(upbeat music)
- I have one final question before we open it up
to the comments, assuming we have some time.
Actually one of the comments is from Kim.
What are some suggestions for empaths?
And in your book "Real Change"
you make the distinction between empathy
and compassion and talk about maybe the misnomer,
that it's what we often call compassion fatigue,
is actually empathy fatigue.
Empathy can kind of be like feeling with
and taking on some of the energy of what's around us,
whereas compassion is a bit more about feeling for.
There's this offering or extension of care for the other,
and which includes ourselves as we obviously seen,
where you can form healthy boundaries
out of a sense of compassion as well.
You also share the near enemy of compassion
is a sense of burnout, feeling overcome
by the amount of suffering there is in the world,
or for those who we care about.
And so when we're burnt out or overcome, we can't serve,
and that new enemy of compassion is not compassion itself,
it's something that we mistake for compassion.
But that sense of compassionate feeling for others,
that genuine sense of care and love
that we just doing trough that meditation.
And you can feel a lot of us who are in caring professions
or who are caregivers, even if we have pure compassion,
it's still a lot to be extending that care
and so in your book, "Real Change",
you talk a lot about the intersection
between compassion and equanimity.
You share that equanimity helps to balance our care
so that our compassionate action can be sustained
in a way that we're not always burned out.
This equanimity can help us,
to not drown under the weight over our own worry.
And so I've always found equanimity
and the intersection between equanimity
and compassion to be very difficult to teach.
And that's said in the last chapter of your book,
"Real Change", which I hope everyone buys 10 copies though.
You do a great job of explaining that intersection
between compassion and equanimity,
and how equanimity can fuel us
to care for others in a sustainable way
where we're not feeling burdened.
And there on page 221 of the hard copy
you share that, you share a few equanimity phrases with us.
That we can reflect on and meditate on over time.
- I wanna look in my book (laughs).
- Okay, yeah, and so I'll just read a few of the phrases,
to give people taste of the central section
between balance, this feeling of equanimity and compassion.
I care about your pain yet I cannot control it.
I will care for you and cannot keep you from suffering.
May I offer love knowing I can't control
the course of life, suffering, or death.
I wish you happiness and peace.
Yeah, cannot make your choices for you.
I will work to alleviate suffering in the world.
And I know I'm not in control
of the unfolding of the universe.
You talk about how equanimity is broadening a perspective,
rooted in care and wisdom.
It's all about balance.
And you talk about how with climate change
there's so many pieces to the puzzle
and it can feel very heavy, but if we broaden,
if we bring a broader perspective
to the forefront that can help us
to push for change in a sustainable way with more balance.
I know this is a long-winded question,
but climate change is an enormous challenge.
And personally when I think about climate change,
if it can feel overwhelming very quickly
it was just through the enormity of it.
And through equanimity, I try to broaden my perspective,
and yet sometimes that perspective isn't even broad enough
to kind of encapsulate climate change
'cause climate change can itself feel so big.
I hope this is making sense so far.
So when you reflect on climate change in the enormity of it,
I'm just curious personally,
like how you bring this sense of compassion and acronymity
to be able to hold it within a wider perspective
without getting overwhelmed by it.
And what that means to you
and how you relate to the enormity of it.
- Well, I'm actually gonna do a sort
of lateral shift from climate change,
and talking about equanimity at first.
And I also wanna say that I don't,
I try not to use them all the time
but I try not to use words like maintain or keep,
or, because I don't think it's gonna happen.
That very first lesson in meditation,
your mind's gonna wander.
You can let go and start again.
I think this is the most important lesson of all,
'cause people say that to me all the time.
I just did an evening
with somebody theoretically in Berkeley
although of course I was sitting right here,
and the question was, how do I keep faith?
And I said, "Well, you're not gonna."
Like we're all gonna lose it.
We're gonna lose it periodically sometimes a lot
but we can start over.
And that's what resilience is.
And that's very, very important as a point.
So equanimity is a really tough word to understand.
It sounds to us like indifference and not caring
and things flattening out or being oblivious.
It doesn't mean any of that.
It does mean balance.
And some of that balance comes, it's exactly like you said.
It's having, it's being able to hold many things at once.
Like the joy and the sorrow and the devastation
and the possibility and being able to be in touch
with acknowledge fully, both.
