Dear Thay,
dear beloved community,
it's so wonderful to be here with you.
I had many things going on,
and Sister Chan Khong said you must come,
so here I am.
I came.
I always listen to sister Chan Khong.
My name is Cheri Maples.
I was a police officer seven years into my career
when I ended up, you can decide,
by accident or coincidence
or a series of causes and conditions that came together,
at my first retreat with Thay.
Before, I have noticed with many police officers
three things start to happen over the course of their career,
and that had already happened to me.
The effects of a career, there are three of them.
Physiologically,
what happens --
many of you might be able to relate to this
if you live very busy lives --
Research has shown that we all have a certain amount of adrenaline,
and this is the normal range of adrenaline.
People that know how to be rather than do
probably are here and here.
What happens with police officers,
and you can probably relate to this with multitasking and doing too,
is the adrenaline starts to shoot up because of hyper vigilance
and being worried about your own safety and the safety of everybody else.
You're always taught about what can go wrong.
Not so much about what can go right,
which is the majority of the time, but what can go wrong.
There's a lot of hyper vigilance.
So the adrenaline shoots out of the normal area
and looks like a peak like that,
and it takes twenty-four hours
for it to come back into the normal range,
but what happens is people go back to work
before that twenty-four hours is up.
So their lives start to look like this,
if I had to just show it visually.
Up here, people are, you know, making command decisions,
on their feet, they have a sense of humor,
the adrenaline has kicked in.
And then down here,
where they start to spend their lives at home,
this looks a lot like no energy,
listlessness, depression,
a lot of the symbolic stuff that happens down here
mimics depression really well.
And as sister Chan Khong said,
there are four times as many police officers, in the US anyway,
that take their own lives,
as compared to the number that are killed in the line of duty.
This is a very real phenomenon.
Physiologically,
there are many effects
that are very difficult.
That's the first area,
and emotionally what begins to happen
is the effects manifest as irritation and impatience
and anger and depression.
There's a lot of cynicism
because if you were all a group of police officers,
and I did a word association test, and if I asked you,
"What's the first word that comes to your mind
when you hear the word Boy Scout leader?"
I guarantee you they would all scream out in one, with one set word: pedophile.
Because those are the Boy Scout leaders that they deal with.
So there's a very cynical sort of response that develops,
and spiritually the effects, I think, of doing that job
manifest as an armoring and a numbing of the heart.
It's very hard to be compassionate when those things are going on.
The other thing that happens
is you develop, what I call, "I used to" syndrome.
I used to know how to water the seeds of joy.
I used to bike. I used to play sports.
I used to garden. I used to write poetry.
I used to have hobbies.
All those things are gone,
and your world becomes smaller and smaller,
because of shift work and odd hours
and thinking that people don't understand,
you end up socializing and being only with other police officers.
So all those things get reinforced.
That's how I showed up at my very first retreat
with Thay in 1991.
I had a work injury,
and I was going to see a chiropractor,
and this chiropractor was very close to where I reported for work.
She had a book of Thay in the waiting room,
it was called Being Peace.
I picked it up, and I was leafing through it,
and I went, "Hmmm,
this is very interesting."
Then I was ordered off work for a little while,
and I saw a flyer on her bulletin board
for a retreat that Thich Nhat Hahn was doing
in Munda Line, Illinois, in 1991,
so I thought, well, I will give it a try.
I came very armored and defended.
I was really ready for people to hate me
because I was a police officer.
That happens a lot, even among people whose progressive politics they share.
They'd see the uniformity and immediately make a decision about who I was.
That's the the attitude I came there with, and what happened?
I have to show it.
This is very interesting what happened.
If you imagine ...
We did.
Then, the retreats were pretty quiet.
We did -- Thay taught just about everything:
we did sitting meditation, and we did eating meditation,
we did walking meditation.
There weren't nearly as many monastics then as there are now.
Sister Chan Khong was there.
So many of the monastics have had such a huge impact on my life.
What do you see there? Anybody?
A red dot.
Well, that's where I was living and --
I think what meditation and mindfulness is about
is it helps you see the white space, right?
All this spaciousness,
all this spaciousness that's available, and we go right to the red dot.
