This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Eco-Chaplaincy-Joanna Macy - Honoring pain

Introduction

Welcome to IMC. I am just twenty-four hours back from teaching a week-long retreat in the Sierras at a new retreat center up there called Big Springs Retreat Center. It is a beautiful place at 5,000 feet with just endless forests around it. Some of you might know of the beautiful outcropping in the northern Sierras called Sierra Buttes. It is right underneath the Sierra Buttes, that old volcanic rock that somehow was laid down flat once upon a time and now stands upright in these beautiful buttes that stick up. You can see it from Highway 5, I think, on a clear day driving north. It is right there with spectacularly clean water. I don't know how many places in California you can still drink the water coming straight out of the ground without it being filtered and chlorinated. Even hiking in the Sierras, most people will filter their water. It is called Big Springs because all this water was pouring out of the ground there, out of this volcanic rock. Some people have considered it some of the cleanest water in California. Some people have said that it takes seven days to replace half of the water in your body. So, if water is seventy percent of our body, what you're looking at now, sitting here in front of you, is thirty percent Sierra water.

In this wonderful exchange we have with the natural world, air, water, and food—so much of the natural world is there for us to participate in, partly through breathing, drinking, and eating to transform us, to keep us alive. We are completely made up of not only natural material, but recycled material. These amazing mammalian processes that we share with other mammals are moving through us and processing all this natural material. It was wonderful to be up there for that week, living there in the forests and on this natural water and springs coming out. So, it is still very much with me. What I was up there doing was teaching a Buddhist eco-chaplaincy training.

One of the things that has been a big part of my life for the last twenty years is steadily entering into this world of chaplaincy training. Chaplaincy is a way of meeting the world with compassionate care to support people. Now with eco-chaplaincy, we support people in their interface with the natural world, and sometimes just caring for the natural world itself in a way that's a continuation of Buddhist practice, our inner life, our spiritual life. It is just a delight to be part of this; it is still very much with me. So, you're going to have to bear with me as I offer you some of the teachings that were done there.

The Work of Joanna Macy

The retreat was organized around a four-fold teaching by Joanna Macy^[1]. Joanna Macy was one of the great Buddhist thinkers of the modern world here in the West. She was a deeply studied Buddhist scholar who studied Western philosophy and general systems theory. Someone who studies general systems theory and then begins understanding the teachings of dependent arising in Buddhism sees a tremendous overlap with them. She was a wonderful thinker and philosopher who took that, worked it, and developed it. She was very influenced by a social action movement in Sri Lanka called Sarvodaya^[2]. Daya here means something like compassion, love, generosity, or all of the above, and sarva means all. So, "compassion for all." That was a wonderful grassroots movement in Sri Lanka, kind of Gandhian, that was really out there to serve people. Out of all that, she came back to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and was very much involved with the nuclear disarmament movement.

From there, I think because of that, she was invited to help some Russian people deal with the aftereffects of Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant that exploded and spread lots of radiation across the lands in Russia, and back then, the Soviet Union. The story that was told about the first time she went there to offer some kind of compassionate or spiritual care for people who had been affected by that, it was for villagers who lived in the forest between Chernobyl and Moscow. When it exploded, there was a lot of radiation started with the wind being carried to Moscow. To protect these huge population centers, a cloud was seeded so it would rain, and the rain would take a lot of the radiation out of the atmosphere and rain it down on the forest below. But they didn't tell the villagers who had lived there for many generations. No one told them they were going to do this, and that while it was raining radiation they should stay indoors.

Not only were they heavily radiated, but their lands, their forests, their ground, and the plants they were growing all became uninhabitable for humans. They were forced to move out of their forests and into cinder block homes somewhere in an urban setting. You can imagine how difficult it was for them—the tragedy, maybe their anger, their pain. Joanna Macy was asked to go and support them. Somehow, out of her Buddhist practice, she had the idea that you had to name your pain. You had to sit with your pain and acknowledge it in order to work with the grief and the anger that people had. But when she brought this idea to the villagers in this workshop she was offering, they got really angry with her. They said, "You're here to help us move forward and be happy, just do something better and have a better life. It's too painful for us to look back at what happened and to live with this deep emotional pain." They were pretty angry with her. There was one woman in particular who was very angry that she would come there to reawaken the deep wounds that they had.

They stopped for the day to continue the next morning. That woman who was most angry went home, furious, and lived with her fury through the night. As she lived with it, something began to shift and change. Something began to open in her heart. She got to see that underneath her anger was a deeper grief. That deeper grief then opened up. She was very surprised, as the story is told to me, that as she opened up, she started feeling an amazing connection to the natural world, the world around her, and the people—everything in a way that she had never felt. She felt intimacy, felt connected, and felt kind of—I don't know if love is the right word, but felt something very profound in that interconnection. She understood how important it was for her to go into her anger and her grief in order to be transformed and come out the other side. She came back to the workshop and explained what had happened. That apparently helped all the other people to understand how important it was, as they could see how she had been transformed, the one who was most angry.

