Mindfulness, Love, Courage, and Grace

We know the practice: present moment awareness. But how do we practice when things are so rough and torn?

First, with love. The invitation, moment by moment, is, can I bring not only awareness, but also love? 

Second, with courage. Because no matter how much love we bring, this mind, this body, this world, will present challenges. It’s nothing personal - it’s just the way things work. So, courage.

And third, with grace. When I googled grace, I got three things: simple elegance, courteous goodwill, and doing honor by one’s presence. I like all three, for all of us, moment by moment by moment.

Also, Happy Halloween!

Transcript

Judi: Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #508. Happy almost Halloween. 

To situate us, we’re walking down the Eightfold Path, which is the fourth of the Four Noble Truths, and we’re on Step Two, which is Wise Mindfulness. Last time I shared some thoughts about Wise Mindfulness from Bhikkhu Bodhi, Sharon Salzberg, and Kaira Jewel Lingo, whose idea that Wise Mindfulness is a kind of “adult supervision” of our tender hearts and minds, I so love. I also shared a frame I work with, of “looking in,” during formal practice, to see what this heart/mind is up to in the moment, and “looking up,” which starts with the same internal check-in and then invites us to tune into what’s happening with others, the community, and the world; in other words, to employ mindfulness throughout the day. So that’s most of the “what” of Wise Mindfulness in a nutshell, and let’s wrap that today. And then next time, take a look at the “how.”

Bhikkhu Analyo, perhaps our greatest contemporary scholar of mindfulness, says that Wise Mindfulness as a “path factor,” meaning as this second step on the Path, requires two qualities: diligence and “clearly knowing.” Diligence, essentially meaning Wise Effort, which, again, is the Goldilocks amount of effort for each of us, infused with joy. And “clearly knowing,” which Analyo says is “the ability to fully grasp or comprehend what is taking place” in each moment on an elemental level: grasping and fully comprehending what we’re seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, feeling internally in the body and emotionally, and thinking. 

To my way of seeing, “clearly knowing” requires a kind of attention to detail that we already employ as legal professionals. Not much gets by us when we’re on our game. So we know how to pay attention at this level but the attitude is different. In the law, we’re scanning to get things right and to win, and for what could go wrong. In the practice of “clearly knowing,” there’s no right or wrong or winning or losing. We’re simply silent observers, infusing each breath and each moment with joyful effort and love. 

As we practice over time, our capacity to sit or stand or walk in stillness and to attend, with a quality of joyful, loving awareness, to whatever is arising, increases, or at least that’s been my experience. Eventually, loving awareness becomes a default mode, or a frequent mode, not only moment to moment but also in the broader brush of life. Annie Dillard – Pittsburg writer – shout out to my favorite Pittsburgher – speaks to this when she says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

With the practice of “clearly knowing,” the invitation is to be mindful not only internally but also externally. I take this to mean, as I mentioned on the last Wake Up Call, that we’re invited to not only look in, but to look up, at those around us and at the world. Even though we can’t know for sure what others are thinking, feeling, or experiencing, “clearly knowing” is nevertheless about loving awareness at a level of connection that at least enables us to read a room, or read a human, as best we can, and then, as legal professionals, deliver information, news, or even a coup de grâce, with kindness and compassion and without causing harm. Even when our work requires us to balance one harm against another, loving awareness can provide us with the insight to know that we are not in a fully non-harming moment, and the wisdom to make a different choice, or, when that’s not possible, to be compassionate towards everyone affected, ourselves included.

This need for greater compassion is what has pointed me, over the years, towards a definition of Wise Mindfulness which I hope honors the teachings and teachers, and also my own practice: present moment attention with courage and grace, or, “courageous, graceful, present moment attention.” 

Present moment attention is diligent, clear, loving attention, moment by moment, internally and externally. It is the foundation for the arising of insight into suffering and the end to suffering, interconnection, and impermanence. It enables compassion. 

Courage is something I feel like all of our teachers all implying. When we pay attention, invariably we encounter difficult internal states like greed and anger and exhaustion and worry. We may even doubt mindfulness altogether. Plus, we notice, sometimes more loudly or with stronger resonance, the unkind words and actions of others, difficult news, bias, injustice. These are not easy things to see. We can’t face them without courage, let alone stay with them – stay with the truth of the moment, and also with the truth of how our own challenges are not separate from everyone else’s. How everything we say and do matters, even in moments of great pain. How we are all breathing the same air. 

When we can’t see, or can’t stay, then compassion fails to spring into being, or it emerges, then withers. With courage, we can see. We can stay. We naturally connect. Compassion arises and grows strong. Jack Kornfield says it this way: “As children [and maybe in the law?], many of us were taught courage in the form of the warrior or the explorer, bravely facing danger. In…[mindfulness], however, great courage is not demonstrated by aggression or ambition. Aggression and ambition are more often expressions of fear and delusion. The courageous heart is the one that is unafraid to open to the world, to care no matter what.”

The great news is, we also learn courage in the law, or we should. Bobby Kennedy said, in 1962, at the University of San Francisco School of Law by the way, that, “Courage is the most important attribute of a lawyer. It is more important than competence or vision. It can never be an elective in any law school. It can never be de-limited, dated or outworn, and it should pervade the heart, the halls of justice and the chambers of the mind.” 

And then grace. Grace is the loving companion of courage. If we need courage to open to the world and to care; if courage must pervade the heart, the halls of justice, and the chambers of the mind, then we also need grace, to remember our own humanity and that all things that arise, also pass away. To remember that our own exhaustion and fear and worry will one day subside, as will the current violence in the world, even if we are not here to see that. To remember that whatever we’re here to see, tikkun olam, our job, our reason for being here, is still to heal the world, in whatever way we can, every day. To see that it’s not just the practice, it’s the whole point: to bring loving awareness to each moment no matter what presents itself, to care about everyone – not just those who think or live like we do – and to let go, moment after moment after moment, of everything that gets in the way of love. On grace, Anne Lamott says it best, “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”

Let’s sit.