Hitch-Hiking the Unknown: The Intimacy of Night

It’s 3 am, no moon, just darkness. I’m sitting in the living room in a la-Z-boy and turn on a lamp to provide just enough light to write by. And it feels like a whole universe fits under this canopy of light. It’s so quiet. So alone. Nothing yanks at me for attention, except maybe the hands of sleep. They almost close my eyes, almost.

 

There’s this woodblock print by a prolific and fantastic Japanese artist named Kawase Hasui. It’s of The Sanggye Pavilion or temple, located by a body of water in Korea. The structure is so strong, but bare. In the background, trees, of beautiful oranges, reds, and yellows. A man stands alone by the bright trees and water, just like I sit alone by the dark.

 

We might often think of ourselves as alone, especially when it’s night, and we’re in pain of some sort, or afraid, have suffered a loss; or we feel the breath of death on our face. Maybe that’s why the man in the woodblock gets to me. He’s clearly not young, but still very upright. He’s looking off to the autumn trees. Is it autumn in the woodblock because it’s late in the man’s life?

 

It’s so hard to look directly at our own aging and to understand it. It sneaks around all the seconds of life until suddenly, it’s just there. A pain, a sickness, a lost friend. How do we come to realize we only live because we age, and that our constant changing is what carries us through life? And when we’re awake to these changes, like we can be in the quiet dark of 3 am, so much becomes clearer to us. Our mind and the world feel so intimately here for us.

 

And when we’re awake like this at 3 am and we’re lucky enough to be relatively pain-free and open to consciously focusing on our existence in this very moment, we can better discern and decide the great matters of our lives. Consciousness was created just for this purpose, to see who we are, see ourselves both here, alone, and in a greater context, carried by the entirety of life, so we can better make decisions about what we do next with our life.

 

When I was 24 or so I hitch-hiked from NYC to San Francisco and Berkeley. It was the 1970s, a very different time than this one, and soon after I had returned from the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. Hitch-hiking was never the safest way to travel. But I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.  And when we’re out there like that, on the road, thumb out, so blatantly in the realm of the unknown, with little to serve as protective walls between us and the vagaries of what we might be exposed to, anything can happen at any time. We can get arrested, attacked, run into people from our past. Run into insights and beauties of all kinds.

 

I ran into someone from college, who had been in the theatre group I was once part of, and we spent a wonderful afternoon together. I met and stayed with one cousin and by chance ran into another. What I needed, I found.

 

One day, I decided to hitch-hike north, to Mendocino, California, to find a friend I had grown up with. All I knew about where she lived was that she was part of a commune in northern California⎼ and there were communes in Mendocino. I got a ride to a small town most of the way to my destination. But then nothing. No cars, no rides.

 

I was beginning to think my whole plan was crazy. How could I imagine I could just set off without knowing my destination and actually arrive there? Then a car stopped on the opposite side of the road and a woman emerged from the car. She had a small backpack and soon put out her thumb. After maybe a half hour of doing little but standing on opposite sides of the road wondering about each other, we smiled back and forth. I crossed the road, and we started to chat.

 

She asked where I was going, and I told her I was looking for a friend (I’ll call) Jo, who was living in a commune somewhere in northern California. My new acquaintance said she lived in a commune in the area. And a housemate of hers, named Jo, had just left for New York to meet up with a friend who had just returned from the Peace Corps. Me.

 

Just then a car stopped for her. She told me the name and location of the commune and then left with her ride. I eventually got to the commune, stayed for a few days, and then returned to Berkeley. It took a few months before Jo and I could get together….

 

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

A Time to Remember That What We Need Can and Must Be Fought for and Won: When Our Breath and Heart Find Each Other

The winter holidays⎼ they bring up so much for so many of us. As with many others, I have almost always looked forward to the holidays. When I was a child, I looked forward to gifts and family celebrations. As a student and teacher, I looked forward to a vacation from work. Now that I’m retired, my focus is on getting together with family and friends. However, there were years in college that I dreaded the holidays, especially the New Year. If I didn’t have a family gathering, a party to go to, friends to be with, a date, the holidays could be lonely and alienating.

