Ferguson

It’s so easy to limit the definition of mindfulness to an avenue towards finding inner peace and well-being. While that’s true, it doesn’t end there.

The requirement of true mindfulness does not afford us the luxury of camping out within the gated privacy of our own hearts and minds. It requires us to include what’s happening outside of ourselves, and little-by-little, that means everything.

So today I am writing about the difficult and painful, about a different kind of climate disruption. Think of Michael Brown, James Foley and Trayvon Martin, that so many marginalized people only have access to the worst food, the dirtiest water, substandard education and healthcare, run-down homes (if they have homes at all), that our prisons are bursting with unprecedented numbers of young African American men, the militarization of our police, that racial profiling is real, and I cannot leave out the polar bears, butterflies and bees.

When I think about the myriad causes and conditions that were present for Michael Brown to have been killed in Ferguson, I can imagine the fear, pain, distrust, anger and resentment that created a big gaping wound of profound suffering. As I’ve watched the footage of the protests, the wound is obvious and palpable. No imagination is necessary. When we see this kind of pain, really take it in, we cannot unsee it. How it got there is probably ancient and not such ancient history; traceable and untraceable, knowable and unknowable.

In light of these terrifying and deeply disturbing events, I want to talk about morality from the Buddhist perspective. This perspective gives me hope and it gives me something I can do. It helps to transform my sense of helplessness and restores my balance. I’m not giving you a lecture in morality, I promise.

In Buddhist practice there are lists for everything. The Paramis, translated as the Perfections of the Heart is one such list. Generosity is the first and Morality is next. Morality is also addressed directly through Wise Action in the Eightfold Path, another foundational list. The bottom line is that we’re asked to live a life of non-harming, but how we define non-harming is different from one person to the next, from one community to the next, and from country to the next.

Here are the five guidelines the Buddha taught for lay practitioners like us that define non-harming, and set the intention for living a moral life.

1.       Protect life by not killing anything that breathes

2.     Be generous with our resources and do not taking anything that hasn’t been freely or directly given

3.     Respect our bodies by not using sexuality in a way that harms or exploits ourselves or others

4.     Take care in how we speak to others, guiding our language to be kind, truthful, useful and appropriate. Having good timing may be the most crucial of all. How many times have we said something truthful, useful and kind, but our timing was so off that what we said had nowhere to land or caused unintended consequences?

5.     Maintaining a clear mind by not using substances to the extent that it causes heedlessness

What I appreciate about these guidelines is that they’re offered as a practice. Perfection is not required. The Buddha also points out through these guidelines that by protecting myself, I protect others and by protecting others, I protect myself. This, too, is a practice that’s worth thinking about.

I am under no illusion that by trying to live a moral life that violence, racism, and poverty will end. But if I end it in me, and you end it in you, we’ll have a little more peace.

Rules of the Game

Nearly 20 years ago my nieces Zoe and Marlee came to visit us in rural northern California from their home in suburban Chicago. At the time they were little girls, ages 5 and 3, and our kids were 6 and 7, so it was a full house of fun little kids. One night as we sat down for dinner I asked everyone to put their napkins in their laps. I’ll never forget the look on Zoe’s face, age 5, when she looked me square in the eye and stated clearly and emphatically “We don’t put napkins in laps in my neighborhood!”

* * * * * * *

Last week I played a new card game with 34 other mindfulness teachers and facilitators. We split into seven groups of five. At the outset each group was given the rules of the game, which included playing in silence, though gestures and drawing pictures were allowed. After each round of five hands, those who’d won and lost the most hands moved onto other predetermined groups, and play resumed with the newly assembled groups.

It wasn’t long before big waves of gesturing and lots of looks of confusion and annoyance filled the room. And then the muffled laughter began to ripple out as we all realized that each of the original groups had been given varying sets of rules. The collective knowledge was unnerving, confusing, frustrating, challenging, intriguing and because it was a game, comical. One person even stood up in the middle of her group, incredulous, hands on her hips and said “They changed the f*#%@^g rules!”

We all know that everything changes, that life is challenging for everyone, and on some level we understand that everything depends on everything else. But until we’re forced, we don’t really know it in our bones. A sudden or serious illness, the death of someone we love, an unexpected loss of a job, or the fires burning northern California this summer, these get our attention and we begin to get it. Hardship brings it close, much closer than when things are going well.

The card game brought us all to the edge of our comfort. Issues of fairness, equality, communication, competition and culture were right there, palpable and sticky. Who was right? Was anyone wrong? How do we proceed when there is no level playing field?

We think we know the rules, the social and emotional norms of our families, communities, and those of the wider culture.  Imagine being the only person of your skin color, heritage or gender in a crowded room with others who not only look nothing like you, but know the world from entirely different sets of guidelines. What is that like? We cannot possibly know what it’s really like for anyone else. And what about varying rules around language, money and education?

