Self-compassion is really simply compassion, and exercising compassion strengthens it. The experience of receiving caring primes circuits in your brain to give care. As Kristin Neff says,
"The more we are able to keep our hearts open to ourselves, the more we have available to give to others."
That so many Americans don’t have much available for others is a problem – and it seems to be a growing problem. Along with the disintegration of trust in each other and the institutions through which we build the collective good, has come a diminution of public compassion. We see this in resistance to masks, and vaccine hesitancy. I want to share with you the beginning of David Brooks’ column from two days ago. (He does use a mild swear word, which I will leave in.)
“Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II? It hardly seems possible. That victory required national cohesion, voluntary sacrifice for the common good and trust in institutions and each other. America’s response to Covid-19 suggests that we no longer have sufficient quantities of any of those things. In 2020 Americans failed to socially distance and test for the coronavirus and suffered among the highest infection and death rates in the developed world. Millions decided that wearing a mask infringed their individual liberty. Experts now believe that America will not achieve herd immunity anytime soon. Instead of being largely beaten, this disease could linger, as a more manageable threat, for generations. A major reason is that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is reluctant to get vaccinated. We’re not asking you to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima; we’re asking you to walk into a damn CVS.”
Between World War II and today we became a country that no longer, by and large, understood “what do I need” to be the same as “what does the greater good need?”
In The Atlantic last week, staff writer Derek Thompson wrote that he contacted people who were refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine. They said things like: "I’m not especially vulnerable." "I may have already gotten the virus." "If I get it in the future, it won’t be that bad."
"The risk from an experimental vaccine seems greater than the risk from the disease." Even if all of that were true, which it isn’t, they are thinking only about what’s right for them as individuals. They aren't thinking about anyone but themselves.
Thompson wrote:
“I made this case to several no-vaxxers: Your grandparents, elderly neighbors, and immunocompromised friends will be safer if you’re vaccinated, even if you’ve already been infected....This argument gave several no-vaxxers a bit of pause.”
It apparently hadn’t occurred to them that they might have any responsibilities to the nation and the most vulnerable people in it. A lot of Americans of all races and genders are not accustomed to thinking in terms of compassion – for themselves or for others. They do guard their individual interests, but not in a self-compassionate way – more in a defensive, self-protective way – a way that sees the self’s interest as separate from, and sometimes competing with, other interests instead of seeing that, truly, the self IS others, and there is no separation between others’ interests and one’s own.
“Compassion can make you happier and healthier. Compassion is your ability to experience others' feelings — from joy to sorrow — with a desire to help. The pursuit of compassion may make you happier than the pursuit of happiness. Giving or receiving compassion can:
Boost your bond with others; Make you healthier (the reason: the happier you are, the easier it is to commit to healthy habits); Improve your mental health by decreasing your stress levels; Temporarily shift your attention away from your own challenges and put things into perspective; Enhance your spiritual well-being.”
Dr. Sood concludes:
“The joy you'll feel after committing a random act of kindness will give you a sense of elation that money just can't buy.”
You may ask: What about compassion fatigue? Compassion fatigue is an issue among caregivers and can include emotional, physical, and spiritual distress in those providing care to another. This is the flip side of the separation coin. If your concept of self and other is that they are separate, and you focus only on self’s needs, that’s a problem. But if you assume there is separation and focus only on other’s needs, that’s also a problem. Compassion toward all beings includes you – you are not separate.
With self-compassion and authentic, sustainable self-care daily, there is no compassion fatigue. There may still be plain, ordinary fatigue. Issues of overwork might remain, and I know the pandemic has made for a lot of very overworked caregivers, and I sure hope they get some easing of their workloads soon – just as I do for every overworked person.
So when social justice comes up, when there is talk about the suffering of people oppressed and treated unfairly, traumatized, exploited – not merely dehumanized, but de-animalized – objectified – utterly excluded from concern and respect -- do you think, “Ugh, this just makes me feel bad. I don’t like feeling guilty. I want my congregation’s worship to be spiritually satisfying to me -- to give me uplift and inspiration. That’s what I need.”
OK. I believe that that is what you need. There is nothing more uplifting and inspiring, nothing that satisfies the spirit, more than compassion: the active wish that a being not suffer, and a feeling of sympathetic concern – empathy with a desire to help. With compassion, we want to know where the pain is. We want to know the details of it – where it came from, how it manifests, how widespread it is – so that we can more skillfully respond.
On this mother’s day as we think about and honor mothers and mothering, please call to mind the image of a compassionate, skillful mother. I hope that you had one, or have one, though I recognize that not everyone did. This mother finds a wonderful joy in mothering. Maybe it is mothering under challenging conditions – like Imani Perry, in this year’s Common Read, Breathe, when she writes:
“But no matter how many say so, my sons, you are not a problem. Mothering you is not a problem. It is a gift. A vast one. A breathtaking one, beautiful.”
Call to mind your image of a compassionate, skillful mother. When she hears that one of her children is hurting, she does not say, “I don’t want to hear about that. That’s a downer.”
She knows that sometimes children experimentally complain – just probing to see what response they might get – but she also knows that a complaint that is persistent, consistent, and insistent indicates a real issue. When there is a real issue, she wants to know all about it: How did this happen? How bad does it hurt? She wants to hear about it, learn about it, so she can best respond. I’m not talking about some extraordinary, almost superhuman mother – this is just ordinary, everyday parenting. And if she herself, it turns out, has been doing something that causes or worsens the problem, she wants to know all about that, too, so she can see what to change.
The call to social justice is like that. It is the call to compassion, and there is nothing that brings greater joy, or is more inspiring and uplifting, or is more spiritually healing.
We ask, “What do I need?” Compassion, I believe, is what we all need.
What do I need? It’s not a bad question to ask ourselves. What are my needs? Are they being met? Good questions, from time to time. It's good to check in with ourselves and tend to our own well-being.
