Moving Through The Storms Of The World

Even as we deepen in mindfulness, lovingkindness, and the path of clarity the Buddha taught, we still find ourselves immersed in a world of drama, corruption, loss, and the heart-rending stories of war, oppression, and greed that fill our media and minds. How do we stay well amid all this? Drawing on the teachings of the Buddha and the practice of loving awareness, compassion, and deep listening, we find a middle way through the storms of the world, present with everything as it is without falling into overwhelm or hopelessness.

Transcript

Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa Namo tassa bhagavato arhato sammasambuddhassa So we so often hear the instruction from teachers to meditate every day.

And often by that they mean sit in stillness.

But more broadly than that,

Maybe we can say,

You know,

Bring the mind to an intentional resting place each day in a way that that's a kind of training for stability,

Continuity,

And is nourishing for,

You know,

For the heart,

For the mind,

For the body even.

In the flux of our days.

When we talk about daily meditation practice and what's so good about it.

Very often what's being pointed to is this aspect of attention training.

Where it takes significant and continuous practice for quite some time to get some leverage in relation to the habits that we have been taught,

Have fallen into,

Have learned,

Have cultivated unconsciously.

That have been oppressed into for all of these decades.

And these are really the habits of the mind,

The thinking mind,

Spinning in ways that are somehow both very natural,

Natural responses to the stressful conditions we find ourselves in,

But also painful and not ultimately healthy.

So these are like the mental and emotional patterns around worry,

Concern,

Fear,

Anxiety,

You know,

Being unsure about the future,

What's going to happen,

It's not going to be good.

And all of the ways that the heart-mind assembles around that imagination that really believes that our relationship to the future is fixed in some way.

It's not that we're wrong,

That things are going to be difficult.

You tell somebody who's worried,

You don't want to say to the worried person,

They're like,

I'm so worried about the direction this country is going.

And you don't want to say,

Oh,

Don't worry,

It's going to be fine.

Because that's neither known,

Nor necessarily true,

Nor relationally attuned,

Nor helpful in all sorts of ways.

At the same time,

You don't want to say,

Oh,

My God,

You're right,

I'm also terribly worried.

Let's take both of our worries and stir them up,

Whip them up into a froth together so that we both get more heated and stirred up in our worry.

And this is a lot of what we do,

Actually,

In friendship and conversation,

Partly because we all want to be heard and feel understood and mirrored.

And so if I go to my friend and I say,

Ah,

And my friend goes,

Yeah,

Ah,

Then we both feel better in a way.

But we're also encouraging this habit of mind that that is not seen clearly.

Right.

It's it's picking out one aspect of the whole mix of what's happening right now,

Fixating on it and then suffering,

You know,

Based on it.

And,

You know,

Our practice has to,

Again,

Find this this sometimes very difficult to find middle way where the instruction is absolutely not to ignore or deny or somehow wish away or,

You know,

Think that,

You know,

Or like just think positive or something like that's absolutely not the way.

It's also important to not fall into the like,

You know,

To be real,

To be connected with reality means,

You know,

Engaging with the worst of reality all the time.

And so we have to find somehow somehow this middle way where we're being truthful and honest and not in denial and not bypassing and at the same time finding ease and rest and non-worry and non-anxiety in the heart mind.

And this is true for all of the afflictive emotions.

So anxiety and the fear spectrum is one.

You know,

The other side of that is the anger spectrum.

That's everything from,

You know,

Annoyance and frustration to anger and rage,

You know,

Bitterness,

All of the hostile directed energies,

Again,

Deep habits to be enraged.

And on the anger spectrum,

For many folks,

There's something powerful and active and beautiful about mobilization.

And so anger,

You know,

Anger can be mobilizing.

Fear also can be mobilizing in a different way,

But anger often can be mobilizing in a way that,

You know,

Gets stuff done and,

You know,

Moves,

You know,

Moves the rocks in the world,

You know,

Lifts stones that you couldn't lift because the child was stuck underneath,

You know,

The way moms do.

And folks who care can do all sorts of things when motivated sometimes by that kind of fire.

In the middle way with the anger spectrum,

You know,

Is really the same,

Right,

To acknowledge that the world is real and the injustices of the world are real and,

You know,

The old,

If you're not enraged,

You're not paying attention,

Basically true.

And our middle way is,

Is it possible to pay attention and not be enraged?

Because there are other engines for social action,

Protective action besides anger.

Anger is one of the easiest.

We talked a couple weeks ago,

Talking about,

You know,

Activists motivated by anger as a wholesome and righteous motivation.

Often this is a very moral kind of rage,

You know,

There's a kind of rage at injustice that has a deeply felt,

You know,

Ethical compass at its heart,

A deeply felt morality,

You know,

This should not be is a kind of moral rage,

You know.

And,

But again,

There's,

You know,

There are ways to hold and move and be moved by that energy.

Perhaps that change it from being the thing that we would call rage as a kind of habitual disorganized force in the psyche to something more productive,

You know.

And I think sometimes in the activist world,

In the activist Dharma world,

There can be a lot of fretting about this,

Maybe because we don't have enough words for our feelings.

We say like,

Oh,

You know,

I need my anger in order to be an effective organizer or to,

You know,

Not give up or something.

And I respect that impulse.

But then I also wonder,

Right,

Here's our practice in the Dharma of recognizing that,

You know,

Rage or anger,

Really thinking of them as,

You know,

Painful,

Unskillful emotions.

And then here's folks being like,

No,

This is skillful for me,

This is what I need to do my work,

Because I care.

And I wonder if we're getting into a muddle,

You know,

Being like,

Oh,

How do we figure this out?

Rage can be righteous,

But also unwholesome.

And how do I organize myself around that?

What if I just don't have enough words for feelings and the feeling of being like burning with contracted,

Impulsive aggression because something is happening?

What if that's a different feeling than like burning with the fervor to save that which you love?

And that,

You know,

Like righteous anger,

What if it's actually just different from reactive anger?

We have to just use adjectives because we don't have the right words.

Let's say we're trying to figure out anger.

What if we could feel the difference between righteous anger and a reactive anger?

In the same way with fear,

You know,

What's righteous fear?

Reactive fear is like somehow I've become startled and all I want to do is run away.

I feel like that sometimes in the world right now.

But where to go?

But what if that's reactive fear where I've kind of lost my compass,

I just want to flee.

What would righteous or skillful fear be?

Maybe there's a temptation to call it rational,

Like,

Oh,

I've considered the situation of the world and I understand that things are dire and I have a heartfelt wish to be safe and protected.

Like,

We kind of talk like this as Dharma teachers a lot,

As if you could sort of do some kind of composed metta practice and integrate or metabolize that kind of intense feeling.

But I think it's very difficult to do because these are visceral responses in the nervous system.

What is righteous fear?

I think that there's not just a rational understanding of the world as it is,

But,

You know,

There's a feeling in the Dharma where through insight,

You've come to have a very clear intuition that engagement with the world is painful,

No matter what.

And that the arising experiences of existence,

You can feel their unsatisfactoriness,

Their unsafeness,

The dukkha is the Pali term.

You can feel how there's not a refuge there.

And so this,

You know,

This is a kind of the Buddhist kind of righteous fear.

Is an insight stage.

In the middle,

Sort of deep in the sort of middle of the stages of insight in the commentarial tradition.

There's a series after insight into karma and the characteristics and seeing phenomena arise and pass in this sort of,

You know,

Ceaseless flux and then seeing phenomena just dissolving away in momentary flickerings out.

There's a series of insight states called fear,

Disgust and misery.

And they're wholesome.

They are terrifying,

But wholesome because they are the insight that there's no safety in the world,

That there's no refuge in a world of constant flux and instability.