Out of this work that Joanna Macy did in the Soviet Union and other places, helping people in areas of great tragedy, she created something called The Work That Reconnects. It's a wonderful movement to help people do this very deep grief work and reconnect to the natural world. She created something called the spiral process. I think it is a spiral because you do it over and over again, and it becomes richer each time you do it. It involves four steps dealing with grief, loss, anger, and these kinds of things that go on in the human relationship with the natural world, for people who are paying attention to it or for whom it's important. As an eco-chaplain, that's one of the things they're caring for: people's relationship to the natural world and often climate grief, climate despair, and climate anger, which are new terms over the last twenty years. This process was what we organized the retreat around, and we took people through it, partly teaching them about it. It was a wonderful retreat for people.

Step 1: Gratitude

The four-step process that Joanna Macy uses to address deep emotional pain starts with focusing on gratitude. It may seem counterintuitive that when you're going to focus on pain, you first focus on gratitude, touching into what we're grateful for and what we appreciate. The world is not just pain; it's a bigger world. The way we refer to the natural world in the eco-chaplaincy program is to call it the "more-than-human world." I think this phrase is very evocative. Most humans live in a very human-centric world. One representation of that is how much time you spend in front of a screen. If you're in front of your screen, you're really in a human-centric world, even if you're looking at cat videos. Beyond that, reading the news or the activities we do with other humans, we engage in things that—some of it is very natural, some of it has never been done before until the modern world. The orientation is caring for this human-centric world without any reference to the impact it has on the more-than-human world. It is greater in two different ways. One is that it is just larger. The human-centric world is a small percentage of what this earth is all about. But also, I like the word more. For me, it evokes the idea that there is something greater, not just larger.

As soon as it evokes the idea that there is a greater world here than you could imagine if you only live in the human-centric world, for me, that reminds me that there is a more-than-human world within me as well. You think that all that is in me is also human. Of course, how could it not be? But it's not the human-centric world of thoughts and ideas, what we're navigating, negotiating, building, and trying to get more likes for on our social media posts. We share so much with the natural world within us: our breathing, our hearts, our circulation system, our neurology. Most of what makes us alive right now are deeply evolved natural processes. Some of it we ignore, some of it we don't pay attention to, and they atrophy. The degree to which people who live in the natural world much of the time, who grew up in it, are attuned, heightened, and aware of what goes on around them—their senses are so alive. For some of us who don't live in that world, it is hard to understand how sensitive and alive their senses are. Some of ours have atrophied compared to them.

It begins with gratitude, and part of that gratitude is for the more-than-human world, that so much of what we need to be alive is given to us kind of freely all the time. One of the most important things we need to be alive for the next few minutes is to be able to breathe. And that's been given to us. How is it given to us? Because of these amazing natural processes that we're participating in, the oxygen-carbon cycles that go on. There was a time on this planet of ours when there was no oxygen and no life that we know of today. It wasn't possible. Then very slowly, some kind of unicellular organism somehow evolved to photosynthesize. Very slowly, because of photosynthesis, oxygen began to appear in the atmosphere, and that allowed an oxygen-based kind of life to grow and develop.

It's amazing that we're participating in this. Water—where does that come from? How do we get water that's clean enough for us to drink? For some places in the world, it's very hard. Food—there is so much that cares for our life. Not to see it only as a consumer, only as something you deserve, pay for, and acquire more of, but rather to appreciate how much is provided. To have a deep appreciation, inspiration, and gratitude for that. One of the things that does is that it prepares us. In the Buddhist tradition, we don't usually start looking at our pain by looking at gratitude first, but if there's anything comparable, we prepare to look at our suffering by being generous. The connection between generosity and gratitude is intimate. Giving and receiving go around and around; there is reciprocal giving, and there is gratitude. We receive and we're grateful.

Giving and receiving happen all the time. It is represented for me with the idea of just breathing. These wonderful plants that are around us—you see out the window there, the tree is taking in carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, which we need in order to breathe and be alive. Where does that carbon dioxide come from? Probably only a teeny percentage for that tree, but it's coming from us. We take in the oxygen and we send out carbon dioxide. So there are so many ways in which this is reciprocal. In Buddhism, we tend to start with generosity, but generosity in Buddhism, as it is always with the word, is voluntary. It has to be inspired from the inside, something wholesome that cleanses, opens, and warms something inside of us. It feels like love, or it feels like joy. It is very nourishing to be generous.

