I have discovered many unkind and even cruel thoughts arising in me in relation to a person in my life who actively seeks to provoke me many times a week. When I step out of the self-righteousness behind these unkind thoughts, I find myself having some sympathy for the worst people out there (think dictators & tyrants), who take things a step further and act upon their negative emotions. Moreover, I notice how much of these unwholesome thoughts are followed by a depletion of my energy and a derailing of my focus-- both of which beome the primary motivation to not indulge in these sorts of negative states. As much as we seek to punish those whom we perceive are doing wrong and misbehaving, a close examination of ourselves reveals that what is true for us must be doubly true for them: the negative state they are in is both its own punishment and the seed of future suffering for themselves and others. The greatest gift we can give is to cultivate the inner capacity to not be a conduit for spewing negative emotions.
A brilliant and powerful question to pose, not just to leaders. I experienced this through two conflicts that arose: one with a conventionally powerful person, and the other with a tenant in one of my rental properties who occurs for me as a problematic and nasty personality. The powerful person occurs to me as everything Margaret Wheatley describes above, which is very much in contrast with the publicly projected persona. And yet in dealing with my nasty tenant, I found all sorts of horrible and mean thoughts about her occurring in my mind. Suddenly I realized the tremendous gift that I was receiving from having this difficult tenant: she was showing me my flaws and lack of integrity. I too project a public persona of being kind, generous, and easy-going but the thoughts in my head were downright mean, selfish, and manipulative / controlling. Oh how much I need to grow! How much I am just like that powerful person who is generating conflict with me! That was enough for me commit to being getting my head and heart in integrity with my persona and treating the tenant differently not despite her nastiness, but because of it. Truly priceless... and yet powerful people rarely receive genuine feedback from those around them. This brain death for empathy is the blindpot from which great wounds and re-wounds are inflicted upon everyone around them. Wonderful that Margaret Wheatley can whisper this question in their ears!
The most dangerous man is the one with no self doubt. WIth a little bit of material prosperity in one hand, and enough of a feel of dharma in the other, such a man declares that which he doesn't understand to be either irrelevant, non-existent, or colored wholly with the shade of his own wrong view. The result is to re-injure the world in the ways one is broken because of the inability to confront the blind spot that self-doubt points toward. How to wake up such a man before his actions drive past the point of oblivion? This kind of man is a metaphor for a slightly awakened western civilization as well, possessing prosperity and a little bit of understanding of the subtle, while unconsciously destroying everying it does not understand.
Enoughness of small graces is a paradox, akin to the concept of human perfection. Shunryu Suzuki summed it up perfectly when he said, "Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement." When we consider human evolution, paying attention to all the little things that are not quite right is what allowed our ancestors to survive on the savannah, whereas basking in the gratitude and sufficiency of small graces might lead to inattention toward fundamental survival threats. In the modern world, we must balance the ever-rising tide of hedonic adapation-- where we get so used to every new comfort and advantage that it ceases to bring us joy-- with gratitude for both the blessings and challenges we encounter. In my personal experience, this is very difficult to do without both a meditation and a gratitude practice. Meditation is what trains and restrains the momentum of the powerful subconscious mind that operates wildly like our ancestors from the savannah. Gratitude is the precious food that puts a higher clarity and perspective in charge.
Another way of re-stating this is that life is offering sufficiency at every turn for the task at hand. Our distractions keeps us unaware of the underlying ebb and flow, and never quite clear enough to know our purpose in the moment because of the momentum of the past or the grasping for the future. We experience that dissipation and energetic gap as depression. For all those who face some form of clinical depression, the question I hold is whether depression preceded thought, did thought precede depression, or do they arise together and support one another? Do we believe what we experience, or do we experience what we believe? I suspect that getting to the bottom of these questions will create the space and energy to rise from the downward spiral we experience in depression.
This reminds me of the classic 'circle of influence' and 'circle of concern' which is always a superset of the first. Our greatest power is always in our circle of influence, but we often discount the tremendous ripple power of authentically inhabiting that limiting circle. As the Servicespace ecosystem often says, "Change yourself, change the world."
I've heard humility defined as, "Suspending judgment to allow what is, to arise." How natural it is for the farmer to be humble, how difficult for us, with our multiplicity of wants, needs, desires, and views. Remembering personal history, and how often things which seemed like victories came with barbs and traps, while that which often felt like defeat was actually a gateway to brighter vistas is of great help to me in staying balanced with the present moment.
