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Mary will facilitate this Monday, April 11.
When something bad happens, it seems second nature to look for someone or something to blame. There’s a lot going on right now and there’s plenty of blame in the air. I don’t always see right away how I may be connected and contributing, directly or indirectly, to the cause and the solution. What is it that I could do or stop doing to help make things better? The slogan ‘Think globally, Act locally’ comes to mind.
Pema Chōdrön, a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition, teaches how to use blame to help us awaken and become more compassionate:
“When I first read the lojong, or mind training, teachings in The Great Path of Awakening by the nineteenth-century Tibetan teacher Jamgön Kongtrül the Great, I was struck by their unusual message that we can use our difficulties and problems to awaken our hearts. Rather than seeing the unwanted aspects of life as obstacles, Jamgön Kongtrül presented them as the raw material necessary for awakening genuine uncontrived compassion. It is unconditional compassion for ourselves that leads naturally to unconditional compassion for others. The lojong teachings are organized around seven points that contain fifty-nine pithy slogans that remind us how to awaken our hearts. Here are two of those slogans.
Drive all blames into one.
This is advice on how to work with your fellow beings. Everyone is looking for someone to blame and therefore aggression and neurosis keep expanding. Instead, pause and look at what’s happening with you. When you hold on so tightly to your view of what they did, you get hooked. Your own self-righteousness causes you to get all worked up and to suffer. So work on cooling that reactivity rather than escalating it. This approach reduces suffering—yours and everyone else’s.
Be grateful to everyone.
Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting—shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compas- sionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening.”
Monday night we will continue our exploration of the teaching of the Buddha on non-self. Through guided, walking and sitting meditations, we will practice together to experience our interconnectedness or interbeing with all that exists. I welcome you to join us to rest, relax and restore yourself in the sacred space we will create together. I offer a poem for these times:
The Blame Game
I could blame the jar
but really it was I
who picked it up
loose-handed and distracted
so it fell and scattered
glass & Ezekiel
barley fruit & nuts all over
the kitchen. I would blame
my husband who burned
the oatmeal as he often does now
but then I'd have to blame
old age overtaking us
and myself for falling in love long ago.
I could blame Obama
who brought us together
for not being fierce enough
to stop the rape of Crimea.
My back hurts as I sweep
shards of glass.
How to sweep up all the
shattered windows bones & children
forever shattered—
mother & father could not keep them safe
when the squat mean ugly little man who would be Tsar
mustered squadrons of unbelieving
troops to bomb churches kindergartens and schools
and old women who remind them of their own
babushkas. You could blame Jesus Christ
for all the Orthodox church-goers
who vote him in again & again.
Just as I blame our home-grown flock
who want to bring back
our own would-be autocrat
to keep people with darks skins in their place
let women bear children they can't feed
send refugees back where they
came from: maybe Ukraine?
Syria, Somalia, or Guatemala?
Born into war
I lived in cities
piled high in rubble—
the last "good" war.
I feel shame to sit
fed safe & warm
to watch a war
I can't fight in or stop.
Lilla Lyon revised March 11, 2022