“Our Humble Return”: Knowing our Capacities, Boundaries, and Aspirations

“Our Humble Return”: Knowing our Capacities, Boundaries, and Aspirations David Ketchum July 30, 2023 Watch the video HERE

        I’ve spent a significant amount of my life supporting human beings navigate through and heal from difficult and distressing experiences: as a minister, mediator, conflict coach, peer counselor, support group facilitator, educator, and friend. And after spending tens of thousands of hours over decades of listening, I can wholeheartedly confirm what you already know: having healthy relationships with healthy boundaries in our unhealthy society is hard work. 

        One of my favorite descriptions of boundaries comes from Dr. Helena Liu: 

“the framework in which we take responsibility for our own emotions and actions and relinquish responsibility for the emotions and actions of others. They are fundamental to leading healthy and happy lives.”

    Importantly, Liu notes that these are living spaces, “dynamic and flexible”; the more in-tune we are to our needs and circumstances, the more we can customize our boundaries to the moment. At certain times in our lives, or in certain relationships, we may relax or strengthen our boundaries. In other words, and if I may borrow from a well-known observance about the Sabbath, boundaries are made for human wellbeing; humans are not made for boundaries.  

    Dr. Liu calls boundaries “the necessary spaces” between us, and names five common aspects of life where we experience and need healthy boundaries. 

• emotionally (to mutually know and honor our feelings, rather than “reject or deny” them); 
• mentally (to mutually know and honor our values and beliefs, rather than to “impose … thoughts and opinions” on ourselves or others); 
• energetically (to mutually know and honor our time and energy, so that we can spend our lives aligned to our aspirations);
• physically (to mutually know and honor our bodies, their safety and wellbeing); and
• materially (to mutually know and honor the possessions that are in our care). 

        You probably noticed that I’ve taken the liberty to frame each of these aspects with the phrase, “to mutually know and honor … .” At the risk of sounding obvious, healthy boundaries in relationships arise when people take the time to understand their own and learn about the other person’s boundaries, and then work together to treat each other in ways that honor both. As simple as this sounds, there are many places where things can go wrong. Maintaining healthy boundaries depends on each person having the skills, resources, support, willingness, and dedication for things that require a lot of effort, such as self-reflection, communication, listening, creative problem-solving, assertiveness, and flexible decision-making. Add to this a commitment to ethics and self-restraint, and we begin to see how complicated boundaries can be. This is also why so many of us choose to rely on cultural and relational scripts to do the heavy lifting. 

        Yet what are we to do when those cultural and relational scripts are not healthy? The world as we often experience it actively undermines our wellbeing and our ability to thrive. For too many of us, we are trained to be alienated from our own bodies; to actively ignore our needs; and to then view the emotional pain of this alienation as proof of how we are somehow terrible human beings. Unhealthy relational and cultural patterns, especially abusive ones, also condition us to accept this kind of alienation as normal. Add on layers of marginalization and oppression that comes from the kinds of injustice that are baked into our society and culture, and the cards are often stacked against us. 

My friend and colleague, Caryn, illustrates these kinds of differences by comparing the living habitat of a beaver dam to a rigid, fixed system like a concrete dam and channel. Beaver dams are part of and responsive to their ecosystem, not separate from it. They slow and filter water flow, help recharge groundwater levels, and create wetland habitats that support bird and amphibian lives, including many endangered and threatened species that depend on wetlands. In contrast, human-built dams are associated with erosion, trapped sediments, and habitat destruction. They often lead to species extinction, and their reservoirs are typically populated by non-native, invasive species. It’s a powerful image of the difference between boundaries that are life-affirming, that make sense of and support our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others, and boundaries that are imposed, rigid, and life-denying. For many of us, we have been living with boundaries that have been shaped and defined by oppressive systems that do not have our wellbeing in mind. 

     We can reflect on much of our activism and movements for social change in relation to our work to insist on our humanity and gain some level of self-determination in our lives, to establish our own boundaries that do center our personal and collective wellbeing. But when we decide to act, to become agents of change resisting and transforming unjust systems and cultures, then we encounter another way for our boundaries to be tested and stretched, as we balance what needs to be done with what we can do. And with our society’s obsession with productivity, even our most skillful activism and balanced boundaries can be haunted by the question, “have I done enough?” There are thousands of temptations, every day, for us to ignore our boundaries and push past the limits of our wellbeing. Everywhere we turn, we run into the traps of cynicism, indifference, despair, fatigue, burnout, and powerless rage. 

        When it comes to boundaries and oppression, it is also important to explicitly note how boundaries and privilege interact.  Jo Musker-Sherwood expressed the tension in this way: 

  “we don’t have much of a positive culture around ‘no’, and that the number of options available to us in saying ‘no’ can very depending on our levels of privilege. / Which boundaries are respected are in part determined by the strength of preference on either side, but also by the balance of power. So boundaries are personal, but they are also deeply political.”

In other words, when it comes to unmasking, resisting, and transforming injustice, establishing a boundary is often a defiant act of asserting our humanity. For this reason, working with boundaries can be a healing and empowering experience, especially for any of us navigating oppressive systems, recovering from abusive experiences, and unlearning internalized oppression and dominance. This is wonderful, but this also means that marginalized people are often – and again – carrying an extra load. 

        For example, Dr. Liu notes how racist tropes work like this, with Black women expected to have an “infinite reserve of inner strength” and Asian and Middle Eastern women expected to be “‘naturally’ subservient and … available at the beck and call of others’ demands.” The result is:
 

“Integral to the work of setting and maintaining boundaries is recognizing the sexist and racist assumptions that set unreasonable expectations on women of color. We need to do the ongoing work of decolonizing our minds and learn to detach from these harmful assumptions both in our expectations of others and our expectations of ourselves.”

