THE STATUE OF LIBERTY HAS long been an object of reverence for me. I am fascinated by her compassion, transported by her dignity and strength. I’ve publicly confessed to owning any number of blue-green objects meant to be her, each made of glass, or crystal, or whatever erasers are made of. I once joked about wanting to buy a five-foot replica to put in the small New York City studio apartment I was subletting—to bring this emblem of welcoming into my home. Mostly, I was joking about it. Mostly. I am a genuine fangirl.
The grace of the Statue of Liberty is perfectly expressed by the inscription by Emma Lazarus at its base. Naming Lady Liberty “the Mother of Exiles,” Lazarus writes in her voice:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Millions of people, immigrants (like my grandparents) and visitors, have come upon those words, a lightning bolt declaring, “Here’s a chance.” She’s someone saying, “Welcome. You have a home here. You, too, belong here.” She lifts the light of arrival. That iconic welcome is her best-known action.
The Statue of Liberty welcomes us all home to ourselves, that intrinsic part of us that—no matter what—deserves love, happiness, respect, and a place to rest. This is our universal goal, the inchoate yearning held in our common humanity, what we’re all striving for in ourselves … and if we’re able, for one another.
That sense of striving begins with agency—taking a concept that can be abstract or distant and breathing life into it, daring to imagine that dreams can come true, and determining to try. Anyone who has ever lost a job and doesn’t know who they are anymore; or who has been rejected by the love of their life and needs to start anew not quite knowing what’s real or who can be trusted; or who has woken up at night wondering if they’re worth anything at all; or who has felt defined by physical illness, intense emotional distress, stifling circumstances of poverty or trauma or disenfranchisement by others—any of us who have had these experiences has a sense of the significant wherewithal it takes to stir up a push toward action.
In the previous chapter, we looked at daring to imagine a future that looks different from the past or the present. Here, we consider what it takes to make that real.
If you look carefully at the Statue of Liberty, you see that the back of her right foot is raised. She is in midstride. As Dave Eggers said in his book about the statue, Her Right Foot, “This 150-foot woman is on the go.” Lady Liberty is ready to spring into action. She is moving forward to help quell fear, to embrace lonely strangers, to pick up the discarded and bring them all the way home. Her step represents action, activity, aliveness. It isn’t just the sense of movement I find inspiring. It’s also the sense of purpose animating the movement, reminding all of their inherent worth, that they belong.
SOMETIMES IT IS an intense and personal experience that not only wakes us up but impels us to act to try to make a difference. It isn’t always this way, of course. Pain and loss and challenge can easily cause us to turn completely inward, enveloped by our situation. On every level—cellular, physical, emotional—we are curled into the fetal position, trying to absorb the shock of sudden change. It’s like having an infection, where the defenses of the body rush to the affected site to wall it off. Our sensitivity, our awareness, our compassion can so easily be blocked, especially when we’re trying to bear a great magnitude of pain. Perhaps, being human, we are inevitably blocked for a while. But for some, the story doesn’t end there. It progresses, leading to an inclusive and expansive caring for others. The fight/flight/freeze reaction, blunt and automatic, refines into a response that is active and engaged. We want things to be better for others. We look for meaning, connection, a purpose to our day.
IN THE PAST decade, attorney Ady Barkan has helped improve the lives of millions of people: he co-authored the law that guarantees paid sick days to all workers in New York City; he helped end the abuse of stop-and-frisk practices that unfairly targeted black and Latinx New Yorkers; and he moved the Federal Reserve to adopt policies that prioritize job creation and wage growth for the American public.
Then, in October 2016, when he was thirty-two years old and his son was only four months, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease (after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it in 1939). Not long after Barkan was diagnosed with an illness that progressively breaks down all the muscles in the body, he went from being able to run on a California beach to relying on a wheelchair and facing mortality.
The diagnosis left Barkan with a profound choice about whether to retreat or continue on the path that had formed the basis of his life. He decided he would keep trying to make a difference to others, as long as that was possible. And he has done so without the bitterness and self-pitying that’s so tempting to drift into when we are faced with the worst.
