We Don’t Leave a Sister Hanging

Recent revelations about the extent of sexual harassment in the workplace have been met by a powerful social media response of women willing to step forward and say #metoo. There is such bravery in this action. Thank you to all who have done so.

Insight meditation is not only calming and focusing the mind. It is also noticing with compassionate awareness the patterns of thought and emotion that pass through. For many women there are tight knots of troubling thoughts around things that have been said or done to us by men who mindlessly or purposely abused their power.

Our practice is to neither push away nor cling to whatever arises in our experience. When a troubling thought surfaces, we notice what sensations, emotions and thoughts arise with it. Perhaps the jaw clenches or the chest tightens or we get caught up in a long involved story full of shame and blame. Our practice is to sit with whatever is there: the pleasant, the unpleasant and the things we have chosen to forget. We do this practice with a quality of universal compassion, very different from feeling sorry for ourselves or seeing ourselves as isolated objects. We tap into the wholesome wellness of being that is our birthright, and we rest there, able to see things with greater clarity.

In class we didn’t share details of our #metoo stories but we acknowledged their existence, and the way this #metoo focus has caused us to look more closely, to see if there was anything we dismissed that is still a painful knot within us. What is hidden, even forgotten, pushed down into the recesses becomes an abscess that leaches out, poisoning our lives. Openly investigating in a gentle way allows us to see the root cause of our own unhappiness.

Sometimes people are afraid to meditate because they sense that there will be painful inner discoveries. I have learned over the years that when we give ourselves the natural gift of quiet alone time on a regular basis, the body-mind self-regulates. A universal inner wisdom available to all arises and offers insights at just the right moment for us to receive, understand and benefit from them. Nothing is forced. Nothing ever arises that is too hard for us to bear in that moment. Only when we are ready to receive it will a discovery come. And it will always be for our well being.

Not surprisingly, when delving into this particular area of exploration, anger often arises: Anger at the perpetrator and anger at ourselves for perhaps not having the wherewithal in that moment to say or do something different than what we did. (This is our way of giving ourselves some control over the situation in retrospect, but it usually just transfers blame and isn’t particularly helpful.) So we sit with the anger. Anger is not wrong. It’s just what’s arising. We make more room in our field of spacious compassionate awareness for the anger to be present.

What happened to us is not who we are, but it does contribute to how we relate to all that arises in our experience. So it’s worth recognizing. We hold it in an open compassionate embrace. We send metta to ourselves. We open to receive this infinite lovingkindness and really feel it. Deeply. Only after we have truly felt it in ourselves, we send metta to the perpetrator. This is not condoning their behavior or even forgiving them necessarily. Metta heals all beings with its loving light. And we want those who are doing these things to be healed so that they will do them no more. Right? Nobody’s off the hook here. We all take responsibility for our actions.

You might ask, with so much else going on in the world, why are we doing this now?When a rise in social consciousness brings about a willingness by even the most vulnerable to share, even if only with two little words preceded by a hash tag, we don’t leave a sister hanging. Once she has bared her soul, both for the benefit of her own well being and generously for the benefit of all, we step up to stand with her.

While the focus has been on sexual harassment in the workplace, this is just one facet of a much larger and even more insidious world of abuse of power perpetrated by mostly men toward mostly women, but also toward children, which is often just too awful for us to contemplate. So we may turn a blind eye just when someone really needs us to see what is happening to them, hoping we’ll read the cues so they don’t have to speak the unspeakable, or break the trust of the totally untrustworthy. So as important as it is for each of us to compassionately soften, loosen and untangle the tight knots in our own minds, and express the truth of our own experience, we also need to acknowledge and stand with and for those who suffer, who feel beyond words, maybe even beyond hope.

It is way beyond time for the perpetrators to do some soul searching and self-examination, to see this abuse as a weakness and a deficiency that needs to be tended, rather than some harmless indulgence or proof of their manhood. Quite the opposite, in fact! Real men are mindful of the impact their actions make on all beings. Real men live with strong intention to live ethically and do no harm. Real men can be relied on to protect and defend against abuses of power by others, and not stand idly by. Complacency is complicity.

This #metoo is like those tests of trust where a person is encouraged to fall backward into the arms of people they may not even know. Are your arms strong and open to support these women who have spoken out? Even if you’ve put all thoughts of what happened to you away in a dark corner of your brain, even if you feel it didn’t affect you because you are tough and not a victim, this is the moment to receive your sister into your arms and know that you stand with her. If not for yourself, then for your children, your nieces and nephews, the well being of our whole society. Now is the time.