      Rheeda Walker, a psychologist and professor at the University of Houston, similarly points out that BIPOC  “communities disproportionately carry high levels of burden with less access to education, housing, economic and political opportunities while shouldering more violence and disparities in health and well-being.” This pushes resilience to its edges, where we find ourselves overwhelmed and “as if we cannot take anymore, mentally.” Establishing boundaries comes with recognizing our limits and caring enough about ourselves to believe our wellbeing is worth protecting. Walker recommends reflective questions to help us track with those limitations, so that we can affirm our worth, recognize when we are being overwhelmed, and take steps to come back to balance:

“Am I behaving in ways that are inconsistent with my character? Am I snapping at friends or my children and feeling regretful about doing so? Do I resent having to get out of bed in the morning? Have I lost my sense of joy and peace?”

Yet because our society is set up to expect and benefit from their exploitation, marginalized people often experience pushback when they do establish boundaries. This means that, not only is it essential for members of marginalized and oppressed communities to develop healthy boundaries, it is also an act of resistance against systems and cultures that are organized around our exploitation. Boundary-making helps us recover our agency, but it may also expose us to pushback and even attacks, especially from people who benefit from our marginalization. Dr. Liu links boundaries, self-care, and “showing up for others”: 

“Caring for ourselves is also a cornerstone of sustainable activism, where we can sustain our passion and commitment while not succumbing to exhaustion and despair. … Sometimes if you advocate for yourself when people are used to compliance from you, they will be taken aback. / We must ultimately remember that when we give and give and give without any regard for our own needs, we will burn out. When we work ourselves to exhaustion, we won’t be able to give anything to anybody.”

This is a good reminder that boundaries are also about honoring our personal and collective limitations. Anyone actively involved in trying to make the world a better place has felt the pressures to push past our limitations, abandon boundaries, and sacrifice our well-being and aspirations in the name of a cause. While it is true that sometimes we may strategically and intentionally place our needs to the side to deal with a crisis, it is not sustainable or healthy to do so over the long-term – for ourselves or our movements. 

        If we need a devastating reminder of just how true this is, we can reflect on how our current ecological crisis and the urgency of climate change arises out of our humanity’s reckless refusal to honor the earth’s boundaries. Climate change and environmental injustice are both a reality and a symbol of the harm that arises when we ignore boundaries and balance. Musker-Sherwood helpfully makes this connection, and names the remedy: 

 “It is precisely in our difficulties respecting boundaries that we have found ourselves facing the consequences of an overstretched planet, and it is therefore in our humble return to the natural rhythm of giving and receiving, of action and rest, that we can find healing personally and globally.”   

        But this also means that boundaries are about accountability. The healthiest boundaries are meaningless if we don’t know how to practice them; recognize when we are out of balance, being harmed or harming another; and adjust course toward healing and growing. One of the important essays I’ve encountered on this topic is Shannon Perez-Darby’s “The Secret Joy of Accountability” (in The Revolution Starts at Home). Writing in the context of recovering from domestic violence, she describes how an abusive relationship narrowed the choices available to her and eroded her agency and self-determination: “The solution to breaking a pattern of power and control that limits choices lies in an increased ability to act powerfully and make choices on your own behalf.” (105-106). “Relationships,” she wrote, “are made of tiny moments of intention and choice.” (103) Boundary work brings our intention and attention to these tiny moments, helping us recognize both woundedness and strength, and our need for both “self-determination and safety” and accountability. Perez-Darby’s description of this helps capture it as a living process of healing and growing:

“I define (self) accountability as a process of taking responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices. … In a process of self-accountability, this reconciliation isn’t dependent on another person’s involvement, but instead engages with our own sense of values and what is important to us. In the work of self-accountability, we are constantly striving to align our actions and our values, knowing it’s likely they will never be exactly the same. When there’s a gap in that alignment we can reflect on what choices we would need to make in the future so our actions are more in line with who we want to be.” (110-111) 

This brings us full circle, back to the Dr. Liu’s description of boundaries as: “the framework in which we take responsibility for our own emotions and actions and relinquish responsibility for the emotions and actions of others.” This relinquishment does not mean letting go of community; instead, we are cultivating community in ways that give us each the support, resources, and care we need to “take responsibility for our own emotions and actions.” Like the beaver’s dam, our healthy boundaries help create a life-giving habitat of mutual care and support. Perez-Darby calls it “creating the conditions for loving each other the very best way we know how – beautifully, fully, and as people who can act powerfully and make choices on our own behalf.”

        And, at least for me, it is this kind of vision that makes the hard work of healthy boundaries more than a psychological routine, more even than an act of resistance, but a creative practice suffused with joy, love, and hope. 

“Listening is the first duty of Love”

“Listening is the first duty of Love”       July 23, 2023  Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

(Listening) can adequately be described through three functions of creative justice, namely, listening, giving, forgiving. In none of them does love do more than justice demands, but in each of them love recognizes what justice demands. In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening. All things and all men, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens. “Tracing Paul Tillich’s Words on Listening and Love via Welcome to Clearing Customs, by Craig Thompson.

https://clearingcustoms.net/2015/06/20/tracing-paul-tillichs-words-on-listening-and-love/

 

For three years prior to the pandemic, I made annual trips to Scotland and England to speak at conferences and in churches, always with my friend, John Churcher, as host. In a recent conversation with John, I was informed that I had lost a lot of my audience in England when I made a conscious decision to stop talking about Donald Trump. It seems that a lot of my popularity in Great Britain was predicated on our mutual disgust for America’s “clementine Caligula.” Although I hate losing listeners and I would certainly welcome another invitation to go on a lecture tour in with John, I have to admit that I hate having to think about Trump a bit more. I hate how I feel when I have to read too much or hear too much about him, either of his past administration or his hope of returning to the White House. 

 

I still think that the treat of fascism is real. I am worried about the health of democracy all over the world as right wing, sometimes fascist, and sometimes neo-Nazi political candidates gain popularity in countries which, frankly, should know better. 

I understand that fear is a huge factor in politics which often drives voters in the direction of a strong-man leader, even if they may despise dictators or a loss of personal freedoms, they crave a feeling of security even more. But there is something more at work in the world than the usual, more predictable, political influences. 

 

For our entire lives, western democracies and gone back and forth between more conservative or more liberal parties and leaders, but those changes didn’t often break up marriages! The change of presidents from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Regan in 1980 was very upsetting to me, but it didn’t affect church attendance. In fact, it rarely affected preaching. 

