How to Respond to Evil

How to Respond to Evil An Excerpt from Sweeter Than Revenge by David Richo We open our discussion with a powerful statement from Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ, former head of the Jesuit order, in his 1973 Address to Graduates of Jesuit Schools in Europe: Most of us would be relatively good in a good world. What is difficult is to be good in an evil world, where the egoism of others and the egoism built into the institutions of society attack us and threaten to annihilate us. Under such conditions, the only possible reaction would seem to be to oppose evil with evil, egoism with egoism, hate with hate; in short, to annihilate the aggressor with his own weapons. But is it not precisely thus that evil conquers us most thoroughly? For then, not only does it damage us exteriorly, it perverts our very heart. . . . Evil is overcome only by good, hate by love, egoism by generosity. It is thus that we must sow justice in our world. To be just, it is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self-interest as the driving force of society. Evil is a mystery. But we can say something about the elements of an evil act: We intend and do grave harm. Our action involves a serious matter. We act with malice. We are fully aware that what we are doing is wrong. We are acting with the full consent of our will—that is, voluntarily. All evil is harmful, but not all that is harmful is evil. An example of an evil act is murder in the first degree: someone wills an evil effect—that is, the criminal death of the victim, with no mitigating circumstances and with full understanding that murder is wrong. (Psychopaths have an organic deficit of empathy, a lack of conscience, so the question of choice becomes moot.) Not even a good end justifies an evil means, but when evil happens anyway, good can sometimes come of it, though this does not justify evil choices. Sometimes we choose the cause that leads to a harmful end while not deliberately willing that effect. An alcoholic husband knows he will most likely strike his wife and children if he drinks too much. He then is actually choosing to be abusive when he engages in excessive drinking. Sometimes evil is willed in both the cause and effect. For instance, the advertising committee members of a tobacco company vote to aim advertisements at teenage children while knowing that vaping and smoking will definitely harm their health, be likely to lead to addiction, and possibly end in death. Unlike premeditated murder, the tobacco company willfully reaches out to teens, but not intentionally to cause the possible lethal effect—that is, cancer. Yet tobacco companies know of the deleterious effects of their products, so they have willed evil in cause and effect. In this instance, intentional greed—a malicious intent—is the motivation. Evil is a quality of a human act. Some acts can be harmful, but we are not responsible for any resulting evil. For instance, we know that driving a car causes harm to the environment, but we are not maliciously intending that result or seeking personal gain. So evil in this instance cannot be imputed to the driver, but the driver is doing harm. Likewise, killing in self-defense or to protect others from being killed is doing harm, but it is not an evil in itself. All evil is harmful, but not all that is harmful is evil. Evil is a quality of a human act. People perpetrate evil acts. Acts are evil, but people are not. At the same time, some people give themselves over to evil deeds so often and so fully that they become possessed by evil and so are considered evil by society— for example, Hitler or Stalin. Such people don’t consider their evil deeds to be wrong, only necessary. They normalize evil in their own minds but are still culpable. In the plays of Shakespeare, for instance, Macbeth and Iago normalized the evil that possessed them, but Laertes and Othello only did evil things. Evil is not only a quality of an individual act but can also be systemic. It exists in corporate, political, and religious institutions that perpetuate injustice, abuse, greed, and war. Systemic evil exists in most of society’s institutions. In recent years, we have seen the corrupt underbelly of one venerated institution after another. All institutions, like all people, have a shadow side: a life-, justice-, and freedom-negating agenda. Whistle-blowers are the assisting forces in the human community who turn the spotlight on them and on ourselves. Nonviolence is not a goal but a virtue, a habit, an ethical choice in the face of evil and aggression. In Buddhism we are warned of three poisons that prevent enlightenment: greed, hate, and ignorance. All three can pave the way to retaliatory behavior. In greed, we want more and more and may be vengeful toward those we envy for having it. We retaliate more and more against those we hate. We retaliate out of ignorance of our interconnectedness as humans, thinking we have a separate existence or that our life is worth more than the lives of others. Notice the varied uses of the word “more” in the above description of the three poisons. Pursuing each “more” leads to winding up with less. Indeed, pursuing recrimination is precisely about a life of less: less generosity, less love, less connection. There are many ways to respond to evil. Three stand out: passivity, violent resistance, or nonviolent resistance. What is called the reptilian brain—that is, our brain center of primitive, aggressive, uncivilized impulses—supports the first two options. The third way is militant nonviolence. This is not passivity or obsequious submission, but resolute opposition to evil using peaceful means—what Martin Luther King Jr. often called “soul force” and what Gandhi called “truth force.” Nonviolence is not a goal but a virtue, a habit, an ethical choice in the face of evil and aggression. Its only purpose is the peace and survival of all concerned. It is not a strategy to win but to win over others to the disarming arts of fruitful relating. We act this way in our relationships whether others show loving-kindness to us or even thank us for it. Faithfulness to our own standard of love is so satisfying that recognition by or thanks from others is no longer a priority. Now even our political purposes have become enlightened. The old lyrics “We shall overcome someday” mean that we shall overcome injustice, war, and hate, not that we will show the officials who support them how wrong they are. This is what a new way of living looks like. Evil easily wins approval when it is motivated by what we judge to be a positive purpose or when it offers the possibility of a beneficial outcome. In such instances, we may believe that a good intention can justify an evil result. Of course, good intentions do not justify evil. As it is said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the irony is that sometimes evil leads to an unexpected good, as in the story of Joseph and his brothers. Friedrich Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human states: “Such evil and painful incidents belong to the history of the great emancipation.” Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Share Add to Goodreads Shelf David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He combines Jungian, poetic, and mythic perspectives in his work with the intention of integrating the psychological and the spiritual. David Richo is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California. Explore David Richo’s Shelf

