The Purpose of Mindfulness Cannot Be Peace Now
This world doesn’t need your peace. It needs your clarity. Even if what’s clear is anger.
In a meditation group for women+ that I attend, we had a discussion on anger. So many of us don’t want our anger. We feel its edgy discomfort and fear its unretractable mouth. So many of us will say, “I am afraid of what will happen if I express it.” But it seethes under the cover of our skin, our attention trained on it so it stays under our control like a wounded rescue dog. We meditate out of a hope we will train the dog for good. We meditate to soothe it and find peace.
We are seeking peace in the quagmire. We seek peace amidst intense and enduring injustice. We seek peace when the outrage of flagrant racism gets a White supremacist constructed trial. We seek peace when leaders line their pockets as they negotiate away the future and the present making a mockery of all attempts at progress that have roots in the past. We seek peace when we are paid less and have to work harder to live in a society that has become unrelentingly expensive because of the policies of self-interested and self-dealing politicians over the last 2+ generations. We seek peace when full societies around the world are burning down. We don’t need peace right now. We need anger. This is what anger is for. Sadness is for loss, anxiety is for unpredictability, anger is for injustice. We do not need and should not try to meditate or breathe it away.
We don’t choose the feelings we have, they volunteer. Clean Anger has volunteered as an inner voice about injustice. Murky anger is usually the bully-stand-in for another hurt which makes it the kind of anger that is hard to pin down, feels helpless and causes harm. We should be worried about our murky anger and what it will do. Since it’s not really speaking for righteous anger it will be more inclined to the lashing out from its lack of clarity like my dog before the hair cut. But this is why we practice mindfulness. Not so we don’t have or feel anger. It is so we can be very clear on where the anger comes from and what it needs.
Sometimes it needs to be felt and honored. “Yes, I see you. You are correct. That is wrong.” Sometimes it needs to be spoken for, “I feel very angry about this. What you have done is wrong.” Sometimes it needs to be acted upon. “Today, because the way poor neighborhoods and their people have been wrongfully under-invested in, I will vote for India Walton.”
Mindfulness can help delineate the anger; show you where it lives in your body and clarify the story of its source. Peace-pursuits, misapplied, can bypass anger but then more than just anger gets bypassed so instead of peacefulness there is a vagueness that we call “better” than the burn of anger. But it’s not as if we can select out anger and keep the rest. We can’t intricately modulate our feeling experience. We have to learn to see and feel all our feelings with reverant clarity so we can move with wisdom in the world.
Mindfulness can help clarify the story of the source of anger and when practiced can show you the ways anger gets coopted and amplified. Social media feeds, opinion and interpretation of news, uninformed discussion all have a way of pressing down on anger and making it feel more edgy and uncomfortable. Have you noticed? Social media feeds, opinion, interpretation and analysis of current events all tend to land in places that feel a certain way — anxious or angry.
But we don’t need this. We need to be in the world that is ours. Awake and aware of the well being of the people in our homes and our communities. Awake and aware of the injustices that affect both us and the people who live nearby because marginalized people down the street reflect the physical, mental and spiritual health of the community as a whole. Everyone matters. If we can successfully care about that then we need to extend beyond and care about the injustices of the larger contexts in which we live, country, continent, world. Be clear about your capacity to care and learn to wield your injustice-based anger for good in the largest possible context that remains honest inside of you. And by injustice, I mean harm. I don’t mean idea. I don’t mean harm from ideas like the imagined harm from critical race theory. People don’t become poor or die from understanding the world through the lived experience of people other than those like you, they may feel sad or vicarious shame but they will also feel more compassion which is associated with greater life satisfaction so being more aware of more peoples’ actual lives and stories no matter how hard can only enhance well being. But I don’t mean these misnamed idealogical harms, I mean harmful policies and practices that make it harder for real people to live and be happy. Ideas are not injustices and uncomfortable feelings are not harm. Policies and practices that create and exacerbate class divisions are. That is where our anger is necessary. To make clear the distinction between a real and imagined harm and direct needed attention toward the real. But in this time of fire-hose opinion flooding, mindfulness is a practice to make all this clear.
Mindfulness, or simply a practice in breathing with some simple clarity on what’s happening at this moment, a moment of living with awareness of the senses, can help inform us of what sorts of information to avoid. Anything that presses down on anxiety and anger, telling us we’re helpless in one form or another, should be avoided. Anything that tells us we’re under attack should be avoided. Our body will tell us what to avoid if we have the clarity to hear it. Encounters with media aren’t clarifying for our lived reality. They might inflame our inner reality with vividly anxious anger but this is not the same as clear. The daily interactions with neighbors will tell you more about reality than the interactions with media. The media won’t tell you that about itself, though. So you need to practice being clear.
Peace is what we must strive for together but we can’t opt out of engaging with what needs to be changed in favor of it. Clarity has a peacefulness around it, though, even when that which it delineates is difficult. The anger that this time inspires is necessary but we need to keep it clean and distinguished from the anxious angry feelings the media stokes. We need to be clear right now more than we need to feel groovy. We need our anger right now and we need to acknowledge it, acknowledge its rightfulness, speak for it and act. Practice mindfulness in service to this clarity.