Talking about his attitude in an email message, which he reproduced in his book Eyes to the Wind, he said:
The truth is I’ve had an amazing hand so far in life. Compared to the billions in abject poverty, the tens of millions killed in war, the untold number who aren’t happy, I’ve been very lucky. So rather than bemoan “Why me?”—which I certainly have the urge to do almost every moment—I want to be happy and energized and squeeze every last drop out of what I’ve got left.
So, I am now moving full steam ahead trying to seize these last few months/years and live them to the fullest—including being with Rachel and Carl and friends and family, doing some beautiful things.
Barkan described his and his wife’s practice as focusing on what they had left, not on what they had lost; remembering to breathe; and staying active and involved in the moment. He has focused his efforts on turning out voters to elect candidates who will protect health care programs for Americans. Ironically, his very disease makes him a potent spokesperson for maintaining and extending affordable health care.
SAMANTHA NOVICK ALSO woke up one day to an event that radically changed her life and her view of the future. Samantha graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2008. Her mother, Sharon Cutler, is a teacher there and was at school on February 14, 2018, when, as we noted in chapter 1, a gunman killed seventeen students and staff and wounded seventeen others. Her father, Ken Cutler, is a local politician who sits on the Parkland City Commission. The tragedy mobilized Samantha to take action and help to organize a historic march against gun violence that attracted national attention.
When I asked Samantha about what motivated her to action, rather than freezing, in the aftermath of an event more horrible than she could have imagined, she said:
It’s like we were suddenly and unexpectedly hit by a huge meteor that left a giant crater in the middle of our lives, our community. And some were hit directly, like those students who were in the building or saw things no person, let alone a young person, should ever have to see. People lost friends, spouses, children.
This giant thing descended, hit us out of nowhere, and left this huge hole. For those who weren’t directly hit, it was a bit easier for us in the beginning. A bunch of us just grabbed shovels, if you will, and did whatever we could to try to fill up the hole, but as time goes on, we see that the hole is never going to be filled. It’s just not. But if there is anything I can do to help one person or to further the cause of non-violence in any way, it would be irresponsible not to act.
I don’t think I’m being entirely altruistic. Because it’s also been helpful for me. There seems to be a sort of a self-serving purpose behind throwing yourself into activism, because it helps you heal. It feels good to not just sit there and stare at the hole. It feels good to do something, to start filling it in, no matter how impossibly deep it is.
As these potent examples of action in the midst of personal and societal tragedy demonstrate, agency is that purposeful, embodied, heartfelt movement from deep within, and we know it when we’re experiencing it. A fire is stoked inside us, and while hopelessness and despair may arise, they also recede as a sense of purpose steadies us and moves us forward. We have control over so little—a truth that is sometimes exceptionally bitter—but we can choose to care, and we can choose to act. That is the truth that frees us.
It’s also possible that intense, personal pain might not be the thing that causes us to take that step forward. Maybe we see the effects of discrimination on the cousin we grew up with who recently came out as gay. Or we hear our friend’s biracial child was refused the use of a bathroom by a clerk in a small store. Or a colleague is overcome by addiction to pain medication, and we see both that they are not evil and that there are very few available or affordable services that can help them. Or we take the time to talk to someone very different from ourselves, and when we discover how much we are essentially the same, their lives and concerns become palpable, real.
I was recently hospitalized with a severe infection, which brought me into close contact with a series of professional caregivers. I’ve long been an admirer of Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, co-director of Caring Across Generations, working to ensure better treatment and basic rights for these very hardworking people. I’ve offered some meditation classes and met quite lovely people in Ai-jen’s organization. I’ve been at the margins of the movement to ensure rights for domestic workers. I’ve been to many funerals of the mother or father of a friend, where “Gladys” or “Marjorie” or “Sonia” is profusely thanked, some caregiver the rest of us didn’t know. The comment is usually “She saved us” or “She enabled my mother or father to die at home, with dignity.”
