aches in the heart and embarrasses me. Even if it takes away my dignity, I don't care; this is how I want to be in human affairs, and so in divine ones also.
[...]. As soon as I stopped expecting anything, stopped wanting anything, I was set free to do what hte heart really wanted, which was to offer and express love and gratitude and desire and joy. I didn't have an ecstatic prayer experience. But I did have a sense of communion, if only with myself, and the honesty of my wanting to express love. That is what I really wanted: to hear my heart. Not God's -- mine.
72 "spoken lonesomeness is prophecy." -- Allen Ginsberg, "Witchita Vortex Sutra Part 3"
[...] The more spiritual work I did [...] the more I chipped away at the false layers of ego surrounding a core of pain, loneliness, and suffering.
73. But most of all, I think it was love, and its lack, that first impelled my spiritual wor. Is it coincidence that while I pined for love that I could never consummate, I also yearned for the love of a somewhat distant and judgmental God, who I feared as much as loved? I had many spiritual experiences during those years, but they were almost always tinged with authority and conditionality. I rejoiced in the sacred spaces of religion, but there was always a need to impress this distant God, to do the right thing so I would merit his love.
I don't regret my loneliness. [...] I have seen how each of us is existentially alone, and reaching outward or inward to fill the emptiness. When, almost paradoxically, it takes on the character of fullness precisely when it is left alone and empty.
74. Love and let go, love and let go. Was it so complicated? No, I'm a slow learner. <
[....]. Spiritual practice has even taught me how joy and sadness can coexist, if only the resistance to sadness is relinquished; such a surrender dissolves loneliness into pure aloneness, the simple freedom of Being itself. And it is tinged with tears and love.
75. Would I have learned the deeper lessons of love if I had not been lonely myself? Would I have taken the time to sit in silence for weeks, months at a time if my heart had not been broken?
80. Particular boundaries define identity, and can be transcended, if the programmatic is restrained in the name of the spacious.
The silence gloriously aches.
82. All of us have screwed up now and then, on large stages or small ones. This should bring us comfort, but generally it doesn't.
83. Maybe for some, a self-deception repeated often enough becomes a kind of truth. Truthfully, I would have been happy for that to happen to me; I'm not so proud of my integrity.
85. Impermanence is a feature of every conditioned phenomenon [...] the movements of the heart, which arise and pas very quickly when they are not propped up by the mind.
86. When encountered directly, especially during meditation, the truth of impermanence brings about liberation, and can transform the experience of sadness, pain, anger, or any other supposedly undesirable state of mind.
88. I actually find it more joyful to hear the voice that reminds me: "Love and let go, it's going to pass, and in fact it's passing already."
This may sound like even more of a downer, but I experience this voice as one of love. It protects me; it gently holds my heart. protecting it from wounding itself in an excess of enthusiasm or hopelessness. It's part of how I understand the process of getting older. The oscillations of the soul are part of its nature; they teach me the truth and, I find, this kind of truth sets me free.
91. Sadness, grief, joy, and even anger are all parts of life, and deserve to be experienced. Depression blocks them.
94. On good days, I neither fight nor believe the desire. [...] Oh, you again. Oh, and there's that sense of lack, of insufficiency, of envy, that you carry along with you. I know you well. Let's see if I can hold you without either pushing you out of my mind, or believing anything you have to say.
97. But doubt interrogates belief, destabilizes it; doubt keeps us from believing in nonsense. And in seeing the fallibility of the human mind and heart, I find it provides a kind of humility.
99. Yet there is such a fine distinction between falling into the stories of loneliness, which cause a cycle of suffering in the ego, and releasing into the pure feeling of it. It is possible to lose one's way without even noticing it.
To yearn for love is a fundamental human (possibly animal) desire. The aching, too, is to be loved; the pained, intense, entirely justifiable and natural loneliness that we may feel when like millions of other men and women at this very moment, we are alone.
100. I wonder what a different model of leadership would look like, one that leads from vulnerability rather than illusion.
[....] Residing within loneliness is spacious and secure. It is to see life as it is. It is calm and honest. And when the loneliness of people is visible, I love being with them. [VS Loneliness being repulsive to others]
107. Most of the paths through the gate of tears lead to a place of internal sufficiency, a profound sense of arrival -- a settling-back of the mind that is otherwise often in poses of attraction or repulsion. This is the momentum of freedom. [I feel this -- no self-abandonment but insufficient connection]
108. Contemplative quietism naturally leads to interpersonal activism, because the imperative to alleviate suffering arises naturally from a spacious mind and spacious heart. Compassion arises when the obstructions to it are taken aways.
117. This was a sweet surrender. The conditions were present, the phenomena arose. [...] Being awake does not mean that the infinite chains of causality will be broken.
119. There is nothing so whole as a broken heart. -- Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk
121. It is also desiring. With close, contemplative attention, one can notice that the mind either wants or doesn't want almost everything it encounters.
122. When I push away sadness [...], I am denying "What Is" -- denying God. It's as if everything is holy --except this.
The gate of tears is a sustained and gentle Yes -- or at least, a not saying No; not capitulating to this quite natural tendency of the mind, to mistake what is in front of us for something other than God.
124 At such times, the yielding seems like an embrace of the non-dual, the God that is yotzer or u'vorei choshech, Former of light and Creator of darkness. This God offers a different kind of comfort from traditional religion; not the love of a Friend, or the assurance of a father figure, but the sense of being surrounded and filled by What Is.
125. [...] I still call for help. Of course, this personal, devotional, anthropomorphic God is largely projection; it's a way of seeing more than a thing that is seen. But as projection, God is a precious Friend, a beloved, a companion. Is not love, too, such a myth?
My religious life oscillates between these two poles, these two Gods of Drowning. At times, I love to think of God in what are essentially human terms. This is the God to whom I pray -- and of whom I say "whom." This is the God that is You. Other times, I love the clarity of the more atheistic, nondual God: What Is, YHVH. The great silence that is the impersonal universe of empty phenomena rolling on, with no one directing the traffic. Sometimes I want a hand to rescue me from drowning, and other times I just want to drown, to merge, to dissolve into You.
129. The religion in which I am interested is about being in love with the world. [...] I don't care about the God you don't believe in; I care that there is a source for inspiration.
130. Sometimes this language helps, and sometimes it does not. But when I speak of sadness, I seek the symbols of God, the sequences of myth, and the patterns of old religion. It is not that I suspend disbelief; I find the question of belief irrelevant. [...] Precisely when I am at my most desperate -- that is, my most open -- the personal God reappears, as if She or He has been playfully hiding in plain view all along.
131. We are without control over our lives, and there is only mystery. We have no idea. In the face of this realization, tears lie deeper than reason.
132. As Lama Surya Das said, "Truth is about getting free, not getting high." [...Biblical] Joseph has developed empathy; that is why he cries. [...] a deeper health. You are meant to cry, because life is cruel and death is worse -- not only to cry, of course, but when it is appropriate to do so, which it often is.
133. Faith, unlike theology, is composed of tears, not theorems. [...] crying out to the nondual is ridiculous. But sometimes I do like to cry. Ana adonai, hoshi'a na -- please, God, save me. In a small irony, our tears fall all the more readily if we are crying to a God in which we're not sure we believe.
141. The theistic yesh is the God to whom I cry; the theistic ayin is the God which cries through me. The non-theistic yesh comprises all my stuff, my gender, my sexuality, my life; the non-theistic ayin sees that all this stuff is a set of empty phenomena, rolling on, with no one guiding the boat.
142-3. To see from God's point of view is not meant to be a permanent condition for a second reason: there is a world to heal. The compassion that flows naturally form enlightenment distinguishes it from mere ecstasy, and invites us to engage with the world. That engagement [...] requires a sort of tzimtzum on the personal level, a contraction back into finitude, a return to caring.
[...] the true unity includes both God's point of view and our own points of view, and as a consequence cares about our transitory pain. At moments of enlightenment, all is transcended and included in the One. Sadness does not disappear; it is included in a serene and compassionate embrace.
145. God will be with you [...] even in the pain; that there will remain accessible a reservoir of unconditional love that is either Divine or, more remarkably, a natural capacity of the human heart. The trust in this faculty of mind (or, if you prefer, grace of God) is a kind of salvation.
147 Kohelet becomes the recipe for liberation.
158. Rabbi Nachman "The world is full of light and mysteries both wonderful and awesome, but our tiny little hand shades our eyes and prevents them from seeing."

