Awakening from a Slumber ~ 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje

The only path forward is true solidarity —
not only in hope
but also in lamentation. 

John Green

If you possess one quality,
it would be as if you had all enlightened qualities in the very palm of your hand.

Which quality?
Great compassion.

– The Buddha’s Sutra on Avalokiteshvera’s Realization –  

I keep a satirical cartoon on my desktop that says if you stand in front of a mirror and say “chronic illness” three times, someone will appear behind you and tell you that you should try yoga.

Owing to the fact that yoga is central to what I do for a living, I am among the fortunate few not subjected to this particular kind of haunting. In fact, as a full-time yoga and meditation practitioner living with chronic illness, I am a poster child for the limits of what mind-body practice has to offer in terms of cure or panacea. 

I would like to openly address the broader social problem that this cartoon lampoons. It is a small snapshot of a massive cultural prejudice that disables our capacity for compassion, driven by unexamined ableism, compulsive fault-finding, and discomfort avoidance.

As a yoga therapist, I feel a moral obligation to confront ethically problematic behavior connected to the yoga and wellness world and to validate and give voice to the experiences of those harmed by it.

As a person living with chronic illness, I want to explain how certain seemingly well-intended behaviors can be incredibly harmful and how a better understanding of these issues can make us kinder human beings and agents of powerful social change. 

French geophysicist and Catholic altruist Xavier Le Pichon points out that our humanity is not a fully actualized power that we receive once and for all at conception. It is a potentiality that we are born with and that we either progressively develop or destroy each time we come into contact with suffering.

One does not presume to be a compassionate person. One commits and submits to its ongoing labor — a radical, challenging, messy, everyday, culture-defying, fierce and gentling practice; a lifelong learning process that demands ever-deepening relational awareness, social education, and genuine humility.

To sit at the feet of the guru of compassion is to face up to the many ways you habitually bypass it, to be stretched beyond the comfort zone of your self-conceit in order to have your heart be educated by others, to open your eyes to your own participation in cultural cycles of harm, and to commit to the slow, daunting, transformative work at the intersection of personal and collective liberation. 

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. 

 – Audre Lorde –

All of the world’s most beloved spiritual teachers emphasize that human salvation and liberation are contingent upon the realization of compassion. The Buddha, a uniquely observant and methodical explorer of the human psyche, pointed out that a central feature of this work is familiarizing ourselves with the enemies of compassion that live inside us.

The yoga tradition makes a keen distinction between what is called the “near enemy” and the “far enemy” of compassion. The far enemy is behaviors and mind states that are overtly oppositional to compassion, deliberate cruelty arising from indifference, self-interest, and vengeance-seeking. The objective is not to determine whether or not you have these traits but rather to acknowledge that you do, and to deepen your awareness and understanding of how and why they show up in you. 

The near enemy of compassion consists of more subtle mental states and behaviors that masquerade as positive, virtuous, and helpful but on closer inspection are self-centered, negative, and harmful. Near enemy mindsets and behaviors presume to come from a place of compassion but quietly distort and undermine it.

The near enemy of compassion in us generally gives off an air of judgmental critique, cursory pity, and an unwillingness to be present to pain and discomfort (one’s own and that of others). Its presence is made known when our capacity to care and to connect becomes hindered or hijacked by:

  • a sense of superiority (I’ve got it together and they don’t) or inferiority (they’ve got it together and I don’t)
  • a sense of immunity from what someone is going through (that would/will never happen to me)
  • presumptive judgments that size up someone or a situation in a patronizing, reductive way (if only they would just do this [xyz]; if only they hadn’t done this [xyz]; they brought this on themselves; they could be handling this better; they’re over-reacting; they wouldn’t be in this situation or could handle it better if they were more like me)
  • the compulsion to minimize, compare, and compete (you really can’t/shouldn’t complain; well if you think you’ve got it bad…; i got through it, so can you; they got through it, so can you)
  • the compulsion to counsel or advise the other person
  • the impulse to remediate or silence someone’s emotions and experience by bullying them into “positivity” and/or painting them as being “negative” or overwrought for expressing what is true for them 
  • trying to control people and circumstances to “fix” what is happening  
  • dread of being discomforted or inconvenienced by someone else’s suffering or your own
  • intense hyper-responsibility and/or disabling despair

Despite the use of the word “enemy,” the intention is not to vilify and shame ourselves for having these very common human responses. Compassion’s near enemies are disarmed and transformed by our maturing awareness of them. By observing their nature, by familiarizing ourselves with how and why they show up in us, they become less powerful and less palatable, and we find ourselves freed to explore fresh new mindful ways of being and caring and relating.