 

Talk about politics and religion has always been hazardous at family gathers, making many holidays a time to dread but over the past decade, the fractures around politics have become so deep and so wide that many families just don’t even plan to get together at the holidays. Something is different now and I have spent way too much time as an armchair sociologist trying to understand what has happened to my people, my friends, and my family. 

 

America and the world have a lot of problems right now. Some of the most serious and most dangerous of those problems are problems with obvious and fairly easy remedies but, in most cases, we seem incapable of doing even the most simple and effective things because we are so divided. Americans are so split down the middle by politics that we can almost never reach a majority decision to do anything meaningful. 

 

Clearly, it is imperative that we find some way to bridge this gap. We have to love America more than we love our own partisan views. In my next sermon, to be released on August 2, I’m going to open a whole new can of “whoop-ass” on the corruption in our Congress and Supreme Court. The problems in our nation are too serious to mince words, and too important for us to just call in “sick of it all” and drop out.

 

But before I vent my spleen fully, I want to say a pastoral word about trying to heal the divisions among us that make every problem so much more complicated and so difficult to resolve. I have long believed that if we can take the time to fully understand another person that we will find ourselves capable of forgiving them. That doesn’t mean that understanding is justification or agreement, you can listen to a person who has hurt you or disappointed you until you fully understand how and why they did what they did and it may still be true that this person really sucks, but understanding at least gives you the opportunity to approach forgiveness.

I hope that the name “Paul Tillich” is familiar to you. He was one of the early 20^th century’s most profound and important thinkers but he is often over looked, frankly, because, most of the time, he is very hard to understand. But he was a theologian who lived through the moral crisis that was WWII and the Holocaust and his attempts at plumbing the depth of what went wrong with the world is important to listen to in this time of our own moral crisis. 

 

Tillich writes, the: three functions of creative justice, namely (are), listening, giving, forgiving. He says that the first duty of love is to listen. 

We cannot understand the moral divide between progressives and conservatives, we cannot understand how almost half of this country’s voters still want to re-elect Donald Trump even after his moral failings, his dishonesty, greed, philandering, his contempt for democracy and his fascist inclinations, and narcissism have been clearly revealed both in the media and in courtrooms, we’ll never understand the chasm between Trump voters and the rest of us if we refuse to listen long enough to understand them. We cannot forgive them if we don’t first understand them. 

 

Agreement is not the goal here. Unity is probably entirely impossible, but if listening can lead us to understand one another, to the point that we can turn down the hateful rhetoric and mutual rejection, maybe we can find some common ground where we can work on solutions that will help everyone.

M. Scott Peck writes in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, 

 

Since true listening involves a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the others. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable, and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the dance of love is begun again. (M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled)

 

Peck speaks at length about the fact that there are different kinds and types of listening. Some people just talk all of the time; sometimes that is a compulsive behavior and sometimes it is just a bad social habit. 

But you don’t listen intently all the time. You couldn’t. But there are times when loving someone means that you will give them your undivided attention and listen with the intent to understand them.

 

We have all been in conversations, to call them that, they are really conversations at all, when people are constantly interrupting one another to object or to contradict the other person. They are not listening to understand, they are just pretending to listen while they compose their response in their own minds. When someone keeps interrupting you to offer either advice or a contradiction, you know that they are not listening to you, and you feel it, right? You don’t feel loved when someone is way too quick to presume that you are wrong or that they are so brilliant that they can tell you what you should do or think. The first duty of love is to listen, listen to understand.

 

Most therapists who work with pre-teens or adolescents keep a few games in their office, chess or checkers. I’ve done this myself when I have found myself needing to help a young person through a rough spot. They usually cannot put their feelings into words. They don’t know why they are depressed, or angry, or even violent. They don’t know why, in spite of warnings from their parents and classes at school, that they start using drugs the instant that drugs are offered to them.

 

I have sat in my office suffering through long awkward silences staring at a teenager who was just looking at the floor. The parents don’t always think that they are getting their money’s worth when we do it, but therapists will often spend the whole session playing chess, rarely saying a word, but paying very close attention to what is said, even to noting body language and paying attention to their ability to concentrate and be patient enough to find a good move. 

You would be surprised what a teenager will reveal about themselves when they are focused on beating their counselor in chess. In grad school, all through the years of my training in counseling, we had to write what is called a “verbatim” to turn in and discuss with our supervisor ever week.

 

A verbatim is an account of a counseling appointment in which you give a paragraph about the patient and their reason for coming in for an appointment, and then you write about 25 pages of an account of “I said, then he said, then I said,” description of the session. Of course, we didn’t tape record our sessions and we wrote our verbatims to both be confidential and, consciously or unconsciously, to make ourselves look really good to our supervisor. 

 

I don’t know where they found this picture of the late professor Mills, because in the 5 years that he was my supervisor, I don’t remember him actually smiling. However, the one time that he got really angry at me was when, in the verbatim, Dr. Mills thought that I was forcing my client to come to terms with a past trauma that they were not emotionally really to discuss. He shouted at me, “It is not your job to force a person to open up, it is your job to shut up and patiently listen until they are ready to open themselves up.” 

 

Until he passed away, I sent him one or two letters a year, thanking him for how hard he was on us and how he demanded excellence from us. When I remembered to shut up and listen, and a very troubled client managed to work their way through to a real break through, I knew that I had managed to keep my mouth shut only because Mills had stressed how important it was to allow a person to talk until I could understand them and until they could understand themselves. 

You may think that you know your father or your mother, your children or your best friends, but I guarantee you, there is a thousand times more about them that you do not know, than what you do know. You will never improve on your meager understanding, of even the people in your own family, if you do not give them the loving gift of listening to them intently. 

 

Our national divisions may be more severe right now than ever before. That’s hard to believe since we have lived through a Civil War and all of the riots related to organized labor and civil rights, but we have some unique things at play in our world that are truly unprecedented.

 

For years now I have attended every opera performed by our local opera and I have done that only because our music director is also the director of our local opera. He knows that I am there to support him but he also knows that almost every opera bores me to death. It is almost impossible to get 21^st century audiences to sit through two and a half hours of classic opera, even when there is a translation projected above the stage and even when you already know the story line. 

