What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?

Meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. As a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades exploring the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, he lays out twenty-six qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Sofer to talk about the dangers of burnout, the power of being patient with not knowing, and the role of curiosity in nonviolent approaches to conflict. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, then listen to the full episode.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You begin the book with the quality of aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. Can you say more about the power of aspiration?

Oren Jay Sofer (OS): Aspiration is a verb. It’s not something that we have; it’s something that we do. To aspire is to connect with the energy of our life, to the spirit inside that moves us. Aspiration is how I translate the Pali term saddha, sometimes translated as faith, conviction, or confidence. I think about saddha as a stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that trusts that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. The Buddha’s placement of aspiration at the beginning of his teachings is so brilliant to me because he makes the connection that if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

[The meditation teacher Anagarika] Munindraji was fond of saying that any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way. That stayed with me all of these years as an invitation to really look deeply and ask, What is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? If we all were able to listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises are calling for is not for all of us to do the same thing but for each of us to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through teaching or parenting or making art or doing direct social change work. The articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations, and holding fast to that vision can power social movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that aspiration can help provide us with the energy for change. Sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

OS: I love exploring [the theme of energy] because it’s present in our lives at all levels. In Western society, we tend to have an all-or-nothing approach to energy, which comes from the fossil fuel industry’s extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity. Many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive and to push past our limits.

There are many ways to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy and cultivate the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look to nature and the cycles of the seasons, day and night, and our very breath. All religious traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation in each of our lives to explore how we relate to our energy and how we can start to see the degree to which we’ve become disconnected from our bodies and from the rhythms of the planet. 

JS: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

OS: Absolutely. When we’re disconnected, either we’re unaware of the signals that our body is sending us to rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. This is one of the key factors that leads to burnout. Angela Davis says that anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of themself. I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. In order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest—and how to reclaim our right to rest. Once we start to examine this, we begin to see that self-care and rest are actually radical acts.

JS: Learning to rest often requires patience, and it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. How have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

OS: There’s a powerful quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait’ . . . this ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” When we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity, and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act. And yet at the same time, there’s a need for patience on the moment-to-moment level.

Through the lens of contemplative practice, I’ve come to understand patience in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening. With patience, we can learn to bear the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experiences, whether it’s unpleasant sensations or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. Having patience on the moment-to-moment level allows us to have more breathing room so that we can tolerate the discomfort we experience when we disagree with what’s happening or when it goes against our values. That capacity to bear discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside us so that we can draw on other resources to make a more wise and empowered response. That way, we’re not reacting based on discomfort and resistance.

JS: You also mention the etymology of the word patience. Can you tell us about that?

OS: Patience comes from the Latin patientia, which means “suffering.” To be a patient in a hospital is to be one who suffers. In a sense, patience includes the willingness to bear discomfort consciously. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, I see us called to be patient with not knowing. The more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer and not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we need certainty, the more strained our internal resources become and the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

SS: You’ve mentioned the connection between patience and rest. Can you say more about how we can reclaim our right to rest?

OS: There are a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. The first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind, which broadens the sense of what it means to rest. If we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in downtime activities that were very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. Any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. Rest is a human need. It’s a right; it’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it so that those who have access to rest are those who have resources. There are very real economic pressures just to meet basic needs like housing and healthcare, and then there are also internal barriers to rest, like how our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish and how well we perform. We might think that the busier we are, the more important we are, so some people feel proud of being busy and not resting.

I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing not only to do something about it but to feel it. We can also investigate other questions: How much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

JS: Patience and rest can also open up space for curiosity. Can you say more about the power of curiosity in transforming our relationship to afflictive emotions?

OS: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just an openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. It’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. Curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

Curiosity plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. Dr. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents that the initial stage of a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information. A strategic nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

The post Nurturing the Energy for Change appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Buddhist circles, hope often gets a bad rap. Especially in times of crisis and emergency, it can appear light, frivolous, or even delusional. But writer Rebecca Solnit is determined to change this narrative. For Solnit, hope is inextricable from action and allows us to imagine alternate modes of being in the world.

Over the course of her career, Solnit has published twenty-five books on feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, and hope and catastrophe. Her most recent project, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, explores how we can harness the power of hope in the face of our current climate emergency. Featuring climate scientists and activists from around the world, the book addresses the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis—and envisions a path forward.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Solnit spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg to discuss the difference between hope and optimism, the dangers of hyperindividualism, and why she believes beauty is an essential piece of activist work. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): You write that our present moment is an exodus into the unknown, and our task is to make a home in this space of uncertainty and possibility. Can you say more about how we can take refuge in the unknown?

