Papança and the Quiet Mind

Having just returned from a 10 day concentration retreat, I find my tendency this morning is to sit and stare out the window.  The morning is blissfully quiet of my little part of the world.  A bird sings softly from time to time and then falls silent.  The water on the distant bay is quiet, the air is still with just the gentlest of breezes.  Even the workmen across the green have accidentally lapsed into silence.  All of this will change shortly, I’m sure.  But for the moment the peacefulness of the morning matches my mind and we sit together - the morning and I - in perfect harmony.

That is not to say that I spent the last 10 days in blissful silence.  Far from it.  The tumult in my mind at times was deafening.  The effort of concentration was at times exhausting.  

All that was worth it for the moments of absolute stillness, of actually looking into my mind and realizing that my mind was still, even empty.  There was only one thought and it was the one I was thinking about my practice at that moment. And that one thought disappeared  and after a space another thought about my practice would arise.  

What this moment of complete stillness revealed to me was how much my mind is filled, not just with the foreground thoughts of what I’m doing, going to do, have done, but how behind all of that, was a low level morass of unconscious or semiconscious thoughts, memories, anticipations, fears, stories and fantasies, planning, mind states simmering and jumbling along like litter in a breeze, momentarily distracting or outright commandeering the thought process in a new direction.

Leigh Brassington, one of my teachers on this retreat, says that only 20 percent of our thoughts come from an external stimulus - a sight, sound, bodily sensation, smell, taste. What the Buddha called the sense doors.  The other 80 percent is what our minds do with that stimulus.  (He says he read that somewhere, as have I.  Neither of us can remember where.)  Whether the proportions are verifiable or not, we all know the experience of all that mental activity sometimes interfering with our ability to see what’s in front of us.

That’s why this initial feeling or feeling tone we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks is so important.  To review, when any experience first arises - a sight, a sound, a thought, whatever - there is an initial feeling of liking, disliking or neither liking or disliking, what we have been calling positive, negative or neutral.  And following that initial feeling tone are a string or crowd or stampede of thoughts, feelings, mind states, memories all sparked by that feeling tone.  To make matters worse, each of those reactive thoughts have their own feeling tone and stimulate other thoughts, reactions, emotions, memories which have their own feelings tones….etc.  My teacher called them down-stream thoughts.  The Buddha called this proliferation of thoughts papança (pronounced PA-PA’-N-CHA).  It sounds like a huge bag of mail falling down steps, breaking open, and scattering in all directions.  

 The stronger the feeling tone, the greater the downstream proliferation of thoughts will be.  And since these thoughts barely subside into turbulent little eddies before the next stimulus occurs, it’s a small wonder our minds function at all!

The Buddha asks us to pay attention to these feeling tones.  The proliferation is not inevitable.  It is a product of inattention.  With awareness, mindfulness, we can see the initial feeling tone and hold it in awareness.  Under the light of this shining awareness, the feeling tone is seen as just that, a feeling tone.  And the proliferation ceases.  

It’s a process however.  And one that needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, until this awareness becomes more established and arises more quickly to hold the feeling tone.

The Buddha’s words as quoted by Joseph Goldstein tell us exactly what we do with these feeling tones when we don’t pay attention to them:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  [Here he means pleasure of the senses.]  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”  

Does this sound familiar?

More about feelings....

Last week’s introduction and overview of the second of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Feelings, was comprehensive but also dense so I wanted to circle back and talk a bit more about this important practice.  First of all, feelings in the Buddhist context refer to the initial positive, negative, or neutral response we have to any input - physical or mental, from the external world or internally (thoughts, etc).  Emotions are more complex and, thus, are included in the third Foundation of Mindfulness, Mindfulness of Mind.

The beauty of being able to notice feelings or feeling tone (Vedana in Pali) is that we can discern the positive, negative, or neutral feeling tone before or just after the cloud of associations spring up to complicate the experience with thoughts and opinions.  Sometimes the associations spring up so quickly we get both the feeling tone and the entire “story."  This can be quite illuminating if we remember that the “story” is not inherent in the object of perception.  As an example, I love dogs.  My love of dogs is not inherent in dogs but has been conditioned by positive experiences of dogs in the past.  So when I walk in the park and a dog bounds up to me, I am happy to see them - positive vedana or feeling tone with more complex feelings of happiness and various associations arising shortly thereafter.  But if a dog starts running after me fast and coming from behind, the feeling tone is neutral to unpleasant.  I feel a note of warning and turn to face the dog and come to a standstill.  The aversion is accompanied immediately after by a memory of a dog which chased me from behind and bit me. So friendly dog approaching and dog chasing from behind will elicit two different kinds of vedana or feeling tone - both conditioned by past experience or associations.

The Pali word vedana has connotations of both feeling and knowing.  So as Venerable Analayo says in his comprehensive book Satīpatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, “To contemplate feelings means quite literally to know how one feels, and this with such immediacy that the  light of awareness is present before the onset of reactions projections, or justifications…”  And later, “The systematic development of such immediate knowing will also strengthen one’s more intuitive modes of apperception, in the sense of the ability to get a feel for a situation or another person.  This ability offers a helpful additional source of information in everyday life, complementing the information gained through more rational modes of observation and consideration."

Of course, the stronger feeling tones will break through the background noise of all the gradations of feeling tone from positive to neutral to negative we experience.  But every experience that we encounter - internally or externally, mental or physical - will have a feeling tone.

The other important fact is that these feelings tones are conditioned.  So they can be altered by other experiences around the same stimulus.

This may be especially noticeable around traumatic or disturbing events.  My brother works on the far side of the Key Bridge in Baltimore.  He crossed the bridge to come home from work barely two hours before the bridge was hit and felled by a tanker.  Up to that point, I usually enjoyed bridges as I crossed them.  Since I live on an island, the pleasant vedana is a response to the beautiful expanse of water that appears or the sense that I am nearing home or the sail boats out on the Bay, etc.  Now I have a greater awareness that bridges are not indestructible, that they are very high up, and that they are what is between me and the water.  So something that usually is a pleasant or at least a neutral vedana has now taken on a slight negative feeling tone.  Since vedana is moment-by-moment arising with each new stimulus and the crossing of the bridge takes several minutes, the feelings tones can shift from one end of the spectrum to the other depending on what I see, hear, think, remember, etc.  So my overall experience of the bridge crossing may depend on the frequency and intensity of positive or negative or neutral feeling tones.  

As I wrote last week, the importance of discerning these feelings tones is that, without our awareness, they can condition or lead to grasping, clinging, and attachment, aversion and pushing away, or delusion.  And this can color our experience of the world.  If I think only of the Key Bridge when I am crossing a bridge, the crossing will be unpleasant and may condition the next crossing to be more unpleasant.  Last week I talked with someone who is now much more anxious about crossing bridges that they were before the Key Bridge collapse.

This kind of “conditioning” occurs in every aspect of our lives and can determine whether we look forward to parties or hate them, like to sit in silence or find silence makes us restless, listen to the news regularly or find television news too disturbing.  It can even create feedback loops in our own minds in which we have a negative feeling tone produced by a disturbing thought while we are engaged in an everyday activity and begin to fear that every day activity because we fear the negative feeling tone that arose the last time even though the experience of the everyday activity itself had been quite neutral for years.   

Mindfulness of feelings tones begins to free us from the automatic conditioning these feelings initiate.  It helps us notice when feeling tones lead  in the direction of aversion or greed and returns to us the choice to decide when moving away from or toward different experiences is wholesome or unwholesome.

Even if we miss or are unmindful of the beginning of a sequence, mindfulness or awareness of feelings tones allows us to notice when we are suddenly engrossed in a pleasant fantasy.   We might think back and realize the pleasant fantasy was prompted precisely because we encountered a painful experience minutes before either in the body or in a memory or thought.  The move toward the fantasy was our automatic reaction to replace a painful experience with a pleasant one.  This is an experience we can have during meditation or during any aspect of our lives.  

To refrain the Buddha from Joseph Goldstein’s reference last week:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  [Here he means pleasure of the senses.]  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”

"Vehicle to freedom..."

For the last few weeks, we have been delving into the teachings of the first, Mindfulness of the Body, of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta). We’ve explored breath awareness, awareness of the body postures, of the body activities and movements, of the compositional elements of the body (anatomical parts, the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind), and finally the mortality of the body, the body in decay.  This last reflection prompted a number of heart-felt comments from prioritizing our family, friends, community, and social justice issues in our later years to making a binder for those we leave behind with all the information they need “when we go all dotty,” to quote one respondent.  That last bears repeating because there will come a time when someone would like your passwords to everything from your bank accounts to your facebook page and everything in between.  Facebook is littered with the unearthly remains of people who didn’t write down their passwords for those cleaning up their lives.  