 

No matter how impressive the score, no matter how amazing the voices of the performers are, it is just too long and it moves too slowly to hold your attention. Generations in the past loved going to the opera. There was an opera house in every tiny town in America because people couldn’t get enough of it, two hours, three hours, or more; at the end people would stand and cheer for more.

Our opera company has resorted to all kinds of fund raising efforts to get people to attend, we have opera stars singing Beatles songs with a local rock band. We pull out the most famous arias from a dozen operas and just perform them as free-standing solos, to raise enough money to put on a classic opera which inevitably loses money because very few of us are willing to go. I buy two tickets and always end up having to beg someone to go with me. We have become a short attention span culture.

 

A local mega church has started incorporating mixed-martial arts, monster trucks, and recently even a tank, to try to keep people’s attention in church. I blame MTV for hypnotizing kids into staring at a rapidly changing series of images that flash between guitar players and things blowing up, burning buildings, and scantily clad models. Then we invented cell phones that become so addictive, you can’t go to the rest room without it, you have to be staring at short videos or games all of the time lest you get bored for 30 seconds.

 

Is it any wonder then that in the time that elapses between when the McDonalds employee asks, “Is this order to go?” and when you reply, “No, I’m going to eat it in your lovely dining room,” they have already stopped listening to you and they hand you your order, all bagged up for travel. Somehow, having the information superhighway in the palm of our hands 24 hours a day is making us dumber, or at least, it is teaching us to never really pay attention to anyone. 

 

It may seem like a stretch to you, but I blame, not the division itself, but the degree and severity of the division in our country on the short attention span we have inherited from our phones and the internet in general with all of the tick tock videos and face book memes that take only seconds to digest before moving onto the next stimulating, though probably entirely false, video or image.

 

Isn’t there someone in your life that you used to love but you no longer speak to one another because voted for Donald Trump, or they refused to get a Covid vaccine, or they tried to get you to invest in imaginary bitcoin? Don’t you miss them, if even just a little? Do you remember when you could fill your house to capacity for a holiday dinner or party? Remember when you might get 200 Christmas cards in December? Now, do you ever, as I certainly do, have difficulty in finding someone, anyone, just one person to go see a movie with?  

 

The division that has pulled apart churches, families, corporations, and friendships is killing us but the solution is not that hard. It isn’t easy, but you can do it. Pick a time and a place, pick a person you have neglected for years, and give them your undivided attention. Listen to them until they feel like they have been heard. Don’t argue, explain, or correct, just listen and see if you can find room in your heart to love them again. 

 

If you do it, write me an abbreviated verbatim and send it to me. I want to see how it went:

Empty Promises: From Consumerism to Community

Empty Promises: From Consumerism to Community David Ketchum July 16, 2023 Watch the video HERE

        I grew up in a working class family, with an emphasis on community and helping each other during times of need. Those of you who have listened to my reflections in the past know that these experiences were far from perfect, especially when it came to understanding and resisting oppressive systems, from racism to misogyny. Despite these limitations, it was still in my working class family that I received the first tools for deciphering this mess of injustice and oppression that we’ve collectively come to accept as normal. My father especially extolled the importance of labor and unions, as well as studying and understanding history. And even the conservative religious community that hurt and alienated me so thoroughly, also gave me a lens to understand justice, peace, and a vision of healthy, happy society beyond the long reach of exploitation, violence, and inequality. 

        I held these values in tension with the world around me. As a small child, everyone I knew was part of this working class, and our economic experiences were not that different. Outrageous wealth mainly existed as a plot in books and movies, but I didn’t have any personal experience of it. When I went to junior high, I met and befriended people whose economic world was different than my own. Suddenly, I felt a social pressure to desire things that I had never wanted before. I took extra odd jobs to buy golf clubs (a sport I was both terrible at playing and couldn’t afford to play) and my first pair of branded shoes (white Nike cross-trainers with an orange swoosh). I copied a friend by buying a poster of a huge house with a four-car garage, with each open door revealing a different luxury car parked inside. I bought a CD player and joined those mail-order music clubs so I could own the most popular music of the day. I even felt like something was missing in my life because I couldn’t afford to buy a designer leather jacket, the must-have fashion item of my friend group. My family had never been in poverty; my dad had a stable factory job with good benefits, and we had the good luck of being relatively healthy and accident-free. But when I visited friends at their big suburban homes, I began to see and feel the influence of a whole other way of life in the United States.  

When I encountered the academic study of economics at university, the first lecture of the first day of class introduced economics as “the study of how people satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources.” Our professor sped through the choices we have for dealing with this scarcity. Using resources wisely held some importance to her, but she told us it was not very practical. Reducing our unlimited wants was basically dismissed out of hand. After all, one of the basic traits of being human was to never be satisfied and this, she stressed, was really a virtue. Insatiable greed is the driving force of creativity, innovation, and productivity. So we were left with only one real option, which would be the focus of the class: maximizing economic growth. 

What this emphasis amounted to was a romanticization of economic growth, or growth for the sake of growth. At the individual level, the economy would be sustained by everyone always envying those above them in the social order, their envy inspiring more and more consumption. At the macro level, the economy would be sustained by constant expansion: new resources to extract, new labor to exploit, new technology to develop, and new consumers to entice. In both cases, contentment was the enemy. And while my professor spoke about meeting people’s needs, she wasn’t describing an economics centered around care, community, or human thriving. Humans mainly existed for the purpose of fueling the economic machine, which must be fed, at all costs. If we allowed it to falter, everything would collapse. In that world, a certain amount of economic injustice, of exploitation and inequality, was a small price to pay to save civilization.  

I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but I was being taught a neoliberal approach to economics. First coined in 1938 by such economists as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, neoliberalism became the favorite ideology of the very wealthy. The version I received at my conservative Christian university espoused competition as the highest value. The market is the ultimate arbiter of who succeeds and fails, who lives and dies. The good citizen is the good consumer. Democratic choice is freedom to choose what to buy and what to sell. And anything that limits competition is an enemy of freedom, such as taxes, ethical and environmental regulations, public services, labor unions, and collective bargaining. Everything is an opportunity for profit and consumption, so everything must be privatized. Even inequality is seen as the result of merit. In a neoliberal version of the world, an unrestrained market makes sure everyone gets what they deserve. If you are rich, you earned it. If you are poor, you just need to work harder, hustle harder, innovate harder, and exploit every moment, circumstance, and person you can to get ahead. If you don’t, then that’s on you. 

