Chapter 1
Something Deeper Than Despair
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
âTA-NEHISI COATES
On November 14, 2016, just six days after Donald Trump won the election, my wife, Annie, woke up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. A trip to the ER revealed that the cancer sheâd been fighting for more than a year had spread into her abdomen and a tumor was blocking her left kidney. Several long hours later, she emerged from surgery with a plastic tube implanted in her side that drained urine into a bag. I was told that sheâd likely have this tube for the rest of her life. When our three-year-old son visited, I had to teach him not to touch his momâs tube.
That was a moment I could hear despair calling meâalmost audibly. It said, âYour life is shit. Everything is completely fucked. Your best option is to go cower in the corner.â
In that intense moment, I thought of a story Iâd heard the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh tell countless times over the twenty years Iâve studied with him. Itâs a story about a banana tree and it goes like this:
One day, Thich Nhat Hanh was meditating in the jungle in Vietnam and he saw a young banana tree with just three leaves. The first leaf was fully grown, broad and flat and dark green. The second leaf was still partially curled beneath the first, and the third leaf was very light green and tender, just beginning to unfurl.
This was during the middle of the Vietnam War, and he was leading a huge organization of young people whoâd help rebuild villages thatâd been destroyed by bombs and napalm. Heâd spent nearly every day with villagers whose lives had been ravaged by war, and heâd witnessed the deaths of several of his closest friends. The central question in his life at that moment was how to reconcile the intensity of his calling to help suffering people with his mindfulness practice. He knew that he needed his mindfulness practice to keep from being overwhelmed with despair, but how could he justify cultivating peace and joy in himself while so many other people were dying?
He was holding this question in mind and looking at the young banana tree when he had a deep insight. It occurred to him that the eldest banana leaf was fully enjoying her life as a leaf. She was absorbing the sun and rain, radiating beauty and peacefulness. However, she hadnât abandoned the other leaves to pursue her own happiness. In fact, as she nourished herself, basking in the sunshine, she was also nourishing the younger leaves, the banana tree, and the entire jungle. He decided that human beings are just like this. As we nourish ourselves with peacefulness and joy, weâre also supporting the well-being of every other person in our lives.
In that hospital room, as I looked at my wife and son, I couldnât avoid seeing how much they needed me. They didnât need me to do anything in particular. They needed me to stay with them and help them to see that they werenât aloneâthat life was still worth living. If I could somehow find a way not to lose touch with whatâs beautiful and joyful in lifeâif I could tap into something in me deeper than despairâthen Iâd have something to offer the people I love most.
DEEPER THAN DESPAIR
Looking around today, itâs hard to escape the conclusion that our world is exquisitely fucked. Of course, thereâs a lot of beauty in the world at the same time, but the sheer magnitude of violence, greed, hatred, and straight-up stupidity can be overwhelming if we let ourselves pay attention and care.
The terrifying part for me is what happens to good-hearted people when we get overwhelmed by all of it. Weâre committed to paying attention and caring, and we refuse to escape into whatever privilege we can find. However, the intensity of suffering we experience poisons us, and we lose touch with our humanity. We either end up in despair on one side, or we fall into toxic righteousness on the other.
Toxic righteousness is a term created by writer and activist Starhawk to describe the anger-fueled self-certainty that pervades our political discourse. Toxic righteousness is what happens when weâre mere inches from despair but somehow summon enough strength to lash out instead of collapsing. In that state, weâre incapable of listening, and often donât even see why we should, since our opponents are less than human. If anyone tries to say that our vitriol and indignation arenât helping, we get violently defensive because we believe the only alternative is giving up entirely.
The challenge of staying human in a fucked-up world comes down to how we respond to the immensity of suffering that confronts us from every direction. Whether Iâm suffering from things in my own life, things in the lives of people I love, or the pain I feel when I pay attention to the conditions in our world (and itâs usually all of those), I have to find a way to take care of the compassion in me so that I donât end up overwhelmed. If I canât, Iâll find myself in despair, possessed by toxic righteousness, or (worst of all) Iâll find whatever little bubble of privilege I can escape into and stop caring.
Once I understand that the suffering in the world can turn me into someone I donât want to be, I become extremely motivated to find a way to stay human. I donât want to stop caring, and I donât want to drown in anger and bitterness. I want to stay present and be a force for good. I want to become Thich Nhat Hanhâs banana leaf with enough joy and peace that Iâm able to benefit myself and others. I refuse to let everything thatâs fucked up in the world strip me of my humanity.
FROM HERE TO THERE
How do I become that kind of person? How do I strengthen that capacity in me? What am I supposed to do if itâs not easy for me? What if I really struggle with anger, despair, and shutting down? Is it possible to change?
I can almost guarantee that when I was first exposed to mindfulness and compassion training as a nineteen-year-old college student, I was a much more fucked-up person than you are. I grew up poor in Boston with an alcoholic single mother. I was constantly bullied, homeless as a teenager, and I never knew my father. By the time I got to college, I was angry and lonely, and had few social skills.
When a political science professor of mine assigned Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, it changed everything. I immediately recognized that mindfulness and compassion were exactly what were missing from my life. Thenâas nineteen-year-olds sometimes do when they find something that makes sense to themâI immersed myself in these practices, often spending several months on retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh each year and following him wherever he went.
Through all that practice and study, Iâve learned to experience more joy and freedom than I would have thought possible. Iâve gone from being someone with an intense amount of suffering and self-destructiveness to someone with real intimacy and harmony in my life. If I can change, anybody can.
