11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 5

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 5

Class 4 examined what creating a meditative space might look like. The idea of contending with the mind's commotions to clear a more pristine and quiet area is one of the most difficult aspects of meditation. There is something about sitting to be quiet and calm that invites noise and entanglements. It is these cacophonous forces that discourage many people from pursuing what could be a most helpful and healing interaction. We think there is a real difference between the environment of our outer lives and that of our inner lives. Just as we expect some perfect ideal of ourselves, so we expect that when we make the decision to sit quietly we will have a carpet of soft comfort unrolled before us. It is surprising when that doesn't happen and frustrating when we encounter commotion every time we sit to meditate. It is so easy to adapt to the commotion we can see and hear in our awake lives than to struggle with sometimes even greater disordered forces that collide in our minds.

The clamorous cacophony of our minds when left to themselves is classically referred to as “monkey mind,” that state in which wild and unbidden animal sounds and images impinge on orderly thought (refer here to the quote of Michel Montaigne). This is normal for the mind. It is what minds do when left open to the elements of meditation. It seems that the monkeys are always playing in the background and we only notice them when we expect quiet. If we sit and open up the mind without grounding or resourcing, then we are thrown in with all those wild forces. If we at first ground ourselves in our bodies, sensing the breath and enlisting the parasympathetic nervous system, then choose our strongest and most meaningful resource, we have cleared space over which we have control. If then we become the participant/observer of our thoughts, we can begin to choose what we want our minds to consider, if anything. The point is that we get to choose. If we are once again besieged by monkeys, then we can return to the breath and to our personal resource to quiet the noise. The process of quieting is just that, a process, one that is always being altered in one way or another. I would say that in any given meditation period I do this oscillating between noise and resource many times, always beginning again but always in a slightly different place in the stream of thought. Isn't it said by wise people that we can't step into the stream twice in the same place? So it is with meditation and the context of our minds from one moment to the next. Sometimes that new beginning feels like progress and sometimes it feels like a rescue. But what it feels like will come from our own exertions and it will be ours to claim. Even if the stake we claim turns out to be a dud in that moment, we will have made the choice and hold to the freedom that brings.

I would like to suggest that this commotion and confusion is creative. In addition to being a normal phenomenon of mind, it is also the context for understanding ourselves and the world more fully. It is in this understanding that we are able to break away from the tethers of being controlled and oppressed to a state of liberation. To do this, we need to begin to understand better what being human entails. We have already observed how debilitating it can be to strive for some ideal self, to create a pain gap between who we aspire to be and who we truly are. We have explored how “self” is constituted in the brain and how our unique identities evolve from our autobiographical experiences. To go a bit further in understanding how the self can become the ground of creativity we need to consider more ways in which the self can be profiled.

To this end, let me add to the definition of self the qualities of imperfection, impermanence, interdependence, insecurity, unpredictability, uncertainty, and mortality. These are forces that may intrude on our meditations repeatedly and with varying degrees of force and noise. They are the same forces that lurk in the backs of our minds during waking hours when we are tending to tasks of mundane life, like doing laundry or making school lunches or flossing our teeth. When we sit expecting a quiet space, they are there to bedevil us. Yet, it is in giving ourselves over to them that we are able to embrace a more fully rounded emotional life. Because they are embodied and true to our existence as human beings on earth, we add them to the pain of our divided selves when we push them away in hopes they will disappear. When we have fooled ourselves and they return in full force to our desired quiet space of meditation, we are outraged at their presence and persistence. But are we not railing against what rounds out our human character? Are we not dishonoring our true selves? Are we not disowning who we are? And in doing so, do we not create our own suffering?

When we encounter monkeys, we often treat them as we do other threats and stresses. We trigger reactivity (the hard-wired fight, flight, freeze), frame a relationship with them, and formulate judgments about them. (“Is this a dangerous situation?”, “Is it safe to pause and respond?”). Beyond the protections of the reactive state, layers of judgment can build up and these become unclaimed baggage, emotional and otherwise (“I was so weak”, “I shouldn't have said that”, “I am a failure”).

If, instead, we are able to recognize our impermanent state and our vulnerability, then aren't we in a good place to pause and create the conditions for creative action and interaction? Are we not then participant/observers of our own life and able to make choices about what happens next? While life has its unpredictable aspects (how much can we truly predict or control?), we can say we don't know what “next” means. When we do ask “What then shall I do?” (see notes for Class 1), we open up the infinite expanse of possibilities and we get to choose what comes next. The notion of choice, of having options from which to choose, gives us control over a certain number of elements in our lives, especially within our inner lives and the meditative space (forces in our outer, mundane lives, are less respectful of our choosing and we will look at them in Class 6). All of this process is part and parcel of sitting in meditation and moving beyond grounding and resourcing. And what seems effective in the meditative space of our minds, also becomes effective in the mental space of our waking days. It is for this very reason that dividing up our lives into “inner” and “outer” doesn't make much sense because effective mental processing applies to the wholeness axis. With practice in meditation, we practice how to be in every part of our lives, always progressing to greater integration, even if it doesn't always feel that positive.

In the last two classes we will look more closely at how we might choose to respond to simple dualities that divide us and that arise all the time in the meditative space. We will also explore how to approach the judgments we make based on them. Are we held prisoner by our judgments or can we consider them and then let them go?

So, the inner commotion that surges up in meditation is the creative ground for greater flexibility, resilience, and adaptability. We are more balanced on our feet and in our thoughts. We have made friends with the monkeys and we have tamed them to some extent. Yes, they will be there when you return, but they will be different every time. The key is to show up for the show and to address them with kindness, for in doing so, one shows kindness and acceptance for what it is to be a human rather than a monkey (so little separates us genetically, but in crucially important ways) and to be who you truly are.

The kindness and understanding we show to ourselves and the ways in which we deal with our personal monkeys also contribute to what is referred to as neuroplasticity of the brain. Neuroplasticity is all about exercising within the resilient zone, modulating between activation and responsivity but attempting to spend as much time as possible in the calming phase. When we are able to accomplish this, we are in a position to literally change our minds. The firing and wiring that occur in the brain from repeated channeling in specific networks reinforce the kindness and compassion that are healing and allow us to become more adaptable in a world that appears increasingly out of anyone's control. So, a good case can be made for meditating as a habit and repeating all the basic steps that lead in the direction of more personal freedom over what initially seems intractably constricting and inescapable.

