How can we meditate in a world on fire? | Sister True Dedication | #shorts #mindfulness #meditation

So, sometimes we're asked, "How can we

possibly justify the practice of sitting

in meditation when the world's on fire,

when there is so much violence, injustice,

and suffering in the world? How is

meditation in any way an appropriate

response?" And sometimes there's even the

sense of, "Is it spiritual

bypassing? Are you just running, running

away from the problem?" So, in our

tradition, we have some quite deep

responses to this. The first is what our

teacher used to say, which is: "Each one of

us not only has the right to sit in

meditation, but we must reclaim

that right." And for him, it was to say

that we have the right to stop, to look

deeply, and to listen deeply, and to take

care of the pain of the world as it

expresses itself in our

body. And this is the insight of interbeing,

right there: the pain in our body,

the tension in our body, the suffering,

the anguish in our heart is not separate

from the suffering and anguish of the

world. There is a profound

interbeing between the two. So we have

the right to show up, to slow down, to

stop, to look deeply, and to actively take

care with our compassion and mindfulness

of the ground of our being in

our body and

mind. And then he went further, and he

said, "Not only do you have the right to

sit in meditation, you have the

responsibility to sit in

meditation. Your sitting in meditation is

already a contribution to the situation."

Now, that might sound, might sound really

strange. How can it possibly be that

little old me, little young me, whoever we

are, wherever we are, sitting in

meditation, how can that possibly help?

But in our understanding of action and

energy, we say that there are three kinds

of energy. There's the energy of our

bodily action, the energy of our speech,

but also the energy of our

thinking, our mental, emotional

landscape. That is an energy we are

bringing to everything we're doing in

the world. And the way in which our

meditation is a field of action is that

it is literally the ground of our being,

being that is the ground of our doing. If

we don't have that 10, 20, 30 minutes a

day where we touch deeply again into the

magic and mystery of life,

into that realm where we can have deep

compassion for great suffering, where we

can transcend our hatred and blaming, and

really touch

non-discrimination, when we can lean into

that and dip into that as part of the

landscape of who we are as people, that

quality of

being is already action and will

determine the quality of our doing and

engagement. And we may be able to devote

however many hours of the day it is to

our service, to our activism, to whatever

we have chosen as the field of our

contribution to help make our world a

better place. But those minutes of

meditation

become, yeah, like a sacred ground of

being for that doing.