Today we’ll venture into the second foundation of mindfulness, Mindfulness of Feelings.  It is the shortest of the four but packs a wallop well above its word count.  Joseph Goldstein says that, when accompanied by mindfulness, these feelings become "the vehicle of our freedom.”

I have included it in it’s entirety here from Access to Insight, translation by Nyanasatta Thera: 

II. The Contemplation of Feeling

And how, monks, does a monk live contemplating feelings in feelings?

Herein, monks, a monk when experiencing a pleasant feeling knows, "I experience a pleasant feeling"; when experiencing a painful feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful feeling," he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful feeling." When experiencing a pleasant worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a pleasant worldly feeling"; when experiencing a pleasant spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a pleasant spiritual feeling"; when experiencing a painful worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful worldly feeling"; when experiencing a painful spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a painful spiritual feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful worldly feeling, he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful worldly feeling"; when experiencing a neither-pleasant-nor-painful spiritual feeling, he knows, "I experience a neither-pleasant-nor-painful spiritual feeling."

Thus he lives contemplating feelings in feelings internally, or he lives contemplating feelings in feelings externally, or he lives contemplating feelings in feelings internally and externally. He lives contemplating origination factors in feelings, or he lives contemplating dissolution factors in feelings, or he lives contemplating origination-and-dissolution factors in feelings.[12] Or his mindfulness is established with the thought, "Feeling exists," to the extent necessary just for knowledge and mindfulness, and he lives detached, and clings to nothing in the world. Thus, monks, a monk lives contemplating feelings in feelings.

The feelings contemplated here are usually called feeling tones, Jack Kornfield calls them “primary feelings.”   They are as indicated above the positive, negative, or neutral feeling tone that accompanies every experiential contact in our lives.  We smell freshly baked bread.  Definitely positive.  A jack hammer close by.  Usually negative.  Passing cars.  People walking down a sidewalk.  A street name sign.  Usually pretty neutral.  

The importance of discerning these feelings tones is that they condition or lead to grasping, clinging, and attachment, aversion and pushing away, or delusion.  

The distinction made between spiritual or unspiritual above (in other translations referred to as worldly and unworldly) is a further indication to help us discern if the initial feeling tone is likely to lead us toward or away from wholesome actions.

So it would seem pretty important to be able to detect these feelings tones when they arise.  In addition to the reason stated above - knowing what is going to leads toward wholesome actions and away from those that are not, feeling tone is the earliest arising of the series of chain reaction-type arisings that can lead to unwholesome actions.  When it encounters a feeling tone and knows it, mindfulness has the greatest possible chance of cutting off the unwholesome progression toward grasping and attachment, aversion or hatred, and delusion or not understanding what is going on.  

Joseph Goldstein writes in his wonderful book, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening:  “Why is this important?…When you’re not mindful, pleasant feelings habitually condition desire and longing, unpleasant feelings condition dislike and aversion, and neutral feelings condition delusion - that is, not really knowing what is going on.  Yet when we are mindful, these very same feelings become the vehicle of our freedom.” (p. 82)

So mindfulness of feelings tones (the Pali word is vedana) allows us to discern what is wholesome and what is not and to dissipate the chain reaction toward the unwholesome that can ensue before it takes root.  

And yet feelings tones are subtle.  We often either overlook them or are not even aware of them before we are launched head long into a negative reactivity pattern.  The good news is that if we miss the initial feeling tone, mindfulness can still weaken the progression into the unwholesome further into the chain of reactivity.  But the earlier mindfulness can be applied, the easier it is to stop the chain reaction.  It’s a little like putting out a smoldering cigarette in a waste paper basket before it catches fire and spreads to the curtains.  

Joseph goes on to quote the Buddha in a key aspect of this chain reaction:  “Being contacted by painful feeling one seeks delight in sensual pleasure.  For what reason?  Because the uninstructed worldling does not know of any escape from painful feelings other than sensual pleasure.”

Habitually, we turn toward sensual pleasure to escape from painful feelings.  And with mindfulness, these painful feelings can become our vehicle to freedom.  

"The Deathless"

When the Buddha-to-be left his family’s palace, left behind his fine clothes and comfortable bed, delicious delicacies, music and flowers, all the pleasures the body could possibly want, and even left behind his wife and son, he went in search of answers to the realizations he had discovered that this body will age, will become sick, will die.  A wandering monk with peaceful countenance was his beacon of hope.  

He came upon and studied with the two great masters of the day until each pronounced him to have learned all they could teach and invited him to stay and teach with them.  He studied and mastered deep meditations called absorptions or jhanas.  And he practiced mortification of the flesh as the ascetics taught until his skin hung from his bones.  But it wasn’t enough.  It did not solve the problem of aging, sickness, and death.

The ancients of that day, including the Buddha believed in reincarnation.  They believed that after all the suffering they experienced in this life time - and of course it wasn’t all suffering - that they would die only to be reborn either in a better situation or worse to do it all over again.  

Imagine for yourselves how that appeals.  As much as we don’t wish to die, does the prospect of starting all over in unknown circumstances after death seem inviting?  Yes and no, with a lot of emphasis on the no.  The suffering each human endures in their individual life times is enough to give one pause - no matter how favorable the circumstances - about doing it again.  And again.  And again.

We humans, not unreasonably, experience a lot of fear and trepidation about our futures.  Things may seem good now.  But how will our death come about?  Not without suffering, we can be fairly sure.  And even if our suffering seems bearable, we have only to look around us and read the news to learn that the human condition can be pretty awful.

One of the great discoveries the Buddha made upon his enlightenment was that he had found a way "to shuffle off this mortal coil” as the Bard said and NOT shuffle back on again in another life time.  He had discovered a way to end the endless round of lifetimes and suffering.  And as I mentioned before, he called it “the deathless.”  He had discovered the path to the end of the tyranny of the “lord of death.”

But his discovery of “the deathless” did not just apply to the endless round of lifetimes, which is good news for those of us not so schooled and invested in reincarnation.  His enlightenment was a transcendence within this life time of any fear of death.  And it was marked by great happiness.  

Bhikkhu Analayo, renowned teacher, practitioner and scholar of Early Buddhism and author of many scholarly books on the Buddha’s teachings, recently wrote a book shedding some light on this state of enlightenment or experience of “the deathless” entitled The Signless and The Deathless.  As a scholarly and carefully crafted text, it is not rapid reading.  

But what he has to say has relevance for us and our practice.  First, that enlightenment is not something you can force.  It will appear in its own time when the conditions are right.  The most important conditions involve sincere and dedicated practice to developing morality, concentration and wisdom.  These three pillars are essential and stand together as the foundation of freedom from suffering. Without any one of them, the other two are not sufficient.  

Beyond that, the mature practitioner must be willing to let go - completely.  Let go of what?  Of any attachments - to be free of desire and aversion and able to see clearly what is wholesome and what is not.  This letting go means a complete acceptance of impermanence, that this body will die, and therefore, a complete letting go of attachment to the body.  

And the mature practitioner must be willing to let go of identifying with any aspect of the body and mind that are subject to death and decay.  This is the idea of "not self" we have touched upon.  If we identify with the body, taking this mortal and impermanent body to be “me,” and appropriating this body of matter, of various anatomical parts,  of the four elements as “mine," we have taken for ourselves something that will die and decay.  But if we no longer identify with the body and all that belongs to the body which includes our feelings, perceptions, habits and volitional actions, and indeed even our consciousness, if we see their inherently non-self nature, we no longer take as “me" and “mine" that which will die.  And the enlightened state of “the deathless” can take place.  Just to be clear, we do not in any way get rid of the self, we simply realize there was no solid self there in the first place!

Bhikkhu Analayo quotes Sri Lankan Buddhist scholar and philosopher Karunadasa who writes, “…an arahant (enlightened one) is completely beyond old age and death from the moment of becoming a fully awakened one, due to no longer being in any way identified with the physical body (or the other aggregates.).  For this reason, those who have gone to the ‘death-free’ place - another term for the deathless - have reached complete freedom from any type of grief.”

This is the ideal that has motivated monks and lay people alike to leave their homes or change their lives, to devote long hours to practice, to go into seclusion by taking robes or going on retreats - in order to go beyond the endless rounds of suffering inherent even in this single lifetime, to achieve “the deathless”, and to reach complete freedom from any type of grief.  

And this was the quest that drew the Buddha from his life of comfort: to discover “the deathless” and freedom from any type of grief for himself and for all of those who would listen and practice.  

By now we have explored, at least in part, each aspect of the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness  - Mindfulness of the Body.  We have reviewed the better known practices of mindfulness of the breath in the body, body scans, mindfulness of the body in different postures, and mindfulness of the body in daily activities, daily movement.  