NOTHING IS FREE (UNTIL IT IS)
On the other hand, change isnât easy, and it doesnât happen on its own. It requires that we find ideas and practices that make sense to us on a deep level. We have to engage with those ideas and allow them to change how we see the world. Then we have to put them into practice and see what effects they produce in our lives. Finally, when we find a teaching or training that feels truly helpful, we must commit ourselves to deliberate practice. The more time and effort we invest, the greater the change we can expect to see.
But then something magical happens. The practices and ideas that used to require so much effort begin to feel like second nature. Itâs as if youâve put so much energy into learning to speak French, and then all of a sudden, you realize youâve developed a little fluency. You can now have a conversation in French without much effort at all. In this case, we start to experience a compassionate thought arising on its own in a moment that would have triggered anger in the past. Itâs the fruit of our dedication. Itâs the effort that leads to effortlessness.
WORDS GET SICK
Itâs possible to pay attention and care about the suffering in the world without letting it poison us. There is a quality of mind we can develop that allows us to stay present with suffering without losing touch with the joy of being alive. We can accept that pain is an inevitable part of life without letting that make us callous or uncaring. Instead, we can respond with radical acceptance and a willingness to do whatever we can to alleviate suffering.
The word that my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe this way of relating to life is mindfulness. However, I donât really like that word. Too many people use it to mean something entirely different from what Thich Nhat Hanh means. They say mindfulness is about taking deep breaths, sitting on a cushion on the floor, or watching your thoughts and feelings with disinterestâlike youâre watching a boring TV show.
When Thich Nhat Hanh uses the word mindfulness, heâs describing a way of relating to the world (and specifically to suffering) that contains compassion, joy, equanimity, and wisdom. It is precisely the quality that allows us to stay human in fucked-up situationsâto stay open, caring, and able to relate.
Itâs possible for words to get sick and lose their meaning. When that happens, we can either abandon the word or we can try to rehabilitate it. Iâm not entirely ready to give up on the word mindfulness (at least not today), but when I use it, please remember that I mean it in this deeper sense.
Regardless of what you want to call it, the ability to stay human in the face of intense suffering is something thatâs in short supply in our world. Itâs also something that we desperately need. So the next question is how to develop this capacity in ourselves. How can we learn to do this better?
Iâve spent my life studying this question, and Iâve come to believe it can be developed through training ourselves in a set of specific skills. This book is designed to help you develop the skills that will help you stay humanâhelp you pay attention, care deeply, and feel connectedâeven in really fucked-up situations. First, youâll learn about each skill. Then youâll try it out until you find a way of using it that feels beneficial. Finally, youâll practice it until it feels natural.
Chapter 2
Finding Beauty In Life
As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.
âKURT VONNEGUT
When life is fucked up, itâs so easy to believe that nothing good existsâor even if it did, it wouldnât matter. However, if you only pay attention to whatâs bad in your life, you will inevitably end up exhausted and overwhelmed, because experiences of joy are the fuel that we need in order to be present with suffering.
Too many people focus exclusively on everything thatâs wrong in their lives and in the world, and the result is they end up being too burned out to do anything about it. Thereâs a subtle art to learning how to be present with suffering in a way that wonât overwhelm you. Most of this book will focus on facing suffering directly, but the first skill to develop is how to find beauty in life. If you canât do that, it will seem like suffering is all there is in the world, and that will crush your spirit. This isnât a practice of âlooking on the bright sideâ or some other way of denying real pain and injustice. Instead, itâs an essential skill for staying human.
In every moment of life, there are infinite reasons to suffer and infinite reasons to be happy. Our experience largely depends on where weâre focusing our attention. For example, imagine taking a couple of minutes to list everything that you could be upset about right now. Youâd never run out of ideas. Now imagine taking the same amount of time and making a list of everything that you could be happy about, like the sky at sunset, the sound of rain, or the eyes of a newborn baby gazing at you. That list could be pretty long too.
So many of us believe that itâs impossible to be happy until all of our reasons to suffer are gone. Yet, we also know thatâs never going to happen. There will always be reasons to sufferâsmall ones, like goals we havenât accomplished or people who donât understand us, and big ones, like war, poverty, oppression, and climate change.
These reasons to suffer exist, but they arenât all that exists. For us to have any experience of joy, we need to be able to pay attention to what is beautiful in life in this moment. That doesnât mean weâre denying the problems in our lives and in the world. Instead, it means that we recognize how tragic it would be to go through life ignoring all of the beauty and wonder around us. If we put off our happiness until all our reasons to suffer are gone, weâll never have a chance to be happy. If we donât feed ourselves with moments of happiness, weâll have no energy to make the world better.
We can develop the skill of noticing whatâs beautiful in life by training ourselves in the ability to choose where to focus our attention, rather than letting our minds run wild with worries and judgments. It takes commitment, but if youâre doing it right, it should also feel pretty good. We are remembering to appreciate the shapes of clouds, the feel of a cool breeze on our skin, and the presence of a loved one beside us.
ENJOYING YOUR NONTOOTHACHE
As we practice recognizing whatâs beautiful in life, we also begin to notice everything that isnât wrong. For example, when we have a toothache, itâs clear that not having a toothache would make us happier. However, as soon as our toothache goes away, we forget how lucky we are. Take a moment to see if you can actually enjoy...