Here we are with all this spaciousness available to us,
and we hang on so tight to our little red dots:
our thoughts and our emotions.
Out here love is available, happiness is available.
No coming, no going is available, emptiness is available
the spaciousness of being in everything and nothing at one time.
That's how, even after that first retreat,
I started to understand some of that intuitively.
I hadn't read a lot.
All I wanted to do was practice.
I began to think of meditation
as just resting my mind
with this open awareness,
and at that retreat I touched peace in a really fabulous way.
Many strange things happened after that retreat.
I came back,
and I was working nights as a sergeant then,
and I was going on calls,
and I couldn't understand why everybody around me had changed.
They'd seem to have gotten kinder in my absence.
Even people I was arresting.
(Laughing)
It didn't make any sense to me.
I didn't know somebody had gone around
and sprayed Prozac or some other anti depressant while I was gone,
but it took me a little while to get
that it was my energy was different,
and people were responding to it.
That was an incredible teaching for me
because there it was, the proof in the pudding.
At that retreat also what happened,
as sister Chan Khong referred to it,
is this whole thing about the five mindfulness trainings came up,
and of course the first one is reverence for life,
and I said, "I can't take these, I carry a gun for a living,
and I never know what's going to happen."
And to this day, I can't remember if it was Thay or sister Chan Khong,
one of them said to me,
"Who else would we want to carry a gun except somebody who will do it mindfully?"
(Laughing)
Oh! A whole new way to look at things.
What happened for me was such a transition
where it took a while, the changes were incremental,
but I stopped doing my job in a mechanical way.
And what I started to see
is what was right in front of me
that I seem to have missed with the other attitude:
a suffering human being who needed my help
and often didn't have any place else to turn to.
So I started taking my time on the calls I went on,
I started trying to connect with people from a different space,
and I had these experiences early on.
One of my favorites that I like to tell
is the experience of going on a domestic violence call.
We had a mandatory arrest policy in those days,
so if anybody was threatening somebody,
in a physical way, in any way whatsoever,
you were supposed to arrest them.
That was a mandatory arrest.
So I went on this call, and I didn't have any backup,
and a woman came running out and said,
"My husband has my child and I'm really scared.
We just broke up, and he won't let her out
to come be with me, I'm picking her up.
We have an agreement about who is supposed to have the child when,
and now it's my turn.
So, I asked her to go wait in the car down the block,
and I went and I knocked on the door,
and there is -- I'm about five-three --
and this six-three, six-four inch man,
who looked very angry, opened the door,
and I could just see the suffering.
It was just so obvious to me.
In a very calm voice I said,
"May I come in? I'm just here to listen and to help."
I came in, and I saw his daughter over there,
and I said, "You know what, I see your little girl over here,
and I know you love her, and I know how much you care about her,
and I see that she's scared,
and I know you don't want that to happen.
So how about if we let her go out and be with her mother,
and you and I talk."
And he did.
So rather than escalating this situation
to the point where an arrest had to be made,
it was just a matter of being compassionate and mindful.
So I violated every policy in the book,
and with my gun belt and my bulletproof vest
I sat down next to this guy, what you're never supposed to do,
on the couch and he started crying in my arms.
That was an incredible experience for me
in terms of what a little kindness and compassion can do,
and that there are alternative ways to respond to people.
Of course when you're angry, irritated and cynical yourself,
it's really hard to see those possibilities.
I ran into this man three days later.
I was walking down the street that I lived in
and he came up behind me,
and, you know, it's not good to come up behind a police officer.
(Laughing)
He picked me up off the ground and he said:
"You! You! You saved my life that night."
He picked me right up.
It was a wonderful experience.
So I served two of the teachings of Thay
and the Order of Interbeing in our community,
our international community,
that I think are so important is we focus --
There's such an emphasis, not only on happiness in the present moment
and having a foundational mindfulness practice,
but building community and engaged practice.
Those two things you don't find in too many other --
the emphasis on that -- in too many other Buddhist traditions.
I've heard teachings from a lot of different traditions now,
and those two things are just so special.
And I started thinking of a sangha, community.
I joined a sangha right after that retreat,
but I started thinking of community as wherever I was.
I started thinking of my workplace as a sangha;
I started thinking of my family as a sangha.
When I did direct-action-things in the community,
I started thinking of all of us as a sangha.
So I think community is such a big piece of this.
In 2002 I came to Plum Village,
so eleven years has passed now, and I've been practicing,
and practice is getting deeper and deeper, and going on retreats,
and I became a member of the the Order of Interbeing.
Thay transmitted the 14 mindfulness trainings
to myself and 32 other people,
and I was here for the three-month retreat
and had such an incredibly grounding time.
In those days you wrote a letter to Thay,
I think you still write a letter if you you want to be ordained,
and I didn't think that he read these,
so I just put it in the bell.
My letter was really about ...
I was still struggling
with feeling like both the victim and oppressor in this job
and bouncing back and forth between those.
The next day there was a Dharma talk,
I can't remember which hall it was in,
but Thay gave a Dharma talk on the different faces of love.
I was sitting in the back,
and he mentioned police officers,
and I was sitting in the back,
and I just had tears streaming down my face.
Another big transition took place,
more softness, more understanding of Thay's teaching
about "we're all victims and oppressors."
One of the things that happened in the ripple effects of this --
I don't even know who it was,
and she will never know the ripple effects of that.
If you're here, please come tell me --
We were doing working meditation and chopping vegetables,
and I said, "I have this very, very, ridiculous image in my head
of police officers holding hands and doing walking meditation together,
creating peaceful steps on the earth,"
and she looked at me and she said,
"Cheri, you can make that happen.
You can make that happen."
Thursday there was a question and answer session,
and I got up and I asked Thay
if he would come do a retreat for police officers.
I'm very worried about what the response will be,
and much to my happiness it's the opposite of that.
He looked up and he said, "Yes, I think we do it next year."
Which meant there was a year to organize things
and try to get police officers to come to a mindfulness retreat
with a Buddhist teacher.
There were many things that happened during the course of that year,
but one of the --
I don't even have time to go into them, they were quite ...
It was very, very hard.
There was a big reaction.
All over I started getting hate e-mails
in terms of: I'm Christian, and I want to offer a stress reduction retreat.
The separation of church and state,
even though it was going to be a nonsectarian retreat, came up,
and it was very challenging.
But I had wonderful people in my own Sangha
and had contacted people among the monastics.
That helped a lot.
So Thay came and we made this happen,
and there were, I don't remember how many people.
There were about 16 officers from my own police department
that were there,
and after Thay's first Dharma talk,
which was "Violence Begets Violence",
and talking about how, you know,
if you put out violence, you are going to get violence pretty soon.
And the police officers, after that first talk,
surrounded me and they were like,
"Cheri, what are we supposed to do?
What do you mean: you can't fight violence with violence?
What does he mean by that? What are we supposed to do?
We want to talk to him."
(Laughter)
And I said, "Well,
I've never had a personal talk myself with Thich Nhat Hahn,
but I will see what I can do."
So, another long story short,
Thay came and talked to just the police officers,
and by the end of that hour that he spent with them,
the whole room went ...
It was just so beautiful,
and after that there was never another problem
or objection that entire week.
One of the things that so affected me at the end of that retreat
is Thay said: "Are we going to hear from the police officers?"
The Thursday night before the retreat ended,
the police officers gave a presentation,
and I have never heard police officers share like that.
Share what life is like for them as a police officer,
and never before have I
seen a community be so receptive
to what they had to say.
That was so --
I could just see them lighting up,
and it was just so meaningful
that there were people who were willing to be receptive to this.
At the end of that retreat,
the sixteen officers from my department and I
held hands and did walking meditation.
So you never know what the ripple effects of anything can be.
Then all kinds of things happened
once I got back to Madison out on the street.
So, one of the things that happened
-- this is a story that I just love --
is one of the people who was at the retreat came up to me and said,
"Cheri, I just saw two of your officers,
two of your young officers who were at the retreat,
and they were arresting somebody,
and they recognized me.
They arrested the person, and they put them in the back of the car,
and they turned to me and they bowed.
(Laughter)
I said: "Well, when we bow to the person that we're arresting
as well as to the community that we're doing it for,
we will really have arrived.
So, there were miracles that happened.