Rebecca Solnit (RS): A lot of people seem to really dislike uncertainty. One of the things I love about Buddhism is that it really encourages us to engage with codependent arising and to see that innumerable forces are at work, and exactly how they’ll dance together remains to be seen. I think of both optimism and pessimism as forms of certainty about the future. In both cases, we assume we know what’s going to happen. Pessimists assume it’s terrible and let themselves off the hook from doing anything because they speak as though the future has already been decided. Optimists take the opposite position but with the same kind of certainty that everything will be fine, so nothing is required.

Uncertainty is unnerving because it’s unpredictable but also because it demands a lot of us. If the future does not yet exist and we are creating the future in the present, then we have tremendous responsibility to actually engage. [We tend to have] anxiety and avoidance around recognizing the truth of uncertainty, which is also recognizing that change is constant. People often don’t have much memory of the historical past. They think of the present as a kind of eternity that’s somehow being shattered rather than seeing that the world was radically different twenty or fifty years ago, let alone a hundred, so of course it’s going to be different in the next twenty or fifty years. How it will be different is something we’re deciding now. This is the decade of decision.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): Throughout your career, you’ve written about the power of hope in times of emergency, and you say that hope is not a lottery ticket but an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. So how does hope function as an ax? And how can we harness hope as a powerful organizing tool?

RS: One of the quotes that I love is that you can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about hope. One misconception is that it’s the same as optimism. But optimism is certainty about the future, whereas hope is just about possibility. Another misconception is that hope is a feeling and that if you don’t feel good, you can’t be hopeful. But we know that people in the worst situations in the world dared to hope, not because they felt good but because there was something worth doing.

Hope is active, not passive. Hope is where you begin, but you don’t just sit there on the couch feeling hopeful. You actually need to take that hope and act on it. I love the anti-prison activist Mariame Kaba’s definition that hope is a discipline, meaning that it’s a real commitment to how you want to be in the world, and you’re going to try without being confident or certain about outcome.

“You can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope.”

I often go back to Václav Havel, the Czechoslovakian activist who helped topple the [Communist] regime in ways that were so unforeseeable until it happened. He’s a great beacon of hope, and he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Sometimes people think that if you don’t always win, then your hope was ill-founded, but it’s always a gamble. You’re breaking down the door with an ax, but whether you’re going to get everyone out of the theater on fire or the flooding basement remains to be seen. Still, you might as well try.

SS: You liken hope to love in the sense of taking risks and being vulnerable to the possibility of grief and loss. Can you say more about the relationship between hope and love?

RS: I think hope is a kind of vulnerability and a form of care. You don’t hope if you don’t care. Cynicism is a way of saying it’s not worth caring because it’s all going to hell anyway and there’s nothing we can do—it’s a form of giving up beforehand. When I wrote Hope in the Dark, I was really struck by who was hopeful, which was often people on the frontlines, and who was cynical and despairing, which was often really comfortable people who saw it as a form of solidarity with the people they imagined as being desperate and therefore hopeless. I think they were wrong about the hope, if not the desperation. But I also think that ultimately, they were taking care of themselves rather than the world.

Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot. If you hope we can win, then why the hell aren’t you doing anything to win? If you hope that this life can be saved, you better get out there and save it. Hope is inextricable from action, whereas cynicism is almost inextricable from passivity and making decisions that may benefit yourself but not the greater whole. I think cynicism comes partly out of a sense of powerlessness and partly out of a sense of separateness.

“Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot.”

So much encourages people to believe that we can’t win, so all you can win is a really good posture for yourself. But I think that’s wrong. There’s so much more that we can win, and the historical record demonstrates this. This is why I view hope, which is about the future, as very connected to memory and to the past. If you remember how different the world was and how many times dedicated small groups changed the world through nonviolent direct action and concerted campaigns, you know that the world can be changed by these means—it has been changed, and it is changing all the time. The fossil fuel companies, Wall Street, and capitalist forces are all very willing to change it for the worse, so we should be at least as willing to change it for the better.

The post Taking Refuge in the Unknown appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It can be so easy to dismiss joy as frivolous or not serious, especially in times of crisis or despair. But for poet Ross Gay, joy can be a radical and necessary act of resistance and belonging. In his new essay collection, Inciting Joy, Gay explores the rituals and habits that make joy more available to us, as well as the ways that joy can contribute to a deeper sense of solidarity and care.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and co-host Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about finding joy in the midst of grief and sorrow, the dangers of believing ourselves to be self-sufficient, and how joy can dissolve the boundaries between us. Read excerpts from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

James Shaheen (JS): At the beginning of the book, you mention a student who said they’d always been told they couldn’t write about joy because it wasn’t serious enough. How do you understand a comment like that?

