Highlights
The sangha aspect of this path of resistance is to be in community, to resist the separateness, to resist the individuality that is so inculcated in us, especially in the West. If you get yours, I can’t get mine. And so my job is to take yours or make sure you can’t get it so I can get it. ⊠And even there, we can’t let the beloved community not include those same people who are telling us that you are separate from us and who are impacting us and violating us and oppressing us individually and as collectives. We still then have to welcome them into this beloved circle.
These practices of stopping, calming ourselves, mindful breathing, mindful walking, and it doesn’t need to be anything grand, but simply recognizing, feeling my feet on the ground, taking a deep breath and slowly releasing the exhale to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. What does that do? In addition to calming the nervous system, it regulates, it’s an act of self-regulation, self stewardship. And that is also the practice of not just self-regulation but co-regulation because we’re not separate. And so a regulated nervous system really is beneficial to the whole environment.
This practice, what it does when we take that breath and we take that pause, it gives us a bigger perspective. And it’s that simple, right? It’s not like you have to go in front of people and recite the five mindfulness trainings or recite contemplations before eating in the midst of a protest. It’s as simple as stopping and breathing and remember coming back to yourself, coming back. I remember that I’m part of something much bigger than myself, right?
The disruption is the stopping. We’re disrupting the fast pace. So the disruption and the resistance is actually saying, I’m not going to go with the majority. I’m actually going to stop. I’m going to breathe. There’s all this going on, but right now, I feel so ungrounded, I’m going to actually go and spend a day of mindfulness just breathing, walking slowly, making tea, whatever, orange juice and drinking it mindfully. I’m going to be lazy. And to me, that’s a disruption. And if we could all be disruptive in that way, as well as getting on the street, as well as writing the letters to the governors, as well as sometimes laying down on the ground in front of the bulldozer.
I think we need to grieve the moment, there’s things to grieve. It’s real. Let’s not bypass the grief. And then we need to find joy. The joy is so, so important. The joy is what gives us the ground from which we can keep coming back again and again. So we need to grieve and then we need to find joy. And when I say joy, I mean just the preciousness of any moment that’s there right in front of us, the preciousness of their friends, the preciousness of sangha, preciousness of the sun and the trees turning colors.
The transcript of this conversation can be found here: Practice Is Disruption
