It is all too easy to feel the collective weight of the world these days. Often, when catching up on the latest headlines or sensing the general tension in the air, I feel a familiar tightening in my body—a quiet voice that mutters, here we go again.
The modern news cycle can feel like a relentless storm of division and uncertainty, leaving us feeling anxious and ungrounded.
The Japanese Jodo Shinshu priest Ho Sen, reflecting on the passing of a year, wrote:
Another year passed. Empty rice sacks remind me how lucky I am
You might think Ho Sen would feel lucky if his rice sacks were full, but instead, he reflects on his good fortune—the empty sacks remind him of all the food he has already received that kept him alive.
Taking a cue from Ho Sen, I offer this:
Another chaotic news cycle My meditation cushion reminds me How lucky I am to rest my body and mind.
How do we steady ourselves when the world feels so fractured?
I find that the higher my anxiety level, the greater my resistance to sit down on my cushion and just feel my breath, just feel my body supported by the chair or the floor.
But we feel what we feel. Meditation has nothing to do with controlling our feelings. It has everything to do with simply feeling them without being undone by them.
This takes courage. And this courage nurtures our resilience.
“Poetry itself is an instrument of resilience,” Jane Hirshfield, a practicing Zen Buddhist, wrote about her poem below. Poetry, like our meditation practice, reveals the space for creative responses—just as the tree displays in her poem, Optimism:
More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Can we meet the challenges of our times creatively? Both poetry and our mindfulness practice beg us to step out of our default comfort zones and embody clarity, kindness, and compassion.
The core message of the poem—and indeed, of a contemplative life—is simple: Wake up from your default modes of fear, anxiety, and reactivity, and explore what you choose to pay attention to and the choices you make.
As David Foster Wallace counseled:
If you’ve really learned how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.
When the world gets loud, our negativity bias may go on steroids, and that’s OK.
But try taking the risk of noticing the lovely things that happen in your day. Perhaps someone holds a door open for you at the store. Maybe you glimpse a tiny purple flower by the side of the road.
Just let these short, sweet moments in—the ones our negativity bias wants to brush aside. Take your meditation seat, if only for 15 minutes; give yourself a break.
And nurture your resilience.
Tom Davidson-Marx founded Aloha Sangha in Honolulu and has practiced Buddhist meditation for decades, including three years as a Theravada monk.
Comments
4 responses to “nurture your resilience”
As a person of color, I sincerely appreciate and am deeply touched by your words, as well as your courage to express them so eloquently with conviction and without apology.
Thanks so much for this very moving comment, Phyllis. Although I am white and Caucasian, I was raised in Central American by a woman of color, an indigenous “nanny”and always felt “white guilt.” I still do. Even saying that seems unnecessary. There is so much to take in if we simply allow ourselves to be vulnerable. So much healing can happen–but we need to model our deep shared truths, our profound interconnection, and our responsibility of kindness. I am hopeful. Thanks Phyllis so much.
Thank you, as always, for your thoughts, Tom. I think Tara Brach recently said something like we need more activists to get on their cushions and more meditators out in the streets? I always understood that meditation was meant to help us see the world as it is, rather than shelter us from what we might already be privileged enough to hide from. I am grateful you fearlessly discuss it all. If this nation is ever to fulfill its promises, white people like you and me must find the courage to face things as they are. It seems to me meditation can help us do that. If we are willing.
Thanks Rachael. One of my teachers in Thailand once told me answers which come from thinking aren’t true answers, they are just more thinking. I have never forgot this. He said treating others with genuine kindness, even when you disagree, is just one example of true understanding.
He said contemplation which is based on stillness is more reliable, because when you are still you can see deeply and it does not come from thinking; if you think too much you only see the surface and superficial.
He kept telling me to train your mind to be still, so that it can penetrate deeply into the nature of the moment and its repercussions. This is the most profound gift of our meditation practice I feel.
Thanks again.