In Class 6 we will take a look at how the meditative space interacts with the wider world. We have already noticed how “inner” and “outer” are a somewhat false duality, but encountering the “full catastrophe” of life has additional dimensions. We will go from “monkey mind” to “full catastrophe” and see where it takes us.

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 4

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 4

Class 3 introduced the idea of resourcing as the next step in meditation after grounding or centering. Sources of meaning, peace, joy, and calm can change, just as the circumstances of life and the meditative space change. All of the notions of CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, and INTERACTION are organic and personal, depending on the conscious choices we make. They are “bottom-up” and emerge from our daily lives. The resource selected on any given day may be a source of stability and strength but it may also change from day to day. You get to choose which one works and how it works for you.

One of my biggest challenges as a beginning meditator was what to do after sitting on my cushion or chair, positioning my crossed legs, and focusing on my breath for grounding. What was supposed to happen next? We have already explored some of the ways in which meditation can support self care, how it can be structured with attention to CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, and INTERACTIONS. When it comes to describing the meditative space and how we gain access to it, we are confronted with the challenges posed by the limited language we have to say what it is. I like to think of this space we are creating every time we sit to meditate as a place where we experience what is now called “flow.” It is a nod to limited language choices that we use in references to “stream of consciousness,” “flow of a river,” and where the idea of water becomes a way of accessing the meditative space. Flow is a concept developed extensively by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1990s and expanded since then to include what we now call mindfulness. Flow is a state of mind that includes the following components: (1) Intense and focused concentration on the present moment, (2) Merging of action and awareness, (3) A loss of reflective self-consciousness, (4) A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, (5) A distortion of temporal experience (one's subjective experience is altered), and (6) Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding. When one is in a state of flow, one is said to be “in the zone,” and I interpret this to be the resilient zone we defined in Class 1.

Because the meditative space can be inhabited by an infinite number of objects, subjects, and relationships (including memories), the state of flow can represent our absorption with joy and peace in one moment and with trauma and sorrow in another. The flow state is not a state of bliss or “zoning out.” It is a state that begins with intention and leads to attention and the expenditure of energy. It is the space we move into with grounding, a sense of stability and relaxation, and with a meaningful personal resource at our core. It is a state in which we can define the CONTEXT of our thoughts in the moment, the emotional RELATIONSHIPS we identify as meaningful, and we can decide how our INTERACTIVE energy will be spent. In a sense, we can create the meditative space in which we wish to settle.

It is important to point out that accessing this space depends on showing up, being present to one's own mind and autobiographical self. That is not to say that what enters the space will be predictable and orderly. In fact, almost every session of meditation I have gets crowded with the harpies and demons and aggressively insistent lists that are present in my mundane life day-to-day. It isn't until I ground and name my resource that I can begin to clear enough space for the conscious choices that lead to focus and calming. We will look at some of those uninvited guests in future classes. At this stage, it is important to have intention and some amount of discipline to show up and sit down, if sitting is how you meditate. When one accesses the meditative space during the course of a busy work day, when mental pausing is the entry point to meditation, then this may occur while walking or driving or sitting at a computer terminal. The important point is that one makes the choice to take the pause. Once again, it takes only milliseconds to move from grounding to resourcing and then into the space where calming can occur.

The quiet space we value and can create in our homes is not always available to us in mundane life. While it is a wonderful place to tend and while I would like to think it is possible to attain this space in the midst of noise and activity, it is not always possible. The process of meditation, however, is always available and can become a part of a busy outer life, if only for brief periods of a few breaths. Conscious breathing opens up the wholeness axis to physiologic calming and support of the parasympathetic nervous system. We escape the pressure of circumstances in which we find ourselves and enter a space where we know our own bodies and their capacities to support us in the resilient zone. It is back to the basics with us in control. We transition from our hard-wired reactivity to responsivity.

I think clearing space for the meditative mind is one of the more difficult aspects of the process. Getting started on any given day at any given time depends on meeting so many demands in mundane life, but noticing that makes the need for meditation even clearer. How can we cope with the demands without grounding and resourcing and finding the space in which we can regulate our emotions and restore our courage and strength? Perhaps, what begins as a hobby will become a habit and then something you can inhabit as a refuge or a sanctuary for restoration. This may become for you an immersion, a cleansing, a clarification, a diving, a submergence, a flooding, a baptism of sorts, an ablution, a purification—all experiences referring to water and the power of “flow.”

When all is said and done using the limited words and concepts that are familiar to us, we are left with mystery at the heart of meditation. There are frontiers yet undiscovered in neuroscience and, thus, in meditation. It is possible that scientific experimentation will uncover those frontiers but it is also possible that they will remain always out of science's reach. In any case, mystery will surround our efforts to describe what happens in the human brain that opens up mental space for what we call meditation or reflection. If we are comfortable with the idea and reality that our lives change all the time, then there is a new opportunity for exploration of mind every day. The open-ended aspect of this experience lends an element of freedom to our daily lives.

Creating the environment for meditation is about suspending time and concepts of space and opening to the creative potential of the human brain where anything is possible and everything is useful. This is a place where we can experience peace in seconds or minutes (our mundane lives) or over the course of months or years (the life of a hermit or monk). We get to make choices. We get to ask questions and experiment to find what works for us. We act as participant/observers of our own lives and honor the relationship we have with ourselves. Are you comfortable with mystery and unpredictability?

Class 5 will look at what happens when we enter a meditative space and work with our inner lives.

11-22-18

Meditation Notes 3

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 3

In our last class on care and healing, we looked at how one uses the format of identifying context, the facts and details of any situation, and then working with the relationships we have to that particular context at a particular time. In this regard, relationships refer to our feelings generated by the emotions we have and which are often hidden in our subconscious. Thinking about context grounds us in our own lives and keeps us in touch with our inner spaces and how we perceive the world around us. The details of mundane life are a stream but we don't often perceive them that way. There seem to be individual periods of punctuation and interruption and disjointed connections. We seem to be more aware of the stream-like characteristics of our emotional lives and can perceive them as moving from one to the next. That said, we have more control over our inner lives, the meditative spaces, and can make choices about the possibilities that curiosity and inquiry open to us. This class focuses on what happens once we consciously enter the stream of our emotional lives with the intent to direct our attention to one thought at a time. The relationship we have identified as important to us assists in this effort of attention. The thread of attention here will be on resourcing, finding a source of meaning that can serve us as we settle into the meditative space. Poetry can be one source (not the source) for this step in meditation. It needs to be said that “resource” is a verb as well as a noun and, in the context of this course, represents a process of change.