When we encounter suffering in ourselves, in others, and in the world, we enter into close proximity with fear, sadness, and vulnerability. All sorts of unpleasant realities get stirred up like mortality, impermanence, complexity, cruelty, heartbreak, and lack of control. The near enemies of compassion are a set of defensive strategies we use to try to circumvent contending with what is painful or unpleasant — a whole menu of options for steeling ourselves, looking down our noses, and sticking our heads in the sand, instead.

Near enemy tactics dodge what feels scary, messy, difficult, unknowable, overwhelming, and unpleasant about life. They help us to organize against anything that threatens our eagerness for comfort, security, predictability, control, and status quo. But the false sense of removal that these defensive strategies afford us ultimately leaves us walled off, our hearts inaccessible not just to others but to ourselves.

In building our capacity for compassion, we are learning how to be more fully present with our own pain while deepening our understanding of how that interfaces with being more fully present to the pain of others. 

In cultivating compassion, we draw from the wholeness of our experience — our suffering, our empathy, our terror, and our cruelty. 

– Pema Chodron –

The Buddha of Compassion, Avalokiteshvera (Sanskrit) “the one who hears the cries of the world,” is also known as the Bestower of Fearlessness. The courage to bear witness to suffering and to be in relationship with our fear and our grief is precisely what humbles us to open our hearts to the shared human condition and to the mystery and preciousness of all life.

What the near enemy of compassion in us seeks to resist — discomfort, sorrow, vulnerability, change, not-knowing — is actually alchemical grist for awakening and transformation in this world. Processing painful feelings and facing difficult and uncertain realities together is what forges our humanity, our creativity, our levity, and our intimacy.

Spiritual and political activist Dayna Lynn Nuckolls writes, “Americans are conditioned to believe that they should never have to feel negative feelings, which is why when something bad is happening they choose the path of least resistance, whether it’s pretending Covid isn’t dangerous or sending homeless people to camps or prisons to not have to see them. But if you can’t feel, then you can’t get free. Your emotional availability to yourself is a direct parallel to your capacity to be a compassionate presence for others and to participate in the transformation of the world.”

When Zen Master Kobun Chino Roshi was asked how he deals with fear, he replied, “I agree. I agree.”

When Zenshin Florence Kaplow describes her first several years coming to terms with developing ME/CFS after a bout of Mono in her mid-30’s that left her with debilitating spells of chronic pain, muscle weakness, and immobilizing exhaustion, she writes: “I’ve cried a lot of tears of self-pity in the last few years, and I wonder why self-pity is such a pejorative term. To feel pity for the person in pain—me—has been the first step toward really understanding that this is the human condition. It’s hard to hurt so much. Our tears mingle together, a big invisible river circling around the world. Through my tears of self-pity, I join everyone who cries.”

Western colonialists built their concept of fearlessness not on the courage to be in honest, caring relationship with what is in us and what is in the world but rather on the suppression and domination of what is in us and in the world. We have inherited a worldview that conflates strength with denying pain, fear, sadness, vulnerability, and limitation. One speeds right past them, one rises above them, one conquers and transcends them, one flattens out all of the discomforts and constraints of life into a nice, smooth ride.

It is precisely this kind of vacant, aggressive, egomaniacal hubris that we have indulged for centuries to perpetrate and justify the commodification and destruction of the natural world and the exploitation and degradation of less “civilized,” less “enlightened” peoples in service to the comfort, security, longevity, and prosperity of “more advanced” societies. 

