I just returned from a frustrating walk. Right away, one dog is licking something off wet leaves on the ground (oh god what is it?), while the other wraps his leash around a tree. My knee starts in on me. Every few feet, my little hunter tries to bolt into the woods, and my homebody will just stop in her tracks, suddenly immovable, like a barrel of wet cement. She looks at me like she just came to, “How did we get here?” They’re going to pull my arms off. Halfway in, a roadside crew fired up every piece of heavy machinery in town all at once: chain saws, stump grinders, wood chippers, street sweepers… I don’t know; I couldn’t see them. But it sounded like all of it, and the screaming racket swallowed the woods. It was the first time I actually wanted the walk to end. It was loud; my dogs had traded in their brains for fruit flies; my underwear was slipping down under my pants; and my own inner monolog mirrored all of it.
I have been listening to Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity. The first piece of one of her exercises requires homing in on a particular facet of your life that is “out of integrity,” meaning that you are living in disharmony with your truth. I chose a low stakes but frustrating situation around mealtime in my house (another story for another day). While I was walking today, I decided to prod at that a little bit — but what spilled out was a whole different thing. What spilled out was a harangue about what a luxury it is for me to be dorking around in the woods with my pampered dogs, indulging this angst about my inner alignment while other beings in this world are living in terror, squalor, starvation.
This is how I go off the rails when I start an exploration of my personal wellbeing. No one is free until everyone is free. How dare I, when others… ?
I resist embracing platitudes like “You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help someone else with theirs” and “Be the light you want to see in the world.” Not to disparage the sentiments (please be that light), but I worry they’ll become thought-stopping slogans — a way to comfortably abdicate responsibility, so I can navel gaze with a clear conscience, absolved from bearing witness to suffering because there’s nothing I can do about it, a la Barbara Bush: “…why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
Beck addresses this in her book, using the hopeful imagery of fractal growth. When we act out of integrity, the benefit exponentially multiplies into the world. She also believes in the possibility of global satori: “If enough people reach a critical threshold of integrity, we might see a virtual explosion of awakening. I like to imagine this, as opposed to the more likely scenario that our species will soon expire in an inferno of its own making.”
It’s such a lovely, seductive thought, but I don’t think there are enough middle aged, middle class white ladies swanning around the upper rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy, clutching our Mary Oliver, to lead humanity to this tipping point (especially if our deranged voting habits are any indication). And everyone else is busy.
I remember being in the meditation hall at Maitripa, giving a bit of a side-eye to the immense, beautiful, golden Shakyamuni Buddha in front of me. I’d think, how is it compassionate to sit there smiling with your eyes half closed when people are suffering? I soon found an answer in the teachings around the Brahmavihara, the Four Immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Each of these states has a shadow, or a false friend, that tricks you into thinking you’ve achieved a divine state when you could not be more lost and further from home.
For instance, if a person is so profoundly affected by another’s suffering that they, themselves, become despondent, it may appear to themselves and others that their suffering is evidence of their great compassion. This is what shadow compassion looks like. What they’ve done is centered themselves, rather than the sufferer, and rendered themselves unable to be of service. This is where I was off base, believing that compassion should look like suffering.
Maybe this is what I’m doing when I say to myself, “I can’t justify pursuing my own wellbeing because others are suffering.” I am paralyzing myself, abdicating responsibility, and serving no one. Very “ego reacting to a potential extinction event” energy! (It should not worry.) The skillfulness of compassion is, as always, down the middle: be with suffering; don’t lose yourself in it.
Reading that last paragraph back to myself, trying to figure out where I’m going with this, I realize that I’ve manufactured a duality in holding myself distinct from others. I remember that, here in the US, Buddhist teachers have to distinguish self-compassion from plain old compassion, because when we Americans say, “compassion for all beings,” it fully escapes us that we are beings, too. We don’t know how to include ourselves.
I’m going to leave this here, unresolved, tangled around trees, underwear slipping. Messy and tender. No bow on top. No blithe platitude about how I’m actually helping. I don’t need to make this ok. I wasn’t born to degradation, oppression, fear, deprivation, war, or disease, and I’m not going to tell myself a fairytale about why. But I am going to entertain the idea that if choices I make can support or contribute to those evils, then maybe choices I make can also contribute to conditions where evils can’t thrive. I will pray that I may honor my blessings by not trying to transform them into suffering. And may I honor the suffering of others by not trying to neutralize it with meaning. May I let it be.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering May all beings never be separated from the boundless joy that is free from suffering May all beings dwell in equanimity, free from grasping and aversion
Ilse Thompson 