DEEP IN OUR HEARTS, WE all long for a feeling of being at home: in this body, in this mind, with someone else, on this planet. Somewhere. If we look carefully at our actions—what we say or do, what we refrain from saying or doing—we can sense within them an urge toward wholeness, toward happiness. This urge to find a home, to find happiness, to make ourselves feel whole again, to build resilience, is a message hidden inside telling us to take care of ourselves. Even if we look at addictions—whether we’re entangled with alcohol or drugs, food, gambling, or sex—whether it’s a quiet problem or it has blown our lives apart—at the root, we find an urge to feel something unfractured, significant, real.
The basic, universal wish for one’s own happiness is ultimately constructive. It’s not selfish and it’s not wrong, although those who dedicate so much of their time trying to help others often tend to consider such a wish to be too self-centered.
But in truth, this self-nurtured happiness is replete with inner abundance and resourcefulness—the wellspring of energy within that allows us to serve, offer, create. When we are constantly confronted by situations and injustices in the world that we want to change, we can feel guilty that we’re never doing enough or feel personally responsible for correcting everything that is at all wrong.
If we don’t think we can ever do enough, if we’re taught to believe we could never be enough, we won’t be able to keep on giving. Whatever we do will seem insufficient, and we won’t derive much joy from it.
The good news is that there are ways to practice happiness, thereby strengthening ourselves and ultimately strengthening our capacity for service. We used a simple tool for this during the program for domestic violence shelter workers at the Garrison Institute. It illustrates how naturally we all have something we have tried, or have regularly done, to find replenishment or upliftment.
TO BEGIN THIS exercise, make three columns on a piece of paper. After reflecting for a while, in the first column, write down your biggest stressor.
In the second column, write down what you do in the face of that stressor to take a break, to build resilience, to make yourself whole.
In the third column, after reflecting on what you wrote in the first two columns, write down how you feel about what’s in the second column.
What people wrote in the first column covered a broad range: from the truly traumatic to overwork, to bad communication with colleagues. In the second column, they listed an array of what we generally consider bad habits (excess drinking, drugs, anger, overeating, etc.) as well as some positive tendencies, such as exercising and getting out in nature. In the final column, we asked people to honestly reflect on their habitual responses to stress and how they sought to feel whole. Maybe they had written down, “I go out into nature,” in the second column and then reflected, “Well, it’s been about seven years since I did that,” or they had written down, “Lots of drinking,” and began to reflect on the negative consequences in their lives.
In the same spirit of inquiry, I have long had a habit of asking people I come across what they do to find resilience. The answers are almost always noteworthy. For example, Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter, simply said, “I look at the mountains.”
I love that.
A friend of mine who does housing advocacy work told me, “I think of our bodies as made of stardust.” (Which apparently is true, according to a paper by the astrophysicist Karel Schrijver and his wife, pathologist Iris Schrijver, which explains how everything in us originated in cosmic explosions billions of years ago, how our bodies are in a constant state of decay and regeneration, and why Joni Mitchell was right when she wrote the song “Woodstock.”)
When Shantel Walker, the fast-food wage activist from chapter 1, is swallowed up by the demands of her struggle, she avoids burning out and taking it out on herself or those around her by getting out and riding a bike. It’s not about finding a destination. It’s just about the movement, the change of scenery. “Being on the bike takes my mind off things for a while,” she says.
Susan Davis, who has worked against poverty for decades, talked to me about certain touchstones that are important for her, including taking time to read and time to meditate in the morning with her wife. “I also find healing and refuge and solace by connecting with trees and leaves,” Susan said. “I carry an image in my mind of when the wind is blowing and leaves on the trees are shimmering. Wind is not always with us, and light’s not always here, and yet it is always here. I can get preoccupied and let monkey mind [i.e., distractedness] take over, but I can bring it back in a second with just that awareness.”
People do lots of things to reconnect and recharge: swim, sing, run, dance, gaze at the stars.
What do you do, and how do you feel about it?
If you seek to make change in the world, in whatever way, in whatever scope, and you don’t consider this, you may end up—perhaps you will likely end up—not taking good enough care of yourself.