Poetry needs no defense. It is able to stand on its own as a formation of mind and language. Its reputation for being arcane or difficult or irrelevant precedes it. But, like the outlier, the coyote, the nerd, the misfit, the holy fool, it has its own integrity, take it or leave it. I have chosen to take it in and place it into the class on meditation because of what it offers my experience with exploration of the mind. I offer it to all of you, thinking that it might take on some useful purpose as you explore your own versions of meditation. Once again, I emphasize that poetry is not one thing, rigid and fixed, just as any poem or meditation session is not just one concept or experience. If you can accept the idea that we are changing all the time in body, mind, and spirit (the wholeness axis), then perhaps you can see how poems change in relation to the changing contexts of our lives. If we take time and give poems a chance to speak to us, they will sound one way today and a different way tomorrow. That happens because the context of our lives changes from day to day and so we engage the poem as changing beings.

What I hope to do in this discourse is to show how I think poetry belongs to our considerations and explorations of meditation. It is not the only doorway to meditation (and may be, in fact, a stand-alone meditation in itself; if not in reading it, but also in writing it) but it can serve us in that capacity as well as any other. With the domain of self care always in mind, I would like to refer to some of those initial considerations (Class 1) when writing about the potential of poetry to stabilize our minds and open up space for meditation. In addition, I want to explore how the factors that seem to be important in meditation are also present in poems ( i.e, CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, INTERACTION), just as they are present in encounters we have in our mundane life and I include here those occasions when we can replace reactivity with responsivity. The poems I have included in each class seem to me to be related in some way to the thread (theme) of that class, but you may read them differently. That leads us into experimentation with interpretation, always a good and healthy thing in lifelong learning.

It is worth emphasizing as often as I can that what each of these classes does is to tease out a thread from the whole fabric of the wholeness axis and from the fabric of meditation when, in fact, the intention is not to unravel but to make sure each thread tightens down the warp and woof of the entire project. It is by looking at the threads and seeing their contributions that we are able to integrate all of them into the whole. We do this with our lives and scientists do it with their experiments. By experimentation with pieces and threads, we come to some concept of how our lives are changing and progressing and we grow in appreciation and gratitude. By this method, we are able to make choices and change our minds.

I don't believe that there is any such thing as a “minor” poet. There are poets that make it big on the world scene for any number of reasons, and there are those that don't. But all of them begin with the same blank piece of paper and begin to choose words from similar cultural lexicons in different languages. In this, they begin as we would, were we to attempt a poem. What differs, of course, is the CONTEXTS of their different lives, the RELATIONSHIPS they have to their lives and their work, and the INTERACTIVE choices they make when they write. We read them on one day with our own contexts, relationships, and interactions and then on another day with a different set of factors, with different eyes and ears.

The CONTEXT of poetry includes, most obviously, language—words with meanings that are often straightforward and sometimes ambiguous. How they aggregate to create a narrative is a process that neuroscientists believe begins non-linguistically in parts of the brain dedicated to sorting and selecting representations or patterns in mental maps. Once narrative coalesces, the words become symbols and allow us to distance ourselves from experience long enough to perceive patterns in a complex universe. When we communicate those patterns to others, we open a gateway to understanding and sharing. This is the basic ground of communication and the ground of poetry as well. Perception of poetry as communication is segmented in the brain where a “top-down,” executive left brain deals with language as defined words and a “bottom-up” right brain takes a dominant role in interpreting words with ambiguous meaning. In addition, imagery evoked by poetry seems to activate areas of the right hemisphere dedicated to the visuospatial processes of the brain. The poet may be freeing us from the onerous entrapment of fixed meaning (left brain influence) and inducing an integrated state that contributes to the wholeness axis and emotional regulation in the resilient zone. A few moments of breath awareness or poetry reflection can create a state in our minds of receptive awareness to what arises. It is this pause or step back that rescues us from reactivity and fosters responsivity. These pauses are available to us at all times but poetry can also be a vehicle that transports us into mindful awareness and meditation.

It seems that the effectiveness of a poem's message depends on our state of intentionality to receive. But poems can also activate a state of receptive awareness. It is believed they do this by stimulating a sensory immediacy that is the ground of experience and that is the basis for integrating the wholeness axis in meditation. Poems enable observation with some clarity, as they imply relationships without didactic descriptions. Poems, because of the immediacy of their personally rendered imagery and sensations for the poet (and maybe in the same ways or different ways for us) can create entirely new ways of conceptualizing the world. In this way, poems bring forth new ways of knowing our own worlds. Words create worlds.

In Class 2 I mentioned how important it seems to be able to name and label feelings as a way of healing the pain gap, the split that divides the person we aspire to be and the person we truly are. In naming and labeling feelings, we are supporting emotional balance and approaching resilience. The role of self-talk is important in how we do this, as it makes us the subject of our own lives instead of being the object. The dialogue is with ourselves and, by this means, we open up creative inquiry. Neuroscience has shown that exercising the ability to use words to describe internal states of being, such as feelings, makes us more resilient in adapting to stress and trauma.

So, that is some of the landscape, the context, of poetry. What can we make of RELATIONSHIPS and INTERACTIONS? I believe we can discern context and relationships within any poem, but poetry in general also offers us a way to be in relationship with it. My relationship to poetry has to do with what it offers me as a resource. Resourcing is an important part of wholeness axis stabilization and follows on after grounding. It has been shown that resourcing as a conscious effort is very effective in contributing to how we respond to traumas, large and small. But the meditative space is reserved not only for dealing with traumas, as its contents are infinitely potential and include anything that is possible to experience. The list of resources is as vast as there are people who can name elements of their lives that give them meaning and joy. In this way, naming something that represents safety, peace, joy, and personal meaning is contrasted with that resource's play against the trauma that may occupy the meditative space at any given time. We dwell for a time on trauma here only to demonstrate how resourcing in meditation can address some of the most difficult aspects of our inner and outer lives.

