Wise Action: Reconciliation

With wise action, I am suggesting that our actions are toward reconciliation. The actions we take are in an effort to restore ourselves to wholeness. And wholeness doesn’t have an endpoint, it's a direction. Wholeness is more like self-retrieval. We are engaged in restoring lost parts of ourselves. This is the action of practice. We’re not trying to change them or make them better just include all parts, no part left out.

Transcript

We've been moving through these practices and qualities that are known as the eightfold noble path or the noble eightfold path.

And they have been described as practices that we do and that we undertake and they are also described as characteristics that we become,

Attributes that spring up within us.

So when I am seeing clearly,

Not adding any meaning or perception to an experience,

Then I am living with wise view.

When I practice in the morning to set the compass of my heart,

I'm setting it towards purposeful awareness and this is wise intention.

When I speak the truth without exaggeration,

Without gossip in a kind way,

I am speaking with wise speech.

My speech heals,

Divides,

And doesn't create more.

And in this way,

I'm becoming the path of practice.

It's bubbling up within me.

So today,

The path factor is on wise action.

And I've been delivering these path factors with the intent that they bubble up from within us as part of our character.

And for some people,

These ethics are really close.

And for some,

They've been lying dormant.

So with practice,

We strengthen and reawaken them.

So to recap these couple of weeks that we've been going through,

I've kind of reframed the traditional teachings and I'm going to go backwards.

So on Tuesday,

We spoke of wise speech,

Why speeches healing speech,

Speech that unifies wise intention,

Has purpose,

Wholesome purpose,

And wise view has meaning.

So the path is becoming how we are in the world,

Not just something that we follow with the hope of arriving and enlightenment someday in the future.

Enlightenment happens in the ordinary.

Sometimes it's seeing all the ways that you're not enlightened.

That is the enlightenment.

So with wise action,

I'm suggesting the reframe that I'm suggesting is that our actions are towards reconciliation.

The actions we take are in an effort to restore ourselves to wholeness.

We are one right.

And the wholeness doesn't have an endpoint.

It's a direction.

Wholeness is more like self retrieval.

We're engaging in restoring lost parts of ourselves and welcoming them.

This is the action of practice.

We're not trying to change ourselves or these lost parts or make them better.

We're just including all parts of ourselves,

No part left out.

So reconciliation on this Buddhist path of practice is described as reestablishing trust.

So if I deny responsibility for my actions or I assert that I'm not doing any harm,

Then there's no way that I can be reconciled.

If I were to say that you have no right to hold me to your standards of right and wrong,

Then what will happen with that position is you won't trust me not to hurt you.

To have trust,

I have to show my respect for you and for our mutual standards of what it is to have acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

What is and is not acceptable?

So cultivating trust in ourselves,

What does that look like?

What is that action?

When we talk about having trust in ourselves,

We're not talking about fleeting things like anxiety in the moment.

It doesn't feel fleeting,

But it is.

Feelings,

Emotions,

They come and go and we don't have to give into them.

We can trust our own capacity to meet challenges and experiences with awareness and care.

Making decisions and taking action from anxiety or instability.

It's coming from a fogginess in the mind quite often and it doesn't generally work out.

Maybe you've noticed that.

I certainly have.

Having trust in our own awareness really speaks to how we relate to whatever is happening.

What arises in the mind is out of control.

What arises in life,

We have very little say in,

But how we relate to it is the turning point right in the moment.

So the reconciliation I'm pointing to in wise action is bringing together the parts of ourselves that we leave out.

That we leave out.

For example,

We all have habit patterns when there is conflict with another person.

You can maybe reflect for a moment on what that looks like for you.

When we're operating from an unconscious,

It's generally an unconscious habit habitual place.

On some level we're dropping into the old brain,

The mammalian brain.

You know with like either fight,

I'm going to confront this person or flight,

I'm going to ignore this person or we freeze.

I can't deal with this.

Let me let me block this out or go to one of my early survival skills.

But the backward step,

The backward step is to restore ourselves to wholeness.

So this is the intent,

Right?

That's the intention,

The purpose to suffer less.

So right in the moment we have to turn inward.

I like what the meditation teacher Tara Brack calls it.

She says we have to make a U-turn like right in the moment.

So we have to turn inward and see what's running in the background and question our assumptions.

You know there's what happened and then what we're making it mean,

Right?

So let's say an event happens and then almost immediately there's an associated meaning.

So what part of you is triggered and that trigger,

You know that activation oftentimes you know is it based on the past?

Most likely.

And then there's this inclusion.

Oh there's this trigger.

This trigger.

Okay I see the trigger.

And then we look again.

So it's sort of like in the moment I see the habit and what else is here?

What else is here?

So questioning our assumptions is part of this awareness practice.

Obviously we quickly fixate on trying to do something about the conflict or the misunderstanding.

You know we're trying to fix the irritant,

The problem,

The hardship.

But the reality is that we can't do much about the irritant.

There is Dukkha,

You know the first of the four noble truths.

There is Dukkha.

There is dissatisfaction.

It is everywhere.

But what we can do is affect how we receive it.

So when fear arises,

You know,

Fear is a common emotion that arises for us and people.

When we get to,

Oh there's fear right now.

It feels like a pit in my stomach or a tunnel that I'm uncomfortable going down.

In the naming of it,

There's this,

Can I trust the awareness?

I think so.

Let me bring fear closer and see what else is here.

Bringing these parts of ourselves closer,

It doesn't mean they're going to run the show.

We're not feeding them.

We're just welcoming them,

Letting them be,

But looking again.

This is from the teacher Chogyam Trampa.

He writes,

Acknowledging fear is not a cause for depression or discouragement.

Because we possess such fear,

We also are potentially entitled to experience fearlessness.

You fearlessness is not the reduction of fear,

But going beyond fear,

Looking again.

This whole idea of progress,

Of growth,

It rests completely on how we're relating to what's going on.

So the fact is that if what we're experiencing is painful,

It doesn't mean that it's bad.

It doesn't mean that it's wrong.

We can trust our own experience.

And the most important aspect of it is the quality of awareness that we can bring to it.

What is this pain?

And then go right into the body.

I'd like to close with a Zen story.

It's about a man riding a horse that is galloping really fast.

And there's another man standing alongside the road yelling at him,

Where are you going?

Where are you going?

And the man on the horse yells back,

I don't know.

Ask the horse.

I think that's our situation.

We're riding a horse that we cannot control.

And our practice,

The most important practice is to know what's going on in our mind and in our heart.

We become the path when we ask,

What's the meaning I'm ascribing here?

Wise view.

What's the purpose?

Wise intention.

Does it serve me?

How am I talking to myself about this?

What's the tone?

Why speech?

And how can I bring reconciliation to this pattern?

To live in awareness.

Wise action.

This is how the path bubbles up in our life.

Asking these questions.

So if we stop trying to manage all the conditions to get it right and we start meeting ourselves as is.

You know,

Suppose that our intention is just I take you as is.

And that whatever comes,

We just say thank you.

Thank you.

This is possible.

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