Facing suffering is hard.
Your anxiety and your desire to retreat makes sense. It means the self-protective mechanism in you is alive. It is trying to keep you safe from horror — especially the horror you do not know what to do with. Your fear does not make you less. It makes you human. It tells you that a part of you feels vulnerable. That quivering animal of you needs care. This is no time for chiding it. Guilt will get us nowhere but back into our egos. Right now we need to sit right here with the world.
What defines you from here is whether you can turn skilfully towards suffering. Do you have the eyes brave enough to truly look at it? Do you have the heart calm and clear enough to take in the suffering without illusion, without sensationalising or diminishing it? Perhaps anger will arise, and sadness. Perhaps your throat tightens.
Breathe. All these feelings are valid, but they are not you. You can still touch your steady centre. Breathe into your feelings. Don’t reject them, and don’t indulge them. Let them come. Let them sit with you where you are. As though they are stray animals who have come into your home, give them some room. You can even hold them in your lap.
If it helps you, journal about these feelings with curiosity. What information do they give you about yourself? That are human, that you care deeply about the world? If you have the imagination for it, you can even speak to these feelings and let them respond to you, through you. Let your feelings speak. Hold them carefully. Again, neither indulge nor reject them. Meet them fully. You may raise your voice a little. You may even cry. Be very gentle.
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The continued proliferation of violence continues to gravely challenge our compassion, and our hope, and our desire for peace. Perhaps you feel called to retaliative violence. Perhaps you feel enraged by the seeming lack of feeling and action from the people around you. You want to scream at them. If they don’t do or say something, you might burst.
I urge you to pause and attend to these impulses and feelings. Remember that the seeds of joy and peace remain present in you. Now, more than ever, you want to act from a point of clarity rather than overwhelm or passion.
If you feel fragile and distressed, this is a time to practice steadying yourself. You don’t have to immerse yourself in the news and participate directly if you have been unfastened. Acting while distressed can hurt you and the people around you. Similarly, any peaceful energy you generate nourishes you, and reverberates out to touch others through your speech and actions.
Present systems are designed to continually provoke us, to prompt desire, craving, anger, shock, and confusion. We are dominated by distractions, sensations, and desires assigned to us by others. People who can resist these provocations and cultivate calm and clarity are real threats to status quo. To cultivate your own centre is a form of peace work. You can do peace work everyday.
Even if you are skilled at attending to your emotions, you may still feel a wave of helplessness. You may feel the hope in you flounder and flag.
Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “We Were Made For These Times”
We were made for these times. Take time each day to sit with your deep well of courage, strength, and compassion. Trust your goodness. The world needs people who dare. How dare you believe in yourself? How dare you not be felled by messages about everything you lack, everything you’re not? How dare you not be stopped by the violent idea that nothing you do amounts to anything? How dare you be unprovoked? Dare. Resist. You are a seed.
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So how does one not turn away?
You begin by paying attention. This is very difficult, and grows more difficult with each day. Find a way to turn your attention to the deep suffering taking place. You need to be skilful here. You need to be creative and strategic. Enter this witnessing with that steady centre. Breathe into it as you feel the suffering come to you. Hold the suffering carefully, with love.
There is a specific kind of attention we want to cultivate. As Nancy Kline points out:
generative attention, uncorrupted and sustained, calms the brain’s amygdala, the emotional “control centre” of the brain, producing hormones like serotonin and oxytocin. These hormones then “bathe” the cortex, the cognitive “control centre” of the brain, allowing a perfect interplay between these “approach” hormones and cognition. And because the listener’s attention doesn’t waver, and we know it won’t, the amygdala stays calm, and thought-disturbing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline stay at bay.
Nancy Kline, The Promise That Changes Everything: I Will Not Interrupt You
In other words, you need to practice the sort of attention that is truly for the other person. It’s not about hearing them out so you can give a wonderfully intelligent response, or so you can combat their ideas with your perspective, or even so that you can solve their problems. How can you suspend your entire agenda for the time the other person is speaking? How can you choose to truly listen without an ego arrow aimed, on the ready to fire? And how on earth will you be able to do that for someone you dislike and disagree with?
If you believe in peace work, I urge you to practice this. You will begin to notice all the ways you do not listen, and the many roots of this in the ego, in the anxiety you feel about being with others. You will need to unlearn many of your habits. It will take years to master, but it may be the single most important skill we need amongst us right now.
The practices of deep listening and noble silence may be helpful. So might Nancy Kline’s book, The Promise That Changes Everything: I Will Not Interrupt You1.
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Like paying attention, the practice of looking clearly is seemingly straightforward but requires committed practice. Political messaging comes from all sides. Opinions amongst peers may be profuse and passionate. Sometimes, even the most well-meaning people may say the most polarising things.
To be clear, I’m not asking you to forgive and permit violent behaviour, or to deny your principles. But look carefully. You will see that all parties suffer deeply. Violent decisions arise from suffering that has not been addressed or cared for. That sort of suffering builds up and reproduces itself in horrific ways.
