We Need Joy Even When Inundated with Fear and Sorrow, Or Maybe Especially Then: Acting Not for the Quantity of Acclamations but for the Quality of Our Lives

I need to talk about joy. I need to feel it; so many of us need to feel it.

Yet it feels a little weird to talk about joy when such a consequential election is only 9 days away. It’s an election that feels, no, that we know can mean the difference between creating a positive future or losing our right to a positive future; to losing our health care, seeing the destruction of our natural environment, and the loss of the ability for too many of us to achieve a livable income. And when we’re daily slapped in the face with a level of corruption and cruelty from our government that was in all probability never witnessed before in this country.

I’ve thought and written about this before. We need joy even when inundated with fear and sorrow, or maybe especially when so inundated. The emotion has been so twisted and suppressed by DT’s constant and chaotic assaults on almost every aspect of our lives. He not only started a capricious and malignant war against Iran—he started a war within our nation and in ourselves. A wall of hate isolates too many from all others, while a cloud of chaos obscures and disconnects us from our own needs and from our communion with others and our world.

And the bad rep that contentment and happiness have traditionally had in many sections of our society just reinforces this. Many of us grew up thinking how can we be content, or happy unless we’ve found success and security? But in DT’s economy, the possibility of security is getting ever more difficult to achieve. And in the face of DT, if we get past the grief for our world and depression in ourselves, shouldn’t anger, outrage, and a commitment to change prevail?

So many of us, even the critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve joy. We’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves. Yes, anger and outrage have their place; but so does joy.

Historian and activist Tmothy Snyder has written with great clarity about the authoritarian’s playbook and how DT is intent on to filling the air with despair, anxiety, helplessness, defeatism– a sense of being crushed and alone without the power to resist.

Snyder recommends we need to acknowledge the thoughts and feelings DT ignites, without letting them control us. And we need to recognize we’re not alone. In fact, knowing how many people share our feelings and are trying to do something to resist DT’s destructiveness is already a step out of isolation and toward community, and action. To act shows us we can act.

He then said something else that felt so real to me. “You have to be in the moment to get through the moment.”

Fear and depression often thrive when we ruminate in our thoughts about life or about fearful things that might happen instead of being present in what is happening. We might think we can put off joy until the election is over, and if we win. But this can prove counterproductive.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how emotions are created. Our body, mind, and perception systems follow a natural process to provide direction on how to respond to a situation. First, we come awake. We get a message to “pay attention now.” This is followed by appraisals of the stimulus, whether it’s good or bad, wonderful or painful, a problem or a threat. Bodily sensations and feelings are created with an almost unconscious impulse to go either toward, away, or ignore the situation.

Then our mind gets even more involved, bringing in memories and judgments. Likes and dislikes are created, or a story to tell ourselves to make sense of what we perceive. And then how we respond, what actions we choose to take depends on how we’ve interpreted the situation we face.

Joy opens us to go toward a situation, a problem, a person, not withdraw. One teaching about meditation that has been helpful to me is to notice how the act of meditation itself can be joyful. When we acknowledge and value such feelings, we want to do it again. With political actions. there can be great fear there, but also excitement, a sense of freedom, camaraderie, joy. These latter feelings reinforce our commitment to do it again.

But if we do it just to capture joy, we chase it away. If we do it just for headlines, we lose it. So often in the rest of our lives, we do things transactionally. We act for what we can get. We focus on possessions, money; we focus on who we defeat, not who we are.

To feel joy is to do something for the quality of our lives, not for the quantity of acclamations. When we do something just to do it, or because it’s the right thing to do, we feel joy. We don’t focus entirely on an idea of what should happen, although such ideas and analyses can guide us. Joy arises in being present in a moment. This is why a deep physical exertion can be so joyful, or seeing a child smile at us, or a sunrise. Or hearing a beautiful piece of music or an unexpected bird call or having a deep revelation. Or when someone we don’t know acts to help us. All these can lead us to forget everything except being right where we are, at home in ourselves and the world.

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

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.

What Might Being at Peace Mean? The Deep Joy Embedded in Presence that Inclines Us to Laughter

Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.

It’s clear to me that saying it and meaning it, doing it with sincerity, is possibly a beginning of an answer in itself. Telling ourselves being at peace is possible is a door to being there. Or maybe it’s a door to persuading ourselves we deserve it.

So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.

But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?

And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.

I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.

And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.

Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal…

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

Root Beliefs

When someone says something to you that seems outrageously wrong and you want to jump onto his back and pound him, or at least leap onto his words and pound them, consider this first. What beliefs or assumptions about the nature of reality that you hold is he threatening? What beliefs or assumptions of his are behind his statements? You might think his reasoning needs correction or her factual knowledge is deficient. But what might instead be the culprit is her cosmology or “meta-narrative,” meaning the central story that he tells himself to make sense of the world. And if so, your response won’t reach him unless you take that into account.

You aren’t going to change someone’s belief system in one conversation, and attacking that belief system will just lead to defensive behavior. No one likes having their God or favorite story threatened. To do so threatens a person’s whole sense of self and reality.

For example, if you believe that there is a male God who favors the rich, and politically and economically powerful, you are likely to believe what these people say even if it is absurd. According to this viewpoint, it is not the institutions, economic and legal systems of a particular society that favor certain people to gain riches. It is nature itself that puts these people in their position. Another form of this cosmology is presented by Ayn Rand, a novelist and philosopher who has influenced a great many Republican political leaders. For Rand, altruism and compassion are signs of weakness and are unhealthy, immoral, even evil. In her book, The Voice of Reason, she said that altruism is a “monstrous notion.” “It is the morality of cannibals devouring one another. It is a theory of profound hatred for man, for reason, for achievement, for any form of human success and happiness on earth.” To help someone else, she argued, especially if the act is dangerous, is immoral because it would show a lack of esteem for your self. It would be putting someone’s interest above your own, thus degrading you. Governments not only cannot, but should not, help the poor, sick, and elderly, who are to be considered killers of growth. Those who take anything from the government are looting from everyone else. It is the poor who exploit the rich, not the other way around. Christian calls to help the needy, or the image of Jesus as compassionate, are likewise notions that promote immorality. If you believe Rand, you treat those who are on Social Security or Medicare as looters, and those people who want to reduce their college debt as immoral, wanting to steal from the coffers of the brave bankers who loaned them money.

The fact that such beliefs reduce each person to a fortress at war not only with everyone else but nature itself is not a result to be deplored but just the way the world works. For Rand, happiness results from acting in tune with this reality.

I fundamentally disagree with this viewpoint. It often leads to a disquieting tendency to react defensively, not to what I’d call happiness. Contemporary neuroscience describes a “negativity bias” in our brain and perceptual system. We react to the mere possibility of a threat to our selves or even to our self-image, to pain or negative experience, more quickly than to positive experiences. Our fight-flight-freeze response activates quickly. In fact, during the course of a normal day, our thoughts might center on one negative or threatening comment and gloss over the far more numerous positive experiences. Rand’s philosophy reinforces this negative reactivity.

Happiness, whether in the form of joy or overall well-being, only appears as this negativity ends. According to neuroscience, one of the greatest sources of happiness is a close, caring relationship, a relationship where you value the other person as highly as yourself. Where you can let down your guard and relax. It’s difficult to feel happy when you feel everyone around you is primarily motivated by the thought of taking from you whatever you have. Helping others increases self-esteem. It leads you to feel you have something valuable to give and the other is worth your attention. It strengthens the ties between people. How you feel about others and the world includes how you feel about yourself. You value others and in turn feel valued.

But if you can’t speak at the level of these core beliefs in a conversation with someone you disagree with, what do you do? Instead of attacking what divides you, think of what you share. Think from a place of agreement so you can reach some agreement. Use language that doesn’t set off a sense of threat.

George Lakoff, in his book, The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant, gives a guide to do just that. You can’t say to someone “don’t think of an elephant” and imagine they won’t think of an elephant. Likewise, to say “Ayn Rand is wrong” or this idea is evil, you strengthen the idea you oppose in the mind of the people you are speaking with. Instead, use the language and metaphors that a person values in order to expose the implications or perspective they hadn’t considered.

Borrowing again from Lakoff, think of “freedom.” Rand and other conservatives speak frequently about freedom. Ask them to imagine that they want to walk on a beach, but it’s owned by a rich person who fences it off from the public. They want good medical care but can’t get it because they don’t have the money. Or they want to attend college but it’s too expensive. What then happens to their freedom? Whose freedom is supported by the belief that the rich are favored by God? Are the rich to be allowed to deny these freedoms to others?

In an important way, we inhabit the world we believe is true and live the story (or the consequences of the story) about reality that we tell ourselves. If we believe that the only way to be free and get what we need is to seize it, no matter the consequences for others or the environment, then others are unlikely to respond to us with love and friendship. If we put up strong walls, then it’s unlikely anyone will get inside with us. Happiness is reduced to the thrill of defending our isolation. But society is a relationship amongst all its members. The quality of society and of our happiness will depend on how much we respect and value each other and value caring relationships.