Vibe Check

 

04.08.2022 VIBE CHECK If you’ve been doomscrolling as much as I have been lately, maybe you’ve come across this recent Buzzfeed article, “What You’re Feeling Isn’t A Vibe Shift. It’s Permanent Change.” In it, Elamin Abdelmahmoud details the tumult we’ve all experienced in the past two years, concluding that the “normal life” we imagined we would be returning to after the pandemic probably won’t happen. We’ve undergone a massive change, writes Abdelmahmoud, and “grief has become the air itself. We are simultaneously grieving the former sturdiness of friendships, old relationships to government, and the familiar rules that governed the world.” That phrase of Abdelmahmoud’s — “permanent change” — keeps rolling around in my head. From one angle, it means that we’ve been thrust into a new era by social unrest, the pandemic and warfare. From different angle, it seems yet another way of stating one of the fundamental tenets of Buddhism: “All conditioned things are impermanent.” Things are always changing and if we can learn to accept this truth, it would go a long way in ameliorating the grief we’re all feeling. Here are three articles to help you work with grief and weather difficult change. “I feel so fortunate to be alive now,” states Buddhist thinker and environmental activist Joanna Macy in an interview I continue to turn to for solace. “People might think I’m crazy, but just speaking personally, it’s an incredible thing to be alive with my fellow humans at a time when the future looks so bleak. Right now we can be here to honor life. It’s a precious thing to be giving thanks for what we have instead of insisting it must last forever. Well, it’s not lasting forever. Can we still be grateful?” —Ross Nervig, Assistant Editor, Lion’s Roar

The Wisdom in Dark Emotions Grief, fear and despair are part of the human condition. Each of these emotions is useful, says psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, if we know how to listen to them. Emotions like grief, fear and despair are as much a part of the human condition as love, awe and joy. They are our natural and inevitable responses to existence, so long as loss, vulnerability and violence come with the territory of being human. These are the dark emotions, but by dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome or pathological. I mean that as a culture we have kept these emotions in the dark — shameful, secret and unseen.

Ask the Teachers: How can the dharma help us work through grief? Breeshia Wade, Tenku Ruff, and Damchö Diana Finnegan share how the dharma can help us work through grief. Part of that is accepting the impermanence of all beings (and all things, including situations). In doing so, we are invited into an intimate relationship with grief—not just grief as past, concrete loss, but grief as fear of loss, a particular type of loss tied to the present and the future. Many people avoid engaging their grief as it relates to impermanence because it touches on their relationship to power, control, boundaries, self-image, and more.

Joanna Macy on the Great Awakening the Planet Needs Lion’s Roar editor-in-chief Melvin McLeod talks to renowned Buddhist thinker and environmental activist Joanna Macy about the global awakening the planet needs — while we still have time. At heart, it’s a spiritual revolution. Melvin McLeod: You say we are in a culture that ‘deadens the heart and mind,’ which it does by encouraging us not to acknowledge our suffering and pain. To what extent does fully connecting with life depend on opening our hearts and minds to the reality of suffering, both our own and others? Joanna Macy: That’s how the Buddha began. The first noble truth is suffering. The first noble truth is suffering. But the truth of suffering seems almost subversive within the American dream of affluence. It seems almost unpatriotic to confess anxieties about this country or our life.

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