And we have touched on the less well-known, perhaps more esoteric practices of Mindfulness of the 32 body parts, Mindfulness of the 4 Elements and Mindfulness of our own mortality in the form of reflections around dying, and the last breath practice. 

The practices around mindfulness of death are offered as a means to help us learn how to live, to learn how to make the most of each moment of our precious lives, and to learn to know more completely how the present moment is a refuge from our endless regretful wanderings through the past and fearful imagining about our future.    

These practices also help us realize the essential truths of our lives that the Buddha taught over and over again and in as many different ways as he could, the truths about what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering, the Four Noble Truths of suffering, the causes for suffering, the end of suffering and the path out of suffering, and the essential truths of impermanence and non-self.  Learning to view the body as impermanent, as made of matter just like all material objects, and as subject to aging, sickness, and death, separation from all whom we love, and heir to the consequences of our actions can help us to live our lives knowing that the choices we make for each moment matter.  

We often put off making certain choices into the future, thinking there will be time.  These teachings encourage us to know that time is finite and that each action we take in each moment is a choice to be a certain way, to live a certain way.

Koun Franz, a Soto Zen priest, in Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, writes about “The Five Remembrances” in The Lion’s Roar. They are as follows:  1) I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old; 2) I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health; 3) I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death; 4) All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them; and 5) My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

This is what he had to say about Remembrance #5.  

Remembrance #5 is maybe the most interesting. “My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”  This is about karma. I’ve heard it said, and maybe you have as well, this phrase, that we own our actions “but not the fruits of our actions.”  We experience the consequences, but we don’t get to have the rewards. Within my tradition, Zen, we can understand this to a certain degree as practice–verification, Dogen’s central teaching that the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.

My life is being expressed 100% right now. This is what my life looks like right now. There’s no backstory. There’s no other thing that you don’t see. And it’s equally true for you wherever you are, whichever part of the world you’re in. However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.

What you choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences. And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters—so live like it does.

These are important and simple words.  “...the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.”  What we choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences which are outside of our control.  And also "However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.”

Each moment is the culmination of our lives so far.  Amazing.  So simple.  But also monumental.

This reflection on our actions and on our impermanence can bring greater importance to some of the tasks we may see for ourselves towards the end of our lives.  One of those tasks may be to make sure our priorities are in alignment with our understanding.  Some of you are now prioritizing family and friends over previous professional engagements.  Some of you may have begun to think about the disposition of your belongings - to family, friends, organizations that want or need them, but also the important task of disposing of belongings that have value to no one but ourselves.  Some of us have updated our wills; some have yet to begin that task.  An important consideration is to leave final wishes for our bodies, our memorial remembrances, and even how we would like our last moments to be.  

Many Buddhists believe that how we are in our final moments will condition our lives after that.  Many who may not believe in reincarnation may nevertheless feel that the final moment of transition is important.  Will we die by the same tenets and beliefs by which we have so passionately lived?  Will our last moments be in anger and resentment as one of my step-daughter’s was?  Or in confusion and shock?  Or perhaps in love and peaceful letting go?  How would we like these final moments to be?  Our own final moments are also conditioned by how we live in this moment, what choices we make for this moment of life.  

As Franz says, “What we do is the thing."

And as Thich Naht Hanh said and you have often heard me quote, "This moment is the mother of the next.  Take care of the mother and she will take care of the rest.”

By now we have explored, at least in part, each aspect of the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness  - Mindfulness of the Body.  We have reviewed the better known practices of mindfulness of the breath in the body, body scans, mindfulness of the body in different postures, and mindfulness of the body in daily activities, daily movement.  

And we have touched on the less well-known, perhaps more esoteric practices of Mindfulness of the 32 body parts, Mindfulness of the 4 Elements and Mindfulness of our own mortality in the form of reflections around dying, and the last breath practice. 

The practices around mindfulness of death are offered as a means to help us learn how to live, to learn how to make the most of each moment of our precious lives, and to learn to know more completely how the present moment is a refuge from our endless regretful wanderings through the past and fearful imagining about our future.    

These practices also help us realize the essential truths of our lives that the Buddha taught over and over again and in as many different ways as he could, the truths about what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering, the Four Noble Truths of suffering, the causes for suffering, the end of suffering and the path out of suffering, and the essential truths of impermanence and non-self.  Learning to view the body as impermanent, as made of matter just like all material objects, and as subject to aging, sickness, and death, separation from all whom we love, and heir to the consequences of our actions can help us to live our lives knowing that the choices we make for each moment matter.  

We often put off making certain choices into the future, thinking there will be time.  These teachings encourage us to know that time is finite and that each action we take in each moment is a choice to be a certain way, to live a certain way.

Koun Franz, a Soto Zen priest, in Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, writes about the Five Remembrances in The Lion’s Roar.  I attempted to send you all the article last week but wasn’t successful.  Just to review, they are as follows:  1) I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old; 2) I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health; 3) I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death; 4) All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them; and 5) My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

This is what he had to say about Remembrance #5.  

Remembrance #5 is maybe the most interesting. “My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”  This is about karma. I’ve heard it said, and maybe you have as well, this phrase, that we own our actions “but not the fruits of our actions.”  We experience the consequences, but we don’t get to have the rewards. Within my tradition, Zen, we can understand this to a certain degree as practice–verification, Dogen’s central teaching that the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.

My life is being expressed 100% right now. This is what my life looks like right now. There’s no backstory. There’s no other thing that you don’t see. And it’s equally true for you wherever you are, whichever part of the world you’re in. However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.

What you choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences. And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit. Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there? So Remembrance #5 is saying that what you do matters—so live like it does.

These are important and simple words.  “...the meaning of what we do is expressed, complete, in what we do. What we do is the thing.”  What we choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences which are outside of our control.  And also "However you’re sitting, however you’re breathing, that’s you—not just a version of you but the complete you, the culmination of your life.”

Each moment is the culmination of our lives so far.  Amazing.  So simple.  But also monumental.

This reflection on our actions and on our impermanence can bring greater importance to some of the tasks we may see for ourselves towards the end of our lives.  One of those tasks may be to make sure our priorities are in alignment with our understanding.  Some of you are now prioritizing family and friends over previous professional engagements.  Some of you may have begun to think about the disposition of your belongings - to family, friends, organizations that want or need them, but also the important task of disposing of belongings that have value to no one but ourselves.  Some of us have updated our wills; some have yet to begin that task.  An important consideration is to leave final wishes for our bodies, our memorial remembrances, and even how we would like our last moments to be.  

Many Buddhists believe that how we are in our final moments will condition our lives after that.  Many who may not believe in reincarnation may nevertheless feel that the final moment of transition is important.  Will we die by the same tenets and beliefs by which we have so passionately lived?  Will our last moments be in anger and resentment as one of my step-daughter’s was?  Or in confusion and shock?  Or perhaps in love and peaceful letting go?  How would we like these final moments to be?  Our own final moments are also conditioned by how we live in this moment, what choices we make for this moment of life.  

As Franz says, “What we do is the thing."

And as Thich Naht Hanh said and you have often heard me quote, "This moment is the mother of the next.  Take care of the mother and she will take care of the rest.”

This body was born...

We have been exploring the practices pertaining to Mindfulness of the Body, the first section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta or The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  This seminal Buddhist teaching serves as the basis for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and almost every meditation tradition taught with instructions and practices for developing mindfulness in all areas of our experience - the body, feelings, the mind, and the way things are. 

After highlighting mindfulness of the breath, of body postures, of all the bodily activities, we explored the lesser known practices of mindfulness of the anatomical parts and mindfulness of the four elements - earth, water, fire, and wind.  Finally we have come to the last practice offered in this Mindfulness of the Body section of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta - mindfulness of death, of the mortality of this body.  This is the great challenge of our lives that follows upon the very first fact of our existence:  Our bodies were born and our bodies will die.  We take our first breath creating the conditions that we will certainly take our last.

Death is natural and comes for every living creature.  Change happens as well to everything on our earth - animate or inanimate.  Mountains arise and crumble and fall.  Rivers flow, are diverted, dry up or become new oceans.  Land sinks into the seas.  Water covers what was once dry land.  And for us, for trees, for animals of all sizes, when the conditions are right, our bodies are born or sprout and when the conditions are no longer right, our bodies will die.

This undeniable fact causes us a great deal of angst and leads to our worst habit patterns, our busyness, our combativeness, our competitiveness, our acquisitiveness.  If we have more wealth, more power, more friends, more food, more activities, we can stave off the specter of our own death.  Or so we think in some dark recess of our deluded minds.

