[From 04 August 2010]

Last night, at a Berkeley fundraiser for the East Bay Meditation Center, prominent Insight meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein gave a general talk on Buddhism, and as he spoke in his gentle, warm, candid, funny, luminously clever way, I felt a familiar tightening in my stomach.

The talk started out like this. There is tremendous suffering in the world. It’s not hard to see. War, oppression and destruction. But if we look closely, we find that the root of that suffering is in the mind. Greed, fear, and hatred. And it’s not just “other people” who have this greed, fear, and hatred; it’s us, too. Therefore, using Buddhist teachings, we turn our attention inward toward the mind/heart, healing suffering from the inside out.

Later, when asked whether his Buddhist practice could be formulated into a plan for social change, Goldstein said Yes: through compassion. Not a simplistic type of compassion, but a compassion that is born out of nearness to suffering. This is more difficult than it sounds, he noted, because our deeply ingrained habit pattern is to try to push suffering away from ourselves. Get rid of it. But in order to have strong, profound compassion, we need to go toward suffering. Without romanticizing it, but seeing it for what it is.

Now, I like Joseph Goldstein. I saw him speak once before at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and he’s hilarious and wise and a gifted storyteller. And on one level, I agree with what he said last night.

The problem, for me, was what went unsaid.

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[From 14 April 2010]

A stat counter is a common tool that lets bloggers see the number of people who visit their site. I learned about it back in 2005, when I first became acquainted with blogs, and have interacted with stat counters and traffic graphs in my bloggerly life ever since. Every day (ok let’s be real: practically every five minutes), I check my traffic chart on Kloncke to see how many people are reading. I glance at the line graph and its 15-day history, with the current day’s data point climbing ever upward until the stroke of midnight, when its ascending carriage takes a pumpkin-like tumble back down to zero. New day, new stats.

Within the past few months, I noticed myself monitoring my stat charts with increasing closeness and intensity. It became sort of embarrassingly compulsive. I checked my traffic at Gmail-like intervals (read: Too Frequently). And of course, my heart would soar and sink according to the graph’s altitude.

High: high.

Low: low.

Many page views: “My writing is helping people.”

Few views: “This blogging thing is just a narcissistic waste of time.”

Et cetera.

And then, the real kicker: auto-adjusting scale.

Let’s say I’ve been plugging along on my little blog for a month, and one day I get 25 views, the next day 30, the next day 7, and so on. The top of the y-axis represents the largest number of views in a single day: 150. The smallest, one notch above zero, is 3. Then, one day, the blog is viewed 170 times. What happens to the chart?

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[From 06 July 2010]

Cross-posted at Feministe. As the verdict approaches, I find myself thinking more and more about the relationships between state violence and intimate violence. In what ways our focus on state violence, and mechanisms for resisting it, jive and don’t jive with methods for dealing with intimate violence. Aaron Tanaka made a wonderful comment on the original post — as always, Aaron, I’m truly grateful for your insights and questions, and their organic connection to the great work you do.

Just yesterday, only 20 minutes after a conversation about police alternatives, as my friend Noa was dropping me off at home, we found ourselves in an impromptu cop watch. Four officers were arresting three men on my block — two of whom I recognized as regulars on the corner, and one with whom I’ve tossed a football across Hyde Street traffic. When I saw the cops lining the men up against the fence, I just stepped out of Noa’s car onto the sidewalk and inserted myself. After one of the officers attempted to intimidate Noa by calling in her plate number (we’d been stopped and talking in the car inside a red parking zone), she drove around the block, parked, came back and joined me for the next half hour as we watched these three men get yelled at, cuffed, and loaded into a police van.

I’ll maybe write up a full summary tomorrow, because the effect of our intervention on the cops’ behavior was pretty interesting, as well as the conversation we struck up with two male officers. For now, here’s my Feministe piece from Sunday.

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[From 23 July 2010]

For a variety of reasons, I often feel shy about celebrating this relationship. Given all the bullshit, grief, and even trauma that most of us young people endure in our love lives (and I’ve had my share, with more to come in the future, no doubt), it feels weirdly rude or dissonant when somebody speaks in detail about a marvelous partnership. Cute couple-y photos, fine; wedding or baby announcements, ok. But in general, no news is good news. Conversations are for commiserating over heartache, analyzing a transgression, or dishing about a new lover.

Besides, it’s a little difficult to even define what I mean by a “marvelous partnership.” I don’t mean pleasurable, necessarily, though it certainly is that. But for me, the relationship’s best attributes aren’t your typical high highs — the dizzy, heady, mind-blowing, earth-shaking, dare I say passionate feelings.