Shelly Tygielski, whom we met as a twelve-year-old in chapter 2, is now in her forties, and still an activist. She has been an involved participant in women’s marches and worked on local political organizing. As a mindfulness teacher, she has offered classes to the Parkland community in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and she has been involved in creating networks of support for those affected by gun violence.
Shelly wrote an article for Mindful magazine on self-care in a politically charged time. In it, she made several key points, including these two:
The need to be prepared for activist burnout. Shelly recommends designing a wellness plan, which some call a coping bank. This allows you to accept the fact that activism may take a toll on your body and mind. It’s stressful, so be strategic and prepare in advance for the possibility of a bit of a meltdown. Start by taking small, achievable steps, and be practical.
The benefits of building a self-care community. If you have a small network of individuals who will hold you accountable for your self-care plan, it’s much more likely to work, since when we get overstressed, the adrenaline rush can cause us to overlook our real condition. These friends will respond when you are in burnout/fatigue/agitated mode and have your back when you say no. They will intervene and help you to get back in touch with your body and mind.
Shelly, among many others, has pointed out that we often neglect self-care out of a (mistaken) belief that attending to it is being selfish. Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei is an author, Zen priest, and founder of the Center for Transformative Change, an organization dedicated to bridging the inner and outer lives of social change agents. With her long career in activism and advocacy, Rev. angel clearly distinguishes between self-care and self-indulgence:
I’m always asking people who are working for social justice, “And what about you? Are you not part of that group of people who are suffering? And would you permit the people in your life to run themselves into the ground?”
And they respond, “No, of course not. This is what we’re working towards.”
I say, “Well, if that’s what we’re practicing is to run ourselves into the ground in order to have justice, at what point will we practice something different? Because whatever we practice is what we will practice. If we are practicing running ourselves into the ground for the sake of justice, then that’s what we’ll continue to practice.”
In the same way, one of the residents in the residential community I used to lead was flying through the house and I asked, “What are you doing? Where are you rushing off to?”
She said, “I’m going to yoga.”
I simply said, “You’re rushing to go relax?” and she stopped.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE ORGANIZATIONAL cultures we build around change often do not, as Shelly and Rev. angel have pointed out, support self-care. A number of studies have looked at the problem and broken down notable components. Professors Cher Weixia Chen and Paul C. Gorski, from the George Mason University School of Integrative Studies, conducted a study of social justice and human rights activists. The researchers reported an overall lack of attention to burnout within the activist groups they studied. Participants reported guilt and shame associated with considering their own well-being, which they came to think of as in conflict with the selflessness of their work. The overwhelming majority of the people studied could not think of a single conversation or mentorship activity concerning self-care, and a number of them described their cultures as hostile to any discussion of symptoms of stress, which one interviewee referred to as a “culture of martyrdom.”
Even if a workplace supports self-care, even if you support it for others, you might find that you are leaving yourself out. Rachel Gutter was in the middle of the dream job of her life as the founder of the Center for Green Schools when she started to notice an undercurrent of something just not right. She told me:
I had so much drive around the opportunities to transform schools into places that put students in touch with nature, and yet I didn’t hold enough space for myself. I wasn’t living a well-rounded life. More and more, that started to take its toll. I started to see the impact of the inauthenticity that came with being a leader who said all the right things—“I want you to live a three-dimensional life, I want you to take vacations, I want you to get off your screens at night”—while also being a leader who believed work/life balance was for everyone else, didn’t take her own vacations, and would send an email at 10:30 p.m., making my employees think they were supposed to respond at 10:32.
When I realized I was becoming less and less equipped to be a good leader for my teams, I was able to give myself permission to spend more time inwardly focused. While helping others, I was able to reclaim what I had lost for myself.
Self-care is not simply about me time. It can have a lot to do with a sense of fraternity and sisterhood, because we’re actually replenished and nourished by fellowship. It’s enlivened by being in community with others, being able to offer something worthwhile to others. I remember watching documentaries about the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement, who seemed exultant at a life with meaning. I was so inspired to believe that there could be a community built on non-violence, shared values, and love.
There’s something very powerful about seeing how any one person connects to the resilience of the human spirit. How we have the opportunity not just to be fighting for change but at the same time to have some joy, a sense of gladness, because obviously, that fight is often not easy.
