This week, Adriana and Annie will co-facilitate. We will read the Five Mindfulness Trainings and dive deeply into the First.
1st mindfulness training: Reverence For Life
Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger, fear, greed, and intolerance, which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking, I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.
Last month, I listened to members of our sangha beautifully reading the first mindfulness training: Reverence for Life. It resonated so clearly in my heart and unveiled the long way we have to walk as practitioners to be close to the real meaning of this training.
There is no doubt that the life of white people is valued immensely more than the life of black, brown, and indigenous people in most countries of the world. This is a fact and the basis of the systems of oppression we see in these countries.
If we contrast each sentence of the first mindfulness training with the reality that has been in front of our eyes and that we have ignored as a society, we are far from realizing this training.
When Thich Nhath Hanh describes the first mindfulness training he says:
“The first training is to protect life, to decrease violence in oneself, in the family, and in society”
To talk about what is happening in the US, where the majority of this sangha is practicing, we may recognize the atrocities of slavery and the practices that have been continually perpetuated against African-Americans.
But, for a lot of liberal people, we may believe that discrimination against Latin-American migrants is a problem of the administration that ended on Inauguration Day last week.
We may have been scandalized when we saw the separation of children from their parents (not new to this administration) or the suspension of the DACA program, but there are many more things we have missed.
While there have been amazing allies among white and other non-Latino people, fighting alongside Latinos for decades, too many of us were comfortably accepting whatever the liberal administrations were telling us. And I include myself.
Apart of the massive deportation ironically known as the “Mexican repatriation” in the late 1920´s and 1930´s, when about 1.8 million people of Mexican origin or descendances were deported to Mexico and at least 60% of them were American citizens, the lynching of Mexican in Texas and other parts of USA, and the sterilization of Latinx women under the US Eugenics program there has been a very clear program designed to kill migrants using the desert of Arizona as a weapon. This tactic has been amazingly effective and the odds of dying crossing the border has more than quadrupled since the plan “Prevention Through Deterrence,” was implemented in 1994 under the Clinton administration.
All of these actions and policies go against our practice of the First Mindfulness Training to protect life.
We need to change the way we practice mindfulness and the way we listen and act on the Five Mindfulness Trainings in order to be capable of opening our hearts but also our eyes and consciences to acknowledge the violence, the killings, and the atrocities that our political and financial systems have been perpetrating against other humans beings.
It seems that in the eyes of most in the U.S., these precious lives haven’t even merited turning our heads to see and acknowledge their existence, except as those who serve us and provide cheap labor.
When we can remove the borders in our hearts and give the same value to all lives, regardless of the color of skin, the culture, the ethnicity, the language spoken, we will truly be practicing Reverence for Life.