By Miriam Hall, with Sandra Ladley 

Resilience is a word on a lot of people’s lips these days. How will I/we/they make it through the next administration? The next year? The next climate catastrophe? Resilience implies flexibility, elasticity, and the ability to recover from calamity quickly.

What comes to mind for you when you think of resilience?

There are many ways to build resilience - through nervous system regulation practices, self-care, and more. But our favorite way to build resilience is through creativity. Creativity is a word that sounds fun - exciting, full of possibility, and joyful! AND, when it comes down to it, the work - even the play - of creating requires energy and commitment. 

For instance,  recently Miriam has been writing an article/essay about the intersection of meditation and the trauma response of freezing, especially for white women. As a long-time writer, Miriam knows that the hardest part of writing is the “ass to the seat” aspect. Through practice over time, and with community,  once she shows up, she can meet whatever arises, delightful or hairy.

The overculture has a myth that creating (like living) happens alone, that we should be solitary (as if we are not already interdependent) in our making, and the same applies to  our thriving. In contrast, Jeffrey Davis, a business and writing coach, uses the slogan “DIT not DIY” - do it together, rather than do it yourself. Being in community is a key to our resilience, and to creativity, as it helps us get through the inevitable bumps and struggles of creating, and of living.

How does being in community support your creativity?

Another support for resilience and the creative life is the elements. The elements help connect us with interdependence, and the truth of impermanence. As Miriam likes to say, nature can’t lie about impermanence. The seasons continue in the order they always have, yet how they manifest dramatically changes as the climate shifts. Nature doesn’t hide death, and it doesn’t hide blossoming - all of the cycles of life. So turning to the elements helps ground us as we make, play and live, further building resilience.

How do the elements support you in everyday life? In our upcoming six-week Creative Resilience class on Saturdays from 11 - 1, March 8th  through April 12th,  we will draw on contemplative psychology, creative play, and work with the elements, to provide tools for collective resilience for these times. All are welcome; we hope you’ll join us.

By Miriam Hall

Many of us wonder how to begin the New Year on the right foot. One way is to start practices early on in the year and establish habits so we can return to them throughout the months. Many of us are looking for ways to soften but also strengthen our hearts. A great way to do that is to commit to compassion.

But many of us aren’t entirely sure what compassion is, much less find it easy to practice. Common questions around compassion include:

Can I be angry and compassionate at the same time? Does compassion for someone else mean ignoring my own pain or hurt? How do I know if what I am feeling is compassion or codependency? What’s the difference between compassion and empathy? Is compassion fatigue really a thing? If so, how do I deal with it? 

Do any of these questions sound familiar to you? If so, you are not alone. It's hard to orient to compassion as a key part of our lives if we don’t really understand it or feel we can’t practice it properly. You're invited to explore this further during our free online event: Karuna Live! Set Your Compassion Compass, held on January 18th. This primer will remind you of your inherent capacity for compassion and help clarify some of what are called the “near enemies” of compassion, which are the ways we confuse it with other, less helpful, states of mind.

One of Karuna Training's strengths lies in the many compassion practices we offer, including Four Immeasurables (aka Maitri/Metta/Loving Kindness), tonglen, four-step/FEEL, "self"-compassion, and compassionate exchange. In this short Karuna Live, get a sense of what different kinds of compassion practice can do for you, and then be led through a guided compassion practice. Come live to ask questions about where you struggle with compassion in your life. Bring a friend, and you can help each other remember to practice what's important to your hearts.

By Miriam Hall

For a long time, I saw myself as someone almost composed of grief. Due to a lot of early loss in my family – including (but not limited to) both my parents by the time I was 19 – it felt as if being depressed was part of my destiny. I even found a definition of my name, which means “sea of bitterness” or “sea of sorrow,” which only served to reiterate this self-concept.