In the months I spent recuperating, thanks to a friend’s great generosity, I had twenty-four-hour home health aides as other friends kindly opened their home to me. Given my limitations in strength and mobility at the time, having the aides saved me from needing to be in a skilled nursing home as I got better.
Throughout that period, I was basically spending my time with a set of new roommates. So of course, we talked. I learned that one person had another job earlier in the day and could only work a later shift. One used her only days off to take her father to dialysis. There were stories of child support never materializing; of coming into this kind of work having taken care of a dying parent; of moving up in the world from picking raspberries and appreciating the good feeling that you are making a difference in someone’s life. Because of the way our culture at large views the work of home health aides, if you have not used their services the people who do it are often somewhat invisible, as is their humanity, their struggle. They are invisible in part because their work makes us think of infirmity, death, isolation, losing capacities, and shame at not being perfect and in control.
Now they were very real to me. Any abstraction I had felt earlier, even as I had admired Ai-jen and tried to contribute to her work through my work, fell away. I now feel committed to not forgetting them or allowing them to “disappear” again.
Agency takes over when it isn’t enough to simply feel bad about a situation, write a disconsolate tweet, or vaguely note that something should be done. It’s like the ignition being turned on. We care for ourselves and others and don’t stop at caring. Now we breathe vitality into that caring. Our values cease to exist only as abstractions, and we cease being a mere bystander to life.
THIS SENSE OF agency to remake our own lives or the world that we see can happen at any time, at any age. As Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina, said, “If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year-old, the hope of the remade life.”
Mindfulness teacher and community organizer Shelly Tygielski is an example of someone getting switched on at a young age. She grew up in an enormously insular Orthodox Jewish family in Israel. Her first experience with activism came after she moved to the United States with her family when she was twelve years old and made friends with a girl named Jennifer. “She had the most beautiful red hair,” Shelly remembers, “and she came from a conservative Jewish family. Which was a curious thing for me. I had never met a Conservative or Reform Jew.”
Jennifer came to Shelly’s house for the Sabbath, and at dinner, when Shelly’s mother served the main course, Jennifer politely refused. “I’m a vegetarian,” she explained. Shelly’s mind was blown. “I was like, ‘Wait, what? That’s a thing? Hold on a second.’” Shelly had never liked eating meat, but in her household, you ate whatever was on the dinner table. For her, this was a pivotal moment. “So it was then that I thought, That’s it. I’m a vegetarian.”
Jennifer continued to expand Shelly’s concepts of how kids can take a stand and make a difference. It was the mid-’80s and Jennifer was aware of and concerned about the social issues making headlines at the time. “When I would go to her house,” Shelly recalls, “one of our playdate activities was to canvass the neighborhood—door-to-door. We’d get signatures to save the whales or to boycott companies that tested products on animals. She was really involved in Greenpeace and PETA.”
Shelly had never felt such power before, such a capacity to make a difference. “We even got our school policy to change, making them start their first recycling program.” The lesson soaked in deep. “It was really exciting to see that when you believe in something, you can organize people and convince them to change for the positive.”
Those first experiences with activism, Shelly says, changed everything, and her life since then has revolved around making a difference in the world. As a mindfulness teacher, she has continually offered classes to the Parkland community in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In 2019, Shelly and I co-created a retreat for survivors of gun violence—people who had lost children, people who had been shot themselves, people who had tried desperately to protect others at the scene of a tragedy.
We bring alive a vision by taking that crucial first step toward making it real—sometimes out of inspiration, sometimes out of outrage, sometimes faltering, and sometimes with resolve. To step forward toward a life of caring and engagement, we challenge our conditioning: the fear, the believing of ourselves or others unworthy, the incorporating of limiting stories we have been told about ourselves and about life. We take on what is holding us back—and there is a lot that can hold us back—starting with feeling we are not worthy.
SO MANY OF us feel ourselves to be lesser, left out, and perhaps not worthy of even our own respect. I can’t recount how many people I have met in my years of teaching meditation who have been inflicted with such low self-esteem, who have been so hurt and downtrodden, that they’ve felt utterly immobilized.
