Dharma, Embodiment, and Waking Up Early

Is there some kind of physiological effect to rising early that helps one hew to the dharma? It seems to be a theme of monastic life across the different Buddhist traditions. I also note that a retreat I’m going to be attending this fall has the day starting at around 5:00 am.

I recently listened to the podcast of Krista Tippett’s conversation with Richard Davidson, the neuroscientist studying Buddhism at the University of Wisconsin (what I actually listened to was the unedited conversation between the two, which the site also makes available in addition to the polished final podcast). The conversation at one point turned to embodiment, and Davidson noted that things like facial expressions and posture can affect a person’s thoughts and emotions. I wonder, can early rising have a similar effect? Does it vary by person? Thoughts?

The Middle Way as “Medium Chill”

This is a very thoughtful post this week on Grist by David Roberts.

Roberts writes about a way of thinking about life he calls the “medium chill.” It’s an internal attitude, he writes, that can help sustain a happy and peaceful life. At the start of his post, he pivots off a Mother Jones piece about external, structural factors that have made the U.S. economy an increasingly stressful place to make a living. This, he said, got him thinking about the inner side of things as well:

But it reminded me I’ve been meaning to write something about the other side, the internal forces impelling us to work harder and harder. We are being driven, but we are also driving ourselves. Finding saner, happier, more sustainable lives will involve addressing both sides of the equation.

Roberts then discusses some economics and psychology research, focusing on the concept of satisficing: choosing to be happy with a thing, rather than seeking to accumulate more of that thing. He writes:

Whatever policy or technological advances we may see in coming decades, some part of getting to sustainability is going to be voluntarily living with less space and stuff. We’re going to have to scale down our material expectations and get off the aspirational treadmill. So how can we do that? How can we make satisficing a respected choice, even a source of status itself? How can we make it okay to prioritize social connections over money and choice hoarding?

He offers two concluding thoughts after these questions:

Good questions! I sure wish more people were thinking and talking about it. This post is already way too long, but I’ll conclude with two tentative thoughts about the answers.

First, we won’t get there through shame and guilt. We won’t get there by morally bullying people into giving up stuff they love. People will only downscale materially if they are also upscaling in social connections and positive experiences. So rather than focusing on the former, let’s focus on the latter. We have all sorts of infrastructure and institutions available for people who want to learn how to get a better job or make more money. But we have lamentably little for people who want to know how to foster more and better relationships, how to find meaning and a sense of accomplishment.

Second, if you’re going to de-emphasize the material in favor of the social, you’re going to be talking about places. If we want people to own and consume less privately, we need to provision safe, accessible, pleasant public spaces and resources. But you probably knew I’d say that.

Anyway, that’s the medium chill. I’d love to hear your thoughts and, best of all, your stories about what the medium chill looks like in your life.

Roberts’ post really got me thinking. I think that Buddhism has been a place where people have been working out answers to these questions for a while now, with some very interesting and useful results. For me, Buddhism has been a helpful way of addressing these issues in my own life. Mathieu Ricard in particular has written about how mind training can help build one’s capacities for compassion and happiness  (see his lovely podcast with Krista Tippett on this).

I think the point about place is also a very interesting one. I think the issue of “safe, accessible, pleasant public spaces” is really important to highlight, and one I haven’t personally paid enough attention to. I think Roberts makes a good point that the nature of the public spaces in our communities can have an impact on the moral and political life of our communities.

In closing, I’d like to note that Buddhism offers what is to me a compelling narrative of the “medium chill,” through the concept of the “middle way.” As Wikipedia explains:

The Middle Way or Middle Path (Pali: majjhimā paṭipadā; Sanskrit: madhyamā-pratipad; )^[1] is the descriptive term that Siddhartha Gautama used to describe the character of the path he discovered that led to liberation. It was coined in the very first teaching that he delivered after his enlightenment.^[2] In this sutta – known in English as The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dharma – the Buddha describes the middle way as a path of moderation between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification. This, according to him, was the path of wisdom. The middle path does not mean a mid point in a straight line joining two extremes represented by points. The Middle Way is a dynamic teaching as shown by the traditional story that the Buddha realized the meaning of the Middle Way when he sat by a river and heard a lute player in a passing boat and understood that the lute string must be tuned neither too tight nor too loose to produce a harmonious sound.

I really like the image of the lute string.

Matthieu Ricard’s NYT article: “The Future Doesn’t Hurt – Yet”

Dealing with climate change is often broken down into mitigation and adaptation.

Mostly, this is discussed in terms of energy and infrastructure.