We can take pleasure in a movie, a story, a good meal shared with a friend, without allowing denial of the pain in the world to sweep us away. We can remind ourselves that we deserve to be pleased, to smile and laugh. There is a lot of suffering out there, to be sure. And there is also valor, and mercy, and one another, and love.
ADY BARKAN, WHO came down with ALS, posted a series of tweets in March 2019 about a hug he received from his young son Carl:
“That was the best hug I’ve ever had,” I told him when he was done, trying more than anything to sear it into my mind’s eye … Because when the daily grind of living a nearly paralyzed life becomes too much, when I am exhausted and depressed and hopeless, I want to return to that hug. I want to imagine that there are similar hugs in my future … That’s also the only way, I think, for all of us to persevere through the atrocities and the hate and the lies … We have to hold on to the precious beauty, to the moments of triumph, and fight in the hope that there are more victories to come, more beauty and love in our future.
Joy is there. We need to decide to look for it, and as Shelly says, we need to make it a priority in our lives.
To retain our vitality, it’s important to be able to switch focus from the negative realities of the world to the positive ones, to regain our capacity for joy, positivity, and connection. From playwright Sarah Jones: “I actually think my work grew from the deepest, most resilient part of me, which was innately playful and happy. And it only began to feel truly satisfying and develop in the thrilling ways I always hoped it would when I did the internal work of connecting with more balance and joy in my life.”
Joel Daniels, the storyteller/activist who wrote A Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter, talked with me about finding the power to nourish himself through his relationship with his daughter:
My daughter helps me a lot. She is a very big source of inspiration for me, a constant reminder of what the purest form of love looks like. We’re all looking for something because we’re human and there’s a need to fill that void. Well, that void can be filled with love—self-love. If it’s not that healthy kind of love, then you’re going to try to find love in other things, in things that are really not consistent, reliable. It comes back to loving yourself because that’s going to replenish you.
Many people say these days that society is broken, but as we consider repairing its fractures, we also need to look to see what is not broken. Zainab Salbi—an Iraqi woman who founded Women for Women International to provide support to women survivors of war—tells a story that speaks beautifully to this point. When she returned to the United States from working abroad, Zainab would often talk about a woman she had met in Afghanistan—the travails the woman had suffered, the trauma, the injustice. One day, Zainab was startled to realize that she wasn’t also speaking about the fact that the woman was an attorney, had inner resources, had skills. Powerfully, she questioned the completeness of her own compassion if she wasn’t quite seeing the woman as the full human being she was.
It’s uplifting to see that many changemakers do now include taking care of themselves as a vital part of their mission in the world. They know that truly taking care of themselves—so that they can be of the most value—is indeed something that speaks to a deep part of who they are. It’s part of their overall desire to feel a sense of home and belonging. It is not a luxury.
If someone seems grim and desperate in their efforts to change the world, I usually bring up the civil rights movement. “People didn’t march sobbing,” I remind them. “They marched singing.” I’m thinking of singing done by people like Bernice Johnson Reagon, the activist who used her powerful alto to spread the message of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Reagon, who went on to co-found the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, was featured in a 1991 film called The Songs Are Free. She spoke with journalist Bill Moyers about how something that nurtures the soul can simultaneously be enlisted to effect change:
Sound is a way to extend the territory you can affect. Communal singing is a way of announcing you are here and possessing the territory. When the police or the sheriff would enter mass meetings and start taking pictures and names, and we knew our jobs were on the line, and maybe more … inevitably somebody would begin a song. Soon everyone was singing and we had taken back the air in that space.
Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post hosted a podcast series entitled Voices of the Movement, exploring how music propelled the civil rights movement in the United States. In the series, Capehart interviewed Ruby Sales, a longtime activist whose involvement dated back to the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. “As a little black child in the South,” Sales said, “I could sing 50 songs and that was the way in which I was connected with my elders, with my ancestors.… It was our inner selves. It was the essence of who we are as a people. It was a repository of our hopes, the repository of our dreams, the repository of our victories, and the repository of our defeats.… Without songs, we couldn’t have had a movement.… It was where we embodied our courage.”
There is plenty to weep about, and it can be good to cry, but by the time we’re marching, or deeply listening, or envisioning a brighter day, we are relying on some energy flowing. Our hearts need to be opening, not collapsing under the pressure of hopelessness.