And then there’s this other question: What do others need? What do other people need – people of other cultures and races? What do people of other gender – or transgender or no gender -- need? What will our grandchildren’s grandchildren need? What do other species need – other mammals, other warm-blooded beings, other vertebrates, other animals, other living beings? What do ecosystems need? What does the planet need?
In some cases, the answer might be leave them alone and they’ll take care of their own needs. Still, there is something we owe to each other. “What We Owe to Each Other” is the title of a 1998 book by philosopher Tim Scanlon. The book was inspiration for, and mentioned by name in, the TV series, “The Good Place.”
So, here are these two questions: What do I need? What do I owe myself? And what do others need? What do I owe to others?
One very common and perhaps intuitive approach to these questions is to say: we try to balance them. They pull in opposite directions, there’s a tension between what I owe myself and what I owe others, and the best a person can do is try to find the right balance between competing pulls, giving the appropriate amount of attention and concern to each side. I don’t think the balance approach is the most helpful here – the truest to what your own and others’ needs actually call for.
For some of life’s questions, this balance approach is right on – but not this one. For instance, when it comes to work vs. family-leisure-recreation, those competing pulls do require finding a right balance. Finding that balance may not always be easy, but trying to find it is the right approach there.
But the question of what I owe myself and what I owe others calls for a different approach. On this Mother’s Day, let us turn to the wisdom of mothering. There is some balancing involved – particularly that work-family balance. But the general calling of mothering isn’t about balancing, but a combination of serving the collective need and tending to the individual need that’s greatest at that moment. ("A mother is only as happy as her least happy child," according to the saying.)
There’s the paradoxical reality that on the one hand, others must be respected as distinct beings with their own preferences and life plans that might not even make sense to you, while on the other hand, there are no others – all of reality is you. Walt Whitman expressed this awareness in “Song of Myself.” He identifies with every being and every object, for he understands that a self is all selves. He recognizes the suffering of others as his very own:
“Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.
Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side,
(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)
Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.
Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.”
What do I owe myself? What do I owe others? The two questions are really one question, and the answer is compassion – compassion for all that is, including that skin-bag walking around answering to the name printed on your ID card. The general answer to “What do I need?” is compassion. On this Mother’s Day, we look to the quintessence of what mothering is: compassion.
Compassion is an active wish that a being not suffer, and a feeling of sympathetic concern. If a mother’s child falls and hurts himself, she wants him to be out of pain. If you hear that a friend is in the hospital, or out of work, or going through a divorce, you feel for her and hope that everything will be all right. Compassion is our nature: it's an important part of the neural and psychological systems we evolved to nurture children, bond with mates, and hold together "the village it takes to raise a child."
Let’s look at self-compassion – because one thing we all need is self-compassion – self-mothering. Self-compassion is not self-pity. It’s simply recognizing, "this is tough, this hurts," and bringing the same warmhearted wish for suffering to lessen or end that you would bring to any dear friend grappling with the same pain, upset, or challenge as you.
Take a moment to acknowledge your difficulties: your challenges and suffering. Bring to mind the feeling of being with someone you know cares about you: Your mother – or, if that won’t work for you, another family member, or a dear friend, or a spirit, or God, or a pet. Let yourself feel that you matter to this being, who wants you to feel good and do well in life. Bring to mind your difficulties, and imagine that this being who cares about you is feeling and expressing compassion for you. Imagine zir facial expression, gestures, stance, and attitude toward you. Let yourself receive this compassion, taking in its warmth, concern, and goodwill. Open to feeling more understood and nurtured, more peaceful and settled.
Imagine someone you naturally feel compassion for: perhaps a child, or a family member. Imagine how you would feel toward that person if he or she were dealing with whatever is hard for you. Let feelings of compassion fill your mind and body. Extend them toward that person, perhaps visualized as a kind of light radiating from your heart. Notice what it's like to be compassionate. Then, extend the same sense of compassion toward yourself.
Say to yourself: “May this pain pass. May things improve for me. May I feel less upset over time.”
You may recognize that this is prayer – understanding that the point of prayer is not to get some super-being to grant your wish, but rather it is the orientation you give yourself by merely expressing the wish. Have warmth for yourself. Acknowledge your difficulties and pain. Feel compassion sinking in to you, becoming a part of you, soothing and strengthening you.
People have studied self-compassion, and the studies find that having compassion for yourself reduces self-criticism, reduces stress hormones, facilitates resilience, and helps heal the deficits of care that go back to childhood.
When you ask yourself, “What do I need?” and you answer, compassion for all beings including myself, the question then becomes what does compassion look like right now, right here? We’ve looked at the “including myself” part. We’ll look at the “all beings” part in Part 2.
To get to healing – to the transcendence of suffering -- requires moving beyond blaming. The impulse to blame can be a powerful one. It comes from the old self, trying to hold onto itself, like a caterpillar trying to stay a caterpillar. If blame can be fixed, I don’t have to change.
When social change is afoot, there’s anxiety, which may produce a witch-hunt to find someone or something to blame. In the 1975 film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there’s a scene of a literal witch-hunt. A mob wants to burn some poor woman that they accuse of being a witch. We don’t literally burn people anymore. When we did, it was a community’s dysfunctional way of coping with its anxiety that somehow their lives weren’t going as they thought they should. In the movie, the mob comes before the local knight.
“We have found a witch. May we burn her?”
The knight asks, “What makes you think she’s a witch?”
One member of the crowd says, “Well, she turned me into a newt.”
The knight stares at the man, incredulous. “A newt?”
The man shuffles sheepishly and says, “I got better.”
In the midst of change, it probably doesn’t feel like you’re becoming a beautiful, glorious butterfly. Maybe it feels like you’ve somehow been made into a newt – into something unpleasant. Actually, a sleek, perhaps colorful amphibian might be a better bet than an insect butterfly – but the point, of course, is that it’s a metaphor for something you don’t want to be. You want to “get better” – get back to normal, back to the story of your life that you have been accustomed to telling yourself – a story that cannot be maintained in the face of being this newt-ish thing it feels like you’ve become.
You might have some anger in the process – and want to burn whatever witch it was that made this happen to you. If we can blame someone, we get to hold on to our old story of ourselves a little longer.
