Women (and others) in Power

For women (and others) it is difficult to be in power. And I am not just talking about the external forces keeping us out of power, here I am speaking about the inner struggle to identify as a person of power, to claim that space. We often have a hard time believing in our own authority. It is not surprising there is an amount of inner resistance to this, considering where we have come from. To be powerful, to disagree (with others in power) was considered highly inappropriate, and still is in many ways. I have been thinking that the legacy of this gets perpetuated two ways:

1) Our own conditioning, e.g. self-criticism, fearfulness
2) Continued external conditioning, i.e. smackdown

Of course these internal and external forces can interact with each other. Smackdown will leave us fearful, being fearful makes us weak, and thus a target of more smackdown.

So what do we do to overcome this?

Much of the power base in academia (and other places) is based on the idea of superiority. Some of this is completely valid:  talent and productivity are important. But a lot of success is fortune, opportunity and training. The whole idea of affirmative action was to give opportunity to the most smacked-down of all: ex-slaves. But is opening up this external opportunity enough? My working hypothesis is that there needs to be an inner transformation as well, and that this path is mostly uncharted, and perhaps very personal to all of us (but perhaps not). This seems to be the work that needs to be done, that we are all on the edge of.

There's a lot more to say on this, on motivation, sources of power and disrespecting authority. But that's a longer conversation and I will leave it here (for now).

Checkmate

I found a Rumi poem this morning that pretty much sums it up for me. Here's an excerpt:

The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you'll become lovely, and very strong.

If you can't do this work yourself, don't worry.
You don't even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness,
                                  as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you are beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,
with Hallaj's voice,
                                 I trust you to kill me.

There are a few stanzas earlier in the poem that are exactly the Tibetan Lo Jong (Mind Training) teaching. In essence: those that harm you are your precious teachers. Rumi says:

Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God's solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.

Two of my favorite Rumi poems

These two poems have kept me good company for many years. I think of them often. They are pretty much on the same theme: the bliss within suffering, the path within falling apart, and seeking. And they share this analogy of wings and lifting.

The brilliance of Rumi is that he talks of the spiritual path in to most down-to-earth way. It's all about suffering and joy, longing and communion, restraint and wildness, roughness and ecstasy. You feel like he is your friend on the way. Like he is a jester making fun of your seriousness and a friend holding your hand in your darkest hour. It is amazing that he wrote these poems almost 800 years ago, things have not changed that much really, we still have mostly the same problems we always did. At least in the inner world.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding
the two as beautifully balanced coordinated
as birdwings.

Unfold Your Own Myth

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowering prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to another world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.
Now there's a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone for others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.

Start walking towards Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown
lifting.

(as translated by Coleman Marks, and often available at your local Costco)

Should I say something about these? I think the first is best left to the reader's own meditation. The second has a very nice explanation of all the metaphors here.

One thing that is very interesting is this idea that if you chase enlightenment (or whatever you want to call it), things will go wrong. You will probably fuck up, a lot. We all get blinded by those persistent delusions. But the point here is through that longing, that struggle, there is some sort of redemption, some grace, that we at least feel sometimes. And really the struggle is the key to finding the grace, to moving along in the path.

I was talking to a dharma friend today about following your inner guru, your inner wisdom and asking can we trust it? The Tibetan lamas (especially Lama Yeshe) will/would say all the time after giving a teaching, "Don't take my word for it, check up, see if you agree." Be a lamp unto yourself, Shakyamuni Buddha said. But how do you know it's your wisdom and not your delusions guiding you? This is a hard one, and I'm not sure I know the answer.

I think what Rumi is saying here is that it is the path that matters, and there is redemption from the act of seeking, even if you don't do it "correctly". Seeking is the way to everything, and it is a very personal journey.

On failure, broken-ness and anger

I pray for all the failures out there. Those who are broken, who have been shamed, who have been hit hard by life and have given up, discouraged. May they find something that gives them hope, perhaps serving others, perhaps challenging themselves to grow into something greater. How does one handle these things? Without the concept of karma? How does one look into the past and forgive oneself (and others)? Do we need some concept of redemption, of good works?

