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CHANGE IS POSSIBLE
IN THE TRADITION I’VE BEEN trained in, it’s a long-standing custom to dedicate the positive energy arising from meditation practice to others. So, in the morning, before I meditate, I often spend time thinking of someone I know who is struggling. Naturally, the particular recipient can differ depending on who comes to mind on a given day. I might contemplate someone I met who is caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s or a schoolchild I know trying to recover from a traumatic, violent experience. Perhaps I reflect on a community that is being throttled, as if their voices didn’t count, or I might think of a horrific thing that happened just down the street—like the painting of swastikas on university walls.
Sometimes what captures my attention is the blatant cruelty described matter-of-factly in the news every day, as though the action reported were a normal way for people to treat one another. When I hear of someone being brutally treated, the action seems predicated on the assumption that the person being metaphorically or literally kicked is an object, like a piece of furniture, rather than a person with feelings and dreams and obligations and fears. Some mornings, I just want to go back to bed.
Recently, when I was doing this contemplation, instead of feeling inspired by dedicating the meditation, I just felt burdened, tired out by the relentless onslaught of pain everywhere I looked. I knew I needed a break, something to cradle my aching heart, to remind me of forces unseen and of a broad, open view of change. I had become frozen.
THE STRESS RESPONSE
MOST OF US are familiar with the description of the fight-or-flight response to stress or trauma: our common tendency to perceive a situation as an imminent threat, and react either by gearing up (physiologically, hormonally, and emotionally) to fight for survival or alternatively gearing up to run away as fast as we can.
I felt gratified when stress experts expanded these familiar descriptions to include another common, ready reaction: freezing. It made sense to me as soon as I heard it. We each engage in all three of these reactions, of course, but it seems like each of us has a tendency to gravitate toward one of these more than the others, based on our individual conditioning. I’ll lay claim to freezing as my most frequent automatic reaction, rather than getting ready to bolt or starting to attack.
When we freeze, we’re like the proverbial deer in the headlights. We try to disappear by declaring invisibility. I was recently playing peekaboo with a three-year-old who seemed convinced that I couldn’t see her if she covered her own eyes. That reaction can be adaptive for a while: sometimes we really don’t have the resources on the spot to fully process what is happening, and numbness or temporary dissociation buys us some needed time. It’s no surprise, though, that freezing can also be greatly maladaptive. Some stress experts say fighting or fleeing are signs of hope, while freezing is lanced through with strands of hopelessness. Therefore, it can be harder to deal with.
Our reflexive responses of fighting, fleeing, or freezing—when faced with overly stressful situations or reliving trauma—can be qualitatively different from the marshaling of energy to strongly respond to a need. Our reflexive responses are often fitful and erratic, sending us lurching in reaction without a lot of clarity—more a cry of agony than a battle cry that recalls our purpose and brings us together with others in common cause. My own age-old habitual tendency to freeze, for example—numbing out, disassociating, spacing out, wanting to go to sleep—is not a useful place to stay long term if you really want to make a difference.
I wouldn’t want to pathologize any of our common reactions to stress or trauma, however bad they might feel. The main tools I bring to this challenge of getting stuck in the face of fear are mindfulness and lovingkindness practices—which I have trained in and taught over the course of four decades. The point of developing these qualities is not to judge ourselves harshly when we are less than mindful or kind but to learn how to not be stuck in an automatic reaction. We practice in order to cultivate a sense of agency, to understand that a range of responses is open to us. We practice to remember to breathe, to have the space in the midst of adversity to recall our values, what we really care about—and to find support in our inner strength, and in one another.
Some threats are greatly exaggerated, of course, because of our anxiety, or our feelings of weakness or inadequacy, our entrenched certainty that we will be defeated. Some threats are not real; they live only in our imagination. And while some threats are quite real, we often see them as out of proportion to how dangerous they actually are, heightening our fear. In the times we live in now—when there is great division all around the world—people are often highlighting differences rather than similarities, alienation rather than interconnection. Hatred feels like it is surging, and the scaffolding that has held our communities up—the altruism taught by faith-based traditions, the commitment to good-heartedness in secular traditions, a vision of the body politic’s common good—feels like it has become very shaky. On any given day, anywhere across the globe, people seem more readily torn apart than brought together.
THE ACHING HEART
THE REACTIONS OF fight, flight, or freeze appear to be more of a chronic state that is starting to rule our patterns of consumption and communication, our media, our use of technology, our relationships, the dimensions of our generosity, and the limits of our imagination. We are more afraid, and we are isolating ourselves more: not surprisingly, the number of people describing themselves as quite lonely is shooting up, as reported in the United States, in England, in Japan.