The Buddha’s teaching was very simple.  Turn toward our thoughts and concepts of death, explore them, become intimate with the fact of our own impending demise.  Why?  Not to weigh us down with worry, care, or terror but to liberate us from the delusion that it has to be otherwise for us, that this body won’t die (not yet, not now, not me, maybe sometime in the far, far future) - to liberate us from the debilitating fear of our own mortality.  

Enlightenment is also known as "the deathless" precisely because it is a state in which we no longer fear the death of the body.

But the Buddha had another purpose in urging us to practice mindfulness of death.  And that is for us to wake up to the astonishing fact of our lives and, as we come to understand how fragile these bodies are, how uncertain our lifespan, we begin to use our time more wisely, to begin to practice with the beautiful qualities of mind and to let go of our extreme attachment to these perishable bodies with compassion and wisdom. 

The death reflections recommended by the Buddha help us wake up to the urgency of our predicament, just as he did 2500 years ago when he realized the nature of our bodies to grow old, sicken, and die and left the palace and his family to seek answers.  And with his example, we learn that we too can cast off ignorance and understand what leads toward happiness and freedom from suffering and what does not.

These practices can be sobering but they also can bring a sense of relief and joy as we let go of what cannot be held and relax into this single moment of our lives, this instant of awareness and discover the beautiful, peaceful states of being already there awaiting us.  

Restoring ourselves to flight...

To continue with my two parallel tracks from last week, after the first paragraph where the Buddha pronounced this teaching of the four satipaṭṭhānas or abodes of mindfulness, "the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of dukkah (suffering) and discontent, for acquiring the true method, for the realization of Nibbana (Nirvana),” he goes on in the next paragraph to tell us not only what are the four but also with what attitude we should practice.  

"What are the four?  Here, monks, in regard to the body a monk abides contemplating the body, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to feelings, a monk abides contemplating feelings, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to the mind, a monk abides contemplating the mind, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.  In regard to the dhammas, a monk abides contemplating the dhammas, diligent, clearly comprehending, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.” 

With regard to all of these realms of experience, we are urged to practice mindfulness with the urgency that comes from knowing our time on this earth is finite and unknowable, with clear knowing which comes from interest and investigation, and, of course, mindfulness, which is a quality of mind that arises when we place our awareness intentionally on an object in our experience, shining the light of our awareness on how we know what we know.  Clear knowing and mindfulness support each other and each contains qualities of the other.  And we are encouraged to practice free of desire (wanting) and discontent (aversion or not wanting).  

In our exploration of the first satipaṭṭhāna or abode of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body, we have explored and will explore again, mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness while sitting, standing, walking and lying down, mindfulness while stretching the limbs, eating our meals, doing our daily routines of self-care, shopping, driving, talking on the phone - in short, mindfulness in all our activities.

More recently we explored mindfulness of anatomical parts.  This meditation was pronounced “weird” as indeed it is.  One of its purposes is for us to see more clearly what this body we inhabit and have so many thoughts about is really made up of.  And many of them are off-putting.  This view of the body as unlovely is purposefully encouraged to lighten our attachment to it and to cool off sensual passions that might arise in meditating.

The last two meditations of mindfulness of the body are mindfulness of the body as made up of elements - earth, water, fire, and wind - and mindfulness of the mortality of the body, that this body will die.  

We will explore these last two arenas of mindfulness of the body to see what they have to teach us and how they can enhance our ability to live our lives fully and well for as long as we have.

This last meditation on dying is one that leads directly into the other parallel path I have been exploring on these pages - compassion for ourselves and for others as we wend our ways through this path of living in this challenging existence.

*  *  *  *  *

I recently received this very relevant article from 10% Happier by Dr. Susan Pollok on collective trauma with her prescription of three practices for working with our own corner of the universe of collective trauma.  I wanted to highlight this wonderful quote from meditation teacher and climate activist Joanna Macy, 

“Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.”   

She urges us to relax into our sadness, our anger, to just be with our natural, human responses to the crises we see and experience all around.  Trying to pretend everything is OK when it isn’t is what divides us from ourselves and from each other.

I will write about the first of Dr. Pollak’s three prescriptions here which is walking meditation.  The importance of walking meditation, of movement in meditation cannot be over stressed.  Every meditation teacher I have ever read encourages walking or some form of movement for working with our triggered emotional states.  Thich Naht Hanh instructed his monks and nuns traumatized from the Viet Nam war to practice walking meditation.  Trauma specialist and creator of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine, author of Waking The Tiger and In An Unspoken Voice, stresses the importance of movement to help release our physiologies from their trauma-induced immobility response.  And in these pages, I have recently referred to Heather Sundberg’s Six Practice Points for working with collective trauma, the first of which is movement and Pawan Bareja's movement related practices one of which we have been practicing in our sessions together.   

As a reluctant practitioner of walking practice (I walk a lot, but less often do I do "walking practice"), I have come to appreciate again and again the value and importance of dedicated walking practice.  Immobility as a freeze response to trauma can build up around watching the news, checking our phones, email accounts, texts message, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc etc etc.  And despair can begin to settle in around those static avoidance measures.  Just getting up and walking up and down can be so helpful.  If you’re able to do it in pleasant surroundings, your own backyard, a nearby park, a forest or shoreline, the pleasant sensations can begin to make themselves known and soothe our furrowed brows while the motion gently rocks us into wakefulness.

Yesterday I heard a loud thump on one of my windows.  When I went out to investigate, I found a beautiful red-winged blackbird motionless on the ground near a window.  I picked him/her up and was saddened when her head flopped.  But then she lifted it upright with her beak open.  I gently lifted her up and down, up and down in the air over my head.  The gentle motion mimics flight and can begin to restore her physiological processes.  Then I attempted to put her on a branch.  She fell to the ground with a thunk, but then sat up again.  I gently picked her up and, at the unaccustomed touch, her wings suddenly fluttered and she took off, swooping low while she regained flight and then soaring up.  

This was a direct demonstration of what Peter Levine talks about when he talks about immobility-induced by trauma.  When the normal fight or flight process is interrupted by unconsciousness or hopelessness or entrapment, our animal physiology gets short-circuited.  This can be life-saving in any number of situations.  But we can get stuck in the immobility response and the trauma can settle in our tissues.  When we are encouraged to activate our bodies, as my motions did with the red-winged black bird, it encourages the body to complete the physiological response of fight or flight and thus naturally restore itself to equilibrium.

We too can restore ourselves to flight - with movement practice.

I seem to be writing, thinking on two parallel tracks.  One is compassion and resiliency, collective reactivity or collective trauma, and practices to ease our frozenness, our numbness, our freeze response (of fight, flight or freeze) or conversely our agitation, our restlessness, our inability to connect with ourselves and others.  

The other track is delving into the practices of the foundational Buddhist teaching called The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, otherwise known as The Four Foundations or Abodes of Mindfulness.  After the customary introductory paragraph stating where this teaching was first offered, the teaching begins with these words of the Buddha’s:  

“Monks, this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of dukkah (suffering) and discontent, for acquiring the true method, for the realization of Nibbana (Nirvana), namely, the four satipaṭṭhānas.”  

This statement gives some idea the regard with which the Buddha held these mindfulness teachings.

We’ve been exploring some of the practices from the first satipaṭṭhāna, Mindfulness of the Body.  We’ll continue that exploration tonight.  

*  *  *  *  *

This week I spoke with some fellow meditators about time and our perception of time.  One theme resonated throughout the group.  When we are suffering, time seems to stretch out forever.  A minute of acute pain for instance feels like an eternity.  Getting stuck in the security line at an airport when the scanner breaks down can trigger rising agitation.  When I am caught in reactivity, there is a strong impatience with the present moment of suffering.  Another word for that impatience is aversion.  The present moment in those instances becomes intolerable and the sense that something must change arises.

Our group noticed how this manifests during meditation - periods of restlessness and agitation may arise during which the minutes pass slowly.  I’ll check the clock and be aghast that only 3 minutes has passed and wonder how I will manage to sit through the intended 45 minutes.  At other times, periods of deep calm pervade during which I am unaware of “time” and emerge at some point later surprised at how much “time” has passed.  

Noted meditation teacher, Rob Burbea wrote in Seeing that Frees, “ ...the sense of time becomes more prominent when there is a greater degree of craving or aversion to something... Conversely, when grasping and aversion are relaxed the sense of time becomes much lighter.” (p. 350)

As the group pondered this changing relationship with time, we examined instances when time became burdensome and when it lightened.  Finally, one person said in epiphany, “There is no time!  The connection is everything.”   We all nodded in understanding.

When we are in connection - either with our deepest selves or with others - in genuine connection, not just superficial or unsatisfying conversations, time recedes into the mists as the flow of that connection nourishes our spirits.