And this year especially, so hurtful. The cost of toys, presents, for example, are just too expensive. The cost of simple living is too expensive. My wife and I ignore gift-giving for ourselves. The only gift we give each other is our presence. Yet, for the children we know and charities⎼ it’s a different story. And the commercialization obscures if not undermines the deeper meaning of such moments in time.

The holidays could be so rich. Hanukah is a festival of light and freedom. Kwanzaa of family, community, and culture. Christmas of joy in the birth of Jesus. So much meaning in the depths of the holidays.

The solstice was just last week. Humans have, possibly forever, celebrated solstice, the longest reign of night, and the beginning of the cold, at least in the Northern hemisphere where I live. It’s traditionally a time to engage in rituals to assure that the sun will come again, that spring will follow winter, warmth follow cold, renewal follow hibernation.

The holidays thus have a sacred dimension, a connection to a depth of life and history. Maybe every moment does, too. Their significance is not just religious. The holidays celebrate workers getting a break from intense labor. They signify a recognition of shared humanity, however dim that recognition often was in the past and might be so today.

Every one of us needs time to rest, even for those who get no time off for the holidays. The fact that we have days of rest is beyond a right; it’s a sacred necessity.

Every one of us needs time to step back and contemplate why we’re here on this earth. We need to renew ourselves and our relationships with what surrounds us⎼ to stop, maybe close our eyes and allow ourselves to feel our feet on the ground. To feel right now, there’s no separation⎼ we can never step off the earth or out of the universe that sustains us. Realizing this is a sacred awakening.

We might also feel isolated from others. But we carry other people with us always, in our memories, in our language, in our genes, in our hopes and dreams. Feeling this is a sacred remembrance. When we feel isolated, we’re afraid. When we feel present, fear is diminished.

And there have been moments lately when I just start crying internally. I almost never let it out. Who knows what will emerge. Maybe holidays are here so when no one⎼ or just one dear someone⎼ is around, our breath and our heart can find each other.

In the past, people from many nations fought for a five-day workweek, fighting against those who oppressed them⎼ and they were successful. But today, many are forced to work more than one job just to meet basic economic needs, while the DT regime cuts programs like SNAP, MEDICAID, Headstart, school lunch programs that once helped make life possible for many. He’s working to undermine the power of the people, and is giving to the rich whatever they can steal from the rest of us.

 

*This is a rewrite of an older blog.

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

When Life is too Big for Pretense: Sometimes, Total Honesty and Authenticity Are the Only way

We’ve all experienced pain, both psychological and physical. It’s one element of being alive, yet can be too complex to figure out, so difficult to live with. It can feel like it could shatter us. Maybe we just want it gone and yearn for a pill to mask it or chase it away. Certainly, it exists to signal something is wrong, but it can take on a life of its own, beyond any apparent purpose. It can also house inside itself impactful revelations.

Just a few days ago, an anecdote in a book I had just started reading grabbed my attention. It was Gerry Shishin Wick’s The Five Ranks of Zen; Tozan’s Path of Being, Nonbeing & Compassion. Tozan was a ninth century Zen Master, and his work significantly advanced the practice of Zen.

A monk asked Tozan “How do you avoid the discomfort of hot and cold?” Tozan replied, “Go to that place where there is no hot and cold… When you are hot, be hot; and when you are cold, be cold.”

Recently, I’ve been experiencing a weird pain wrapped in chills. It can feel like an invasion of cold, and I then treat it as such and just want it gone. Other times, it seems to rise from deep within me. I’ve spoken with doctors and tried all sorts of medical, and psychological approaches. I’ve considered how lucky I am that it’s not something worse.

When I can, I try to notice how and from where it came. I notice my response to sensations, and the labels I use for them; our response to pain is as important as the original sensations. If we think we’re having a heart attack, the pain can become immensely greater than if we think we have GERD.

Sometimes, when that cold-pain overtakes me, I visualize in my mind a warm, beautiful day in a place I love. And sometimes, this works, if I don’t shake so much it shatters the image of warmth I had created.

We can get hooked on pain. Pain can narrow our focus, and we can’t let it go. So maybe we then expand the universe of experience, so the pain becomes only one stimulus amidst hundreds. We let it share a moment of our lives with everything else around us, chairs and tables, trees and birds, spatial distances from our body to the walls of the room, or between our nose and toes. Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins describe this method in Dissolving Pain; Simple Brain-Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain.

