For the purposes of our discussion, we can assume that we’ve all made a choice to do the work we’re doing. It could follow, then, that we may be thankful for the opportunity and that we may experience being able to do the work as an honor. While it may seem like a reach to feel grateful while you fill out random paperwork or negotiate with belligerent public employees, one approach is to ask yourself, “What is the alternative to gratitude?”
Buddhist teachers remind us that there are abundant opportunities for gratitude in even the most mundane aspects of our lives. Thich Nhat Hanh, for example, provides a lesson in washing dishes. As he’s scrubbing, he reminds himself that he is grateful for the water, for the opportunity to eat, and for the food he consumed. He goes so far as to say,“Wash each dish as if you are washing the baby Buddha. Why not?”
If we were not raised to see life from this perspective, it can take considerable energy to shift our thinking. And yet if we don’t choose to feel honored by our work, the alternative is that we may end up on the road to feeling like someone owes us something, that we’re not getting what we’re entitled to, or that our work is persecuting us. And that is not a road that goes anywhere we want to go.
It is important, of course, to address the individual and institutional issues connected to our experience. Countless workers do indeed deserve many, many things they are not receiving, including decent wages, benefits, and a healthy work environment. Around the world, there are a multitude of underfunded, underresourced programs doing invisible, undervalued work. Organizations and movements often refuse to say no to taking on more, and then they pass on their overwhelming burden to individual workers and participants. This is where the Buddhist instruction to “wake up to the present moment” is invaluable. We must decide, sometimes multiple times a day, if we can continue to work with the immediate situation as it is, whether or not that situation simultaneously permits us to work for the larger systemic and social change that may one day alter our circumstances. Our integrity and values and ethics cannot be put on hold until we finally get everything we need to do this work. That day may never come.
While we’re not so naïve as to believe that injustice and unfairness in either the world or the workplace will instantly disappear, we must ask ourselves, can we bring light and wellness to our work and accomplish the specific tasks that our work requires? Or, in this situation, are they mutually exclusive? For many of us, a persistent feeling of avoidance—as opposed to gratitude—may be a clue that this balance is beyond our reach.
1. At both the beginning and end of your workday, take a distinct moment to think of one thing you are grateful for.
2. Every single day, think of one person you are grateful to and tell that person so. You can start with those close to you and slowly branch out to expressing your gratitude for all the “teachers” in your life.
3. Advocate for your workplace to create a forum where you and your colleagues can express gratitude to one another. This could be a facilitated time during staff meetings or it could be a bulletin board where employees can post anonymous thank-you notes. Take the lead in thanking others.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE FIFTH DIRECTION • A Daily Practice of Centering Ourselves
There are only so many ways to commit suicide when you’re 13 years old. Or so I thought. I’ve never been the most creative person, but what I lacked in innovative thinking, I made up for with time. I had so much time to think about how to end my life. It was the only way I could fall asleep at night during what turned out to be the last year of my mom’s life. Each night I’d go from She can’t die. She won’t die. There’s no way she’ll die. Please live. Please live. Please live. to If she does die, I cannot live. How will I kill myself? Daily, that was how I centered myself. Every night, that was how I fell asleep. In terms of preventing this catastrophe, it seemed only two things were possible: Either I would find the cure for cancer, or God would appear and intervene. While I would have done anything to cure cancer, my bets were on God appearing. I knew that others died of cancer. But not my mom. She was my whole world. Your whole world can’t just end one day, can it?
Three years from when she’d been diagnosed with cancer, and two years and nine months from when they said she’d most likely die, she did die. And my world, as I knew it, ended. Although I did not commit suicide, something bleak and incredibly life altering did happen. I lost all the trust and faith I had. Because the truth was, no matter how sick my mother had gotten, I had clung to my belief that the worst would not happen. I continued to trust. I stayed strong in my faith.
When she died, my trust and faith disappeared and I began to live exclusively in my head. My heart was uninhabitable, so I found refuge in my mind. I was endlessly vigilant. I focused my energy on controlling my surroundings. I managed my new reality by trying to will into existence a way to move through each day. I was entirely uncentered. For anyone who can relate to this, you know that substituting an external architecture for an internal sense of structure can be bulletproof for a time. But only for a time.
Nineteen years later, I would have an opportunity to realize that my faith and trust were not gone entirely, only buried—deep, deep down. Once again I found myself fervently repeating, Please live. Please live. Please live. This time I was pleading with my firstborn child, who was being pried from my womb by three sets of doctors’ hands. The labor had been 36 hours long. Having had the honor of watching several friends give birth by that point, I knew, intellectually, that anything can happen during labor and delivery. But that didn’t count for much in the face of that willful part of my being that had flourished since my mom’s death. It kept insisting that, of all things, I could deliver a baby on my own. This is perhaps one of women’s most ancient beliefs, and for me it was totally unconscious, but it was deeply held nonetheless. The hospital assistance was a nice touch, I thought, but there was no way I was going to be someone who actually needed it.