And then, in 2007, I went to Vietnam.
Probably many of you were there also, a big group of Westerners and --
with Thay and the monastic community and that had a big impact on me.
Toward the end of that,
sister Chan Khong delivered the message to me
that Thay wanted to make me a dharma teacher,
transmit the lamp to me.
And it was OK.
So in 2008, that transmission of the lamp happened,
and this is the gatha, my gatha for Thay that I'd like to share with you.
You know, we always,
Thay and the person always exchange gatha's.
Breathing in,
I know that mindfulness is the path to peace
Breathing out,
I know that peace is the path to mindfulness
Breathing in,
I know that peace is the path to justice
Breathing out,
I know that justice is the path to peace
Breathing in,
I know my duty is to provide safety and protection to all beings
Breathing out,
I am humbled and honored by my duty as a Peace Officer
Breathing in,
I choose mindfulness as my armor and compassion as my weapon
Breathing out,
I aspire to bring love and understanding to all I serve
So that was really wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you as the sangha that holds up all of us.
There are three interrelated areas
that I found my own personal work happening in
over the course of the years
that the practice got deeper and deeper for me,
and that was my own inner work,
my own meditation and mindfulness practice,
which is of course the foundation for everything.
The second area was relationships,
and the third area was engaged practice.
There is an African-American man in the United States
by the name of Cornell West,
who said the epitome
of how I think we should view police scene, and he said:
"Justice is what love looks like in public."
Justice is what love looks like in public.
How different would our system look,
if we adopted this definition of justice
as the foundation for our whole system?
It would just be incredible.
One of the things that the Buddha was so good at
is providing the architecture for our distress
and also providing the architecture for our liberation.
And Thay was so wonderful
at conveying the Buddhist teachings
in such a simple way that could be understood.
One of the things that happened for me
can probably be described --
how Thay describes it is the psychology of mindfulness.
In the psychology of mindfulness
there are two things that were asked to be.
One is a good curator of the museum of our past,
and the other is a good gardener of our store consciousness.
So if we're a good curator of the museum of our past,
it means that we can reframe our past,
we can understand it in the service of our own freedom.
Now, if we carry it too far, and we don't balance it with the other,
we get attached to the wound itself,
because then we're constantly just taking tickets,
bus tickets back to our past,
and we get attached to the wound itself.
Over here, we're learning how to be a good gardener.
We're learning what to incline our mind toward.
We're learning what we can incline our mind toward, our hearts toward,
and water the seeds of joy and kindness and understanding
and compassion.
But in order to be able to do this,
we have to understand
how our experience is born moment to moment.
So if we can start to recognise, start to watch what arises
and notice how our experience is born moment to moment,
if we can do that, we can also make conscious decisions
about how to incline the heart and mind.
And that is probably the most powerful thing
that has happened to me over the years of this practice.
I can't tell you how many people come up to me and say:
"Cheri, you've gotten so much softer."
And I guess it's true!
You know, those protective layerings of armor removed one at a time.
You learned about craving and aversion
and how to work with with both of them.
And one of the ways that I noticed about myself,
a very subtle form of craving that I really wanted to heal,
was this craving to be calm.
This craving to be calm
with all of the achievements that go along with it and blah blah --
All the doing that goes along with it;
all the identity that gets created.
So you build up this identity,
just to learn that you have to strip it down,
because so much of this practice
is about dissolution of the the ego.
Unfortunately in our society
success often gets equated with doing.
One of the things that I love
about what Thay has helped me understand
is that the quality of your doing
will always be dependent on the quality of your being.
In order to really make that manifest,
it requires a certain discipline
in that you cannot let the things that matter the most
be at the mercy of the things that matter the least.
So often we think: if I just going to get this done,
I'll just get this done and just get this done,
and then I'll focus on my practice.
Then we become habitual waiters.
We become habitual waiters.
We become addicted to doing,
and we have so many exhausted people running around that are addicted to doing.
As a result, in my culture anyway,
we have a lot of people who are tired and wired.
Which leads to a lot of contentious behavior.
Understanding is so key to this practice.
I want to tell you a little story
that when I think back on it makes me smile so much.
It was my first week of being a police officer,
a rookie police officer on the street.
We had just come off
all of our experiences with our field training officers,
and we're now riding alone.
One of the first things that happened to me
is the lieutenant of my shift --
I mean, we have these briefing sessions before every shift starts -- said to me,
"Maples, there's a homeless guy
down there in the basement,
where our squad cars are and where our evidence room is,
I want you to go down there and get him out of there
and skip briefing to do it."
And I say, "OK,"
and I go down there, and I make contact with this man,
who proceeds to tell me he doesn't have to go anywhere
because he's the president of the United States.
Rather than understanding him and trying to put myself in his position,
I'm arguing with him that he's not the president of the United States,
and I'm getting more and more nervous
because I know all these veteran police officers
are going to be coming down the stairs,
and that I'm failing at my very first assignment, right?
And so, this is not going well ...
Finally, one of the veteran officers walks down.
He says, "Hey, rookie, let me show you how it's done."
He goes and he gets a key
to the squad closest to where this homeless man is standing,
he opens the back door,
and he says, "Mister President, your limo awaits you."
(Laughter)
And the guy gets right in and off they go.
So that also taught me something about working for social change.
One of the things that I think is really important
is that we have to learn the difference
between self-esteem and self-compassion,
because until we learn how to bring true self-compassion to ourselves,
the practice doesn't really work well with other people.
And when I say self esteem, I mean,
we used to have a lot of -- we still do --
new age spirituality stuff in our bookstores
that's all about self-improvement, right?
You can make a full time job out of self-improvement,
which leads to high self-esteem,
and I guess that's better than low self-esteem.
But the problem with high self-esteem is you're still comparing yourself
to other people,
and in fact sometimes you're competing with them
and secretly hoping they do worse than you do.
It's not a very good way to live a spiritual life.
With self-compassion we're learning how to not just bring empathy to ourselves
but goodwill to ourselves, in a phenomenal way.
One of the things that I've noticed
is when I'm able to do that with the tools in the practice
that the volume of 'me' goes way down.
And I'm happiest when the volume of me is lowest.
When the volume of me goes up, I start getting ready,
and all those habit seeds are ready to spring into action.
I wish I had more time, but I know you've been sitting here for a while,
and I think I want to go directly to --
I do want to read a quote by Thomas Merton,
and then I want to tell you about the five things
that I think need to happen in the policing profession.
OK?
Thomas Merton said this,
and this is to me such a --
the epitome of Thay's teachings:
"To allow ourselves to be carried away
by a multitude of conflicting concerns;
to surrender to too many demands;
to commit oneself to too many projects;
to want to help everyone and everything
is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace;
it destroys our own inner capacity for peace;
it destroys the fruitfulness of our own work
because it kills the root of inner wisdom,
which makes work fruitful."
One of the things I want to say,
and I've done a lot of engaged work.
We have prison projects in Wisconsin now,
that went from being in one prison to being in the entire system,
and I'm now happy to say that we are about to be able
to start teaching mindfulness to the guards.
We've been doing segregation,
and people have noticed that culture's changing.
And with all the scientific research that's out there on mindfulness now,
they are now asking us to bring it, not just to the correctional officers,
but to probation and parole agents as well.
That is huge.
And I'll tell you about a couple of other little projects,
but I want to say,
that it's so important to keep our --
that's why we have sixty days of mindfulness
as members of the Order of Interbeing --
it's so important to keep the energy of our practice alive,
and I've heard this term that they use now,
called compassion fatigue.
Any of you heard of that term, compassion fatigue, burnout?
To me, burnout is a sign that we're violating our own nature in some way.
It's usually regarded as a result of trying to give too much,
but I think it could result from trying to give what we don't have,
and this is the ultimate in giving too little.
I think that's where compassion fatigue comes from.
So when the gift that we give
is an intregral and valued part of our own journey,
when it comes from the organic reality of inner work,
it's going to renew itself and be limitless in nature.
But that means we have to keep our practice very strong and very alive.
With respect to relationships, I just want to say,
to me relationships are the litmus test of spirituality.
If our practice doesn't show up in our relationships
then something is wrong.
This single, from a practice perspective probably the single most important thing,
and resource that I developed over time in my own practice,
especially as a cop who carried a gun on a daily basis,
is I started to experience
the incredible healing power of non-aggression.