And so then you can't turn toward anything other than the dharma,

Other than,

You know,

The infinite,

Other than the truth as a refuge.

So this is righteous fear.

So there's a righteous fear and righteous anger.

And,

You know,

I just want us to not be confused by the struggle that happens sometimes when we try to square these feelings of wanting to protect people and beings and the planet from destruction and harm.

And how do we hold the intensity of that feeling in a dharma kind of lens?

In meditation,

To come back to this idea of daily meditation,

The discipline of sitting in meditation every day,

I think,

In an extraordinary way,

Is a kind of.

.

.

You know,

It's partly a gesture of faith.

It's partly a kind of magic spell,

An invocation.

It's partly a practice or a discipline in stillness.

The world,

You know,

Like a storm around the house.

Just like weather around the house.

That's the classical,

One of the classical metaphors is raging.

And right now,

Depending where you are,

Who you are,

What social location you sit in,

The storm might feel very close to home.

People you know are in danger,

You may feel in danger at some moments or be in literal danger.

May it not be so.

May it not be so for anyone.

But it's true for many right now in direct physical harm.

And the storm is blowing,

You know.

The folks motivated by greed and fear and hatred in the reactive sense are rampaging through the world.

And you can see it,

You can feel it.

So what do you do?

You do,

You know,

Everything you can to protect goodness.

You move righteous anger,

Righteous fear in ways that,

You know,

You try to help.

You try to protect folks from being taken away unfairly.

To protect folks from being attacked,

Hurt,

Suffering in war,

Starving,

All the things you can do.

But you can also stop for a few moments at a time.

And there's this particular force in stopping.

Because part of what the storm is doing is it's in constant motion,

It's a constant change.

It's blowing,

It's pushing,

It's pushing on each of us,

It's pushing on everyone around us.

It's pushing all the structures around us socially,

Culturally,

Sometimes physically.

And so there's these two,

In the nervous system model,

Right,

There's these two mobilization directions,

The fight and flight directions.

This is sympathetic nervous system activation.

So we've talked about the fight system manifesting as anger,

And then you're going to have righteous or unrighteous anger,

Reactive anger.

On the flight side,

You're going to have the fear spectrum.

So you'll have righteous or unrighteous fear,

Right,

Or reactive fear.

And then often we'll talk about a third primary nervous system response to stress,

Being the freeze or collapse response.

And this is kind of like what happens when high activation trips the switch of the deep survival response,

And there's a kind of shutdown or shock or freeze.

And like the other two,

We can say that there's a kind of stuck or not healthy or nourishing kind of freeze.

There's the kind of collapse where we've just collapsed into overwhelm,

Into despair.

But not even like the really mobile sort of despair,

Which maybe is a kind of flight,

But that kind of just like deep shutdown,

Frozenness that can be difficult to come out of.

Call that the unrighteous or the reactive freeze.

I'm freezing or shutting down in reaction to.

It's just too much.

The world is too much.

There's too much to hold,

To bear,

To feel.

And there's just a numbness that comes.

This is very,

Very common.

If this is your symptom,

You're not wrong for feeling this.

And you can just hold with tenderness.

You don't have to do anything about it because you can't.

That's the thing with collapse.

Don't worry.

Don't try to undo it,

But you can rest with it.

You can feel it.

You say,

Ah,

Okay.

No.

So there's the kind of painful or reactive freeze.

But then there can be also,

And this is where I think meditation partly supports us.

There's going to be a righteous freeze.

Like in the middle of the storm,

One of the most strange things to do,

Right?

When the storm is coming on,

Yes,

You have to run around the house nailing plywood on the windows and filling up sandbags and taking care of your neighbors and all that.

And there's a whole,

There's a lot of that to do.

Endless amounts kind of of that to do.

But there's also the possibility and the necessity in the middle of that,

If you're going to keep your strength up,

To stop.

