Highlights
It’s very challenging to be within all of this and to stay with an open heart. What is a contemplative or spiritual or Buddhist or mindful response to the US elections? If we’re not simply talking about how do we get by the next few weeks feeling okay, if that’s not the limit of our curiosity, what does it really mean to be truly spiritual and responsive in these times over this next month?
… creating a gap and a distance between the speed and the crisis mentality and sinking into something more profound, even over these next two weeks. These deep roots are really how the tree is able to stay alive, how the tree is able to maintain its being. So I encourage you to practice.
There’s ways that many of our Buddhist communities have this kind of aesthetic or culture where we’re supposed to be calm, we’re supposed to be peaceful, and that can really suppress the pain, the rage, the fear, and lead to a false kind of modern Buddhist mask where we’re trying to live up to an ideal. And I don’t think that’s helpful to anyone.
One of the things that I think would be most amazing was if our meditation teachings helped support us in expanding our anger, making it bigger, making it stronger, making that blaze hotter, more intense, more potent, so that we actually have something powerful, that the strength of anger starts to show through. It’s courageousness. And it’s fierceness. This is a flower, fruit of the tree.
Cultivating the capacity to tolerate that openness and uncertainty, to stay with that quivering heart, is part of the swaying teaching of the tree. So the tree teaches us with roots, but also an openness, a swaying, going beyond our hopes, fears, and expectations.
The full transcript can be found here.
