Being is 95%.
Meltdown Episode 1. “I’m Not Doing Enough!!!”
I went on a Spring break trip to Europe recently with my family. Our daughter picked Paris and London as the destination. As a “planner” of the family, I developed the itineraries in detail for months; flights, Airbnbs, transportation, sightseeings, restaurants to check out and experiences to do. It was our daughter’s first time to visit Europe. I was excited to show her my favorite spots in both cities. It was going to be an amazing time! I imagined.
In conclusion, it wasn’t — at least for me. My family had a good experience regardless of my judgment, because that’s what they said. But it wasn’t the trip I imagined. Both my husband and daughter were so seriously jet lagged that they didn’t have much energy left after outing for only a couple of hours. Since they were too tired to go out for dinner, I was their Uber Eats, delivering dinners to-go from whatever restaurants I could find around our Airbnb. My idea of enjoying the local delicacies or going to a well-known local restaurants didn’t come true.
Clearly, a certain expectation was formed and set in the process of planning this trip and that expectation became some sort of a bar to measure my “performance” as a planner for this trip. Being aware of how ridiculous this logic was, I did my best to not express any frustrations. However, whenever either my husband or my daughter whined or complained about anything, even for the most trivial things like “Why is the elevator so tiny?” my inner planner who’s trying so hard to “perform” was immensely frustrated. ‘I’ve worked so hard to plan everything for them and now they are complaining! It’s so effing unfair that they could complain about things like that, while I am trying so hard to hold everything in!!!’
Screaming like this inside, that planner self continued to fume the anger and frustration in silence. It was like being a human pressure-cooker, waiting for explosion. In a nutshell, I was having a very quiet yet powerful meltdown. In this meltdown, things have become quite catastrophic in my mind. I was disappointed with the trip, with my family and most of all, with myself. It showed that I connected my “value” to the family with how well the trip would go.
This glum view of myself stayed for a couple of days even after coming back from the trip. But after a couple of days resting and going back to my routine, it eventually disappeared, like a fog getting cleared. I finally could see things clearly and understand what happened.
When I travel alone, I am not a rigid planner. As long as I know how to get to the destination and where to stay, I leave pretty much everything open and decide on a whim. However, as it turns out, when it comes to a trip with my family, it’s so different. It becomes like a game I cannot lose. I have a goal to achieve in this game — to satisfy everyone by making it “the best trip ever!” Then I take every possible action to achieve this task.
The intention isn’t bad. It’s because I love my family. Yet, as it was clearly proven through this inner meltdown, what I thought I was doing for my family wasn’t really for them. It was for me. It was a delusion that I am only valuable by “serving” them in the way only I approve.
Meltdown Episode 2. “Words Are Not Enough!”
About two years ago, I listened to a very powerful story of a young activist who basically vented at H.H. Dalai Lama in his presence and how he responded to it. A group of young activists from all around the world gathered to meet H.H. Dalai Lama. Whatever these activists asked, the theme of the answer from Dalai Lama was around the oneness of the humanity. He said, “All eight billion human beings are one. We have to work togehter. I firmly believe in the oneness.”
As he repeated this message over and over to their questions, one young activist Ronan Harrington spoke up out of frustration:
“MLK Jr. said, ‘The power without love is reckless; love without power is just sentimental.’ Your words feel overly simplistic and sentimental. I believe it requires more than a shift to realize that we are one. It requires political organizing. It requires power. It is illegal for women to get secondary education in Afghanistan. I do NOT believe Taliban will be overcome with a spiritual shift in perspective. I believe they will be forced out of power or isolated and strangled until they relinquish. We, everyone in this room is losing to the forces of power in this world. Tibet is losing. As we speak, today, Xi Jinping is having the third term as the Chinese Premier. And it’s creating an authoritarian state that will be very difficult to defeat through words of compassion and love. I don’t have a question for you; but that’s how I feel.”
He basically spoke to the sentiment of exasperation and desperation many activists in the room shared. “How do we motivate ourselves when our contribution doesn’t feel enough?” “How can we organize our compassionate actions to those who don’t understand or believe in it at all?”
Seriously, HOW? The group was pressing for the specifics: concrete actions toward oneness.
To this question, H.H. Dalai Lama calmly and gently replied:
“The reality is that many of the challenges we experience collectively does call for that kind of oneness of humanity. The whole humanity needs to understand that eight billion people are one family.”
Again, it was the same message and the meeting was over. However, his “real” answer to the desperate question of activists came as he was leaving the gathering. H.H. talked about his daily practice:
“My daily practice of altruism gives me the inner strengths and peace. That brings fearlessness and your mind can be truly at peace.”
This message left a lasting impression on the activist and the entire group. Basically, what he meant was that only the cultivation of the inner attitude of generosity and compassion for suffering of others and the world could give us the confidence and resilience to navigate any challenges, no matter how difficult other people might be. In other words, by taking care of our inner weather, we can handle whatever outer world throws at us.
By mirroring the misery of others, we can’t be altruistic. If someone holds a gun at our head, we don’t want to express the same kind of suffering that the person holds inside, because that action of holding a gun at someone’s head is an expression of suffering in itself. This is rather an extreme example but we can apply it to our mundane daily experiences, too. Seeing a politician who’s causing so much damage in the world and we disagree with, it’s easy to be angry at them and ridicule them on our chosen social media. Or we can acknowledge that they are saying what they say not because they are evil but because they are suffering from delusion, conditioned by their own life experiences we may not know. We can relate to such delusion because we aren’t necessarily free from it.