There’s historical context for the rise of neoliberalism. For example, the real threat of totalitarianism and fascism made arguments associating social democracy with totalitarian regimes sound more plausible. That suspicion carried over to policies, such as public assistance programs championed by Roosevelt’s New Deal, the bureaucracies that administered them, and the taxes that funded them. Culturally, another shift had been gaining momentum in the late 1800s, and which continues to play a key role today. 

       William Leach, in his book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, described the emergence of consumerism following the Civil War. American capitalism produced “a distinct culture, unconnected to traditional family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy.” Its culture was oriented around business, “with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility.” Its prominent features, Leach explained, were fourfold: “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” (3)

        Leach saw the roots of this transition in American and European history, particularly in the religious mythos of many Christians. “For generations,” he wrote, “America had been portrayed as a place of plenty, a garden in which all paradisiacal longings would be satisfied.” (4) By the 1900s, the literal, millennial promises of Jesus’ second coming and the New Jerusalem were “being transformed, urbanized and commercialized”. People were increasingly enticed focus on “personal satisfaction,” and “the cult of the new” made certain that they always had something newer, better, improved, to satisfy those desires. “Innovation became tied to the production of more and more commodities,” Leach explained. Fashion appropriated folk designs, “reducing custom to mere surface and appearance.” In fact, Leach called this “the most radical aspect of this culture, because it readily subverted whatever custom, value, or folk idea came within its reach.” Although Science was often seen as a threat to traditional ways of life, it was “not intrinsically hostile to custom or tradition or religion. Market capitalism was hostile; no immigrant culture – and, to a considerable degree, no religious tradition – had the power to resist it, as none can in our own time.” (5)

Parallel to this movement was “the democratization of desire.” Around the second half of the 19th century, rapid industrialization brought profound cultural and social changes, perhaps most powerfully symbolized in the shift away from owning and controlling land toward owning and controlling capital. And though inequality continued, and even increased, industrialization made it possible for people to imagine and desire more than they had ever dreamed of before. Leach summarized the argument of John Bates Clark, an influential economist: 

“despite the ‘vast and ever-growing inequality’ of wealth in America, democracy could be ensured through the benign genius of the ‘free’ market, which allocated to Americans an infinitely growing supply of goods and services. … the new conception included … equal rights to desire the same goods and to enter the same world of comfort and luxury. American culture, therefore, became more democratic after 1880 in the sense that everybody … would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased.” (6)

When considering how all-encompassing consumerism as a way of life has become, it’s a little strange to realize it is still relatively recent, and its success in dominating the socioeconomic terrain is astounding. Leach puts “democratizing individual desire” in contrast with other possibilities, choices we collectively had – and have – to democratize “wealth or political or economic power,” and concludes that the “market notion of democracy … was perhaps one of the new culture’s most notable contributions” to the modern world. But the consequences of its success included a focus on competition, an increase in anxiety, a denial of mortality, a growing dependence on money as a measure of all things, including morality, and the prominence of marketing and advertising. Consumerism produced alienation, and alienation perpetuated consumerism. As Leach wrote, “It fostered anxiety and restlessness and, when left unsatisfied, resentment and hatred.” (7)

Now, about a century after the victory of the democratization of desire, this competition has become more than familiar; it is simply the way things are for most of us, most of the time. Scarcity remains an important backdrop, especially as it interacts within oppressive systems. When we talk about consumerism, materialistic values, and scarcity, we must keep in mind how our wellbeing has been fragmented, individualized, and set against one another. Economic and social disparities create the constant experience or threat of deprivation. Andrew Stanley of the IMF rightly calls this “a lopsided world” – “Some 10 percent of the world’s population owns 76 percent of the wealth, takes in 52 percent of income, and accounts for 48 percent of global carbon emissions.” And it is human choice that creates and maintains these disparities. 

As Dr. Richard Ryan wrote, 

 “At this point in human history we have enough material resources to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate every living individual on Earth. Not only that: we have at the same time the global capacity to enhance health care, fight major diseases, and considerably clean up the environment. That such resources exist is not merely a utopian fantasy, it is a reality about which there is little serious debate. Nonetheless, a quick look around most any part of this warming globe tells us just how far we are from achieving any of these goals.” (ix, The High Price of Materialism)

These disparities are both between and within nations, with “insulated pockets of wealth surrounded by ever widening fields of impoverishment.” This is the flowering of the democratized desire; in Ryan’s words, we live by the maxim, “to each according to his greed.” Selfishness and materialism have been transformed from “moral problems” to “cardinal goals of life” in increasingly “winner-take-all economies.” We are socialized into this system and successfully navigating it is key to survival. As Ryan pointed out, we are conditioned to evaluate our worth, our “well-being and accomplishment,” not by our  integrity, “wisdom, kindness, or community contributions,” but in terms of what we “what we can buy. … it is not simply about having enough, but about having more than others do.” (ix-x)

Dr. Tim Kasser, in The High Price of Materialism, examined the research about wealth, consumption, and happiness and concluded that materialistic values “lead people to organize their lives in ways that do a poor job of satisfying their needs, and thus contribute even more to people’s misery.” (28) Consumerism turns out to be good at perpetuating economic systems organized around endless growth, but bad at perpetuating economic systems organized around human and ecological wellbeing. This is because, once our basic needs are met, “increases in wealth do little to improve people’s well-being and happiness.” Instead, “when people follow materialistic values and organize their lives around attaining wealth and possessions,” those pursuits divert time, attention, energy, and resources away from “goals that could fulfill their needs and improve the quality of their lives.” In terms of wellbeing, these materialistic pursuits are essentially wastes of time. (47)