The passage reminds me a of a conversation I was having with a friend where I complained about the insidiousness of the media world, continually snagging, distracting, trapping, and dissipating people. He responded by acknowledging that truth, but pointing out that to get snagged, you have to have hooks. The lesson for me was that its more important to work on smoothing out those latent tendencies and desires that lead us to our own entrapment than complaining about the systems that are designed to trap people.
Anyone who has bought organic vegetables knows that they spoil much faster than industrial vegetables. Anyone who has visited a tropical forest knows that there are tons of bugs that want to eat a little piece of your body. It seems that wherever there is some life energy, there is something that is trying to take a little bit of that energy for itself. In a modern western environment where we have largely eliminated the natural pests that perform this function, we seem to have incorporated the pestilence into our collective nature, where to varying degrees, people live off the energy, attention, and inattention of their fellow man. To some degree, this is a statement of our interconnectedness, but just beyond that is the realm of our individual intentions in the world. We must take to live, but we must also give to live. What is the most skillful way to dance in that reality?
The only answer seems to come from concentrating and deepening our attention so we're conscious of our hooks, and put some space between us and our lures. The space gives us choice, and choice offers us increasing freedom in outsmarting our evolutionary hooks.
In the last few months, I've been feeling like my life exists somewhere at a place in the middle of this poem. All of the stuff at the end seems too inconcievable for me to understand at the moment, but I can understand the line that reads "travelled too fast over false ground" and "open up, to all the small miracles..." When I slow down enough, I can see magic in the chaos. Ironically, meditation alone seems to be kicking up more dust that tends to stick in my eyes and cloud my clarity, while combining it with running (esp in the early a.m.) helps me slow down enough to dance through the dust storm. And I suppose running may be an apt analogy for wherever someone finds their life to be along the spectrum of this poem. The destination may not be clear, and the path hazy and narrow, but all we need to understand is the next step and muster the stamina to take it.
An important element in skillfully watching tension is tremendous humility, patience and kindness towards oneself. I've found that when I'm seriously working on my edges, the challenges I'm confronted with are just beyond the range of my capacity to endure with equanimity. While it is very true that strength and stability comes from overcoming these obstacles, its also true that I stumble and fall often (and I don't think I'm alone). When I'm able to forgive myself and bring patience and kindness to my failure to be equanamous, that's the impetus to keep working with these challenges. Lack of humility, patience and self-kindness is a dead-end that stops all progress.
Anyone has seen a baby learn how to walk can appreciate the idea that if we had to take on such an analogously challenging endeavor in our adult lives, many of us would simply rule it out as impossible. How many times does a child fall before it can even walk across a room? The key is to get up and keep trying. Paramahansa Yogananda said, "A saint is a sinner who never gave up."
When someone hurts/harms me out of ignorance, I find it much easier to 'turn the other cheek,' than when I'm hurt with intention. What has helped me when I'm intentionally attacked is 1. to observe my bodily pain 2. recognize that the other person is in pain too, and the pain they're giving me is just a small fraction of their own pain 3. remember the most severe physical pain I've been able to endure calmly so I can muster the strength to keep calmly observing 4. speak only after pain has mostly subsided 5. let first words be those of acknowledgement, followed by apology for the role I played in the other's pain 6. hug or smile as soon as possible, if possible :-) Marriage has taught me more about forgiveness than anything else in my life because arguments and even silent disagreement spoil the atmosphere more quickly than anything else, laying the basis for continual escalation. Paraphrasing the wisdom of Sun Tzu as heard from a 4th grader, "Those who win arguments will want to argue more. Those who lose arguments will want to win arguments and thus argue more." Forgiveness is the only path to peace and sanity.
This passage was about attention for me: that to know kindness requires tuning into the constancy of the gifts that sustain us. The challenge with constancy is that its so easy to take that flow for granted and lose gratitude for the kindness which continually charges us up. Hence to know kindness, the author says we must go to the extreme end where its flow is nearly choked off such that even the smallest trickle gives rise to an abundant gratitude which ultimately transforms how we live. There is truth in this, but also think there's a golden middle path that's found in fully accepting the challenges life throws at us. Many examples of this: if somehow you don't get a meal or two, be with your hunger and watch how it changes all your lenses; if a car or train isn't available, let your muscles strain on the long journey home by foot or bicycle; if you feel ignored, embrace your fundamental aloneness past the point of discomfort; and through all of these things you will taste food, and sip time, and respect space, and honor love like never before.
On Dec 13, 2021 rahul wrote on You Are Not Alone, by Tracy Cochran: