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On Monday, Engaged Mindfulness working group members Allyne, Magda, and Phyllis will guide our sangha. We will explore how we react during global crises such as the war in Ukraine.
We will discuss how we can transform our emotions to reduce the suffering we see around the world and how we can cultivate and dwell in peace so that we may be proactive with our love and compassion. We will also share information on Engaged Mindfulness resources and on organizations we know of who are dedicated to helping those impacted by the Ukrainian crisis.
From Allyne:
The immense tragedy of this war and so many other humanitarian crises lay heavily on our hearts. We are so fortunate to have a teacher whose own wisdom and experience with the tragedy of war led him to create the path of Engaged Mindfulness. And we are deeply grateful for the workable blueprint he has given us to follow. Over and over again, he teaches that with mindful breathing, meditation, and walking, we can develop concentration and insight, which leads to stable and sustainable compassion and understanding.
With his Youth for Social Services organization, Thay also gave us a model for turning the insight of compassion and understanding into action. Even amid war and overwhelming suffering, he required his students to have a weekly Day of Mindfulness. He understood the critical necessity of inner peace for survival in a world filled with war.
Yet, Thay never saw individual inner peace as an end in and of itself. He often spoke of how Right View of the insight of compassion and understanding naturally leads to helpful action in the face of great suffering. Following his lead, we now find ourselves in a moment that asks each of us to strengthen our practice and, at the same time, see our unique way to help relieve the enormous suffering unfolding in front of us.
A few weeks ago, I met a kind and dedicated Ukrainian woman in a Facebook group through a series of unexpected circumstances and conditions. She was looking for mindfulness tools she could share with the people of Ukraine. Because of time zone differences, she has been able to come to several early morning sessions of MPCF. She shared her life experience in Ukraine and asked us to provide her with mindfulness tools that she could distribute widely in Ukraine. In her sharing, she offered us a gift of many profound Insights.
One gift was the words of a Ukrainian General to the people of Ukraine. He wisely told them that everyone is responsible for finding their own way to offer help in the face of great need. Soldiers need to fight. Others need to care for the women and children the soldiers had to leave behind. Still others need to keep the heart of their people alive with art and song, and so on.
This challenge also applies to each of us. Each of us has our own role to play. On Monday we will share some ways in which we might help the people of Ukraine and others facing humanitarian crises. There are undoubtedly other ways to help, and we know that many of you are already pursuing many of those ways. We are very grateful that you are there.
In gratitude and love,
Allyne
From Magda:
“Mindfulness is the awareness and transformation of not only our own suffering, but of the suffering around us.” Excerpt from the OHMC Engaged Mindfulness Vision Statement
Several weeks ago, I met a young former student who was deeply upset by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To help her feel better I drew on my own experience, offering her advice that I summarize here.
Decades ago when I started working with disadvantaged youth I would often come home in tears as a result of the injustices and suffering I witnessed. Eventually I came to the realization that dwelling in anger and despair about the misfortunes of my students did not reduce their suffering; it only increased mine. There is so much suffering in the world that we could simply spend every hour of every day dwelling in despair, immobilized.
I eventually embraced Thich Nhat Hanh’s recommendation to mindfully embrace negative emotions like a crying baby, explore the root causes that feed them, and then release them through meditation exercises. Instead of dwelling in despair, I started creating a variety of programs for youth. Working to reduce suffering required me to cultivate and dwell in peace every day. “You cannot give peace if you do not feel it,” I told my student. She soon started to feel calmer.
As a young person I was not too different from my student, as I was deeply impacted by the suffering of others. At school many classmates confided in me since my natural sympathy towards their circumstances was comforting to them. My mother tells me that I came home every day telling a sad story about someone’s misfortune. She once told me: “You are going to suffer a lot in your life.” For a while her statement was true. But eventually I decided to transform my suffering energy into healing action, mostly by practicing peaceful deep listening. Thay’s message that deep listening helps heal the world rings very true to me. But I have also made sure to follow his recommendation to not get attached to my own emotional reactions to the stories people share with me. Through mindful exercises I have become an avid releaser.
My young student was having a hard time tuning out all the media messages about the war. I explained that our sensory exposure to world crises has increased over the years because of how accessible and repetitive media coverage of these crises has become.
I have lived through a series of wars that have felt increasingly close to home. I was raised in Puerto Rico during the Vietnam War, which lasted until I was 14 years old. I sensed how traumatic the war had been, not only to the continental United States but to Puerto Rico, and used to worry that my brother would one day have to serve as a soldier as so many Puerto Ricans had. But the war still seemed somewhat remote, something I only encountered through newspapers and limited TV coverage.
The next three wars felt closer to home since they involved Iraq, the country where my husband of 39 years was born. I met him during the Iran-Iraq War when he was trying to decide whether he would return to Iraq or not. If he had, he would have undoubtedly had to serve as a soldier in the war. Before imperial powers formed the country of Iraq, Iranians freely visited the south of Iraq for sacred rituals and to bury their dead. My husband’s mother and father came from Karbala and Najaf, sacred Shia cities. My mother-in-law knew how to speak Farsi and cooked delicious Iranian food. Given the war, I found it odd that my husband’s wonderful roommate and best friend was Iranian, but perhaps their friendship was not so unusual given the two countries’ historic kinship. Over a combination of Iranian and Iraqi food they both prepared, they engaged in long political discussions and often jokingly defended each other’s national dictators. This taught me that, even when nations were at war, their citizens could still be the best of friends and treat each other as family.
The last two wars touched our family deeply. The Persian Gulf War, between my husband’s beloved adopted country and the homeland of his revered parents, felt tremendously difficult. It broke our family’s heart in two. People I loved and respected had suddenly become the ‘other’. By then the media’s capacity to convey images of war had grown considerably. The constant access to news fueled my already strong emotions. I could not hear Bette Middler sing “From a Distance,” whose lyrics many connected to the ongoing crisis, without crying.
In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, my husband traveled to southern Iraq, putting his engineering skills to use to help reconstruct his parents’ cradle. That time feels surreal to me: Suddenly becoming a single mother, not hearing from my husband for weeks at a time. Once, seeing a graphic picture of a dead man on the front page of the Washington Post, I thought: “No, that could not be him, he would not wear those shoes.” The media’s reach was so great then that I once saw my husband’s building in Basra surrounded by armed Iraqis ready to attack it. Moreover, the school of my young nephew was burned down by an American missile. This event had tremendous repercussions for him, dramatically changing the course of his life.
Here in the United States, meanwhile, I witnessed how war can have a divisive effect on families and whole communities. What began as dialogues ended as acrimonious arguments. My family dwelled in despair then, and I wish we had known about Thay’s teachings, expressed in OHMC’s Engaged Mindfulness Vision as: “We will endeavor to understand deeply the views and suffering of those with whom we disagree just as we endeavor to understand our own views and suffering.”
We no longer have Thich Nhat Hanh’s physical presence to rise to the occasion when there is a world crisis as he did after 9-11 or during the Vietnam War. But thanks to his enduring teachings, we have a wealth of ways to cultivate peace and compassion.
A lotus for you,
Magda Cabrero
On Monday will explore the following questions:
How do I react in times of crisis (within myself, my family, nearby community, world at large?)
How do I transform negative emotions into fruitful nonviolent actions?
How do I help transform suffering - mine as well as others'?
How can/do I apply OHMC’s Engaged Mindfulness Vision Statement? Click here and scroll down for our Engaged Mindfulness Vision Statement.
How do I cultivate peace and compassion within and without during times of crisis?