But then I received other, Buddhist names like “Lotus Warrior” and even “Joyful Golden Light.”  I began to do some more research on my name, which is more common in Jewish and Arabic lineages than in the Protestant white culture in which I was raised, and found it can also mean “wished-for child,” “rebellion,” or “lady of the sea.” I spent much of my thirties crawling out of the shell of my previous self-limiting definitions and into a larger world where I began to see that my experiences were not singular (many of us experience much early loss) and that they didn’t have to define me.

One of the ways we can limit our own experience is by clinging to a realm, which in Tibetan Buddhist teachings is usually described as a series of states or places you pass through after death and before rebirth. However, the realms have also come to stand in for psychological states we get stuck in. Each of the six “realm cycles” have a particular flavor, which I will introduce briefly here, and we will cover more deeply in the Karuna Live event on October 9.

The six realms are the God realm, the Jealous God realm, the Human realm, the Hungry Ghost realm, the Animal realm, and the Hell realm. From the initial description, I know it seems like things start pretty well and go downhill from there (from God to Hell, clearly it’s a decline!) but actually, there are problems with the God realm, even though it’s “on top”. One of the places we can see the God realm at play, personally and socially, is by noticing the behaviors of folks who have way more than their basic needs met. While anyone can cause harm, and anyone can have a rough life, the more we move beyond our basic needs being met, the more likely we are not to pay attention to the suffering of others. Not paying attention costs us dearly – our inability to connect with direct compassion, a sense of isolation in the “ivory tower” of our own experience, and a sense of being better than everyone else, which has to be maintained to stay in the perfect-seeming world we find ourselves in.

The realm I got the most stuck in when I was younger and struggling with so much loss, was the Human realm, which is riddled with longing and yearning but also ripe for the development of compassion. While there certainly were echoes of truth in these experiences – I WAS grieving, I WAS often isolated – I also used internalized patriarchy to keep myself isolated and believed in my own story of isolation so much that I missed opportunities to connect to others. Through decades of meditation and contemplative practice, and learning and teaching contemplative psychology (and therapy), I’ve been able to more easily recognize when I am getting stuck and help myself (or ask for help) to get me out of the small cocoon-like world of a realm, and out into the open air.

One way to think of these realms is as if they are costumes – we don the outfits, masks, and mentality of the realm, and then we see the world that way, and others treat us as if we belong there. We become – and make others into - jokers, devils, animals, and more, without realizing it’s all a projection. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that can last seconds or decades, depending on our level of awareness and how much oppression we are facing, much of which is designed to keep us unaware of our own potential and power.  Mindfulness and awareness practices can help us see through the layers of trauma and oppression and how they have trapped us in a disguise, so we don’t even recognize our own brilliant nature.

If you are curious to learn more, come to Karuna Live on October 9th or watch for the podcast later in the month. There, we will explore the realms in more depth, seeing where we tend to get stuck and finding the wisdom in these states, along with some tastes of liberation.

By Naoko and Miriam

Buddhism says there are “two truths” to our experience - we are individuals who are socially located with particular backgrounds and identities, and at the same time there is the nature of all phenomena, called non-self or interdependence.

This is what we are referring to as the paradox of identity: on the relative level, we experience the world through separate identities, while on the ultimate level, we are none of these identities. A paradox is when (at least) two issues that appear opposite, coexist. And these two perspectives - ultimate and relative - definitely co-exist. In fact, they are the same teaching.

For Naoko, as an Asian woman, and Miriam, as a white queer woman, both living in the United States, we have experienced our share of identity-based aggression. Buddhist teachings in the West tend to focus on inner transformation over social transformation, and we have both benefited from that work. However, as Reverend angel Kyodo williams Sensei says, “Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.” This focus on inner transformation can cause two problems: 1. Inadvertently blame individuals for the suffering they experience from oppression and 2. Keep individuals and communities unaware of the power of our potential for social change. Individuals are a mirror, a microcosm of what’s out in the world; we carry systemic belief systems inside of us. We can change that impact inside us, but change must be collective to alter the systemic level.

