The Liberating Power of Disappointment

You can only influence the world positively when you are free of the world. When you are not free of the world you secretly hate it, because it constantly breaks its promise to you. — Anand Mehrotra

What I would like to convey in this post is how powerful a teacher disappointment has been for me and invite you to embrace your own disappointment as a tool for growth and expansion. Or at least a signal for where you could intentionally shift your orientation.

I have been calling the past year or so my “year of disappointment.” It’s not that I haven’t been disappointed in the past. But the disappointment seems to have accelerated over the past few years. Almost as if it were ushering me toward this event horizon beyond which I could not previously see. I feel like I am either inside of that black hole of liberation now or just emerging from the other side of it. The transformation brought about by my accelerating disappointment feels very fresh, like I am a newborn calf still covered in the amniotic fluid of my disappointment, taking a first few tentative steps in this grassy new world of love and the soft power of a deeper non-attachment.

We become disappointed because we have been placing our own conditioned expectations on the world (and especially on people) and these expectations can only be subverted by reality, especially when they are charged with the energy of expected disappointment stemming from unresolved past disappointment. Our ego operated under the false premise that it is possible to control events to avoid disappointment. So one way to define disappointment is that it’s the discomfort of refining the ego.

Disappointment is life’s way of inviting you to wake up to your own conditioned ideas about how things should be, and to the ways in which your own unprocessed disappointment is causing you to manifest disappointment wherever you look. By shedding old ideas about what life is supposed to be you open up to what life actually is, and what it is asking of you. You then expand into your pure potential as a person.

If you blame your disappointment on another, you tend to want to destroy that other, whether it is a person, a religion or a drug. . . . With [non-attachment], you can even enjoy the experience of being disappointed! — Richard Rudd

Adyashanti tells a wonderful story about how disappointment in a seeming lack of spiritual progress was almost a critical, final stepping stone toward both his own and the Buddha’s enlightenment. As many of you know, before he was the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama was trying very hard to find samadhi, the fully awakened state. Following the example of the ascetics of India at the time, he became an ascetic and denounced all worldly pleasure to live in the forest and eat and wear very little. But this didn’t seem to be doing anything for him spiritually. He found that this lifestyle was full of ego traps of a subtler and more pernicious kind. So it was only when he became deeply disillusioned that he let go of that path and any ideas he might have about spiritual awakening, and went to sit under the infamous Bodhi tree, in the kind of deep surrender one finds only after deep and repeated disappointment. There the Buddha finally attained enlightenment and realized the power of his own dharma. Of course enlightenment is merely the commencement of one’s spiritual growth, rather than any kind of static end state. Even the Buddha kept practicing.

I have been disappointed by spiritual teachers and spiritual communities, places where I thought I would finally find the integrity, authenticity, consistency, and kindness I had been searching for my whole life. I have changed cities thinking that one city was more ”spiritual” and open-minded than another. I have gone into business with friends because it sounded easier than starting my own. In each of these examples, I was unconsciously trying to take a shortcut by placing responsibility for my dharma and my own potential as a leader on another person, place, or organization. Looking back I can see now that I needed to have those experiences to stop selling myself short.

It’s not that you can’t find an authentic spiritual community or reliable business partner. It’s that you won’t find them until you are taking full ownership of your own dharma and stepping into the power of your own potential. Once you have been washed clean by your disappointment, perhaps you’ll even have a different experience of those same people, communities and places that disappointed you. That is something I am exploring myself.

Sitting Inside the Feeling of Disappointment

Another reason I kept encountering disappointment in the past was that I was carrying a lot of unprocessed and unacknowledged disappointment from my childhood. My childhood was deeply disappointing in many ways. I was disappointed my most of the adults in my life on a regular basis. When we have unresolved emotional trauma and biomemories, we often manifest experiences that mirror that emotional state. In yoga we say that the dancer is the dance, that the experiencer is the experience. It doesn’t sound fair but this is why we refine our consciousness: in order to have a brighter, freer world reflected back to us.

So another key to transcending your disappointment is fully feeling it. A wise woman once told me that part of being a mature adult is learning to sit with uncomfortable emotions. I can tell you from experience that disappointment is not an easy emotion to sit with. I find it more painful to experience than simple emotions like anger and sadness. Those are emotions you can sort of “do.” You can be angry: you can yell, groan, moan, growl, and hiss. You can be sad by crying it out. But with disappointment, you just have to sit there feeling like shit in a heavy, overcast field of gray. There’s no way around it. In my emotional work, I needed to face that enormous, damp ball of disappointment and let myself really feel it. With the help of plant medicine, last year I spent hours upon hours just letting go of old disappointment. It was grueling but it was also freeing.

Stepping Into Your Power

Disappointment is actually a portal, a powerful threshold toward true perception and true understanding. It is the end of a lengthy process that many of us go through trying to find somebody or something to carry us, to do the work of personal evolution for us. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we’re constantly trying to be saved and give away our own power until one day we encounter the Wizard, find him to be weak and a fraud, and realize that we were the wizard all along. In the words of David Richo:

When Dorothy saw that the Wizard of Oz was a bungling — though well-meaning — old man, she felt deep disappointment, but that was the turning point on her journey of learning to trust herself. . . . As Dorothy learned, there were no coattails to hang on to, no shortcuts to the summit, no godfather to do things for her. Disappointment was a necessary step on her path to adulthood — that is, to taking care of herself while still supporting and being supported by others. Disappointment is “disillusion-ment,” or freedom from illusion, projection, and expectation. All that is left is mindfulness. To someone who disappointed me, I can say, “Thank you for freeing me from yet another of my illusions.”

With a hearty embrace of disappointment we can finally stop looking outside for our power. There’s no place like home.

I invite you to look for the places where you are placing an expectation on a person or a situation and soften around it. Move into your heart space, look for where you could be stepping into your own power, and welcome whatever outcome arrives. Only then can you truly be free.

In the same way that fear is an indication that you’re headed in the right direction (once you’ve embraced this approach to the spiritual path), accelerating disappointment can be a useful signal too, if you learn how to listen to it, how to feel it fully, and how to use it as a catalyst for your own version of finally sitting under the Bodhi tree until you find your truth.