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It’s truly powerful to see the truth of suffering of the person who may harm others. Through whatever practices we do, by grounding ourselves in the notion of oneness, we can be truly altruistic. Those attempts to do anything good in the world can be futile, unless we truly understand what it means to embody the position of the oneness.
Obviously, it’s very easy to talk about this in soundbites but it’s incredibly difficult to do. However, that’s why it requires constant reminders and practices. And that was exactly what H.H. Dalai Lama was trying to imbue, repeating the same message over and over, in this meltdown of activists.
Human Experience of Standing at the Edge
After dedicating her life serving various communities with the utmost altruistic intention, Roshi Joan Halifax identified five internal and interpersonal qualities that are keys to a compassionate and courageous life, without which we cannot serve nor can we survive: altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement. However, she also noted that they can manifest as dangerous landscapes that cause us harm if these precious resources deteriorate. She called those bivalent states “Edge States.”
“The Edge States are assets of a mind and heart that exemplify caring, connection, virtue, and strength. Yet we can also lose our firm footing on the high edge of any of these qualities and slide into a mire of suffering where we find ourselves caught in the toxic and chaotic waters of the harmful aspects of an Edge State,” she wrote. Here are destructive sides of these five human qualities:
- Altruism can turn into pathological altruism: Selfless actions in service to others are essential to the well-being of society and the natural world. But when it’s done as a tool to validate oneself, our seemingly altruistic acts harm us, harm those whom we are trying to serve, or harm the institutions we serve in.
- Empathy can slide into empathic distress: When we are able to sense into the suffering of another person, empathy can inspire us to serve and expands our understanding of the world. But if we take on too much of the suffering of another and identify too intensely with it, we may become damaged and unable to act.
- Integrity can bring up moral suffering: Integrity helps us with strong moral principles, but when we engage in or witness acts that violates our sense of integrity, justice, or beneficence, moral suffering can be the outcome.
- Respect can disappear into the swamp of toxic disrespect: Respect is a way we hold beings and things in high regard but it can easily become toxic disrespect when we go against the grain of values and principles of civility and disparage others or ourselves.
- Engagement can lead us to burn out: Engagement in our work can give a sense of purpose and meaning to our lives, particularly if our work serves others. But overwork, a poisonous workplace, and the experience of the lack of efficacy can lead to burnout, which can cause physical and psychological collapse.
These destructive sides of Edge States aren’t permanent. Like our bone and muscles get healed and strengthened when exposed to physical stress or if broken or torn, we can also become stronger even after losing our footing and sliding down the slope of Edge State.
Then, how can we recover from losing our footing at the Edge State? Furthermore, how can we try to NOT lose our footing at the Edge State? That was what H.H. Dalai Lama talked through his view of “oneness” and his daily practices.
The Relationship of Being and Doing
In both episodes of meltdown, the biggest confusion was the unbalanced emphasis on “doing” compared to “being.” I tied my self-worth to what I do for my family. The young activist felt helpless as his actions didn’t create the impact he wanted to see because the world didn’t seem to care. It’s so easy to fall prey to these assumptions that 1) action speaks louder than words, and 2) if our actions don’t bring up the sizable and meaningful impact, what’s the point?
It’s understandable why we operate with these assumptions in our lives and it’s not wrong to think this way. However, it is missing the fundamental truth that when our “doing” isn’t grounded in our “being,” it’s neither effective nor sustainable. It’s not a comparison between being and doing, as if that being is more important than doing. The truth is that those two are never separate and our way of “being” is 95% and doing 5%, proportionately speaking, if we ever want to be effective in navigating this world. We need to take care of our way of being if we want to make meaningful and sustainable impact in the world.
Reams of research have shown that when we practice mindfulness and cultivate compassion, we are less stuck in self-consciousness and self-judgment and have more bandwidth for ourselves and other people. As Roshi Halifax noted in her understanding of the Edge State, no matter how noble our intentions are, the virtuous qualities stop serving us and others if we lose our footing in our way of being. That’s why H.H. Dalai Lama kept going back to the notion of “oneness” of the humanity and mentioned his daily practice to the group of activists who became weary and disheartened in serving others.
“Putting on your own oxygen mask first before helping others” isn’t just a nice thing to say about self-care. In essence, it’s about taking care of our way of being with understanding that we are one. “Oneness” isn’t just an abstract feel-good idea. If my being suffocates due to the lack of oxygen, I cannot do much for others and they will be harmed as a result.
I insanely drove myself in our Spring break trip expecting that the trip had to go in a certain way as I planned in the name of my family, even though I was mentally and physically tired too. As I became silently pissed off, it didn’t help the mood of my family, either. The outcry of activists was sincere and genuine in questioning the efficacy of their efforts against the cruel realities, but they couldn’t be effective anymore in their work, without tending to their beings. Taking more actions will be pointless to their outcry, if they can’t feel grounded and trust in their way of being.
Oneness means my well-being is tightly connected with the well-being of others. It’s deeply connected with the idea of the inter-being, as Think Nhat Hanh’s teaching suggests: “I am because you are, and you are not because I am not.”
Getting our footing firmly grounded in our values and remembering oneness, we are ready to take meaningful actions. And whatever we do, the way of our being determines 95% of the outcome of every action.
So, how is your state of being now?
Do you feel grounded and at pease and ease?
What can you do to take care of your being?