If it were only as simple as what to do with our napkins.

Five Dollar Bills

Six or seven years ago I heard a story on the radio about a woman who saved all of the $5 bills she received in tips from her waitressing job. At the end of each shift, she dutifully put the bills in a special place for safe keeping. In the beginning, her intention was to simply save enough money to buy a CD and earn some interest in a safe and predictable way. It didn’t take her too long to buy her first one, and she realized she enjoyed the self-imposed savings challenge and that it would actually pay off. So she kept it up.

When the first CD matured, instead of cashing it in and enjoying the added bonus of the interest it earned, she reinvested it all into a new one. And, she continued to buy new CD’s as her stash of $5 bills grew. She kept up this savings plan for a five years, and at the end had saved $12,000.

I was so inspired by this story that I decided to take up the challenge and start saving all of my $5 bills, too. But I’m not a waitress and don’t receive cash as part of my regular compensation, so I knew my savings would be a lot smaller. When I began this savings plan, I found a special secret place in my house to keep the bills, did not tell my husband where it was, and much sooner than I expected, I had $100. 

I will admit that over my own five years of savings, I did not invest in CD’s and turn the original $100 into $12,000. I used the money for special things like my now beloved red reading chair, airplane tickets to visit my kids, and spending money for travel.

And then I heard the story about a woman who on her way to Berkeley from the East Coast was given a fat sealed envelope by a friend just before she left. The envelope was stuffed with $20 bills. The friend asked the woman to give the money away to the homeless people she passed on the street.

I started to imagine what it must have been like to give those bills away, the look on people’s faces, the feeling in the hearts of both the giver and the receiver at the precise moment the money was given, whether or not they could look into each other’s eyes in recognition of their shared humanity.  And I started to think about my $5 bill stash and whether or not I could give it away.

The Buddha gave some very pithy instructions about generosity, instructions that have really sunk into my thinking. He said generosity brings happiness in three ways: 1^st, in the initial thought to be generous, 2^nd, in the actual giving, and 3^rd in remembering our generous acts.

As I thought about whether or not to give the $5 bills away, I decided not to think about it for too long. My initial impulse to give the money away just felt right, and over the next couple of months I gave the bills to people on the street. While some moments were a little uncomfortable, I found it one of the more directly satisfying ways of expressing generosity. 

My stash is gone now and I have not yet replenished it, but when I think about the experience of handing an unsuspecting person a five, it does make me happy.

Despite All Odds

Today, I wanted to write about peaches, mostly the unnamable pleasure and luxury of eating a melt-in-your-mouth drippy sweet peach. I wanted to write about peaches and raspberries and blueberries and strawberries and pie and sunflowers.  About the things of summer that fill my heart. I wanted to write about sweetness and joy, and the human being’s astonishing capacity to care and love, despite all odds.

Today, I read about Gaza, Israel and Palestine, that the Colorado River Basin is drying up, that tornadoes are blazing trails through the Midwest, about the refugee crisis at the Texas-Mexico border, and the unprecedented numbers of hungry children in the US. About the other things that fill my heart.

And today, I am reminded of the utterly reliable way mindfulness helps navigate this perpetual stream of joys and sorrows. Through increasing awareness, curiosity and the willingness to be with the complex, intricate and incomprehensible, the beautiful and tragic, we expand our tolerance and capacity to show up for it all.  

Sitting down, feeling my feet on the ground, the breath coming and going without my interference, being with exactly what is as it is, knowing I cannot end war, fix or change the climate or the crises of social justice. But I can be courageous enough to see it. And today, that is enough.

“The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” 

― Joanna Macy

Summer Splendor

I've just returned from a few days backpacking in the Russian Wilderness, a spectacular area of the Klamath National Forest. In lieu of writing this week, here's a photo of where I've been. 

Big Duck Lake

Just Like Dogs

This past weekend, I went to a dog trialing event called Mondioring. It’s a sport that combines obedience, agility and protection. Most of the dogs were Belgian Malinois, an incredibly strong, smart, agile, and protective breed. It was amazing to watch the intensity of focus in both the dog and the handler, and it occurs to me that dog training, mindfulness and meditation have a lot in common. All three train us in present moment awareness for the purpose of clear, skillful and appropriate response.

My German Shepherd Dog, Olive, teaches me this every day. If I don’t keep up on her steady regular training and practice, she gets rusty and sloppy which she demonstrates beautifully by ignoring my commands. It’s a lot like my mind. When my meditation practice loses momentum or gets off track, my general level of mindfulness gets sloppy and my mind seems to ignore my commands, too!

Just like the dog obedience basics sit, stay, heal, and down, there are basic components of mindfulness and meditation that support our practice.

Zeal and Passion – the drive that brings us back to practice over and over again. With something as fundamentally difficult as training the mind, focusing the attention, and developing skillful response, we need zeal and passion to keep us going.