It is true that the two of us, along with all humans, are equal in the eyes of suffering; suffering is a universal experience. However, it is also true that our individually racialized and gendered experiences have affected us deeply, and impact how we receive and interpret dharma teachings. The detrimental impacts of oppression should not be blamed on those being oppressed; rather, we need to do collective work to change oppressive systems. In Karuna Training, we talk about “intrinsic health,” which applies to individuals and all relationships, including institutions. In other words, we can work together to uncover the intrinsic health of society.

The three poisons of clinging to (passion), pushing away (aggression), and dismissing (ignorance) reality are key to suffering. Acknowledging our experience as a valid aspect of reality isn’t clinging; it’s discriminating awareness wisdom. We can both acknowledge that clinging to any identity at any level can cause suffering and, at the same time, recognize that bypassing identity to try to come to some “truer form of emptiness” also causes suffering.

These are just some of the topics we will dive into together during our live event on August 11. Join us for this two-hour introduction to contemplative psychology, through a discussion and practice around the paradoxical two truths of our identities.

June is Pride Month in the United States and many places. I recently saw a cartoon by Bless the Messy on Instagram which compared what people think Pride Month is (rainbows and parades) versus what Pride Month *actually* is (many things, including but not limited to celebration, protecting trans youth, surviving hard shit, feeling free, and being valid to stay in the closet to feel safe). It’s true that June *can* be a time filled with parades and parties. Personally, as a middle-aged, chronically ill, introverted queer person, I now know that protests and parades, whether celebrating pride or fighting for our rights, are all things I need to do very mindfully, if at all. Most of the time, my life in June is not so different than it is any other month. 

That’s not because I no longer care about queer rights or because I’m not into celebrating. I’ve just gotten to know more about what I need as an individual queer person and more about what I can contribute to the causes and conditions of our liberation. In terms of how the larger world celebrates during Pride Month, June can also bring genuine statements of solidarity and (frequently) meaningless corporate sponsorship.

In the early 00s, at a huge pride event in San Francisco, I noticed a beer advertisement featuring a gay couple for the first time. My initial reaction was – how courageous! Then I felt sort of delighted to see part of my identity reflected to me in the pages of a mainstream magazine. But not long after, because I was developing critical analysis, I recognized that becoming a target market isn’t such good news. Over the last couple of decades, such LGBTQIA+-oriented advertising has become a part of most people’s everyday visual and auditory experience despite resistant pockets where homophobia is front and center.

Having our identity as queer folks contested in politics and media so frequently can do a number on our sense of worthiness. Last June, in a Karuna Live offering, my colleague Emma Bunnell and I contemplated the need for women and queer folks to trust our worth, and our value, internally and externally. In our program, we addressed how can we value who we really are, without further oppressing others since a fair number of media in pitching toward gay communities still center predominantly cisgender and white folks?

These are some of the questions driving the upcoming podcas to be released this month: What is pride? Is it a “good” thing or a bad thing? In addition, what is an identity? Should I be proud of a queer identity? When can “too much pride” mean I oppress other queer folks who are more vulnerable than I am? Should I see identity (in a Buddhist way) as a not-solid thing? Should queer folks be more oriented toward liberation than pride? How has the idea of queer pride gotten co-opted by the media and capitalism? Can we find a liberated form of pride? And how do rights fit into all of this?

My sense of what true liberation is has also changed over the decades. In recent years, I have been practicing and studying spiritual abolitionism with Lama Rod Owens and somatic abolitionism with Resmaa Menakem, slowly finding a unified vision of liberation that is both political and spiritual. 

As Lama Rod expresses in his recent book The New Saints, queerness itself is fundamentally disruptive and liberatory. In my June podcast, I will explore how dharma weaves into pride, identity, and liberation when it comes to queerness. All folks are welcome to listen – though I will be addressing these issues through a queer lens, we have and will always continue to learn a lot from queer elders, especially queer elders of color, regardless of our identities.