When you feel that low, it may be necessary to seek help, to find your tribe, to seek out those who will make it their mission to lift you up. So often these are people who have been lifted up themselves and want to pass that on to others.
I’m reminded of seeing Viola Davis accept the Golden Globe Award for her supporting actress role in the film adaptation of August Wilson’s classic Fences. The award recognized her poignant portrayal of the neglected and abused housewife Rose Lee Maxson in the movie, and in her speech, Davis spoke directly to those who have experienced sexual abuse or assault and tend to think of themselves as worthless and to blame: “There’s no prerequisites to worthiness,” she said. “You’re born worthy, and I think that’s a message a lot of women need to hear. The women who are still in silence because of trauma, shame, due to the assault—they need to understand that it’s not their fault and they’re not dirty.”
Respecting ourselves may not appear to be a radical act—but it is. It is both radical and impactful. When we care, and when we know we are worthy, we can be agents of change—for ourselves and for others.
Shantel Walker, the fast-food worker we met in chapter 1, was able to organize workers and press for fair wages because she knew that she, and they, were worth something: “I took action because my family had always let me know I was worthy, and I knew therefore I was worth more than how I was being treated. I knew others were worth more and maybe didn’t know it. I had to stand up for myself and for them.”
TO CELEBRATE JOSEPH Goldstein’s sixtieth birthday, some of our close friends rented a boat to sail around New York Harbor. It was a really fun experience, with chanting, a great Indian meal, and loving friends and family—amusingly, there was even the surprise appearance of teenage Joseph’s bar mitzvah portrait.
Despite my otherwise happy feelings, and my wearing a magical acupuncture wristband meant to prevent seasickness, I started to feel ill. I’d experienced a lot of motion sickness as a child, but not much really since, even while following a lifestyle of perpetual travel. Seasickness is a ghastly feeling, one that I tried to smile over on the boat so as not to spoil the mood. But looking back, I suspect my smile was more grimace-like than anything and, as the party went on, began to increasingly convey, “Just put me out of my misery.”
And then the boat drew close to the Statue of Liberty.
There she stood, 305 feet high from the base and pedestal to the tip of her torch, broken chains at her feet, welcoming those who have often been through a long and harrowing journey. I was enraptured. If little eraser replicas make me happy, imagine what the real thing does! My queasiness and unease disappeared. Only then did I remember that as a child, I’d only begun getting motion sickness once I had turned nine. I had lived with my parents until I was four and they divorced. Then I lived with my mother until I was nine and she died, which was when I moved in with my paternal grandparents.
In that period of my life, any mode of transportation—buses, cars, trains—would leave me heaving. And I remembered just as suddenly that as a child, I would only get sick leaving home—I never had any trouble at all, on any kind of vehicle, on the way back. I was just so generally afraid, so unanchored, that having any less of a ground overwhelmed me.
Sometimes it is scary to leave home, which is why it brings such a profound feeling of relief to realize we can carry a sense of home within—of knowing who we are—energizing and enlivening, as we step forward, stepping over or into and beyond our fear.
I THINK OF the Statue of Liberty in contrast to other iconic women, women who wait. I think of the architectural feature known as a captain’s walk, or less auspiciously, a widow’s walk, seen in some nineteenth-century North American coastal homes. The latter name, folklore has it, refers to the wives of seamen standing there, waiting, pacing, looking out to a sea that had very likely taken their husbands out of their homes and into hers. Women pacing in fear, waiting to be completed by something or someone external, waiting to receive rather than to give, waiting to come alive. And waiting some more.
When I was living with my father’s parents, I was the quintessential person just waiting. And waiting. No missing husband, but a strong sense of a missing life. I was going through the days as though I were a tape recorder with the Pause button on. My entire life, up until I was eighteen, I’d felt on the margins, different, left out. I’d felt numb, or couldn’t think what to do, or I was convinced my doing anything was a futile gesture. I was helpless to move, to effect change. Suddenly, I wanted a chance for things to be truly different.