In the colonialist paradigm, those who prove their extraordinary mettle are blessed, deserving of all the goodies both materially and spiritually, and righteous, sanctified to mete out the judgments and prescribe the remedies. It isn’t hard to draw a straight line from the 19th century religious and pseudoscientific elitism that gave us Manifest Destiny, master race theories, and Better Babies competitions to the 21st century new age spiritual elitism and health-and-destiny-manifesting pseudoscience that gives us human optimization, The Secret, and people who operate at “high vibrations.” 

Across generations, the colonialist worldview has fostered hierarchical and ableist paradigms that position those perceived as having superior traits at the top. Those who project a facade of transcendent equipoise and mastery over life are deeply admired. Meanwhile, we perpetuate cruel social stigmas around grieving, being ill, being overweight, being disabled, being impoverished, being homeless, being mentally ill, being incarcerated, experiencing depression, navigating the lifelong fallout of trauma, or contending with addiction.

It is in this paradigm that western yoga teachers display their credentials by using bio pics that either feature them with a sublime dental billboard smile or executing the most challenging physical asana (pose) possible as if the aim and zenith of spiritual practice is permanent, uncomplicated, anesthetized bliss and awe-inspiring physical prowess. 

Overbearing confidence, physical fitness, unwavering positivity, knowing what you want and willing it to happen, conquering all setbacks, surmounting all illness and injury, and “attracting” wealth and abundance are the admirable ideals of a life well lived in the conquerer’s paradigm.

But there is very little that is community-minded or compassion-centric about this self-promotional social framework where individuals take complete personal credit for their health and good fortune, where human worth and esteem is made into competitive sport, and where individuals are considered solely responsible for their conditions of life, health, and wealth without any regard for the role of biology or the role of community in human thriving, including the social and political implications of class and privilege, differing access to resources, differing access to social and familial systems of support, systemic and institutionalized discrimination and bias, intergenerational and personal trauma, and exposure to environmental pollution and toxicity — all disproportionately consequential due to the western supremacist paradigm and the pursuit of limitless abundance in a world of finite resources. 

Dr. Jocelyn Fitzgerald describes how in medical school she took an elective called “Stress” thinking she was going to learn about meditation and yoga. Instead, the professor spent six weeks demonstrating through evidence-based research how poverty, complex trauma, and political and social marginalization damages people’s health on a molecular level. She describes how she thinks about this every single day both as a doctor and as a human being.

The emphasis on self-improvement, in lieu of self-compassion and mutual aid, is a weapon that we aim as aggressively at ourselves as we do at others. “Perfectionism is internalized oppression,” Gloria Steinem points out. And so it goes that we are conditioned to be horribly preoccupied with evaluating, comparing, judging, analyzing, strategizing, measuring, and improving upon ourselves and our lives ad nauseam, ever hopeful that we will finally emerge victorious and impervious to the discomfort, disorder, incompleteness, and dissolution that life and nature require. Simply being human, for us, is deeply problematic.

Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche observes, “We often approach life as if there is something fundamentally wrong with us, so we need to defend ourselves from an attack or further reproach. In this regard, human relationship toward self and others is quite aggressive, competitive, isolating, and full of one-upmanship. 

We need to investigate whether it is beneficial to build ourselves up, which generally requires putting others down. Rather than reinforcing our ‘me-ness’ and justifying ourselves constantly, we could base our lives on something more powerful and trustworthy. If we develop real trust and love for ourselves as we are, constant self-defense is no longer required.

You don’t have to be an egomaniac to appreciate yourself, because egotism is actually based on self-hatred. You don’t have to artificially puff yourself up because basic dignity comes along with being gentle and kind with yourself. Rather than deceiving other people and, more importantly, deceiving yourself, you can just be as you are, which is more than good enough.”

In meditation, we do not seek to cease the function of thinking but rather to become more aware of it, to be less consumed by it, to understand its nature and so to be less subject to its obsessive and ruminative tendencies, to be less vulnerable to its delusional and destructive whims. Author Ray Bradbury once wrote, “Thinking is meant to be a tool that supports life, not the center of life. The center of life is supposed to be living, not thinking.” In that same spirit we should consider that judgment is a tool of discernment that is meant to protect life, not beat it into tidy submission. The center of life is meant to be loving, not judging.

