As devotees to the truth of things, as those on a path of compassion and awakening, it seems to me that the tragedies and intensities in the Middle East are bringing us to new territory. Although the path of practice is the same – from discontent to inner peace – the sensitivity and strength required to stay on track is an ongoing process of learning new ways of connecting and being. This learning is critical and we are on a steep learning curve. Yet as the poet Auden wrote at the outbreak of World War II: “We must love one another or die.”
It is a time when emotional maturity is ever more essential. Emotional maturity is multifaceted, but one aspect is the capacity to recognize that no one holds the entire truth or knows exactly what will alleviate the tremendous suffering we know is happening in our one body of being human on this one earth we share. It isn’t easy to respond to one’s own emotional life by resolving to stay steady within one’s body and to take responsibility for one’s powerful emotions instead of blaming others. Yet we must.
There seems to be a worldly imperative these days to have to have the “right” opinion. Another approach is to bring awareness to confusion and drop into the heart and the body. This is the practice of wise restraint, patience, and humility.
We know that the roots of the current situation go back countless years and that the actions taken today will affect the future. In the absence of wise action, hearts will harden even more, and more unwise actions will take place. The cycle of suffering will not end without each one of us vowing to meet what is with awareness and love. The foundation upon which wise action rests is the willingness to connect rather than disconnect.
It seems to me that our current guiding lights need be the merging of compassion and equanimity. The Buddha defined compassion as a trembling of the heart. It is the willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others instead of retreating into self-righteousness, no matter how righteous the cause. How does transformation really happen? It doesn’t happen through force, violence, superiority, or even reason. It happens through recognizing trauma and responding to that trauma with compassion and wisdom, especially taking responsibility for one’s own trauma. As practitioners, sitting with dukkha is where deep and lasting empowerment can be found.
If compassion is the willingness to let our hearts tremble instead of freezing, equanimity is the growing capacity to stay steady. In poems the Therigatha (Verses of the Elder Nuns in the time of the Buddha) speak to the cultivation of an unshakable heart amid a world that is shaking. Bringing compassion and equanimity together, we remember these intentions: May we look after ourselves with ease, May we look after our dear ones with ease, May we look after this world with ease and spaciousness, steadiness and inner balance of being. May it be so.