So on that night, sprawled under impossibly bright lights, numb from my chest down, listening as they cut me open, hearing them agree that “this baby is nowhere near coming out,” knowing they were trying to pull my child out of me, I had an epiphany. I could only survive this through faith and trust. Faith and trust. Faith and trust—where was I going to find them? For the last 19 years, I’d found all comfort by seeking things outside of myself. By trying to control things. Control and faith don’t coexist well, and control was not going to work here. I could not move. Even my tears were being wiped away by someone else—a saintly anesthesiologist. I couldn’t micromanage these people; I knew nothing about their craft. I could not think clearly, and what was there to think about? There was only one contribution I could make to this situation, and that was to keep my own heart beating. And so I went deep inside.
I focused on my breathing and going deeper, breathing and going deeper, until I arrived at some unfathomable place that contained what had been locked away for almost two decades: my sense that there was indeed something larger in which I might feel faith and trust. In those moments, which seemed to last an eternity, I remembered what it felt like to be centered. I was humbled; if my life and my baby’s life were to be saved, it would be by others, most of whom I didn’t know. I felt grateful; their voices sounded as if it would all be okay. I kept breathing. I had not been centered in humility, gratitude, and faith for a long, long time. I had been living in my head, and my heart had been asleep.
While my mother’s death and my baby’s birth were not experiences that lasted indefinitely, their legacy has. In those moments of becoming a mother, I was brought to my knees, and on some level, I have never gotten up. I can still micromanage and be controlling and live in fear with the best of them, and yet I was able to find a center again, something I thought I had lost with my mom. For me, being centered has come to mean being able to call up that place of humility, gratitude, and trust innumerable times each day. It is what guides any mindfulness I’m able to muster, and it’s where I retur
n when I am most challenged.
And this brings us, finally, to the fifth direction. The four directions ultimately lead to the fifth. This direction leads us inside to our core, where we center ourselves, and then, gracefully, leads us back out, renewed in a way that allows us to engage with the outside world at our best. The frequency with which we choose to come home to ourselves and then go out again will vary for everyone. It is my hope that the four directions will aid you in having more and more and more access to the fifth direction—your most awakened self. Many of us are familiar with living in our heads, depending on our intellect, and developing enough external architecture to function and get by. But if we are to truly care for ourselves in a sustainable way, let alone anyone else—if we are to thrive — then something greater is required of us. We must discover an awareness of what allows us to live, moment by moment, from a centered place, from an awakened heart.
Throughout history, sages have said that the means to find our truths are already in our possession. We are all capable of creating a daily practice to center ourselves. Eventually, this may allow us to reconnect with the parts of ourselves that feel wise, resourceful, and even divine. A practice may occupy two minutes or two hours, but the hope is that this is something to which you can commit. Your practice will change over time, but what is important is that you prioritize this communion with yourself enough that you come home to yourself daily, if not several times a day.
As almost all of us know, this is easier said than done. Even when we base our practice around something we might find joyful, like singing or riding our bikes, we are likely to resist the commitment. A doctor in a First Nations health services clinic echoed what many of us might say as we describe our attempts to follow through with any piece of a daily practice: “I’ve done yoga for years. I mean, I haven’t done it for a long time. Well, I do it in my head.”When challenged as to why he hadn’t made it to the gym in months, a community-activist friend of mine said,“I like the idea of running.”
“We’re encouraging people to become involved in their own rescue.”
From my perspective, a practice is not just a healthy option; it is our best hope of creating a truly sustainable life for ourselves. The more often we remind ourselves of this, the more likely we are to discover the discipline we need. Of course, there will be times when our commitment will falter. As our practice deepens, however, we are likely to improve our skills at rebalancing ourselves when we stumble.
As you begin, I would like to suggest two simple techniques that can serve as the first steps toward practice—or even serve as a practice in themselves. The first is to create an intention for your day, and the second is to begin to cultivate moments of mindfulness. Both can be done in a matter of seconds, require no physical exertion, and don’t cost a thing. It takes less work to do them than to come up with the excuses to avoid them.
We can stop and create an intention for any aspect of our lives. As a boy, Deepak Chopra watched the practitioners who regularly rose before dawn to gather for daily meditations. In The Book of Secrets, he explains that by greeting the sun upon its arrival, the meditators believed they could influence the day. Every morning, they expressed an intention for meeting their purpose that day. For us, too, creating an intention is like allowing sunlight to flood the next few steps in front of us.
We could say: I will notice one thing to find joy in today. I will go to the gym. I will refrain from gossiping. I will move just a little bit slower today. I will smoke fewer cigarettes today than yesterday. A daily intention can focus on a mood or an action. Our goal may be small, but our spirit should be large. We don’t know where we will end up, and we certainly don’t know how we will get there, but by creating a deliberate intention about what we want for our next hour, next meeting, next interaction, or next day, we are participating in a powerful process of centering ourselves.