I think in Ricard’s piece there is a powerful case that working on  our culture and personal inner state is also a form of mitigation and adaptation with respect to climate change. The ideas that we hold dear have effects on the world:

My life has definitely become more hectic, but I have also discovered over the years that trying to transform oneself to better transform the world brings lasting fulfillment and, above all, the irreplaceable boon of altruism and compassion…

Unchecked consumerism operates on the premise that others are only instruments to be used and that the environment is a commodity. This attitude fosters unhappiness, selfishness and contempt upon other living beings and upon our environment. People are rarely motivated to change on behalf of something for their future and that of the next generation. They imagine, “Well, we’ll deal with that when it comes.” They resist the idea of giving up what they enjoy just for the sake of avoiding disastrous long-term effects. The future doesn’t hurt — yet.

An altruistic society is one in which we do not care only for ourselves and our close relatives, but for the quality of life of all present members of society, while being mindfully concerned as well by the fate of coming generations.

In particular, we need to make significant progress concerning the way we treat animals, as objects of consumption and industrial products, not as living beings who strive for well-being and want to avoid suffering. Every year, more than 150 billion land animals are killed in the world for human consumption, as well as some 1.5 trillion sea animals. In rich countries, 99 percent of these land animals are raised and killed in industrial farms and live only a fraction of their life expectancy. In addition, according to United Nations and FAO reports on climate change, livestock production is responsible for a greater proportion of emissions (18 percent) of greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector. One solution may be to eat less meat!

As the Dalai Lama has often pointed out, interdependence is a central Buddhist idea that leads to a profound understanding of the nature of reality and to an awareness of global responsibility. Since all beings are interrelated and all, without exception, want to avoid suffering and achieve happiness, this understanding becomes the basis for altruism and compassion. This in turn naturally leads to the attitude and practice of nonviolence toward human beings and animals — and toward the environment.

from self-care to community-care

Very insightful essay on changing the paradigm from self-care to community-care.  h/t brownstargirl.

We need to move the self-care conversation into community care. We need to move the conversation from individual to collective. From independent to interdependent.

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home- alone- and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that “self-care” to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break; where we are continually reminded of our own trauma or exposed and absorb secondary PTSD, and where we then feel guilty or punished for leaving work early the night before to take a bubble bath.

Self-care, as it is framed now, leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing. Isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch in the belt of Oppression. A liberatory care practice is one in which we move beyond self-care into caring for each other.

You shouldn’t have to do this alone.

Why are we seeking Care?

There is a growing rumble of yearning for healing in our movement work. Oppression and trauma do influence our well-being. On-going generational trauma and violence affect our communities, our bodies, our hearts, minds and spirits. Racism, sexism, classism, eats at our very beings. This leads us to seek care. We know this. Our bodies know this. Our friends can read it in our faces even if we have learned to ignore it.

We put our bodies on the line everyday- because we care so deeply about our work- hunger strikes, long marches, long days at the computer or long days organizing on a street corner or a public bus or a congregation. Skip a meal, keep working. Don’t sleep, keep working. Our communities are still suffering, so I must keep going. We risk and test our bodies to go further and we stretch our hearts or close our hearts to keep going- whatever it takes- and ultimately what it takes is a toll on us. This leads us to seek care.

We want to deny it- but abelism still shapes our movement work- “go hard or go home”. In the the Needs Assessment by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, they state, “Changemakers are dying as a result of spiritual and physical deprivation from trauma, stress and unrest in our movements.”

We are burning out faster and at higher rates- unable to do the work we love. How can we win when our bodies individually and collectively can’t keep up? We are risking not just burn-out, but organizer loss and movement fragmentation. We cannot afford this…

Organizations for Liberation

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Dr. King (Letter from a Birmingham Jail)

As our conversation develops from the limited idea of self-care to the expansive reality of community care we are able to honor the depth of Healing Justice work and the depths of ourselves. We need to switch our thinking- individually and organizationally- to including well-being in our work for justice. Because when we are able to do that- that means we are cognizant of Dr. King’s “network of mutuality.” Because when we do that we will truly be working towards a liberatory and visionary new world.

So go on and call me when you are ready to do some real work.

greetings planet

This site is just starting off, I’m hoping more will be up soon. I put down some thoughts about what this site might do on the About page, which I reproduce here for convenient reading.

Basically, the phrase “free software buddhism” expresses my approach to Buddhism. I see it sort of like free software – a set of practices to build and protect freedom that thrives on sharing and collaboration.

This site is just really starting off (summer 2011), but I want to try to discuss things like self-care, community-care, mutual aid, compassion, grace, resilience, Buddhism, organizing, radical and progressive politics, software freedom, managing large amounts of information, focus, and mindfulness.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas that I want to put together and see what comes out, maybe something useful.

The site is called “practice notes,” because what will be here will be notes from my own practice, so I guess it will pretty much stay a work in progress.