It gets clearer by the day how polarisation and binary thinking of any kind (good vs. evil, us vs. them, left vs. right) only deepens fissures, divides us further, and weakens our ability to relate across differences. Again, I am not asking you to excuse violence. You don’t have to endorse or accept violence in order to look at it with compassion.
For violence reproduces itself. We cannot homogenise a world into peace, or eliminate one faction and expect to be left with a whole. We need to talk to one another across our differences. This requires us to be incredibly skilful. Can you cultivate a way to listen even when you’ve been triggered? Can you learn to stay open even when your first instinct is to reject everything that’s being said? Can you consider for a moment that you may not fully understand, and may even have misplaced assumptions about the other person?
Sometimes a person uses a word you know but means it in a different way. Sometimes a person says something you may not agree with, but there remains room for understanding, if you would let them tell you about their fears, their hopes, their desires. Do you know a helpful question that would give you the opportunity to learn more, and them the opportunity to be heard?
You need to practice. Learn to differentiate between listening and agreeing; endorsing and understanding. Practice being different without panicking. You can listen lovingly without agreeing. You can seek to understand even if you do not endorse. Nurture your discernment. Making room for the other person does not mean abandoning yourself, either. Balance is a process.
The more we divide ourselves up and call one group the enemy, the more we reproduce the cycles of violence we are mired in. Whatever you reject and disown comes back. What we need now are skilful integrators, people who can build bridges across the most divided islands and guide their residents to speak to one another.
Integrators are strategic and mindful. They are not open to the point of looseness. They are principled and agile. They know when to listen and give the other person ample room. They know when to respectfully stand their ground. They are open to changing their minds.
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Where does seeing lead us?
I believe it leads us to the concept of interbeing2. I am because you are. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, everything is made up of what it is not. For example, each human being is part water, which means that a part of us was once rain, once cloud. A piece of paper is made from trees, which were made from sunlight, water, and other nutrients. So part of the paper was also once rain, once cloud.
And whether we like it or not, a part of us is also our parents. A part of us is the animal or vegetable we ate. A part of us is the seed of love a friend planted in our heart. I am because the trees are, because the clouds are. I can be because the minerals are. We are inextricably interconnected. We all inter-are.
To turn away from suffering, then, is to turn away from ourselves. When we do that, we hone a habit of not-seeing. We hone a habit of numbing out. We refuse to engage with the suffering of other people even when we know it’s there, and that it touches the most vulnerable part of our humanity. We refuse our own suffering. We are afraid of it, and so we suffer more.
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Are you still breathing? This is difficult work.
As we learn to see, we need to find our balance. It is crucial to not turn away from suffering. It is equally important that you do not run towards it.
As you probably know, the Buddha started his life as a prince. His parents tried to shelter him from all knowledge of suffering. They didn’t just shield him from horrible hardships, like war; they didn’t even allow him to associate with anyone who was unhappy. But he rejected hiding away from the truth of suffering, not just because it felt immoral, but because it was also ineffective. It didn’t help anyone to run away from suffering, not even himself.
So next he tried the opposite, running towards suffering. He invited as much hardship as he could by following a path of extreme asceticism. But that didn’t work either. In fact, it nearly killed him. What did work in the end was finding balance: neither courting suffering nor avoiding it.
Dan Zigmond, “Right Action in the Face of Suffering”, Lion’s Roar
The middle way is challenging. It’s grey. You aren’t overtaken by passion and rage. You’re also not indifferent or averse to suffering. You care without growing attached. You act bravely from a place of equanimity.
The middle way is about living in reality. We accept reality in the sense that we don’t deny it. We don’t pretend that things are different than they are. But we don’t stop there. The Buddha described many different components of the middle way path, and one of these he called samma-kammanta — right action. After we see the world as it really is, we take action. Based on the clarity we develop in our mindfulness practice, we respond to the world with compassion.
Ibid.
The peace work that needs to doing is great, and will take time. You can start now by honing the tranquility and compassion within you. Like I said, you can do peace work everyday.
Give yourself the grace of that journey. You are not a saint or a saviour. And peace work can take many forms. Some of us will organise. Some of us will donate money. Some of us may speak with friends and family, to deepen mutual understanding about what is happening. Some of us may sit alone, reflecting quietly. Some of us may be overwhelmed.
No matter what form your peace work takes, you must breathe deeply into your body, into this moment. By cultivating clarity, resilience, and calm, you begin to change yourself. Which means you begin to change the world.
I leave you with this article written by Thich Nhat Hanh, where he shares about war, peace, and deep listening. In particular, he talks about Palestinians and Israelis at a Plum Village meditation retreat in 2001. I hope it nourishes your spirit.
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Everything I share here is an amalgamation of lines and lineages of wisdom that have come before me, especially the Plum Village tradition of engaged Buddhism established by Thich Nhat Hanh. I channel what I have integrated, but do not claim to reflect accurately every aspect of the tradition.
I also believe that engaged Buddhism is applicable regardless of your religious beliefs. It can serve as a secular form of philosophy that guides us to live peacefully and ethically with one another. I don’t need to believe in a god so much as I need to believe in you, in me, and in us. The world we can do together.
It is padded with a good amount of fluff, but it carries an important core message with helpful guidelines.
Read more here: https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/insight-of-interbeing/