Resourcing does not ask for the trauma to be rehearsed or repeated or relived. Retraumatization is a real phenomenon, as most of us can attest because of our experiences with the cycles of rumination that loop in our minds. Instead, we characterize the trauma in terms that describe how it feels to us: How big is it? Is it heavy? Does it have a color? Or a temperature? Where in the body does it sit? Our resourcing has supplied us with other imagery and sensations that bring us calm and joy. Perhaps it is the image of a spiritual leader, a place in nature, a pleasant childhood memory, a loved one, an icon, a poem. In dealing specifically with the trauma, resourcing enables us to be in control of the oscillation or toggling between the characterized trauma and the resource. This can take any time that seems comfortable. With each visit to the trauma, it is good to ask how it has changed in character—Is it as heavy? Is it still as hot? Has it moved from its original location? In this way, the resource is a safety net below the abyss of trauma. Now, obviously, there are big traumas (you get to decide which is big and which is little, not someone else) that require the help of a professional, but for many of the smaller traumas that bedevil all of us, this technique can prove useful in stabilizing and regulating back into the resilient zone. Pausing, breathing, noticing posture, grounding all flow into mindful awareness and support the parasympathetic nervous system as it calms the body. Resourcing can be the next step in our efforts to deal with those traumas and stresses that require more than momentary mindfulness.

Perhaps the rhythm of the poem, the imagery, the alliteration, the overall flow help us access the doorway to meditation. Again, it is just one way of gaining this access and can be effective for those who are receptive to it and work with it. It isn't for everyone, but it is available. It might be worth a try to pick a poem and let its beauty and energy become a resource. Let yourself develop a relationship and history with the poem and the poet behind it. Read it aloud several days in a row; notice how your relationship with it changes, how it might generate questions about its meaning or how it contributes to your daily toil. Poetry may be beautifully pointless or pointlessly beautiful, but either way it is a representation of the flow of consciousness of which we can partake. It can contribute to our efforts at self care.

The thread of this class is not so much poetry as it is the helpfulness of having another entry point to meditation and to use poetry or any other resource as a way of doing that. The emphasis is on using elements of beauty, peace, and joy as counterpoints to the darker and negative stresses and traumas that are a part of our lives and, thus, part of the meditative space we inhabit.

This points to Class 4 where we will explore how one can make space and time for meditation.

11-22-18

Meditation Notes 2

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 2

Class 1 offered a view of the landscape of self care, with focus on what constitutes the “self”, how it deals with stress and trauma, and some suggestions about how one might begin the process of caring for it. This class looks at a perception of self in its wounded state and opens up how one might go about healing it. It is important to remember that my ideas are just one person's view of self and meditation. There are a myriad number of other possibilities and they are all based on unique personal experiences. I like to think of my own experiences as experiments, knowing that most experiments end without confirming the original hypotheses. That's alright, as growth is occurring with positive as well as negative experiences. In the case of these experiments, negative is not the same thing as failure. My intention with the meditation classes is to explore what meditators might encounter when they open up to the space of meditation. This includes the “full catastrophe” of living a human existence.

When someone asks the question “How are you today?”, I often think the truer question, the one with greater depth, is “Who are you today?”. Asking someone who they are implies that the answer today might be different from the one given yesterday or tomorrow. It implies that who we are is changing all the time. Certainly, we can see changes in a newborn baby occur rapidly over months, but we aren't so impressed with the changes we go through every day, in part because we aren't attuned to our bodies and in part because the changes occur in smaller increments, unless dramatic illness strikes, as it often does.

I'm not certain it is accurate to portray our general perception of “self” in society as wounded, but I know there are many who would accept this characterization. For those of us who do see ourselves in this way, it is helpful to think about how we perceive ourselves in relation to someone whom we don't necessarily know but who we see as some sort of ideal or whom we admire in some way separate from us. This is the person we want to be. When we do this, we begin to divide ourselves, slicing away by small or large cuts into who we are in an attempt to carve out the ideal we see. We begin to separate ourselves from our true and unique selves and the gap we create between our true self and the ideal is the source of great pain and suffering. The slicing away into our true selves is a traumatic experience. The entry points to self care mentioned in the last class are the extensions of compassion for self and the beginning of healing of this trauma. There is no ideal or fixed self to which we can aspire and no ideal meditation to achieve. Our meditations are reflections of our selves and our lives. We are our meditations.

We become good at the ongoing practice of self care by doing exercises that bring us back to a grounded and stabilized state of body and mind. Poems can do this and in this course they will serve as examples of how one might open up an inquiry. The inquiries for this class will begin with the four questions posed in Class 1, if only to give our meditations a focus. When we meditate on our own, we can return to these few questions to give us a direction and a form.

“Where am I right now?” “What is the CONTEXT of the “care” in self care?” The context here features the inner life and outer life all of us possess. There are many forms of meditation that address this two-fold world of ours. Vipassana meditation, for instance is a mindfulness practice and focuses on the small, even microscopic, details of our lives. I think of this as focusing on the intimate, the private. Shamata meditation is expansive and takes in the vast landscape of existence. I think of this as focusing on the expanse of public life or the scope of cosmological space and time. In truth, my own concept and practice of meditation is a combination of both and I think that is probably true for most of us in our lives. To the extent that meditation reflects our entire lives, we oscillate between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between the inner (intimate) life and the outer (ultimate) life of experience.

I think it is useful to think about the difference between healing and curing, a consideration for our biological lives as well as our emotional lives. The distinction is important in both. There are many diseases and conditions of the biological life that are treatable but not curable. The same is true for our emotional lives. Healing, however, is always possible for the wholeness axis, no matter the trauma or stress experienced. For instance, certain cancers are not curable but they are manageable with therapy, leading to a healing of tissue. In the same way, emotional traumas, such as PTSD, are often not curable or eradicable but there are modes of therapy and care that lead to healing. I think of this in the same way with depression. History is populated with individuals who have documented their spiritual traumas and wounds and the scars that resulted. The most uplifing ones also document the healing that has resulted from the experience. Scars are formed and contract and harden but never disappear altogether. But they are healed in ways that allow for continued personal growth and change.

So, the context of this meditation might include the factual details of the trauma, the therapy, the healing, and the scars. It might also include how non-linear healing can be, not following any particular format or timing once a scar has formed and before healing takes place. It might take note of how contingent and interdependent the elements of the wholeness axis are and how one's trauma flows to the others.

