In any moment, countless people all over the planet are caught in one hell realm or another, one aspect or another of the full catastrophe. It is not to be minimized. The suffering is enormous. And a great deal of it is not adventitious.
Sometimes suffering is because of war or other forms of violence; because of loss, grief, humiliation, shame, a sense of powerlessness or worthlessness; or from being in prison or imprisoned by addictions and blindness. These hell realms themselves can compound violence, sometimes leading people to do terrible things to themselves or to others.
And yet, in the face of even the most unthinkably terrifying situations, we have a powerful innate capacity to hold whatever it is — even terror, despair, and rage — in awareness, and carry it differently. We can see this in the many different acts of kindness that occur even in times of war and hardship. As humans, we can meet and carry our hurt, our anger, our fear in new ways that can be deeply restorative and healing.
This is what mindfulness as a practice offers us: a new way of being in relationship to what is, not as an escape route or as an expedient, but as a way of being more in touch with our humanity, our goodness, and our beauty.
Moreover, in the poignancy — or even the horror — of any moment, we can recognize through having seen it over and over again in the mindfulness practice itself what is sometimes called the law of impermanence: the fact that everything, without exception, is always changing, that things will not, cannot stay the same forever. In the present moment, we can also recognize that our awareness is already free — even in prison, even in hell — and gives us the freedom to choose how to respond inwardly to our circumstances, even if our outer circumstances are beyond our control. Viktor Frankl put it this way in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, describing his experience in a Nazi concentration camp: “Everything can be taken from a human being but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”