But so far, no doctor has explained, no approach has fully healed the pain. So, this anecdote speaking of hot and cold, this story⎼ or what in Zen Buddhism is called a Koan, a retold conversation of a Zen master with a student meant to lead to awakening⎼ got to me. It felt so right but its reality eluded me.

What if instead of thinking myself separate from the pain and experiencing it as foreign, it became just one moment of a universe experiencing itself?…

 

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

Can We Utilize Fear Instead of Fearing It? – When It’s So Real It Feels Unreal

This time in history we’re going through is not only scary and disturbing, but so difficult to understand and accept as real. Part of that difficulty comes from the almost all-pervasive reach of the threat. Part of it comes from wanting so much to know what will happen⎼ want to know “we will be all right” ⎼ but we’re in a different universe from knowing that. Part of it comes from perceiving that so much we value, that we feel is crucial to our lives is being taken away step by step. And this is so real it feels unreal.

 

Just last week, DT threatened to withhold support for or attack lawmakers who go against his wish to wipe out the independent free press in this country, including defunding NPR and PBS. And then his sycophants in Congress defunded NPR and PBS.

 

He sued the Wall Street Journal for billions for publishing a letter purportedly from DT to Jeffrey Epstein that included a lewd drawing, and apparently providing evidence that DT and Epstein were not just casual acquaintances.

 

Stephen Colbert, who was often critical of the president in his monologues, saw his contract for his late-night show terminated by CBS. This looks suspiciously like CBS acting in fear of being attacked by DT. As Steven Harper, in Common Dreams asked, was Colbert’s termination part of an implicit or explicit deal to get Federal Communications Commission approval for a merger between Paramount (parent company of CBS) and Skydance Media?

 

And was the termination of Colbert’s contract a continuation of Paramounmt’s bowing down to DT that they started earlier in the year, when they agreed to pay the President $16 million to settle a suit that he had almost no chance of winning? The suit was not just frivolous but a direct attack by DT on CBS for daring to share, during the election, an interview with DT’s opponent, Kamala Harris.

 

And these are just a small sampling of his attacks on the press. He threatened legal action against CNN for reporting on an app that warns people when ICE agents are nearby. He threatened Disney, which owns ABC News, with a suit because George Stephanopoulos, a top news anchor, shared a description of the president’s assault on writer E. Jean Carroll⎼ and Disney capitulated, paid $16 million to DT, despite the fact DT was found guilty by a court, for this case of sexual abuse.

 

And on and on. DT is quickly moving to secure the power of a dictator. He’s trying to rip away our right to free speech and to eliminate all the vehicles we could use to exercise that right. Back in 2017, during his first administration, he received criticism for calling the media, the free press, the “enemy of the people.” Now, he’s straight out attacking any media or anyone that shares views other than his own. He’s doing anything he can to shut it, or us, up.

 

We don’t know what will come of this. We don’t know if enough people will protest, or enough politicians will say “we’ve had it with him.” And then there’s the Jeffrey Epstein rebellion against DT.

 

There’s a large segment of MAGA supporters who voted for DT because he promised to reveal a list complied by Jeffrey Epstein of prominent men who utilized Epstein’s connections to engage in child sexual predation. And now DT’s saying the opposite⎼ saying, there was no list. There is nothing there. And any of you that waste my time on this are weaklings, stupid people. Will the Jeffrey Epstein rebellion against DT’s refusal to come clean build in strength and undermine his power base?

 

DT has also been showing increasing signs of cognitive decline, although there have been warnings of him being reality-challenged for years….

 

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

A Necessary Ingredient for Sanity in Our World Today; The Empowering Force of Compassion

When I stop and just feel what is going on in myself, and listen to what I most need, I discover a drive for being held, and for holding. For care and comfort, and for comforting. And somehow tied to that is a need to be more accepting of how little I know for sure. And to realize this is one aspect of compassion⎼ to recognize I share so much with others but there’s so much more I don’t know. And to value all of it, the knowing and the not-knowing. And the learning of how to be more open and compassionate, for myself and for others.