If we can blame China for the coronavirus, we can delay coming to terms with what this really means. If this is all the fault of Asians, we don’t have to wear masks, or social distance – just punish anyone who happens to be Asian. More broadly, we don’t have to change the way we live. We don’t have to stop degrading the environment, or take any note of the connection between the planet’s loss of species diversity, is directly connected to pandemic outbreaks.
Last October, a UNESCO report established the links between biodiversity loss and the increase in pandemic risk factors.
“The report warns that future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy and kill more people than COVID-19 unless there is a transformative change in the global approach to dealing with infectious diseases, from reaction to prevention....We must transform the way we live on Earth together with other species of the living world, and establish a new pact.”
Healing is about transformation – not getting back to what you were, but becoming something new. t’s not about solving a problem, but becoming new in response to a new reality.
As Pema Chodron writes:
“We think the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
“’T is you that are the music, not your song.
The song is but a door which, opening wide,
Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,
Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong
Sing but of you. Throughout your whole life long
Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide
This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
The song of earth has many different chords;
Ocean has many moods and many tones
Yet always ocean. In the damp Spring woods
The painted trillium smiles, while crisp pine cones
Autumn alone can ripen. So is this
One music with a thousand cadences.”
You are the music. You may have been thinking it was your song – your thoughts, your doings – that was the music. Nope. It's you yourself: the being behind the doing.
And then one day you get sick, or seriously injured – or your life in any of a thousand ways becomes broken: loss of a partner, loss of a job, loss of a home. It always appears first as loss. That old song just won’t sing any more.
It would be flippant of me say, “sing a new one.” It’s not that easy. Even if you know and believe everything I’ve been saying today – even if you understand that your task at such a time is to learn a new song – it’s going to take a while, and it’s not going to be fun. Perhaps it will be your swan song – as you enter into the last loss, the loss of your own life.
If it seems easy, it isn’t genuine – isn’t real transformation. There’s no transcendence of suffering without the suffering. Amy Lowell titled her poem “Listening” – because we don’t so much write our new song as listen – listen for the song that finds itself emerging.
Healing is no picnic, dear friends, but it is worth it. May it be so. Amen.
Healing is our theme for May. The May issue of On the Journey: Healing is out now. Please give that a read. You’ll have a chance to explore it with your Journey Group later this month.
Healing. Well, you may ask, what is the wound? Let’s start today with an obvious, literal physical injury. If you happen not to have one right now, then let me ask you to remember one, for a minute. A literal, physical wound. A scraped knee, perhaps – or a broken bone. And it got better. The cells of your body knew what to do. You probably helped them in their work: you washed the scrape so as to give your cells an easier time of it as they went about the work of repair. Or you went to a doctor to have the bone set properly, and appropriately immobilized, so the bone cells could grow back together in peace. You helped out, and your body took it from there.
You got the award for actor in a supporting role – your body takes the award for leading actor.
And the show was a hit with critics and audiences alike. Healing happened. It was the sequel to “The Wounding,” which had opened to much more mixed reviews. The critics had appreciated its dramatic tension, but audiences didn’t like “The Wounding.” Then there were more sequels: a continuous flow of sequels. Like a series perpetually renewed, the healing never stops.
At first, you thought that what you were healing from was simply some mishap that shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and you just wanted to get back to – to what? Back to “normal”? Turns out normal isn’t what you’re here for.
Some people say God has a plan for you. I might go with that as a kind of metaphor. Some people say you make your own meaning and plan. But that could only be another metaphor – maybe, actually, the same metaphor. If it’s your own idea, OK, but where did it come from? You didn’t have the idea before you had it. Even a unique idea is composed of parts that came from somewhere and fit themselves together in a unique way.
Where your purpose came from is a mystery – as mysterious as where the universe came from, where the big bang came from. You can name that mystery God if you like, and then you have a name for it. You haven’t solved it, or clarified it, or reduced its mysteriousness in any way. You’ve only named it – though with that particular name you’ve associated the purpose of your existence with the creative force of the universe itself, with creativity. And that might be helpful. Wherever your purpose came from, I’m pretty sure you do have one. And getting back to normal isn’t it.
You are here to love, to give what you are, and to grow. Like all living things – like amoebas, grass, salamanders, cats, fungus, daffodils, octopuses, wood thrushes, slime mold, larch trees, beagles, yellow-naped Amazon parrots – like all that is alive -- you and I are here to grow – to change, to transform. For humans and the more social animals, at least, growth doesn’t happen without wounding. We don’t grow into wisdom without some pain.
As Naomi Shihab Nye's beautiful poem, "Kindness," says:
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”
There’s a piece in your Journey Group materials this month by Thomas Egnew from a study he did interviewing doctors about what they learned about healing from their careers as healers. They spoke of wholeness – “making whole again,” or “becoming whole again” or “finding wholeness.” It’s not getting back to normal, but finding one’s personhood within a new normal.
Illness, one doctor said, “denies most conceptions of what it means to be yourself” – because “you can’t do the things you used to do.” You might or might not get better – healing doesn’t always mean being cured or fixed. It does mean finding wholeness in your situation.
The doctors also spoke of narrative – the patient’s story about themselves, about their disease. Healing involves a reinterpretation, a re-drafting of the life narrative. The narrative, most fundamentally, is about relationships: patient with other patients, with family, with medical providers.
Finding yourself, your wholeness, is always finding your place within a web of relationships. One doctor said, “to be whole is to be whole in the presence of others.” You are the author of your life narrative, but it takes a whole network of co-authors working it out with you, editing your drafts. Healing entails a narrative of healing.
Thus healing is a matter not simply of the body, but of the spirit – what one doctor described as the “ineffable quality that we have that propels us forward,” and another characterized as harmony that exists “when what you know, and what you say, and what you feel are in balance.” Healing isn’t “getting back to” something. Healing is transformation.
The healing cocoon doesn’t get you back to being the caterpillar you were, but makes you into a butterfly. And then makes the butterfly into the next thing, and then the next thing. One doctor said, “almost universally, illness awakened them to a meaning of what’s important in life.”
