Buddhism Bits I

I hope you enjoy this - my first article for SG (Spiritualgab).


“Superman Buddha, Force Within” by Elisa Insua.


At the end of January, one of my close spiritual friends died. A queer Black man, a Sufi imam “scholartivist” (scholar–artist–activist) and professor of ministry students, Baba Ibrahim Farajajé died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-three, and I’m guessing he had been carrying too much. It was only six months earlier that Baba and I had sat together on a stage in downtown Oakland, California, under a large hand-painted banner that read #BlackLivesMatter. A brilliant, transgressive bodhisattva, Baba had been targeted for multiple forms of oppression throughout his life and had not been silent about it. When he died, I was sad and angry. I took to staying up all night, chanting and meditating; during my daytime work, I was exhausted.


How many of us who have taken the bodhisattva vow are on a similar path toward burnout? Is it possible for us, as disciples of the Buddha, to engage with systemic change, grow and deepen our spiritual practice, and, if we’re laypeople, also care for our families? How can we do all of this without collapsing? In my world, there always seems to be way too much to do, along with too much suffering and societal corruption and not enough spaces of deep rest and regeneration.


When I get desperate, which is pretty often, I ask myself how to not be overwhelmed by despair or cynicism. For my own sake, for my family, and for my sangha, I need to vow to not burn out. And I ask others to vow similarly so they’ll be around when I need them for support. In fact, I’ve formulated a “Great Vow for Mindful Activists”:


Aware of suffering and injustice, I, _________, am working to create a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. I promise, for the benefit of all, to practice self-care, mindfulness, healing, and joy. I vow to not burn out.


It’s the first thing I give to students in my yearlong program of secular mindfulness for social justice activists. I ask them to sign and date it, because each of them, through their work as community leaders and agents of change, is a precious resource.

The cosmic bodhisattvas like Sadaparibhuta and Avalokitesvara and the rest of the gang don’t burn out. Maybe they have big muscles from continuously rowing suffering beings to the farther shore. They are willing to take abuse while demonstrating unfailing respect and love toward sentient beings. When something bad happens, they immediately absorb the blame. They vow to return, lifetime after lifetime, until the great work is fully accomplished, and until that probably distant time they remain upbeat, serene, and self-sacrificing.


I love this section from the poem “Bodhisattva Vows” by Albert Saijo:

 

… YOU’RE SPENDING ALL

YOUR TIME & ENERGY GETTING OTHER PEOPLE

OFF THE SINKING SHIP INTO LIFEBOATS BOUND

GAILY FOR NIRVANA WHILE THERE YOU ARE

SINKING – & OF COURSE YOU HAD TO GO & GIVE

YOUR LIFEJACKET AWAY – SO NOW LET US BE

CHEERFUL AS WE SINK – OUR SPIRIT EVER

BUOYANT AS WE SINK

 

This poem never fails to give me a refreshing laugh; the archetype of bodhisattva activity it presents resonates with my early Buddhist training. But I have changed. In the social justice activist circles I travel in, giving your lifejacket away and going down with the sinking ship is now understood as a well-intentioned but mistaken old-school gesture—right now, the sinking ship is our entire planet, and there are no lifeboats. As the people with disabilities in my sangha have said, in order to practice universal access there needs to be a radical shift toward an embodied practice of “All of us or none of us.” In other words, no one can be left behind on the sinking ship, not even those who want to self-martyr. Why? Because self-martyrdom is bad role modeling. Burnout and self-sacrifice, the paradigm of the lone hero who takes nothing for herself and gives everything to others, injure all of us who are trying to bring the dharma into everyday lay life through communities of transformative well-being, where the exchange of self for other is re-envisioned as the care of self in service to the community. The longer we live, the healthier we are; the happier we feel, the more we can gain the experience and wisdom needed to contribute toward a collective reimagining of relationships, education, work, and play.

Here in Oakland, I don’t think it’s melodramatic or inaccurate to say that we now live in the midst of multiple ongoing crises. Thich Nhat Hanh has said that the future Buddha, Maitreya, may be a community, not an individual. Perhaps your community, like mine, is in need of inventive ways to carve out spaces for what some are now calling “radical rest.”

I advocate for more forgiving and spacious schedules of spiritual practice that value being well-rested and that move toward honoring the body–mind’s need for enough sleep and downtime. Social justice activist Angela Davis, in an interview in YES! Magazine, says:

I think our notions of what counts as radical have changed over time. Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension—all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles. That wasn’t the case before. And I think that now we’re thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the social world. Even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence in their relations with other people.

Healing. Rest. Self-care. Restorative justice. Restorative yoga. Trauma-informed dynamic mindfulness. Compassion. Love. Community healing. These are words I hear every day within spiritual activist forums, from “scholartivists” and from people embodying the bodhisattva vow to save all beings.