And to find a relatively safe dry place up in the attic if it's flooding or in the basement if it's winding or hurricaning or whatever your flavor of storm is.

With the screens off if your storm is political,

Whatever it is,

You stop.

And meditation is this kind of righteous stopping.

It's a kind of righteous collapse.

I'm going to stop doing anything else for this moment.

I'm going to sit down on this cushion even though there is so much to do.

And for a few minutes I'm going to come into the body and maybe there's so much tenderness or there's parts that just hurt.

Or I'm tired,

You know.

Or I feel good in this moment.

I'm like,

Oh,

Wow,

I didn't notice that I felt so good and bright.

Like you'll find any number of bodies and energies when you stop.

You have to stop to feel it.

And you get still.

Stillness is really the hallmark of meditation in this form.

Whether you're lying down or you're sitting up immaterial,

Standing,

Or walking steadily in a kind of mobile stillness.

But this is not a sort of like moving through lots of different things kind of meditation.

This is really like,

You know,

It's important to make the gesture of stillness.

So you stop and you sit.

You sit,

You notice that when the body becomes still,

Everything else is still moving.

So there's the breath.

Thoughts will bubble up and pass through and a lot of thinking really wants you to grab it and chew on it.

And you can say later,

Later.

And resting.

You can bring the mind to the breathing and hold the breathing close.

Breathing in.

Breathing out.

And it's not just about calming,

But there's more of a radical shift in the whole energy of your life and your awareness when you become still in the middle of a storm.

You become willing to listen rather than just respond.

You become willing to feel rather than just act.

And in the listening and feeling and in the calming,

Settling,

The different energy has a chance to spread through the being.

You know,

And as you can see,

Anytime you've had gotten some traction in any of the concentration practices,

If you can set aside thought for even a little while and come into a fuller sense of the body and the body's energies.

Right under the surface there,

There's a very contactable often,

Mostly,

You know,

Unless you're really in a bad way.

But even then,

If you can cut through for a couple seconds,

There's a quiet right there.

There's a sweetness often right there.

Sometimes it's very tender.

Sometimes there's a lot of grief.

But anything that is not lost in habitual reactivity is wholesome here.

So whatever you find,

Hold it tenderly,

Hold it with kindness and friendliness.

If it's just quiet,

Delight in the quiet.

If it's boring,

That's just a reaction to having been moving around so much and doing so much that you've forgotten how to delight in stillness.

No problem.

Just be bored.

But don't give the boredom much thought.

Like don't think about it.

Just breathe.

Breathe.

So there's this training that we enter into.

It's so.

.

.

The training is to learn to love stillness.

To learn to love quiet.

Not because the thing that we need to do is to somehow disappear from the world into quiet.

This isn't an invitation to go on permanent retreat.

And I mean,

If you've got those kind of resources and the inclination to do it,

For sure do that.

Like,

Because almost nobody does.

And so we need people to become that quiet in the world.

Thomas Merton was talking once about being a monk.

And he said,

You know,

The thing about monks is that they're useless.

It's one of the most important things about them.

They don't offer anything productive to society.

It's important that they don't.

They don't,

You know,

They just,

They live right here.

They're kind of right next door.

They're just outside town,

You know.

You can go visit them.

And they're always there doing exactly the same thing.

They're praying.

They're chanting.

They're doing a little bit of work on the land.

He said,

But what they are,

They're like batteries.

Goodness in the world.

That in the middle of all the flux and everything that's happening,

You can just know that right at this moment,

There's a bunch of people.

Lots,

Actually,

If you include all the different flavors of folks on retreat and monastic kinds of life,

Who are making the radical choice to do way less of a certain kind of thing.

They're not doing less,

Really.

There's no less to do.

Everyone's alive the same number of hours in a day.

Why do we value running around and doing things more than sitting still,

Quieting the mind,

Opening the heart,

Feeling deeply,

You know.