Disease and injury is a suffering, and the suffering is not simply the body’s pain, discomfort, dis-ease. Rather, the crux of the matter is no longer being the person you thought of yourself as – the forced re-writing of your narrative.As Egnew writes, “Not being the persons they have known themselves to be, they suffer.” Healing then, is the transcendence of that suffering. Not the end of suffering, but the transcending of it – the understanding of it within a new context of meaning, a new narrative, a new harmony, a new wholeness.
These are stressful times. Under stress, we are apt to be reactive. Anger, fear, and sadness all have an important role to play in our lives. We wouldn’t want to become unable to feel those things. Anger is fiery energy for insisting on justice. Fear heightens our awareness of danger which helps us stay safe. Sadness slows us down so we can adjust to a loss or disappointment.
Under conditions of stress, these feelings overfunction, and go beyond their usefulness. So today I just want to offer us some tools for approaching stressful moments -- because, I know we’re facing them.
The first tool is Yom Kippur itself. Make amends. Our relationships with family, friends, and any acquaintance you regularly interact with -- or could interact with -- are the key of a good life: our greatest pleasure in good times and our best security in hard times. Yet it’s the nature of relationships that they sometimes fray. Now we’ve got this wonderful occasion, Yom Kippur, to attend to relationships that may be frayed. Who in your life are you on the outs with? Who is on the outs with you? You could go on being estranged from each other. But maybe there are some people you have fallen out with, and that relationship could be mended.
I don’t want to deny that you may have encountered people that are so toxic that you have just had to walk away. I’m not here to urge you to make yourself available to be sucked into every dysfunction you’ve ever seen. Just take a little time this Yom Kippur -- and every Yom Kippur, and maybe from time to time throughout the year -- to reflect on what relationships are a little more distant that they need to be. And then reflect on what you might do to make the relationship closer. Call them up, or write to them to set up a zoom. Apologize for wrongs done, and offer forgiveness for wrongs done to you.
If that feels awkward, you’ve got this holiday to help get past the awkwardness. If you or the other person are Jewish, you just say, “Hey, it’s Yom Kippur, and I’d like to make amends.” If you’re not Jewish, you can still say, “It’s Yom Kippur, which
is this Jewish holy day for atoning, and even though I’m not Jewish, repairing relationships seems like a really good idea, so I thought I’d give it a try.”
You can never have too many friends.
In these stressful times, our relationships are what will get us through. I also want to offer a tool you can use by yourself for dealing with tough situations. It’s an acronym that spells rain -- R-A-I-N.
Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.
Tara Brach
If you can remember those four words, then they’ll help you remember what I’ll say about how to use them. Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. It’s an easy-to-remember formula, and an effective practice. Insight meditation teacher Michele McDonald introduced the RAIN practice about 20 years ago. Psychologist, and also insight meditation teacher, Tara Brach, modified and popularized RAIN. I’ll be sharing with you today the version from Tara Brach.
Recognize: what is happening;
Allow: the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate: with kindness;
Nurture: with self-compassion.
First, recognize what is happening. Maybe not as easy as it sounds. Recognize what you’re feeling in that moment.
Often we get angry without taking a moment to recognize to ourselves: I’m angry. Or: I’m having some anger about this. We get scared, but often don’t acknowledge to ourselves our fear. Bring attention to whatever thoughts, emotions, feelings or sensations you’re experiencing at that moment. If you're mad, recognize that you're mad. If your sad, recognize that you're sad. If you're nervous recognize that you're nervous.
Recognize also your body’s responses. Is there a squeezing, pressure, or tightness somewhere -- in your shoulders? Throat? Face? Gut?
You might recognize anxiety right away, but not notice the bodily sensations.
Or, you might notice the body, but not notice that underlying assumption of your thinking. You might notice, for instance, a jittery nervousness of the body, but not recognize that this is being triggered by your underlying belief that you are about to fail.
To recognize what’s happening, explicitly ask yourself: “What is happening inside me right now?” Be curious about yourself. Curiosity is the antidote to judgmentalism. Whether it’s judgmentalism directed at yourself or at someone else, curiosity is the antidote. Never mind what you think you SHOULD be thinking and feeling. Trust that whatever you in fact are feeling in your body, feeling emotionally, thinking and believing is worth recognizing.
Second: Allow. Allow the experience to be there, just as it is. Allow life to be just as it is. This doesn’t mean you don’t think about what strategies for creating change will be effective. It means you’re not going to be in denial about how things in fact are right now. It means acknowledging that you and the world are OK in just this sense: you and the world have the capacity to move through this.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
-- as Martin Luther King said.
You won’t make positive change by hating what is. You make positive change by loving what is. Allow that it is exactly as it is -- even if you’re only allowing it for a moment while you calm yourself and think clearly and lovingly about how to move forward.
Whatever thoughts, emotions, sensations you discover and recognize, let them be. Whatever they are, they’re allowed. Maybe you don’t like the emotion, sensation, or thought. Maybe you wish it would go away. But your willingness to be with yourself, just as you are, is crucial.
One of my favorite Rumi poems is The Guest House, which you may know:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
What Rumi is saying is: allow. Allow the experience that has come to visit you to be your guest. Allowing is part of healing. Having a key word to say to yourself can help with allowing the experience to simply be what it is. The word might be “yes.” You recognize that fear is present, and you feel its grip, and whisper “yes.” Or, say you’ve recognized that grief has swelled up – a strong feeling of loss. Whisper, “yes.”
Maybe instead of “yes,” you use the phrase, “this too.” Anger arises, say, triggered by a co-worker’s incompetence. “This too” you whisper – recognizing that life also includes this. Or perhaps you say, “I consent” to allow yourself to be with what is.
It does tend to be true that when we recognize an unpleasant feeling and allow it to be, it will dissipate. What we don’t recognize, and try to deny, or repress, is likely to stay around. What we recognize and allow will TEND to go away. And knowing this, we might find ourselves using our word as a strategy to MAKE it go away. You may catch yourself rather mechanically saying “yes” to a feeling of shame when you aren’t really allowing it to be there, but are hoping that going through this motion will make it magically disappear.
