My 10 month old granddaughter Natalie reached for a beaded necklace sitting on a low table where I sit to meditate. The necklace looks like it comes from another time. It was given to me by a friend. it came originally as a gift from an old woman at a buddhist site in India who took it off her neck and placed it into the hands of a stranger. Natalie was intrigued by the turquoise stone at the base of the necklace and so I put it over my head so she could reach it as she lay upon my chest. Somehow the beads connected the old and the young, the past and the present.
As I lay playing with Natalie in my arms, I flashed back to a time 15 years earlier when I did a solo 7 day walk around a cluster of prominent mountains in the borderlands between China and Tibet. The three sacred peaks of Yading were each named for a Buddhist bodhisattva: Strength, Wisdom and Compassion. In Tibetan lore bodhisattva’s are enlightened beings who choose to return and serve humanity. My sense is that with Al disruption, geopolitical events and worsening climate destabilization we are going to need a lot of strength, wisdom, and compassion in the days ahead to stay in touch with each other and with what is precious.
At its heart, compassion is our capacity to be with suffering, that of others and our own. We experience suffering when we encounter difficulty that we have trouble staying present to. Back pain that will not go away or marital issues that feel intractable. Those who are paying attention will notice that suffering and difficulty are part of the world around us. Part of the curriculum. The Disney “happy ever after” storyline sells tickets at the box office, but does not accurately describe reality. Evolution is not a unidirectional story of ascension and greater comforts. Species evolve is they adapt and respond to constraints and challenges. Those that don’t adapt disappear.
While we modern peoples are well practiced at “doing our own thing”, as human beings the superpower that led to our colonization of almost ecological nice on the planet is coordination with others through language, emotion, and belief. Collaborative skills learned over aeons in small bands of hunter gathers. Yet when we are unable to steady ourselves in the face of difficulty, lacking supportive others, we shutdown, isolate and tend to look for simple solutions. In therapy the supportive presence of an attuned other offers a nervous system anchor that allows clients to touch past and present difficulty in ways that open to greater self- compassion, acceptance and new learning. Instead of pushing suffering away, we can touch it, and in so doing mysteriously loosen its grip. Something strengthens in us and change becomes possible.
In times of uncertainty, being with difficulty, gathering our strength and wisdom requires that we open up our connection to the non-cognitive intelligence of the body brain. Something ancient ancestors took for granted. Awareness of the breath, our grounded-ness through feet on the earth, our interconnectedness to each other and Nature. When we steady ourselves in these ways, we are no longer as “triggered”, overwhelmed or shutdown, and we source a new resilience. We can then reach out and band together, join in the task of building something of a healthier future for little ones like Natalie. A culture that cares for people and the living Earth. In this way as we learn to be with things that are uncomfortable, without the need to push them away, we become more available to each other and open to what is happening around us and more responsive to change.