And so the example I'm using these days,
with the book launch, I did this series of four events
which are now up on Wisdom 2.0 YouTube channel.
And I'm-
- Let me post a link to that right now, actually.
- Okay, so one of the events was me moderating a panel
with people who had survived, some had been strongly,
strongly affected by the school shooting
in Parkland, Florida, some years ago.
And I've been going down there
and teaching in that community.
And also we hosted a retreat here
in Barry for survivors of gun violence.
And some people had a child killed,
some people had been shot themselves,
some people were teachers
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
where they were that day, this young woman who I use
as an example in my book, was on this panel.
And her mother is a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
She was there that day.
She wasn't hurt, but it had been like eight hours
or something of not knowing if her mother was alive.
And then the strong woman, Samantha is her name,
'cause she's an extraordinary young woman.
Just a recent graduate and herself became very active
in helping organize the community, especially the community
of students in the marches and so on.
And so the first time I went down there to teach
was not so very long after the shooting
and Samantha raise her hand at one point,
she said, "I feel really weird
because I'm having this incredible experience being here.
And I know the only reason this day is happening
was 'cause that horrible thing happened.
And I don't know how to get over it
in order to really appreciate this."
And I said, "I don't know that we ever get over it
but we learn to hold them both at once."
So the other day on the panel, I said to her,
"Do you remember that exchange?"
And she said, "Not only do I remember it,
I think of it every single day.
I think about equanimity,
I think about the yin and the yang,
the dark and the light and the light and the dark."
And she said, it's like her North star.
And I think that is the reality.
We're not get over it
and we don't sort of only see the bright side of things
is such tremendous suffering.
And when you listed so many of the things
between climate change and the economy and the pandemic,
and racial and justice, I mean, there's so many things
and we need to be able to acknowledge that.
But if that's the only place we see no sense of possibility,
no sense of beginnings, no sense of onward movement,
then we will despair.
And there's such a huge amount
of depression and despair and exhaustion going on right now.
But if we only look at, oh, things can work out this way
and there's this creativity and there's this,
then we're so ungrounded, that is not realistic.
So we need to learn to hold both
and we can learn to hold both.
I think in reference it's one of the questions
as to the chat.
We can't take everything into our heart.
Like we just can't, like the immensity,
the enormity of climate change.
But we can take in
that which we feel passionate enough about to act on,
because the most corrosive feeling of all
I really do believe is that sense of helplessness
or hopelessness.
So maybe within that enormity, there's one issue
that you would really engage in.
For me the overarching issue,
I am passionately involved in,
within anything is voting right now.
If you are a U.S. citizen and you are 18 years old
and eligible to vote, I think it's imperative.
And so the work that I do, like writing letters
and doing this, or even in talks like this
is very much centered around that.
And I know that there are a million activities
I'm not engaged in,
and it's not that I don't care
but this is the one where I feel
like a sense of focus and commitment,
and I can actually do, 'cause remember the word is real.
Like complaining on Twitter or like feeling horrible
because something is going on is kind of not the point.
It's being able to metabolize that distress
and move it into action.
And so that's the arena where I really work.
And for me, it's so confident, with a background
in kind of Buddha's training in a very classical sense
although not monastic, is so confident that action
of voting with the Buddha's teaching
about the innate worth of everybody.
That everybody has worth,
everybody has a neat dignity.
And so that translates to me as everyone should have a voice
and everyone should get to exercise that voice.
And so I feel really happy.
And so that's part of holding it all.
There's the devastation and the distress
and then there's the sense of community
and the goodness that exists.
There's some, I have to look it up
to get the exact numbers right.
But it's not far off from what I'm about to say,
there's some school in, I think it was Minneapolis,
that was serving as a kind of distribution center
for poor families and people who needed food.
And they put out a call
for something like seven bags of food and they got 20,000.
And I think about that,
I have to get the exact numbers right, it's close to that,
and if not that, and I think about that.
And I think that's true too.
That also exists even as this other, the cruelty
and everything that we see, even that as that's going on.
So I would take that section of what seems so wrong,
see what we can act on and we'll act on,
and also be boiled up by the, the force of goodness.
- Beautiful, well said.
Thank you, Sharon.