Every day I do my best not to hate.
Wisdom from a mini meditation retreat
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I took five hours on Sunday to dedicate to meditation. It was a mini retreat that could be attended on zoom, a way to boost my daily meditation practice. Mindfulness is as necessary as breathing in my decade of living dangerously. The fight we have on our hands for truth, clarity, decency, empathy, and all the freedoms and human rights contained therein, will likely last our lifetimes so approaching the work with a clear head is vital.
There were so many beautiful words and moments that occurred during the retreat, and I hope to carve out some time to share them with you, but there is one lesson I felt an urgency to record.
The buddhist practitioner who led the retreat told a story about a Ukrainian friend who was living in London, and was on her way to visit family in Ukraine.
She asked her: “Aren’t you afraid to go back to Ukraine?”
And her friend responded: “Every day I do my best not to hate.”
I share this with you today, because not hating is getting more difficult, but when we well up with hate, it creates misery in our own hearts.
I see those afflicting the world with their greed as people with spiritual maladies, and I will do everything with my words to throttle and expose their seemingly endless sea of corruption. And we’ll win this one day.
But I won’t do it from a place of hate.
The US Special Election results show democracy still has a heartbeat in America. But I am taking a wait and see approach — I am too deep into my studies of Surkov to believe in impromptu heroes. I am glad to see a total rebuke of Trumpism, and will wait and see if it’s a total rebuke of Putinism.
If politicians in America are not supportive of Ukraine, there may be snow on their boots.
As my friend in Ukraine told Bette Dangerous: “Both far-right and far-left are in love with the fantasy of a Russia that doesn’t exist, two parallel versions that are very different. We were all busy ripping on the lunatic Trumpists, while the far left was moving into the void. We need to figure out a way to make moderate seem contrarian.”
MAGA will engage in nonstop racist fear-baiting, using the wins as a cudgel, and without dealing with information warfare in any meaningful way, people may continue to polarize, which is not healthy. Extreme left and extreme right form a horseshoe. In America, we used to come together in the center to get things done.
America is starving for heroes — we used to have them.
Wait and see. Judge them by their actions. And all the while, keep doing the labor of democracy, wherever you are in this world.
And every day, do your best not to hate.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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