Instead, there’s deep comfort. Profound mutual respect and care. Trust. Confidence. Generosity. Wonder. Humor. Steadiness. Openness — which means both closeness and spaciousness. And the kind of love that radiates outward, illuminating not only the partnership itself but our engagement with others, too.

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[From 14 June 2010]

As you may have noticed if you’ve been hanging around here for any amount of time, I don’t talk much about current events.

Partly because this blog is mainly autobiographical — about my own lived experience — and I haven’t been involved in many “current events” lately. Also, news consumption has been extremely low for me in the past year — on purpose.

Despite my personal media fast, some major happenings (mostly US-centric) inevitably come to my attention. Oscar Grant’s murder. The bp oil spill. Arizona’s racist immigration law. The Gaza aid flotilla killings.

Still, when I am trying to talk about these issues, I don’t try to thoroughly research and analyze them the way I might have two or three years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with research and analysis: both good and important. But here, for now, I’m focusing on deepening my understanding not of politics, per se, but of suffering. In order to understand suffering, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening around us — including politics and all the harm that’s constantly happening. But there’s more to it than that, I think.

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[From 16 June 2009]

My friend Nuria grew up in Catalunya, so she knows where to find the quiet beaches here. No screaming babies, squawking vendors, or complaining tourists. (Though those scenes have their own charm, too).

This Sunday she took me to a tiny one, 45 minutes by train outside of Barcelona. Maybe two dozen people in the little nook we picked.

We had a simple day, enjoying the sun and sand and water on our skin. (Bathing suits: unnecessary. Ya feel me?)

But even the simple days are also, inevitably, complex. When you escape the crowds, sometimes you find the loners.

First there was the white guy crouching in the rocks above the beach. Nuria’s eyes narrowed. “Qué hace?” she hissed, hackles visibly raised. She stood up to get a better look. When she was reassured that he had left, we talked about the violence of voyeurs. Men who spy on naturist beaches to ogle and masturbate. A couple of shady characters I encountered on The Camino. Nuria is one of the most loving people I know, toward everyone she meets, but she also has a temper, and this behavior is a big trigger. She has been known to throw stones.

So we talked about the ways in which these men are suffering from addiction, lost deep in their own pain and ignorance, and doing such harm to others because of it. How almost everyone on Earth, including ourselves, at times, is addicted to pleasure in some form or another.

And how, fortunately, most of the time, the collective, family vibe among nude beachgoers (who tend to have a higher level of comfort with their own bodies, and less sexual neurosis about nudity) overwhelms the negativity of predatory intruders. As we talked, Nuria opened up about her past, her own painful histories. Even on the simple days, these things tend to resurface.

Then there was the long-haired argentino dude who sat down next to us, asking for rolling papers and tobacco. His speech was so rapid and his accent so heavily Italian that I gave up trying to follow. One thing I did catch: “. . .parejas?” “Partners?” Pointing to both of us. Well, we are in Spain, a country that recognizes same-sex marriages. Maybe assumptions here are different. Maybe this was a heartwarming break from heteronormativity. Except that…it clearly wasn’t. I didn’t have to understand this guy’s words in order to see his intentions. Just the same old sexist fantasy: girl-on-girl action. And even better — a white girl with a brown girl.

Oh, dear.

Why does a day at the beach have to be so complicated?

Except that…it doesn’t.

There’s a lovely saying I’ve heard a couple of times recently, in different contexts. Just as darkness cannot survive the arrival of light, suffering cannot survive the arrival of equanimity. When you become equanimous — that is, fully present and accepting — toward something that is bothering you, it stops bothering you. You just see it for what it is. Someone is acting out their insecurity. Someone is doing harm. If the harm occurring is severe, requiring action to stop it, take action. If not, let it be. Let it pass. Either way, the first step is to observe, without a knee-jerk reaction.

Eventually, not finding the response he wanted from us, the long-haired dude left.

Did racist patriarchy spoil our day at the beach?

Well, we took some photos. You tell me.

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[Heads-up: nothing explicit, but maybe not the safest for work]

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[From 01 January 2010]

I’ll be the first to admit it, folks: non-resistance, one of the core elements of Buddhist or dhammic praxis, seems like a sham. On its face, non-resistance sounds like one or a combination of (a) weakness: a sort of rationalized fear of fighting back; (b) delusion: playing Mary Sunshine and pretending that there’s nothing to resist; or (c) apathy: leaving it to fate or karma or whatever to sort everything out.

With a slightly more nuanced view of non-resistance, we realize that it doesn’t so much refer to external conflict or confrontation, but has more to do with our internal states, as a tool for reducing suffering. A British professor, a guest speaker I heard at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center back in September, cited as an example the moment you open a delicious-looking box of chocolates, only to find that they’ve all been eaten up — except the coconut ones, which you hate. The more we resist reality (by fantasizing about the missing chocolates; resenting the scoundrels who devoured them), the greater our suffering will become.