We need a path of radical transformation, and there’s no question in my mind that the bodhisattva path is it.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fellow organizers sometimes planned protests to occur at around eleven in the morning, because then the people who were arrested would get lunch in jail and wouldn’t have to wait many hours to eat. For those of you who may feel that social-change work isn’t your thing, or that it’s too big to take on, it may help you, as it helped me, to know that it often comes down to these little details. Every movement is made of real people, and every action is broken down into separate tasks. This is work we need to do and can do together.

How can you make your life sustainable—physically, emotionally, financially, intellectually, spiritually? Are you helping create communities rooted in values of sustainability, including environmental and cultural sustainability? Do you feel that you have enough time and space to take in thoughts and images and experiences of things that are joyful and nourishing? What are your resources when you feel isolated or powerless?

Samsara is burning down all of our houses. We need a path of radical transformation, and there’s no question in my mind that the bodhisattva path is it. Speaking as a mother and a woman of color, I think we’re all going to need to be braver than some of us have been prepared to be. But brave in a sustainable way—remaining with our children, our families, and our communities. We need to build this new “woke” way of living together—how it functions, handles conflict, makes decisions, eats and loves, grieves and plays. And we can’t do that by burning out.

About Mushim Patricia Ikeda

Mushim Ikeda is a social activist and teacher at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. She also works as a diversity and inclusion consultant.

I just started listening to this video ^^^ and thus far, I like this guy.  (I have so much to learn.)

I did watch the Christian street healer, and it is striking what happens.  I also feel rather skeptical that those healings are what they appear to be (some sort of miracle but not ruling that out).  I think people's psychology 'makes' them feel as though they've been healed perhaps (as far as I know, there were no follow-up videos to see if the healings held).  I had to wonder if the aches and pains that were healed returned later. 

Our Teachers Are Not Gods

by Rob Preece| July 20, 2017 


Longtime practitioner and psychotherapist Rob Preece says even though as students we may be devoted to our teachers, we can’t afford to idealize them anymore.

In 1973, I found myself seated before a colorful brocaded throne in a meditation hall in a small Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Kathmandu, Nepal. I was among a large group of young Westerners waiting with some excitement for a Tibetan lama to enter. The atmosphere was electric with anticipation. After a few minutes there was a whisper: “Lama’s here.” We all stood up, and most people bowed respectfully as a relatively young man entered the room, made prostrations, and rose to the throne. When he began to speak, I found myself immediately enthralled by his presence and playful humor. This man was to become an essential focus of my spiritual life from that point onward. He became my guru.

Like many Westerners at the time, I was somewhat lost spiritually and very wounded emotionally. I would have given almost anything to find someone to guide me and give me a sense of meaning and direction. I believed and trusted that this Tibetan lama would do so. I also really wanted to be seen, so that I might have a sense of affirmation about my value and my nature. Part of this relationship to my guru was therefore a huge emotional investment. I became devoted in a way that was akin to falling in love and had a very idealistic view of how special he was. I recall sitting with other students, talking in a kind of romantic haze about all the qualities we felt he embodied.

When I apply a Jungian psychological view to this relationship, I can see that at its heart was a massive projection. That isn’t to say the lama was not extraordinary, but that extraordinariness was the hook for my projection. Jung saw that what we are unconscious of in ourselves, we tend to project onto someone else. In the case of someone who becomes our guru, we project an image of our “higher Self” onto a person who can act as a carrier of that unconscious quality. When this begins to happen, it is as though we become enthralled or beguiled by this projection. In the case of the projection of the Self onto a teacher, we give away something very powerful in our nature and will then often surrender our own volition in order to be guided.

More problematic in this experience was that, like many of my peers, what I had projected was not just the “inner guru”; I had also imbued him with a quality of the ideal parent I dearly needed. In doing so, I gave away other significant aspects of my power: my own volition and my own authority and discriminating wisdom.

Looking back, I can see that I had a lot of growing up to do. My desire to idealize the external teacher was actually supported by teachings I received on guru devotion, which said explicitly that we should try to see the guru as the Buddha and that he (or occasionally she) was essentially perfect. My idealism not only blinded me to my teacher’s human fallibility but was also reinforced by the teachings. I was even given the message that to see flaws in the guru, or to criticize him, would lead to dreadful suffering. In retrospect, I see how I was tied into a belief system that acted as a powerful snare using very skillful rationale.

The danger with indiscriminate idealized devotion to the teacher is that we are trusting that he or she will hold a place of complete integrity and will have no personal agendas. I feel fortunate that with most of my own teachers, this has actually been the case. But what happens when we start to discover that the teacher is human, with issues, flaws, and needs? Do we just dismiss this as our own delusion or his crazy wisdom, since he is after all Buddha?