What I learned to bring to any interaction
was the intention not to cause more harm,
and that included those times when I had to use force,
but that intention was always there.
And one of the other things that Thay taught me that was so valuable,
is that compassion can be gentle and compassion can be fierce.
Wisdom is knowing when to employ the gentle compassion of understanding
or the fierce compassion of good boundaries.
That is very important.
And I think how we talk and relate to others
is probably the most important peace-work that we can engage in.
I remember at work when I was captain of personnel and training,
and one of the great things,
as I was then in charge of training the whole department,
and so I could get some really good things done.
But, I remember sitting at my computer,
working on this Academy, curriculum for the Academy,
when one of my young officers came in and said,
"Captain, can I please talk to you?"
And internally I went, "Argh!",
because I didn't want to interrupt what was happening,
I had to get this done.
That was such a lesson to me.
I immediately recognized what was happening,
and made a commitment
that I was going to switch the foreground and the background.
That relationships were going to be more important to me than tasks.
That meant managing a to-do list.
And it meant some people would be upset,
it meant that I didn't get as many things done as I did before,
but what could be more important
than giving my presence to another human being.
Because the ripple effects of that, you can never, never know.
Well, there were many other things,
but I'm going to --
I do want to talk to you ...
about the current criminal justice system
and what I think needs to change in it.
I can't speak
for what's going on in Europe
or Vietnam or Thailand
or other countries,
but I can speak from what's going on in the United States.
And that is that our current criminal justice system
is based on this very faulty premise.
That premise is that the punishment of the perpetrator
is going to heal the victim and rehabilitate the perpetrator.
What I found is that neither one of those things are true.
It seems to reflect a collective belief
that contributes to all kinds of interpersonal and systemic dysfunction,
because what this premise fails to recognize
is one of the basic premises of restorative justice.
And that is that it's not the wrong-doer's repentance
that creates forgiveness,
but it's the victim's forgiveness that creates repentance.
And I've seen this happen over and over and over again.
So what do we have to do
to change the criminal justice system?
Well, I've been focusing on five things.
One is we need to recognize
what working as a police officer does.
And if you take soldiers or people that are on the SWAT-teams,
or the ops-teams in policing,
the effects that I talked about are much more intense.
So we teach people how to keep themselves physically safe.
We teach them how to keep themselves physically safe and others physically safe
by using force and how to use force.
But we don't teach them how to keep themselves emotionally safe.
And that's where I receive such gift,
is with mindfulness from Thay.
It's so important that we begin
to provide criminal justice professionals
with the training that will help them identify
how their world works and how it can be undone,
especially in the emotional realm.
It's important that we not just do stress reduction.
The thing about mindfulness, and we know this from the trainees,
is it brings a whole ethical framework along with it
that's really important not to leave behind.
What I do, as somebody who is a police officer,
is I know how to translate that language
into language they understand.
Don't talk to them about Buddhism.
I know the language, I know the culture,
and all of you know this same thing wherever you are:
you know the language, you know the culture,
we have to figure out how to translate it.
So focusing on the emotional health
of criminal justice professionals is very important.
The second thing that is so important
is we need to take seriously
the conscious and unconscious biases
that police officers and other criminal justice professionals
are walking around with
that leads to racial profiling
and the incredible racial disparities throughout our system.
And these unconscious biases show up, not just in the obvious ways,
not in the worst possible ways of deadly force,
but they also show up in ways that --
with coworkers and people we interact with.
That builds resentments and fuels divisions
and threatens our own safety as well as the safety of others.
With respect to racial disparities, I think police officers can be trained
to slow down the decision making process.
I used to watch young officers stop a car,
and I would say to them,
"OK, I want you to talk me through
the reasons you made that stop and what was going on.
And now I want you to talk me through where your reasonable suspicion was
for having them get out of the car and search the car.
I want you to talk me through the thought process that happened."
There usually is an opportunity for me to really make a difference.
When we're dealing with racism and racial disparities,
there are decision making points in any organization
that can be identified, where race can be a factor.
And there are hundreds of them in the criminal justice profession.