Early on, I made a key decision that determined the entire course of my adult life: applying to the American Studies department at the university I attended. In it, I asked to spend my junior year in India studying meditation. I think of that moment so often. I was seventeen when I applied, eighteen when I left. I had grown up in New York City and had not even been to California when I sent in that application. How was I not content to simply be a scholar, studying comparative religion maybe? Because of that essential and mysterious and impactful moment, when I’m asked now what my major was in college, I often joke, “Alchemy.” It was kind of like that.
On my journey, I took a longing as ephemeral as skywriting and embodied it. I didn’t think I’d be nauseated the whole long trip to the other end of the world (and I wasn’t), but I suspected I’d be frightened for a lot of it (which I was). I went anyway.
I was hoping to find relief from my own personal suffering, but that journey formed the foundation for my lifetime of work and service in this world. Anything I intuited about listening within, or working through suffering, or caring about myself to care for others was reinforced and intensified and elevated by the practices of mindfulness and lovingkindness that I later discovered.
We can all move off the margins of our lives, the feeling of just watching and waiting for … something. We can discover which limitations are crafted by cynicism or hopelessness, and go past them into the center of change, giving life to what we care about.
ONE AFTERNOON, I was presenting a workshop with bell hooks at the bell hooks Institute in Berea, Kentucky. At one point, I spoke about how others might tell a story about us—about our worthiness and whether we belong or not, whether we’re included—and we take it in. That story might permeate our being until it becomes our story. We reshape our identity around it. Someone in the room said, “I don’t get that. People don’t tell stories about us. They don’t necessarily know us.”
I meant what I was saying to include not only narratives that people might say about us specifically but also the stories that a group of people or an institution might impose on us, even in very subtle ways, such as through architecture. The Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts, which I mentioned in the first chapter, has a stunning colonnade in front, four columns, two stories high, with seven stairs leading up to a large front door.
It turns out what I had always thought of as grand and inspiring told another story to another class of people: wheelchair users. It became clear that we needed to build a new ramp. It can be very difficult to retrofit an old building, and building a ramp in front was going to result in something that would be huge, not necessarily in harmony with the original architecture, and restrict the driveway. That’s why we had put the ramp in the back in the first place.
In the end, we decided the ramp must go out front, because of the story that it tells: you are part of what happens here, you are welcome, along with everyone else; please come through the front door. It may be troublesome—I, for one, am not great at navigating the driveway in my car—but it tells a story about who belongs, and that counts for everything.
At that same workshop in Kentucky, bell hooks offered another example of a behavior, a way of acting in the world, that told a very potent story of who is of worth and who isn’t. Growing up, bell would frequently see a rich white gentleman who dressed up his dog in a fancy outfit and sat the dog in the front seat of his car, while he kept his black maid riding in the back seat. How could someone do that? she thought, as it seemed to her that he honored a dog more than a person.
That left an indelible impression in young bell’s mind. It has taken her a lot of work on love over the years to counteract the kinds of stories she has experienced people telling about her place in the world based on her skin color.
Merck CEO Ken Frazier told The New York Times a story from the days of apartheid about seeing how deep-seated stories could ingrain behavior:
I lived one whole semester in Soweto. It was completely lawless. There were no streetlights. It was a completely separated area where people were contained, because the South African government’s job, as it saw it, was to separate blacks from whites.
But what I remember more than anything else was interacting with people who their entire lives had been told that they were second class, that they were inferior, and how hard it was to get people, particularly the men, to speak up in audible tones, because they had been in many ways told that their voice was not worth listening to. In addition to trying to teach people the substantive legal issues, it was a lot about trying to instill self-confidence.
WHAT PREVENTS US from taking action may have to do with getting caught up in forces beyond our control, as opposed to being beaten down by the specific circumstances of our individual lives, or being defined by the stories others make up about us. Think about poverty, or institutionalization, or disenfranchisement—all of which rigorously patrol the boundaries of what we even think we’re allowed to imagine for ourselves. When I consider these large, powerful forces, they bring up the feeling of collapse, when we grow numb, when we opt to stop caring because hope really does seem like the cruelest thing.