And this is where the conversation around resiliency becomes rich and illuminative.  When we find ways to soothe and nourish ourselves through our mediation practices or through our connections/interactions/mutual assistance with others in friendships, support groups, community events, volunteer work, etc., we strengthen our core values, we become more fluent in conversing with ourselves, and we forge bonds of connection, mutual support and understanding with others.   

This slide came from a course of on "Transforming Climate Trauma" offered by James Baraz and others.  

As you peruse it, one thing becomes clear. We need each other.  We can’t do this alone.  

And we need to be in alignment with ourselves.  We can’t do it without being in deep connection to ourselves either.  

On Compassion...again and again...

Last week I reviewed the six practices for working with collective reactivity/collective trauma introduced by Heather Sundberg and Manuela Mischke-Reeds.  The fifth practice was that of compassion.

The need for compassion in our lives is pervasive - whether in our individual struggles with our thoughts and mind states, sadness, worry, or anxiety about our selves or our friends and family, or, more often than we can even bear, on the world stage.  This week’s news out of Russia of the Alexei Navalny’s death pierced people around the world with sadness and anguish.  At the same time, often in the same news cycle, the attack on and closure of the hospital in southern Gaza with a single line that some patients had to be left behind was the latest event in the ongoing horror of that war.  We are all affected by the suffering of others.  These two examples highlight collective trauma.

There is great wisdom in just admitting there is suffering.  We want happiness so much for ourselves and others that it is sometimes hard to stop and say, this really sad, or this is heartbreaking.  And yet this is exactly the point where compassion and freedom from suffering begins.  Compassion starts with the first noble truth - there is suffering. 

Suffering is not a failure.  Let me repeat that.  Suffering is not a failure.  But we sometimes treat it that way.  We can get entangled in the myths of happiness in our culture that we come to believe that it’s our fault if we’re not happy.  So just admitting there is suffering, this hurts, puts us in intimate relationship with our own experience at the same time it allows us to be in relationship with the huge community of others who are also suffering.  

Compassion has an uplifting quality to it.  As soon as we have turned toward our suffering and allowed compassion to arise, we may feel a subtle release from that suffering.  Compassion is one of the good guys riding to the rescue.  

I was reminded recently of the three steps of compassion - 1) turning toward the suffering with the thought, this hurts, or this is suffering, 2) recognizing the community of fellow human beings walking this planet who are also suffering (and deeply understanding that there is no hierarchy of suffering that says one person has more of a right to suffer than another), and 3) offering ourselves active compassion - in a hug or caress, in whatever words resonate comfort, “This is hard.  There, there.  It’s OK, sweetie.  This too shall pass.”  We can also soothe ourselves with poetry, with an offer of compassion or a period of meditation, with a cup of tea, with a brief period of meditation on our breath, or by bringing ourselves into relationship with nature by gazing at birds, trees or clouds in the neighborhood, or immersion in a nearby forest or nature preserve.

The second step is often overlooked but it is critically important - that of recognizing the community of people, known or unknown, who are also suffering.  This opening our hearts to ourselves and to others in a similar state eases the debilitating sense of loneliness that can accompany suffering and the sense of harsh self-judgment that can be present.

This sense of aloneness can also be a collective one.  Sometimes we’ll hear in an televised interview with someone caught in an attack the anguished question, why didn’t someone come?  Does anybody know what’s happening here?  Where is the rest of the world?  

I want to end with this story from Mr. Rogers, of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood:

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. ‘“  Mar 24, 2020

"To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world," he wrote in "The Mister Rogers Parenting Book.”"

So perhaps, when we are suffering, we can remember that somewhere - close by or far away - someone else is suffering and looking for a helper.  Can we, out of the compassion that arises from our own suffering, become one of those helpers?

Resources for Working with Collective Trauma

Meditation teacher Heather Sundberg and Manuela Mischke-Reeds, psychologist, who have collaborated to develop somatic practices to counter Collective Reactivity and Collective Trauma, developed these Six Practices for restoring resiliency.  These are as follows:  1) Remember to move when any sense of overwhelm or reactivity is sensed.  Even when or especially when sitting in meditation, you can bring subtle movements into the body.  We practiced with placing the hands on the thighs and gently pressing each finger down in turn.  So movement doesn’t have to be large or gross or disruptive to the meditation but enough to bring us back to our bodies and interrupt any movement toward the freeze mode of fight, flight or freeze or numb out or disassociate.  2) Turn toward the water element in the body.  This means bringing awareness to wetness in the mouth or eyes or the way water moves in the torso in response to the breath as the lungs expand. 3) Bring awareness to your perception of aliveness in the body.  This might be found in the internal tingling, resonances, movements found in the hands or feet or perhaps movements in the torso, or sensations in the skin and muscles of the arms and shoulders.   4) Bring Mindfulness to bear to recognize, accept, and investigate your experience - perhaps checking to see if one of the hindrances are present (wanting, not wanting, agitation or restlessness, sleepiness or torpor, doubt).  5) Offer Compassion to yourself by a self hug or caress, by murmuring to yourself, “This is hard.  May I have compassion for this suffering. May I accept myself as I am.”  This directly activates awareness of the First Noble Truth - There is Suffering.  And 6) Savoring the Pleasant.  When we become aware of a pleasant experience, looking at a sunset or bright day, enjoying a moment with a friend or family member, pet, or child, enjoying a concert, all of these and more can soothe and restore our minds.  So the idea of this practice is to savor the pleasantness rather than nodding briefly to it and stepping over it looking for the next problem.  These practices can become a part of your resiliency tool kit and can travel with you anywhere.

This weekend I attended a one day, on-line workshop/retreat with Pawan Bareja called "Rejuvenation, Relaxation, and Resiliency” offered through Spirit Rock Center for Mindfulness in California.  Pawan Baraja works with trauma on both an individual and collective level.  I first became acquainted with her as she offered practices to counter reactivity and freeze in a course on resiliency in the face of environmental emergency/crisis.  

On Saturday she talked about how we can increase our resiliency through practices supporting letting go, gratitude, and forgiveness. Tonight* I’ll share a body practice she offered that is a great preparation for sitting practice but also for easing reactivity and also for general relaxation.

And I’d like to dip into a practice offered in the Sattipathana Sutta. This is one of the foundational teachings of the Buddha that I introduced briefly last fall.  You may recognized it as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  The four are as follows:  Mindfulness of the Body, Mindfulness of Feeling Tone (positive, negative, or neutral), Mindfulness of the Mind which includes thoughts, emotions, mind states, and Mindfulness of the Dharma which translates as both the way things are and the teachings of the Buddha.  If you’ll recall, mindfulness was one of the path factors of the Noble Eight-Fold path found in the Fourth Noble Truth.  (I repeat this often to help make these terms and teachings a bit more familiar to you.) The practice I want to touch on tonight is another way of practicing Mindfulness of the Body called Mindfulness of Anatomical Parts.  This practice might fall under the heading above of practices for letting go and heightens awareness of aspects of the body as individual parts to foster a more curious and dispassionate relationship to the body thereby loosening our attachment and/or our aversion to our bodies.  

* The class referred to in these pages is Mindfulness Meditation for Stress Reduction, a free on-line class offered Monday evenings at 5:30pm through Innerlight Center for Yoga and Meditation. https://www.innerlightyoga.com/

On Collective Reactivity or Collective Trauma

Last week I mentioned collective trauma in this space and in the brief teaching during the meditation hour.  One brave individual to whom I am most grateful asked what did this mean - this collective trauma.

To bring it back to language with which we are more familiar, "collective reactivity” - "collective trauma” - is becoming more widely recognized and acknowledged in the meditation and mindfulness world.  Earlier practice and our experiences of the world were held in a more individual way.  We examined our individual experiences of our five senses and our minds without much reference to what others were experiencing except to say that we often had similar experiences.  We might see a sunset and be compelled to stop and stare, hear a bird and delight, hear a jack hammer and be annoyed or stressed.  We might feel restless on the cushion and work with our own restlessness reassured that others also sometimes felt restless.  It was the way of the mind.  Watching our mind jump around was such a common experience that it was given the name “monkey mind” and considered an achievement to become aware of it.

But it was still our individual experience world that we were examining, reacting to, learning from, practicing with.

The pandemic changed all that.  We all became much more anxious about this disease that was affecting everybody.  No class of people, nation, neighborhood, socioeconomic plane was safe from the scourge.  Doctors and nurses weren’t safe, couldn’t go home for fear of infecting their families.  Even government officials were getting it.  

Dr. Judson Brewer, author of “Unwinding Anxiety” and researcher into the brain and mindfulness, gave 5 minute daily talks on unwinding that anxiety.  In one of his more illuminative talks, he said our anxiety was contagious.  Just as we could sneeze on somebody and give them a cold,  we could “sneeze” our anxiety on to others and infect them with our anxiety.  I witnessed this first hand a number of times before I caught on - as I would anxiously recount statistics or hospital news to a friend and see them become more anxious.  We were all so anxious that we would begin to boil over with a little prompting from somebody else’s anxiety “sneeze.” 