 

It often feels like one aim of the DT administration is to suck the life out of our mutual concern for others. Embedding compassion in the community itself would help not only ourselves but all those around us. It would make us feel stronger, more ready to act. And I think DT abhors this possibility, yet this is exactly what we need right now.

 

But what exactly is compassion? What images do we have of it or of compassionate people? How would we change if we were more compassionate? What differentiates it from other mental or emotional states associated with it, like empathy, sympathy, or pity? First, we must realize that we can actually develop our compassion.

 

One book that could be a resource for us is The Compassionate Instinct, edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith. The book explores scientific evidence and philosophical arguments for compassion. In the first essay, Keltner argues that it is “rooted in our brain and biology, and [is] ready to be cultivated for the greater good.” It’s in us as a possibility, to be developed—or subverted. Our brains are plastic in that they’re continuously rewiring; that’s how we learn. Learning means change. We change according to our experience and education. Even the way our DNA expresses itself and influences our development depends on experience.

 

Compassion is not just empathy, or not necessarily feeling the suffering of others, but a readiness to recognize and act to relieve that suffering. It’s a responsiveness that empowers us. It’s not just sympathy for, and certainly not pity for, what others are experiencing. Pity can be so condescending, separating, and compassion is more of a welcoming. It’s a recognition and valuing of the fact that we never have a full understanding of any other person. Each person is partly an infinite mystery, and we share that mystery and so much else with them.

 

To develop our compassion, it’s best if, in each possible moment, we intend to respect and directly learn who we are. This means mindfulness, or trauma informed mindfulness, and compassion practices. To respond with clarity to events, and to make decisions with depth of thought, we must be able to observe and be present in our experiences, and feel in ourselves the presence and responsiveness of others. We need empathy.

 

We can, for example, pause in whatever we’re doing. Maybe close our eyes or look closely around us; or just feel our feet on the ground, how the weight is distributed on our feet, what our toes feel like in our shoes. How it feels to just stand where we are. Can we smell the air? Where in our body do we feel the breathing in? And when we breathe out, can we feel our shoulders relax, and settle down?

 

Maybe our minds are full of thoughts, self-attacks for not doing enough or wishing the election had turned out differently. With so much awful news, it’s so easy to distance, hurt, exhaust and thus disempower ourselves. We might feel we don’t deserve compassion. But when the world needs us so badly is exactly when we must give ourselves to it….

 

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

It’s Just Who I Am Now: Feeling More Deeply at Home in Our Bodies

One gigantic reality each of us must face is aging. We can feel it when we’re 11 going on 18, or 65 going on 85. At first, the aging, the changes are usually so small, so subtle, just normal reality. Then, seemingly suddenly, the change is immense, startling, towering over our old understanding of ourselves.

 

A few days ago, I was experiencing persistent shortness of breath and thought I should go to the ER for immediate diagnosis and treatment. The symptoms started during a hike; suddenly, it got so intense I couldn’t tell if I would be able to make it back to my car. I kept imagining having to call on my phone for an ambulance. It was too late in the afternoon to call a doctor; so I slowed my pace and distracted my mind from the fear by counting my steps until I reached my car. And when I did see the car, what an amazing relief it was.

 

But despite all that, I didn’t want to go to the ER. I had a physical sense of what might be going on, and it wasn’t a heart attack. So, I drove home.

 

The difficulty breathing abated for a while; but after dinner, it returned, with even more symptoms added on. So, my wife drove me to the ER. After several hours, the ER medical team decided I had issues, but nothing warranting a stay in the hospital.

 

When we got home, the sky thundered. I couldn’t see any lightning, but I felt not only thunder but a driving wind; and an intense rain seemed to fall suddenly out of everywhere, from the sky, the hills, the buildings. We ran inside, dried off, and went to bed as soon as we could.

 

The next morning, I at first wanted to buy myself something, some material compensation for going through the confusion, fear, and physical discomfort, but wasn’t sure what it could be. I imagined going to some local store, maybe a bookstore. I love bookstores. Or go online, if I could just think of something I felt I really needed or wanted. Consumerism shows itself in unanticipated ways.