The next question we ask is “What is my relationship to this pain gap created in my life as I strive to become an idealized person?” Answering this question depends on a level of attending and tending that brings to light exactly the emotions we experience. Labeling and naming are important ways of knowing one's emotional state. Neuroscience has shown that people who use words to describe their internal states, such as emotions, are more flexible and capable of regulating their emotional states back into the resilient zone, once again supporting the parasympathetic nervous system. Another way of looking at this is to see that the idealized state of being we aspire to is a “top-down” perception where we are influenced by external ideas about desirable appearances through media interpretations and advertising. What meditation can do is to open us up to “bottom-up” knowledge about our true selves. This is organic, involves the entire wholeness axis, and originates in our core and autobiographical selves.

Naming our emotions includes naming the most generous as well as the most difficult and often shameful ones. Attending and tending to all of them contributes to healing. While we wish we could hang on to the most delightful and complimentary ones, the ones that shine the brightest light on us, and while we wish we could push away the darkest and most painful ones, we can only support the wholeness axis and the healing of trauma if we name and label all of them. Because all of them are only thoughts, we also have the capacity and choice to let them go. We can acknowledge them as they arise and pass away. We can choose. As we do this, we adopt the stance of the PARTICIPANT/OBSERVER, a most useful way to deal with the healing process. When we become participant/observers, we are able to see and understand ourselves better as subjects of our lives and to observe that we know how we are affected by our emotional states. It is from this place that we can make choices about how to respond.

To write about how all of this might occur is a rather ponderous process of introduction and explanation but, in fact, all of this can occur in milliseconds of consciousness and can occur in those little pauses that help us regulate ourselves in the resilient zone. The last question of inquiry is “How shall I act or interact?” This takes us over the transition from empathy into compassion. Now, we are out of our heads and into the world of action. This question, as with the others, opens up a vast world of possibilities and choices. A philosopher (Michael Foucault) said that curiosity evokes care. This is where we find ourselves now that we have engaged our curiosity. It is at this stage of inquiry that we can experiment. It began with grounding in the body. We have looked at the facts of context and have considered the emotional relationship we have to the trauma. Now, we know more about the pain and suffering and their sources. With the attitude of experimentation we can begin with a beginner's mind and choose a course of action that is consistent with our true selves (vs. that idealized self that was never attainable and thus not able to help us at all). Neuroscientists say it is possible to act one's way into a new way of thinking and that as we fire combinations of neurons together in the service of joy or love or compassionate action, we wire them together and so they remain as a new way of acting. Because we recognize and accept cheerfully that failure is as much a part of experimentation as success (validating one's initial guess about something), we continue with our bottom-up expression of self and our contribution to healing the pain gap. In this way, we continue to grow and change and we make good use of the personal resources we alone posses in just this unique combination. This is what we bring to meditation as a work in progress.

Now, this class points to a more focused look at the resources we might enlist to help us heal. We will look at this in Class 3.

11-21-18

Meditation Notes 1

What follows is a set of notes for a meditation class I taught fall, a year ago. I tried to gather some ideas about what meditation might entail for someone first starting out with the practice. The course lasted eight weeks and I had some notes for each class and so I will post those notes over the next few weeks so that anyone interested can see what my orientation is. They are intended to be my own opinions and only an introduction and I would imagine that anyone else might develop a very different approach to meditation practice. There are some breaks in the first set of notes that originally included some simple graphs which I am not able to transfer over to this format. I think the information in the notes is enough to go on.

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 1

This colloquy is based on a set of notes I put together for presentations before hospice nurses and volunteers. It was intended to address the ongoing needs of these healthcare workers for self care. When I made the presentations, I said that the concerns for self care and how to approach it would apply to anyone dealing with stresses and traumas, which is just about everyone in the world today. So, when I was asked to present a course on meditation, I turned to these notes as a skeleton outline of what I thought might be important for anyone first approaching meditation or for those with some experience with it. The notes include many of the threads I have tried to weave into the course and which I try to highlight in each of the 8 classes. This colloquy is a useful way for me to consolidate my ideas and to bring some coherence to them for purposes of sharing them with others.

The original talk had as its basis my own experiences with workplace burnout and the onset of depression. I wanted to use my own experiences as a backdrop example for what others might experience in their lives. I accepted the vulnerability that accompanied revealing this personal information. In fact, as I told the hospice volunteers, accepting the vulnerability was part of my own process of self care. Personal vulnerability is one of the threads in the course on meditation. It is as much a part of understanding one's own vulnerability as that of someone else in a situation of stress and distress. We like to think we get better at helping others through crises but don't often tend to our own. When we are vulnerable, then we are opening to a vast landscape of possibilities for self care and so accepting that we are vulnerable can lead to meditation as a refuge. When we deal with stresses or traumas, we respond to them with reactivity and unleash a cascade of physiologic activity. We will look at this more closely a bit later, but it is important to point out that traumas can be of the big “T” variety, such as the death of a child or a difficult divorce or loss of retirement savings, or they can be the little “t” kind; such as miscommunications, minor arguments, misplacing car keys, personnel confrontations in the work place. Fortunately, most of our daily traumas are in the latter category and not in the former. All traumas result in some version of the physiologic activation of the fight, flight, or freeze response.

My notes point out how burnout can lead to the perception of loss of identity when one leaves the matrix of a job or relationship. In my own journey I came to question who I was and this led to posing several questions that turned out to be very important in my own emergence from depression. They are:

Who am I? (How could this happen to me?)

What am I here for? (What is happening to me?0

What then shall I do? (What can help me?)

I have subsequently added another question which precedes the others and that is: Where am I? This emphasizes locating ourselves in space and time, especially in the physical setting of the moment. It relates to how I want all meditations (guided or otherwise) to begin—in a place, in a body. It is where I begin each guided meditation for classes and for my own meditation sessions at home. I have now translated those questions into a slightly different language that looks like this:

Where am I?

Who am I? into What is the context of this moment or period of my life?

What am I here for? into What is my relationship to this context?

What then shall I do? into What is my interaction or action that emerges from the first two

questions?

“Where am I?” relates to grounding the body in a space and place that connects with sensory experience. This makes biology and physiology the focus of life relationships. Our behavior under all conditions of life experiences is determined by our physiology and, for the purposes of meditation, by the autonomic nervous system functions. There are many other contributions but a simplistic understanding of the streams of the autonomic nervous system help guide us in our responses to stress and trauma. The stream lets of the autonomic nervous system intermix and complement each other. One streamlet is the sympathetic nervous system (sns) and it is engaged when we encounter stress, trauma, or threat. It produces increases in heart rate, respiratory rate, it diverts blood flow from organs not immediately required for fight, flight, or freeze, which are the ways in which our bodies respond to stresses and traumas. These responses produce an increased awareness, vigilance, and anxiety. In essence, they lead to a state of reactivity, in itself a protective and desirable physiologic default.