Thank heaven for the burgeoning of on-line practices groups, retreats, talks.  This very group formed in July of 2020 out of our common need to come together for support, solace, practice, meditation, and calming.

I listened to a talk today by Heather Sundberg whom I mentioned last week in connection with the Six Practices for restoring resiliency in the face of collective reactivity.

These are mindfulness and somatic (body centered) practices that were developed by her teacher and colleague Manuela Mischke-Reeds and others at the Hacomi Institute.  Hacomi is a an alternative therapy that uses mindfulness and somatic practices to restore balance to people suffering from collective trauma, PTSD, and other more elevated forms of dis-ease.  

This is Manuela Mischke-Reeds definition of collective reactivity - collective trauma: 

 “Collective reactivity or collective trauma – is an experience which affects the psychological health of the whole of the society.  And it tears apart the previous fabric of what we know to be true and real.  These experiences happen over time and are ongoing.  They can create a crisis of meaning.  They can also influence large scale change of societal norms or even collective identity.”

On the short list for situations that produce collective trauma or reactivity are wars, natural disasters, pandemic, collective unrest, and climate change.  We currently are experiencing the overlapping of all five of these conditions with wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, wild fires, atmospheric rivers, huge storms, the Covid pandemic, the polarization of our politics here and around the world, and the escalation of global warming.

As the meditation path progresses, we may have cycles in our practice of this tearing apart of the previous fabric of what we know to be true or real. This is one of the many definitions of insight, direct experience.  So we have some experience building that resiliency. 

So it may become increasingly important for us to learn to recognize and acknowledge for ourselves how we are affected by collective reactivity and to practice ways of calming ourselves so that we can bring our best selves to bear when confronted with these increasingly common anxiety producing events and so that we can share these practices with others and contribute to increasing collective resiliency.

Poem from Stephen Levine

Today I am reminded of this poem by Stephen Levine:  

If prayer would do it

I'd pray.

If reading esteemed thinkers would do it

I'd be halfway through the Patriarch.

If discourse would do it

I'd be sitting with His Holiness

every moment he was free.

If contemplation would do it

I'd have translated the Periodic Table

to hermit poems, converting

matter to spirit.

If even fighting would do it

I'd already be a black belt.

If anything other than love could do it

I've done it already

and left the hardest for last.

                                    ~~Stephen Levine

As we contemplate Right View, Right Intention, and Right Action, perhaps we might consider putting love, compassion, kindness right up there at the top of our list of qualities to foster and reflect upon.  And perhaps we might even consider putting ourselves at the top of the list of those to whom we would offer our love, compassion, and kindness.  And, of course, not stop there.

Now more than ever.  

From January 18th: Intentions and Right View

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about intentions and how this beginning of the new year is a good time to reflect on our intentions for ourselves - both long and short term.  Our intentions can act like a moral compass - helping us orient to what we perceive is the best and highest aspirations for ourselves and our lives.

However, right intention is the second factor in The Noble Eight-fold path.  The first factor is Right View.  Right View is about knowing on a deep level how the world works, how our minds work, and especially what leads to happiness and what leads to suffering.  As Bhikku Bodhi says in my favorite The Noble Eight Fold Path, the Buddha saw no single factor “ so responsible for the arising of unwholesome states of mind as wrong view, and no factor so helpful for the arising of wholesome states of mind as right view….no single factor so responsible for the suffering of living beings as wrong view, and no factor so potent in promoting the good of living beings as right view."  He further writes that our view of the world “governs our attitudes, our actions, our whole orientation to existence."  Whether we fully understand what our views are, they are shaping how we approach and act in our world.

It is of supreme importance that our views and our intentions - whether or not we fully understand them - condition our actions.  This example comes from “The Noble Eight Fold Path: Right Intentions” on the Contemplative Studies website.   

"Intentions are the drivers of actions. They involve thoughtful directions to produce wholesome outcomes. The simplest way to look at 'Right Intentions' is as the aspiration to create greater happiness, wisdom, and well-being, and relieve suffering in ourselves and others. This is where 'Right View' comes in and provides the wisdom to discern which aspirations are likely to produce wholesome outcomes. We may start the day with the intent to help others in need and discern that donating an hour of our time to volunteer work at a homeless shelter would likely produce greater happiness, wisdom, and well-being, and relieve suffering. This is right intention at work, derived from 'Right View' and producing 'Right Actions.' It is critical that the intention is wholesome. The same action, donating time, might be motivated by a desire to appear kind and generous to others, to obtain a tax deduction, or to impress a romantic interest who also volunteers. All of these are intentions governed by desires and are not part of the path. So, the action is important but only to the extent that it is motivated by a 'Right Intentions.’”

By this example, we can see immediately the importance of motivation.  Actions motivated by greed, hatred or delusion (or any of the other softer ways of expressing wanting, not wanting, and confusion) serve to further our own worldly benefit and are not part of the spiritual path.  Actions motivated by generosity, loving kindness, renunciation reflect the “right view” of what leads to lasting happiness in this world and what doesn’t.

So as we spend time with “Right View,” “Right Intention,” and “Right Action,” we may find that it’s OK to plan a trip to lie in the sun and play in the surf in a warmer climate.  But we may also find more heart and more lasting happiness in a trip planned to see family and strengthen connections or to visit a sacred site or to engage in activities that ease the burdens of others through volunteer work or other projects.

This is, I’m sure, a contemplation many of you have already engaged in.  And as our lives progress, this contemplation becomes more and more important as a key part of the art of living the best life we can with the time we have been given.  

The key contemplation is what leads to suffering and what leads to the end of suffering.

Not self versus No Self versus a Healthy Sense of Self

Just a little more clarity and paths for further exploration about this important but confusing topic of “not self:”

Jack Engler, well known psychologist and meditator who died in March of this year, famously said, “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”  (see excerpt from a Tricycle article below)  From the psychological point of view, we need to have a healthy sense of self before we can understand and integrate the teaching of not-self.  

The teaching is more clearly understand as saying “not self” as in thoughts are not self, emotions are not self, the body doesn’t contain a self that it’s control of everything.  The Buddha was not denying our existence as “No self” implies.  But the investigation into how we appropriate things around us as me and mine - turning feelings, processes, people, and events that are not under our control into aspects of our own egos for the purpose of lifting ourselves up or tearing ourselves down - can lead to greater freedom from the burden of carrying all of our selfing around with us and having to live up to it. 

Importantly, according to Sally and Guy Armstrong, "This means, in part, we should not use the teachings to deny a sense of self or the importance of healing past wounds and trauma.”

Tonight there will be a little time for questions and comments about non-self or any other aspect of the understandings and practice of mindful meditation in the Insight tradition.  

From The Tricycle Obituary, by Joan Duncan Oliver, March 21, 2023:

 Clinical psychologist Jack Engler, PhD, widely acknowledged for his seminal work in linking Buddhist practice and Western psychology, died on March 12 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was 83. 

Armed with a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago and intense study with the Theravada Buddhist masters Anagarika Munindra and Dipa Ma, Engler had a long and storied career as a psychotherapist in private practice and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, as well as a Vipassana practitioner and occasional meditation teacher with strong ties to the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. In bridging the worlds of Western psychodynamic thinking and Buddhist practice, Engler will forever be remembered for his pithy summation of the development of the self and its relinquishment: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” 

No mere throwaway line, it emerged from his clinical work as a therapist and his experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation. He first included that observation on self and non-self in an article published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1984. After the article was reprinted two years later in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, a book Engler co-authored with Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, the “epithet,” as he later called it, became a trope. His thesis on what he saw as “two great arcs of human development”—one leading to the individuated self, the other to a contemplative or transpersonal stage beyond it—garnered “a fair amount of criticism and notoriety from friends and colleagues for its developmental position,” he later acknowledged. His response to his critics and an effort to clarify his meaning was “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Re-examination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism,” a chapter in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, edited by Jeffrey D. Safran and published in 2003.

Three Marks of Existence...

We’ve come a long way in exploring the truth of the Buddha’s teachings.  And now we’ve come to the foundational practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation.  In Insight Meditation, as taught at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre MA, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA and in hundreds of smaller Insight Meditation centers around the country, and which is one of the foundations of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the purpose of our practice is to discover the truth of the three marks of existence, the three characteristics that are inherent in every experience we have, every phenomenon we can perceive.  These marks or characteristics are impermanence, suffering, and non-self.  It is this exploration that leads to wisdom and freedom.