 

Then I realized these occasional symptoms and physical changes were just an important element of who I now was. I didn’t need any distractions from my own life. It was just that my self-image was miles behind my reality. My awareness hadn’t comfortably settled into my moment-by-moment experience. But now, maybe, this was changing, like everything else. And maybe now I could perceive this seemingly new situation or time of life as valuable, not just something to deal with⎼ but as something interesting in-itself to observe and learn from.

 

And it became clear to me that no material gifts, or outside objects was what mattered the most to me. What mattered the most was my response⎼ what I did, what actions I took, how I understood whatever occurred. This mattered. This was what would most determine the quality of the next moments and years of my life.

 

A few days later I ran into a co-worker from a job I had years ago. We went through the usual greetings⎼ how are you? what’s your life like now? And we answered as honestly as possible without going into many details. She talked about being 80 years old and beginning to feel old; and she added that young people she knew described older people as afraid of change.

 

But I replied I didn’t think that assessment of older people, of us was entirely accurate. As we age, certainly as I age, I notice changes more quickly than I used to, especially changes in my health, in my environment, in my friends….

 

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

What I Learned from My Dad that He Never Knew He Taught Me: We Never Know What an Experience Will Teach Us

When we’re in the middle of anything, we of course don’t know the ending. But even more, we never know what it might teach us. We just don’t know.

 

My Dad died when he was 96. For the last 4 years or so of his life, it was often painful or frustrating to be with him. Luckily, beautifully, he remained mentally sharp right until the end, but physically, it was a different story. It was painful to see his pain, and frustrating because he took so much time to do anything, from the smallest details to the largest.

 

And he wasn’t always good tempered about it, either, or good tempered with other people. He usually started very polite and upbeat. But if anything didn’t go as he thought it should, like in a restaurant with a server, he’d get annoyed or angry. Maybe he was as frustrated with his own physical slowness as I sometimes was with him, and he let it out instead of restraining it. Maybe he just didn’t have energy left for restraint.

 

He had difficulty accepting his new limitations, as many of us do as we get older. We retain so clearly this image or feeling of when we were younger. When we’re a teenager or in our 20’s, we might be more focused on the future then the past, or on images of what we dream of becoming. When we’re 50 it might be of being 20 or 30. When we’re 70, it’s of being 35 or 50, maybe. But what is it when we’re 96?

 

We carry this conflicting sense of ourselves in our mind and body, a conflict between image and reality, memories or thoughts of other times, and NOW. We think and often feel like we’re much younger than we are, until a medical issue makes itself felt; maybe we have a pain we never had when younger, or we can’t hear or see as well. Or when, like my dad, one minute we can do something seemingly like we’ve done it for twenty or more years. The next moment, it takes us so long to do even the most basic things.

 

And there were days my dad called us to say he went to the ER that morning; and I wondered if he had to do that, or was he just frightened by his aging body.

 

One time when my wife and I we were visiting him, we were awakened by a noise in the middle of the night. We got up and saw my dad getting dressed to go out. He said he was about to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room. We asked him what was wrong and if he was in pain. I think he was feeling short of breath, but I don’t recall his exact symptoms. He said don’t worry; he’d just go to the ER on his own, and we should go back to bed.

 

I thought the ambulance unnecessary and said we would drive him; we wanted to be with him. We argued about it for a few minutes. And then he started to sound more normal. The more he talked with us, the more his symptoms seemed to subside. He paused for a moment, apparently thinking it all over. And said he felt better. We should all go back to bed.

 

And now, for me, in my later 70s, these images of my father come back to me, almost like a message. When I have back pains that make walking difficult, I see my father walking slowly with a cane or walker. I understand better how he might have felt back then. Or I have a sharp pain in my chest and have trouble breathing and can’t tell if I should go to the ER, and I remember my dad. I wonder if what I felt was being exaggerated by fear and the unknown⎼ or was I having a heart attack?

 

And I remember how our talking with him, our show of love, seemed to soothe his pain….

 

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

When the Whole Universe Feels Like It’s Slipping Away: It Can Take a Long Time for Truths to Reach Us

The election of DT first scared the hell out of me. His inauguration makes this even worse, more real. I feel the world, including the natural world, my life, personal and collective slipping away from my grasp. Becoming a gigantic unknown. And it’s forcing me to re-evaluate so much of what I want, so much of what I’m used to and who I think I am.