Part of this wastefulness is connected to the limited ability these pursuits have in meeting social-emotional needs like self-worth, connection, and contribution. When we achieve a goal, we usually expect our feelings of self-esteem and competence to increase. But this doesn’t happen with “materialistic goals,” which are instead correlated with lower self-esteem. With such an emphasis on comparison and competition, in a context of scarcity, our self-worth becomes dependent on both our “accomplishments and others’ praise.” In such a scenario, our sense of well-being is constantly threatened, and our “feelings of competence and worthiness are tenuous, even when they succeed.” Just as there are always more things to buy to make us happy, there are always more things to prove before we can feel secure. In Kasser’s words, “people with strong materialistic value orientations experience persistent discrepancies between their current states and where they would most like to be.” With these “chronic gaps between ideals and actual situations,” it’s difficult to feel good about ourselves and our relationships with others; it’s difficult to be happy. (47-48) 

And that is our starting place. This has been our starting place, because there have always been those among us who resisted this reduction of life to buying and selling, consuming and craving, exploiting and hoarding. The ways forward are both disarmingly simple and overwhelmingly complicated. It is simple because we know the values and practices we need to cultivate: moving from competition to cooperation, consumption to care, craving to contentment, indifference to compassion, exploitation to regeneration, harming to healing, scarcity to abundance, and oppression to justice. 

        But it is overwhelmingly complicated because our survival is so often, and in such complex ways, tied to this current system. Psychologically, we can’t help but get this message all the time, in advertisements, entertainment, job descriptions, expectations from family and friends, or even the inner voice that pushes us to prove our worth by what we produce and what we consume. Financially, we face the limitations of our debt; ever-increasing expenses in housing, transportation, and food; the looming costs of medical care and the threat of being without insurance; and future financial uncertainties related to social and political instability and the impacts of climate change. Socially, we find ourselves increasingly polarized, fragmented, and isolated, often without clear pathways or valuable experience for understanding and supporting our mutual wellbeing. Holding all this together, getting what we need to live, while also resisting the cruelties of consumer culture, is sometimes more than we can manage. 

        So we need to be gentle and patient with ourselves and each other, even while we insist on moving forward. This means being honest about our own desires, goals, and consumption. We need to understand the ways that we relate to this buy-and-sell world, and how we relate to one another. This is not easy, especially for those at the economic margins. When the only jobs we can get don’t pay enough to live; when we work full time and the world still tells us to go harder, to hustle, and we will finally get what we deserve; it can be difficult to not reduce relationships to transactions. So, we also have to be honest about economic oppression and injustice. There can be no platitudes here. “Money can’t buy happiness” might be the message that financially secure people need to hear, but it doesn’t apply when we can’t afford rent and groceries. 

        Still, it is important to realize that being caught in consumer culture is one of the key dynamics that maintains our unjust economic systems. And our collective breaking-free from consumerism is an important part of transforming that larger system. If we can see that consumerism as a way of life is built on empty promises, that wellbeing lies instead in those beautiful, interwoven spheres of care, community, contentment, and human thriving, then that awareness is a powerful resource in itself. The scarcity that human society has assumed and then created is both real and a lie. It is real because our society has chosen to organize in ways that create those huge economic and social disparities. But it is a lie that those disparities, and the scarcity that everyone, especially those at the margins, experience, are inevitable or natural. They are not. We made them; they are ours. And we can change them. 

Just as neoliberalism positioned itself as a preferred alternative in the 20th century, humans are working together to imagine alternatives to neoliberalism today. One example of this is Kate Raworth’s conceptualization of “doughnut economics,” which uses the shape of a doughnut to create a framework that acknowledges and honors a social foundation (the inner boundary, representing human needs) and an environmental ceiling (the outer boundary, representing the limits of our planet’s health). Between these boundaries lies an abundant space for human safety and justice. As Raworth explains,

“Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend … .”

        This vision is not far from the questions my economics professor asked, and dismissed. With the neoliberal emphasis on maximizing endless economic growth (instead of growing responsible, regenerative economic systems), we glossed over areas where we can make a big difference in creating societies that prioritize human and ecological wellbeing: wise use of resources and reducing human wants. An ethic of care brings a focus to those ways we can relate to resources wisely and gratefully, instead of as objects of extraction, exploitation, and commodification. We can learn to work with greed, to notice the ways we are encouraged to solve our problems with purchases, and to make intentional decisions that realign economic and social realities with mutual wellbeing. The more often we choose to understand and act with one another in terms of cooperation and care, instead of competition and craving, the more resources and skills we’ll have to live, enjoy life, and find ways, together, to change the world. 

“Beyond Blaming and Agonizing”: Lovingkindness Practice in Ordinary Life

“Beyond Blaming and Agonizing”: Lovingkindness Practice in Ordinary Life

David Ketchum

July 9, 2023

Watch the video HERE.

Last month, I reflected on the emerging research on the human capacity for violence and empathy: 

“… it is a question about the overall shape of our lives and our society. Will they be characterized by violence, relying on our capacities for coercion and aggression? Or will they be characterized by healthy social bonds, relying on our capacities for wisdom and compassion? Which action will be exceptional, violence or empathy? Which action will be normal, violence or empathy? We can understand both paths as strategies to protect ourselves, and recognize that both possibilities live within us. But the research also points out that these are diverging paths. We nourish one path at the expense of the other. … Each decision we make is something of a crossroads. Collectively and personally, our decisions answer the question: which direction do we choose?” 

As an example of the kinds of tools and practices that can support this kind of personal and cultural transformation, I reflected a little on a 2008 study led by Barbara Frederickson that investigated the impacts of Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation on participants. They documented slow and small changes that built up both intra- and interpersonal skills, through awareness and cultivation of the daily, mundane experiences of “love, joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, pride, interest, amusement, and awe.” Significantly, the study demonstrated that more positive emotions in themselves do not make life more fulfilling. Instead, “greater positive emotions help them build resources for living successfully.” When we work together to create conditions characterized by love, joy, gratitude, contentment, and the rest, human beings have a better chance to thrive. And lovingkindness meditation is one tool we have to support this thriving. 

The most popular form of this meditation practice is to bring the heart and mind to focus on a simple aspiration for wellbeing, usually starting with oneself and then moving outward to loved ones, then strangers, then those we find more difficult to love, then to all beings, and then returning to oneself. A common formula is simply: 

May I be filled with lovingkindness.

