We do not do good work in the world to change the world.
That is impossible. We do good work in the world to change ourselves, our
hearts. Many suffragettes and civil rights activists died before seeing the
change they sowed. Mindfulness helps us find that place of balance between
“caring too much” and “caring too little” where we have the life-long
commitment and endurance necessary to effect long-term social change.
It is natural to feel urgency in the face of suffering. We
want to end pain quickly – both in our own lives and in the lives of others.
This sense of urgency can save lives but it can also become an obstacle to
long-term, lasting social change. In modern society, daily tasks like finding
water (turning on the tap) or entertainment (watching TV) have become so
effortless that there is a modern expectation that all of our needs should be
met so effortlessly and that if the answers aren’t instant or short-term, they
must be wrong or impossible. This ease
and speed of modern life does not prepare us to face social injustice and other
obstacles to change.
Stripping our lives of entertainment and bringing ourselves
back to discipline rooted in loving kindness and patience while on a meditation
retreat, we face difficult emotions in a container that helps us get to know
and understand ourselves in the face of controlled hardship. We notice that
even boredom can be excruciating. We learn that the mind is a very big place
and that our capacity for endurance and compassion – as well as self-change –
is far greater than we ever expected. We learn to work with emotional
resistance to discipline, to discomfort and change. We also learn that it takes
time to improve anything and that trying to speed the process and force change
almost always backfires. Patience is the lost art we must reclaim if we want
change that endures.
Evolution & time
When facing a long-term crisis, whether it is our own or
part of broader social injustice, it is important to remember that beneath the
frenetic, instant-results, instant-satisfaction and stress of modern life,
there remains within us a very different relationship with time. Time has a
longer, evolutionary quality to it as well. The human species has been evolving
for 250,000 years. A true foundation of social change and self-change is rooted
in this second, evolutionary relationship with time. It is patient and has the
emotional endurance to face difficulty for decades from a standpoint of faith
in the innate ability within all human beings to evolve. When we fail to
acquire faith in our capacity to evolve, our efforts peter out and fall short.
When one has deep faith in one’s own capacity for change, this is one avenue to
detachment.
Detachment, social justice & special
education
Detachment does not mean an absence of caring. On the
contrary, it is that place in the mind where we are balanced, emotionally
neutral yet engaged and able to discern when to take appropriate action while
being patient and accepting the way things are temporarily. It is deep faith in
oneself and one’s life.
Deep mindfulness practice is especially critical for parents
and educators who are trying to help children with special needs. Being a
parent or educator is always challenging even when children perform in a way
that is considered normal or above average. A child with special needs often
faces endless uphill battles that have emotional consequences for the child and
ripple effects for the family and community, including that child’s educators.
Facing the pain and frustration these children must endure, parents and
educators can experience profound loss of faith, helplessness, desperation and
an urgency to fix the situation quickly. This blog addresses how mindfulness
can benefit adults facing complex suffering that may last decades within their
own lives or in the lives of the people or children they are trying to help. It
is intended to be a balm for those brave enough to face social injustice not
just for one day, but every day.
Caring too little
One coping strategy when faced with overwhelming problems or
social ills is to ignore them. In education, this often manifests as “that
child can’t be helped.” This mentality is a great disservice not only to the
child but also to the educator simply because it isn’t true. It is far more
accurate to say, “As an educator, I haven’t figured out how to help this child,
but maybe someone else has developed a technique that works or maybe someone
will in the future.” This is an honest, accurate capture of what is happening.
Children who hear a person of authority (a teacher or parent) say that their
situation is hopeless and cannot be helped can internalize that statement,
develop lower self-esteem and give up on themselves. This is a profound tragedy
when you consider that you cannot help another person change without their
participation.