There is a 10th century Mahayana Buddhist text, very popular with Tibetans, called The Wheel Of Sharp Weapons, the whole point of which is to see all of life's miseries, disappointments and discomforts as burning the evil self-cherishing mind that leads us to do wrong, the part of us that puts ourselves above others, that lashes out, that hurts and maims. The idea is that this is what is really causing us so much misery, any emotional or physical discomfort, is really an opportunity to "smash it to bits", compost our evil streak. In this way suffering becomes a tool of enlightenment.

I love this text in part because it is so radical, so punk rock:

Frantically running through life's tangled jungle,
We are chased by sharp weapons of wrongs we have done
Returning upon us; we are out of control
This sly, deadly villain-the selfishness in us,
Deceiving ourselves and all others a well
...
This sack of five poisons, mistakes and delusions,
Drags us down in the quicksand of life's daily toil-
Cut it off, cut it off, rip it to shreds!
...
Batter him, batter him, rip out the heart
Of our grasping for ego, our love for ourselves!
Trample him, trample him, dance on the head
Of this treacherous concept of selfish concern!
Tear out the heart of this self-centred butcher
Who slaughters our chance to gain final release!

What's cool about this method is that all of the anger we usually direct outward to others who have wronged us is turned back into killing our own delusions.

I love the psychology of Buddhism, it's so clever.

Notes on "The Wheel of Sharp Wepons":
It was written by Dharmarakshita, who was the teacher of Atisha. Dharmarakshita was Sumatran, Atisha traveled there before coming back to India and eventually Tibet, reviving Buddhism there.

Dharma advice on overcoming abuse (http://www.khandro.net/dailylife_depression.htm):

"I am having trouble distinguishing between two things.  I am one of the one-in-three Americans who have been sexually abused, and one of my most important tasks is to build a far more solid sense of self than I have ever had. At the same time I know the work of dharma of dissolving the vicious nature of ego is my ultimate task. I need some help in how to deal with the conventional and ultimate levels at the same time."

Rinpoche:  "The situation you describe is one of a variety of situations that tend to destroy someone's confidence in themselves as an individual. One way to deal with that is to look directly at the situation and the attendant pain and habit of viewing yourself in a certain way. If you look at all the aspects of a situation, you will see that it is a demonstration of interdependence and of the relative coming together of different conditions. Also consider the fact that our experiences are the product of previous karma and therefore, while the experiences are brought about, they themselves are interdependent and impermanent. Then what will happen through intense analysis is that as your fixation on an imputed self lessens, you will discover an innate wisdom which will give you a confidence in yourself that not only will transcend the trauma, but that goes far beyond the confidence that it is possible to have as long as such confidence is based on a reified (solidified) self."

~ Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche. A Teaching on Interdependence and Emptiness. (17).

I like the point that we are seeing ourselves through a certain lens, effectively judging ourselves, seeing the self as permanent. I've been thinking about having compassion for ourselves in this way. Feel the pain objectively, offer yourself compassion, comfort. Ribur Rinpoche once said (and it's been said many times by others) that you have to start with compassion to yourself before you can effectively have compassion for others. We always have ourselves to be compassionate towards.

Anger can compel us, propel us into action. But this is just strengthening the propensity of our minds to experience anger, reinforcing the habit to go there. We need another motivator, which is why Mahayana is so big on compassion. Compassion for others' suffering can be as big a motivator as anger (bigger!) with only good consequences. This is the Mahayana trick, generating great compassion, wanting to save all beings from suffering, makes us get our shit together faster and get enlightened, since that is the only way we can effectively help others. This is how Gandhi and Martin Luther King were able to change the world, through the force of their compassion for others. This was also their own personal path.

Gandhi on Anger
"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world."
— from Gandhi the Man, by Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press.

Ditto for HHDL: 

HEALING HATRED


By His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"The destructive effects of hatred are very visible, very obvious and immediate. For example, when a strong or forceful thought of hatred arises, at that very instant it overwhelms one totally and destroys one's peace and presence of mind. When that hateful thought is harboured inside, it makes one feel tense and uptight, and can cause loss of appetite, leading to loss of sleep, and so forth. 

If we examine how anger or hateful thoughts arise in us, we will find that, generally speaking, they arise when we feel hurt, when we feel that we have been unfairly treated by someone against our expectations. If in that instant we examine carefully the way anger arises, there is a sense that it comes as a protector, comes as a friend that would help our battle or in taking revenge against the person who has inflicted harm on us. So the anger or hateful thought that arises appears to come as a shield or a protector. But in reality that is an illusion. It is a very delusory state of mind.