 

Throughout human history, people have faced such feelings, that a gigantic change or feared cataclysm⎼ or hopeful revolution⎼ was coming. Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s that “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Religions of different places and times expressed their hopes and directed their fears.

 

In Christianity, for example, there was talk of the “end times,” through different stages including the time of the Anti-Christ, or Satanic man, and finally the New Creation, when Christ remakes heaven and Earth, and ends death, pain, suffering. In Judaism, there’s the prediction of a time of a coming messiah, a liberator who will bring the end of days, the Kingdom of God or an ideal state. Islam speaks of the day of judgement.

 

Times of natural disasters, droughts and fires, floods and hurricanes, created fear and sorrow, a sense that the greater world was turning against us. Wars, rebellions, and injustices, times when leaders spread hate and violence created a sense of our own humanness turning against us. People felt powerless, that their nation, human society was collapsing. Instead of focusing on the light within, people turned to the dark. Instead of looking clearly at the world, the society, or themselves, they searched for someone or something to blame.

 

We know this happens. We turn ordinary humans like ourselves into devils; instead of self-inquiry and studying history, science, thinking critically, we see Satan.

 

In such times, it is never more important for people to do what many of us are trying to do now: to get creative. To look for understanding and ways to join with others, ways of acting.

 

In 1882, philosopher Frederick Nietzsche wrote: “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly, “I seek God!” “Whither is God.” He cried out. “We have killed him- you and I.” And later, “Whither are we moving now? …Is there an up or down left? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? …. There has never been a greater deed. And whoever will be born after us… will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”

 

Social Media, Information Establishments,But then, Nietzsche’s madman fell silent. No one responded to him. “[T]his event is still on its way… The light of the stars requires time, deeds require time…  before they can be seen or heard.” The events and movements of today share characteristics with the insight and emotion behind the madman’s cries. If we can face our fears and gigantic cultural shifts, a higher history can follow.

 

Almost 100 years after Nietzsche wrote this, in 1966 it became an iconic news headline. An article about it in Time Magazine led to angry pulpit speeches and pinpointed the decreasing influence of established religion in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the US. It asked us: if we eliminate a central focus for belief and for guiding behavior from the past, from understanding ourselves, whatever that focus is, what will take its place?

 

Charles Kupchan, in a recent article in the Atlantic, wrote, “Trump is Right that Pax Romana is Over’.”…

 

 

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

Entering the Darkest Time of Year, and the Yearning for Gifts of Light; Are There Any Gifts We Can Give Each Other to Help Us Survive the Coming Years?

Both politically and seasonally, we’re entering the darkest time of year for those of us in the northern hemisphere and the US. The winter solstice is this week, along with several other seasonal and spiritual holidays. And in the next year, next month, a new political reality arises, filled with so many unknowns and threats, threats that might convince us to physically or emotionally emigrate from the new reality in the US. So, are there any gifts we can give each other to help us survive the coming years? And to find the awareness, the strength to better perceive opportunities for appropriate action and better take care of ourselves and our loved ones?

 

I would like to suggest a different sort of holiday gift, a gift of resources, programs to listen to, books to read, different emotions to share to strengthen ourselves, our friends and others. The first is difficult right now for many of us⎼ gratitude. With so many threats and unknowns staring us in the face, we might ask what do we have to be grateful for?

 

I was driving home earlier in the week listening to Here and Now on NPR, and there was an interview with Monica Bartlett, Professor of Psychology of the Positive Emotion and Social Behavior Lab at Ganzaga University. She spoke about how gratitude can be healing in times when we’re frightened and feel isolated and powerless. We all share a negativity bias. We tend to think first about our safety, more about what might hurt us than what might uplift us. And this negativity just enhances our fear. In contrast, when we feel gratitude, we feel more powerful and capable. And when we care for others, it’s easier to feel cared for.