It’s no wonder we’re fearful and despairing, since many times these days it can feel like we’re being hit with an avalanche of sad news on many days, while we so rarely hear inspiring visions of the future. Many people, particularly young people, feel trapped. They say that they find themselves participating in, and therefore perpetuating, a system they did not create, that does not reflect their values, and is destructive of the planet and inequitable. How to have inspiration, they ask, when the only game in town feels rigged? There’s a cognitive dissonance that goes along with that kind of trapped feeling. It’s a form of daily moral injury, what journalist Diane Silver described as a “soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality and relationship to society.”
As I’ve traveled around the world teaching, I’ve gotten a sense of the prevalence and depth of the moral injury resulting from world events. In the political climate of the United States in early 2018, I myself encountered near at hand the very ingredients I needed to get agitated: deception from authority figures, shifting narratives not in accord with objective reality, one’s own perception of the truth continually undermined. My childhood had been shaped by people who I believe cared deeply about me. Yet they thought the best way to express that caring was by never mentioning my mother after she died when I was nine. They thought it best to describe my father’s overdose of sleeping pills when I was eleven as accidental—never explaining how a mere accident led to the rest of his life being spent in one psychiatric facility or another. It was painful to figure out when I was away at college: “Oh, that kind of pattern speaks more of suicidal intention than of an accident.” Feeling something to be true right down to the cells of your body while having that truth affirmed exactly nowhere outside, in fact denied, can make you feel just crazy. That was the flavor of my childhood.
It strongly reminds me of anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory—a once popular (first put forth in the 1950s) though now discarded theory about the roots of schizophrenia. A double bind is exemplified by receiving two conflicting messages, so that successfully responding to one means you’ve failed in response to the other. (A common example is a mother telling you she loves you while her facial expression and body language communicate distaste.) You come to feel torn apart, frustrated, doubting yourself more and more. It might not be the source of schizophrenia, but it can be fearsome. As I looked for articles on this topic through Google, I saw one titled “The Double Bind Theory, Still Crazy-Making After All These Years.”
In service of a more malicious intent to conceal, manipulate, or dominate, these double messages are tactics designed to frighten or confuse, fostering the repeated suggestion that you can’t trust yourself or your perceptions and feelings. We call this gaslighting—a term originating with the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight, and used colloquially since the 1960s to describe efforts to manipulate someone’s perception of reality to the point that they question their sanity.
I knew that inner landscape of collapse and chaos very well. Though when it emerged in the political turmoil of 2018, it had been quite some time since it had surged that strongly or been so sustained. But now, unlike in my childhood, I had tools I had learned in meditation practice. I had values that served as a North Star in my life, such as a respect for myself and others and a commitment to balance. I had insight into ways of fostering resilience and could remind myself, with genuineness, of the crucial fact that I was not alone. I believed in the healing power of love. Helplessness no longer felt natural, the way things are meant to be, but a distortion I could address and did address.
No matter the times we are living in, it takes some determination to acknowledge our own vulnerabilities alongside the truth of discord, and bias, and exploitation, and climate degradation, and yet also see what might be the source of light, or connection, or freedom.
For a while, a friend and I had a pact to send each other one piece of good news a day. We were not alone in this pursuit: the AI-based Google Assistant recently added a feature that provides news in response to the prompt “Tell me something good”; Mindful magazine calls out acts of kindness in its Top of Mind section; The New York Times has a regular good news feature, The Washington Post has the Optimist, and the Los Angeles Times has a good news Twitter feed; groups like Solutions Journalism highlight ways people are trying to work out our problems; and sites like Upworthy and the Good News Network are filled with uplift.
My friend was very into tortoises and quite knowledgeable about them. Apparently, tortoises were doing pretty well as we neared the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, because I got a lot of very positive tortoise news, day after day. For me, though, on some days, between stories of racism, and misogyny, and gender bias, and children separated from their parents, and a resurgence of anti-Semitism, and stories of greed ruling over decency and even common sense, and school/concert/church/synagogue/mosque/mall mass shootings, a reciprocal uplifting article was very hard to find.
A kaleidoscope would be an apt image for this torrent of news, for with a flick of the wrist and a change in perspective and some different elements brought in, the whole constructed world can shift. The 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was an unspeakable tragedy, and it also brought the world a glimpse of the strength and clarity and compassion that lives within the next generation.
Sari Kaufman was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas when a former student went on that shooting spree on Valentine’s Day, killing seventeen students and staff and wounding seventeen others. Sari ran for her life and survived. Along with several other students, she became active immediately after the event, speaking locally and nationally about doing something about gun violence and taking a leading role in an anti-gun-violence march past the school. Those young voices roared. For Sari, the work has been uplifting, but it does not remove the pain, which is indisputably present. In an interview for this book, we spoke about Parkland’s March for Our Lives, which she helped organize. She said:
When we marched past our school, we had thirty-five thousand people just completely silent, which was insane. To keep that many people quiet, and passing the memorial and passing the building where it happened—just being in the spot where everything changed, where this movement was created, it was just really inspiring. We marched around our school and then came back to the park. It was a weird day because it was like, “Wow, look at what we just did,” but at the same time it was, “We did this because of what happened.” So it was kind of bittersweet. I didn’t know what to feel because I was just so happy that after all this work it was a huge success, but at the same time, I lost one of my friends. If that didn’t happen to us, we wouldn’t have had to have the march.