Look out for the episode later this month on the Karuna Training Podcast.

*I am using the term "queer" as an umbrella term, as many folks in my generation (late GenX) prefer it to LGBTQIA+. If you prefer LGBTQIA+, please know you are a part of this discussion, too.

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I was raised agnostic in the US Midwest. We recognized the basic Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, as well as colonial celebrations like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. Each of these was approached with some energy but not much meaning. Christmas equaled family time, which was similar to other holidays.

When I was twelve, my dad died, and then my mom died when I was nineteen. Holidays became wrought for me, a time of grieving not just my parents, but also grieving what others had that I fundamentally lacked – the family that was at the center of the meaning of those celebrations. I tried to build new traditions with my remaining siblings, but none of it ever felt right. 

As I age, I understand that each holiday also has a lot of political and spiritual history. The tangled mess that semi-Christianity and patriotic culture have built out of national holidays parallels my family's tangled mess. Now, in addition to the bags of family history, I can sense the layers of social and economic history behind each of these days.  

Because of all this, my spouse and I have mostly chosen to opt out of big celebrations, taking tender time to be quiet together on often difficult holidays. But there’s more room for what joy can emerge, space made available out of practice.

All families and all communities are complex systems. Most large-scale holidays are complicated because a lot of the federal holidays in many countries are tied to colonialism, religion, and or wars. 

I want to take some time to honor the complexity of celebration when it comes to holidays and offer some suggestions for staying grounded. 

A holiday – in the American use of the word – is generally some predetermined date or day when a collection of folks celebrate, observe, or mourn. Dig into the history of any particular holiday – let’s pick Halloween since it is that season. Doing a Wikipedia search will reveal hundreds of years of associations and layers, from Christian All Hallow’s Eve to Pagan Samhain to appropriation from Latin American Dia de los Muertos. 

In addition, there are all the commercial layers – what I’ve been told by advertising this holiday means – candy, costumes, and, as I’ve aged, drinking and “sexy” versions of just about any costume. 

Finally, there are the inner layers, the ones more personal to my family and to me – cooking green bean casserole, thinking of those who have died, celebrating the glorious color of autumn.

I have struggled with Halloween for years because of my previously traumatic relationship with grief. People around me were putting skeletons in their yards but couldn’t talk with me about having been orphaned at 19. The dissonance was too much for me. As I have resolved a fair amount of the trauma, I have become more curious about the holiday’s history and meanings for others and building new traditions for myself.

Pause and think of a major holiday for you – one recognized by the culture(s) around you but complicated for you, whether it’s Rosh Hashanah, Eid, Christmas, Diwali, or another. What are this holiday's political, religious, and social histories? And what’s your personal history and that of your family of origin? How does it feel to hold all of that as an adult? 

In Karuna Training, we often say that every relationship you’ve ever had is in the room when you enter. This means we bring our history with us everywhere, and those present mirror that history for us. I think that every holiday is there when we observe – every past Yom Kippur we’ve observed is part of the present Yom Kippur, and so on. When we bring awareness to those stories, we let go of unconscious expectations. For me, coming to terms with the former holidays in preparation for each present holiday helps me enjoy what I can.

A lot of this is grounded in the elements. When I need to deal with the fact of death on the day of a funeral, the bright autumn leaves outside my window bring peace. When I struggle with being generous without breaking the bank, I reach into the richness of the soil. When I can’t seem to clarify travel plans, I walk near water and follow its flow. To each of these experiences, I can offer up the confusion of so many celebrations and transmute them from being just my pain alone to understanding them as a part of universal human pain. From there, I can see my relatives and friends, clients and teachers, and all other humans battling in a similar way each time a significant date on the calendar approaches.

Understanding a bit of our own history, our family’s history, and the social history of a holiday can help. Using awareness to check our expectations is also helpful. Once we are at the celebration, having practices that help us stay connected to ourselves is essential.