Merton talked about,

You know,

Seeing the monks walking in from the field in the afternoon.

They would do,

They would work on the land most of the day.

They're walking in from the fields to come in for the evening service.

He said,

Just like,

You know,

Their rosaries swinging,

Right?

They're just like,

They're just on the way back from the fields,

But they've already just swung right back into praying the rosary,

You know.

Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father.

Ten Hail Marys and an Our Father.

It's about the right ratio,

By the way,

Right?

Ten to mom and one to dad.

That's,

You know,

Speaking of which,

You know,

Blessings for a delicious journey into whatever comes next to my favorite Pope of my lifetime.

Francis managed to die on Easter.

Good going,

Pope Francis.

A great soul working hard for the poor,

For the oppressed.

Trying to heal the church from a time of,

From many,

Many decades,

Maybe centuries,

Almost certainly,

Of deep dysfunction.

Blessings to him.

Maybe well.

So,

You know,

The monks are,

You know,

Batteries of goodness in the world.

I think meditators,

You know,

Practitioners,

When we,

Even in the middle of the,

Our,

The busyness of our lives,

The storms of our lives,

When you sit down in meditation,

And you get still,

And you set aside the stories,

You come into the radiant field of the body,

And you steady the body and the heart,

You bring in fresh breath,

You become still,

You become willing to be useless,

Useless to capitalism for a few minutes,

You know,

Useless to your plans for,

You know,

Great business success,

Or,

You know,

Whatever brilliant parenting,

Artistic triumph,

Whatever you're going for,

You stop doing it for half an hour,

And you sit down,

Five minutes,

You know,

Whatever you got.

And you do this extraordinary magic of stopping.

So the training of attention works best if you do it a little bit regularly rather than irregularly.

So the standard advice is,

You know,

Every single day is really helpful.

Three minutes a day is more helpful than an hour once a week,

Because you're not just trying to have like a stretch of relaxing,

Like getting an awesome massage,

You know,

Once a month,

Which is great to do.

But,

You know,

If the thing that you want is to be not in pain in your body,

Then like moving a little bit every day and working on sitting and standing and walking and lying down with wholesome posture is going to do you more of a world of good,

Because you do it a little bit every day,

Than,

You know,

One great massage once a month.

So it's the same in meditation.

A little bit every day.

And if you can a little bit several times a day,

This could be just like stopping in the middle of anything.

I am very blessed to have as my,

You know,

Sometimes annoying administrative day job working at a Buddhist meditation center.

So we often begin Zoom meetings with four minutes of meditation.

Like,

Really,

That's extraordinary.

The invitation for everybody to just stop before we dive into spreadsheets and,

You know,

Whatever the drama of the week is.

Regularity is the thing,

Because what you're training is continuity.

The continuity of a new habit of being present,

Of just being at ease,

You know,

No matter what's happening.

No,

That's not the right way to say it.

You're not necessarily at ease no matter what's happening.

You're going for the continuity of being awake,

Whatever's happening.

That's really what you're going for.

Because it's not always easeful.

Often it's not.

But what you want is to have your full faculties present.

You know what's happening,

You can respond,

You're not lost in reactivity of any of the flavors,

Right?

We're not lost in reactive anger.

We can work with mobilization and force in a wholesome way when we need to.

We're not lost in reactive fear and anxiety,

But we can work in a wholesome way with discernment around when to step back from the troubles of the world.

And we're not lost in reactive collapse.

And we can understand something different about the power of stillness,

Coming inside,

Setting everything down,

Not doing anything for a short while.

And each of these is a kind of healing for the nervous system,

A settling for those parts of ourselves that have just been startled and overwhelmed for so long.

And so bit by bit every day we come back again and again.

Stillness,

Steadiness.

Taking in new breath and releasing the old as a gift.

And we just nourish ourselves again and again so that we can then return.

We oscillate from action to stillness.

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