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Gentling the Inner Critic

Gentling the Inner Critic As you left their voice behind The stars began to burn Through. . . . —Mary Oliver, “The Journey”   Our inner critic is the part of us that has given up on us. It hurls “can’ts” and “shoulds” at us: You can’t go. You can’t make it alone. You should stay put. The inner critic is a mindset, usually from the past; it’s something we learned, not something we were born with. It is an echo from people and institutions who judged us in the course of life. They include family, peers, religion, school, society. This mindset is now internalized and part of our mental apparatus. Most of us have internalized some shaming messages from our past. The inner critic most often has the voice of the scolding parent. This voice takes on a life of its own in us, so we think we are hearing our own accurate assessment of ourselves. But we are actually listening to a skilled ventriloquist. Yet, there is good news. Since the critic now exists only in our heads, we can change the message we hear. We can input the voice of a nurturing parent or kindly coach instead, one who says what encourages us and bolsters our self-esteem. We can hear in our mind what we wanted to hear from our original parent. We might also hear what our parent or any supportive person in our lives has said. Nurturance can be described as a caring that is shown by the five A’s—sources of joy too!      We can tame or silence the inner critic—this enemy within who tells us we can’t move, can’t make an accurate assessment or a wise choice, that we have no options. We do this not with a whip but with gentle coaxing of the negative voice onto the channel of self-advocacy. Free of self-deception we might say to ourselves: “So much of what I hear from myself is not really me. I allow my supportive voice to have a say.”      One inroad into the posture of the inner critic is noticing that the voice always sounds final: this is who you are and all you are. It is absolute in its verdict: you are nothing but guilty or weak or inadequate. It is not provisional. It is not open to discussion, to solutions, to alternatives—exactly the style that can keep us stuck. Indeed, an inner critic abhors the idea of a journey; it wants only to keep us immobile, unevolving. In other words it is nothing less than the bully of fear. This is why it can’t be right in what it whispers to us. The inner critic is on the side of self-reproach, self-abnegation, self-negation, self-loathing. It does not love us. Likewise, the inner critic moves from one particular experience to a deadly generalization. “She doesn’t like me” becomes “I am unlikable.” Thus, what happened today becomes tomorrow’s decree. The inner critic is the heretic who denies the Buddhist teaching on enlightened liberation being available to everyone all the time. Six Practices to Change the Inner Critic into an Inner Ally Here are some ways to reset our inner critical voice into one of self-advocacy. Choose any one or try one each day: Moving from Past to Present List three negative messages from your inner critic in your journal. Connect each statement to its origin, usually in early life. Was it appropriate then? Is it appropriate now? What shame did you feel? Where did you first hear this? Who said it? Were they trying to help or hurt you? Do this without blame for anyone but only as an accessing of information.  Moving from Always to Sometimes  Notice if the inner critic’s vocabulary is absolute: You always . . . You can’t ever . . . Under the absolute statement write a more inclusive one. Don’t deny the main point but only reduce it from absolute to relative: “Yes, I often can’t . . .” and “Sometimes I can . . .” Now you are changing a negative verdict against you into a neutral fact about all of us. You are reminding your inner critic—that is, yourself—that inadequacy is a feature of being human. It is a given that all of us sometimes make mistakes, act inappropriately, fail. Let yourself thereby feel a kinship with all other humans. Remind yourself that you also are committing yourself to do what you can to make up for your failings—all that really matters. As Joe Biden said at the 2020 Democratic Convention: “Failure at some point in life is inevitable but giving up is unforgivable.”  Mindfully Breathing  Place the message of the inner critic into a mindfulness container: Sit with the statement and shear it of judgment, shame, belief, insult, triggering. Let it become only words in your head and label them as such. Do all this as you keep coming back to your breaths, lifelong teachers of taking in and letting go.  Showing Self-Compassion   The inner critic disregards the pain it causes us by its put-downs. It does not seem to care about how our feelings are hurt, how our self-esteem is diminished. We can, however, step in and show self-compassion as the antidote to its judgments. We are actually helping our inner critic become compassionate. Our practice also extends to the inner critic in us that judges others, whether internally or vocally. In that area too, we convert judgment into compassion. Everything we judge others for has some kind of pain behind it. Our practice is to look for the pain the other might be feeling in doing what we believe is wrong. For instance, we judge someone as controlling. Behind that behavior there can be the pain of compulsion and fear. We are retraining our brain so that our inner judgments automatically redirect into compassionate avowals.  Giving Equal Time  The inner critic catastrophizes about upcoming events and sees the worst as what will definitely happen. We then worry about the outcome. Worry can be reduced by openness to other possibilities beyond the catastrophic. As a practice, we expand our speculation: We give equal time to the opposite of catastrophe. We acknowledge that the worst might not happen. We hold our hands out palms up and imagine we are holding the negative speculation in one hand and the positive in the other. We look at the hand holding the positive and see ourselves being grateful. We look at the negative one and see ourselves being courageous in handling whatever happens. Now we are allowing our minds to go in two directions, but in both we find something positive.  Calling on Our Spiritual Resources   Call on the spiritual resource that fits for you. Ask for support in your practice:   Bodhisattvas, help me appreciate your wisdom and compassion. Holy Spirit, I thank you for your gifts, help me appreciate them and put them to use. May the universe join me in my personal evolution.  Here are three examples of combining the above practice with these spiritual resources:  Inner critic: You make stupid mistakes because you are stupid. Your sane voice: Like all humans, I sometimes make mistakes. I also make up for them when I can. Your higher self: I have received the gift of wisdom. May it keep opening in and through me. It is opening right now in this practice I am doing and being. Inner critic: You will never amount to anything. Your sane voice: Like all humans, I will sometimes be successful and sometimes not. I commit myself to do all I can to live a worthwhile life. Your higher self: I am of great value to myself, others, and the world. May I deeply grasp this and be thankful for it. Inner critic: You have nothing to offer a partner or a career. Your sane voice: Like all humans, I have some valuable qualities. I will keep gaining knowledge and skills. I have no control over whether someone will see them, but I will keep showing them. Your higher self: I have all the effulgent virtues and graces that any human may have. I also keep upgrading my skill set to fulfill my calling. May I be thankful and keep sharing my gifts with the world around me.  We don’t have to worry too much about buying into our self-deceptions. Our higher self is unrelenting in its battle against pretense. Circumstances and people will keep appearing on our stage that will unmask the characters and plot. This will feel threatening to the imperious ego robed so safely in its thousand disguises. But a subtheme of this book is letting go of an inflated ego, the harbinger of a great fall, so let’s welcome the opportunity.      This book offers many practices and proposes many changes in how we relate to ourselves, others, and our world. None of us will be perfect or totally successful in establishing new mindsets and behaviors without work on ourselves. In addition, a readiness has to happen that is beyond the reach of work. One of my greatest joys is knowing that I am more and more of a beginner and being friendly toward that position. My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am. —Carl Jung, response to a student who had just read Bunyan’s book and asked Jung what his “pilgrim’s progress” consisted of Share An Excerpt from Ready Related Books David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He combines Jungian, poetic, and mythic perspectives in his work with the intention of integrating the psychological and the spiritual. David Richo is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

