Freeing Ourselves from Fixations, Opening to Joy: The Paradox of Sky, The Revelation of Breath

Sometimes, I have a wonderful revelation and write or think about writing an article about it. And then I pick up a magazine, or read a book, and there, right in front of me, is the revelation. But it’s by another person. It’s by a Buddhist teacher, a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim mystic; a philosopher, a neighbor, or a friend. Often, the first impulse of feeling I have is frustration; what will I write now? There’s envy there, jealousy maybe, although how can I be jealous of Buddha or Jesus?

 

I need to remind myself there’ve been thousands of years of people on this planet. There are over 8 billion of us right now. Do I really expect myself to come up with something no one else ever thought of? The particulars, the context I write about might be different, the flavor. But total originality? And isn’t a revelation a revelation whether or not another person was graced by it before I was so graced? Do I have to compete over joy or get jealous over sharing whatever I think distinguishes me from others?

 

And would searching for total originality be just another way of isolating ourselves from others?

 

Occasionally, I notice a very different response. Oh, wow. I’m not alone. This is exciting. Or: I wonder how this other person describes it? I sort of know where the idea came from for me; but what’s the story for this other person? I feel curious, and a sense of joy for both of us. This response feels so much better.

 

It reminds me of what Buddhism calls Mudita, one of the Four Immeasurables or mental habits that liberate the heart. The other three are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity, or being able to discern, adjust to, and move with whatever occurs. Mudita means sympathetic or empathetic joy, or when we feel joyous in the happiness, achievement, good fortune, or in the skills and revelations of another person.

 

When we notice in ourselves these feelings, of envy, jealousy, or the like, and let them go by kindly recognizing how human the feelings are yet limiting. And we wish them good fortune. There’s relief there. There’s a sense of freedom, from fixations and walls of fear. We feel more cared for, and more able to create relationships and community.

 

Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg shares how we sometimes, like my first response above, begrudge another’s happiness or achievement. Some of us are even inclined to glory in another’s setbacks or failures. We might think there’s a limited stockpile of success or happiness; that if they get it, we won’t.

 

Yet, we can look up at the sky and feel a beauty that seems to go on forever. It might seem familiar, like it’s just sky, like we know it already. Or it can scare us, wake us up to how small we are in the universe. It can provide a revelation of infinity in the midst of the limited, normal, and every day. The sky is just so different from the trees and buildings that reach into but stand apart from it. The infinity of sky seems so different from the immensity of matter.

 

I remember standing on the great lawn in the middle of Central Park in New York City and looking downtown toward 59th Street. The contrast between the trees and the buildings shook me up for a second. The two sights, great trees and big buildings, just didn’t seem to go together. And then I looked up and saw the sky above— it didn’t fit at all. It was so vast it couldn’t be contained by any mass of trees or grid of streets.

 

Such a paradox: at a distance, there’s the vastness of sky. It’s blue, orange, gray, black or something that includes all or none of those choices. But close up, it’s air, invisible…

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

One Step: The Fight We’ve Been Given

For some reason, or maybe thousands of reasons, the actions of Louisiana governor Jeff Landry were just too much for me. He suspended an election. He stopped Congressional primary elections in his state from going forward, even though thousands had already voted. Why? So, he could redraw maps of election districts and prevent the interests of Black people, and Democrats, from being represented. He wants no more Black majority districts. White majority and Republican districts, yes. But Black, no. He stops an election solely to stop democracy. This is too much.

 

And there’s the GOP in Tennessee eliminating the one majority Black and Democratic House District in the state. They’re disenfranchising black voters and trying to give DT and his party an additional seat in the House. And it’s being done right in our face. Obvious. Blatant.

 

This racist, autocratic manipulation was made possible by the recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v Callais which further undermined the Voting Rights Act’s ability to counter discrimination in the construction of election districts. DT’s Republican Party is flat out doing all it can to stop a fair election in 2026 and forever afterwards. They fear us voters. They fear democracy. They fear they will lose badly unless they do everything possible to control the election outcome beforehand.

 

And I can’t help but think Landry’s action is just a practice run for November. It’s what DT is possibly planning if or when his party loses the House and Senate. During an interview with Reuters News Service back in January, he hinted at it out loud. According to Reuters: “He boasted that he had accomplished so much that ‘when you think about it, we shouldn’t even have an election.’” In the previous week, he briefly mentioned “cancelling” the 2026 elections to House Republicans.