Allowing doesn’t always make the feeling go away. It TENDS to help the feeling dissipate, but not always – and particularly if you aren’t sincerely allowing it to be just as it is. Often, we have to allow over and over. Yet even the first move toward allowing -- whispering “yes” or “this too” begins to soften the hard edges of the feeling. You have at least ratcheted down your resistance to what is – and that resistance tends to make things worse for you.
Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. In the second part, I’ll talk about how and why to Investigate and Nurture.
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
Those words of Rabindranath Tagore, and today’s topic of the Inner Critic – the voice inside you that is always telling you what’s wrong with you – and this month’s theme of Joy – somehow combine in thoughts about: Democracy.
Democracy is, as John Dewey said:
“more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
When I was a graduate student in philosophy, I adopted Dewey as a special research interest. John Dewey, born 100 years before I was, helped me see democracy as not “simply and solely a form of government”, but a social and personal ideal – a spiritual value, for through democracy, he wrote,
“the incarnation of God in man . . . becomes a living, present thing.”
Thus I have come to see this as the great value of congregational life.
Yes, certainly a congregation facilitates and encourages your spiritual growth, but if you’re determined to pursue spirituality on your own, there are options for doing that. You can read books about spirituality, you can meditate and get a guru or spiritual teacher. You don’t HAVE to have a congregation to develop your spirituality. Congregational life is a particular container – we might say, chalice – for nurturing your spiritual flame, and congregations provide unique features you won’t find on any noncongregational spiritual path.
In particular, congregations are self-governing. Congregations have committees, and rules of procedure, and bylaws. Congregations give you a role in running the place. Meditation classes or sessions with a spiritual therapist don't. I know that the prospect of being on a committee is not a huge selling point these days. Nevertheless, spiritual community that is run by the seekers themselves offers a unique level of richness, meaning, and connection.
For those of us who choose this path, the activities of self-governance form an integral part of our growth and deepening. Through those activities we practice and hone the arts of democracy, and democracy is a really important spiritual practice.
And the skills of democracy – the habits of hearing diverse viewpoints, of weighing other people’s interests and perspectives with our own, of running a meeting and of participating in one so that your voice, and all voices, are sympathetically heard without your voice or any voice dominating – these are the skills of love. This is how equality of concern and respect is realized, how inherent worth and dignity of every person is affirmed and promoted. God becomes incarnate, as Dewey said, in and as democratic bodies -- whether those running a voluntary association or a town.
If spirituality is the meaning our lives have through being part of something bigger than ourselves, then democratic practice is quintessential spiritual practice. Our collective health and wholeness, our communal well-being, is a function of every voice being cared for enough to be heard, all needs and interests taken into consideration – and no voice dominating, overbearing, or becoming dictatorial. In other words: democracy.
In the ideal democracy, which actual democracies sometimes approach, everyone has a seat at the table, and everyone at the table is there to serve the greater good to the best of their capacity to discern it. And that service, as Tagore said, is joy.
I’m talking about democracy because I am one, and you are one – each of us is. Your psyche is an unruly and raucous parliament of voices, each looking out for one of your many and competing interests. Your decisions are products of constantly shifting coalitions of inner voices that are able to, for a time, have the votes to get motions passed.
No single voice is in charge in there. In the 2015 Pixar movie, “Inside Out” – which a number of you watched this week – we see inside 11-year-old Riley’s head as she negotiates life. Joy, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness are the emotional voices that, together, make Riley Riley. There’s no Riley inside of Riley – rather, Riley just IS the product of her inner voices interacting, sometimes one of them rising to prominence and sometimes another. In the same way, there’s no United States IN the United States – rather, the United States just IS the combined product of what all its people do.
Sometimes we may tempted to imagine that there is a little person inside our head taking in all the sensory inputs as if sitting in a theatre watching the movie of our life. This homunculus pulls the levers and pushes the buttons to give motor commands that make us move. When my son John was about seven or eight years old, I happened to mention to him this homunculus theory of mind, and he immediately put his finger on the problem. He asked, “And does this little person in my head have another little person inside his head?”
There isn’t one person in charge in there. You aren’t a monarchy. You’re a democracy. But democracies can get distorted. Certain interests can manage to hold disproportionate power and ignore and suppress certain other voices. The same thing happens to us individually.
At its healthiest, a democratic state or a person, hears all voices and allows none to gain too much power. And that brings me at last to the Inner Critic. One of the voices in the unruly parliament called “you” is the Inner Critic, and yours probably has too much power. It’s a bit of a bully.
Another voice is the Judge – who passes judgment on other people – and that voice can also often contribute to our misery – but even people that have become less judgmental of others may still be taking heat from the Inner Critic’s judgments of themselves.
“In America your Critic is likely to criticize you if you are not special enough or if you are not superior to others. Your Critic does not want you to disappear into the crowd, to be ordinary. Australian Critics take the opposite view...You are not supposed to stand out, to be special, or to do anything that will draw special attention to you.” Inner Critics there “are quite judgmental toward people who stand out too much or who try to be special.” (Hal and Sidra Stone 5)
"You're ugly," says the Inner Critic. "You're stupid." "You're fat." “You’re lazy.” "There's something wrong with you." "You're so weird."
“The Critic can become our ally once we learn to recognize it and to handle it. However, as long as we are unconscious of it, we must constantly appease it” (5).
And you can never satisfy it. The Inner Critic is never satisfied. “No matter how much you listen to it and try to change yourself in the way that it wants it follows you and grows stronger....The harder you try to change yourself, the stronger it gets. Try to please it, and it will grow” (6).
“Like a well-trained CIA agent, the Inner Critic has learned how to infiltrate every portion of your life, checking you out in minute detail for weakness and imperfections. Since its main job is to protect you from being too vulnerable in the world, it must know everything about you that might be open to attack.”
