When my therapist suggested I try mindfulness my initial reaction was a flat No - mostly because I have been a political fighter all my life and I didn't like the idea of 'mindfully' accepting injustice.
This is, I now realise, a misrepresentation of what mindfulness is. Whilst you strive daily to learn and practice compassion and presence, that does not mean looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, or choosing to accept rather than change it. Rather, you learn, slowly but surely, to observe the world with a clear, compassionate head, rather than one which is ruled by your triggers and immediate emotional responses to things. As a social policy academic I have spent a long time researching inequality, particularly as visited upon and experienced by women, disabled people and older people. And I used to get really REALLY cross about it. As a dear friend and academic colleague once said in her professorial inaugural lecture 'If you work in my field <media representation of women and pornography> and you AREN'T angry, then you really haven't been paying attention.' In particular, I used to get outraged every time I tried to discuss things like poverty and inequality with those on the political right, who have a very different outlook on these things than I do. How could they not SEE what was right in front of them? How could they not interpret the evidence the way I did? Did they just not CARE???? Now, some of the nicest people and my closest friends are Tories. They are my friends not because we share political or ideological beliefs (we don't, and they are wrong....) but because they will hold my hair back when I am puking and help me bury the bodies under the patio. In short, they DO care, about me, and I care deeply about them. They are one of the many reasons I get impatient with political tribalism - the idea that anyone not in your political party is scum, by definition. It's the main thing wrong with Scottish and leftwing politics, in my opinion. Bu Tories and right wingers do genuinely believe that people who experience poverty need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop relying on 'handouts'. And I genuinely believe, (after decades of research mind you) that structural issues account for about 90% of poverty and inequality and it is those we need to tackle for a fairer, happier society. But I have also learned, the hard way sometimes, that engaging in these political battles for social justice with a hot head and an angry heart gets us nowhere. I can observe injustice and fight it more effectively (and with less toll on my own mental and physical health) if I remember that we are all mortal and frail, and we all have our own burdens and pain to bear - but also that MOST of us are good at heart and mean well. Some of us are not. Some of us are evil, wicked, exploitative, dangerous, violent, greedy and blind to our own faults, happy to benefit from the abuse of others and our own lucky birthright. There seem to be an awful lot of those kind of people in power at the moment and it is even harder to fight for social justice when they are. I do not think for a moment that we need to simply accept what these people do, often in our names. But I do think we need to understand their beliefs and motivations in order to engage with them, and I think we need to accept that those beliefs and motivations are different to our own. So I can look with compassion on rich people, people who hunt foxes, people who hate foreigners, people who abuse others, people who are right-wing whilst fighting the injustice they create in the world, and whilst knowing, with the deepest of loving-kindness, that they are WRONG. And I, of course, am right.
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AuthorI came to mindfulness through trying to find a way to be sane and compassionate in an insane and harsh world. Archives
October 2017
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