We all are aided by appreciating the good in our lives, the availability of beauty, the uplifting energy of community. We are nourished by being able to connect to something bigger, both in our personal lives and in viewing the world. In Buddhist teaching, it is called gladdening the mind, creating an ease of heart that can accompany us in times of adversity or trauma.
Lynn Nottage speaks of love and light and darkness:
I need to circle back to love. I can’t dwell too much in the darkness. The darkness for me is not a creative space, but that doesn’t mean I don’t seek light in dark places. I have found light in the form of human resilience in midst of the protracted war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or in the Rust Belt, where people persevere despite the lack of prosperity. Or in the struggle of an elephant that’s on the verge of being poached, as illustrated in my play Mlima’s Tale. Like Mlima, for me, it all begins with the things I love.
When (or even before) our work starts to become discouraging and inspiration has dried up, there are practices we can do to build a reservoir of well-being, refreshment, and ease in both our bodies and our minds. Consciously reflecting on what we love, what we have to be grateful for, is one example of such a practice. It’s not meant to make us stupidly negligent of real suffering—in fact, it does the opposite. What we have to be grateful for tends to get so little airtime in our consciousness that the buoyancy it can provide to help us look openly and courageously at all of our experience is unavailable to us. With renewed well-being, we are able to see that our path of trying to make a difference may be a long path, and full of obstacles, but it is a good path.
We all tend to have our own means of gladdening the mind. Friedrike Merck is an artist, an activist, and a philanthropist. She talked to me about the refuge of nature she created as a child and the joy of singing as an adult:
My older sister died when I was seven years old and she was thirteen. I know that the beauty of nature saved me and entertained me, and gave me an endless, astounding fascination for the natural world. I grew up near a swamp. We weren’t allowed to have TV. We’d go outside. I was always outside. And I used to be the cheerleader in the family. “Oh, come look at the beautiful sunset. Oh, isn’t that a beautiful mountain?”
As an adult, along with her art and delighting in her son, Friedrike came to a greater ease of heart by getting sober, meditating, and singing:
Eighteen years ago, I stopped drinking and began meditating. I sat in meditation for twenty minutes, and I then sat for four years without missing a day. It was really profound. At the same time of becoming sober, I started working with somebody using sound and resonance as a healing tool. It was really enormous, and I started singing again. I think that singing has a spiritual element to it that’s deeply visceral and profound and cuts across all spiritual practices, whether it’s polytheistic or monotheistic or Buddhist. I joined a choir! And within the choir, I have found a community that has been extraordinary and sincere in its welcoming. I am just so happy.
When we see that appreciating what’s good in our lives is right, not wrong, we can feel it lifting us and replenishing us. We need that. It gives us the strength to also look at pain in a different way. If we’re looking only at pain, we get exhausted. We have to look at pain skillfully, but there’s a place for letting the joy emerge in the midst of the pain as well.
Sarah Jones speaks about spreading the joy, what she calls benevolent contagion.
I hope that when people listen to a piece of heart-opening music or see a soulful mural on the street, there is a benevolent contagion that helps them create their own art, or have the audacity to dance or skip (literally or otherwise) for a moment on their way to their car, or to listen lovingly and attentively to the inner voice that tells them to try a new recipe or wear the paisley shirt with the striped socks when convention says not to. I know that’s how experiencing other people’s art affects me. And the same disruption that leads to people protesting in the streets is also connected to any liberation from groupthink that enables people to hear and heed their own drum beat a little better—to even remember it’s there.
TO OPEN OUR minds and hearts and stay in touch with the light, we practice gladdening our minds: cultivating generosity, acknowledging joy, seeing what we have to be grateful for. In doing so, we build an inner resource that enables us to persist through anything.
In 1984, IMS brought the renowned Burmese meditation teacher Sayadaw U Pandita to Barre to lead a three-month retreat. My friends Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and I had never met him before, but we issued the invitation because we had heard that he was a remarkable teacher, and so we committed to practice under his guidance. Once we met him, our experience confirmed what we had heard. We also found that he was very tough, demanding, and even fierce as a teacher.
