Preventing Corruption & Other Advantages Of Mindfulness

Hey,

Everyone,

It's Judy Cohen and this is WIC of call 338.

And today's call is about chapter 18 of the Dhammapada,

Sort of about the head.

And it's called the title of the chapter is corruption.

And when I read the word corruption,

When I was first doing this,

You know,

I first thought I thought about graft and money laundering and the corrupt systems and how easily the word corrupt falls off my tongue when politicians have a subject of my sentence.

I thought about corrupting a child.

But this chapter isn't so much about all of that,

Except in the sense that the kind of corruption the chapter is talking about could maybe lead to that or maybe does lead to that.

But I think that before any of that can happen,

What happens is the is the kind of corruption that this chapter is talking about,

Which is the corruption we do to ourselves or we allow to happen to ourselves.

So chapter 18 starts us off with a kind of like a fire and brimstone warning.

You know,

It says,

Here we are,

Like a yellow leaf standing at the door of death with no provisions for the journey,

Right?

This very scary moment.

And then it tells us what to do about that.

It says,

Make an island for yourself.

Be quick in making effort.

Be wise.

As a smith does with silver,

The wise person gradually bit by bit,

Moment by moment,

Removes impurities from themselves.

So I don't think it's a sermon about original sin and how we're born impure and need to remove impurities from ourselves and purify ourselves in the Judeo-Christian sense,

Maybe,

But I could be wrong.

But I think from a mindfulness perspective,

It doesn't feel like that's what it's saying,

Because our true nature is is clear and wise and full of love.

But you know,

A lot happens in a life,

A lot that can amount to corruption,

That can result in impurities.

And I mean,

In fact,

Everything that happens in a life can result in impurities.

You know,

The times we're born into like these times and our families when we're young and when we're not young and our friends at various steps along the way.

I can think of a few friends who may have contributed to my own impurities.

No judgment.

And the paths we take as we begin to choose a life.

And again,

I think about college and some of the things I did.

Yikes,

You know,

And everything we engage in,

Everything we take in,

All the media,

All the advertising,

All the social media,

All of that can result in impurities.

Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the television shows that we watch and the foods that we eat.

And I think for all of us,

Also the legal profession.

So I think being part of the legal profession can sort of infuse us with impurities.

And of course,

All of this is happening inside the bigger structures at play,

The political and social systems.

We live in the white supremacy,

The patriarchy,

Our climate emergency right now.

So all of these things condition us and sometimes they corrupt us.

And it's not just the big things,

Every moment,

Conditioning,

Sometimes corruption is happening.

But actually,

It's not so much the things,

It's our relationship to them,

I think.

So I grew up in a family with a mom who was very mercurial and kind of alternating between anxious and angry.

And I took on a lot of the anger and spent years and years,

You know,

Turning towards that,

Softening it,

Letting it go to various degrees of success.

My brother didn't take on the anger,

But she took on the anxiety.

So how we relate to what our environment is offering us,

Maybe you fell in with a group of friends at some point in your life and you were influenced by them to say or do things that were in favor of your better judgment or against your better judgment.

And when we get to law school,

We all have those choices.

Do we find ways of using the law as a tool to advance capitalism?

I did that for a long time.

Do we find ways of using the law to help families navigate the world or to help people accused of crimes find safety as they navigate the criminal justice system?

Do we use them to dismantle injustice?

Do we use them to go into government or politics?

We have these choices.

And chapter 18 names some of the choices we can make by naming the corrosive elements that may be inherent in those choices.

So it talks about bad conduct is corruption in a person,

Stinginess in a giver,

Ignorance,

The greatest corruption,

Ignorance,

The greatest corruption.

And I think I was drawn to the law in part because it has what seems to me to be these very bright line boundaries against these corrosive elements,

These black and white rules.

I don't think I had a clear sense when I was 21 and heading into the law,

Exactly what my old bright line boundaries were.

And the law provided me with a way to understand those and to create those.

And it taught me to follow the rules exactly,

Tell the truth absolutely,

Precision is everything,

Timeliness is paramount.

Or at least those were some of the ones that I took on.

Those were the ones that I felt like would keep me from becoming corrupted,

Keep me from bad conduct,

From stinginess,

From ignorance.

The trouble was,

For me,

The rules were so solid and so consequential that I began to live with a deep sense of dread.

What if I got something wrong?

What if I was late?

What if I missed something?

I began to feel like every single thing had to be perfect.

And also,

That no matter how much I had on my plate,

No matter how embattled I felt,

That there was no space for any of that,

And that perfection was key.

And that's still in there for me.

And you can take a minute and see whether any of that is in there for you,

Whether any of that resonates for you.

But that perpetual sense of dread,

That zero room for error of being under fire,

I also feel like those things corrupted me.

And I can kind of see how they did it.

They led to a kind of impatience and a deep sense of self-criticism,

Which I then rolled out in the way I related to others.

They led to stinginess because I was so afraid.

They reinforced my false sense of separateness because I began to believe in life as a battle with winning the only acceptable outcome,

And I forgot that we belong to one another.

So make an island for yourself,

The chapter says.

And that makes sense to me for all humans,

But especially for us lawyers.

Be quick in making the effort,

It says.

Or as Pema Chodron says,

There's no time to lose.

The great news is conditioning is always happening whenever some solid,

Fixed,

Finished person and not all conditioning is corrosive.

So for example,

Mindfulness practice,

I would call it an anti-corrosive.

Sometimes when I sit on my cushion,

I have the thought,

And I don't know if you ever have this thought,

But I have the thought,

Nothing's happening.

You know,

What's so important about this?

But I know that the practice is conditioning me.

You know,

It's conditioning all of us.

This very simple but profound,

You could even say revolutionary practice of paying attention moment to moment,

Of having the courage to turn towards each moment,

No matter how painful,

How difficult,

How intense.

And to do that with grace,

The grace to slow down,

To see things for what they are,

To make space for a breath or two or three.

And in that space for wisdom,

For creativity,

For compassion,

For kindness,

For love,

For self-compassion and self-love to arise.

So we could take a look at whether corruption is happening or might happen as a result of something we're saying or doing or being asked to say or do.

And then letting that wisdom and that love guide us again,

Really moment by moment.

Even in the most courageous imagination of our practice as an anti-corruption tool,

Even taking precedence over the assignment itself,

The work we're being asked to do.

You know,

What if we did that?

And what if we taught that spaciousness to our students?

And then they and we were rewarded in the profession for taking a breath,

Taking a moment,

To take care,

To be heedful,

To make an island for ourselves.

You know,

If we're looking for at least some of the roots of corruption in the law and in this world,

That's so deeply influenced by the law,

We should start there.

And then maybe appreciate even more the importance of,

You know,

What sometimes seems inconsequential,

But is actually very powerful,

This practice.

So let's sit.

And that was a lot of words.

I'm kind of excited there.

So just letting all of it go.

Letting all the words go,

Talking to myself as much as to all of us.

And just coming to the body.

And taking those few moments to really ground the practice,

Feeling the body settling into the chair or the cushion,

Or if you're standing or walking or lying down,

Just sensing the body in whatever posture it's in.

Relaxing into the posture,

Relaxing into the moment.

And then locating the object of awareness,

The anchor,

The object of awareness.

Or the home base,

The breath maybe.

Breath in the body.

Or sound,

The sound in the environment.

So just about any moment.

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