The hyper-judgment of internalized domination culture fosters deep shame, comparison, competition, arrogance, preferencing, prejudice, separation, segregation, and alienation. It instills in us the delusion that imperfection, insecurity, ordinariness, illness, sadness, fear, limitation, struggle, and suffering are enemies of the ideal — aberrations — rather than normal, shared, inevitable parts of the human experience. Those who suffer in such a paradigm are made to feel othered — weak, flawed, unfortunate, pitiable, lost, diminished, tragic, burdensome, and relegated to the margins. 

Xavier Le Pichon argues: “The fragility of human life is what should define a culture. Fragility is the essence of being human — it is at the heart of our humanity. What we discover in true community where one lives and interacts with people who have deep suffering is that you yourself have your own fragility and you don’t have to be ashamed of it. Instead you have to accept it, you have to share it and say, ‘Look, I am like you.’ That is what frees us.

Communities that worship strength historically do not take into account the weak points of the community and the people who are living with difficulty and so they tend to be the societies that do not evolve. A humane society puts the most fragile at the center of the community and it is they who regulate the life of the society. 

The founding experience of humanity is discovering through empathy that you are one with the person who is suffering. Caring attention to tenderness and fragility in ourselves and in others is the essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve. Frailty and flaws are also essential elements in living geological systems. God is discovered only through the tender and fragile parts of us, which have the power to transform the world.”

We are conditioned by a society in which people with disabilities are among the most politically and socially disregarded and exiled. Where, until the last ordinance was struck down in 1974, it was illegal in many places for disabled people to be out in public because they were considered “disturbing.” Where, just last year, a popular mainstream photography company offered parents in Washington State the chance to buy a school photo that did not include the disabled children in the class. 

Where liberal mayors and governors across the country are jumping at the chance to enact conservative legislation that criminalizes homelessness — sending a homeless population that skews largely Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and People with Disabilities to prison. Where violence towards white bodies provokes much greater concern and outrage than violence towards black and brown bodies, both domestically and abroad.

Where it is common for women to be dismissed by physicians as well as friends and family members as being weak, negative, anxious, depressed, or pesky for reporting concerning health symptoms, delaying diagnosis and access to treatment for 2.5 to 4.5 years compared to men. Where being overweight or experiencing depression is considered laziness, weakness of character, and a personal failing. 

Our preoccupation with ascendancy, invulnerability, gratification, and exceptionality is indulged so insidiously in western culture that prejudice, eugenics, exploitation, and the wholesale destruction of the planet have simply become second nature for us, invisible enablers that in the most subliminal way feel justified, moral, necessary, and inevitable.

We have inherited a worldview that is incompatible with life and that thrives on hobbling our capacity for compassion. This is why developing a compassion-centric worldview is a radical proposition. This is why compassion practice is a culture-defying practice. This is why it is so critical that we deepen our understanding of what compassion truly asks of us.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals. 

– Pema Chodron –

Compassion facilitates a perception of sameness versus hierarchy and judgmental “othering.” I see howthey are like me; I see how I am like them.

Compassion enlightens us to interconnectivity and the realization of collective causality versus the delusion of individualism and isolated causality. My happiness is inseparable from the happiness of others. The suffering of others is inseparable from my own suffering.What happens to them also happens to me; what happens to me also happens to them. My choices impact their well-being; their choices impact my well-being. Human life is inseparable from the life of all beings and the delicate balance of the planet’s ecosystems. This is like this because that is like that.

Compassion facilitatesthe wisdom ofequanimity, facing what is, inhabiting continuous mindful awareness of the world within and around us (versus clinging, tightening, suppressing, and avoiding the reality of the world within us and around us). “To have no illusions and to still hold the inner flame,” as Marie-Louise von Frantz put it.