Months later, in June 2018, people around the world felt for the twelve boys, ranging in age from eleven to sixteen, and their soccer coach who were stuck in a small dry spot in a deep, water-filled cave in Thailand. They spent eighteen days there before a heroic and dangerous rescue by trained divers. They survived without food, with limited oxygen, and with only water that dripped from stalactites. An early rescue attempt ended in tragedy when a Thai Navy SEAL lost his life trying to reach them. As horrific as it was, the tragedy also reminded us—as we learned the boys meditated to marshal strength for their ordeal—that we have startling capacities within us. We have our vulnerabilities, and we can be fragile. But we are also strong, resilient. We can bounce back.
Ekapol Chanthawong, the boys’ twenty-five-year-old assistant coach who learned to meditate from his mother and regularly practices at a monastery, said about guiding the boys in mindfulness meditation, “I like to call it my transportable tranquility, because it goes with me wherever I go. I do not need to go outside or down the street or up the block to search for it. It’s already within me, waiting for me to knock and enter. My mother, who quoted philosophers and visionaries, often shared a favorite passage, that ‘Tranquility itself is not freedom from the storm but peace within it.’”
SOFT AND STRONG
WHEN I WANT to summon strength and power in the midst of awfulness and hate, I contemplate water. Our ideas of strength so often surround images of things that are hard—like rock or even a clenched fist. Perhaps that’s why we think love doesn’t include strength, just softness. We are thinking in only one dimension. That’s why I think of water, in all its manifestations. Look at the many ways we experience water: it trickles, spurts, floods, pours, streams, soaks, and shows itself in many more modes. All these convey evanescence, release, flow. They are all about not being stuck.
Water is flexible, taking the shape of whatever vessel it flows into. It’s always interacting, changing, in motion, yet revealing continual patterns of connection. An incarnation of the water in the juicy piece of fruit you ate yesterday may have fallen as rain halfway around the world last year, nourished a flower offered to a beloved in India, or Cleveland, or Buenos Aires. It might have refreshed an elephant in the African savanna, misted the face of a koala in Australia, or fogged in a flight from the San Francisco airport to the consternation of the delayed passengers.
Water can be so expressive, a signal of our most heartfelt feelings. We cry tears of sorrow, tears of outrage, tears of gratitude, and tears of joy.
Water can be puzzling, seeming weak or ineffectual, yielding too much, not holding firm. And yet over time, water will carve its own pathway, even through rock. And yes, water freezes. But it also melts.
RADICAL PRACTICE
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE always found uplift and inspiration in metaphors, like water, but we also take inspiration from other people, and their strength and resiliency in the face of difficult circumstances—the ways in which they unfreeze themselves and make change. Not just in one way but in as many ways as water flows. I have been so moved by people I know who act in ways that seek change and who also tap into an inner strength—a way of being as well as a way of acting. They have helped me find the courage to go beyond freezing, as well.
The people I find deeply inspiring derive their sense of purpose, their vision, their resolve, from different sources: faith traditions, traumatic losses, a sense of oneness with all that they learned in their families or a propulsion away from the values their families lived by. Their efforts in the world have been bolstered by community, nature, music, poetry. For me, the core meditations of mindfulness and lovingkindness have most directly awakened the same values of compassion, inclusion, and understanding, and I have found them the most sustaining practices of all. I celebrate the qualities that emerge from meditation practices and encourage us all to develop these tools to whatever degree we find helpful, but I myself don’t just draw inspiration from meditation practitioners. I want to lift up exemplary human qualities wherever I see them emerge, however people get there, because it is in recognizing those qualities that we remember what’s possible for us.
How these qualities will manifest in our lives may vary quite widely. When I was first talking about this book to one of my friends, the groundbreaking feminist author bell hooks, she told me she doesn’t use the term social action. I am well accustomed to the word parsing of Buddhist scholars, the excruciating care they take to differentiate one term from another, and the painstaking detail with which they will do that, but I’ve told bell I think she has them all beat. She has a point, though.
For her, she said, social action calls to mind overt protests, like marches and picketing, and that limits the range of effective responses one might have to the challenges of the world around us. I agree with her that the scope of possible action that can initiate change, that can move us to act in big and small ways, is far vaster than protests. She suggested radical thinking, or radical practice.
