Taking refuge in community, in sometimes-scary times
As individuals, we're not particularly powerful or trustworthy. But can we trust in something bigger?
“Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.” — Gautama Buddha
Last week, I attended a five-day silent retreat at the beautiful Omega Institute in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was not because I had finished my personal to-do list, that’s for sure — but because I needed to step away from my to-do list in order to come back to my community with some semblance of sanity and intentionality, after a life-changing move. (It was also because my husband willingly went on solo parent duty for a week, so, thank you husband.)
In my ongoing interview series with skillful community-tenders, this is emerging as one common thread:
Rather than seeing time in solitude or silence as being the opposite of showing up in our communities, these actions are interdependent, like our inhalations and exhalations. We breathe in spaciousness; we exhale patience. Conversely, if all we are breathing in is stress, anger, resentment or oppression, that is often what comes out of us.
No one else can breathe for us. But the implications of our space-taking are big for all of us.
What I found in the silence was not loneliness, not isolation. It was solitude within sangha — within a community of fellow-travelers who were all there to cultivate greater compassion and wisdom, in order to offer those things back to the collective. There were therapists and early childhood educators who were looking to show up with more patience with the people they serve, and to shed layers of secondary trauma incurred during the pandemic and aftermath. There were app developers looking to make products that promote mindfulness and those who teach it. And there were talented teachers leading us who spoke touchingly of their own children and partners, and the ways in which their practice on retreat has nourished their ways of caring at home.
This kind of travel is very different from taking time away to go on, say, a raucous road trip to Reno with friends. (Both are great, don’t get me wrong — I have done the latter, and still have the delightfully cringe memories to show for it, though lamentably no longer the bejeweled satin heels I picked up in a thrift store.)
What I am saying is that the intention to take space in order to offer more peace to the collective, I found, infused my time away with a sense of purpose that previous trips for pleasure could not give me.
On retreat, I was not seeking to escape the horrors of the world through consumption. I was not looking away. I was looking and looking, for hours and days on end. I looked at the horrors my own mind is capable of manufacturing, all on its own. I looked at the fear I feel just being in this ever-changing world. I looked at the madness that other bundles of synapses and bone like me can inflict on other bodies. I looked at the harm I myself can inflict when I am in a place of reactivity around all of that.
Many of us go our whole lives looking away from these things. What a gift to get to see them clearly.
I was able to do so, I think, because I was staring into this howling storm of hurt while surrounded by a sangha of well-intentioned people whom I trusted not to hurt me. I walked back to my cabin at night and did not feel the need to tuck my keys between my fingers for safety. I sat at various tables and benches with my “In Silence” badge on and knew that if any person approached me and saw it, they would respect my personal space and keep walking. I felt each person’s quiet grace, offered in my direction, each time I grew weary of sitting or walking, or sitting or walking, or once again f#$% sitting or f#$% walking, when my back drooped or my mother-hips ached. This quiet communal comfort helped me to achieve a level of personal clarity through my practices that I could not have found at home by myself.
This is the difference between everyday friendship and sangha. In sangha, you don’t even have to know everyone else’s name. You simply have to share a commitment to helping other people to do hard things in the name of non-harming, ahimsa — a value that is inherently relational, one that we cannot honor alone.
I returned from my retreat and immediately launched a new peer support circle via RTZ Hope with my friend Emily Marlowe, offering refuge and community to people who have recently had to end a wanted pregnancy, due to fetal or maternal health factors. Here again, I saw the magic of sangha at work. As I’ve written previously, every time we do this, the first call is the same. One by one, isolated faces appear on a screen, ashen and disbelieving. By the end, they are laughing together at the deep frustrations and exhaustion inherent to surviving stigmatized grief. They have become more than themselves, more than their losses, more than their bodies and the things that have happened to them, more than the ill-informed stories that other people tell about them. They have become a sangha.
I have also watched an outer circle of advocates forming around folks like us for some time, since the Dobbs decision dropped just weeks after my would-be due date in 2022. Recently, I read in anger and awe as
reported that since misoprostol has been declared a controlled substance in Louisiana, even in hospitals where it is used to prevent fatal hemorrhaging in patients, “those who work in hospitals are running timed drills to ensure that they can get to the locked away medication and back to a patient without her hemorrhaging to death.”To be clear: These helpers should not be placed in this position, in the same ways that teachers should not have to run shelter in place drills to ensure children don’t die at school, and in the same ways that aid workers should not be shot while shuttling food to starving people. Yet as a helper myself, I relate deeply to our shared determination to protect others, in spite of and not with the support of the powers that be. That they are doing so collectively and not as individuals gives me hope that they will succeed.