But just as the CIA in a democracy was formed to protect the democracy, it can grow too powerful and adopt an agenda that undermines democracy. The Inner Critic, as your Internal CIA, starts to pursue its own agenda, undermining the democracy of your internal parliament. “The information, which was originally supposed to be for your overall defense and to promote your general well-being, is now being used against you...With the Critic’s original aims and purposes forgotten, it operates secretly and independently of any outside control” (12).
The inner critic kills creativity. Criticism, inner or outer, kills creativity. Adam’s music today features the work of Beethoven, who was a creative genius, but not, Adam reminds us, during the year that Beethoven was studying with Haydn. Haydn’s critical voice brought on a dry spell for Beethoven. Quite possibly, Haydn’s voice internalized into an Inner Critic voice for Beethoven, but fortunately for us, Beethoven was able to differentiate from it. The inner critic is also apt to be a source of low self-esteem, of shame, and can make you depressed.
Maybe it starts with The Pleaser. An infant soon learns that life is better when ze smiles. So the Pleaser is born, making the child smile more frequently than spontaneous uprisings of delight would dictate. This way, the parent will be happy, which makes the infant safe, and the world feels nicer. The Pleaser’s job is to make others happy so that they, in turn, make you happy, and your vulnerability is protected. As the Pleaser expands, it takes on staff, who then function quasi-independently.
The Rule Maker makes up the rules about what kind of person you should be and what kinds of characteristics are acceptable.
The Rule Maker’s job is to notice what is rewarded and what is punished and draw inferences from that about what rules we should live by. Then the Pusher emerges. This is the voice urging us to achieve, to meet goals, get ahead in the world.
Where the Pleaser wants to please particular other people, the Pusher has abstracted particular people into the world in general, and abstracted concrete pleasing into gaining success and recognition from that world. “With a strongly developed Pusher, we are like racing dogs running after an artificial rabbit that we an never catch” (17). The Pusher has specific goals and objectives, and this may spin-off a counter-voice that says, "What about other things? It’s great to master the oboe, but what about being a great athlete? What about the Nobel Prize in physics?" Thus the Perfectionist is born. The Perfectionist quickly learns that you can’t master everything, so it doesn’t want you to do at all what you can’t do well. The Perfectionist cannot abide happily dabbling. For the Perfectionist, “nothing is less important than anything else. It is just as important to play perfectly during a friendly tennis volley as in the final match of a tournament. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing perfectly.”
The Inner Critic teams up with each of these voices to criticize you for not making others happy, for not working harder on your goals, for not being excellent at everything you do. To a large extent the Inner Critic grows from other people’s judge.
The more strongly we hear judgmental voices around us when we’re growing up, the more we internalize those voices and thus the stronger our Inner Critic is. The Inner Critic cannot be suppressed.
If you try to be rid of the Inner Critic, it just transforms into criticizing for not being very good at not being self-critical. “I shouldn’t be so self-critical” is just more self-criticism.
To become a more ideal democracy, none of the voices may be exiled. All the voices have a seat at the table. But none of them are you. France’s Louis XIV in the 17th century supposedly declared L’etat, c’est moi – the state, it is I – I am France. That, of course, is the opposite of democracy. Your inner democracy requires recognizing that none of the inner voices are you.
The problem isn’t that you have an Inner Critic. The problem is that you become identified with it. You mistake one representative in the parliament for being the voice of the nation itself. This is very common. Counselors who work with clients in recognizing their Inner Critic report that over and over they hear clients say, “I’ve heard that voice all my life. I just thought it was me.”
We see the world through the Inner Critic’s lens, or mirror – just as in Tracy’s story. And we think that’s just how the world is. Developing the Aware Self is like having a Board Chair who has no agenda of zir own, but oversees a process of letting the agenda emerge from the voices at the table, letting decisions be made only when all voices are taken into account.
Developing awareness of your voices – as voices – takes some work and some practice. But TRYING to live life from an Aware Self “gives the Inner Critic the best food of all! Inner Critics simply love to accuse us of not having an Aware Self...If you try too hard to live your life from an Aware Self, it is a sure sign that your Pusher, your Perfectionist, or both have taken over again. This will allow your Inner Critic to grow even fatter as it tries to help you to reach this new, unattainable, goal.”
There are some exercises you can do. But don’t TRY to do them. Just do them.
The crucial move is to not be identified with the Inner Critic – to differentiate from it – to see it not as you but as a voice talking to you. So do this: in your journal, or any piece of paper, write down some of your most common self-criticisms. Writing stuff down is really powerful for self-awareness, and it probably works better to use real pen and paper – typing on a computer screen just doesn’t feel as real.
So write down your most common self-criticisms, only, write them down in the second person – that is, as “you” statements. So don’t write: "I can't get anything right. I'll never be successful."
Instead write: "You can't get anything right. You'll never be successful."
This will help you see these thoughts as an alien point of view – something that an inner voice is saying to you, and not the absolute truth.
Notice how hostile this internal enemy can be. If another person said those things to you, you’d think they were being terribly hostile. Well, it actually is another person – only it’s an internalized one.
So the next step is to envision this other person. What does your Inner Critic look like? For some people, the first image that comes to them is their mother. If you had a critical mother, that wouldn’t be surprising. So, to help take away some of the Inner Critic’s power, imagine the inner critic as a cartoon character.
Imagine that it’s Daffy Duck saying these critical things to you. Or Goofy, or Popeye, or Homer Simpson, or Eric Cartman from South Park, or Tweety Bird, or Snagglepuss.
My inner critic is Yosemite Sam. Yosemite Sam’s insult vocabulary is heavy on “varmint” and “galoot.” I find I don’t take criticism so personally when its coming from someone who calls me a varmint or a galoot.
Next step: Respond to your inner critic by writing down a more realistic and compassionate evaluation of yourself. Write these responses in the first person – that is, as "I" statements. So if your Inner Critic says "You're such an idiot," you could write, "I don’t always understand as quickly as I might wish to, but I am smart and competent in many ways."