May I be well.

May I be peaceful and at ease.

May I be happy. 

Since 2008, studies have continued to show how beneficial this simple practice can be. Emma Seppälä, writing for Psychology Today, collected research on eighteen benefits of lovingkindness meditation. They include: decreasing migraines, chronic pain, PTSD, and schizophrenia-spectrum disorder symptoms; slowing aging; and improving social connections, such as increasing helpfulness, compassion, and empathy while decreasing bias. 

        More recently, lovingkindness practices have been increasingly designed to address specific areas of harm in need of healing and transformation, such as the “Black Lives Matter Meditation for Healing Racial Trauma.” And a 2022 study explored how lovingkindness meditation can help people “navigate harmful situations, both individual stressors and systems of oppression.” This study is especially important and relevant because of its enlarged focus beyond the individual, including participants’ social contexts such as a community where they meditate, social justice movements they support, particularly those committed to racial justice, and global systems of oppression that they seek to resist and transform.  

The core commitment is to metta, variously translated as lovingkindness, friendliness, or goodwill. When this goodwill encounters suffering, it arises as compassion. When it encounters good fortune, including and especially the good fortune of others, it arises as joy. And when our goodwill is sustained by wisdom and insight, it arises as equanimity. Ajahn Sucitto, a Buddhist monastic and teacher in the Thai Forest tradition, calls back to the Buddha’s simile of a conch. These four qualities of kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are called “the measureless intent”, “because their sound blows without restriction in all directions: to others as to oneself; to the heart that acted on those energies and to any others who have been affected by them.” He wrote that, 

“Exactly what ‘tune’ one plays is something that arises dependent on the distortion one is healing. There are pains that bring up the awareness of the basic need for the nourishing quality of kindness; whereas sometimes the awareness of how volatile and vulnerable we all are calls forth compassion, the protective energy. Sometimes it’s the case whereby we recognize the harm that comes from neglecting what is good in ourselves and others, or even through taking others for granted. Then the sense in appreciating goodness, however obscured, can arise. It’s important to not neglect this one – the stream of good deeds that you did do, the kind words that just seemed natural, but were the right thing at the right time. It’s important not to overlook it, because we so often do. Equanimity holds the empathic space and allows things to unfold. It doesn’t ask for results, but attunes to how things are right now.” 

        One of the reasons I mention these studies and applications is because of my own experience with lovingkindness practices, which has been the center of my life for decades. Exploring these different aspects of lovingkindness is helpful in discerning what we are actually experiencing, empowering us to be intentional in our actions. And metta practice has been key in healing, transforming, and empowering me, both personally and in my participation in community programming and social change movements.

Beyond my own personal practice, I’ve most often been invited to adapt lovingkindness meditation to the wellbeing and aspirations of my lgbtqia+ community. Similar to those applications of lovingkindness meditation to healing racial trauma and navigating systems of oppression, I’ve found applying lovingkindness to my experience as a queer person to be an essential part of my well-being and a joy to share with others. For example, as a member of the ACLU-MO’s Trans Leadership Table, I was invited to lead a guided meditation (2020) that adapted lovingkindness to our particular experiences in the world. We began by pausing and cultivating a sense of having “arrived in this moment across sadness and incalculable loss; across joy and innumerable gifts; through the love and concern of yourself and others; against oppression and hardship.” As a nonbinary person whose existence has been debated and erased throughout my entire life, this grounding in the here and now is transformative. To be here, despite the numberless times that people and systems have communicated to me that I don’t belong here, is deeply healing and connecting.

This grounding helped us to center ourselves in our deepest aspirations, pausing and opening to those things that most lift our hearts and animate our lives: “How is it that you want to encounter this improbable and impermanent moment of time and space that you inhabit? What opens your heart and brings forth your love, your joy, your creativity, your fierceness?” And in this example, I expanded the basic formula to include elements that are often stressors that our trans community faces:
 

May I be safe.

May I have food, shelter, and friendship.

May I have health in my body.

May I care for and appreciate my body.

May I honor my own strength.

May my heart be open and free.

May my wounds, inner and outer, be healed.

May I be generous, creative, and caring.

May I receive the generosity, creativity, and care of others.

May I be equal and free.

We then extended those aspirations toward others, eventually envisioning “a transformed world,” “savoring and being nurtured by this kindness, and our shared commitment to liberation and justice.” We closed by resolving “to let this energy carry and sustain the tasks that lie ahead, embodying and co-creating a new world where all transgender and gender nonconforming folx can live with freedom, safety, and joy.” This kind of meditation intentionally connects our wellbeing with our community and a future where we live in abundance, rather than scarcity. It energizes us, and reminds us of how important it is, to connect with our aspirations, our selves, each other, and a vision where we no longer have to fight for our very right to exist. 

Another, related aspect to lovingkindness practice is bringing attention to areas of our experience where we especially need to direct kindness, compassion, enjoyment, and equanimity. In the case of those of us who have experienced being alienated from our bodies, especially through discrimination and marginalization, cultivating lovingkindness for our bodies is an essential, and often overlooked, practice. This became the theme of a guided meditation I offered for a Transgender Day of Remembrance (2020) gathering with the theme that “Our Bodies Will Be Heard.” In this practice, we began with an awareness and appreciation of the courage and self-love it took for us to listen to, trust, and honor our own bodies: “In the face of a society that told us we couldn’t, shouldn’t, or didn’t exist as transgender and gender expansive folx, we dared to listen to ourselves. And our bodies told us: ‘This is what this body is like.’” We then paused and held the pain and suffering that we’ve had to carry in our bodies, and the grief that has so often worn us down and worn us out. Yet despite all this pain, our bodies have continued to carry the possibility of a different world: “Breathing in, I am aware of my body. Breathing out, I listen to the life in my body.” We then listened: 

“Our bodies teach us what we need. We dream of a world where these bodies are safe, healthy, and rest easy at night. We dream of a world where we access the medical care, housing, food, employment, and enjoyment we need. We dream of a world where we get to decide what supports our well-being, and where all people are free and equal. And in this moment, anticipating a future built by us and for us, we relax into joy and peace. Our bodies will be heard. … So … we make room for more than grief. We make room for our fierceness, our pleasure, and our love. Because when we are included, our communities are stronger, more beautiful, more complete.” 

