The Wake Up Call @499

The Wake Up Call @499

Ten years ago, the Wake Up Call was an unlikely dream, of a place for those of us who were practicing both law and mindfulness, to be together. And here we are, at Wake Up Call #499.

Ten years plus, of exploring how these highly trained legal minds, and those of us who have them, can be different with, and benefit from, mindfulness. Howe we can be more effective. How we can be happier. How we can be of greater service to the world: more compassionate, wiser, more connected (especially more connected). How we can (maybe) inspire others to practice, and in doing that, change the cultures of our law firms and legal organizations. And in doing that, maybe, just maybe, slowly, change the world.  

I feel so fortunate to be engaged in this lifelong endeavor with all of you, and grateful, too, for your company. And not just company, but courage and perseverance, in this endeavor and also in an unwavering commitment to change. 

As Margaret Mead said so long ago, let’s all of us never doubt that we can create that change. As the Buddha said, let’s also not doubt we can be the change. 

Transcript

Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #499. Which is super fun to say. 

I divided 499 by 52 to see how many years the WUC’s been happening. But then I remembered I have the notes, so I went back and looked, and the earliest notes I have are for the third Wake Up Call, which was on May 7, 2015. So that means the first Wake Up Call was two weeks earlier, on April 23, 2015. I looked back and my calendar and it was interesting, because a bunch of other things happened around then, too: the very first Law & Social Change Jam happened a week later; and, we began accepting students into the very first Mindfulness in Law Teacher Training, MLTT 2016, that fall. 

The Wake Up Call emerged from an idea that Alisa Gray & I had (shout out, Alisa!), which was to offer a phone call, where Alisa would talk about yoga and law, and I’d talk about mindfulness and law. We did the call a few times, it had it’s run, then I thought of doing the Wake Up Call and Alisa and I went on to imagine, create, and teaching MLTT. 

I had just accepted a lecturer position at Berkeley Law to teach Mindfulness for the Legal Mind. So one thought for the Wake Up Call was, there are a few of us teaching mindfulness in law schools, and a few of us offering mindfulness at firms and in legal organizations. Why not have a place where everyone could also sit together in an ongoing way? 

I knew it would have to be a quick, hop on, hop off, offering, since we’re all so busy. And it would have to be relevant to the law. There’s a mindfulness teaching for anyone offering the dharma, which are the teachings of mindfulness: “teach in the vernacular of the people.” So it wouldn’t be Pali or Sanskrit, it would have to be English plus our language, the language of the law. And a little Pali thrown in for good measure, so a kind of mash-up of languages.

That mash-up was one of the inspirations for Warrior One. I’d done a workshop with Joanna Macy where she’d recounted the Shambhala Warrior legend. That legend essentially says that when the world is a mess, a warrior class will emerge – wearing no uniforms or insignia – and they’ll heal the world with two “weapons,” wisdom and compassion. 

The minute I heard the legend, I thought, “That could be us!” Here we are with so much knowledge and power, which are often not different - yesterday I was listening to my husband talk with a lawyer about an issue he’s solving with his family company, and the lawyer cut right to the heart of the issue, showed my husband the way forward, and  reminded me how true that is: knowledge is power. 

Power not in the sense of “power over,” although sometimes it gives us that if we take it. But power in the mindfulness sense. Power, as in, knowledge of the law combined with mindfulness practice, equals the power to choose what states of mind and heart to bring into the room: the power to choose skillful states like wisdom over greed and hatred, compassion over confusion, and peace over war, in the context of legitimate legal battles. And when we forget, which we will (or I will), or remember but fail (which I also do), the power to know we can begin again: begin again the practice of skillfulness, of mindful lawyering. 

I am more effective, full stop, when I do that: when I choose and re-choose, over and over, compassion, and wisdom, and peace, remembering and forgetting and remembering to begin again. And I’ve seen the truth, with my own eyes, of adrienne marie brown’s point, that “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system:” that practicing wisdom, compassion, and peace at the small scale, with human after human even (or especially) when they’re the “other side” or even our nemesis, can reset the patterns for the system, whether that’s the system of the firm or organization, or the legal system, and or the larger political system, or the family system. Skillful, moment by moment choices – wisdom, compassion, and peace – have an immediate and long-term positive impact. 

In that third Wake Up Call, that first one I have notes for, I was working with Joseph Goldstein’s book, Mindfulness, looking at something from the teachings that we’re invited to develop, called, “clearly knowing.” The definition of clearly knowing is knowing in each moment what we’re doing and why: meaning, knowing whether the words I’m choosing are intended to foster peace or war. Only once we can clearly look, and see, can we know this. And once we know, we can continue to orient towards wisdom, compassion, and peace, even during pitched battle, and also re-orient towards these skillful qualities of heart and mind if, when we investigate, we discover (or “clearly know”) that our words are about to start a war. Clearly knowing is about seeing so we can reset, understanding so we can choose what’s best, and in doing this over and over, resetting the patterns for the legal and possibly the larger, system. 

At first there were only two or three people on the Wake Up Call each week, and one was Alisa and one was my husband who was being supportive. Some weeks, especially if one or both of them were busy, no one came. But for me this has been and continues to be such a labor of love, no matter who shows up. A way of practicing, over and over, whatever it is I’m sharing, and of doing that week after week. A few times I’ve sat down and knocked out the note in an hour, but more often this little ten-minute talk takes me many hours, so it could only happen as a labor of love. 

I’m so grateful to all of you for being here, and for coming back week after week, because that tells me that we have work to do, and that we want to do it together, setting new patterns, learning to fight our battles with wisdom and compassion. And maybe, over time, create meaningful, even systemic, change.