A Path for Responding to Tragic Decisions

As you are faced with individual and political actions that put living beings in danger and lead to their harm and suffering, it can be challenging to maintain compassion and the energy to work for life-serving change. You need space to feel and be present for your own rage and grief. In such intense rage, you might have the impulse to give up on the country or community in which you live and move somewhere in which you imagine people are more aligned with your values. This is a sort of protest impulse likely arising from needs for integrity and congruence. A part of you can’t make sense of the fact that you are participating in a system that could make such harmful decisions.

Before uprooting your life, it’s helpful to take time to remember that rage is reminding you how important protection, fairness, inclusion, and care are to you. Take time to get grounded in these values and the actions you are taking everyday to live them. From this grounded sense of purpose and inner stillness, you will know where you can be of the best service.

As you find your center again after hearing of shocking political actions, you can invite your attention and perspective to expand. Shared humanity is a useful strategy for returning to connection after such a divisive stimulus. You might begin by bringing to heart and mind those who you know will suffer from the given political action. Breathe in their suffering and breathe out compassion. Feel the compassion in your heart, see them wrapped in a blanket of your care, and offer a prayer or wish for their well being in words that are authentic for you. 

Next bring into your awareness those that passed the new legislation. It can help here to picture individuals rather than using labels or groups of decision makers. Just like you, each individual wants to be happy, to contribute, to live free from fear and pain. Just like you they are subject to conditioning and engage in tragic strategies to care for themselves and others. And again, you can breathe in their suffering and breathe out compassion. Feel the compassion in your heart, see them wrapped in a blanket of your care, and offer a prayer or wish for their well being in words that are authentic for you.

As you settle into greater equanimity and your energy to contribute life-serving change returns, it might be useful to remind yourself of some basic principles regarding needs and motivation. When someone says or you imagine that they are doing something to inflict harm or punish wrong-doing, remember that this is a tragic strategy to meet a universal need. Someone who uses tragic strategies is usually not conscious of the needs motivating their behavior. With large scale political decisions, the needs are very diverse relative to each individual. It’s likely true that each person believes that some needs for some people must be protected at the cost of needs for other people. This view of course arises from fear and an economic system meant to promote and feed off false ideas of scarcity.

At the individual scale of things, tragic strategies in which someone tries to directly hurt or punish another often arises from an unconscious need for empathy. The thought that goes with this is "If I hurt you, you will know how I feel (or felt in a trauma from their past).” Understanding that someone’s motivation for violent action is a beautiful need helps us access wisdom and compassion, which is the basis for truly effective protection for those who are harmed and transformation for those who do the harming.

When someone's needs have been unmet for a long time, it can be difficult to believe they are really acting from needs. Sometimes the needs they are acting from don't obviously relate to the events at hand. For example, when someone lashes out at you unexpectedly over something small, it’s likely about some unrecognized and unrelated feeling and need in them not relevant to the situation at hand. 

Tragic strategies for meeting needs can also show up in a tit for tat kind of mentality. For example, imagine you have a date with a friend and some more interesting invitation comes up for the same evening. If you are in tit for tat thinking you might have a thought like this: "She flaked out on me last month, why should I worry about breaking our date this month."  In this example, in a moment of remembering pain stimulated by your friend, you compare levels of suffering and imagine that equal suffering somehow justifies disregard for the other person’s needs. Tragic strategies like this don't meet needs for integrity, empathy, caring consideration, or mutuality. They just add suffering to suffering. At the same time, this is part of the conditioning of this world and so it makes sense that this type of thinking arises. When you notice this kind of thinking in yourself or someone else, you can place a hand on your heart and feel compassion for the power of conditioning and your longing to be free of it.

Practice

This week I invite you to consider viewing every tragic action you witness or experience as a cue to slow down, honor your experience, grieve, connect, receive support, and return to your heart and find the energy to take life-serving action.