There is no greater loss than a loss of faith in oneself and
one’s potential. Saying to a child, “Today I’m going to have you teach me what
you notice about yourself and if we discover something new, we can help other
students too” is empowering. Children often have tremendous clarity about their
own situation and by identifying for themselves what’s not working and where
and how they get lost, they can actually give a teacher or parent the
information they need to teach effectively. To share this information, however,
a child has to have confidence that the adults around them accept them
unconditionally as they are, believe in their capacity for improvement and who
support them every step of the way, even when the pace seems excruciatingly
slow.
When people care too little or we refer to someone as being
“too detached,” it means their emotions are not engaged or are not
obvious. Often someone in this category
may feel numb as a result of professional burn-out. This can occur as a result
of initially caring too much. The pain of not being able to help a child
(especially when internalized as failure) or change social injustice can so
overwhelm that a person instead reverts to a less painful idea – that it’s just
not possible to help certain types of people or situations. Impossibility
becomes permission to avoid the struggle or to take a break from it, which
someone may actually need but which doesn’t make their belief in impossibility
true.
In contrast, a teacher who starts out detached yet engaged
does not feel the emotional need to make absolute statements about anyone or
anything. They can work with the breadth of information that is available in
the present moment, aware of rules and exceptions while keeping an eye out for
completely new solutions that arise. This is a far more interesting way to
work. Deep meditation practice helps adults develop a healthier relationship
with the present moment and a better sense of what is within our control and
what is not. When we acknowledge what we cannot control, we create space for
change to arise on its own.
Caring too much arises from
a belief that we should be in control when we’re not. We do not have the power
to change the world; not by ourselves. We only have the power to change
ourselves. Detachment is a type of caring that does not attempt to control or
identify with progress or lack of progress as success or failure. It arises from the direct experience during
meditation retreat that control is impossible. It is an illusion. The ability
to observe reality and respond to it as
it is is far more powerful. The good news is that even failure to change
social injustice has benefits. A lifetime of doing good in the world, serving
others and refining oneself yields at the very least a peaceful death –
something we in the modern world often fail to contemplate.
Endurance and clarity
If we are honest with ourselves, we can notice that when we
try to force self-change or eradicate something about ourselves that we don’t
like, often that aspect of ourselves gets worse. Once we develop patience with
our own issues, we learn how we change. Then we can then help others do their
own work of self-change. Even then, we are not changing others. They are
changing themselves. It is very important to help someone else from a place of
acceptance rather than aversion to where they are.
A common assumption is that Buddhist monks and nuns feel
peace all the time when in fact, they often have a luminous glow of peace on
their faces because they are completely open to suffering. They are choosing an
incredibly difficult life and their resistance to suffering diminishes so that
over time, they have an outward appearance of beauty and refinement. They have
been carved by their openness and willingness to be present with suffering, to
explore it and to understand it. Just as facing the initial boredom, discomfort
and pain of physical exercise makes a person physically stronger and more
beautiful over time, mindfulness is mental exercise. The longer one has
exercised one’s body and mind, the more effortless challenges become. Running a
mile might seem daunting to someone who is just beginning to exercise but
effortless to someone who has trained for a half-marathon. In the same way, a
child with special needs who is exasperated by the emotional pain of facing
daily mental challenges over time can develop great patience and ability in the
face of difficult circumstances.
The importance of choice and
free-will
If children in special education fail to progress, it might
be because no one is giving them a choice and they are expected to be passive
recipients of instruction rather than directing their own process of self
improvement. There is a lesson I teach about success and failure. I write two
sentences “I am a success” and “I am a failure.” Which of these two sentences
is more dangerous? Take a moment to consider your beliefs about both statements
before continuing to read.
My view: both of these statements are dangerous.
