Saturday, May 30, 2020

Take Care of Yourself and Others


05.29.2020
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
AND OTHERS

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that a third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, according to Census Bureau data. “The findings,” they write, “suggest a huge jump from before the pandemic,” and “provide a real-time window into the country’s collective mental health after three months of fear, isolation, soaring unemployment and continuing uncertainty.” 

 

The numbers are worrisome. I’m sure said feelings of fear, isolation, and uncertainty are now intimately familiar to us all. Right now, people all over the world are lonely, restless, frustrated, and grieving. Many this week, too, are experiencing anger mixing with their grief, in response to the wrongful loss of life of George Floyd, a black man killed by police in Minneapolis, and so many others before him. If you’re feeling heavy-hearted, the world is with you. 

 

Recently on LionsRoar.com, four Buddhist chaplains shared their experiences working on the front lines of the pandemic. Each of them shared accounts of the fear, sadness, and loneliness they and the people they serve are feeling at this time. “It’s critical that we take care of ourselves so that we can take care of others,” Jamie Kimmel wrote, “I know that I could not do this work otherwise.”

 

And so, I offer you this small care package of Buddhist wisdom that invites you to take care of yourself so you can, by extension, take care of others. The teachers below each invite us to attend to the emotions we’re feeling, so we may use them as a catalyst for positive change and awakening — both personal and collective. 

 

—Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, LionsRoar.com

This Is the Buddha’s Love: An Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh

In this interview from 2006, the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about non-self, interdependence, and the love that expands until it has no limit.
Thich Nhat Hanh: We say, “I take refuge in sangha,” but sangha is made of individual practitioners. So you have to take care of yourself. Otherwise you don’t have much to contribute to the community because you do not have enough calm, peace, solidity, and freedom in your heart. That is why in order to build a community, you have to build yourself at the same time. The community is in you and you are in the community. You interpenetrate each other. That is why I emphasize sangha-building. That doesn’t mean that you neglect your own practice. It is by taking good care of your breath, of your body, of your feelings, that you can build a good community, you see.
 
 

We Can Do This!

As long as we don’t burn out and give up, we really can change the world. Mushim Patricia Ikeda on self-care for activists.

Ask yourself regularly, how alive do I feel? “We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive,” says Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in the New York Times science bestseller The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

In the current political mess, it almost always feels counterintuitive to slow down, to drop into the body, to connect quietly to something as seemingly obvious as the sensation of our weight pressing into a chair or the breath going in and out. But we need to begin establishing a sense of basic trust that being alive means that not everything is destroyed by despair. Impermanence means that things can improve, and we have agency. Limitation is real, but so is liberation.
 

 
 

Meditation: Be Kind to Yourself

Kristin Neff offers a three-step contemplation to give yourself the compassion you need (and deserve).

Speak these words to yourself, out loud or silently, in a warm and caring tone:

This is a moment of suffering.
Suffering is a part of life.
May I be kind to myself in this moment.
May I give myself the compassion I need.

 

 
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