And I thought right away, What about art? which I consider a profoundly radical practice. Many historians give great weight to art and the world of ideas, not just politics, in assessing forces of social change. For example, in the late Tony Judt’s award-winning history of the development of Europe after World War II, Postwar, he counts the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time as significant factors in shaping a new world from the ashes of the old. Ideas artfully expressed move the mind.
Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, at a talk at Yale University in 2019, described art as a medium for social change. “I always thought that if world peace happened, or if great movements in society happened that lifted us all up, it wouldn’t happen because some politicians spoke to each other. It would happen because art and music changed people enough that they could speak their convictions and access their own feelings.”
Rosanne went on, “All art and music is political,” because through art we “develop compassion and empathy … and when you know that other people suffer, you want to do something about it.”
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While writing this book, I volunteered in Puerto Rico for an organization called Bajacu’ Boricua, in collaboration with the Holistic Life Foundation of Baltimore. They brought together a teaching team, half from Puerto Rico and half from the international community, to explore meditation, music, and movement as modes of healing and expression. This coincided with playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda bringing his enormous musical theater hit Hamilton to the island as part of an effort to help in the long-delayed recovery from Hurricane Maria, offering all proceeds to the Flamboyan Arts Fund his family helped start to support music, theater, visual arts, dance, literature, and youth arts education.
I loved Hamilton, and as have many creative works, it deeply moved me. I would suggest that playwrights—not to mention choreographers, cinematographers, composers, poets, and more—are often engaging in radical acts that go far beyond mere entertainment.
Lynn Nottage and Sarah Jones are both playwrights who use art as a form of “radical practice.” Sarah views art as a motivating and disrupting force. She wrote to me:
At our best, those of us who dare (or feel compelled) to sit down to a blank page and chisel away at an idea until it feels true enough to live its own life, or those who are able to harness a world in their minds and use it to fill a void in the world of cinema, hopefully we are a useful example to others—whether they’re moved by the work itself or just the process of creating something, the emotional risk-taking and vulnerability.
Likewise, Lynn is inspired by what she calls “a form of activism and writing that incites change and invites people to think—invites small revolutions, whether those revolutions are tiny shifts in perspective or whether those revolutions are ones that force people to go outside of themselves and do something surprising or different.” A play is not a fixed thing, she says. It is enacted in the moment. “No matter how many times I produce a play, it is never the same play, because it’s completed by the audience and by the energy that’s in that room.”
MINDFULNESS IS NOT ONLY FOR MOUNTAINTOPS
I’VE SPENT THE last four decades working to help people cultivate the inner capacities of mindfulness and lovingkindness through meditation and other methods. I know meditation is sometimes seen as a purely internal and esoteric practice, deeply spiritual and with positive repercussions for the practitioner, but nonetheless quite separate from day-to-day life—a retreat from life’s pains and struggles. We think of gurus on mountaintops and disciples cloistered away in ashrams and caves, living pure, almost disembodied existences.
More and more people use mindfulness and compassion practices these days, moved by their reported influence on the nitty-gritty hurdles of day-to-day life. I’m not sure how many of those people would assert that these methods affect more than themselves and their immediate circle. But I do know that the outcomes of lovingkindness and mindfulness meditation practices can be foundations for engaging in the world in large, bold ways that are also realistic and sustainable. In the face of struggles for social justice, for making the world a better place even when the times feel daunting, mindfulness and lovingkindness practices can help provide us with the tools we need to navigate the emotional and conceptual terrain that comes with seeking to make change.
Sometimes these practices are seen as promoting the opposite of a commitment to social change; they’re regarded as a sort of soporific we can imbibe so that we can feel good no matter what’s going on around us. We can half snooze through life rather than engage with the suffering of others, or even of ourselves. That view of a meditative life paints a fuzzy, sepia-toned picture, a parallel to the disconnected freeze effect in the collection of fight, flight, or freeze stress reactions. It all seems so vague! So removed! So … numb!
Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American born in New York City in 1944, was ordained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in late 1972. He lived in Sri Lanka for almost twenty-four years. For most of his monastic life, he pursued scholarship and translation, as well as practicing and teaching meditation. In the last decade or so, following his return to the United States in 2002, he has increasingly turned to activism, speaking out about hunger and climate change and girls’ education, among other matters. Although he was politically active in his college years, once he became a monk, he felt working on himself and learning the legacy of the ancient tradition was most important. However, he said recently, “I came to feel and to believe that our way of interpreting and applying Buddhism has to adjust itself to the dominant ethos of the age in which we’re living, and to the vital and crucial needs arising from the conditions under which we’re living.” In other words, he came to feel that the conditions of our time require a robust response that reflects our inner values writ large as we look at the legacy of our societies, our priorities, our choices.
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The truth is, meditation would not be as meaningful for me at this time in my life if it were just about me. For my part, my experience practicing, studying, and teaching mindfulness and lovingkindness meditations is that they work to:
Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Salzberg