But it's important, I think, that every single one of us
identifies those decision making points in our own organizations,
really sit down and think about them.
So, with respect to discrimination and oppression in our collective lives,
activists face many challenges.
For those of us who have experienced marginalization of some kind,
it's how do we free ourselves
from the adaptations that we've made to our oppression.
And for those areas
that we have unearthed the unearned assets of privileges,
how do we cut through
our sense of privilege in some areas of life
and our inferior status in others?
How do we get over our superiority, inferiority and equality complexes?
The third thing that I think has to happen
is coordinated community responses.
We have to start taking seriously
the proposition that public safety
really depends on the capacity of neighborhoods
and how to build the capacity of neighborhoods.
And in terms of engaged Buddhism,
we've come up with several different ways to do that,
and I hope I get a chance to do a Q&A session at some point
and then tell you about those.
And the fourth strategy is that we would put a lot more effort
into reducing environmental opportunities for crime.
So we would gather more data to notice what the patterns really are,
and we would be proactive rather than reactive,
so that we don't keep responding to the same thing over and over,
and rather than having officers tied to radio calls, go here, go there,
they would be more connected to neighborhoods and technology
and crime prevention resources.
So, police officers have to really begin to understand
that in order to be effective they can't rely on their authority,
that they have to rely on so much more,
and that they have to rely on a much larger coordinated community effort.
A fifth thing I want to address
is that we should all be very, very concerned
about the militarization of our police departments.
The police mission is very, very different.
The police mission is to serve and protect
our neighbors, our friends, our community residents.
And we don't do that by militarizing our departments
and turning people into enemies.
I think that's where communities really come into being,
because it's pressure of police departments to change
that makes all the difference in the world.
And on the other hand, it's very, very important
-- the last thing I would say --
is that police officers need your support,
they need your understanding.
I've seen what happens when they get it,
and they need to hear from you,
and they need to understand you.
So, the more situations that we can put police officers
and residents of communities in
where they just have the opportunity for dialogue.
I think that makes all the difference in the world.
And the other thing I want to say to all of you,
I don't know what cultures and organizations that you work in,
but one of the things that I got committed to,
as a result of my own engaged Buddhism,
is noticing the unwritten and unconscious agreements
that existed in the organization, in the culture of policing.
Those things aren't in the policy manual,
but the things we get socialized to in any community
can be identified.
And once you identify those
and you bring them into the conscious arena for discussion,
more ethical behaviors just start to happen.
Because people are examining and thinking about those behaviors.
And so often in our associational lives,
especially in the organizations and communities we're part of,
we tend to think of ourselves as effect rather than cause.
Somebody else, the leader is responsible for this,
somebody else did this.
We seem to believe that someone or something else
is the problem,
and that someone needs to do something better for things to change.
We forget that we're a member of this organization.
People come out of a meeting and say, "Oh, that was a terrible meeting."
And I say, "Were you there?"
It was a terrible meeting because we all made it a terrible meeting.
What could you have done to improve it?
So in authentic community membership,
we're always holding ourselves accountable
for the well being of the larger community.
We become more than just judging critics and consumers,
and we start to shift the belief that this world,
this organization, this meeting, this gathering,
is ours to construct together.
And that's what has to happen.
Any one of us
can make such an important difference in any given moment.
You can be the person
that makes the difference in a contentious interaction;
you can be the person that because of your practice
pauses and refrains
and holds that grounding;
and you can be the person
that rather than exacerbating pain and violence,
transforms that by the way you bear witness to it;
and you can be the person
who instead of telling people how it should be,
that you bring those unconscious and unskillful ways
into the conscious arena of question and dialogue;
and you can be the person who chooses not to gossip
or to recruit others to your viewpoint behind closed doors in an organisation.
So, let me just say in conclusion
that probably the most radical political act
that any of us will engage in
is how to learn live in more harmony
with everyone and everything.
To change the world or to love everybody
is too big an ambition for any single person,
but to respond to this moment
with engagement and compassion
is possible for each and every one of us.
And what Thich Nhat Hahn inspired in me
was a strong belief
that even something like carrying a gun for a living
can be an act of love,
if one is also armed
with mindfulness and a compassionate intention.
So, thank you for your presence, your practice and your attention.