Chandrakirti states in Entry into the Middle Way that there might be some justification for responding to force with force if revenge would help one in any way, or prevent or reduce the harm which has already been inflicted. But that is not the case because if the harm, the physics. injury or whatever, has been inflicted, it has already taken place. So taking revenge will not in any way reduce or prevent that harm or injury because it has already happened.

On the contrary, if one reacts to a situation in a negative way instead of in a tolerant way, not only is there no immediate benefit, but also a negative attitude and feeling is created which is the seed of one's future downfall. From the Buddhist point of view, the consequence of taking revenge has to be faced by the individual alone in his or he future life. So not only is there no immediate benefit, it is harmful in the long run for the individual.

However, if one has been treated very unfairly and if the situation is left unaddressed, it may have extremely negative consequences for the perpetrator of the crime. Such a situation calls for a strong counteraction. Under such circumstances, it is possible that one can, out of compassion for the perpetrator of the crime and without generating anger or hatred, actually take a strong stand and take strong countermeasures. In fact, one of the precepts of the Bodhisattva vows is to take strong countermeasures when the situation calls for it. If a Bodhisattva doesn't take strong countermeasures when the situation requires, then that constitutes an infraction of one of the vows. 

In addition, as the Entry into the Middle Way points out, not only does the generation of hateful thoughts lead to undesirable forms of existence in future lives, but also, at the moment that strong feelings of anger arise, no matter how hard one tries to adopt a dignified pose, one's face looks rather ugly. There is an unpleasant expression, and the vibration that the person sends is very hostile. People can sense it, and it is almost as if one can feel steam coming out of that person's body. Indeed not only are human beings capable of sensing it, but pets and other animals also try to avoid that person at that instant.
If we examine how anger or hateful thoughts arise in us, we will find that, generally speaking, they arise when we feel hurt, when we feel that we have been unfairly treated by someone against our expectations.

These are the immediate consequences of hatred. It brings about a very ugly, unpleasant physical transformation of the individual. In addition, when such intense anger and hatred arise, it makes the best part of our brain, which is the ability to judge between right and wrong and assess long-term and short-term consequences, become totally inoperable. It can no longer function. It is almost as if the person had become crazy. These are the negative effects of generating anger and hatred. When we think about these negative and destructive effects of anger and hatred, we realise that it is necessary to distance ourselves from such emotional explosions. Insofar as the destructive effects of anger and hateful thoughts are concerned, one cannot get protection from wealth; even if one is a millionaire, one is subject to these destructive effects of anger and hatred. Nor can education guarantee that one will be protected from these effects. Similarly, the law cannot guarantee protection. Even nuclear weapons, no matter how sophisticated the defence system may be, cannot give one protection or defend one from these effects. The only factor that can give refuge or protection from the destructive effects of anger and hatred is the practice of tolerance and patience. 

"
The Dalai Lama from Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective: 

Question: "Where does hatred come from?" 

Dalai Lama : "That is a question which requires long hours of discussion. From the Buddhist viewpoint, the simple answer is that it is beginningless. As a further explanation, Buddhists believe that there are many different levels of consciousness. The most subtle consciousness is what we consider the basis of the previous life, this life, and future lives. This subtle consciousness is a transient phenomenon which comes about as a consequence of causes and conditions. Buddhists have concluded that consciousness itself cannot be produced by matter. Therefore, the only alternative is to accept the continuation of consciousness. So that is the basis of the theory of rebirth. 

Where there is consciousness, ignorance and hatred also arise naturally. These negative emotions, as well as the positive emotions, occur right from beginningless time. All these are a part of our mind. However, these negative emotions actually are based on ignorance, which has no valid foundation. None of the negative emotions, no matter how powerful, have a solid foundation. On the other hand, the positive emotions, such as compassion or wisdom, have a solid basis: there is a kind of grounding and rootedness in reason and understanding, which is not the case with afflictive emotions like anger and hatred. 

The basic nature of the subtle consciousness itself is something neutral. So it is possible to purify or eliminate all of these negative emotions. That basic nature we call Buddha-nature. Hatred and negative emotions are beginningless; they have no beginning, but there is an end. Consciousness itself has no beginning and no end; of this we are certain."