When I visited former countries of the Soviet Union after its breakup, I was struck by how little sense of agency people seemed to have. In this state of chaos, they were unsure of how to behave. They had been paralyzed by being conditioned not to act, taught to be passive observers of their own lives. I was taken by the fact that they took refuge in incessant sarcasm and cynicism. It gave them, I think, a false sense of agency, a way to feel that they were responding to their conditions, taking some kind of action, when in fact they were mired in inaction, because they couldn’t see any way to act.
Being tied to a system that drains our agency conditions us to futility and defeat. I think of a friend who told me a story about being seven or eight years old, living with her divorced mother and her maternal uncle. The details are dim, she says, but she remembers her uncle breaking her mother’s arm and then a social worker coming (they were living on public assistance). The social worker refused to supplement the mother’s rent so that the mother could move out, saying my friend had already lost her father and would be harmed by losing her uncle, too.
I don’t know specifically what impact this had on the mother, but my friend recalls she wasn’t asked about her preferences. Since she was a child, it was assumed her voice didn’t count. Something just gave up inside her then, and she has worked her entire adult life to mold a sense of agency and to protect and preserve it, having known what it means to live in a mental state of powerlessness.
I was walking with another friend through the streets of New York one evening after dinner when we were approached for money by a man who had clearly been living on the streets. My friend was newly sober and was concerned the man might use the money to buy some booze. She said, “I won’t give you money, but let’s go into this deli and you can choose whatever you want to eat. I’ll pay for it.” The three of us entered, and I watched the man go through stages of disbelief, intimidation, dawning acceptance, and finally delight. He kept checking, “Really anything I want?”
“Anything?”
“I can choose extra cheese?”
I was once again struck by the toxic humiliation and powerlessness society often pairs with poverty, binding them together and sealing them tight: “If you can’t afford much, you’re pretty worthless. You don’t look tight, nicely prosperous, or predictable.”
I thought a lot about choice, about belonging, about having a vision and dreams and a reasonable path to at least try to achieve them.
The man in the deli could not have looked more elated. Having so little choice in his life, he seemed to savor the novelty of being treated with respect, as an individual with his own needs and desires. I learned a lot watching this powerful exchange: a moment of paying attention to someone can often switch on a glimmer of self-worth in another who seems completely bereft.
I DERIVE THE same inspiration from two stories of one place, told from different angles. It offers us the recognition that everyone has something to give, that no one is excluded from the possibility of agency. In 1999, Killian Noe moved to Seattle and teamed up with a group of people to found Recovery Café. The group was committed to tackling a challenge that keeps so many people homeless and unable to lift themselves up: addiction. Recovery Café is a community of people who have—as their About Us statement says—“been traumatized by homelessness, addiction, and other mental health challenges.” Their mission, they go on to say, is to “[come] to know ourselves as loved with gifts to share.” It’s a place people can come to when they’re sober to find, and offer, community and companionship to others, and it has grown from a small storefront to a facility that takes up an entire triangular city block and houses a School for Recovery. Today there are eighteen Recovery Cafés in ten states and the District of Columbia. The next one is slated to open in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2020.
“To know ourselves as loved,” as their statement says, speaks to the heart of the matter. Killian herself says that the café serves personal needs that she has, as well: “I, too, need community to reflect back my self-worth.” When she talked to us about the guiding principles of the café, she provided a wonderful definition of what agency means, particularly in terms of elevated self-worth:
We intentionally call the people we serve here members, not clients, because we want them to know that this is a place of belonging. This is not just a social service agency where you go to receive services. It’s a place where you come and you contribute to the community. You take ownership for the community. You help the community thrive not only by contributing to helping to run the café—one of the commitments is that everyone must pitch into the actual work—but also by showing up for each other. That’s the biggest contribution: giving yourself.