Ok, understandable, but something still feels off. It was at that moment, when he pulled out the bonbon anecdote, that the thought occurred to me: This white guy has no idea of the weight of the words he’s using.

Resistance. Struggle.

These words carry a lot of meaning for a lot of people. How could he use them so blithely, so unawares?

Now, it wasn’t just a matter of the professor: his explanation, language and vocabulary were also tied to the audience he was addressing: largely wealthy, white, overeducated, and middle-aged. But there was also a larger context: the neighborhood in which this dharma talk was taking place. Area 4, poor and gentrifying, a long under-resourced and heavily policed area, with lots of homeless and near-homeless people of color.

When talking about non-resistance, how often do we hear examples of irritation like sitting in traffic? Not getting a bonus or promotion at your firm? Undergoing chemotherapy?

In my experience, A Lot.

And how often do we hear examples of police profiling and brutality? Eviction? Domestic abuse? Racist education? Colonization? War?

It’s a shame that so many dharma talks by convert Americans in the U.S., from what I’ve seen and read, are couched in terms of a white ruling-class (and often straight, male, cisgendered, non-disabled) experience. Some may include the “social justice question” as an afterthought, or as a response in a Q & A, but rarely do dharmic explanations center around the people who must resist routinized oppression in order to survive. Talks ignore these realities. And that ignorance, willful or not, can raise a lot of skepticism about the dharma. Earlier in 2009, brownfemipower approached this same question from a different angle: the notion of submission, and whether it can ever be relevant to people who don’t really have a choice.

Fortunately, though, the way I see it, when we get to the deep meaning of non-resistance, we understand that it is totally compatible with political and social struggle. Lately I’ve run across a few explications that speak to confronting violence or abuse.

Some psychologists, among them Tara Brach and Marsha Linehan, talk about radical acceptance—radical meaning “root”—to emphasize our deep, innate capacity to embrace both negative and positive emotions. Acceptance in this context does not mean tolerating or condoning abusive behavior. Rather, acceptance often means fully acknowledging just how much pain we may be feeling at a given moment, which inevitably leads to greater empowerment and creative change.

– Christopher K. Germer from “Getting Along” (Tricycle, Spring 2006)

Non-resistance means looking at the totality of a given situation: not denying any aspect or focusing too narrowly on one area. And not getting lost in our own imagination, our own reactions, or our own desires to appear strong, calm, courageous, or unperturbed. In a conversation with Pema Chödrön, Alice Walker makes a similar point about the importance of acknowledging and accepting pain when somebody tells us to “go to the back of the bus”:

The cause of someone’s aggression is their own suffering. So we can connect with our own aggression and provocation, feel that, and exude good wishes for ourselves and others.

Let’s be clear: exuding good wishes for ourselves and others doesn’t rule out strong action. Even physical, militant action. In his essay “Loving the Enemy” (2002), Jeffrey Hopkins writes,

If your own best friend [suddenly, without warning],* came at you with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker in whatever way you could—you might even have to hit the person in order to disarm him, but once you have managed to disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because he is close to you.

If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the same relationship to you as your very best friend, and if you saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend [acting harmfully],* you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred. He would be too dear to you.

We’re not talking docility here. What makes non-resistance so great and useful is that it’s not a prescription for action or non-action, but rather an aid to clear-sightedness that we can apply to any given situation. It says: look at the reality in front of you. Much as we might want to deny that our friend is brandishing a knife, he is, and that needs addressing. Much as we might want to concoct some story of betrayal — that our friend has now become our enemy — in truth he’s only our enemy if we make him so. Otherwise, he’s only changed from what he was before.

As my teacher Goenkaji says, Accept each moment as it is — not as you would like it to be, but as it is.

And when the moment comes to resist, you’ll resist.

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Have a good weekend, friends. I know I will. :) More on that next week.

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*The original language in this piece talks about the best friend “going mad” as the explanation for the harmful behavior. As folks at Feministe pointed out while I was guest-blogging there, casually linking violence and mental illness presents a lot of problems, including exacerbating stigmas against people living with mental illness. I think Hopkins’ story is still helpful in the sense that it points to the power of a pre-existing, positive, loving relationship that allows us to choose mercy over revenge, refusing to totalize a person even based on their violent actions. At the same time, it’s also a very simplified example, evading the possibility of calculated betrayal, or an inherently predatory “best-friend” relationship. If you have time, I really recommend checking out the Feministe thread, and probing the example a bit further.