Over-achieving students can commit suicide because their mantra is “I am a
success, my family history is one of success and I must not bring dishonor to
my family or myself.” In short, failure is unacceptable. They have
over-identified with the concept of success. Conversely there are students who so
strongly believe “I am a failure, my family history is one of failure and
suffering, I have always been and always will be a failure” that they cannot
find the motivation to try to change themselves. Mindfulness is about the
middle way. Truth lies between the extremes. My mantra is “failure is part of
success.” If you’ve ever learned to ride a bike, you know that every time a
person tries and falls off of a bike (often crashing) that fall is a failure but
with each failure, the brain is learning. We don’t know everything about the
brain. All we know is that after a certain number of tries (and failures), the
brain figures it out at an unconscious, automatic level. Suddenly you are
riding the bike effortlessly for the first time and even you are surprised by
this event! This ability to learn, to adapt and change is miraculous. While
waiting for change, we often feel impatient but once change occurs in ourselves
or in our society, we realize how miraculous it is that it even occurred at
all.
The value of struggle
Self-change has automatic and exponential repercussions. It
can inspire countless others so that goals that seemed out of reach for decades
suddenly become accessible. For example, participants in the 1960s civil rights
movement did not expect to see an African-American president in their lifetimes
but it happened. The change they started with so much suffering, horror, blood
and tears decades before culminated in a joy celebrated the world over. When
Gandhi’s non-violence movement liberated India, it was miraculous. Yet this is
why we are all here: to change ourselves over not years, but decades. Change is
painful as much as it is miraculous. It requires tremendous courage and faith
in ourselves, in our process. Patience at the outset is especially critical. If
you think of it in terms of human evolution, a few decades is nothing yet the
message of long-term patience is missing from our cultural mythology. We
celebrate the accomplishments of people like Einstein, Beethoven, Gandhi,
Lincoln and Aung Sang Suu Kyi without giving children an accurate understanding
of the profound struggles of their lives. Their struggles are just as important
as their accomplishments because those stories give us the patience and
endurance we need to face our own struggles. Indeed to struggle is to change,
to evolve.
Joy and struggle
Let’s look at the bike riding analogy again, this time from
the perspective of a child with special needs. The critical piece of learning how
to ride a bike, in my view, is the desire to ride the bike. A child can fall
again and again and again without losing their enthusiasm and commitment to
their goal of riding a bike. When they look back on their experience of
learning to ride a bike, often it’s a happy memory despite the failures (we
enjoy looking back and laughing about how and where we crashed). This dynamic
would completely change if the child did not want to learn how to ride a bike
and was forced to ride and fall every day. The failure and identification with
failure would become the child’s reality. This would not be a happy memory.
This creates a conundrum for adults who are trying to teach special needs
children academic standards. You could argue that a child might never want to learn
math in the same way they are motivated to learn how to ride a bike, yet there
is always someone who can teach a difficult subject in a way that is inspiring
and motivating, who can bring that level of passion and commitment to
self-learning into a classroom.
Change is inevitable but seems
slow, the path long
While there are no panaceas, breaking obstacles down into
bite-size pieces or smaller stepping stones makes success accessible. Start
with the tiniest increment of struggle. Stop and get feedback from the child.
Build an understanding of struggle into academic curricula. Praise the child
for each of these small, seemingly irrelevant increments of struggle and
change. They are becoming stronger! They are evolving!
If you are fighting social injustice, take heart that you
are just as strong as special education students. Just as they struggle daily to
speak, to move, to read, to write, to understand algebra and connect with others,
you too can successfully struggle to progress. Identify the smallest piece of
social injustice that you are willing to struggle with and take it on with
patience, engagement and a lifetime commitment. When it comes to facing social
injustice, all of us need to be gentle and patient with ourselves, whether we
are activists or a lame duck president. The journey of 1000 miles begins with
small, often difficult steps but together over decades our collective steps
carve a mighty path forward – despite of or perhaps because of our disabilities.
If you want to know the value of your good work in the
world, do not look to the world – where in a single moment, resistance to
change can seem far more powerful than the inevitable undercurrent of
evolution. Look within yourself with patience. In that stillness, your heart
will tell you.
Copyright © January 2017 by Ellen McCarty. All rights reserved.