When we can let go of some of that additional luggage, our arms are open for the now moment, ready to make new traditions or be clear-minded about opting out. In other words, we have equanimity. We can hold what’s coming up for us and also witness others’ suffering with more compassion and clarity.

Join me as we do practices to cultivate our curiosity and equanimity around complex celebrations so you can have more tools in your pocket and a sense of community.

*Please note that, for example, Jewish high holidays will have already passed in September; not all countries and cultures “celebrate” at this time of the year. Despite the timing of this event, it will be focused on any holiday/celebration, not just US Thanksgiving, Christmas, and/or Gregorian New Year.

By Miriam Hall

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“What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?“

- Ross Gay, Inciting Joy

Joy. A three-letter word that is so simple and short, and yet, experiencing joy often feels complicated. Through my study and work in Karuna Training, I’ve seen joy as a spectrum, from contentment to ecstasy. There’s a wide range in there - celebration, happiness, satisfaction, playfulness, delight, wonder, and more. And, as Ross Gay says in the quote above, joy is not separate from sorrow.

Pause for a moment to consider the following:

You can make a list of what brings joy, but I invite you to go deeper and consider how joy feels in your body, heart, and mind.

If we are going to harvest joy, first, we have to plant the seeds for it. When I woke up this morning, the sink was full of dirty dishes. I remember grumbling to myself before going to sleep that I’d take care of them in the morning. When I saw the sink this morning, I momentarily cursed last night me, but then I recalled I was exhausted and couldn’t do one more thing last night. I turned on some fun music and dug in because leaving them for future me would kick the struggle down the road a bit.

This morning, I had the ability to give my afternoon self the gift of joy that comes with getting to see a clean sink and the minor, but important, accomplishment of finishing something. I can’t always do that. I struggle with cyclical depression and anxiety, and sometimes planting joy looks more like leaving a favorite stuffed animal in bed to snuggle with that night. Sometimes it looks like crying with a friend until I am emptied out, and we can laugh about something silly. 

In other words, small bits of joy resource us, give us the strength and ability to handle hard times, and help us be receptive to further joy. Deb Dana, a polyvagal researcher, and therapist, coined the word “glimmers” to refer to the opposite of what we commonly call “triggers”. While triggers set our nervous system into states like fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, glimmers help us recover from those states and, sometimes, even attain equilibrium and joy. Though the idea and experience of glimmers are often small or momentary, we expand to the whole spectrum of living - joy and sorrow- when we practice joy in microscopic ways.

All of this talks about joy as if it is an “inside job.” In a way, it is. But the inner aspect of joy isn’t the whole story. The fact is, some people can’t access the basic resources they need to survive, which can mean joy becomes a lower priority on the list. I think it’s important to look at joy as both an outside and inside job. Everyone can enjoy the small things in our lives - butterflies, children’s smiles, beautiful flowers - even as we struggle to survive or work toward liberation for all. Survival and joy don't have to be pitted against each other; we can always keep the joy in mind and heart. Joy and care often come together. Joy isn’t meant to bypass pain; rather, to help give us more than just pain in our lives. 

Once we begin to recognize joy on a personal level and a larger scale, we need to harvest it: take it in, savor it, and share it. Since it’s intermixed with sorrow and everything else, this harvesting of joy isn’t always clean and simple. When we harvest joy, we have to harvest the full complexity of our lives. 

In August, I am facilitating a Karuna Live to take a deeper dive into the concept of harvesting joy. I invite you to join me for an hour to collectively cultivate a sense of interconnected joy, embracing the richness of our overall experience.

By Miriam Hall

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“Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.”

– Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not An Apology

Oppression based on gender and sexuality is more heightened than ever in the United States and many other countries. Folks who identify as female, transgender, queer, nonbinary, or other identities that are not heterosexual and cisgender (identify with the gender they were given at birth) worry about their lives. Many compassionate people who are cisgender and/or heterosexual are shocked by these public persecutions and are unsure what to do. Oppression of those with differing gender and sexuality affects everyone, even if those closest to what is deemed “normal” often feel it less.