One day, we were in the meditation hall, and someone asked, “How long should I pay attention to physical pain while meditating before I move my attention to something easier?” (This might include listening to sound, paying attention to a part of the body that doesn’t hurt, consciously shifting to something like lovingkindness for yourself and others.) I thought that given Sayadaw U Pandita’s usual intensity, he would suggest something like, “You should be with the pain until you fall over.”
Instead, he replied, “Don’t be with it very long. Pay attention to something easier, then bring your attention back to the pain. Leave it again.”
He went on, “It’s not wrong to just be with the pain … and be with the pain.… But you’ll likely get exhausted. Why not build in balance all along the way?”
Hearing that, I almost fell over. Surprised as I was, though, I knew him by then as someone who had incredible integrity, so I knew he believed it to be good advice. I thought, He doesn’t pander. He’s the furthest thing in the universe from someone who would say something untrue just to be nice or consoling.
We can extrapolate from that teaching on physical pain what we might need to work effectively with heartache, trauma, or extremely bad circumstances. It points us to a key instruction in trauma therapy: titrate. You can’t do it all at once. You can’t absorb all that pain at once.
In 2019, when I was hospitalized with a severe infection, I well remember the first time I was able to get out of bed and walk down the hospital corridors using a walker. The physical therapist accompanying me seemed to find me quite amusing. At one point, she said, “It’s not a race, you know. You’ll get farther if you stop and rest periodically.” I started taking that as advice for my life in general.
Sometimes it feels like we have to run a race. We have to beat the onslaught of hatred and divisiveness, the beleaguered planet, the economic and political disenfranchisement. They threaten to rush past us, as though the planetary metabolism were speeding up. But in truth, stopping and resting periodically helps us go farther.
We have our goals and our dreams, where we want to get to, what we want to accomplish and change, but we are, each of us, in a body with its limitations. As we stretch and reach out, we need to, as René Daumal says in his novel of mountain climbing, Mount Analogue:
Keep your eye fixed on the way to the top, but don’t forget to look right in front of you. The last step depends on the first. Don’t think you’ve arrived just because you see the summit. Watch your footing, be sure of the next step, but don’t let that distract you from the highest goal. The first step depends on the last.
Daumal’s “first step” reminds me of the upraised heel of Lady Liberty about to take that first step out. We stride, but we also “watch our footing.”
There is relief to be found in our lives, like the times discussed earlier that friends have used to awaken joy and care for themselves: riding a bike, walking in nature, giving a hug, getting a hug.
For the sake of our own resilience, we need to strengthen our capacity to accept and absorb joy. If we can’t, we will get overwhelmed. There’s an awful lot of suffering around, and trying to be fully awake to it demands energy, balance, perspective, and the ability to let go of our attachment to immediate results. Ali and Atman Smith and Andrés González, whom we met in chapter 3 and who co-founded the Holistic Life Foundation in Baltimore, say this: “Do the work; don’t focus on the results.” They work in the harsh environment of under-resourced city schools with kids who know more than anyone should about poverty, drugs, and violence, and yet they remain some of the most cheerful people I know. That cheerfulness is a big part of the gift they give to the schools they work in.
MANY YEARS AGO, I went to spend time with a new friend. He was (and remains) brilliant, loved by many, a committed activist, and someone who taught me a lot in terms of caring for others. At that time and for a considerable time before then, he was also deeply depressed. We walked together along a nearby lake, both in a mode of self-reflection. At one point, he turned to me and said, “You know, I can’t even allow myself to enjoy eating a banana.”
Assuming causation where there is only correlation is a famous trap in reasoning, but I do think the relationship between his depression and his refusal to allow even the simplest kind of joy into his life was an intricate and intimate one. His awareness of how many people may have suffered to get that banana to be near at hand—underpaid, perhaps far from home, or exploited or frightened—that is real. And that is a sensitivity lost to many of us as we focus narrowly and sometimes exclusively on our own pleasure. I would never want him to lose that sensitivity, and I knew that his awakening greater awareness in people like me was important. I need moral exemplars. I am very influenced by people who say in effect, “I’m not going to eat a banana.”
Yet I saw how unhappy he was as he himself brought up the banana, and I know how intense scrupulosity—which psychologists define as a pathological obsession with morality or religiosity—can make us hard and self-righteous, starting with being hard on ourselves. It can leave us feeling incredibly alone.