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Best of David Richo

Sign up to receive hand-picked advice on life, love, and relationships from psychotherapist, teacher, and bestselling author David Richo. With over 50 years of experience as a psychotherapist, David Richo is a leading relationship expert whose work has touched hundreds of thousands of hearts and lives. Blending Western psychology and Eastern spirituality, he offers a fresh and inspiring approach to personal growth and emotional well-being, providing us with the tools we need to care for ourselves and the world around us. Over the next two months, we'll be sharing a series of hand-picked quotes from each of Richo’s books that explore topics like emotional healing, mindful loving, healthy communication, and personal growth. We hope these offerings serve as a source of reflection, meditation, and growth for you and your relationships. Explore David Richo’s Shelf David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He combines Jungian, poetic, and mythic perspectives in his work with the intention of integrating the psychological and the spiritual. David Richo is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

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Mindful Loving: A Relationship Q&A

Relationships as a Spiritual Practice A Q&A with David Richo, author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships What does it mean to be an “adult” in relationships? Firstly, what does it mean to be an “adult?” To be an adult is to learn to play for ourselves the roles the functional family was supposed to play for us. Becoming more adult means having an inner nurturant parent who supervises our unruly inner child, protects our endangered inner child, and comforts our scared inner child. It is only through the nourishment of our inner child that we can learn to engage in a healthy adult relationship. To be an adult in relationships we must commit to a thoroughly truthful enterprise of ongoing love. It entails an unremitting willingness to keep agreements and handle obstacles by addressing, processing, and resolving conflicts. Happiness and mutual respect result. True love cannot be fooled, nor does it attempt to fool others. As mature adults, we can no longer be charmed by looks or sweet talk. All that matters is enduring mutual commitment. Ultimately, to be an adult in relationships means: to make and keep commitments to act from integrity not only in our intimate relationships but in all our dealings to take responsibility for our feelings, behaviors, and choices to act in trustworthy ways, including being faithful to the ground-rules of our relationship to show the five A’s of love: attention, affection, appreciation, acceptance, allowing  When we apply mindfulness to our relationships, we can finally see ourselves and others as we are, in all our touching vulnerability and with all our rich potential for love. In How to Be an Adult in Relationships you say, “love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.” Can you elaborate on this? Love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present. We show love through a sustained and active presence with an unconditional expression of the five A’s and without the conditioned overlays or mindsets of ego, such as judgment, fear, control, and so on. We receive love the same way—with the five A’s and without our ego interferences. In other words, love happens best in the context of mindfulness. Mindfulness is an ancient meditation mode in which we let go of our fears, our attachments, our cravings, our expectations and entitlements, and our judgments of others. Instead of these habitual strategies, we learn to simply stay present openly in the moment—with nothing in the way—so we can experience life as it occurs. When we apply mindfulness to our relationships, we can finally see ourselves and others as we are, in all our touching vulnerability and with all our rich potential for love. Have you seen relationships change over the last few years due to COVID? Do you have any advice during these times? Yes, I have seen more strain on relationships because the hunkering down means we are required to spend more time together. Healthy relationships thrive on a combination of alone time and together time. When we are forced to be together for too long we begin to lose our patience with one another and anger arises. This means that we lose some of our communication skills. We may even begin to feel smothered or a loss of freedom. If you feel the pressures of the current pandemic weighing on your relationship, I suggest sharing your concerns with your partner and working together to find a new balance of alone time and together time that works for you. Cooperation—partnership—is the heart of conflict resolution. We are not working individually for the ascendancy of our own positions. We work together for the health and happiness of the relationship. Take a moment to assess the balance of alone time and together time within your relationship with this exercise: VOWING/DISAVOWING | Ask yourself: Does my vow of commitment to my partner require a disavowing of any part of myself? Ask these questions of one another: Can we find ways to work separately on the inner discoveries we both need to make before we can fulfill one another’s needs adequately? Can you grant me that space? Can I allow you that space? Can I trust that you will still be there for me when I come back intact and ready to be in touch? Will I be there for you also? Or will our own urgent childhood needs or our desire for drama be so intense that we will vitiate or scuttle this whole soulful venture? Are we genuinely committed to doing the work it will take to safeguard our relationship? How can we take critical feedback from our partners without getting defensive? When you are committed to the work of making yourself a more loving person, you no longer rely on your own brain for all your information. You are happy to learn about yourself from your partner or anyone else you trust. You are open to finding out how you appear to those who see your shadow or dark side. You welcome feedback about how you come across to others. If you find that your ego cannot tolerate being called to task or shown to be inadequate or wrong, then the work is letting go of ego. A good affirmation is: I commit myself to find some truth in any feedback I receive. Why do we seek to re-enact the deficits, wounds, and deprivations of our childhood with our current partners? A poignant thing about us humans is that we seem hard-wired to replay the past, especially when our past includes emotional pain or disappointment. Though most of us want to move on from the past, we tend to go through our lives simply casting new people in the roles of key characters, such as our parents or any significant person with whom we still have unfinished emotional business. Unbeknownst to us, we are glimpsing important figures from our past in our partners, friends, associates, enemies, and even strangers. We bring them the still unfinished or unseen or unexpressed feelings and needs of childhood. Recreating relationship patterns from our childhood is our way to tell the untold story inside us and complete it. For better or for worse, our psychic development is the result of a lifelong continuum of relationships. The adult goal is to work through each of them. When we did not receive fulfillment in one or more of the five A’s, a bottomless pit was created in us, an unfulfillable yearning for the missing pieces of our puzzling and arid past. Mourning an unfulfilled childhood is painful. We fear grief because we know we will not be able to control its intensity, its duration, or its range, and so we look for ways around it. But engaging with our grief is a form of self-nurturance and liberation from neediness. Paradoxically, to let ourselves experience our wounded feelings fully places us on the path to healthy intimacy. Ask yourself: Is this my problem? Have I been afraid to grieve what I did not get from Mom and Dad and so have demanded it from partners, strangers, and innocent bystanders? Am I unable to find it in myself because I have been investing all my energy in looking for it in someone else?  This topic became another book of mine. The title says it all: When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships. Our work is not to renounce our childhood needs but to take them into account, work on them, and enlist our partner to help us do this, if she or he is willing. Why is it important to be a ‘mirror’ for your partner? Mirroring helps us survive emotionally—that is, to experience the events of our life with the power to handle them and without being devastated or embittered by them. We all have what it takes to feel, but to experience our feelings fully and safely, they have to be “validated” by someone who mirrors them. Mirroring happens when someone accurately reflects our feelings back to us with a warm welcome. We then know we are understood and it is safe to have and show our feelings. Mirroring by someone includes unconditional positive regard for our unique needs, values, and wishes shown by someone who mindfully provides the five A’s. The element of mindfulness means that we feel loved without the ego’s artifacts of fear, attachment, control, expectation, clinging, biases, defenses, or judgment. This practice from my book is designed to strengthen your understanding of mirroring: MIRRORING | In every phase of life we see the influence of our earliest longings. Our work is not to renounce our childhood needs but to take them into account, work on them, and enlist our partner to help us do this, if she or he is willing. Our goal is not just to cut our parental ties but to unite with a partner who can join us in our work. As Shakespeare says in King Lear, “Who alone suffers, suffers most.” Ask these questions of your partner: I was derailed in some of my development. Can you help me in my efforts to get back on track? Are you the person with whom I can safely welcome and revive my earliest unmet needs and redirect my thwarted strivings? Can I work with you on mutual mirroring, that is, understanding and welcoming of feelings? Do I sometimes trigger you into feeling something I couldn’t bear to feel, so that you can help me identify it and then hold it with me? Do you make me feel the things you couldn’t bear to feel? How can we challenge ourselves on all this and move past it? Which of my feelings do you mirror? Which of yours do I mirror? Which feelings do we fear in one another? How do we know when it’s time to move on from a relationship? Last year was my fiftieth anniversary as a psychotherapist, and I asked myself what problem I saw the most in clients. The answer was: staying too long in what doesn’t work. That has been true of me too. You? We have all stayed too long in what doesn’t work. The “what doesn’t work” can apply to relationships, jobs, addictions, chronic pain, unresolved conflicts, enmeshment in family drama, affiliation to a religion, organization, or institution—just about anything we become involved in. On the other hand, there are times in life when we don’t stay long enough. We don’t hang in there through thick and thin in a relationship or affiliation that really can work. There is also the mystery of timing, feeling and responding to the opportune time. Ultimately, our readiness depends on the ping of a timer not in our hands. Time is a player in all our comings and goings. My book, Ready: How to Know When to Go and When to Stay, coming out this April, treats this topic and presents practices that can help us know our timing and act in accord with it. Share Related Books David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He combines Jungian, poetic, and mythic perspectives in his work with the intention of integrating the psychological and the spiritual. David Richo is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