How is shame perpetrated internally? Humans are meaning-making beings. Tremendous wisdom and wrenching confusion can emerge from the meanings we create. When children are getting to know themselves and the world, if what they feel internally doesn’t match what others tell them is acceptable (implicitly or explicitly), the meaning they make is that there is something wrong with them, not with the world. As Sebene Selassie teaches, belonging is as basic to our survival as water and food; if we sense we don’t belong, we will do anything to fit in.

For instance, a common situation: a cisgender male child wants to wear dresses, but he is told by adults that he can’t wear dresses. Even if they don’t say there is something wrong with him, he will come to that conclusion. The child’s wisdom is in playing with gender representation and seeking something outside the straightjacket of what’s deemed okay. But he has also internalized many messages that even more strongly say there is something wrong with him. He will decide there is something wrong with him for wanting to wear dresses, instead of recognizing that there’s something wrong with a world where boys can’t have more clothing options. This idea that there is something wrong with us is what fuels shame from the inside.

Even folks who are cisgender and straight can remember back to adolescence when most people experience shame around gender and sexuality. Lovingly touching our personal experiences of this kind of shame can help develop empathy for others who fit the default even less.

In contemplative psychology, we study the ego as our basic sense of self, which is constantly forming and reforming every moment. The development of the ego is not dissimilar to the development of a child’s mind. The self is a pattern-seeking, meaning-making calculator, which adds up all the pieces, eliminating anything aberrant in ourselves or others. This reinforces a sense of difference as being wrong and deepens shame about our own “wrong” thoughts,views, or desires. 

What is driving the oppression of gender and sexual diversity externally? When shame grows unchecked, we suffer. We blame others for our fear, sadness, and disgust, the three primary emotions underneath shame. The more the folks who are blaming have systemic power, the more dangerous the blame is for their targets. 

Are you feeling overwhelmed? That’s fair. This is a deep and wide system, one meant to overwhelm us, that Sonya Renee Taylor calls the “Body Shame Profit Complex.” How do we peek underneath all those layers? Take a moment as you are reading, and pause. Let yourself feel the largeness of your own experience of how these systems have harmed you, and let that acknowledgment help you connect to others. 

I invite you to join us for this Karuna Live. Together, we will collectively begin to feel what is underneath shame and blame around sexuality and gender, shedding layers until our raw selves are able to tolerate being seen, even if it is only a little bit. Even if we can’t yet share with others our deepest fantasies, views, or identities, we can reveal them to ourselves, casting a light of love on what we would otherwise keep hidden.

We will talk more about the main emotions underneath the secondary emotion of shame, and how we are wired to be ashamed of our gender and sexuality, regardless of our identities. Then, we will carefully practice feeling into the wisdom locked up in our shame, letting it show itself so we can grow out of our shame shell slowly, in sustainable and loving ways. 

People of all genders and sexualities are welcome to attend. 

By Miriam Hall

During the pandemic, I got interested in mending some of my older clothes. I researched how to darn and patch, not having done much of either in the past and quickly found many videos and tutorials on “visible mending.” Visible mending is not hiding that something has been mended – using a patch that shows off where there’s been repair or embroidering in a way that makes a sewn tear appear more beautiful than before. There is a Japanese form of mending pottery, kintsukuroi, in which potters heal a broken bowl or cup with gold, so the flaw is transformed into art.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if this could be the case for relationships? What if, instead of seeing only scars when we have hobbled back together after hurt, we could find a deeper richness after repair? During the pandemic, I have experienced rifts and tears in many minor and major relationships – some initiated by me, some initiated by others, and a few that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I’ve been able to ask for or make repairs in only a couple of those circumstances. Yet, as cliché, as it can sound, those relationships that we were able to repair are, in fact, richer than they ever were before. So why are some of those relationships reparable, some went by the wayside, and some caused great pain without any resolution?

