Hey friends — sorry for such a late post today! It’s been a whirlwind. Morning tea with a dharma/movement kindred spirit (a revival of Radical Sangha is in the works!); a super-intense two-and-a-half-hour group session with a generative somatics facilitator/counselor/consultant/rad person at the Faithful Fools; being interviewed by someone who’s making a video documentary about the Fools; and now off to prep some work with the Marxist feminist group in honor of International Women’s Day tomorrow.
Life: it’s full sometimes! And I was in a similar gear last Friday when, among other things, I showed up to join a crew of about 20 supporters of a rank-and-file picket of health care workers (above) who were illegally fired for going on strike. More on their inspiring (and victorious!) battle, including videos of Friday’s picket, here. Then, most of us supporters rolled out to a downtown Oakland rally against the gang injunctions. Here are some photos of each; sorry for the lack of commentary, but hopefully tomorrow I’ll have time to add a little more.
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about metta. Many of you are familiar with it, but for those who aren’t: metta is a particular type of meditation practice that focuses on cultivating and exuding loving-kindness. Which might sound like trying to muscle a halo onto your own head, striving to become all saintly and luminous and stuff, but actually has much more to do with focusing attention on others: wishing them well.
I like the above video not primarily for its message of metta-as-problem-solver (although I have definitely experienced moments where my metta practiced seemed to lubricate and ease a tense situation), but mostly for the way Ven. Balacitta’s articulation encapsulates the practice: wishing that others be free of enmity, be calm and happy, and be able to take care of themselves well.
Crucially, it seems clear to me that his wish for others to be “calm” is not a front for wishing for them to agree with him, or to become passive. The practice is not about wanting conflict to magically disappear. And even though the focus is on kindness, friendliness, and well-being, in my own experience it is impossible to separate these from the realities of suffering and animosity. Although metta is different from the Tibetan tonglen practice (a “training in altruism” in which one “visualizes taking onto oneself the suffering of others on the in-breath, and on the out-breath giving happiness and success to all sentient beings,” and thus focuses equally on suffering and well-being), metta also inherently contains both positive and negative aspects.
Lately I’ve been returning to metta a lot more. Tremendously helpful. Conflict has arisen between me and my dad, which has been very painful for me (I won’t go into detail), and metta helps me to re-ground in wishing well-being for him, and for myself. Again, this doesn’t mean glossing over harm and dissonance, but fostering my own outward vectors of deep friendliness.
It’s a tough question. Metta is by no means a mandatory practice for all situations. And focusing solely on loving-kindness, without also seriously analyzing and militantly opposing the oppressive forces at work, is not an approach I can get down with.
On the other hand, what happens when metta and militancy combine?
Yes, let’s leave it there for now. What happens when metta and militancy combine? Can we imagine that? Do we see examples of it in our own political work? Do we see areas, in ourselves, where one or the other might benefit from conscious cultivation?
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Thanks in advance for donating to free Jesse, the above-linked genderqueer student protester who was arrested while fighting for trans and queer rights on campus (at Laney College, where Ryan also goes, and has been part of this organizing). As of now, they are still being held on multiple false charges. Anything you can give is much appreciated.
Tricycle has a wonderful interview with Burmese monastic Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who authored a book with a fabulous title (see above). When asked about its name, he responds,
We picked the title because it is important not to underestimate the power of the defilements. When I teach meditation I emphasize the importance of watching the mind. While doing this you will see a lot of defilements. In their grosser manifestations, the defilements are anger, greed, and delusion. And they have plenty of friends and relatives, who often show up as the five hindrances: desire, aversion, torpor, restlessness, and doubt. I advise yogis to get to know and investigate the defilements, because only through understanding them can we learn to handle them and eventually become free of them. If we ignore them, the joke’s on us: they’ll always get the better of us.
If they cause us so much grief, why do we ignore them? People often become attached to what they’re good at, to what they’ve achieved; they only want to see their good sides. Therefore they often don’t acknowledge their weaknesses. They become proud and conceited because they don’t see their negative sides. But if you cannot see both sides, the good and the bad, you can’t say the picture is complete. If you do not observe the defilements wisdom cannot grow.
Is wisdom an absence of defilements? Yes, when there is right understanding there won’t be any defilements. They are opposites; non-delusion is wisdom. Wisdom inclines toward the good but is not attached to it. It shies away from what is not good, but has no aversion to it. Wisdom recognizes the difference between skillful and unskillful, and it sees the undesirability of the unskillful.
The whole interview is well worth a read — he gets into a range of topics, from learning more and more effective ways of overcoming his own depression, to the folly of mistaking the sitting posture for the meditation itself — but I just wanted to flag a resonance between the danger of condescension in spiritual work, and parallel problems in political efforts.
Kloncke 