In the same way, having a pure gratitude—not a gratitude that makes you obligated to return, but a pure gratitude that is also nourishing, inspiring, and opening—takes us beyond the small little human-centric, egocentric world that's so easy to live in. We start Joanna's work with gratitude. Spend time on it. Up there in the Sierras, it was very easy to spend time walking around in the trees and plants on the ground in the mountains, and to be directed to see what you're grateful for, how you're grateful, and to feel it there in the natural world. Something could relax for people that sometimes doesn't ever relax in a human-centric world. For some people, the human-centric world is always a place of danger, a place of tension, problems, and challenge. Some people only find their solace, their inspiration, or find themselves by going into the natural world for a period of time, letting all the challenges of the human world fall away. They feel like they belong here. They are fully human and are allowed to be who they are. They feel accepted. Some people might roll their eyes when they hear this, but that doesn't take away how some people experience it. They experience that the tree accepts them, that they can be who they are one hundred percent. The tree is just as willing to be there with them and accept them as they are. The water coming out of the ground, flowing over the ground at Big Springs, is there to accept them. The bees will accept you.

Because some people never experience this in their life, to be in a place of gratitude and feel that acceptance... In Pali, the word for gratitude is usually said to be Kataññu^[3]. It means something like "knowing what has been done," acknowledging what has been done. When we acknowledge what has been done that benefits us, that is gratitude. What happens in you if there is no fear, no obligation? You are not required to do anything in return. You can just relax into that and feel the goodness of it. Something shifts and prepares us for the next step of Joanna Macy's work.

Step 2: Honoring the Pain

The next step is to feel our emotional pain, but she doesn't just call it feeling it. She uses a very important verb before the word pain rather than just "feel your pain"—she says "honoring the pain." She adds the word honor. I don't know all the associations that you have with the word honor—to respect the pain, to revere the pain. I certainly like the word respect. It is not just being a victim in our life. It's not just having a wound and being swallowed into the wound or drowning in it. It's not being a passive recipient of suffering and pain, being overwhelmed by it and collapsing with it. There's something about stepping forward—and maybe this is the generosity piece—stepping forward and saying, "Wait a minute. The pain is more than just pain. The pain is something important here." The suffering we have is not something to dismiss, not something to ignore, not something to get rid of. You don't take out your emotional bazooka and just destroy it and blast it away. It's not something to go to the doctor to get a pill for, so that you take the pill and then you can go on with whatever you're doing and forget about your pain. That would do a tremendous disservice to our humanity if the point is simply never to have emotional pain.

One way to say this that is very important is that emotional pain, any kind of pain at all, is first and foremost a message that your body, your system is giving you. Are you ready to listen to the message? Can you discover what the lesson is, what is being told to you? There are people apparently born genetically without the ability to feel physical pain, and their lives are really hard. They tend not to live very far into adulthood because they don't get the message that they've been hurt. They will be hurt and continue life as usual without knowing it, and they can't take care of themselves. Some of us only know that we have something wrong with us when we feel internal pain. If you don't have that internal pain, you just continue doing the same injurious thing over and over again. So the ability to have physical pain, as much of a drag as it is, our life depends on it. To honor that pain means that this pain is more than just pain. Pain is a connection to yourself in a deep way. It is a message. It's also a connection to the world around you. Maybe it's a very important message from the world itself, because a lot of our emotional pain has to do with the wider world and our relationship to it.

I think a certain humility around our emotional pain is really healthy. We don't necessarily know what's cooking inside of us. We don't necessarily know why. I find it somewhat sad how many people will go to the doctor to get a pill for depression. I know that depression is sometimes debilitating and needs medical care and pharmaceutical care, but I think that some people have this instinct to just get over it and not have it, let's take the medicine right away. Sometimes depression is a phenomenally important time, preparing us to look at and work through something underground, something that needs time, place, and understanding. To honor depression, sometimes it is more important than fixing it. To honor our anger. I've been angry and spent time with it, giving it time so I can really listen deeply: What's the message here? What's going on more deeply? What needs attention here? Don't kill the messenger.

What is the message? With anger, the message for me has often been fear, sometimes sadness, sometimes a feeling of threat. Then the question is, what is being threatened? Not a few times, when I finally could look underneath the layers of anger at what was being threatened, I had to put a big question mark on that. "Really Gil, is that what you're allowing to be threatened? Maybe that's not really the heart of it, what is needed here." So the idea of honoring the pain, just beginning to respect the pain, begins for some of us to change the inner dynamic that we have with emotional pain from what we had when we were just a victim of it or being crushed by it. We're actually shifting, moving in a new direction. We're taking some responsibility. We're stepping forward, taking some initiative with it. Some people don't know how to take initiative with their own emotional pain. Therefore, they're only victims of it, or feel there's someone else who's going to fix it for them: "Someone else knows what to do, and I just have to find the right person, the right process, the right something." But without taking some ability to respond or step forward in ourselves, we're not going to find the transformation that Joanna Macy is hoping for, what Buddhism is hoping for from people.