 

Propublica published a report exposing several efforts DT is using to prepare to overturn the will of the voters in the midterms and dictate future election results. One notable example is he fired 75 federal officials in the DHS and DOJ tasked in 2020 and before that with safeguarding elections. Then he fired the professionals and replaced them with people loyal only to him, not the constitution. Ten of those appointees had worked to overturn the 2020 election. He also gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency which worked to counter false claims about the election being hacked.

 

I don’t know what will happen. No one does. All we have is right now, what we see and know in this moment, and our plans and intentions for the next. Now, we have a chance. There are millions in this with us. The No Kings marches mobilized 8 million people. 15-20 million people took part in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020. Other countries had mass demonstrations to fight for freedom and justice. In June 1987 there was the Democracy Struggle in South Korea; in 2004, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine protested election fraud, forced a re-vote, and ushered in democratic reforms.

 

John Pavlovitz wrote an article published on April 4th by the Good Men Project asking if Americans were too lazy to stop a dictatorship. Are we too distracted, too lost in phone screens, and running so much on autopilot we lack the patience to maintain a struggle, even one to save our own freedom? To save our nation and planet? Or so we might mistakenly think. Despite the world being on fire, for too many of us everything looks perfectly normal– pickleball courts are full, weekend parties in full swing. We need to look deeper at our world and ourselves in order to better discern what’s here and what’s possible 

 

I shuddered reading Pavlovitz’s article, with both fear and a sense of self-questioning, despite recently writing two blogs expressing similar warnings and analysis as his. Do I personally have the determination and courage, the attention span to continue the struggle?…

 

*To read the whole blog, please click on this link to The Good Men Project. Thanks.

When Our Wanting Wants the Wanting to Never Cease; When We Feel Present, We Feel More Powerful, and are Less Likely to be Manipulated

May I be happy….

 

Like so many of my friends and neighbors, I sometimes feel that to spend any length of time other than fighting injustice, going to work, dealing with health issues, or caring for others is a waste of time. Having fun can get lost. Fun is fiddling while the earth burns. It’s putting flowers in the window of a building about to be demolished. It’s sitting silent while our rights and lives are being stolen from us.

 

May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be at peace. May all beings be free from suffering.  I learned this loving-kindness practice, meditation, and wish from author and Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg and others. Visualizing myself happy, smiling, for example, can free me from ruminating, worrying, especially right now, in today’s world. We need to feel we can have moments of happiness despite the multiple threats to our world. If we feel we can’t be happy, we might give up and do nothing.

 

To feel we can be happy we need to feel that we have agency, that we can make changes in ourselves and the world around us.

 

To feel we can make changes, it’s helpful to feel present right here, right now. When we feel present, we more easily feel joy.

 

A few days ago, I heard a program on NPR. The program was an interview by Alicia Garceau of Michaeleen Doucleff, author of a new book called Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultra Processed Foods. The book applied evidence of how research paid for mainly by gambling industries was utilized by social media platforms and the food industry to addict us to their products.

 

Doucleff is a science writer and trained biochemist. Several years ago, she wanted to figure out how to reduce her family’s dependence on new tech and ultra processed foods. She found something surprising.

 

We think of the hormone and neurotransmitter dopamine as the pleasure molecule. What she discovered was dopamine doesn’t give us pleasure; instead, it ties us to what we’re doing. It creates a feeling of wanting. We eat chips and we keep eating them, not because they really satisfy us. They have little to no nutrition. But the more we eat, the more we want. We get caught by wanting.

 

And when we want, we feel empty. We feel what Buddhist philosopher David Loy describes as lacking; we feel that what we have, what we are is not enough. It’s part of the Buddhist understanding of the cause of suffering or feeling our lives are unsatisfactory. Wanting wants the wanting to never cease. It robs us of joy and agency.

 

Children intently desire and get focused on their screen time. They get caught up in “the infinite scroll” not because it brings them joy; the screen experience robs them of that. It promises so much, a sense of belonging, community, support. But this is a trick. It’s like a game advertised by a casino that promises us riches but delivers financial loss instead.

 

Casinos aim to create in the player a continuous, timeless, flow-like state so we more easily feel we have won something when we haven’t….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.