The parasympathetic nervous system (pns), on the other hand, when engaged leads to a decrease in heart rate and respiratory rate and fosters a state of relaxation, calmness, and equanimity. This is a state of general responsivity (vs. reactivity).

It is the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems that is described as the resilient zone. The resilient zone in balance looks like this:

sns activation pns calming

By contrast, this is a disregulated resilient zone leading to fight, flight, or freeze and their consequences, but also showing how one can reenter the resilient zone with normal spikes of reactivity followed by calming:

stuck on hyperarousal: hyperactivity, hypervigilance,

anxiety, panic, rage, pain

trauma or other

trigger

                                        

stuck on hypoarousal: disconnection, exhaustion, fatigue,

freeze, numbness, depression

All disregulated consequences stem from or lead to fear and suffering.

 

In mundane life, our everyday life, our physiology tracks our experiences from morning to night and even when we sleep. When we wake and become conscious of our surroundings, we become aware, focus our attention and become mindful. Mindfulness focuses our attention and we can be brought to a state of bearing witness. In the case of our own stresses or those of another, we experience sympathy, the next stop on the path of caring. Sympathy engages us at a distance. As we get closer to suffering, we experience empathy where we engage emotionally with our own situation or someone else's as if it were our own. We are attuning in each instance and activating what neuroscientists call “mirror neurons”. The final emotional state in this process is compassion, an opening to action.

When our lives or our jobs call for the above path of emotional responses, we can get stuck at empathy. Every marker on the path leading to compassion is a mental function and it isn't until we reach the junction between empathy and compassion that we pass from a mind function to action. I believe it is this crucial transition that serves self care in important ways. If we think of this process of emotional engagement as the Department of Unclaimed Baggage (to use a workplace example) where we are in charge, then every episode of stress, every request for some unclaimed baggage unsuccessfully met, represents an inability to satisfy the customer in distress over being unable to calm the physiology of loss. In the workplace this leads to a build up of empathy until the accumulation of repeated episodes of reactivity (hyperarousal) lead to hypoarousal and numbness. Some have called this compassion fatigue. In effect, however, we experience empathic exhaustion. Compassion is believed not to fatigue but draws on available energy sources, never draining away more than can be spent and renewed.

When we are able to make the transition from empathy to compassion, even if it is only to tell the stressed customer that you understand what this means to them and assure them of your full attention, the shift from mental focus to action and interaction has occurred. We do this with others and we do this with ourselves. We have shifted from knowing our own pain to action that leads to care.

At any point during the day, we are able to pause, to step back, to contact our bodies (Where am I?) in time and space, to observe the context of the event (Who am I?), and to ask what my relationship (What am I here for?) is to what is happening; good, bad, or indifferent, but just to notice what emotions (or none) are present. This can take us all the way along the chain of emotions to empathy and the transition to compassion (What then shall I do?) In the pause, we are managing all of the transitions and we are the subjects of our lives. We are able to entertain options and make choices about what to do. Fight, flight, or freeze might still be good options, but others may also be viable. We get to choose and we can act. We are not stuck on empathy. In some cases, we are tending to self and, in others, we are tending to someone else (but maybe also tending to self in subtle ways).

“Who am I?” is not just about location in space and time and about physiologic processes essential for life and survival. It is also about the integration of this body, this mind, and this spirit in what I like to call the Wholeness Axis. The axis implies an integration of everything that contributes to one's sense of “self”, to one's sense of identity. Of course, the elements of wholeness are of a whole and we take them as separate pieces only to point out how important each is to being someone.

BODY is where we begin to reconstruct the physiologic resilient zone. The body we have is the only one we will ever have, a fact that tends to elude us some days. It is a refuge as well as a sanctuary where calm and equanimity can be accessed. How do we do this? Some of the compassionate (emphasizing the transition from empathy to compassion) actions we can take include the following entry points or doorways to self care:

sleep

posture

breath

nutrition

exercise

yoga

meditation

relationships

community

nature

prayer

faith traditions

song

dance

poetry

pets

MIND is where our sense of “self” is located, embedded in the miraculous and complex channels and networks of the brain. A very simple schematic for MIND looks something like this:

the human brain>evolution of mind>development of the core self (personhood)>growth of

the autobiographical self (personal identity)

MIND is where we access our unconscious and make conscious effort, in part, to:

store data

revive memories

solve problems

analyze

make decisions (the executive functions of our left brain)

The core self is the background knowledge that we are humans and not some other being or thing. The autobiographical self, where we perceive ourselves to be individuals and where we become the subjects of our own lives in relationship to others and were we exercise the power of a personal narrative, is the evolving self based on the contexts of our lives and which we can access through memoirs, journaling, companionship (self and other in dialogue), the arts, and therapy. It is often a combination of actions that assist us in transitioning to compassion and an appreciation of ourselves as whole beings.

SPIRIT is where we source innate wisdom and explore anything other than body and mind. It is where we develop lifelong meanings in core values, personal interests, and religious or spiritual traditions as well as deep emotional ties to other individuals and our communities. The life of the spirit is also where creativity is nourished and shared. Because it is part of the axis, we open to it when we open to compassion. Once again, the inquiry that brings us to an awareness of self and to compassion also makes us aware of the existence of others.

What is the work of renewal? What nurtures the wholeness axis?

Acknowledging change, especially the evolution and growth of the “self”

Acknowledging the context of one's unique life

Choosing vulnerability, loosening one's hold on the myth of omnicompetence

Choosing self-trust

Choosing curiosity

Choosing to participate in an inner dialogue of “self talk” and the practice of inquiry

Choosing to do an experiment, enacting compassion

Choosing community, practicing “I don't know” and asking for help.