In this approach, lovingkindness meditation is more oriented around our intentions and aspirations than our emotions or sentiments. At least for me, I am not trying to coerce or manipulate my feelings; I am training my heart and mind to a default of kindness and justice, after a lifetime of learning to survive in a world oriented around violence and oppression. In much of our lives, we are bombarded by messages that we are misunderstood at best, and very often we are unwelcome. Resolving to “Take Our Space in the World” is an expression of lovingkindness to ourselves: “We exist in the face of all this violence, hatred, and grief, and insist on living, loving, and thriving. We create new worlds.” And this new world can be born of kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. 

This point is especially important to me due to my experience (many years ago) of being part of a meditation group. When I shared that my own practice was oriented around metta, they responded by teasing me. The general idea was that metta was too sentimental; it wasn’t “real” meditation, like the insight practices they focused on. I also practiced insight meditation, and I found these practices mutually supportive. I didn’t understand their association of lovingkindness with sentimentality, because I didn’t understand that they had been taught lovingkindness in a very different context. My practice was born of deep suffering. It wasn’t weak, and I wasn’t coercing my emotions. I was transforming aversion into goodwill. I was refusing to repeat unhealthy, coercive habits. I was resolving for my own body to be a place where suffering could come to an end, rather than incubating that pain and passing it on to others. 

Returning to Ajahn Sucitto, we get a better sense of how this comes to be and the connections between kindness and equanimity. We learn to discern patterns based on our conditioning, and the conditioning of others: 

“In the world in general, there’s a huge inheritance of abusive patterns based upon violence and deprivation – and who knows where all that began. But, instead of blaming and agonizing, we can regard our own and other people’s actions in terms of cause and effect. That regard is equanimity, the most reliable base for action.”  

Equanimity is perhaps the most challenging quality to develop, but it is well worth our continued practice and effort. My understanding of Ajahn Sucitto’s point that equanimity is “the most reliable base for action” is that equanimity empowers us to act out of insight and understanding. Our brains are meaning-making machines, spinning out stories to help us explain why we feel the way we do and why we are justified in doing what we have done or want to do. Psychologically, what we want is a convincing story, and we’d prefer to have it quickly. Some of those stories may even become old standbys, providing easy answers for how to interpret difficult and complicated experiences. And too often, we are simply caught in stories that praise or blame. These explanations may or may not hold some truth, but they are convenient. However, convenience is not a “reliable base for action.” 

This is part of the reason why, when we begin a meditation practice, it is common for our minds to unearth all sorts of memories, from ridiculous to mortifying. This is part of getting to know our minds and bodies, and how we relate to suffering and the end of suffering. You might be enjoying your first taste of deep concentration in one moment, only to find yourself singing the lyrics of a silly tv commercial you heard as a child in the next moment. During one extended time of sitting meditation many years ago, I found myself listening to a fractured playback of the entire Thriller album by Michael Jackson, pieced together from memories I made as an elementary school student. It had been hanging out there in my mind, undisturbed for decades, until my brain got desperate enough to fish it out and see if it would be the thing that would finally make me give up on my sitting meditation and do something more interesting. It still makes me chuckle. 

But we can also encounter more difficult experiences, which is why we always recommend working with an experienced teacher, tradition, and community. (And, in cases of unresolved trauma or complex mental health issues, it is important to work with your mental health caregivers.) There are several aspects to meditation that can be disorienting and challenging, such as directly experiencing that what we often think of as permanent, unchanging self is a dynamic process. But anecdotally, the most common challenge is that we encounter those patterns of thinking, feeling, and remembering that we find embarrassing, confusing, disturbing, or scary. These are often key parts of our own stories of praise and blame, and they can be cruel. In those moments, it is vitally important that we have the resources we need to respond with kindness, patience, understanding, and wisdom. 

Several years ago, I was leading a workshop on cultivating self-compassion during conflict and stress, which is an important aspect of lovingkindness practice. One of our participants was a retired human resources manager who was volunteering with a non-profit. He had spent the morning looking rather disinterested, so it didn’t surprise me when he approached me at our first break. “This stuff just doesn’t apply to me,” he said. “I don’t struggle with any of this and I’m thinking that maybe I should just leave.” I was quite excited to meet someone who had had already mastered the skills of self-compassion, so I quite enthusiastically celebrated his skillfulness. “That’s fantastic!” I exclaimed to his surprise. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to stay here if the training doesn’t benefit you,” I continued. “But if you do stay, you could take the perspective that our reflections here might help you understand others, because a lot of us do struggle with having self-compassion.” This made sense to him, and he settled into the morning with more interest. 

        But all of that changed during our lunch break. The room’s floor was tile over concrete, the perfect medium in which to shatter glass. Inevitably, we were cleaning up a mess pretty regularly. And on that day, this HR manager was the one who, accidentally knocking his glass of water off the table, proved that gravity was still working after all this time. And as the glass hit the floor, in that moment of shared quiet when everyone turned to see what had happened, our affable HR man said to himself, in the most savage tone that I could imagine, “stupid boy!” 

        With our reflections on self-compassion fresh on his mind, he looked up and locked eyes with me. It was a look of mixed fear and wonder, like some lost secret had just been uttered. “I had no idea that that voice was inside of me,” he later told me. “It was my father’s voice, plus sixty years of shame for every mistake I’d ever made.” The afternoon took on new significance for him, and he came back for the follow-up trainings, too. I don’t doubt that some people have already developed these skills, even without formal training. But most people I meet have quite a way to go, and we need all the encouragement we can get. All of us who are committed to continually growing into compassionate, wise people can benefit from having these skills and resources available to us, so that we can be available to ourselves and others when we need that kind wisdom the most. 
 
        So may we – our selves, our communities, and our movements for justice - be filled with lovingkindness; may we work together so that all of us have the resources we need to take care of ourselves and enjoy life; may we grow communities where justice is the norm, free of the cruelty of all forms of oppression; and may we be happy.