Zooming further out, I read another story this week, via
, about unionized Greek dock-workers who banded together to block ammunition from being shipped to continue killing innocent civilians in Gaza. As the union declared before they took action: “It's time to shout loudly that we won't allow Piraeus port to become a war springboard.”These people — people who almost certainly did not know each other’s names at the start — were able to accomplish something in the name of peace that no single one of them could do alone.
What a powerful teaching. What a powerful example of sangha.
As Joshua writes:
We are so conditioned to individualism that we take the horrors of the world and ask “What do I do?” And we should take action, of course, but our framework for assessing actions should be collective rather than individual, but so few of us are really, meaningfully, plugged into groups that allow and encourage us to take meaningful collective action. In short, we are not conditioned to think in the collective and we rarely have the infrastructure to act in the collective.
It might seem counterintuitive, but that slight shift from “What can I do?” to “What can we do?” can be the first step towards individual action. When we fixate on our personal culpability and responsibility, the weight of the world can sit heavy on our shoulders. When we realize that we are part of a larger whole, and that the only way for us to be effective is to be part of something larger than ourselves, we can plug into existing organizing efforts and try to do our part. We may still be worn out and pessimistic, but we rightly understand that our actions alone mean little, while our actions as part of a collective could mean the world.
Sitting alone on my meditation cushion, I could contemplate forever how fragile I feel in this human body, and allow this to paralyze me. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. I would be lying if I said it didn’t.
This is inarguably a very scary world. Many of us carry trauma that tells us so — that lives, as Stephanie Foo puts it, in our bones. This trauma can make us believe that we are alone in that scary world, that our efforts will never be enough, and we might as well give up now.
This is why the Buddha once remarked to his dear friend Ananda that “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.” Cultivating connection, and not just personal discipline or effort, is grounds our spiritual and ethical ideals in the soil of what
calls “the human scale.”On the human scale, it may take everyone you know to weave “a tiny raft that could just barely hold your weight.” But over and over again, history shows that people will do this. I believe they will continue to do this. It would also be a lie to leave this part out.
You don’t have to believe in anything bigger than that, than that tiny raft, to have faith in something bigger than yourself, and in the future. And I do believe in that.
Sangha is what I am talking about when I say I was loved back to life after loss by a grove of Mother Trees. It is what I am talking about when I share how I have been held by another grove of mothers as we all stared into the void that is the massive suffering in Gaza. It is what I am talking about when I talk about the red thread that connects us all in times of uncertainty.
Sangha is what I felt during those precious five days on retreat, where I was silent and often solitary, but never really lonely or alone. I felt more like a tree shedding its leaves and preparing for the long winter ahead, knowing that the strong root systems beneath me will continue to hold me, even during the storms to come.
And there are storms to come in the next few weeks, friends. I remain fearful about this coming election. I remain angry about all that is at stake. But I hope that this week, each one of us can find a moment of solitude to go inward and connect with the sad and scared parts of ourselves. And then, as we emerge, I hope that we can reach out, and connect with someone else who is sad and scared too. (If you don’t know anyone like this, you can reach out to me.)
Alone, we will likely remain sad and scared. If we can re-learn togetherness, though, then we all may stand a fighting chance of not just surviving, but building a better, more joyful world than the one we’re living in now.
Further reading:
One breath for you, one breath for me: three short short meditative practices you can try today, created by self-compassion expert Kristin Neff especially for caregivers.
A web big enough to hold the both/and: on writing poetry about Gaza in community with other mothers, when I could not write about it alone.
Rebuilding the village was never going to be easy: on how discomfort and community can (and must) go together if we are to form lasting coalitions that can accomplish great things.
Half of the holy life: the quotation with which I opened this newsletter comes from what is known as the Upaddha Sutta, a small sub-section of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, a collection of Buddhist scriptures. It is translated from the Pali here by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
Banding together to protect pregnancy loss survivors
October is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month. This year in the U.S., we are having important conversations about the fact that abortion care is healthcare — not only for people who are choosing to end unwanted pregnancies, but also for people who find themselves losing or needing to terminate profoundly wanted pregnancies. The Center for Reproductive Rights has been pushing back on authoritarian approaches to pregnant people’s bodies, and advocating for much better policy that meets all needs. All proceeds from this post and others in October will go towards supporting this organization. (For other organizations who are doing great work in this field, see this deeply-researched roundup from Jessica Valenti.)
Also, if you live in the U.S. please remember to vote! Many local ballot initiatives concern reproductive justice in this election — not just which person you think should be President. You can find details about your local polling stations and early voting logistics here.
Thank you Ryan! This is so beautiful and inspiring - and the words I need right now. I am phone-banking this week and next with the Harris campaign and there is a zoom call that you join with other volunteers while you do it. It is exactly that which you speak of - the reassurance that others are with you, doing the work.
We’re all terrified - we’re all desperately hoping to win - and in the anxiety of this moment the only antidote is action.