The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path

Jay Michaelson’s The Gate of Sadness: Sadness and the Spiritual Path seeks to create a much need corrective path from New Age books, talks, and seminars devoted to finding and attaining happiness through spiritual and religious pursuits. Rather than viewing sadness as an impediment to the spiritual path, Michaelson frames it, quite correctly, as integral; without dark times, we would lack the necessary cognitive and mental tools to refine our sense of being in the world.Even when the sadness appears to serve no purpose, Michaelson explains techniques to hold the sadness, to allow it to dwell within us without comment or judgement. This Buddhist technique can reveal startling results. By sitting still with the sadness, we can come to an understanding of it as a fleeting state. It moves on, just like all our emotional states. Sadness has no more hold on us than any other emotion.Michaelson writes this book in the first person, giving the work an intimate feel, revealing much about himself and the ups and downs of his quest. This book is excellent ballast for the scores dangerous Pollyanna spiritual guides we find today. It's OK to be sad.

I found this book an odd reflection of what seems to be going on now in spiritual circles: there is a lot of cross-over (which can sometimes expand and deepen understanding) but how much of that cross-over manages to avoid the difficulties and demands of each path or miss the point completely? The old way (a sometimes rigid and culturally conditioned adherence to one way of seeing things) has been replaced by "a little of this and a little of that". Is it really possible to separate Buddhist practice (vipassana) from the 8-fold path with its very specific moral and ethical demands and turn it into a sectarian practice? There is a weird compartmentalization that is happening now and it seems to me to have to do with "having your cake and eating it too". I found this book to be a reflection of that compartmentalization. Renunciation is not the same thing as repression or self-indulgence.. I think it's difficult to reconcile impermanence and emptiness with continuing to prop up a "feel good" sense of the "me".

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

The book was an easy read and quite moving.

Well done and thoughtful.

Beautiful. Contemplative. Soulful. Redemptive. I savored this book slowly over the Jewish high holidays, and then recommended it to my fellow students, mentors, and colleagues at Harvard Divinity School, as well as to friends who, like me, have journeyed through loss in some way... Thank you, Jay Michaelson, for a book to read slowly--and then again.