Action and Compassion
“What good is meditation when the world is burning? Isn’t it time for action!”
This was a repeating question asked by the participants throughout a three-day retreat I just attended with much-beloved Buddhist teacher and nun Pema Chodron.
In her 86 years, Pema said she’s never seen this degree of rancorous division among people, and she welcomed the question. She held fast to her deep conviction that compassion is the path beyond this milieu of disregard for and disrespect of each other, in too many cases even of our very lives. That capacity of deep compassion lies within each one of us, Pema teaches – without exception. It is inherently part of us, and there are ways we can cultivate and expand it. She calls this our basic goodness. It is our Buddhanature, the Christ within.
The way she knows to cultivate goodness and compassion involves meditation and intentionality.
It begins with finding within ourselves two attitudes:
A willingness to let yourself be touched by the world - and the courage to do so.
A longing to bring down barriers between people rather than put them up.
With this attitude in hand – or rather, in heart – we can grow our capacity first to acknowledge the pain we carry ourselves and then open to the pain carried by others. Meditation is a tool to see more clearly how our own pain colors everything we see. What we carry in our hearts is what we see in the world. If we carry fear, despair, and hopelessness, the world looks to us to be a fear-ridden, desperate, and hopeless situation. This becomes what we resonate with, likewise with negativity, anger, and hatred. The same holds true when we carry hope and love in our hearts; this is the possibility we see.
As we get to know ourselves deeply through meditation and developing what Pema calls intimacy with ourselves, we gain understanding, trust, and confidence. This creates spaciousness in our hearts that naturally leads to the love and compassion of our basic goodness. Not happening all at once, this is a process that the practice of meditation encourages.
Pema taught a particular type of meditation practice that seems to be designed for times like these – where we intentionally ease the pain and suffering in ourselves, others, and the world.
This practice is called Tonglen, which means ‘sending and receiving’. The practice is ancient and has many levels. The simplest version is like this:
We settle ourselves and then begin to recognize a painful feeling in ourselves. On the in-breath, we turn toward it; on the out-breath, we offer it care and ease. This alone is often soothing and allows the heart to relax a little. We may realize that the pain we struggle with is also a struggle for others, even though situations may differ. There is a universality, or common humanity, to human emotions.
The next phase is to bring to mind someone we love who struggles with some difficulty. We breathe in their difficulty and breathe out care and a wish for them to have greater ease. We may notice our hearts filling with more compassion.
Connected to the compassion growing within us, our hearts become spacious enough and strong enough to connect the basic goodness in ourselves to the basic goodness in others. We then expand this to more people, groups, and even people we don’t like or who trigger negative emotions in us. Our inclination to bring down barriers rather than build barriers grows the more we practice this.
We don’t ignore the messiness within ourselves and in the world. Rather we turn toward it, see and feel it fully, all the while knowing we are more than this messiness. We often use the metaphor of the waves in the ocean; waves are the ever-changing challenging emotions and behaviors, and the ocean is our basic goodness. The waves always return to the ocean, which is spacious, steady, and can hold them all.
Pema says, yes, take action in the world to make it better: be angry, protest, write to congress, whatever constructive form our action takes. But also cultivate a kinder, more tender attitude toward ourselves, other people, and the culture around us. Anger without compassion is dangerous and leads to hatred. Anger balanced with compassion can change things for the better.
Both are necessary – action and compassion.
With every action we take, Pema says to ask ourselves: are we putting up barriers or taking them down?
So, what good is meditation when the world is burning? It can put out the fire, one heart at a time.
This is a bold claim. Do you believe it to be true?
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