Disappointment: Friend and Ally on the Unconditional Healing Path

Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin

Disappointment might seem, on the surface, to be a strange topic for a podcast about healing. But at the beginning of every great difficulty, we face a profound disappointment. We are not getting what we wanted, or we are getting what we don’t want. Either way, we are disappointed.

But how we respond to that disappointment holds the key to what happens next. The typical reaction is to move on quickly, sometimes pretending or denying we’re even disappointed. Or we just “solve” it by reciting affirmations that we don’t really believe like, “It’s so good this happened” or “This is all for the best”. Others around us often offer similar platitudes, not knowing what to say in order to help us. While those affirmations might be true in the long run, we actually have to go through the painful situation of being disappointed to reap the benefits.

In this episode we’ll investigate disappointment from the inside out, seeing both its painful aspects and its beneficial ones. We’ll explore:

· How disappointment cuts through our need for constant validation
· How a hopeful attitude differs from its more future-oriented cousin, ‘hope’
· What the sports world can teach us about being totally present
· Why a “couldn’t care less” attitude can become our saving grace
In the end, disappointment reveals much about our general attitudes, and how we operate in the world. It has much to teach us about being authentic, being kinder to ourselves and others, and how to become, as Chogyam Trungpa once said, a “grain of sand” able to make a proper cup of tea.