by Janine de Novais
“Healing is a school. Everything we learn along the way is meant to be shared widely.”
—Chani Nicholas
Loving Corrections. My first thought is, why didn’t she say “revisions” or even “critiques”?
I worry people will bristle at the severity associated with the word “corrections.” I worry that people, especially those socialized in the context-collapsed, ego-drunk world of social media, will fear the word. I worry that they will reject the discomfort but then I remember that the discomfort, and how to become resilient to it, is the point. adrienne sees humans, herself included, through a lens that is equal parts exacting and exalting. She sees the flaws, and she sees that we can learn to fly and soar beyond greed, hatred, and delusions of heteronormative and transphobic patriarchy, racial capitalism, ableism, climate violence, settler colonialism, and imperialism, beyond the meanness through which these delusions structure daily lives.
When adrienne reminds us that “healing is the victory,” I take that as an encouragement to reap our healing-victories along the way, so we can be nourished. How do we craft freedom from unfreedom, craft “happy pockets” amid despair, and lovingly correct course? By changing. But change is hard because it is loss. Even lovingly, a correction means trading the hard-fought safety of an idea, the tether to our story, for uncertainty. Everywhere authoritarian monsters are raging and growing, it is because they are feeding on fear of change.
The profound discomfort a loving correction brings, whether on a small or global scale, is integral to our functioning. The cold or sweaty palms, the profuse sweat or dry mouth, the heart racing, or the voice quaking, all of it is a stress response. Paradoxically, this stress response, in a healthy dose, is what sparks learning. When you seek to integrate new information, in order to stop that discomfort that it brings, you are learning. Our beautiful brains panic whether the discomfort is “the saber-toothed tiger is chasing me” or “I have to rethink my stance on Palestine.” Luckily for us, nature, “the great teacher,” has gifted us a superpower: we can craft ideal conditions around us that defuse that stress, that make loving corrections possible. In both saber-toothed tiger times and our time, ideal conditions are the same: we need people. We need people around us to journey with, and learn about the world with. The quality of our human relationships and communities constitutes the grounding for our resilience for change.
One of the friendships “not rooted in panic” in her life that adrienne mentioned is with me. We call each other “neighbor” for two reasons. One is basic. We long for a time when we will be actual neighbors who can meet on the porch at the end of the day. Since we’re not there yet, we are manifesting this dream so it can come true. The second reason came to me whilst in a silent meditation retreat when I first learned of one of my favorite Buddhist stories or suttas.37 In it, the Buddha’s beloved disciple, Ananda—the Gayle to his Oprah and the Julius to his Beyoncé—asks the Buddha to check if he understands the role of friends in the Eightfold Path (put simply, the path is the practice of being in right relationship with all beings).
Ananda asks, “Blessed One, are you saying that admirable friendship and admirable companionship is half of the holy life?”
The Buddha replies: “Don’t say that, Ananda. . . . Admirable friendship, admirable companionship is actually the whole of the holy life.”
This is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old insight into the kind of animal we are, a social animal for whom meaning-making in community is like food and water. The moment I heard this story, sitting quietly with one hundred yogis listening to our teachers, adrienne appeared in my mind as the admirable friend who helps create the condition for me to wheather becoming myself, with integrity, with grace, and with courage. The one who will not judge me because I will not judge her. She was so clearly present that I almost forgot to relay the story to her afterward. I felt she’d been there to hear it with me. She is, in fact, almost always there to hear me.
Be generous in your pursuit of good friends on your path of loving corrections and radical imagination. Give yourself a community who loves you enough to risk losing you to help you grow. Find and cherish those mirror-friends who witness your worth when you cannot, and who in your silent darknesses, can reach inside your heart and ring that bell. The operative word in loving corrections is loving.
37. “Upaddha Sutta: Half (of the Holy Life),” trans. by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, retrieved from https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn45/sn45.002.than.html#fn-1.