In order to go forward, I want to go back to an email I sent in May 2023 where I quoted at some length from Bhikku Bodhi’s treasure of a book -  The Noble Eightfold Path - Way to the End of Suffering.  I often find it uplifting to read some of the teachings multiple times.  This quotation is one such teaching.  

According to Wikipedia, "Bhikkhu Bodhi, born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk, ordained in Sri Lanka and currently teaching in the New York and New Jersey area.”  He is well-known as an author but also as an editor and translator of Buddhist teachings.

He wrote this in his chapter on mindfulness.  

“The Buddha says that the Dhamma, the ultimate truth of things, is directly visible, timeless, calling out to be approached and seen.  He says further that it is always available to us, and that the place it is to be realized is within oneself. The ultimate truth, the Dhamma, is not something mysterious and remote, but the truth of our own experience.  It can be reached only by understanding our experience, by penetrating it right through to its foundations.  This truth, in order to become liberating truth, has to be known directly.  It is not enough merely to accept it on faith, to believe it on the authority of books or a teacher, or to think it out through deductions and inferences.  It has to be known by insight, grasped and absorbed by a kind of knowing which is also an immediate seeing.  

“What brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is the mental faculty called in Pāli sati, usually translated as “mindfulness.”  Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness.  Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness.  All consciousness involves awareness in the sense of a knowing or experience of an object.  But with the practice of mindfulness, awareness is applied at a special pitch.  The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment.  In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event.  All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped.  The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.  The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

“ It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage.  Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness.  In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it.  Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum (NB: Facticity!  Great word!) The cognitive process is generally interpretative.  The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. (my Italics) Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions.  To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs - sets of mutually corroborative concepts - then weaves the construct together into complex interpretative schemes.  In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.  

“The Buddha calls this process of mental construction papañca, “elaboration,” “embellishment,” or “conceptual proliferation.”  The elaborations block out the presentational immediacy of phenomena; they let us know the object only “at a distance,” not as it really is.  But the elaborations do not only screen cognition; they also serve as a basis for projections.  The deluded mind, cloaked in ignorance, projects its own internal constructs outwardly, ascribing them to the object as if they really belonged to it.  As a result, what we know as the final object of cognition, what we use as the basis for our values, plans, and actions, is a patchwork product, not the original article.  To be sure, the product is not wholly illusion, not sheer fantasy.  It takes what is given in immediate experience as its groundwork and raw material, but along with this it includes something else: the embellishments fabricated by the mind.”  

It is thought that what occurs in our minds is about 92% our embellishments (I mistakenly wrote this the opposite way round in the original email) which leaves a very small percentage for the raw experience of the original perception. Whether the percentage is correct, it’s clear that a great deal is add-ons, proliferations of our minds made up and scotched-taped on, reflecting what we want, what we don’t want, and otherwise how we are deluded.

"The embellishments fabricated by the mind” are not just random and without purpose.  We face a great uncertain certainty in our lives.  That which is born will die, that which arises will pass away.  This is an inescapable truth and yet we live our lives in the delusion that it won’t happen to us, won’t happen to those we love, won’t happen to things we possess.  

The delusions we live with and with which we embellish our experience are the delusions that things are lasting, that happiness can be found in attaining what we want and avoiding what we don’t want, and that there is a solid self to whom all of this is happening.  These delusions can be gradually dispelled as we practice.  A foundational part of our practice is to see that all experience, all phenomena are impermanent, within each experience is suffering (often the suffering that things are impermanent), and that there is no solid self in any of it, not our bodies, not our minds.  These are known as the three marks of existence, or three characteristics of all phenomena - the truths of impermanence, suffering, and non-self.  

What may seem counterintuitive is that learning the truth of these teachings is the path to liberation from suffering.  In its simplest, least explicable form, if there is not a solid self to whom all of this is happening, there is no one in control, no one creating suffering and no one to suffer.  Life unfolds according to causes and conditions, uncomfortable experiences can be held with kind attention as simply the way things are, that good and bad experiences alike are impermanent, are suffering only when we hold on to them, cling to them, and are void of a solid self to whom all of this is happening.  

The self in psychology and in Buddhism is a mental fabrication we create over and over again to give ourselves the illusion of that things are permanent, that suffering can be avoided, and that we are in control.  Freedom is available to us in the fading of those delusions.    

As the Buddha once famously said, For whatever one imagines a thing to be, the truth is ever other than that. 

We’ll delve more deeply into these teachings in the coming weeks.  

Lessons from "The Dance of Connection"

A number of years ago I read a couple of books in Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.’s bestselling series The Dance of… as in The Dance of Anger, The Dance of Intimacy, etc.  This story from The Dance of Connection has been showing up over and over again for me in the past few weeks. 

Two little kids are playing together in a sandbox in the park with their pails and shovels.  Suddenly a huge fight breaks out, and one of them runs away, screaming, “ I hate you!  I hate you!”  In no time at all they’re back in the sandbox, playing together as if nothing has happened.

Two adults observe the interaction from a nearby bench.  “Did you see that?” one comments in admiration.  “How do children do that?  They were enemies five minutes ago.”

"It’s simple," the other replies.  “They choose happiness over righteousness.”

Over the last couple of years this simple story has surfaced and wandered around my memory, its very simplicity giving it an immediacy and relevance to a couple of connection-disconnection scenarios I was witnessing.    

It goes like this.  With long time relationships, family, friends, or colleagues in a shared endeavor, it is inevitable that occasionally someone screws up big time and/or a series of small mishaps and larger decisions get reinterpreted and mis-interpreted and boom!  there are hurt feelings, lack of communication, people saying things they wish they hadn’t and not asking the right questions they wish they had, making assumptions about what the other person or people want.  As a country we may be caught in such a quagmire.

There is anger, fury even, righteous indignation (remember that phrase?), separation, not speaking.  The silence of cutoff, uncoupling, sulking, licking of wounds, and then the endless babble of self-justification, spinning thoughts, replaying the event and always coming to the same conclusion in a sort of comfortable/uncomfortable trap.  

But something happens over time.  Anger is exhausting because it continually needs to be refueled, restored.  It doesn’t have an organic coherence of its own that self-propels and grows after the initial mushroom cloud is spent.  Especially if mindfulness is present.  

Out of these ashes a memory surfaces of the friendship that was like a shoot of grass, Oh, yes, we had a great conversation in the cloakroom of this restaurant, or Oh, that person offered me an opportunity to that changed my life, or We used to have such a good time, toasting each other with a glass of wine.  And these memories are fed from a vast ground of love, kindness, friendship that was the relationship before the blow out.  How the climbing back into the sandbox occurs is a mystery but it must start with a softening of the mind and heart and find its way into some invitation.  Sometimes there is a mediator who plants seeds and opportunities and keeps the welcome mat out for all.  Sometimes there is just a realization that life doesn’t give you endless supplies of dear friends and relatives. 

And eventually the ground of good feeling towards the other that was always there rises up and the anger disappears as if it had never been.  This is a good sign for the universe.  And clearly it’s not as straightforward as that on the world scene, but the fact that it occurs at all can give us hope and renewed intentions for our practice.  This is one of the freedoms we yearn for - freedom from anger and hostility, freedom to care and have compassion for ourselves and others, freedom to delight in the good fortune of others.  And this freedom to move in the direction of love can bring us peace and equanimity.

Of course, we see many examples when the harm caused is greater than what can easily be overcome. We have learned to send loving kindness and compassion to all those caught in these devastating circumstances.  And we look for ways to help when we can.  

But even as we may feel relatively safe in our daily lives from those more destructive conflicts, our daily lives are the arena we can practice in.  We learn to turn our attention to the inner workings of our minds and hearts, to care for our own hurt places, to begin to recognize pride and ego and when we might have acted unskillfully or out of misinformation.  We also learn to wait, give space to others while events unfold or soften or whatever that mysterious process is when anger begins to give way to the underlying current of caring.  And we can learn from our past missteps and learn to step up sooner and perhaps even more fiercely for what we believe.

And yes, larger losses are inevitable.  And the possibility exists that unskillful thoughts and actions will lead to irrevocable harm.  

So we practice with the wish and the intention that the wisdom that grows from our practice will guide us and those around us through these difficult patches with as little lasting harm and as much healing as possible.   We learn to climb back in the sandbox when we can - with perhaps the spirit of inquiry and investigation, letting go of anger and especially righteous indignation.

Equanimity...the balancing state of mind...

And finally we come to equanimity.  We’ve touched on this state of mind in the past.  It’s a quality of mind we would most like to have and which seems the hardest to attain whether we are in the midst of the confusions and distractions of daily life with teenagers or spouses, pets and houses, mishaps while traveling, or whether we’re encountering the more serious vicissitudes of life - the loss of loved ones, health issues, and the decline of the body through aging.  When things go wrong, our carefully cultivated equanimity seems to fly out the window.  