Compassion prioritizes resourcing joy, beauty, wonder, humor, play, rest, recovery, and renewal. Compassion recognizes that depletion and despair are forms of violence that smother our spirit and harm our body-minds. The compassion and attention we extend to others should be no different than the compassion and attention we extend to ourselves; both are inextricably linked.

Compassion facilitates caring regard for the well-being of all beings (including oneself) which necessitates accountability, healthy boundaries, and restorative justice. Compassion is not niceness, politeness, complacency, neutrality, toxically insistent positivity, or looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Compassion includes uncomfortable honesty, protective anger, conflict, confrontation, deep grief, and civil disobedience in response to harm. 

Compassion towards ourselves awakens us to our basic goodness and personal magnificence. It anchors us in kind, gentle self-dignity so that we feel less threatened or destabilized by being honest with ourselves or having others be honest with us about ways we are causing or perpetuating harm.Pema Chodron observes, “The most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves and to others is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

Compassion teaches us about how we are equals — all made up of the same ingredients — all wounded, all subject to suffering, illness, aging, sadness, fear, insecurity, anger, ignorance, greed, arrogance, hypocrisy, mistakes, failure, loss, hardship, and death. All capable of healing, awakening, and transformation — all worthy of beneficence, love, relief, care, patience, forgiveness, support, joy, dignity, and respectful consideration. 

A compassion-centric worldview embodies fearlessness not as suppression, repression, or domination but as courageous honesty, caring humility, and non-self-centric reverence that brings you not into the upper echelons of high vibrations and a perfect body mass index but into solidarity and onto shared ground with others. 

To “crip” something is to bend, compress, twist, subvert, and imbue the wisdom of disability into systems, institutions, and cultures. Ableism is baked into our society. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and physical labor to crip the world.

– Alice Wong –

The cartoon on my desktop vents the grief and frustration of people navigating life with chronic illness, a harrowing experience that is compounded by being made an easy target for the near enemies of compassion.

A study published in 2018 in the Journal of Health Psychology entitled “Suicidal Ideation in non-depressed individuals: the effects of a chronic, misunderstood illness,” identified risk factors for suicidal ideation in patients with ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) stemmingnot from depression but from significant roadblocks to treatment access, lack of disability assistance and support systems, and acute social isolation — all significantly attributable to cultural, medical, and social stigma.

The study observes that these findings align with similar studies specific to other chronic, disabling, and “invisible” illnesses. *An invisible illness is a health condition that is not easily visible or apparent to others but constitutes a challenging physical and/or neurological impairment that significantly limits one or more major life activities. 

What researchers identify among the most common contributing factors to suicidal ideation in this population reads like a near enemy of compassion bingo card:

  • “unsolicited advice,”
  • “blamed for illness,”
  • “illness makes others uncomfortable,”
  • “illness pathologized by physicians and loved ones as laziness, ennui, negative attitude, anxiety, or depression,” 
  • “illness complicated by the burden of self-advocacy — having to educate others who misunderstand, dismiss, and delegitimize the nature and severity of the illness including physicians, friends, significant others, and family members.”

Patients with positive mental health outcomes in the study reported “finding a knowledgable and supportive physician after years of shuffling through dismissive and ignorant doctors; access to financial resources and social safety nets; and supportive, validating, and compassionate loved ones.”

One patient reports: I was in a new age community and was judged for not getting well and was told that it was my fault. I must be ‘manifesting it’, they said, and who wants to be around that?

The study cites that participants “frequently encountered misunderstanding and downplaying of the severity of their illness when describing their experience and limitations in navigating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to others.” Common responses include — ‘Yeah…I’m tired, too,’ ‘Just wait till you get to be my age,’ or ‘I must have that too’ (while laughing).

The study goes on to describe how doctors lacking proper education on the disease make dangerous ableist recommendations such as “the need to exercise” or “push through fatigue and limitations” for a condition that can be made much more severe, long-lasting, and even deadly by such ill-informed advice.