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How Being with Our Pain Can Open Our Hearts

A Few Thoughts about Suffering An excerpt from Peace from Anxiety As you can see from the discussion of trauma, suffering comes in many flavors. It can be rooted in personal, interpersonal, or systemic issues. Some suffering is inevitable—things like death, illness, and loss touch everyone in their lifetime. Some of us are protected from certain kinds of suffering, while others face a disproportionate amount of it. In this chapter I’m going to invite you to step back a bit and reflect on your relationship with suffering—your own suffering and the suffering of others. Cultivating a meaningful relationship with suffering is central to working with anxiety. One of the ways we can define anxiety is “a fear of fear.” Our fear of facing our suffering can end up making us more anxious than the suffering itself! Being with Suffering Being in a conscious relationship with suffering is necessary if we want to be whole and at peace. As Brené Brown says, “Because we have lost our ability to feel pain and discomfort we have transformed it into anger and hate.”¹ When this is directed outward, the world feels like our enemy. When this anger is directed inward, we become our own worst enemy. If we want to heal, we have to feel the source of our suffering, not the pain associated with denying it. Lanie’s story is a good example of this. Lanie struggled with an eating disorder her whole life. When she came to me at age fifty, she was still in a cycle of dieting and binging that had begun at age eight. For the first few months of therapy, it was hard for me to get her to talk about anything other than food plans and exercise regimes. She had such a deep hatred of her body, and her whole existence was oriented around her cruel inner voice that constantly told her that she was disgusting. She knew that as a young girl she’d used food to mask her feelings of grief over the death of her father. Her mother and sister had died while Lanie was in her twenties, and this had taken her eating disorder to a new level. Through some deep work in therapy exploring what was beneath the eating disorder, Lanie realized that not only did she use food to numb her grief, but also her grief had been transformed into self-hate, and that fueled her behavior. As painful as it was to struggle with her weight and self-esteem, on some level this was easier than dealing with her grief. Only when she finally let herself feel her grief was she able to find the compassion for herself to feel that she deserved to live and be happy. Her preoccupation with food and her weight was a distraction from the deeper issues that she was avoiding. Reflection What are your conscious or subconscious beliefs about suffering? What were you taught about suffering in your family of origin? It’s okay if your answers seem irrational or unreasonable. Suffering as Growth Right now, I am raising a middle schooler. I don’t know about you, but middle school was one of the toughest times of my life. I know very few people who have fond memories of sixth grade. It’s a tumultuous time socially, hormonally, and academically. Adolescence is when we are faced with the discomfort of these changes in our body and mind. This is our transition from childhood to adulthood, and even when kids have all the support they need, it can feel chaotic and hard. If we weren’t faced with trauma prior to adolescence, this can be the first time we face significant suffering. In some ways, how we deal with adolescence can influence how we deal with change and suffering as adults. Many adolescents tend to blame the outside world for their discomfort. This is a bit of a hallmark of that stage. My sixth-grade son is no exception. He is in a phase of being unhappy with everything. Rather than being with his pain, most of the time he is convinced that the world is a horrible place designed by adults to keep him miserable using tactics like homework, video game limits, bedtimes, and vegetables. He is often angry and frustrated, feeling like things never go his way. In quiet moments together, usually at the end of the day when he’s in bed and I come to say goodnight, he’ll acknowledge the depths of his pain and admit that it’s not caused by anything outside of him. In his case, things are fine, and he wants for nothing. He knows he is privileged and has his basic material needs met as well as loving people around him. He knows his unhappiness cannot be eradicated with unlimited video game time and desserts. When he gets vulnerable in this way, I do my best to listen and simply bear witness to his experience without trying to fix it right away. I try to sit with him in his suffering to show him that he doesn’t have to run away from it. In some ways, how we deal with adolescence can influence how we deal with change and suffering as adults. Sometimes I’ll offer him tools for how to be with his intense emotions. Things like noticing how the emotion feels in his body and using breath or grounding to not get overwhelmed. I remind him he can write in his journal or reach out to a friend or me or his dad. Sometimes he takes it in, but right now he mostly rolls his eyes and tells me I don’t know what I’m talking about. (It takes everything in me not to defensively say to him, “I’m an expert in this stuff! I’m literally writing a book about it!”) I know that it took me a lifetime to learn about suffering, and I’m still learning. I spent the first half of my life trying to avoid suffering, and only in the second half of my life am I understanding the wisdom of being with it. I can’t make my children avoid what I think is unnecessary anxiety and pain by pushing these ideas onto them. That would be ironic! As much as I’d like that, I know that they’ll need to be bumped around by life and learn the lessons in their due time. As parents, being able to be with our children’s suffering with patience and compassion (even if what is bothering them seems unreasonable) can be one way we help them navigate the layers of their own pain and help them see