The scale of our tools needs to match the scale of the challenge of the moment.
In March I wasn’t meditating as much as I had in the past. I was practicing basically every day, and integrating practice more and more thoroughly into daily life, but my formal sits were shorter than usual. My baseline levels of peace, fulfillment, and ease were still increasing tangibly. I felt sort of embarrassed that I wasn’t practicing more, but it seemed to be working well enough, so I stuck with it.
The scale of my practice matched the scale of my super busy but largely peaceful life.
Then came the pandemic. I read news of it creeping towards my home city day by day.
I watched crazy impactful simulations of the spread and impact of the virus, and it really friggin hit me how many people were probably going to die. Grief. Horror. Helplessness. Fear. Urgency. These feelings came, and they came big and jumbled. Reading about the US federal government’s abhorrent handling of life and death decisions day after day added rage and fury to the mix. I felt saturated — too full — with thoughts of what’s going to happen and what needs to be done and what can I do to fix it, and all all all the feels.
The moment far outpaced the scale of my practice.
At the end of March I sat a virtual retreat with Shinzen. By chance it intercepted this crescendo of inner and outer activation. Suddenly I was sitting 10 times as much as I had been before. And wouldn’t you know it, the overwhelming cacophony of thoughts and feelings became a flow of force and source. I still felt clear that I need to be active in providing care and transforming systems in this country. Only now, instead of feeling dwarfed and bowled over by the scale of the problem and my mind-body-system’s reactions to it, I felt empowered by the energy of this activation rushing through the body and inspiration running through the mind.
I scaled up my practice to match the moment, and this empowered me to meet it with equanimity and action.
If you’re doing the same things to care for yourself that you were doing six weeks ago and it feels like it isn’t cutting it, don’t be surprised. It isn’t you. Those tools are now caring for you in the face of a way bigger challenge.
There are two pieces to this equation: 1) The scale of your tools/practices, and 2) the scale of the challenge.
Sometimes decreasing the level of the challenge can bring things into balance. Maybe I check Twitter two times a day instead of ten. Maybe I don’t go to the grocery store when I’m feeling most raw because (at least in NYC) it’s friggin anxiety inducing. Maybe I give myself some intentional breaks from thinking about this whole pandemic thing at all.
But sometimes I can’t decrease the intensity of the challenge. And sometimes I don’t want to.
I have to walk my dog, and every time I do I am confronted by the alternatingly eerily desolate or frighteningly crowded streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood, both reminders that leaving the confines of my home no longer feels as safe as it used to. And it’s important to me to read the news so I know what’s going on and where I can focus my actions to be most useful.
So I need to scale up my tools — the practices I engage in to care for myself and metabolize emotion.
For me this looks like:
Increasing my daily meditation practice time
Doing some periodic longer sits
Being even more intentional about practicing a meditation technique during my day-to-day activities
Dancing and moving my body more
Talking with friends and partner about my feels and their feels and just plain fun stuff
Connecting with nature (shout out the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for your videos)
Really listening to my body about how many hours it’s okay to work in a day (when this is possible; and this one is not possible for everyone)
Staying engaged in the work/projects/actions that make me feel connected to purpose and life force
Learning about and trying new actions that help me feel (and I hope be) effective and empowered to create the change I think is so important for this country and world
Give yourself enthusiastic permission to take more time to engage in the practices that care for you and bring you into balance.
If the current demands of your responsibilities don’t allow you much time to devote exclusively to care, remember that meditation practice can happen in the background while you’re taking care of business, or in tiny bursts between tasks.
Focus on the moment-to-moment sensory experience of the sights and sounds and emotions of being with your children. Repeat some caring phrases towards yourself while you take care of physical tasks.
Difficult feelings will still come. And with enough engagement with meditation and care, they can increasingly be allowed to arise and pass in their own natural wavelengths, and leave you feeling more and more connected to a sense of common humanity and empowered for effective action.