The study observes how “friends and family often gave participants unsolicited and unwarranted advice that conveyed their lack of understanding of ME/CFS.” One patient remarks: By far the most common reaction in social situations is ‘Have you tried … [insert suggestion here]?’ and then if I say I don’t want to try it, or I have tried it and I didn’t get better, they look suspicious, or comment, ‘Well, if you don’t want to get better …’

Political scientist Dr. Jenn Jackson, who specializes in issues of race, gender, disability, and sexuality, expands on this subject: “Able-bodied people too often associate disability and chronic illness with personal failure, as if disabled people have done something wrong or as if we didn’t take care of ourselves and that’s why we are disabled. It’s harmful and further stigmatizes our experiences.

For people living with chronic illness, there often isn’t a one-shot solution to managing the symptoms. So when able-bodied people say things like “just get in shape and lose some weight” or “try this diet” or whatever unsolicited advice they decide to give, they’re really revealing that they blame us for our situation. Not only that, they associate fatness with sickness. That is so violent.

The message is that you are not trying hard enough, you are not putting in the work, you are not dealing with it as well as they would or as they have. But you can eat perfectly and have a positive mindset and still get worse or continue to feel bad. It’s not your fucking fault, and those who are well only think they can take the credit for it.

People with chronic mental and/or physical illness are usually doing everything they possibly can to feel better while realizing through this process that they have limited control over their illness. You can do everything ‘right’ and still get sick, still remain sick, still deteriorate. The sooner the general public understands this, the safer it will be for chronically ill people to navigate this world.” 

That disabled people can only succeed by overcoming disability is an ableist cliché. After five decades of interactions, I still don’t know how to rebuff their pity, how to tell them the simple truth that I am not broken. We take constraints that no one would choose and we build rich and satisfying lives within them.

– Eli Clare –

You should try yoga is the unsolicited advice featured in the cartoon on my desktop. Mind-body practice is well-documented as a highly supportive, often beneficial therapy for those living with chronic conditions. In some cases, mind-body practice can down-regulate or bring symptoms of chronic illness into remission. Yoga, however, is not universally relevant, accessible, or applicable to all situations and conditions, nor is yoga a cure-all.

An insidious notion embedded in western wellness culture presumes all physical and mental illness can be surmounted through a combination of mind-body practice, positive mental attitude, and lifestyle choices. This assertion betrays both a lack of understanding of how the human body works and a painfully superficial grasp of the rich history and sophisticated depths of the mind-body tradition.

Someone close to me once had to make the difficult choice to drop out of a yoga teacher training because the lead instructor claimed that all depression can be cured through dedicated meditation practice, betraying that both the training and the yoga community at large was not a safe, knowledgeable, or understanding space for people living with complex chronic health conditions.

While meditation, under the guidance of a skilled professional, can help to stabilize and improve mental health, research demonstrates that in some cases depression and other mental health issues can be exacerbated by meditation. I have read and benefited from powerful testimonials by long-time meditators with mental illness who, despite experiencing stigma in yoga and/or dharma communities, have found that medication combined with meditation practice is ultimately what best supports their long-term well-being.

“Skills not pills” is a catchy and well-meaning concept, but it is paramount that wellness practitioners understand and acknowledge there is no one-size-fits-all path to wellness. Those who experience improvement or complete remission of mental or physical health symptoms attributable to mind-body practice are right to celebrate and share their stories while also being mindful not to universalize their personal experience.

I myself have benefitted from the down-regulation and sometimes temporary or lasting remission of ongoing physical and psychological health challenges AND I have also experienced the clear limits of what mind-body practice can do for me when it comes to trying to ameliorate a chronic condition. There are plenty of instances in which skills and pills is what is needed and required for someone to thrive. Furthermore, sometimes the most profound skill set that mind-body practice has to offer is learning how to live with and care for what cannot be remedied.

Yoga practice engages mind-body tools that support the brain, body, and nervous system’s natural restorative capacities. Far beyond that, though, yoga aims to support each of us in navigating the physical, mental, and emotional suffering and discomfort in life that cannot be imminently relieved or remedied, even as it seeks to root out amplifying factors that may ease the presence of intractable suffering and discomfort. Yoga aims to nurture whatever measure of refuge and liberation may be available to us from moment to moment, whether we are well, temporarily unwell, chronically unwell, or terminally unwell and on our deathbed.