Sensing his intense sadness, I was tempted to say, “Just eat the damn banana already, would you? Yes, you’re inspiring, but what if it kills you? What if you need the potassium?”
That refusal to allow ourselves pleasure and joy is like the Bizarro World version of narcissism. If a narcissistic tendency has us seek attention, power, or status out of a sense of entitlement, this tendency is one of rejection, pushing away vitality or energy or experience rather than endlessly seeking it. Only the terrible bleakness underlying both is the same. It’s as if we regard the intense level of suffering we feel in response to others as something sacrosanct, a badge of honor that must not be let go of, or even explored, despite the fact that it may be incapacitating us.
Neuroscientist Richie Davidson has done research on whether meditation can affect our relationship to pain. He was studying physical pain, but since in meditation training we look at physical pain as our template for emotional pain—heartache, disappointment, distress—it is interesting to imagine the applicability of the results extended to our experience of pain generally. What Richie found is that meditators and non-meditators differed most sharply with one another in their experience of what happened before and after the painful stimulus was withdrawn. More of the non-meditators flipped into a cycle of rumination and anticipation—When is it coming back? How bad will it be?—while more of the meditators could let it go. Letting it go implies moments of respite, periods of relaxation and peace, rather than seemingly unremitting suffering.
When Richie opened his center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (as it was then called), I was on a panel with him as well as the Dalai Lama, John Dunne (a Buddhist scholar from Emory University, now at Richie’s center), Barbara Fredrickson (the positive psychology researcher), and Matthieu Ricard. Matthieu is a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Before he was ordained, he was a scientist who earned a doctorate in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute, and so he is a valuable collaborator in meditation research since he knows both the contemplative world and the scientific world so well. And indeed, he was one of the people involved in the meditation and pain study.
The Dalai Lama was emphatic that the pain should be applied suddenly in the study, which indeed it was; participants did not know whether they were going to get pain or not, nor did they know when the pain might come. It came upon them suddenly, without advance warning. When the Dalai Lama said suddenly, I recall that he lurched forward and imitated an abrupt and unexpected jab. At that, Matthieu, sitting next to me, just about leaped into the air. Since so many research projects had begun with refining the interventions by starting with Matthieu, I imagine he assumed he’d be soon subject to abrupt and unexpected jabs.
I saw the point His Holiness was making. Physical or emotional pain is often irregular, abrupt, and fitful, and that’s what makes it harder to bear. If we always knew when it was coming, we might more easily acclimate ourselves to it. The fact that it comes upon us suddenly is yet another reason to have long-term strategies for working with pain. Hoping it will never come is not a strategy.
THE NEUROSCIENTIST TANIA Singer (along with co-author Olga Klimecki) writes, “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s wellbeing. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”
Empathy seems an essential ability in today’s world, which can seem awfully cold, even cruel, if people feel they must disdain others and go it alone. On the other hand, when I consider the exhausted, worn-down activists I’ve met, the international humanitarian aid workers or nurses or parents, they often seem to me to have plenty of empathy. So I’ve come to believe that something else is leading to burnout.
One description of compassion in Buddhist psychology is: “The quivering or trembling of the heart in response to seeing pain or suffering. It is a movement of the heart, a movement toward, to see if we can be of help.”
The first part, the quivering, is the empathy part. The second part, the movement toward, to see if we can be of help, is the compassion part.
While empathy is essential, if we over-identify with the person or people hurting, the empathy turns into empathic distress, where our own discomfort ironically takes center stage. We collapse or run away.
I see the process in sequential terms. The empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for compassion to arise. We feel the empathy, but maybe we’re frightened by what we see, and so we crumble. Or we’re exhausted, disheartened, overwhelmed: we don’t have the energy to move toward. Or we are caught up in blame. I recently met a therapist who found himself mentally blaming his clients, thinking, I gave you perfectly good advice six months ago. If you’d only listened!
It’s also possible to develop a savior complex—we don’t merely go toward, taking that first tentative stride; we go right into the fires of suffering, determined to control them up to the point where we find we ourselves are burning up.