When Repair Is Ill-Advised

Not all situations of hurt or harm should be repaired. Regardless of our fundamental capability as humans to be good, some relationships suffer from power imbalance and need to be gotten out of as soon as possible. 

People who are systematically oppressed often try to repair situations we need to leave. As I often remind myself and my students, we can use any form of dharma teachings against ourselves. So before we go any further, I want to remind us all that repair is not only not always possible, it is at times dangerous to remain in a relationship, much less attempt to ask for or offer repair. As is often discussed in the prison abolitionist movement, some detrimental systems or situations aren’t broken – they are meant to function that way. If a system or relationship continuously harms you, that may be by design, even if unconsciously, not by accident. 

Digging Into Details

The prefix “re” means to “do again,” and pair means to “be together.” If we weren’t together in the first place, it would be hard to pair us again. I have tried many times in my past to force a re-pair with someone when the fact is, there wasn’t a pairing to begin with. For instance, during the pandemic, I forged a zygote of a friendship as a white woman with a Black woman on social media. We “liked” each other’s posts, re-shared on occasion, and exchanged some private messages. But as is often the case for white women, I assumed too much intimacy with her, wanting us to be more “paired” than we were. This confused intimacy led me to make some mistakes – sending her a video I thought was funny that she thought was violent (which I would have tracked had I paid closer attention to her content) and, ultimately, commenting on one of her posts that generalized her talent as a Black artist. 

I knew I had made a mistake immediately, because of a set of sensations I have learned to track in my time as both a student and teacher of Contemplative Psychology. My throat tightens, my face reddens, and my mind begins to race. I wished I had taken my time before I made the post; I wondered if I could remove it before she saw it, then the equivocating began – “It’s not that bad, it will be fine.” I spent the next 24 hours constantly checking my messages to see if she had replied, even to say, “Hey, that was not cool.” All of this is textbook behavior for me. My body and mind do the same reactions they have done since I was a child and harmed someone; however, what has changed is that I can now observe these reactions and – for the most part – not act on them, just notice them.

Once a week had passed, and I hadn’t heard anything from her, including no hearts or laughs at posts she would have normally responded to, I sent a brief apology, naming that I knew the comment was harmful and I was sorry. 

I never heard back.

I obsessed over her non-reply for twenty-four hours, then it finally hit me: we didn’t have enough of a relationship to begin with. 

It’s not that repair isn’t possible when we don’t have a relationship, but to expect her, as a Black woman, to do the emotional labor with a white woman with whom she hasn’t built trust is too much to ask. There wasn’t enough there to repair, for either of us. I have mostly let go of the idea that I can “make it up to her” somehow, and I no longer expect her to want to pair with me. Part of the skillful means, in this case, was realizing repair wasn’t possible.

Skillful Means

We live in an era rich with transformative justice, relational wisdom, and mindful action. Out of the suggestions of people like Dr. Ken Hardy LMFT, along with the four-step practice we use in Karuna Training to heal when we split from the wisdom of our felt sense, I have a kind of “checklist” for myself, which we will try out during the Karuna Live offering. 

I am not perfect at repair. But I’ve come to understand that no one is. If you have even made it this far, certain folks reading this newsletter would love to tell you how I hurt or harmed them and did a horrible job of mending. I regret some circumstances and wish I could have handled them with more skill. Equally, I can think of the times when others have caused more pain through attempts to patch things up than repair. This isn’t about repairing perfectly or being better at it than others. Not every rending can be repaired; not every crack can be made beautiful with gold. We transform together when we can stay awake and aware of both the hurt or harm caused and whether or not repair is possible. If repair is possible, which it isn’t always,  we need to practice skillful means to get through it.  

Register for Miriam's upcoming course, "Ripening Into Repair: Practicing Right Relationship".

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