“Appropriate Action, Appropriate Stillness” with Benjamin this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

This Sunday, Benjamin will lead a practice and discussion of “Appropriate Action, Appropriate Stillness,” drawn from the section of that name in Chapter 16 of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield:

In the natural world we find the teaching of doing and nondoing. Trees bear fruit and fall dormant; otters, bears, and spotted trout sleep and wake; day alternates with night, and summer with winter. Often we feel that we must be making a continual effort to enact our bodhisattva intentions, or else we are failures or lazy. But the wider community of being tells us that without the winter-chill months of dormancy, there can be no apples. Stillness, nondoing, listening are as important and essential as action in the mandala of awakened life.

Thomas Merton cautions us:

"To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times."

Sometimes it is necessary to march, sometimes it is necessary to sit, to pray. Each in turn can bring the heart and the world back to balance. For us to act wisely, our compassion must be balanced with equanimity, the ability to let things be as they are. Just as our passionate heart can be touched by the sorrows of the world, so too we must remember that it is not our responsibility to fix all the brokenness of the world—only to fix what we can. Otherwise we become grandiose, as if we were put here to be the savior of the humanity around us.

Compassion and equanimity come into harmony when we live in the reality of the present. It is very simple. Mindfulness and compassion are genuinely undertaken one step at a time, one person, one moment. Otherwise we become overwhelmed by all the problems that must be attended to: the dilemmas of our extended family and community, the injustice and suffering worldwide.

Compassion is most real in the particulars, in our response to the immediacy of this moment. Even in global situations it is this way. It is in the particulars that the mercy of the heart is extended. Whether it is our ailing next-door neighbor or the one-step-at-a-time building of a worldwide campaign to ban land mines or halt the destruction of rain forests, each day, each step is like breathing, a practice of expanding the heart. In these small steps our truth can blossom...

All are welcome to join this exploration on Sunday! Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight