Dear Mother Earth ...
Even though we your children have made many mistakes, you always forgive us. Every time we return to you, you are ready to open your arms and embrace us.
Thich Nhat Hanh
This is a very challenging moment in our history, for sure, but it is also a "noble moment." I heard that description used in a beautiful dharma talk today (linked below). ...and it stuck in my head and in my heart. This is a noble moment in our history.
What is a noble moment?
A noble moment is a "teachable" moment, a moment we can learn from, grow from and awaken from. In the Buddhist teachings a noble moment consists of both enlightenment and suffering.
Say what?? How can suffering be noble?
Suffering can lead us to the edge of our comfort zones, where we have been hiding with our eyes closed. It can force us to open our eyes , see where we were, see where we were heading and put us back in the very here and now....so we can change our trajectory.
We as a human species have been stuck in a comfort zone furnished by collective and personal egos. So caught up in our struggle to avoid suffering through striving, gaining, attaining, clinging and doing we were unconscious to the reality of what type of imprint on this world we were leaving.
We have been trampling unconsciously and busily over this planet and not looking down to see the foot prints we were leaving behind. We had this absurd idea that it was "all ours" and we could do with it what we wanted in order to keep these greedy egos fed and happy within this comfort zone. Mother Earth (I will borrow this beautiful description of our planet) has been crying out to us for years with her gentle warnings and her maternal pleas but we were not listening.
We didn't listen well enough to her when it was the earth's crusts we were digging up for fossil fuels and minerals; when it was the forests we were clear cutting or the coral reefs we were poisoning. We didn't get it enough when the climates began to change; our landfills filled up with pollution she couldn't digest or when species of precious animals and plants, her other children, began dying off .
We were not listening!
She is a kind mother. She teaches with love. We forced her to become the "disciplining" parent for the good of all. She is not punishing us because we were "bad"...she is simply "teaching" us by gently showing us what we were doing. I believe, she just wants us to learn. When we didn't learn in other ways, she had to get stern and make us feel a bit of pain. She put the human race in a "time out" .
Are we ready to listen now?
We need to use this time in "time-out" to listen to her. To reflect on what we have done, to see clearly and understand the consequences of our actions. This social distancing is a quiet time to reflect and learn. Sure it can cause some temporary suffering and some of that suffering can be great...touching on our worse fears as human beings: "illness" and "death". But it can be a healing time, as well...a time to grow up a bit.
We are not bad children. We are simply unconscious. We do not need to feel "guilty" and hang our heads in shame over what we have done. That will not get us anywhere but down...and this is not a time to feed the negative ego. We simply need to be aware and see.
Each of the physical beings on this earth are fragile, impermanent and inter dependent. We need to take care of our own little selves, our species as a whole ( humanity!) and the entire planet better.
We humans are grouped together collectively in this crisis because it seems...we are the ones being targeted rather than the ones doing the targeting. It is our lesson to learn and we must suffer it with grace and humility not only for our own healing but for the healing of the entire planet.
Make the most of your time Out
In stillness, in quiet we can open up to that awareness. We can hold this idea of impermanence and inter-being in our minds and hearts. ( dharma talk) We can reflect, sure, on the error of our ways but more importantly we need to set an intention to do better. Mother Earth doesn't need our apology, she needs our awakening.
The Use of time Out in My Own Life
Whenever I used to put my kids in time-out when they were younger for hurting each other in some way, they had to do three things before being let out. They had to show me (and the one they hurt) that they reflected on what they did. I also asked them to take the anger they had towards their sibling and rework it...to turn it back into Love. To do that they had to come up with three things they liked, loved or admired about the sibling that was hurt by their words or actions. They also had to come up with a plan to make it better in the future.
For example, if one of the twins was hurtful to the other in a fit of rage, the offender was ushered to the time out bench or their room. Before being released from time out, this "prisoner" had to come up with a reflection on what happened and on how the other twin would have felt by those comments. "I felt mad when she took the feet off my Bratz doll and glued them to the wall so I said those mean things to her. It probably made her sad to hear them."
I would then get them to step away from their negative angry place and write or speak three positive attributes like , "I guess she is funny and she makes me laugh. She has a nice smile." And I would have been happy with "Just her feet are smelly. The rest of her smells okay," for the third positive.
Finally, they had to come up with a plan, "The next time I feel myself getting angry with her, I will step back and away, take a big breath or punch a pillow before I talk to her again ."
Of course the effects of such learning may have only lasted all of two minutes but you get the point, right?
Not A Punishment
The time out wasn't just a random automatic punishment. It was meant to serve a purpose...to calm the misbehaving child down, to give them space to reflect, to help them find compassion and empathy within themselves, to connect their own feelings, to sit with those feelings, to find the blessing in the other, and to find a more positive way to relate with others and the world around them.
I am not saying it always went well because it didn't!! The offender would often initially resist and demand that they be allowed out or off the bench. They would frequently say, "It isn't fair!" or "I'm not doing that, this is as stupid as she is!" And if I let my guard down, for even a second, they would walk or even run away giggling (in the early, early time -outs) from their forced isolation. The longer they resisted, however, the longer their time out.
We are in a time out like that now.
Let's not resist! We don't want to make this time out longer than it has to be. Follow the protocol and accept the situation.
We can reflect on what got us here, and how we feel. We can learn to sit with our feelings instead of running from them . We can use this time to build our compassion and empathy muscles by praying for, reaching out, holding in our awareness all humans effected by this virus. We can also show a little more respect for and connection with Mother Earth. We can find the blessings in this situation, in this world and in this Life. Hey, not all of it is smelly!
And we can decide what we are going to do when we get out. How are we going to respond to each other, and this wonderful beautiful world we live in then? Are we going right back to the old behavioural patterns that got us in time out in the first place?
Hmm! I hope not.
I hope after this is over we have many more reformed, compassionate, empathetic, aware, mindful and conscious people in the world. That would be so nice, wouldn't it?
All is well.
Plum Village dharma talk (March 30,2020) This is a Noble Moment.
(I cannot seem to re-upload this site to get the url . I will keep trying....it is really worth listening too.)
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