that their suffering can be a doorway into deeper self-knowledge and even freedom. Finding the Wisdom in Our Suffering Find a comfortable position, take a few moments to get grounded, and connect with your breath. When you’re ready, think about your relationship with suffering. Notice how it feels in your body to think about suffering in general, and, if you feel grounded enough, stay with it for a moment. Then imagine that you could turn this feeling into a person, animal, or any type of creature. What does it look like? What does it say to you? What does it want you to know? What does it need from you? Let your imagination flow here as you imagine a dialogue with this wise creature. Moving Through, Not Around In The Book of Joy, which is a conversation between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the authors write: “Suffering is inevitable . . . but how we respond to that suffering is our choice. Not even oppression or occupation can take away this freedom to choose our response.”² These wise men feel that we always have a choice, even in the most extreme situations. Both men are known for their compassion and levelheadedness in the face of crisis, and both have a lightness and sense of humor that is unexpected given the atrocities they have experienced and witnessed. In this poignant book, they talk about being with suffering as a doorway to empathy as well as a reminder that we’re not alone in our suffering. It is through their acceptance of suffering that they have been able to find hope and even joy. This is not what we are taught in mainstream Western culture (and many other cultures). Many of us are taught to deny and avoid our pain at any cost. Consumer culture tells us to buy things to make us happy and aspirational marketing has us striving for superficial goals like being thin, wealthy, or popular. We are taught to value appearing happy rather than actually being happy. We often hide our suffering from each other. This perpetuates our isolation and false belief that everyone else is okay and faring better than us. As the saying goes, “What you resist persists.” We’ve got to face our suffering head-on, so that we can transform it, move through it, or be able to be with it without adding to it with our resistance. Surfing offers an interesting metaphor for this. When I was taking my first surfing lesson on Venice Beach, the instructor explained to me that when I’m paddling out, if a set of waves starts to roll in, I should turn the nose of my board into the waves rather than trying to avoid them. He explained that if I try to avoid the waves they will pummel me to the bottom, but if I meet them with the nose of my board I can surf through them and get to the other side. That all made sense, but when the moment came, my fear had me paddling away from the giant wave coming toward me. I knew in my head I should meet it, but my body automatically had me frantically trying to avoid the powerful force heading my way. Inevitably I’d end up thrown off my board and pushed to the bottom of the sea. I’d come up gasping for air and worried that my board was going to hit me in the head. Finally, after being beaten by the waves many times, I stayed to face the next one. It felt counterintuitive and, although I didn’t realize it then, I actually used my resourcing tools of breathing and grounding through my board to be able to not run away. This time, I moved toward the wave. And guess what? I went through it! And it flowed over me without much drama. It was quite empowering and made surfing a much more fun activity. We’ve got to face our suffering head-on, so that we can transform it, move through it, or be able to be with it without adding to it with our resistance. I had another chance to learn this lesson while giving birth to my second son. After laboring for several hours, it came time to push and I hit what is called “transition.” This is often the point where people think that maybe they can’t push the baby out because it’s too hard. For me, transition felt like a hot fire that was going to rip me in half. My midwife was instructing me to push as hard as I could. The pain was so intense, and, to try to manage it, I started visualizing holding my baby and being on the other side of the pain. But each time I did that, the baby would start to move back up the birth canal. You see, I was trying to bypass the pain, and each time I did, I got further away from my goal. Finally, my midwife looked at me very matter-of-factly and said, “I need you to go here,” and she pointed to the ring of fire. “If you don’t, the baby’s health could be compromised!” I knew in that moment I needed to do what I teach others to do. I had to move toward the intensity, toward what felt like could be death. On the other side would be my baby in my arms, but I couldn’t skip over the process. At that moment, I bore down as hard as I could and pushed right into the pain. It was scary, but I knew there was no choice. A few minutes later Marley was born. I wish I could say that my first thought was about my beautiful baby, but it wasn’t; it was, “Thank God that’s over!” I was exhausted! Then my body started shaking. I knew it was discharging the trauma of the birth, so I let myself shake and release for a while. Then I was able to feel gratitude for my baby, and for myself for all my hard work! Reflection What life experiences have you had that have taught you that suffering can be transformed into meaningful growth? What experiences have you had of resisting suffering and inadvertently creating more? What situations or experiences are currently present for you that may be opportunities to stay with discomfort rather than avoiding it? Footnotes Krista Tippet, On Being, podcast, January 2020. Desmond Tutu, Dalai Lama, and Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (New York: Avery, 2016), 7. Share Related Books Hala Khouri, MA, is a therapist, yoga teacher, and somatic experiencing practitioner. One of the founders of Off the Mat and Into the World, she teaches workshops on resilience, anxiety, trauma, and social justice nationally.

