Many of us are feeling called to service in this time, as we read about the pain caused by this pandemic and experience it firsthand in our own lives. One of the sometimes-unintended effects of meditation tends to be an increase in compassion — a capacity to hold and face into pain with love, and a genuine desire to care for pain. Recently, this compassion has sometimes felt overwhelming. There is so much pain in the world right now. I have at times felt dwarfed by its magnitude. At other times I have felt powerless in the face of the large and powerful systems that are failing to provide adequate care in relation to this pain. I have watched with horror and rage as the federal government of the United States uses its vast power and reach heedlessly. In the face of this monstrosity, I began to think, “How impotent my meditation practice is; how inconsequential the actions of this one human.”
I had a mental image of every death, every mourner, all of us who have lost someone or something we held dear to this virus (in other words, all of us) emanating a dark smoke of pain. A great mass of suffering hung like a low fog, covering our nation and world. I realized that if our society is going to recover from this — emotionally and economically — we will need to metabolize this suffering. And I recognized that every ounce of that pain that I can participate in ameliorating, whether my own or others’, will be a service to the collective — will support the resilience and wellbeing of our entire nation and world by reducing this great mass of suffering. This helped restore a sense of meaning to all levels of service for me.
I imagined a schematic of all the different scales on which I can help to ameliorate pain, and sometimes even provide care that prevents additional pain from arising at all, with benefit flowing freely from one level to another.
I saw how care at each level supported the others. And I did some writing to map out how I can personally be useful at each level, given my individual networks and strengths. I highly recommend doing this writing for yourself. I have since felt so empowered to let go of the places where I do not have pathways to effect change, and to take up action where I do.
Here is what I came to on how I can conceptualize and be useful on each scale of service:
Personal: My meditation practice, reaching out to friends for support, singing with my husband, moving my body, allowing whatever emotions arise to flow through with as deep permission as possible, relishing the fresh blooms of spring, these are all acts of deep service. My own wellbeing is a worthy end in itself; and by caring for it I open availability in myself to offer care to all other levels of engagement.
Close Friends + Family: Staying connected with my closest friends and family and showing up for them as such as I have the capacity for. Showing up for the Zoom call for my nephew’s birthday and the Zoom Passover seder are not just acts of sharing love with the individuals I get to spend time with. They are part of maintaining the holding environment and bolster to our resilience that are community and ritual. We are all nodes, with threads emanating from ourselves to one another. If we each keep sending love and care down the threads that radiate from us, we will collectively be caught by this loving net — our society fortified by our bonds of love.
Institutions + Communities: I made a list of all the groups and institutions I am part of — all the networks through which I can reach others. These are the pathways to which I have access to scale my impact. When I take action in any other dimension, I can think about how I can organize and share it with others in these networks, and ideally even to show them how they can take action and organize others in their networks to do the same. By activating these networks, service can be mirrored and multiplied exponentially. These are also the lines along which I share what I love to create — for me, teaching meditation and writing.
This is also where I think about those who will not be caught by the net of person-to-person care, and what needs can be met by institutions but not by individuals. This is where I think about which organizations to donate to and volunteer with.
Government: I believe that one of the most impactful things we can do for the wellbeing of all in the United States, with rippling impact to the entire world, is to bring about a reality in which compassion and power reside in the same people. We actually have an incredible capacity to influence this in the United States. For me, right now, this looks like: Calling my representatives to advocate for vote-by-mail so we can all vote safely, and voter turnout is not suppressed by reasonable fear of the virus; supporting efforts to end gerrymandering so all people’s votes are counted fairly; writing letters and other efforts to get out the vote; organizing others to do the same; and of course, voting myself.
And so we put one foot in front of the other — guided by compassion, sometimes also feeling great grief and fear and rage, sometimes great joy and connection — to dissolve the great mass of pain hanging in our midst. One mindful moment at a time; one birthday call at a time; one act of organizing at a time.