Ross Gay (RG): Sometimes people see joy as a kind of lightweight or consumerist emotion. And that’s not it at all. Joy emerges from the understanding that we live in the midst of profound difficulty, and it seems to me to be about the practices of entanglement. When we’re entering these practices of understanding that we belong to one another, that we are not separable from one another, what comes from doing those practices is joy.

Joy is so powerful because it reminds us that we can belong. Culturally, there’s a kind of profound alienation that people are experiencing, and I feel like joy itself is the evidence of a feeling of belonging. That feeling of belonging can be mutual heartbreak. It can be a gathering around all kinds of things. But it does feel like it is the evidence of the belonging to one another, and that feeling of belonging incites more stuff by which we understand we belong to one another. I want to be able to articulate all these ways that we do this daily. I want to be able to notice the ways that as I’m walking down the street, going to get my coffee, or whatever, I’m in the midst of a kind of remarkable care.

JS: Instead of imagining joy as separate from pain, you suggest that it emerges from how we care for each other through sorrow and suffering. Can you say more about how you came to this understanding of joy?

RG: I spent a lot of time fighting to avoid my sorrow and isolate myself from my sorrow, which is also a way of isolating myself from other people. One of the teachings that felt like a life-changing teaching happened at a mindfulness class at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. We were doing a body scan meditation, and the teacher asked, “How’d it feel?” One of the students in the class said she didn’t like it. The teacher said, “Well, why not? Are you OK to talk about it?” And she said, “Well, it made me sad.” As this was going on in this class of thirty people, I realized that I literally couldn’t watch. I couldn’t look at them. It wasn’t like someone was having a finger cut off. It was someone saying they’re sad. But I couldn’t bear to look.

In my body, I was having the same exact feeling that I would have when I would visit my mother. My father had died recently, and my mother was really sad. It was so difficult to be with her in the midst of that sadness, and I learned to watch the ways I would try to get out of being with that sadness. Being with that sadness, to me, is called joy. Being with your mother in the midst of her sadness is one of the aspects of joy, I think.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): I think what you’re saying is so powerful because we can have so many conditioned reactions to that sense of sorrow, which is not allowed for many people. In the book you use an image of inviting sorrow in for tea, echoing the story of the Buddha inviting Mara to tea. But the tea soon turns into a neighborhood potluck full of dancing and raucous celebration. Can you say more about that image of the neighborhood potluck and the boisterousness that can come from sharing our sorrow?

RG: One of my hunches is that if we don’t reject our sorrow, then we don’t reject the sorrow of other people, and if we know that sorrow is not unique to us, maybe we are less inclined to be overcome by it. I think of that potluck itself as a kind of practice of entanglement. In the potluck, there’s a group of people who form a fermentation crew, and then a coven forms. People are dancing and making kites out of the obituary pages. It feels to me that all of these practices emerge as a way for people to acquaint themselves with and then be with their sorrows. When the sorrows get invited in, it’s actually a party where people figure out how to care for each other.

“Joy is so powerful because it reminds us that we can belong.”

JS: You organize the book around two guiding principles: investigating the rituals and habits that make joy available to us and exploring how joy makes us act and feel—in other words, what incites joy and what joy incites. Can you say more about these principles and how they’ve shaped how you see joy as a practice?

RG: The question of what incites joy goes back to the student who said, “Well, I’ve been told that joy isn’t serious. Why should I be thinking hard about joy?” And to me, what I’ve found is that what incites joy is, in fact, deadly serious, including the fact that we die, we grieve, we suffer, and so on. In the book, I talk about pick-up basketball. I talk about gardening. I talk about dancing. A lot of these things are ways that we practice making room for and accommodating as many of us as possible. Often, these are practices where the divisions between us get murky—like dancing, hard. The idea of you and me changes when you’re dancing. Any time you’re growing a garden, a very regular practice of the garden is to share. You’ve got extra zucchini; you share them. Your potato harvest was wild; you share the potatoes. That sharing itself troubles the boundary between you and me.

JS: You say that joy can kindle “a wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity,” which in turn can incite further joy. Can you tell us about this transgressive power of joy in bringing us together across boundaries?

RG: It’s my understanding that there’s extreme care in, say, a pickup basketball court or a strike. What does it mean when people who have been told they’re not supposed to care about each other really love something together and come together around something, whether it’s a song, a garden plot, or a waterway? It feels to me like it’s dangerous, that transgressive joy, that transgressive gathering.

The post Inviting Sorrow in for Tea  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.