This is different from writing down affirmations, which I don’t particularly recommend. It’s a response to a specific criticism that doesn’t say you’re the greatest ever, but just brings a kinder, more honest attitude toward yourself. You’re not trying to give yourself an ego boost or make yourself feel better – your focus is just to be realistic.
You don’t have to do what your Inner Critic says. That ridiculous cartoon character is not you. Thank it for its input, and then take actions that represent your own point of view, who you want to be.
Your Inner Critic may respond by yelling at you louder and louder. Over time, it will grow weaker. And it does take time. Trying to rush it just gives the Pusher and the Critic more power.
Democracy doesn’t always deliver just what you wanted as quickly as you wanted it, but we remind ourselves nonetheless to trust the process. It's the same with our internal democracy. Trying to rush it would be, well, anti-democratic because some voices would get lost in the rush, and the best judgment of "the people" doesn't have time to emerge. Trust the process and give it time.
Spend a few minutes every day – or every week – doing the exercise: write down self-critical thoughts in the second person.
Imagine them coming from a cartoon character – because they are – the Inner Critic is cartoonish, a caricature of you. Write a more well-rounded response in the first person. Gradually, differentiation from the Inner Critic occurs. The Aware Self comes more often to the fore. Over time people learned to see the looking glass as only one lens or reflection of a much deeper experience.
From the spiritual point of view, everything is a lesson – every object, person, or experience I encounter – every cup or pen or rock -- is trying to teach me something. The spiritual task is to listen to each moment. Its meaning is always uncertain – indeterminate. Nonetheless, the spiritual call is to discern – or construct – what meaning we can – to ignore nothing. The poet Kristin Flyntz has been listening for what our current pandemic might be trying to teach.
An Imagined Letter from Covid-19 to Humans
Kristin Flyntz
Stop. Just stop.
It is no longer a request. It is a mandate.
We will help you.
We will bring the supersonic, high speed merry-go-round to a halt
We will stop the planes, the trains, the schools, the malls, the meetings, the frenetic, furied rush of illusions and “obligations” that keep you from hearing our single and shared beating heart,
the way we breathe together, in unison.
Our obligation is to each other -- as it has always been, even if, even though, you have forgotten.
We will interrupt this broadcast, the endless cacophonous broadcast of divisions and distractions,
to bring you this long-breaking news:
We are not well.
None of us; all of us are suffering.
Last year, the firestorms that scorched the lungs of the earth did not give you pause.
Nor the typhoons in Africa, China, Japan.
Nor the fevered climates in Japan and India.
You have not been listening.
It is hard to listen when you are so busy all the time, hustling to uphold the comforts and conveniences that scaffold your lives.
But the foundation is giving way, buckling under the weight of your needs and desires.
We will help you.
We will bring the firestorms to your body
We will bring the fever to your body
We will bring the burning, searing, and flooding to your lungs
that you might hear:
We are not well.
Despite what you might think or feel, we are not the enemy.
We are Messenger. We are Ally. We are a balancing force.
We are asking you:
To stop, to be still, to listen;
To move beyond your individual concerns and consider the concerns of all;
To be with your ignorance, to find your humility, to relinquish your thinking minds and travel deep into the mind of the heart;
To look up into the sky, streaked with fewer planes, and see it, to notice its condition: clear, smoky, smoggy, rainy?
How much do you need it to be healthy so that you may also be healthy?
To look at a tree, and see it, to notice its condition: how does its health contribute to the health of the sky, to the air you need to be healthy?
To visit a river, and see it, to notice its condition: clear, clean, murky, polluted?
How much do you need it to be healthy so that you may also be healthy?
How does its health contribute to the health of the tree, who contributes to the health of the sky, so that you may also be healthy?
Many are afraid now.
Do not demonize your fear, and also, do not let it rule you.
Instead, let it speak to you—in your stillness, listen for its wisdom.
What might it be telling you about what is at work, at issue, at risk, beyond the threats of personal inconvenience and illness?
As the health of a tree, a river, the sky tells you about quality of your own health, what might the quality of your health tell you about the health of the rivers, the trees, the sky, and all of us who share this planet with you?
Stop. Notice if you are resisting.
Notice what you are resisting.
Ask why. Stop. Just stop.
Be still. Listen.
Ask us what we might teach you about illness and healing, about what might be required so that all may be well.
We will help you, if you listen.
Two Kinds of Care
“Some kind of care is the kind of care that caring’s all about. And some kind of care is the kind of care we all could do without.” Some of you will perhaps recognize the line that I am modifying. When my children were little, there was a popular children’s record – made of vinyl – that was called “Free to be you and me” – by Marlo Thomas and friends. We played that record hundreds of times. One of the tracks was a song, with lyrics by Shel Silverstein.
Agatha Fry, she made a pie
And Christopher John helped bake it
Christopher John, he mowed the lawn
And Agatha Fry helped rake it
Now, Zachary Zugg took out the rug
And Jennifer Joy helped shake it
Then Jennifer Joy, she made a toy
And Zachary Zugg helped break it
And some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping's all about
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all can do without
So: if someone helps you do something that you didn’t want to have done – that’s the kind of help we could do without. It’s the same way with caring. Some kind is the kind that caring is all about. Like when you care about fairness, so you give support to people treated unfairly. Or you care about the people you love, so you take care of them – you make sure they are provided with what they need – whether that’s concrete things or just a friend to hang-out with. Or you care about people learning stuff, so you become a teacher. Or you care about creating beauty and become an artist. We all need something big to care about. Here are some headlines from a few years ago: “Woman with one leg out to conquer Everest” “Six-year-old boy’s dream brings water to half a million people.” Or more recently: “16-year-old to urge United Nations to address climate change.” Wow. Those were people that really cared about something – getting to the top of Mt. Everest with one leg, bringing water to people who needed it, or preserving the earth from the harms of climate change.
If you have enough food to eat, it’s because someone – a whole lot of someones -- cared enough to plant it and harvest it and package it and ship it to a grocery store, so other someones could buy it and prepare it. George Bernard Shaw said, “This is the true joy in life – being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.” The thing we choose to care about so much that our whole life is oriented toward it – that’s the kind of caring that caring is all about.