One of the greatest Zen masters of the 20th century, Shunryu Suzuki, used to joke about how practitioners believed the merit of his lifelong practice and enlightened wisdom made him impervious to colds, flu, and other illnesses. “How funny that he has been in bed so long!” he would jest.

He often referenced the following story of founding Zen master Baso Doitsu and his disciple Nangaku:

Baso was known for his strong and imposing physique. But one day, Baso fell ill. When his disciple asked him, “How are you feeling recently? Are you well or not?” Baso replied, “Nichimenbutsu Gachimenbutsu” / “Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha.“

Sun-faced Buddha lives for 1800 years. Moon-faced Buddha lives for one day and one night. When we are healthy, we are sun-faced Buddha; when we are unwell, we are moon-faced Buddha. Baso’s point is that there is no meaningful distinction — whether we are well or convalescing in bed, we remain Buddha.

Sun-faced Buddha or moon-faced Buddha, we take refuge in our fundamental capacity for awakening through compassionate awareness. That liberating force is what truly matters; it is what serves us and serves others limitlessly within the scope of whatever limitations life presents.

Bearing the unbearable is the deepest root of compassion in the world. When you bear what you think you cannot bear, who you think you are dies. You become compassion. You don’t HAVE compassion — you ARE compassion.

– Ram Dass –

Ultimately, the cartoon on my desktop illustrates the risky quagmire of unsolicited advice — the presumption that someone who is disclosing or reflecting on their personal experience (or simply existing in our proximity) needs or wants our counsel even though they haven’t asked for it.

Though the impulse generally arises out of a genuine desire to help, unsolicited advice stems from social conditioning that entitles us and pressures us to say something insightful, helpful, cheerful, and instructive in order to “remedy it.” This healer-savior mechanism subconsciously conflates vulnerability and variance with weakness and brokenness, and it enlists a subtle sense of self-aggrandizing judgment that underestimates the other person’s resourcefulness, personal agency, knowledge base, and lived experience in favor of our own. 

Actor and disability activist Michael J. Fox, who has lived with Parkinson’s Disease since his mid 20’s, remarks: “This message is so simple, yet it is easily forgotten: the people living with the condition are the experts.” 

Here we have an example of disabled wisdom — or whatauthor and disability activist Eli Clare calls disabled brilliance — because, arguably, in all cases when something personal is being shared, we would do well to recognize that the other person is the expert on their own condition. 

This is not to say that we should forevermore withhold all suggestions, advice, feedback, or counsel. Of course. Every one of us can recall countless times when we have benefitted from each other’s knowledge, expertise, insight, wisdom, experience, and feedback. But, it can also be a transformative experience for us to simply listen to each other, rather than to indulge the reflex to jump in and fill the space with what we think we know.

It is possible to slow down and quiet ourselves in a moment of sharing to simply connect, to sit with our own feelings and the other person’s feelings, without flexing the hyper-responsibility we have to try to course-correct the other person or steer the conversation. Advice-giving can shift us out of a place of listening, respecting, and learning from others. It can obstruct the simple magic of sharing our experience of life with each other. It makes us hostages of fixing and of being fixed. 

Unsolicited advice is discouraged in support groups of all kinds, and in many communities of faith, for good reason. When someone shares something personal and is met with unsolicited advice, the effect is often one of being silenced, patronized, and pressured to get with someone else’s program. Furthermore, the advice-giving impulse is in part an urge to shoo away discomfort and suffering — our own and the other person’s — when our task is to simply be present to it. 

A second noxious notion permeating western wellness culture is that forced positivity is superior to honesty and emotionality. When it comes to the yoga community, I have witnessed and been on the receiving end of some of the most mind-blowing cruelty imaginable in the name of keeping things “positive.” I have seen the dark side of “it’s all love and light.” It is Positive Psychology twisted into Suppression Psychology. It is “positivity” framed in a negative and harmful way.

