My Adele Problem

Our hearts have a lot to tell us about how we care for things, or withhold care, how we offer friendliness, how we make space for these huge, sometimes clumsy, sometimes operatic, sometimes micro-micro-nuanced energies called feelings. I want to share an experience I had about that.

This is the story of my Adele problem.

So, many years ago, before I had done any kind of heart practice, it was like I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Adele. For those who don’t know, Adele is a British singer who sings with profound emotion. Her songs are full of longing and regret and loneliness and passion and ardor. And I would hear these songs and I would just cringe. I thought they were so cheesy and annoying and kind of maudlin and just like, extra. And they were playing literally everywhere: when I got into a Lyft, or as I walked down the fluorescent aisle of CVS, or blaring from a bar on a Saturday night and there’d always be a group of people drunkenly slurring, “Hello from the other side…” 

It was like I couldn’t escape this chorus of soppy emotion, and my heart had this yuck response. And part of that response was like, “No, no, I assure you. I know suffering. My suffering is different from all the suffering. It’s its own species, like it’s behind a wall of glass set apart from all the other suffering, untouched.”

And then, I started doing heart practices. Lovingkindness meditation or metta where you use phrases to repeat a kind of well-wishing for yourself, “May I be peaceful, may I be well, may I be safe and protected from inner and outer harm.” I freestyled my way into a kind of somatic practice where I lay on the couch in fetal position and pressed tightly against my heart with my hand jammed between my body and the cushion. From there I moved into self-compassion practice, and I would very gently, very slowly contact how suffering felt, in my heart, in my body. And honestly, lying there jammed against the couch, it hurt. I felt defenses, and scar tissue, and shame, and desire and the whole story of my heart started to reveal itself. This took weeks and weeks, months and months, every time getting a little closer to just being present with my pain. 

And then one day, I was in the supermarket. I was reaching for a can of Minestrone soup, and I heard something. It was like this call from deep inside, almost like from within the earth itself, and it whispered its way through the gatekeepers of my hearing and all the way down into that secret place inside my heart I had been visiting in my practice, and it touched it. I’m holding this can of soup and I just start sobbing. Like, “Oh my heart, oh all the feelings, my scars, this beautiful world!” And I’m listening to this sound, and it’s like, “Who is this genius who sings directly to my tender place with the voice of the deep earth itself?”

And then I listened a little closer, did a double-take: Hello from the other side. The singer who knew my heart—it was Adele. Same song even. But now because of the practice I had done opening my own heart, I heard my suffering in her voice. And what they say in Buddhist practice is we learn to go from believing it’s my suffering, to recognizing, No, it’s the suffering. It’s the suffering of Being, of existence, of living in a mortal, impermanent body and loving beings who are also impermanent. It’s not a mistake, it’s not something to fix, it’s actually a kind of passport to participate fully, authentically in life. 

It’s interesting, because as long as I believed my suffering was separate, walled-off, needing to be defended, I couldn’t actually just be with it as a friend; I could never get close enough. Passing through numbness, denial, endless curlicues of “figuring it out,” and finally just simple pain, I met my heart as a friend. And in that meeting, I encountered the world.

When we befriend our experience, we have the space to open out and listen to the cries of the world around us, and the inner resources to meet them with compassion, too. 

A poem to close, from The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns, translated by Matty Weingast.

Mitta ~ Friend

Full of trust you left home,

and soon learned to walk the Path—

making yourself a friend to everyone

and making everyone a friend.

When the whole world is your friend,

fear will find no place to call home.

And when you make the mind your friend,

you’ll know what trust

really means.

Listen.

I have followed this Path of friendship to its end.

And I can say with absolute certainty—

it will lead you home.

If you’d like to explore these practices experientially, check out the guided meditations on the Watch & Listen page.

(Photo Credit: Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, March 2016)