Socially Engaged

Today, I thought that I’d give you a little background about why I began this blog.

As many of you know (and some of you may not), I’ve been in formal (virtual) practice for a little over a year with the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM. The program is called Socially Engaged Buddhist Training, or SEBT. Socially engaged practice refers to the application of Buddhist ethics, insights acquired from meditation practice, and the teachings of the Buddhist dharma to contemporary situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering, injustice, and need.

This past year has been very rich! I’ve been filled-up many times over with inspiration, skills, humility, and deep admiration for UPAYA’s incredible teachers and for my fellow SEBT trainees. It has been an amazing and unexpected gift of the pandemic.

As part of our training, we were assigned to begin an engagement project - one that would move our practice of meditation and study into action in our community.

In contemplating my engagement project, I kept coming back to a moment I witnessed (on zoom) at UPAYA’s “Social and Environmental Justice” weekend. It was there that I heard Sensei Kritee Kanko, PhD speak. Sensei Kanko is a distinguished scientist, a climate justice activist, and a Zen priest with access to both sophisticated technologies and deep spiritual practice. And yet, when asked about what had kept her whole through the pandemic, her response was simple and instantly relatable: friendship. The friendship of a few key people who met regularly and were able to stand together and help each other through this very difficult time with humor, compassion, and shared experience.

This landed on my heart and, since then, I’ve realized that my internal compass has begun to train itself on friendship as its true north. I’ve begun to realize that, for me, practicing with friendship could energize and nurture engagement with an already available, yet almost neglected resource. (The neglect, sadly, is mine.)

Once this realization occurred, I began seeing articles and posts everywhere about the benefits of friendship and the fundamental human needs and faculties that it nurtures and facilitates. One of the most important articles (for my purposes) was written by Norman Fischer and published in Lion’s Roar on May 12, 2017. Its title? “Making Friends on the Buddhist Path”. He begins by telling the story of the Meghiya Sutta (linked here).https://www.lionsroar.com/friends-buddhist-path/. His conclusion is unequivocal: “Friendship is the most important element in the spiritual path. Everything else naturally flows from it.”

I’m now exploring the experience of friendship on a couple of different levels:

• Deepening my friendships with local people as a personal practice. This involves in-person meetings, coffees, and other gatherings in my small town of Halfway, OR.

• Connecting this real time effort to a larger conversation about friendship between those I know locally and those I know from other contexts. This ongoing work will be accomplished utilizing this blog. Ultimately, my hope is that it will be a tool that increases connection and compassion between all of us.

• With the building of trust, in time, this virtual sangha of local and virtual friends might find an action – political or otherwise – that we all feel strongly about taking. If so, our collective voices would amplify the voice of each individual and make the action feel more connected to community and more effective.

And… you’re all invited!

The common topic will be friendship and its joys and pitfalls.

Some personal practice questions I’m actively exploring through this project: How does one’s practice move more fully into expression in the world in an active way? How do you measure your progress on this path when there are so many possible paths? How do we trust process when our world’s problems are so urgent?

What do you think? Are you ready to engage?