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Peace from Anxiety Book Club Guide

The material in Peace from Anxiety can be much more impactful when approached in an interactive and exploratory way. It is especially powerful when you can engage with the material with others. This is your guide to working with the concepts in this book with a small, trusted group of people. There are many ways to run your book club. This document is going to give you some ideas on how to create some structure for your meetings and your conversations. 5 lucky book clubs will win a special guest appearance from Hala Khouri! Enter to win by downloading the book club guide. Hala will join groups with five or more participants for a 30-minute Q&A session about the book. Winning book clubs will be selected on Tuesday, May 5, and contacted via the email addresses provided at download. Enter your email address to download your book club guide and be entered to win a guest appearance from Hala Khouri! Email Address * First Name     *You are agreeing to receive promotional messages from Shambhala Publications. You may unsubscribe at any time.

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Free Dowload | Peace from Anxiety

5 Free Tools to Release Stress and Anxiety Reclaim your capacity to heal and learn to regulate your nervous system with practices and reflections from therapist and yoga teacher Hala Khouri, author of Peace from Anxiety. Draw a body map, learn to feel your emotions with curiosity, and shift your limiting beliefs with this collection of tools for releasing stress and being present with discomfort. In this download, Khouri explores how our brain and nervous system experience stress and how we can begin to get in touch with our body to better understand its signals and how to handle them. Join Hala Khouri on a journey from individual wellbeing to collective care. Download Now Related

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Having a Clear Intention in Conversation

