If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks.
This past weekend, I did several things for the first time in 18 months. I stepped out of my normal routines. I donned a mask and moved back into the germ-filled world. And it had a profoundly healing effect on my mind's health.
If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks.
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July 10, 2014
I walked into my apartment, opened my laptop and the first story was there. Of a Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over the Ukraine. Images of a scarred landscape. Intense, manifest suffering. I got up, put on the kettle, sat down. Felt utter panic. Stood up. Put on the radio. After 30 minutes of radio, internet, and the shock in journalists voices, the tears came. Because this felt personal. As someone who grew up in Hong Kong, I flew with Malaysian Airlines to Europe countless times. That could have been my family. And a thought kept circling my mind: my people, my people, my people. The people of my world are hurting. I finally turned everything off. I saw a young woman yesterday, as I stood waiting for a bus in Portland, Maine. An art student giving out free hugs. A line on her placard read: “Love is unconquerable and constant.”
I was spending the morning putting up posters for our upcoming meditation workshop called 'Overcoming Anger'. The poster seemed specifically designed for this morning after the US Presidential Election of 2016. This past week, I have found solace in an 11th century poet's mind. The great Buddhist master Shantideva. As bombs have torn through people and lives, and as chaos has reigned in the region, the country, the world. The accents on the radio and TV are the same Bostonian accents of my sangha friends down in Massachusetts.
Our Buddhist center was meant to be running a workshop in Boston this weekend, in a church just one street over from where the bombs took place. That workshop, which would have been led by my teacher, Kelsang Pawo, was going to be all about the power of our minds, and how by training our concentration, we can overcome our inner demons - harness our minds to all our good qualities and learn to be of service to others. It's been a time where I've gone deep within, to find an answer, and it's brought me again and again to Shantideva. |
Peace BlogWhere I contemplate my meditation practice and how it aligns with daily life. Sometimes these take the form of poems. Categories
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