In starting with small intentions, we recognize the realities of our lives—how harried or overwhelmed we are, and how difficult it is to remain in the present moment. Even after years of practice, we may still have ways of being that take us far away from where we’d like to be. All my life, for example, I have been impatient. I suppose you could say my impatience feeds the fire that I bring to my life and work, and it has fueled my ability to keep on keeping on at times. But there’s been a cost—not only to myself internally, but also in relationships of all kinds in my life. I had my first profound glimpse into the depth of my impatience a few years ago when I had an epiphany about an unconscious belief. I had never imagined myself living past 44, the age my mother was when she died. When I connected the dots, I understood that I didn’t expect to be around for a long time, and so I was trying to cram an entire lifetime into a few years. I hurtled through my days and nights at a speed that kept me out of the present moment in fundamental ways.
In recent years, I’ve found a new set of teachers to educate me about this aspect of my character—my children. As they’ve grown, no longer able to be directed in the way that was possible when they were younger, the number of times I find myself screaming about this or that has increased exponentially. I’m usually yelling because something is not happening fast enough or in the way I want it to be happening. Instead of coming into the present moment and trying to solve the problem creatively, I let the frustration take over.
One morning recently, I was going off about who knows what. My daughters have grown up immersed in a variety of spiritual practices, but I learned on this day that one in particular had really made an impact on my four-year-old. She’s been to multiple meditation retreats, where quite frequently a beautiful bell is rung and everyone stops in their tracks for several minutes at a time. This bell is designed to bring everyone back into the present moment. My daughter has seen thousands of people stop in mid-sentence, mid-movement, mid-step. We’d never talked about this at length, but it apparently took root in her mind.
So there I was, at the height of my diatribe, and suddenly I heard from her mouth a loud “Gonnnngggggg!” She was standing with her feet together, hands folded one on top of the other with her palms up, eyes softly closed, and with the slightest smile across her lips, not unlike a statue of the Buddha. I stopped in mid-yell and began to follow my breath in and out. My shoulders dropped a bit, my heart rate slowed. My seven-year-old relaxed into her breath as well. Minutes passed, and then again we heard my younger daughter sound her definitive “Gonnnngggggg!”We all opened our eyes. Having been returned to the present moment, I found a new direction to take.
This brings us to our second technique. Allowing ourselves to hear the bells that can bring us back to this present moment will greatly influence our ability to practice trauma stewardship. My daughter gave me the gift of functioning as a living “mindfulness bell,” but we can also ring those bells for ourselves. Your method can be as seemingly contrived as setting an hourly alarm on your watch, reminding you to stop and pause for a minute; or making a resolution to hear a mental bell that will remind you to choose your words carefully each time you’re about to speak; or dividing up your day into thirds so that the beginning, middle, and end are marked by several minutes of “bell time.”
The world can be remade to these sounds.
We know that much of the harm in the world is the result of our failure to be present. If we are not present, we cannot achieve the state of integration between our felt sense and our rational mind that will allow us to be deliberate and intentional with our speech, actions, and conduct. Our lack of internal integration often paves the way for decisions, policies, and movements that can create generations of harm.
The possibilities for practice are nearly infinite. Whether we root ourselves in meditation, cooking, prayer, playing the saxophone, lifting weights, or walking our dog, a daily practice can lay the foundation for our work as trauma stewards. Our capacity to help reform our organizations, our communities, our movements, and ourselves is fundamentally altered when we initiate each step from an intentional pl
ace within. I think of this as our responsibility. Remembering how high the stakes are with the people we are trying to assist, the creatures we are trying to help, and the planet we are trying to protect, it seems that the least we can do is to participate in some kind of a daily (or daily-ish) practice. This is what allows us to bring our best to what we do.
The American Catholic peace activist James Forest said, “What American peace activists might learn from their Vietnamese counterparts is that, until there is a more meditative dimension in the peace movement, our perception of reality (and thus our ability to help occasion understanding and transformation) will be terribly crippled. Whatever our religious or nonreligious background and vocabulary may be, we will be overlooking something as essential to our lives and work as breath itself.”
PROFILE HARRY SPENCE
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
CURRENTLY: Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School.
FORMERLY: Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services; deputy chancellor for operations for the New York City Department of Education; a governor-appointed receiver for the bankrupt city of Chelsea, Massachusetts; a court-appointed receiver for the Boston Housing Authority.
I first started understanding trauma exposure when I began doing child welfare work, which was in December of 2001. I came to the position of commissioner [which he held when we talked] with strikingly little experience in this field, and mostly all I knew about child welfare was from the tabloids. I realized that I was entering this incredibly complex world of utterly imponderable decisions. I was first aware of the quality of decisions that I and the caseworkers were asked to make on a routine basis. I prided myself as a manager on always being able to frame a problem in a way that led to a rationally defined set of solutions, and yet here I was making decisions I couldn’t possibly create a rubric for. I was stunned by how utterly imponderable these decisions are. This is why the story of the wisdom of Solomon is a story about a child welfare problem. Child welfare problems require the wisdom of Solomon.
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