Positive Psychology — strengthening neural networks in the brain associated with fundamental safety, ease, peace, connection, joy, hope, and gratitude is powerful, evidence-based practice that can deeply enrich our lives, teach us how to self-soothe, and support the natural healing processes of the body and the brain. “Antidote practices,” or nurturing the positive, are among the most profound equanimity practices in the yoga tradition, designed to help us balance and regulate our thoughts and emotions, not to censor, bypass, or suppress them.

Self-suppressive “positive thinking,” emotional repression, and conflict avoidance do not foster good health outcomes, nor do they promote tranquility. They do not confer immunity, nor do they constitute a cure for physical and mental illness. To the contrary, what history tells us is that feeling and expressing our full range of emotions is what propels humanity towards positive change (see the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the disability rights movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement, etc). What the research tells us is that feeling our full range of emotions is part of the bigger picture of tapping into positive psychology’s internal pharmacy. Venting and processing anger, fear, and grief activates our body and brain’s regenerative and recovery systems in the same way that tapping into “positive” emotions does. In fact, these two processes are deeply interconnected and inseparable.

Palliative care specialist and grief literacy advocate Stephen Jenkinson observes, “Gratitude is not how you solve being sad — it is not inhibiting. Gratitude is how you be sad. Grief is the natural way that love honors and praises what it misses. Grieving and loving are a shared skill set. Grief softens you in places where suppleness is the humane proposition — the capacity to bend without breaking, the capacity to entertain other possibilities besides your own, the capacity to be heartbroken in the presence of others. Being willing to be heartbroken together is how you can tell you’re in the presence of a couple of grown ups.”

Buddhist activist Joanna Macy writes, “Should you fear that with this pain your heart might break, remember that the heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it.”

Psychotherapist Francis Ward Weller writes, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”

And, finally, Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran beautifully writes:
Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

When someone is sharing and expressing emotion, they do not require pity or advice on how to feel better. Trying to control someone and their emotional response is the opposite of loving them and walking alongside them. What is needed is your understanding and camaraderie. We can completely free ourselves of the pressure to “say the right thing” or “say the helpful thing,” because these moments are not opportunities to practice speaking well but rather opportunities to practice listening well.

Xavier Le Pichon observes, “When you walk with the suffering of another person, your heart progressively gets educated by them. They teach you new ways of seeing and of being. We have to be educated by others. Our hearts cannot be educated by just our own experience — it comes out of relationship with others.

If we accept to be educated by others, to let the other explain to us what happens to them, how they feel — to allow yourself to be immersed in their world — then we begin to share something very deep. You will never be the person in front of you, but you will have entered into what we call communion, the capacity to share at a very deep level. That was the central teaching of Jesus. That is the essence of life.”

JENNE’S CLIFF NOTES ON HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD 📝  

  • I’m so sorry you’re going through this.
  • That sounds really hard.
  • I’m here for you.
  • I wish there was some way I could help. I want you to know how much I care about you and want relief for you.
  • Do you need help troubleshooting solutions, do you want my thoughts on this, or do you just need some company and emotional support right now?
  • I want to learn more about what this is like for you. Can you tell me more about your experience? Although, if that’s not something you have energy or time for right now, that’s okay. (I can do some reading about it on my own to educate myself and see if there are ways I can advocate for you and others who are affected by this).
  • I had this insight / I thought of this suggestion / that might help, but you can take it or leave it depending on whether or not it’s useful to you.
  • Here’s something that really helped me, although I realize that what has worked for me isn’t necessarily what will work for you / everyone.
  • Have you heard of this (article / treatment / study / book / advocacy organization / etc)? I just wanted to make sure it’s on your radar in case it might be of help to you.
  • I have this specific idea of how I want to offer my help and support you right now — would it be helpful for you if I did this [xyz helpful thing] for you?
  • I can see that you’re crying / sad / upset / angry / anxious and I want you to know that this is a safe space for you to feel everything you are feeling right now. I’ll just listen / hold your hand / hold you (whatever you need) and you can get everything you need to off your chest.
  • Please let me know what I can do to support you right now.
  • I’m here for you.

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