Navigating Difficult Conversations An excerpt from Compassionate Conversations Intention and Conversation Having a clear intention will literally help us navigate our conversations when we encounter difficult terrain. To enter a conversation (other than one that is simply social) without an intention is like walking into the wilderness without a compass. And yet we engage in conversations all the time without having one, sometimes without even the vaguest idea of how we would like the conversation to go. Rather than being clear as to what we want, whether it’s to assert our truth, to exchange perspectives, to expand our understanding, to learn about another person’s life, or to practice listening, we go in blind and end up stumbling all over the place. We lose ourselves in dense, hidden motives ranging from wanting to be right and proving others wrong, to flaunting our expertise and establishing dominance. We become entangled in trying to impress others or trying to self-protect. We aren’t prepared for feelings when they crop up, so we ignore or simply cope with them, like wading through unexpected expanses of deserts or boggy swamps. Our important conversations are often rambling, aimless, and in the end, unsatisfying and wearying. We need a reliable reference point, a North Star if you will, for when the going gets tough. So in our facilitation work, we insist that our groups always agree on a shared intention for a conversation right up-front. Intentions engage the frontal cortex, that part of the brain involved in thinking, planning, and decision-making. It coordinates our thoughts and actions with internal goals and provides us with a healthy focus. As Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor, neuroendocrinologist, and neurobiologist, points out, “The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.” For example, when anxiety begins to grip the room and we then bring our shared intention to mind, it will often restore relaxation, curiosity, and faith in the process. Gabriel and Diane organized a workshop that brought together a group of black and white friends to explore and transform their racial dynamics. When putting out the call for the workshop, Gabe explicitly said, “This is a space where everybody, black or white, gay or straight, liberal or conservative, and everyone in-between, must agree to challenge themselves, to grow their heart and communication skills and be accountable to the rest of us. Our intention is to transform our unconscious group dynamics into liberated and mutually affirming relationships.” Typically, most of us engage in conversations about race, gender, politics, or religion not to grow our heart, but to confirm our own personal beliefs and perceptions, including proving others wrong. Group identity and loyalty to our own tribe has far more influence on what we think, believe, and say than we would like to admit. In this workshop, Gabe deliberately formulated the intention to have conversations that were fresh and revealing, and that gave everyone a chance to grow their skill set. To meet these aims, everyone had to buy into the shared intention. Leaders in human development research assert that individual adults can grow and develop new capacities indefinitely: cognitive, emotional, moral, and even one’s sense of self. And this personal growth can translate to broader cultural change, greater political skillfulness, better leadership, and more effective activism. Gabe interviewed each person who answered the invitation. He wanted to make sure that their intentions and desires were aligned with those of the workshop. After talking with some potential participants it became clear that the workshop was not appropriate for them. Some were more interested in conversations regarding politics or activism; others wanted to do healing rather than relationship work. Some potential participants felt that the premise that we are all responsible for transforming relationships was faulty since some identity groups have obviously dominated and abused others. But Gabe was clear about the purpose of the conversation he convened. The clarity of his intention helped his friends determine if it was the right conversation for them. There are all kinds of useful conversations, but they may have very different intentions, and therefore outcomes. An explicit shared intention serves like a cell membrane for conversation. It includes those who share the intention and excludes those who don’t. This is especially important at a time when in many settings we place a premium on inclusion. We may feel that we need to admit anyone who wants to participate in the conversation, but mixed intentions create mixed results. When people have different purposes and outcomes in mind, conversation can grind to a halt. But with a clear direction, when people have primed their frontal cortex to do the hard thing when it’s the right thing to do, conversations can evolve into creative, energized experiences, where more and more perspectives can come to light. Resistance, Opposition, and Receptivity An intention does more than create a positive direction; it also creates resistance and opposition. Have you ever set a New Year’s intention and the first thing you notice is how much you resist it? Have you ever noticed when you commit to a discipline how many of your habits that are precisely the opposite come fully into view? For example, if we intend to listen, we’ll begin to notice all the ways that we simply don’t want to. If we intend to hold multiple points of view, we’ll notice all the times we collapse into one solid, unyielding perspective. The intention to go up highlights the experience of going down; our desire for this points out how often we do that instead. But resistance is extremely good news because opposition points to exactly the times, places, and patterns that we need to work with in order to grow our skills. Practice takes time; it requires repetition, and encountering obstacles is intrinsic to our growth and skill-building. Resistance functions like gravity, creating drag on our systems, and overcoming it requires galvanizing strength, ingenuity, and determination. Without resistance, our new habits we’re trying to establish don’t become as strong and durable. So working with