This honoring the pain, giving room for it. In her processes, there is room for people to speak their pain. In her workshops, it is done collectively with a group of people. It is very different from the Buddhist way generally, or like around here at IMC, where to honor the pain means you sit quietly by yourself, close your eyes, and just really feel what's there. In Joanna Macy's work, it is done interpersonally in a community. Something very different goes on when you speak it in the presence of other people and they hear it, respect it, care for it, understand you, and hold you in it all. Sometimes it allows things to move through, shift, and change faster than it does in meditation for people, when the focus is not so fully on the whole experience. It is spoken, it is felt, there is room for it, and it is acknowledged.

Step 3: Seeing with New Eyes

Then it comes to the third step of her work, which is seeing with new eyes. That's maybe coming right out of Joanna's Buddhist background, where in Buddhism there is what's called "awakening the Dharma eye." There is having vision, observing, seeing deeply. The language of seeing in Buddhism is emphasized over and over again as part of that transformational process—to come out of that suffering, to go beyond the suffering, to open up into it and beyond into freedom, into a whole new way of seeing the world. Simply seeing, for example, that this emotional pain is a process to honor and live through, rather than something to fix, stop, or avoid, is to see in a new way. To see in a new way is to understand that the very person experiencing the emotional pain maybe doesn't have to live in the same identities that we were stuck in in the past. Maybe the identity is that of a victim. Maybe the identity is that of being the responsible one who has to fix everything. Maybe the identity is to be the one who is incapable. There are all kinds of ways in which we see ourselves that begin to fall away, providing us with a new way of seeing.

One of the things I emphasized at the retreat is that with deeper meditation practice, at some point, seeing in a new way means we see that it's possible to live without clinging. We have a clear enough experience, a reference point, a knowing of what it's like for the heart not to be attached. I want to use the word non-clinging—what it's like to have the heart not clinging to anything, not restricting anything, not tightening down around anything, not resisting anything. The ability for the heart to be really free, open, and clear. To discover that for yourself, not to have anyone tell you you're supposed to and try to do gymnastics to be that way, but to honor the pain, sit here, open up, and relax, and discover what this possibility of non-clinging is. That provides a whole different orientation of how to live a life, a whole sense of possibility. It gives a vision of what's possible for oneself and possible for others. In the village in the forest of the Soviet Union, they saw that this was possible for their neighbors and their friends as well. This woman came back out of her night of anger and shared it because there was a vision: this is possible. We can do this together.

Step 4: Going Forth

Then the fourth and final step in Joanna Macy's spiral she calls "going forth." In Buddhism, going forth is usually the word used for leaving home to become a monastic. But that's not what Joanna Macy was encouraging people to do at all. She was anything but monastic. She was this wonderful, dynamic social activist, layperson, and Buddhist teacher who wrote, organized, and engaged with the world. For her, going forth is to be engaged, to step forward, to make a difference in the world, to help the world, to support your communities, your families, your friends, and to be there. This is where the generosity thing comes back. I like to think of it being full circle, starting with gratitude and moving to generosity. We have this reciprocity of giving and receiving that goes along all the time. To step forward into the world—not stay in the human-centric world, but step into the wider world, go forth, and make a difference to support and help people to make this a better world. Certainly, that's what Joanna Macy's life was about. She died about a year and a half ago, and she was one of the big supporters of our Buddhist eco-chaplaincy program. When we graduated the second or third group, she came and gave the keynote graduation talk. It was quite wonderful.

Reflections

Gratitude, honoring the pain, seeing with new eyes, and going forth is what I was up to last week, and I wanted to share that with you. Because it's tea time and you get to talk to each other if you want to stay, I think it honors this process I just talked about to ask what it was like for you. I want to be careful and honor you that this touches on difficult and evocative parts of people's lives. It might actually be helpful for you to have some self-chosen way of sharing something about this talk with someone here in a friendly way as a way of introducing yourselves. How that would work is to just say something. It could be as simple as, "Overall, what was it like to hear this?" Or, "Is one of these four steps the one that most inspires you?" You don't have to talk about what's most difficult or the greatest pain, but something that was uplifting for you. So we'll take a short period of time, maybe about six minutes, to say hello to someone here and share, if you want to, about the talk. It's helpful if it can be two or three people, but look around and make sure no one's sitting alone. Please, and you don't have to stay if you don't want to either.