Equanimity is the fourth of the sublime states or Brahma Viharas after Loving kindness, Compassion, and Sympathetic Joy.  The Pali words are metta, karuna, mudita, and upekkha.  The late meditation teacher Ayya Keema calls them “our highest emotions” and “the only ones worth having.”  She said, "We’re all looking for an ideal world, but it can exist only in our own heart, and for this we have to develop our heart’s capacity so that we learn to love independently.” ~~ “What Are the Four Brahmaviharas?” Lion’s Roar , Nov. 2019

Equanimity is the balancing emotion of the four.  We cultivate loving kindness towards ourselves and others.  When loving kindness encounters suffering, it engenders compassion.  When it meets joy, it responds with sympathetic joy or joy in the good fortune of others.  Equanimity balances them all so that loving kindness doesn’t constrict into attachment, so that the compassion doesn’t overwhelm us with grief or sorrow, and so that we don’t become giddy with joy for another.  It helps us attain the quality of limitlessness so that loving kindness extends to all - not because they are deserving but because they are living beings. We train our hearts in these emotions so that we can extend them to all beings.

Jack Kornfield writes that “To find equanimity and peace requires an acceptance of the mystery of life itself.”  We are formed out of the elements of the universe and that process had many turns and unfoldings.  Kornfield quotes cosmologist Brian Swimme who says, ‘Four and half billion years ago the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera.’”  

As we appreciate how far the universe has evolved to support all our human and non-human lives, we can begin to appreciate that this unfolding inevitably occurred with setbacks, with dangers, with harm to living creatures.  So it is part of that mystery and that unfolding that we too encounter hardships and difficulties - and will inevitably encounter the end of our existence on this earth.  That breeds a lot of uncertainty.  Human beings - not surprisingly - don’t like uncertainty.  

Kornfield continues, “ When we realize things are fundamentally uncertain and learn how to relax into this uncertainty we come to trust in the unfolding of our individual lives within the vastness of all time and space.  As Zen master Suzuki Roshi says, ‘When you realize the truth that everything changes and find your composure in it, you find yourself in Nirvana.’”  ~~Jack Kornfield, A Lamp in the Darkness:  Illuminating the Path Through Difficult Times

Equanimity is not indifference or withdrawal.  And neither is it dependent on bad things going away and good things prevailing.  It is our ability to be steadfast and peaceful of mind, open to caring and concern for ourselves and others, in the face of the changing conditions of our lives.

So this is perhaps our greatest challenge on this earth - to learn to live with the uncertainty, with the setbacks, with the inevitable suffering of so many, and to come to a place of acceptance, of deep caring and compassion, and of calm abiding, to come to equanimity.  

Making space for joy....

I’d like to turn to Muditta, the third of the four Brahmaviharas  (Pali for divine abodes or dwelling places).  Muditta or joy/sympathetic joy is probably the most overlooked or neglected of these sublime abodes.  As I’ve often said, we’re hardwired to look for trouble and, especially recently, trouble abounds.  That is precisely why this emotion is so important.

Recently, I ran into a woman in the grocery store whose husband had a scary cancer.  She was able to report he qualified for a particular kind of surgery, had had the surgery and was doing great.  It was easy to feel her joy and reflect that back in my own.  This is sympathetic joy - rejoicing in the good fortune of others.  Many of you know this well.

But there are many occasions when such joy is not so easy to share.  When someone is favored over us, receives some good fortune that we wished for ourselves, then our own lack comes to the surface in jealousy or envy and we may find it hard to share in their joy.  In such cases, joy as a practice is a wonderful thing to cultivate.  It can be done with phrases much as loving kindness and compassion can be cultivated.  The traditional  phrases are these:  “May your good fortune continue, May your good fortune increase, May your good fortune never cease.”  These phrases can be directed toward ourselves, toward others or towards a group, towards those we naturally rejoice with as well as those for whom we may find rejoicing a bit more elusive.  

One thing that such practice can bring to light is where we feel competitive, where there is comparing and we inevitably come up short, or perhaps where we interpret our good fortune to affirm that we are better than someone else.  The practice reminds us that we really are glad for the other person’s good fortune, we don’t really wish them ill.

The beautiful thing about the muditta practice, according to Tuere Sala, a meditation teacher who has earned the right through her own hardships not to feel joy, is that we increase our own joy when we can share in the good fortune of others.  She looks around for people to rejoice with because as well as adding to her joy and the joy of the other, it increases the amount of joy in the world.  Sort of like those 2 for 1 offers we see all the time.  Sympathetic joy is definitely a 2 for 1 proposition - or even 3 to 1 or more.

But you may ask, or you have already asked, how can I feel joy when so many are suffering?  The Dalai Lama is reported to be one of the happiest individuals on the earth.  But he is not happy all the time.  When he comes into contact with suffering - his or someone else’s - he responds to that suffering.  He may be sad at loss or feel compassion for someone else’s suffering.  When he listened to his monks recount their suffering at the hands of their Chinese captors, he responded with appropriate emotions, disturbed by their story of suffering, compassion, gratitude for their escape.  In other conversations about good fortune or with friends, he responds with joy or good humor or any number of other emotions.  He lets the world in and lets the emotions go through him without grasping for one emotion or resisting another.   

This is the skill we practice - learning to find joy when and where it arises, letting sadness or anger or jealously or other difficult emotions go through us, seeing them clearly, not grasping after the pleasant ones and pushing away the unpleasant ones.  When we can maintain this kind of balance, we are open to the small joys and the larger ones when they arise.  Perhaps as simple as hearing the sounds of birds quietly whittering to each other, coming across an unexpected bloom or a gentle breeze - being open to the wonders of the world and letting them in, this is a foundation for experiencing joy when and where it arises.  Even in the midst of the sad and disturbing news of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and animal species, nature is still capable of tossing up a beautiful day, and we too are capable, out of nowhere, of experiencing a momentary happiness, a surge of gentle joy.  

Reinforcing our own access to joy is so important, it was addressed in some of the Buddha’s teachings.  And Spirit Rock Guiding Teacher James Baraz wrote a book called Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness and designed a course around it which has been ongoing since it started.  

Joy comes naturally.  And joy needs practice.  

We need to let it in, let it flower, nurture it, and understand that joy is a human emotion, part of our precious human lives on this earth, and worthy of our support even in the darkest times of our individual and collective existences.  

"...stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach..."

It’s been an unbelievably challenging week in the news.  This week continued and even upped the challenge of last week as more and more horror seeped out of Israel and more and more unseeable and unforgettable images made their way to television screens.  I wondered more than once how the newscasters, how world leaders including our own, how the diplomats looked at - made themselves look at - the images that most networks wouldn’t even show on the air.  And how that seeing changed them.  There were tears in the eyes of many on television this week, family and friends of victims and the kidnapped, for sure - but also the news people themselves and their highly placed and knowledgable guests.  And diplomats and spokespeople looked either haggard or also close to tears.  The shock from last week took on different dimensions.

And throughout the news there were examples of reactivity and fury, decisive decisions that moved toward disaster for millions of people, and also examples of mindfulness of consequences, of rational consideration, of those walking a decisive path of fierce support balanced with compassion and realism.  For those on the scene - anguished survivors and families desperate to be heard, the news casters were sometimes the only ones listening to their stories as their leaders prepared to defend and redress the attack.  For those in this country, an amazing leader who lived through unimaginable loss himself choose to listen and listen and listen to the stories and outcries from anguished people.

And what is compassion if not that ability and that willingness to find a quiet spaciousness within to listen and listen and listen?  In the talk I played last week by Koshin Paley Ellison, he talked of listening as the 9th of The Noble Eightfold Path.  (Actually Wise Speech includes non-speech, wise listening.)  Famed Catholic priest and author of The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen writes in Reaching Out, “…healing means, first of all, the creation of an empty but friendly space where those who suffer can tell their story to someone who can listen with real attention.  …But listening is an art that must be developed…It needs the full and real presence of people to each other.  It is indeed one of the highest forms of hospitality.”

This listening is hard to do.  Compassion means to tremble with, to be willing to accompany another into the depths of their grief, to share the burden, not to view from afar with pity, but the see the common humanity, the “there but for the grace of God go I…” of their circumstance.  And it hurts to be with such hurt.  

So we need to respond to our own pain as well as the pain of others.  To the extent we have plumbed our own depths of vulnerability, pain, and despair and learned to have compassion for ourselves, we are able to be with others and listen, listen, listen…

This week I have seen my own limits rising and falling, responding with compassion and listening at times, and turning away, turning off, protecting my own wounds at others.  Does this sound familiar?  And can we hold ourselves in a vast compassion, in that friendly spaciousness that invites us to be with what we can’t bear?

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., American poet, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist, says in Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times, "One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

"Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

"It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.”