That’s why researchers and Buddhist scholars who define compassion rather precisely see it as the solution and prefer, as I do, the phrase empathy fatigue to what is conventionally called compassion fatigue.
Compassion implies boundaries (movement toward, not into); balance (compassion for all, including ourselves); stability rather than shakiness; and clarity rather than overidentification. Compassion can be cultivated, through practice, and as it develops further, it helps us avoid burnout and fatigue by teaching us how to say no when we need to, without guilt, and learning to build boundaries. You come to know that saying no is a courageous act and can be empowering. It’s also empowering for others, seeing you healthy and able to pick things up another day, rather than barreling ahead distressed and harried.
Deep compassion is suffused with equanimity. Compassionate action is then imbued with wisdom—realizing what we can do, what we can’t do, and what we cannot control. Over the long run, that clarity will build resilience, the ability to bounce back when we have stepped beyond our limits, exhausted and without the capacity to offer real help.
END Fund CEO Ellen Agler, author of Under the Big Tree: Extraordinary Stories from the Movement to End Neglected Tropical Diseases, talked with me about the intersection of empathy and compassion:
I’ve come to really appreciate the distinction between compassion and empathy. That has helped me a lot. I took great interest in the research that shows that when you’re in an FMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] machine and you’re feeling empathy for someone who is suffering, the parts of your brain that light up are the ones that light up when you are suffering. It’s almost like you’re going through that same kind of suffering. I have definitely seen that lead to burnout. It’s a fatigue, and it has affected so many people I’ve known in the social sector. They can’t stay in it for very long because it is exhausting or depressing or they just work too hard until they can’t work anymore. So many non-profits are understaffed and under-resourced compared to the enormous aims of their work. You can work 24-7 and still feel like you haven’t done nearly enough to address the suffering caused by injustices you are focused on ameliorating.
By contrast, it seems, with compassion you learn to be present for and hold with spaciousness and dignity the pain and suffering of others, without fully absorbing it as your own. You can hold this with an open hand and an open heart and respond and serve in the ways that are possible. But it’s important to practice self-care in the midst of it all so you can keep showing up again and again and again. I continue to try to learn that it’s more powerful to give from overflow than to give from a place of depletion. For me, it’s compassion, more than empathy, that is one of the most critical tools.
AS WE WORK for change, we will be nourished if we can keep in touch with our authenticity, instead of trying to fit into an overidealized mold of a perfect person. Or worse, a savior. There is a story I first heard from spiritual teacher Ram Dass that I’ve encountered various versions of over many years. I find it a wonderful description of our daily efforts to conform to the expectations of others, the stories they project onto us, our own assumptions of what perfection must look like, and where it can be found. Here’s the story:
A man wanted to have a suit made. So he went to a tailor in town named Zumbach. Zumbach took his measurements and ordered very fine material. After a while, the man went in for a fitting and put on the suit. One sleeve was two inches longer than the other. He said, “Zumbach, I don’t want to complain. It’s a beautiful suit. But this sleeve is two inches longer than that sleeve.”
Zumbach looked affronted. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with the suit. It’s the way you are standing.” And he pushed one of the man’s shoulders down and the other one up and said, “See, if you stand like that, it fits perfectly.”
The fellow looked in the mirror again, and now there was all this loose material behind the collar. He said, “Zumbach, what’s all this material sticking out?”
Perturbed, Zumbach said, “There is nothing wrong with that suit! It’s the way you are standing.” And he pushed in the man’s chin and made him hunch his shoulders. “See, it’s perfect.”
But with his shoulders all hunched up, there was another problem. “Now my whole rear end is sticking out!” the man complained.
“No problem,” Zumbach returned. “Just lift up your rear end so it fits under the jacket.” Again the customer complied, which left his body in a completely contorted posture.
“But standing like this the pants are too short.”
Zumbach answered, “There is nothing wrong with the suit! If you’ll just bend your knees a bit, you’ll see the trousers are just right.” The customer tried it, and lo and behold, with his knees bent, his rear end lifted, his shoulders hunched, and one shoulder pushing up and the other pushing down, the suit fit perfectly.
The man paid the tailor and walked out of the shop in a terribly awkward posture, with his shoulders lopsided and his head straining forward, struggling to keep all parts of the suit in their right places. He was walking to the bus, and somebody came up to him and said, “What a beautiful suit! I bet Zumbach the tailor made it.”
