DEAR ZEN: Dropping pain and heavy burdens

Squaring past pain with future optimism. A collaborative response with Matthew Hahn.

This week's newsletter is an installment of my fortnightly advice column, DEAR ZEN. Previously, this column was only available in full to paid subscribers. After running this paid subscription experiment on Substack for a while, I've decided to discontinue it. From now on, all of my content here on Substack (including DEAR ZEN and any fireside chats coming up) will be free. :-)

I am so grateful to everyone who has been a founding member and a paid subscriber to CMOON over the past year and a half! If you'd still like to express your appreciation monetarily, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Chozen-ji, the Zen temple and dojo where I live and train. 

With great gratitude, 

Cristina

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Dear Zen,

How do I square my vow to do good in the world with the abuse I witnessed and endured while incarcerated? It rattled my sense of humanity. I feel at odds and dissonant. I wish to be of service however I can and have made an impact through my work. On the flip side, I harbor something so heavy from my time inside. What I saw staff/guards do. The viciousness and delight in it. I can see their suffering, but I struggle to be clear and compassionate about it. There’s a density around my experience. I hope this makes sense. Maybe. 

- Kevin

Hi, Kevin. Thank you so much for sharing this very sincere and painful question. I asked my friend Matthew Hahn, a formerly incarcerated Buddhist teacher in California, to help answer it. I'm going to share his response first:

Thank you for sharing this. I spent nearly a decade of my life in prison and have been witness to the cruelties that you speak of. I understand how heavy those experiences can be. I know the way that they can haunt us for many years afterwards. Despite the fact that I have been home for more than twelve years, some of them still do. One thing that strikes me about many of those memories of cruelty is their singular and collective incomprehensibility. 

In the recovery program I am a part of, we share a dedication of merit that has a line worth sharing here: “As we have learned from practice, great pain does not erase goodness, but in fact informs it”. This feels like a good starting point for working with the heaviness of these memories. I suspect that you have ways of supporting the formerly incarcerated people with whom you work in ways that only you know how because of your experience. In a way, then, the cruelties of prison are already informing the good work you do in the world.

“As we have learned from practice, great pain does not erase goodness, but in fact informs it”.

But let’s be clear: supporting the folks who are the victims of cruelty does not prevent the cruelties from happening in the first place. Perhaps, then, some of the tension you feel is nestled in there. Perhaps there is a sense that the suffering just keeps tumbling toward you as the prison system perpetually churns out wounded people. I get that. The carceral wheel of samsara is very real.

I work with folks both in prison and after they come home. I am aware of the fact that my work focuses specifically on addressing harm after it occurs and not on the systemic sources of that harm. But I begin with supporting others who are hurting, one person at a time. I begin by empowering the people who have been disempowered and, in time, help build up a community of people who have come home from prison and started healing.

As our community grows, our collective voices grow louder, and our voices grow louder in direct proportion to the number of us who have healed. These are the voices that will change the system. We cannot afford to get discouraged by the fact that the suffering just keeps on coming. It is heavy, sure, but we are those tasked with carrying it.

As our community grows, our collective voices grow louder, and our voices grow louder in direct proportion to the number of us who have healed. These are the voices that will change the system.

And here’s my response.

Kevin—Since your question seems to hinge on having compassion for the guards you describe, I'll share how, early on in my Zen training, Chozen-ji's head priest pointed out that the Latin roots of the word compassion mean "to suffer with" (com "with, together" + pati "to suffer"). 

compassion (n.) from Late Latin compassionem… from com "with, together" + pati "to suffer"

In modern contexts we tend to understand compassion as more like having sympathy with or understanding someone else's suffering. I like this older understanding because it forces the recognition that suffering with someone—to share in their suffering—requires strength. I think a lot of us need to develop such inner, spiritual strength, and the greatest strength I've cultivated has come from training the body, heart, and mind together.

I’ve written a lot about the integration of the martial arts into my Zen training. Something about the demands of the martial arts combined with skills from the zazen we do right before—seeing 180 degrees in every direction, keeping my breath slow and below my belly button, and feeling my feet on the ground—put me in the right condition to release repressed emotional baggage in ways that aren't otherwise possible. It is in both the process and the end result of this letting go that I have found greater physical, psychological, and spiritual strength—and along with these, a new sense of freedom.

Suffering with someone—to share in their suffering—requires strength. It is in both the process and the end result of letting go of my own baggage that I have found greater physical, psychological, and spiritual strength.

As I've gotten more serious, I've had to drill even deeper into strength, speed, and awareness. To do so, I've had to bring a new level of fire and drive to all of my training. I realized that before, I was often just phoning it in. I was only training when there was a class, and I was letting myself daydream and be distracted from discomfort even when I was technically training. Now, I know what it feels like to have to "bring it" when facing off with an opponent, and I can bring that urgency into my sitting.

The actress Olivia Munn recently shared that, when she received her breast cancer diagnosis, she found herself dropping all of her jealousy, anger, resentment, regret, and lifelong self criticism.

"I couldn't climb a mountain carrying all this extra weight," she said, describing what it felt like as a young mother to face the possibility of dying from cancer if she didn't act quickly and drastically. 

Absent such life or death circumstances, you might consider addressing your psychophysical burdens through the body (as part of your spiritual training). Working for the betterment of the world can be like climbing a very steep mountain, and at times, you will need to sacrifice and share in the suffering of others to do it. To have the strength to do so, you'll need to drop the heaviness you describe, like your work—and maybe even your life—depends on it.