Acknowledging and choosing lead to positive and prosocial experiences that include:

becoming inquisitive without falling into a stalled narrative of rumination,

slowing down mental activity, leading to a pause and the state of responsivity (vs. reactivity),

to support parasympathetic nervous system activity,

reestablishing “self” as subject, to thwart disconnection of parts of the wholeness axis,

reinforcing curiosity and choice,

encouraging relationships and community,

moving from pure mental processing (up to empathy) to a transition to compassionate action

in the resilient zone,

disrupting the burdensome myth of omnicompetence,

disrupting the feeling of guilt that often accompanies actions we feel are forced on us in a

state of reactivity.

It is my belief that anything we can imagine is possible and everything is useful.

I believe that everyone has the resources required to make a daily journey of wholeness.

I believe we can make appropriate choices to be:

vulnerable

self-trusting

curious

in dialogue

in community.

I believe it is possible in most situations to ask oneself clarifying questions, that the process of inquiry supports the wholeness axis.

I believe that acting compassionately leads us to experiments in living that lead to openness and personal growth, acknowledging that failure is part of the process of experimentation.

I believe in the fundamental truth of compassionate action towards self and other as the path of healing in the daily journey.

This colloquy on self ends by pointing to what care of self looks like. We will explore this theme in the next class.

11-12-18

WWGD? (What would Gandhi do?)

GANDHI

I briefly profiled Gandhi's life in South Africa in the weekly letter to the kids. I thought some details of his life there might hold some helpful clues to how we might face the difficult times we are living right now. I don't think the leadership of South Africa in the early 1900s is anything like Trump's administration. I don't think there is anything to compare to this, really. Still, there were some of the same social fault lines of prejudice, racism, oppression of religious and ethnic groups, and efforts made to eliminate the “other” from the society by deportation or forced mass migration. The numbers of Indians were small at the time compared to what we now see in the caravan of humanity making its way from Central America, through Mexico, to the US border, a threat Trump claims is fueled by ISIS or the Taliban or Democrats—whichever group he wants to target on any given day. Of course, this is to instill fear and hatred in the minds of those susceptible to them. There are a surprisingly large number of those people these days. The population of South Africa was small at the time but had its entrenched hierarchy of the haves and the have-nots. Of course, economics and moneyed interests were also in play as well as those who wanted a purer white society. The Indians and Chinese were hard workers and were willing to do the hard jobs of labor in order to move up in society. They were a threat to the white people economically as well as a threat to their preconceived ideas about a “pure” society, meaning a society without people of color.

The book by Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India, is based on a context of contemporary reports and writings of the time, giving it a detailed flavor of the forces amassed against Gandhi in his efforts to bring equal opportunity and dignity to the colored communities. One of the things about his methodology and accounting for many of the pages of the long book was his incremental approach to his social justice work, his discipline, and, especially, his satyagraha, or love force enacted as nonviolent resistance. Often, this meant spending months or years in jail for many of the adherents. He had to actively resist calls for more dramatic and violent efforts to disrupt the social resistance, something we see in our own society today with the violent shootings of schools, night clubs, malls, and other public places. We see them as punctuations of what also seems like a current of fear, resentment, and hatred directed at individuals or groups in society with whom the perpetrators have some grievance. They are dramatic and horrific in their outcomes but do not seem to make change, for or against, appear more likely. There are those who want to connect them with the violent stands Trump himself has taken on these issues of migration and immigration with movement of federal troops, building gigantic walls at territorial borders, and winking at private citizens to defend themselves against these poor and starving migrants.

It seemed a tactic doomed to fail for Gandhi but he worked at it and eventually drew thousands to his efforts, including members of his own family. The complexities of his personality were also manifest in his relations with his wife and sons and his social actions reflected his personal biases and those he imposed on them. He was disciplined and often self-flagellating. He adopted vegetarianism and other health-related practices and declared his celibacy soon after the birth of his last child. He attempted to impose similar practices on his followers at his Tolstoy Farm, the site where he developed a small community of people willing to sacrifice for his cause of nonviolence. He imposed such practices on his family as well, rebuking one son who rebelled.

If one can borrow from history, then perhaps there is something in nonviolence that might be applicable to our social crises today. I don't know how it would work or if it would work at all. I think the people who followed Gandhi were impoverished in so many ways and willing to make sacrifices, even of their own lives. I don't know that we have that level of material and spiritual poverty in our lives to convince people of the efficacy of nonviolent actions. Even with the yawning gaps in economic advantage/disadvantage, it is not clear that people would see that as a reason to join a nonviolent movement. Perhaps the economic issue is too nebulous. In Gandhi's time, it was an edict for mandatory registration of foreigners and the levy of a registration tax on everyone that coalesced the forces that eventually made nonviolence a real tool against a repressive regime. There was much back and forth between South Africa and England. The Indians in South Africa were after all British citizens, as was the entire country of India. That never seemed to convince or dissuade the South African administration and so Gandhi had to use other techniques to bring about change.

I think the most impressive thing about the changes that were made was the persistent work necessary to move institutional injustice to a point of accommodation in the least terms and abolishment in the most. It took years and Gandhi was there for 20 years. It is clear from our experiences with Trump that wreckage can occur over a very short time frame and reconstruction of the old or construction of something newer and better will take a very long time. But it is also apparent to me that as Gandhi changed South African policies, he was also changed. So I think about Bruno Latour and his “actor-network” theory of contingent social change and its relevance to science, but also to broader landscapes of human behavior. It will take a much deeper and more committed investigation to discern the factors that need to be considered in the changes occurring in our society (and culture, too) today. It is complex but can't be understood without some broad and deep thinking about the forces at work and the actors involved in them. It is clear to me that we won't be returning to anything that we once thought was stable in our ideas of governance and institutional structures. The ground has been disturbed and we will need to find ways to cultivate stronger institutions and a more humane approach to the needs of all citizens, just as the Founders did several hundred years ago when they were faced with lacing together a social fabric from mere threads.

Much of the initial work of construction has to do with changing the framework of expectations and knowledge in order to create something more stable and long-lasting than what we presently see in our government. Being led by a lunatic like Trump (my use of the term “lunatic” is a diagnosis of serious mental illness and isn't a judgment of personality) isn't the way to enlist the best thinkers in these efforts. He is random, narcissistic, and vindictive, serving his own interests and the interests of his plutocrat family members and friends. We are seeing signs of the corruption that run deep within the government and are challenged to meet them where they surface. Gandhi met every turn and twist of South African efforts to deny him and his followers any equal treatment and that was the secret of his incrementalism. We don't have that same instinct now with Trump. I think most are still befuddled about what can be done and are blinded by his random outrages. But it is just this daily vile behavior that calls for daily responses based on a moral code that incorporates the ethics and virtues that most of us believe have made America the country it is. How those are expressed will change with time and different actors on the stage. But without a moral code we will be adrift for a long time.