Energy, Courage and Persistence – mindfulness and meditation practice have their normal cycles. Sometimes it’s easy, accessible, peaceful, insightful, rejuvenating and invigorating. And sometimes it’s just plain impossible, inaccessible, painful, boring, and exhausting. Finding the energy, courage and persistence to stick with it is essential to cultivating the long-term benefits of practice.

Patience, Return, Begin Again – truly the way it is. The mind pulls us in thousands of directions and the practice is to return, again and again. It certainly requires patience, and beginning again is a relief. It doesn’t matter where we’ve been; we just come back, take a breath and begin again. The shining gem of practice is this very precise moment when we notice we’re someplace else. It’s in this moment of knowing that we are absolutely present. And then we lose it. Give yourself the gift of patience by opening the door to come back and the gentle permission to begin again.

Investigation, Curiosity and Creativity – the fun part. Without curiosity and creativity, practice can be utterly flat. Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, whether in meditation, or work, or doing the dishes, when we bring curiosity or investigation to the task, we open the doors to a wider experience. Be creative with your practice, whatever it is. Experiment.

Some traditions have specific rules for practice. But within the tradition of mindfulness meditation there’s a lot of flexibility; noting emotions, naming thought patterns, focusing on the breath, the body or sounds, investigating whatever arises, resting in open awareness, or even metta practice. Like dog training, find a way that works for you and do it. Just sit down, breath and watch your mind.

"Wisdom arises with practice

Without practice, it decays. 

Knowing this two-way path for gain and loss

Conduct yourself so that wisdom grows."

The Buddha, The Dhammapada, verse 282

 

Explosion

Just a few days ago I was filling my tank at the gas station, the kind with two parallel banks of pumps with two pumps each, and enough space for eight cars at a time. I was on the far outside of one bank with another car on the other side of this same bank. A man in a white car on the far outside of the other bank was just finishing filling his tank when another man pulled in towing a large boat behind an even larger pickup truck, and happened to be smoking a cigarette.

Everyone was outside of our cars when sparks started to fly. The man in the white car began yelling at the man with the boat to put his cigarette out. And, with his lit cigarette hanging loosely between his lips, the boat man thoroughly and completely ignored the yelling as it got louder and nastier, replete with extremely crude one-sided name calling. It was a fiery explosion of fury.

I felt a bit scared by this escalating outburst and got back into my car wondering what, if anything, I could do to help. Call the police, try to calmly intervene, or do nothing. I did nothing, when suddenly the irate man slammed his door shut, pealed out of the station squealing his tires and honking his horn at the precise moment the other man slowly, deliberately and silently put his cigarette out.

This is a perfect illustration of last week’s discussion of the teaching of the Two Arrows. To recap, the Two Arrows teaches that the everyday difficulties and challenges of living a life are akin to being shot by an arrow. We all get shot and it hurts. But how we react or respond to this pain determines whether or not we shoot the second arrow, or the third, fourth or the fifth. And this in turn determines whether or not we manage our pain and difficulty skillfully or spread it around like a contagious infection.

Who knows what was going on with these men. The anger and fear underlying the one man’s outburst were probably about a lot more than a man smoking at a gas station. And what about the silent arrows shot by the smoking man’s stubbornness? Both shot a whole quiver of arrows.

Here’s an excerpt from a beautifully poignant short story by Alethea Black.

You, on a Good Day

“You don’t give the finger to the black pickup truck that tailgates and passes you aggressively, then let go of the wheel to give it two fingers when you see a rainbow-tinted peace sticker on the bumper. You do not call the friend – the one who was in the hospital a few weeks ago, and whom you did not visit or call – you do not call her today because today you need something from her. You do not consider dousing your refrigerator with gasoline and setting it on fire because of the sound its motor makes while you’re trying to work…You do not conjure up, in as vivid detail as possible, every time anyone has ever wronged you in any way…You do not wish that your hairdresser would stop talking about her near-death experience and start focusing on what she’s doing with the scissors. You do not care more about your bangs than you do about the life of a sister human…

“You do not, you do not, you do not…

“Not on this day. On this day, you wake up and remember the sight of your four-year-old nephew aiming all of his fire trucks at the television during the coverage of the California wildfires because he wanted to help. On this day, you think about the afternoon you heard a famous poet thoughtfully, gently, lovingly answer a deranged question from an audience member who was mentally ill. On this day, you think about the day the woman in the ATM vestibule heard you crying on the customer service phone because you’d pushed the wrong button and you needed access to that money right away because that check was all the money you had and she had reached into her wallet and handed you a twenty. On this day, you remember Anne Frank’s little scribbled words – or, you don’t so much remember them as you see them floating before your eyes because you’ve got them taped to your wall on a scrap of paper – It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

There’s much more to this story. To read it in its entirety, you can order it from One Story, one-story.org.