I would like to start today with an excerpt from the poem Kindness by Naomi Shiab-Nin.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
You must travel where the Indian in the white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
How he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
I want to explore with you and remind you of how this practice helps us meet things that we may not want or we don't like.
Maybe we're disgusted with the direction of our country or situations in our life.
Maybe we've taken on the cultural anxiety and fear that seems to be in the ether.
I would like to encourage you to look at this from the perspective of what the Buddha has to teach.
It can be easy to shut down,
To give in to an imagined future.
And the Buddha said,
I teach suffering and the end of suffering.
So it seems to me that we're learning about suffering right now.
I sure think that's true.
Everything we read or tune into on the news is about suffering.
And we're watching it unfold,
You know,
On the internet,
Through memes and social media,
On television and radio.
And we see the suffering.
It touches something in us when we see it.
Some deep sorrow and pain and helplessness,
Anger.
We can feel how suffering touches us.
But how do we open to it?
You know,
As soon as we're touched by suffering,
The next response,
Quite automatically,
Is to push it away.
Like aversion.
No.
It's easy in some way to shut down.
But as students of these wisdom teachings,
Students of the Buddha,
We're learning to understand suffering.
Understand suffering and not push it away,
But bring it closer.
I'm so grateful that I'm understanding suffering more and more in my practice.
That I can watch my expectations not getting met and not liking it,
But also not being swept away in it.
Just,
Ah,
This is suffering.
I can feel the sadness,
The helplessness,
The strong values that I have around nonviolence and non-harming.
Those values that are sometimes hard to see in other people.
And honestly,
Sometimes they're even hard to see in myself when I'm caught in suffering.
When I push someone away with my judgment,
It takes a minute to remember that this person in front of me also has plans and expectations,
Like the poem says.
The Buddha's whole journey was this question,
Why do human beings suffer?
What's happening in there?
Like,
What's going on?
And he went into his own mind and he found patterns and mechanisms in his own mind and saw that it was not just him personally,
But the patterns of all humanity.
These are patterns that get us hooked.
And there are patterns that free us up.
One of the patterns that we get hooked by is the tendency we have to create a sense of other.
We create an identity around views and beliefs and values.
And we create an identity around someone who has different views and different beliefs and different values.
We create a sense of self and other.
And it's very natural.
But in the extreme,
It can cause so much harm.
And it's very natural.
So we have this paradox,
Right?
We're conditioned beings.
You know,
We are who we are because of all the conditions that we lived through.
That's all of us.
The culture of families,
The culture of school,
The culture of communities.
And many cultures were embedded in.
And these cultures influence us.
And you know,
Not only are we conditioned by them,
But we contribute to the culture.
You know,
We create our tribe.
You know,
We have in our tribe people who share my views and my beliefs and the familiar rules of ethical conduct.
And mostly we're not conscious of it.
And we're not conscious about the ways we hold our views and kind of cling to our views,
Saying that this is wrong.
And this other way,
My way,
This is right.
And this way,
The way that I'm doing it is good.
And this other way is bad.
You know,
Othering happens at a very subconscious level.
So it's not something we can easily control.
But it's something that we can be aware of.
To begin noticing when othering happens.
And this is where mindfulness comes in.
What I'm suggesting here is that if we can be if we can get interested in this,
You know,
Where we're othering,
Not repress it,
Not tell ourselves that we're bad or wrong for doing it,
Because it's a very natural function.
But get curious about,
Okay,
So how am I othering?
It's sort of an act of nonviolent protest against normalizing this type of language.
A nonviolent protest.
And maybe in seeing it,
We'll go about go about it differently,
You know,
Go about working with what is so differently.
Maybe there's a way that we can bridge a conversation,
Meet others with compassion,
And meet ourselves with compassion.
So thank you for your consideration on this reflection.
