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Compassion and Challenging Power


I’ve been doing more sitting meditation this summer and it has given me a whole new set of ways of making sense of and coping with the moment.

One of the major insights I have had is the importance of disconnecting from the Trump circus. We have to figure that out. We have to learn now to hold two things in focus at once – Trump and everything he is doing and how we are called to skillfully intervene; and other realities. Other forms of being. Other things that are happening around us.

This feels extremely important to me right now for two reasons. First, for our own survival. For being able to experience beauty and community and pleasure in ways that can recharge us for the fight. But perhaps more importantly, we need to do this because we aren’t going to find the answers to Trump by watching Trump and being absorbed in the chaos he sows everywhere. We are going to find the answers when we create space for creativity, for new visions, for locating a grounded centerpoint that we can speak from.

Trump creates alienation and disaffection. Our answer has to be connection. Trump sows anger and fear. Our answer has to be love and joy and shared security. Trump is about disruption. Our answer has to be about the power of continuity – but a continuity with flexibility to adapt to the moment. Not a rigid institutionalism that is vulnerable to breaking apart in moments like this one.

And we can’t be in love, joy, community, continuity if we are putting all our time and attention into watching and reacting to this person. We know that because we’ve experienced it now for almost a year. It is enervating, depleting, utterly dehumanizing.

One of the things I’ve been working on in my meditation practice is having compassion for Trump. It is extremely challenging. Everything in me resists it. The first few times I tried I just burst into heaving, sobbing tears. Now that has passed, but there’s an inner rigidity that I’m still working with. My impulse is the exact opposite. I want to use him as a vehicle to collect and concentrate all the feelings of anger and hatred and betrayal that have gone unresolved across my lifetime. There’s something very dementedly and masochistically satisfying about following that impulse. It is a lot of work to start envisioning and walking an alternate path.

But I’m not offering compassion for Trump for him, I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it to free up space inside myself for other ways of thinking and knowing. It honestly feels like a very powerful and unexpected form of resistance.

[And I’m not excusing his actions and behavior, or trying to understand or argue they are good or okay. I believe his actions are unforgiveable.]

All of this has made me think about theories of power and how power works. When you have power, it limits your view and your access to information. People tell you what you want to hear. People perform around you so that they can curry favor or escape reprobation. People in power begin to believe their own hype – they lose self-awareness and the capacity for self-critique because there are fewer and fewer opportunities to see how they appear to others.

When power operates as nakedly as it does now, it can threaten to crowd out all else. But what is most interesting and beautiful and creative and inspiring in the world, in life, is what happens on the margins. What happens in the cracks and crevices where power can’t fully obliterate its antagonists. That’s where I want to look now, what I want to see. The beauty in the human capacity to carve out new spaces, new possibilities while power satisfies itself. Power believes it can eradicate those spaces. We know it can’t.

The sitting meditation is reminding me that one of those spaces is inside myself. Power – this evil, pernicious, unbalanced, predatory power we are currently experiencing – power cannot occupy my internal space unless I let it. Sitting meditation is one of the ways I am trying to push it out and allow for something pure and beautiful and all mine to start to grow.

I hope you are all finding your own sources of new creative vision and energy. It’s the only way we’re going to find the path forward.

With love, gratitude and solidarity.

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