[Alison Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book last fall while in a trauma treatment program in the southern United States, and I must say that it helped me to understand just how important grief and allowing oneself to feel and express that grief is if we truly wish to heal from our pain and trauma's.
I should mention that I do know Jay but only as an acquaintance, and as I read his book particularly the sections where he spoke about how music and the arts allowed him to feel and express his grief throughout his life and some of the toughest things he's experienced it provided me with a degree of validation that my use of music to heal my grief over the years was not strange but something that someone who is extremely learned and accomplished also has employed as way of coping.

I am extremely grateful that this book exsits as it is something that I go back to on a regular basis as a reminder to counter many of the old lies I was taught regarding grief. This is a must read for all those who have experienced any type of loss in thier lives.

[Ron Kastner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a hard book to rate. If you are a Buddhist or Jewish it has its appeals. If you are Christian, it has its problems. The topic is very worthwhile; sadness and sorrow should not be dismissed but accepted and embraced as they are inextricably part of our lives. A Christian will not feel the sense of loneliness and aloneness that the author discusses, as he is not Christian. And the presence of the Holy Spirit and Christ in our inmost being will give us a different perspective on sadness and sorrow.

Well worth the read.

[Yitzi Gittelsohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful teachings and open wondering on the cultivation of emotional openness and acceptance of what is. I found it to be very helpful for my meditation and spiritual practice.

[Mary Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound!

Wow.. deeply moving. The book reads like a poem . So much spiritual insight. It’s a book to be savored.

[Marylee Raymond Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

thought provoking and challenging read