So, I relate our present difficulties to those Gandhi faced many years ago but whose moral code and nonviolent tactics we could adopt for starters today in our efforts to construct a more just and compassionate social fabric. We have the capacity and the history, but do we have the intention and will? Change is difficult and transformation is even more elusive. But it can't happen without communities participating and without a revised vocabulary that renews courage and discipline, values Gandhi knew and of which he can remind us once again. We have a duty to all citizens to work for greater freedom and equality.

It is also important to point out that most of anyone's life is composed of thousands and thousands of incremental moments. Yes, we are physiologically constructed to react to threats and trauma, but over time (and in an evolutionary perspective) those events are fewer and farther separated from daily experience. When there is something catastrophic headlined in the media, we tend to activate those same instincts our early upright ancestors had and we translate the isolated catastrophe into a trend or current of occurrence when, in fact, they are dramatic single points on a graph and have only thin connections to anything we can imagine. They, too, are contingent upon many other factors singular to the event and the actors involved but it is hard to discern their connections to what we have come to expect from 21^st century human behavior.

Gandhi's challenge was to demonstrate sufficiently his own moral code and how it translated into social activism of nonviolence. He was noted for leading the way in nonviolent demonstrations and the consequences that led to jail. He didn't expect anyone to sacrifice what he wasn't willing to sacrifice. Perhaps this says something about the universal aspect of human aspirations for freedom and dignity that transcend political, religious, and cultural boundaries. He was joined in his efforts by other people of color as well as adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Do we have the same conviction of common cause with people now considered “other” in our society? Have we lost some of the vocabulary that can energize citizens of all persuasions to join together to make real the blessings of democracy and freedom? Can the words of past times be revived? Can we borrow from those who spoke forcefully in times of greater spiritual awareness? Can we explore the words of America's founding fathers to see how concerns about fair governance can be backed by religion, spirituality, and faith? If those backings were the contingent forces propelling politicians and statesmen in distant times to construct what they saw as a fair and just superstructure of government, then could we use some of those same contingencies to work changes in the reconstruction of what has been damaged over the past two years? Can we learn from history and its actors? Can we make use of ideas that have universal applications? What would Gandhi do today? Would anyone pay any attention to him?

11-5-18

What Bruno Latour Has To Tell Us

No one will read this. I am too far under the radar to count in the blizzard of voices and words. I am too old to be adding my foolish ideas to a web of entanglements. The wizards of politics are hoping to capture the 18 to 29 year old demographic because they are such lazy voters. Yet, here I am, adding my voice and words to the blizzard, as if I had not heard that seniors were supposed to be hitting the couches and watching TV. As I look back on the few blog posts I have on this site from two years ago, it was just at election time that I took up the keyboard to write. It seems even more important today that I do the same thing, on the cusp of another "crucial" election in our long history of them. I am not certain I agree with the pundits that this is an election that will change everything. It seems to me that history writes that sort of story and we only know where we have been by looking back. I think it is safe to say that something will change as a result of the voting tomorrow. This brings me to reflect a bit on what little I know of the work of the philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, whose work was briefly outlined in a recent article.

What I think I understand Bruno to be saying is that causes and conditions are always at work in the lives of human beings. What results from them at any given moment or period in history depends on the context in which they occurred. It depends on the relationships among all the parts in play. We get accustomed to thinking that what has happened was destined to happen and was always so. Latour is focused on science and the scientific establishment and so he has some plaudits and some criticisms to hand out, as one might expect from a philosopher who is called to look at all causes and conditions. He believes that once science uncovers one of nature's secrets, it becomes a fixed entity in our minds and attached to the scientist involved. It is as if the scientist had invented the unlocked secret. In fact, says Latour, what the scientist has unlocked is the next piece of a puzzle that seems to have no end. There is nothing fixed about the data point reported in a scientific journal. The scientific evidence is the momentary piece in a complex web of what he calls an "actor-network" process of discovery. In a rather unfortunate choice of a term, he refers to this as the result of a "social" matrix. Of course, in these times of hard-edged and  politicized language, connecting something scientific with something social plays to the far conservative agenda that denies climate change, opposes vaccinations, and claims scientific facts as malleable and adjustable and perhaps false efforts to fool the public. Latour defends his position by saying that the "robust architecture" of his investigations will withstand any effort to dismantle the science itself.

I am not smart enough to wade into the intricacies of political thinking and manipulations, but there is something about Latour's approach that is appealing to me. As I have gotten older, I have become more aware of how complex the world is and how daunting that can be. But if one takes Latour's approach to understanding how the world works, then emphasizing process over product makes sense and makes the work of understanding anything very hard. We aren't used to thinking deeply about the world and asking all the questions that would help us in our understanding. It is my contention that how we think about the world might change what we think. If we are willing to entertain the idea that the issues and objects of our thoughts are the results of a very long and intricately woven narrative, then we might give up some of our prejudices and biases, our fixed ideas about what the world should be. We might then appreciate how contingent all of our thoughts and actions are. For instance, instead of being convinced that a straggling and starving band of immigrants headed for the Mexican-US border are terrorists, we might look more closely at the circumstances they are escaping in their native country and that might lead us to wonder about their poverty, their own fears for their children, their desire for freedom, and what they are willing to sacrifice to find safety and the fulfillment of basic needs. Are they wearing shoes that fit? Where do they find food and water? How are they able to carry small children on their backs for so many hundreds of miles? Where do they go to the bathroom along the way? Do they sleep? Do they have dreams of a better future and is this what drives them onward?

The basic instincts that I think most of us have about freedom, equal chances, hopes for the future, the dignity of every individual, have been politicized almost beyond recognition and picked apart to suit one side of the partisan divide or the other. It is takes hard work and more of an open heart and mind to understand how refugees and all who suffer resemble us more than they differ. I think Bruno Latour's process of discernment asks us to give up ownership of the easy answers and the group-think that pervade our society today. We are challenged to turn away from the demagogue and his rhetoric, bombast, and outrages in order to reclaim our own souls and to integrate what we think we know with what we can understand more deeply by exercising love and compassion for others. In this way we are able to offer ourselves the love and compassion that unite us.