The times are urgent; let us slow down.
What might failure look like? Where might this generative incapacitation lead us? Who are we and who is here with us? I do not know yet. But I suspect that as I try my feet and hips to these seditious sounds and throw my limbs in trust of the abundance of this place, I will be caught by the surprise of the many already dancing with me—for failure is rich, and where there is “nothing” there is much to go around. — Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Nigerian poet, philosopher, and alternative educator
I am not going to start with a list of all the difficult things that are going on in the world. That would be easy to do and immediately set us on a course of polarity, of ethical and corrupt, of them and us, reinforcing a narrative about whose fault it is—corporate greed is trashing the planet. You may not even notice that’s what has happened, you just feel wearier—and strangely strengthened at the same time. On some level we all crave certainty, don’t we? We want to know what’s good and what’s bad and whose side we’re on. For example, this morning, at the start of our “resilience to resist” half-hour meditation for activists, someone mentioned that they were disturbed by the recent news about Trump. Immediately everyone’s ears pricked up: “What is it? What has he done now?” We take a strange pleasure in the confirmation of our views, both individually and collectively. “He wants to turn the Gaza Strip into a beach paradise, disperse all the Palestinians.” Wow—what brazen disregard of political rights and denial of complexity! Even as I notice these words condensing around a story in my mind, I simultaneously find myself mobilizing inner resistance against the lure of succumbing to the momentum of collective condemnation. It seems to me like a veiled way of going to war, of perpetuating suffering. The resistance itself has a softer tenor; it leans back, temporarily at least, into a matrix of broader, compassionate understanding that values complexity, deep listening, and silence. We are here to meditate this morning for good reasons. Let’s have a closer look at what it may offer us in the way of transcending polarities.
As it’s my turn to guide this morning’s practice, I take us into the body and its relationship to the earth. Many meditations start like that; acknowledging this basic, humble, physical reality—our bodies—composed of the same stuff as our environment and subject to the law of gravity. How does this fact manifest in awareness, over and above just thinking about it? Can we sense the variations of pressure in different parts of the feet where they are in contact with the ground and how that differs from the parts of the feet that are enveloped by air? Is there a clear demarcation of where skin stops and earth starts, or is it less definite than that? Can we be led by curiosity, rather than the compulsion to seek confirmation about what we assume we know? It takes some gentle coaxing to devote ourselves to that exploration, to broaden out from the way most of us spend our energy in our accelerated world: cogitating, looking at screens, absorbing a flood of information that bypasses important sensory options, particularly touch and taste/smell. And I notice that it is hard to write about these patterns without falling prey, at every step, to the very mode of binary thinking I am inviting us to give some attention to, i.e. fast/slow; being curious versus being reactive; thinking versus feeling. It seems to be part of our default setting, the way we see the world. I can’t count the many times I’ve heard people, particularly relative beginners, report ruefully, that they couldn’t stop thinking in their meditation.
Let’s reconsider the place of thinking once we have progressed a little further on our body-scan journey. Let’s, together with Bayo Akomolafe embrace “failure” as “generative incapacitation” and embrace the “broken binary.” Bayo practices a contemplative form of post activism that appeals to me as a Buddhist. “Now the whole journey is the destination” he says, “and each point, each barren point, just as noble as the final dot.” We are gradually letting awareness shed light into areas of the legs, savoring the amorphous feedback from the calves, from the front and the back of the knees, maybe words like “knobbly” or “velvety” capture some of what we feel? Or no words at all, just direct experience. What happens when we hang looser to the notion of a straight and conceivable path from a “here” (frightened and distracted) to a “there” (enlightened and calm)? When we let our agile mind/body organism respond with a dancer’s glee, from within the tangle and mystery of a felt sense of aliveness? When thinking stops being an issue, in the same way as encountering physical pain no longer triggers reactivity, or when it does, there is a less of a fixed self that is bothered.
We have now arrived at the region we call “shoulders and neck,” pulsing and burning, right there at the top of the inner shoulder blade, very familiar. “Healing is not a war against darkness, but a gentle turning toward what hurts,” Akamolafe says. Awareness inhabits the area more fully now, fluctuations of intensity wafting through that borderland, and gradually, miraculously, peace moves in. I recognize the power of this shift, not just for that moment in meditation, but for living resourcefully in the midst of adversity, and my heart is filling with light and confidence. The Buddha’s message was that there can be freedom from the push/pull of increasing pleasure and avoiding pain—those powerful binary motivators, fueling the machinery of commerce and so many of our doomed human pursuits toward lasting happiness. But here we are again in the land of opposites: samsara and nirvana. Look at the Buddha’s smile. Let go, it says, relax the tension of duality-inclined conceptualization. Realize that awareness is not different from appearances.
Our meditation is now settling in the heart space, where thinking lives more gracefully, imbued with compassion and insight. There is stillness, and there is the movement of breathing, billowing into each moment. No opposites. The breath connects us with other life on earth, and I like to imagine that among the 25 billion oxygen molecules of this inhalation may be a few that have been in the lungs of the American president and his supporters, as well as of his opponents. These same molecules might have drifted through rainforests or been processed by plankton in ancient oceans. Each breath is a reminder that the boundaries we create—political, ideological, personal—are more permeable than we sometimes assume. The air we breathe knows nothing of our divisions, flowing freely between all living things in an endless dance of exchange and renewal. This isn’t just poetic metaphor but biological reality, offering us a tangible way to experience our fundamental interconnectedness even in times of apparent division.
There is one more important conflict-resolving lesson to learn from meditation. Sooner or later, we come across opposing inner parts that create tension: parts that want to get up and get on with things, and parts that value going deeper; parts that have noble aspirations for the world, and parts that just want an easy time; victim parts and perpetrator parts. As soon as we become aware of any such polarity within us, we have made some contact with a third agent in the game: our compassionate self that has the ability and motivation to offer understanding to all these parts and, ultimately, help them to see their true, interdependent nature. There is no need to demonize any aspect of ourselves, however embedded that is in our culture. This is a tremendously rich vein of exploration that can, over time, give us a sense of choice and confidence in the face of outer conflicts.
When we take time to meditate, to pause and sense into our bodies, when we listen with open curiosity to seemingly opposing inner voices, when we allow ourselves to experience the complexity of a situation rather than rushing to judgment, we’re not being passive. Instead, we’re building capacity for more nuanced and effective responses. In daily life, we can practice “radical slowness” in small ways—pausing before responding to a provocative social media post, taking three conscious breaths when we feel ourselves hardening into a position, or simply noticing when we’re craving certainty. Each time we resist the pull toward binary thinking, we’re training ourselves in a different, more creative way of being, seeing unexpected solutions and taking actions that address root causes rather than symptoms. At the end of our meditation practice we may want to fold our hands in front of our hearts and bow to the mystery of our living, dedicating our efforts to the benefit of all.
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