In the forty years that I have been involved in the Buddhist world, it has become very clear that while there are some extraordinary teachers with great integrity, they are seldom if ever flawless. They may have extraordinary depths of insight, but they also make mistakes and sometimes behave badly. As a psychotherapist, I would go further and even suggest that a few of them actually have significant psychological problems. It is possible for a teacher to have deep insights but also struggle with the stability of their personal identity in the world. The exalted, almost divine status of certain teachers such as incarnate lamas, and the way they’re brought up, can cause them to become self-centered or narcissistic. Occasionally this can lead to bullying and even cruel and abusive behavior with students. It does not then serve any of us to simply ignore this behavior or to go into a kind of naive denial that says, “It is my obscuration; the teacher is perfect.”

This dynamic can lead to a kind of masochistic intoxication with a teacher’s abusive behavior, with the devotee justifying it as something that is all part of his or her path. I am sometimes shocked when I hear students describe how the critical, bullying way in which they are treated is a necessary part of the destruction of the ego. So often this reflects the narcissism of the teacher rather than some kind of enlightened skillful means.

The Dalai Lama wrote in his book The Path to Enlightenment:

The problem with the practice of seeing everything the guru does as perfect is that it very easily turns to poison for both the guru and the disciple. Therefore, whenever I teach this practice, I always advocate that the tradition of “every action seen as perfect” not be stressed. Should the guru manifest un-dharmic qualities or give teachings contradicting dharma, the instruction on seeing the spiritual master as perfect must give way to reason and dharma wisdom. I could think to myself, “They all see me as a Buddha, and therefore will accept anything I tell them.” Too much faith and imputed purity of perception can quite easily turn things rotten.

Sadly, unquestioning devotion toward teachers has indeed sometimes turned things rotten. While we can hope the majority of Eastern and Western teachers are genuine in their integrity, there are a few who do not behave skillfully, and their students are extremely vulnerable to being abused and taken advantage of. It is therefore necessary for us to wake up and not be beguiled by charismatic teachers and our own need to idealize. In our devotion to a teacher we can have a strong sense of respect, appreciation, and indeed love, but not in a way that blinds us to their human fallibility. We need to retain our sense of discernment that recognizes and faces when things are not acceptable or beneficial. If this means a level of disillusionment, then so be it. At least we will end up with a more realistic and genuine relationship. To quote the Dalai Lama again, “Too much deference actually spoils the guru.”

Possibly the most critical issue that arises in relationship to the teacher is the potential loss of appropriate boundaries. For a relationship between a teacher and student to be healthy psychologically and emotionally, ethical boundaries must be clear. I have seen in my work as a therapist and mentor that students who have encountered a teacher’s confused or loose boundaries suffer greatly. And because there is a taboo against criticizing the teacher, students may then find they have no one within their community to speak to about it. They may also find that their community does not really want to know. In the end, the very heart of the student’s spirituality has been betrayed.

Our teachers need to hold clear boundaries around their emotional and physical behavior so that it does not become harmful to students. In some case, Eastern teachers may not fully understand what this means in the West. Boundaries were often implicit in the world in which they lived, be it the monastery or Thai, Japanese, or Tibetan culture. Once they move to the West, having clear boundaries is totally dependent upon their own integrity. Sadly, this integrity is sometimes lacking, and teachers—both Eastern and Western—can become a kind of law unto themselves, creating their own culture with boundaries that are arbitrary or absent. This culture can become like a dysfunctional family; a teacher becomes an all-powerful parent whose needs and wishes are paramount.

Who then can provide the safe and trusting environment within which students can practice and grow?

Over the years, it has been a privilege to be taught by some extraordinary Tibetan lamas and to practice what they have given me. They have been the holders of one of the most profound paths to wisdom that has ever existed. They have brought this to the West in the hope that we may benefit from their knowledge and find our own experience. However, I have also come to recognize that we must begin to grow up and take more responsibility for our role in the integration of Buddhism in the West. This includes taking more responsibility in our relationship to our teachers.

We may put our trust in teachers and express our devotion, but if things go wrong, then it is for us as students to take responsibility for how we respond. If our teachers make mistakes, it is up to us to address and even challenge them when necessary. If teachers do not maintain appropriate boundaries in their relationship to students, then it is for students to hold the ethical ground when teachers do not.

Our teachers need us as much as we need them. They need us to be honest, straight, and real with them, not blinded by a haze of deferential idealism. They can then be real people with their own challenges and difficulties but also with a great deal of wisdom to offer. If we can skillfully navigate this, then the Buddhist traditions have a chance to flourish in the West with integrity. We can offer respect and even devotion to our teachers but with a real capacity for discernment and personal responsibility.
 
About Rob Preece

Rob Preece is a psychotherapist and meditation teacher living in England. He is the author of The Wisdom of Imperfection (Snow Lion) and Feeling Wisdom (Shambhala).


Above article from Lion's Roar