Jenna Crow is a member of Recovery Café. A service veteran, Jenna was sexually assaulted in the army and came back to the United States with PTSD after her discharge. Through a series of complications, she had trouble getting benefits and ended up homeless in Seattle for a year.
Like so many people, Jenna felt a lack of self-respect, and she silenced herself (which is something we do when we feel unwanted and unloved). She felt powerless. She made her way finally to Recovery Café, which was a key part of her rediscovery of purpose and power. A turning point came one night at a café open mic night. Jenna played flute directly to a man who came in highly agitated. She saw that it soothed him. “I understood what his reality is like,” Jenna said, “because I’ve been in that reality. It was a moment of focus, where I was a person who was able to alleviate his suffering. I’m getting goose bumps right now thinking about it. You suddenly have this moment of clarity and you understand, ‘I am poised to do something that is going to alleviate this person’s suffering.’”
When Jenna saw that she gets to give back, she discovered her worth, her agency, in doing something for others, no matter how small, or unexpected and spontaneous, the gesture.
Jenna is thankful for what the staff have done to help in her recovery, through their “ministry of presence,” essentially being there with her and for her through thick and thin. “They held the space for me is another way of putting it. And eventually, I was on the recovery road. I came out of my little shell.” Jenna became a facilitator at Recovery Café and went on to take recovery coach training and continues to increase her contribution to the community through mentoring others and being mentored by others.
HOW DO WE know where to focus our action? After all, there’s a lot of pain in this world. Part of the answer lies in discerning under what circumstances we will take a step forward. Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda has said, “You cannot let all the world’s tragedies into your heart. You’ll drown. But the ones you do let in should count. Let them manifest action.”
Similarly, historian Howard Zinn, author of the classic A People’s History of the United States, offered this advice: “I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people.… When enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.”
Once we summon the energy to declare, “This is what I believe in as true and just,” then we can go for it.
And we keep exploring the nature of the energy that moves change—what nourishes it, what dampens it, what untangles it, what distorts it—as we look toward sustaining caring and engagement during our life’s journey.
WE DO THIS practice to develop a different relationship to the stories others tell about us and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of. Please sit comfortably, with either your eyes closed or slightly open, however you feel most at ease.
You can begin by bringing your attention to the breath, wherever you feel it most predominantly—the nostrils, chest, or abdomen. You can rest your attention on whatever sensations you find there as you breathe naturally. The breath is like our home base—if during the course of this session you feel lost or like too much is going on, you can just return your attention to the feeling of the breath.
See what thoughts may be present in your awareness. Allow yourself to notice thoughts arising as events in the mind. Experience thoughts coming and going in each moment without pushing them away or being carried off by them. Perhaps experience thoughts like clouds passing through the open sky of your awareness. Some heavy and thunderous, some light and airy, being aware of them all, exploring with gentle interest and curiosity.
It may be helpful to experience thoughts as boats passing along a river. Some passing so silently that you barely notice, some so unpleasant that your attention turns away, others so compelling that they highjack your attention and carry you far down the river. Explore the thoughts arising in your mind, noticing when you are pushing them away or being highjacked by them, and coming back again and again to noticing, taking a seat by the river, observing thoughts passing by.
As a habit, certain thought patterns arise that we tend to get lost in, overcome by, defined by, even as we resent or fear them. We can retrain our whole mental attitude by first learning to recognize these patterns and perhaps even calmly naming them: “Oh, here is the pattern of thinking, Everything is wrong, the pattern of thinking, I’m a failure, the pattern of thinking, I can never do enough.”
Once we recognize them, we can remind ourselves that they are just visiting. They are not essentially who we are. We couldn’t stop them from visiting, but we can let them go. Even if they return a thousand times a session, they still have the same nature—they are visiting, we don’t have to invite them to move in, we don’t have to blame ourselves for their coming, and we can learn to let them go.
After you finish this formal session of practice, you can explore bringing this skill of gentle interest, curiosity, and attention to your thoughts into your encounters throughout the day.