 

Professor Bartlett suggests practices like pausing near the end of the day and writing down 3 things we’re grateful for, no matter how small, and recognizing who we interacted with or why that event happened. This can include a person we know well, or the person at the supermarket who showed us where to find what we were looking for, or a pet. Their research showed such a simple practice highlights the connections between ourselves and others, the good others bring to our lives, and the power in relationships to better the world.

 

Then there’s compassion⎼ it’s such a powerful source for freeing ourselves of suffering. One day as I was meditating on compassion, by doing a Buddhist practice of taking a moment to stop what I’m doing, sit down in a quiet space, and saying to myself “may I be happy, may X be happy. May I be healthy, may X be healthy. May I be at peace, may X be at peace. May all beings be free of suffering.” And I just felt the breathing, in and out. And suddenly, my problems, worries, and plans stopped repeating themselves in my mind. There was a silence so deep no thoughts appeared, yet nothing was missing.

 

Compassion goes beyond empathy, to not only recognize the suffering of others, or myself, but a readiness to act to reduce that suffering. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg points out it’s the opposite of passivity. It readies us to act in recognition of our interdependence, our shared presence in the world, and for the benefit of all. Of doing whatever we feel ready to do, to help a neighbor in need, or to support or start a political action to help millions in need.

 

A third recommendation returns us to the healing power of a pet, or to the bond with or care for another being…

 

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

More Is Being Asked of Us Now Than Possibly Ever Before in Our Lives: We Strive, Not Yet Knowing How, Not Yet Knowing If We’ll Succeed. All We Know is the Need to Act

How do we read the signs that the world and our own hearts and minds are giving us? The universe doesn’t just text us one, clearly typed message, explaining all we’re facing. Would we even welcome such a message? Maybe we do get such messages sometimes and aren’t sure if we’re hallucinating it?

 

I’ve been reading Being-Time: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji, by Shinshu Roberts, and just started to alternate it with Seaglass: A Jungian Analyst’s Exploration of Suffering and Individuation, by Gilda Frantz. Dogen is a 13th Century Zen teacher and founder of one of the main schools of Japanese Buddhism. I usually read only 2-4 pages at a time, because each paragraph is like a puzzle requiring considerable reflection. But the beauty that can be discovered in doing so is immense. Frantz’s book was recommended by 2 Facebook friends. It’s been a remarkable find, of essays, personal stories, and interviews about facing the difficult in life and revealing the myths and motivations that drive us.

 

And yesterday, after reading a little in both books, a deep realization, frightening in its scope, grabbed my mind and challenged my emotions. Both books synchronistically seemed to be sending one message, a message of something being asked, no, demanded of me. Something more than I’ve already given, to the world, to myself. It was less a regret for something left undone than a glimpse into an opportunity⎼ if I could take it. Frightening in the risks involved, both in the doing or undoing.

 

There’s a sense of inevitability posed by life in these times, hidden between news reports and the sounds of rain. Between bare tree branches, deep gray clouds, and the feel of tension in my hands and shoulders. Between the ordinary, the known, and the extraordinary and unknown. And a question⎼ We know we must act. But how?

 

More is being asked of all of us than probably ever before in our lives. No matter how much I might want this not to be so, that is the reality. We must let go of so much of what’s normal to our lives so we can do what the times require of us. What our inner selves demand of us.

 

How do  we change our lives internally so we can respond skillfully to the fear DT incites and manipulates in us? To the assault on our values and humanity? How do we respond to his blatant assaults on our security as a people and a nation? To our health care? To our incomes? To threats of deporting immigrants of color, from Latin America? Threats to LGBTQ+? To anyone who opposes him? To the rule of law? How do we respond to the expanding climate and ecological crises?

 

How do I feel less the me isolated from the rest of us, and more of the rest of us in me? Doing so might not only reveal how to help others, and maybe help others realize what they, too, can do, but inspire or expose unseen depths in myself. I want to meditate even more than I do. To learn more than I know. To do more.

 

To help me do this, I plan to read poets and writers from Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and the US, about how to face the horrors caused by one group of humans against others. Or read writers from the distant past, in ancient China when the social order had collapsed, or even in Ukraine or Eastern Europe, in the villages where my own family might have once lived⎼ so we can feel any horrors of life can be faced, and the strength in ourselves to act can be found….

 

 

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