If the Buddha Got Stuck_ A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path - Charlotte Sophia Kasl [52]
—MAHATMA GANDHI
To be unstuck is to broaden our vision and live by the greater truths—to feel our relationship to all people and all sentient life. In Gandhi’s words, we are children of one and the same creator. To harm another is to harm ourself. I would add to love others is to feel love inside.
The only way we stay fully in reality is to see and accept our connection to the reality of the whole. This will involve a level of listening and attuning that takes us far beyond our conditioned self. You start by realizing that you don’t know another person’s experience, nor can you generalize from your own history. From my own childhood experiences, I can’t know what it’s like to grow up as an African American, or a person in poverty, or in a family where people feel depressed and helpless.
The crucial thing to remember is this: while we can’t know another person’s experience, we can listen with the heartfelt intent of understanding. Such listening becomes the pathway to human communion. This nourishes us at all levels because it assuages feelings of separation. This requires a deep ability to stay present to strong feelings and not run away with defensiveness, not wanting to counter what other people are saying.
I have attended numerous workshops on race, class, homophobia, Native American culture, and the like. There is utter magic when people open themselves to understand one another. At the 1985 conference for the International Decade of Women in Nairobi, Kenya, I sat through a workshop listening to African American women voice their anger at the inequities and pain they’ve experienced and how they felt let down by feminists and feminism with its white, middle-class origins. I could feel my ego murmuring a feeble but, but . . . what about . . . ? Mostly, I felt stunned into silence. I realized the best way to show respect and caring was to be completely present to the anger, to feel it along with the accumulated pain and hurt that lay just below the surface. In another workshop a woman from Palestine engaged in a heated dialogue with an Israeli woman. Tempers flared between them and within the audience, but it was riveting—at least there was an intent to hear, to form some kind of bridge.
Some people are uneasy hearing about the differences in other people’s experience and immediately rush to talk about how we’re all essentially alike. That’s our conditioned, ego-self afraid of being disturbed. We want a pretty picture. It’s hard to be present to accounts of poverty, violence, injustice, abuse, and alienation. Yes, there are human commonalties, but it’s absolutely crucial that we first hear people speak of their pain, customs, anger, and joy; to listen deeply and be touched by their lives and experiences and how they have suffered from the inequities of the system.
At a training on homophobia that I led for therapists I was deeply moved by the humble attention of the male and female heterosexual counselors as two lesbian women and a gay man spoke of their negative and positive experiences with counselors. The therapists were open-minded and willing to be shaken, which they were, because they thought there was nothing much they needed to learn, they were operating with the common conception, “we’re all people.” They were astounded to realize the extent of their lack of understanding of homophobia. The experience of the training was positive because of the profound respect and everyone’s willingness to be known, albeit in different ways. The therapists exposed their lack of knowledge and the three people who told their stories had an opportunity to be heard with dignity and respect. They deeply appreciated the willingness of the therapists to learn from them.
There is no one reality in the amazing web of lives drawn together in the mosaic of humanity. There is everyone’s experience. If you are