The man asked, “How did you know?”
“Because only a tailor of Zumbach’s skill could make a suit fit so perfectly on somebody with as many physical problems as you have.”
I think of the moments we take off the suit we have often struggled to conform to: the perfect image, the invulnerable warrior, the giver who never needs to receive. Whatever the story that has been overlaid on us might be, it is something we have taken to heart and embodied. Part of self-care is actually knowing who we are, what we want, where our boundaries are, and being able to genuinely be ourselves instead of contorting and then highly praising whoever has molded our increased pain.
With an ability to let go of the burden of those external dictates, we can stretch, we can relax, we can contemplate different approaches to our roles, our responsibilities, our tailor, and our wardrobe. Sometimes this looks like going on a retreat or a period of silence, a social media withdrawal, or a time of solitude. At other times, it is the introduction of greater simplicity right in the midst of our everyday lives. Can we let go, for example, of an activity that just seems to promote distraction or division?
Can we admit a preference, be amused by our eccentricity, be tender toward our frailty and exultant at our breathtaking ability to keep growing and learning? Can we fight hard for the decent treatment of farmworkers, and remember that we, too, are just human beings, and that there is likely to be the occasional banana?
IN ORDER TO have the resiliency to face difficulties—for example, a friend or client who can’t be helped or a day full of sudden changes outside of our control—we need to find and nurture the positive parts of ourselves and make a point of paying attention to experiences that give us pleasure.
Too often, we focus pretty much only on what’s wrong with us, or on negative, unpleasant experiences. We need to make a conscious effort to include the positive. This doesn’t have to be a phony effort or one that denies real problems. We just want to pay attention to aspects of our day we usually overlook or ignore. If we stop to notice moments of pleasure—a flower poking up through the sidewalk, a puppy experiencing snow for the first time, a kind interchange between strangers—we have a resource for more joy. This capacity to notice the positive might be somewhat untrained, but that’s okay. We practice meditation for just this kind of training.
For this meditation, sit or lie down on the floor in a relaxed, comfortable posture. Your eyes can be open or closed.
Now bring to mind a pleasurable experience you had recently, one that carries a positive emotion, such as happiness, joy, comfort, contentment, or gratitude. Maybe it was a wonderful meal or a reviving cup of coffee or time spent with your kids. Perhaps there’s something in your life you feel especially grateful for—a friend who is always there for you, a pet excited to see you, a gorgeous sunset, a moment of quiet. If you can’t think of a positive experience, be aware of giving yourself the gift of time to do this practice now.
Take a moment to cherish whatever image comes to mind with the recollection of the pleasurable experience. See what it feels like to sit with this recollection. Where in your body do you feel sensations arising? What are they? How do they change? Focus your attention on the part of your body where those sensations are the strongest. Stay with the awareness of your bodily sensations and your relationship to them, opening up to them and accepting them.
Now notice what emotions come up as you bring this experience to mind. You may feel moments of excitement, moments of hope, moments of fear, moments of wanting more. Just watch these emotions rise and pass away. All of these states are changing and shifting.
Perhaps you feel some uneasiness about letting yourself feel too good, because you fear bad luck might follow. Perhaps you feel some guilt about not deserving to feel this happiness. In such moments, practice inviting in the feelings of joy or delight, and allowing yourself to make space for them. Acknowledge and fully experience such emotions.
Notice what thoughts may be present as you bring to mind the positive. Do you have a sense of being less confined or less stuck in habits? Or perhaps you find yourself falling back into thoughts about what went wrong in your day, what disappointed you—these thoughts can be more comfortable because they are so familiar. If so, take note of this. Do you tell yourself, I don’t deserve this pleasure until I give up my bad habits, or I must find a way to make this last forever? Try to become aware of such add-on thoughts and see if you can let them go and simply be with the feeling of the moment.
End the meditation by simply sitting and being with the breath. Be with the breath gently, as though you were cradling it. Then when you’re ready, you can open your eyes.
Bring this skill of gentle interest, curiosity, and attention to your encounters throughout the day. Notice pleasurable or positive moments, even those that may seem small.