But then there are the kind of cares that turn into worries. Someone who looks careworn looks tired and unhappy because of prolonged worry. They have anxiety. Cares, troubles, and worries can be a big burden. They can feel like a heavy weight on your shoulders. When worrying isn’t doing any good – when worrying only makes you sad and stressed – then that’s the kind of cares we all could do without.
What do you care about? What caring or cares are with you?
Taking Care, Giving Care
It’s good to be back. I would really have enjoyed being with everyone altogether in our sanctuary again, sharing hugs and handshakes. And I look forward to us being together in person again someday – even if the hugs and handshakes have to be replaced by elbow bumps. I was away for a six-month sabbatical at a Zen monastery in northern Oregon, which sits on 25 largely-wooded sloping acres overlooking the Columbia River separating Washington from Oregon. There were the two co-abbots, a married couple; five zen priests – three men and two women – whose ordination entailed a five-year commitment to stay at the monastery, and some have been there much longer. Four postulants – two men and two women -- taking a year or two prepare for – and be sure they want – ordination. In the middle of my time there, two of the postulants completed their postulancy and ordained, so the second half of my stay there were seven priests and two postulants in addition to the co-abbots. There were also at any given time 10 to 15 other residents – some there for a month or two or, in my case, six, with three or four planning to be there for a year or more. In all, there were usually about 25 priests, postulants, and other residents around the place.
Our schedule was variable. Some weeks we’d be sitting meditation three or four hours a day, and doing work practice for six hours a day. My work assignments sometimes had me out in the garden pulling weeds, or in the kitchen chopping and cooking, or in the monastery’s store sewing the mats and cushions they sell, or vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning bathrooms, or working on a building renovation project installing drywall, staining boards, and painting. One day my work practice assignment was: “there’s a clog in such-and-such a sink. Unclog it.” It took 12 feet of plumber’s snake, but I finally got it cleared.
Other weeks we’d be on sesshin schedule. Every month included one week-long and one or two week-end sesshin, when our schedule had a lot less work practice and a lot more sitting meditation. Many guests came in to the monastery for the sesshin and our numbers from double or triple or quadruple to between 50 and 100 people there for that week or week-end. And still other weeks the schedule would be in-between: a middle number of sitting meditation hours and work practice hours. I’m so grateful to this congregation for affording me that opportunity. I was really glad to go, though I knew I would miss you. A six-month time of intensive practice and being monastic was something I’ve been wanting to do for at least the last 15 years.
I was really glad to be there – it was a beautiful experience, a wonder-filled continual practice of opening myself to beauty. And I’m really glad to be back – back to this community of taking care and giving care.
When I was a child, a caretaker was a person who took care of someone else. Then someone noticed that these people weren’t TAKING care, they were GIVING care.
So since about the 1970s, we’ve been calling them caregivers. And it’s true that they do give care. They also take care. They take care OF someone, and they take care in the sense of being careful – mindful of tending to what is needed. They take care in the sense of taking on the responsibilities of caring. Isn’t it funny that caretaking and caregiving are the same thing?
This is not merely an oddity of the English language, but reflects the dual nature of care itself. You see, the difference between giving and taking depends on there being a difference between you and me. Caring – true caring that isn’t just going through the motions – recognizes the truth that there is no difference.
Caring that has no sense of keeping score or being paid back comes from understanding that you and I are not separate. It comes from what the Sufi poet Hafiz illustrated when he wrote:
“Even after all this time, the sun never says
to the earth: ‘You owe me.’
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.”
Of course it’s useful and necessary to be able to distinguish one person from another, Bob from Betty, you from me – and to have good boundaries – including, these days, six feet of separation. From the spiritual point of view, this is a necessary and useful fiction – but a fiction nonetheless.
Your heart and your lungs, for some purposes, need to viewed as separate. But they are ultimately just you. The right atrium pumps deoxygenated blood to the right ventricle which pumps it down to the lungs where it pick up oxygen and drops off some carbon dioxide. The newly oxygenated blood is then drawn into the left atrium, which sends it to the left ventricle, which sends it throughout the body – taking your body the oxygen it needs. The heart never says, “hey, what happened to the oxygen I sent you one heartbeat ago – and the heartbeat before that and the heartbeat before that?” It just keeps sending the oxygen.
It happens that our understanding of vertebrate biology provides an answer to that question that the heart never asks. The body’s diverse functions involve taking oxygen, bonding it with carbon to create carbon dioxide, which goes into the bloodstream, and the heart pumps it back around to the lungs that breathe it out.
Where did the carbon come from? The carbon comes from the stomach and intestines, digesting and breaking down food. It’s all one system. The parts can be viewed separately, but they overlap and blur into one another.
The ultimate truth is that there is no separation of bodily organs – there’s just the one you. And no separation of you from anyone else – or any thing else. There’s just the universe unfolding itself to itself – an unfolding that includes localized pockets adopting the fiction of separation.
The opposite of caring is taking the fiction of separation as if it were ultimate truth. It isn’t. The things we care about, the people we care about and care for, pull us out of ourselves – which is to say, they flow from the recognition that we are not separate, even if we stay six-feet apart, even if we have a screen between us.
We are not separate. Those could be just words – “we are not separate” – just something to say. In our caring, however, we embody and manifest that nonseparation. We live nonseparation in our love for each other, and in our life projects. Whether you succeed or fail at a life project is not the point – but that you were oriented toward compassion is the point. Whether your life project is being an architect that designs spaces of beauty to enrich inhabitants, or being a teacher to help people understand, or being janitor to facilitate others’ productivity by keeping their workspaces clean, or being an epidemiologist working to prevent the next pandemic, what matters more than outcomes is that your vocation orients you toward compassion, that you care about something besides maintaining the illusion of a separate self, and that there are loved ones and life projects with whom and with which you are so bonded that the question of whether you are taking care or giving care makes no sense because care is flowing in all directions at once.
