I received this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh this week.
“Someone asked me, ‘Aren’t you worried about the state of the world?’ I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, ‘What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.’” ~~ Thich Nhat Hanh
What I like about this quote from a master is the reminder of the many realms of our existence that can contribute to our suffering. We are very aware of our personal suffering whether aging, sickness or loss and how that impacts our hearts and minds. Many of us come to mindfulness and meditation because of acute disturbances in one or another of those areas. But we may overlook or discount how much impact the suffering of others around the world may have on our ability to be happy and peaceful. And there are other issues people face that cause ongoing stress and anxiety - issues around financial security, the stress of discrimination whether based on race, sexual orientation, religion, or simply being a woman or an older person. For some, this may be the back ground drip drip drip of people in the news striving to deprive a group of people you might belong to of their rights to adequate health care, or housing, or simply the right to walk around freely without insult or threat. For others, the threats are more imminent and visceral.
Mindfulness and meditation have been havens for many of us on all of these fronts. But we can easily image how useless mindfulness and meditation sound as a balm to the people of Ukraine for instance or young black men stopped by police or incarcerated people.
And yet, we can remind ourselves that it was Viktor Frankl, who spent 4 years in a concentration camp, who wrote: "“Everything can be taken from a man (or woman) but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
And it was the Dalai Lama who fled his native land and endured many hardships including the death and torture of many of his monks, who still counsels finding joy in this life, saying, “Everybody wants to be happy. Nobody wants suffering.” And it was this truth which brought Thich Naht Hanh to the US after years in the war in Vietnam, because he realized that the suffering being caused by our country in his country was the result of intense suffering in our country. And it was Thich Naht Hanh who said as I quoted above: "What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.” ~~ Thich Nhat Hanh
And that brings us back to our most basic freedom to choose to be happy, to choose peace, and to choose to bring mindfulness into our lives - to sit in meditation and cultivate our minds and hearts in freedom from suffering, in compassion, and in equanimity.
And from that place of peace, any help we bring to the world will be grounded in peace, not suffering - in love, not hatred.