Content Warning: War Trauma
This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning!
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Crystals Have Power (Season Two, Episode Eight).
Mentioned in this episode: for the second time on this pod, this poem (that has been so grounding for my spiritually traumatized nervous system) adore from Rumi.
The method of this sit is modeled after Shinzen Young’s “See, Hear, Feel,” so if you respond well to it, feel free to dig deeper on your own!
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 4:25)
Welcome back, sweet friend. It’s good to be with you. It’s hard to know what to do these days, “I’m still figuring out my biz.” But spending time enjoying a cartoon and taking a moment to settle into our body-minds feels like a pretty good place to be.
We can easily get bombarded by memories of the past, mistakes we make, or feel we make, in the present, and aspirations of some better version of ourselves in the future. And it’s not that we should have no desires about how we might change, or dreams for how we might create a more peaceful world, but when we get too attached to them, when we get too controlling, things can get pretty bamboozled, and we can become inattentive to the world that’s actually right in front of us.
This episode is a challenging one for me to reflect on because I am seriously committed to non-violence as a person. And many of the wisdom traditions that meditation has descended through are also really committed to it.
But there are times when the world exceeds our ideas about it. There are times when people in front of us are experiencing real violence and need immediate help. There are times when what we need is less self-control, not more. And those are challenging times, both to experience and make sense of.
I’m reminded of a friend who lived for many years in a place afflicted by a war. They were profoundly impacted by the many traumatic experiences they had as a result of those years (not least of which was a sharp awareness and critique of the military industrial complex and global war machine), but one of those was a piece of insight that really shook me: “nonviolence is a privilege.” They said it so matter of factly. That when faced with the loss of those people and creatures and things you love most dearly, nonviolence isn’t always a viable option.
That reflection has stayed with me for many years. It continues to trouble me. Partly because I cannot (and earnestly hope never to) understand in an embodied way the experiences that it came from. And partly because, while I do not believe they were wrong, and I pass no judgment on this wisdom whatsoever, I also think that when we find ourselves in need of violence, we must commit ourselves to find a way back to peace. Over and over again. There may be moments when violence is required, but there are countless more where violence is chosen when it is not required.
This whole, dizzying notion reminds me of a (line from a) poem by Rumi, a 13th-century Islamic scholar, faqih, and mystic:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other.Doesn’t make any sense.
While we may find comfort in the idea that “evil” justifies the harm we enact, it is also important for us to recognize that “evil” too often becomes synonymous with “different,” “uncomfortable,” and “unfamiliar.” The frames of judgment and knowledge we use to make sense of the world are always limited, partial, and incomplete. And so it is good to be slow to react.
And yet, at the same time, there are moments we must trust our perspective of the world and act as ethically as we can. Sometimes that happens through “controlled conversation” or by “hatching a controlled plan.” Other times, it means going with our gut, breaking a promise we made to ourselves, and honoring the mysterious space between our ideas about the world, and our actual experience of it.
And hopefully meditation is a space we can practice that a little bit. To soften the edges and “snuggle through time and space. And kiss each other on an alternate dimensional plane.”
Or ya know, at least find a little bit more equanimity in our experience.
Let’s see what happens.