intention necessarily includes encountering resistance and dealing with opposition. Our mistakes and failures are golden opportunities to slow down, examine the moment, and look for alternative responses. For example, Anthony, an African American participant in the training, shared with the group one of his greatest frustrations about white people: “You all unwittingly promote institutional oppression by enjoying its benefits while being blind to how those very same benefits are not extended equally to people of color. For instance, in my university context, the hiring is often done by committees of people in leadership, all of whom are white. So it’s no surprise that they hire more white people. And then they wonder why we don’t have more diversity in our department.” He went on: “I want a white ally who really gets this!” His passion and intensity had an enormous impact on the room. After a few moments of letting his message sink in, we asked for a white participant to reflect what he or she had heard Anthony say. Lizzie raised her hand and very deliberately repeated what she had heard: “White people, including myself, enjoy the benefits of our systems and institutions while failing to notice how the benefits exclude people of color.” She mirrored his energy and his frustrations. She continued: “I’ve done a lot of work on myself, and there is a lot more work I need to do around my blind spots. But here’s what I’ve come to recognize about how I perpetuate white supremacy through the institutions I participate with.” She then briefly shared some poignant examples that showed that she understood first hand his point of view. She also shared the efforts she is undertaking personally to account for the impact of her actions. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, but my colleagues don’t see it, and it drives me crazy!” Anthony protested. Now, it’s important to note that the shared intention of this workshop was to deepen our connection to one another through our differences. “Hold on” Diane said, jumping into the interaction. “Anthony, you just asked for a white ally who shares your understanding, but I didn’t see you take in what Lizzie just said. How did you hear her? Did her message have any impact on you?” Anthony seemed startled. He paused, looking back at Lizzie. It was a poignant moment to see him take her in, as if for the first time. “Yes,” he said, “totally. Thank you for that, Lizzie. Wow. I feel way more relaxed knowing you see this, too.” He reflected further. “It’s crazy that I missed that connection, Lizzie. I think I’m so accustomed to being the only black man on my team, where I’m always the sole person pointing out how institutions perpetuate this. And so I failed to listen to what you were saying because I was just gearing up to make my point again.” It was a small but intimate moment. Anthony’s role as an advocate, which was brave and difficult, actually took over in his conversation with Lizzie and prevented him from forging a connection with an ally he wanted. His takeaway from the weekend was that while in his activist mode he still needs to maintain an openness to receiving potential allies and connections, who may be closer than he thinks. An intentional conversation, particularly one focused on the growth of our skills, is geared to disrupt our habitual and reactive patterns so that new perceptions, insights, and skills can come in. Gabe’s intention was to engage differences and to challenge conditioned patterns and biased views so that everyone in his group could genuinely become one another’s allies. His conversation was meant to free everyone to care more deeply about one another and for their work together. Mutual intentions create powerful experiences. Gabriel’s workshop participants experienced a way of being with themselves and others that they had been longing for. Inevitably, there came a moment when they realized that the workshop would end, and they would return to the many mixed intentions of everyday life. Gabriel joked with the participants: “Yeah, when you walk into Starbucks they won’t share our intention, and they won’t be using our ground rules. Neither will the other drivers on the freeway. Or the people dealing with your credit card or tech problem. Or the passenger sitting next to you on the airplane. Or perhaps some of your colleagues at the university. But your individual intention will affect and shape the way you show up, and that is the greatest power you have. And the freedom, intimacy, and camaraderie that you thought could never be created or sustained in the real world will simply become who you are. And that change is the best contribution you can make to the world.” The Practice The next time you enter into a casual conversation, take a moment to quietly form an intention. At several points during the conversation, revisit that intention and allow it to influence your contribution. Notice whether having a clear intention changed your experience. Share Related Books Diane Musho Hamilton is an award-winning professional mediator, author, and teacher of Zen meditation. She is the Executive Director of Two Arrows Zen, a practice in Utah, and cofounder of the Integral Facilitator, a training program oriented to personal development and advanced facilitator skills. She is the author of Everything Is Workable and The Zen of You and Me. Gabriel Menegale Wilson is a leadership coach, organizational change consultant, and peace-builder with a specialty in diversity and inclusion efforts. He is a certified integral facilitator and an associate for Delta Developmental, a leadership and organizational development consultancy. Kimberly Myosai Loh is a conflict resolution and negotiation specialist, leadership coach and co-author of Compassionate Conversations. She works with conscious leaders and teams to up-level their human relationships and transform conflicts into creative opportunities for growth. Devoted to the values of clarity and compassion, her past work includes peacebuilding and mediation research and advocacy for the United Nations, international NGOs and universities, and international arbitration and litigation work as a lawyer in London and Singapore. Find out more at kimberlyloh.com.

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