This year, our mindfulness group at Quest for Balance Wellness will continue to meet on Sundays, but we have moved the group to 2pm, and there will be a regular rotation of mindfulness programming each month.
This coming Sunday (February 2nd, at 2pm), Jai Miranda will lead the Mindful Living series, which will focus in February on Lovingkindness.
Last Sunday, I led our mindfulness meditation group through a guided meditation and discussion about our hopes for the future. This practice was based on a recent episode of Hidden Brain (When It’s All Too Much), which featured an interview with Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray.
I had a chance to listen to that conversation with Dr. Ray recently, and it resonated very deeply with me. Dr. Ray’s focus was on the paralyzing anxiety that can come in the face of the challenges of climate change, and how hard it can be to stay active and motivated when it feels like you cannot make a real difference in the world.
And, I think many of us can recognize this feeling in our lives, whether it is about the climate, or the fraying of our social connections, the state of the world. Or about the kinds of deep, life-changing challenges that show up in our lives.
In the end, who hasn’t felt at some point that it is all too much for one person to make a real and meaningful difference?
Dr. Ray offers a very useful perspective on this challenge, and I think that the lessons she shares will be useful to us all.
One part of the interview that stuck with me was when Dr. Ray paraphrased the quote below, by environmentalist, Bill McKibben, who reminds us of how important it is not to think of ourselves as working alone to solve the big problems:
“… Something people often ask me is what’s the most important thing I can do as an individual? The most important thing you can do as an individual is be a little bit less of an individual and join together with others in the movements that we’ve built to allow for rapid change.”
Bill McKibben
And, I would offer that this is just as important when we are dealing with challenges in our own life – that it is so often more helpful to work together with other people.
Dr. Ray also shared this image below, the metaphor centered on the strength of a choir:
“I use the metaphor of the choir, right? When you’re in a choir, and you’re lots of people singing, and you need to catch your breath, or maybe you have a little frog in your throat or something, you can take a moment out and kind of settle your body again, get your voice back, knowing that the rest of the choir is carrying that song. Whereas if you feel like you’re the only one singing, there’s no space for that, right? And so you just keep singing, and you just sing through the suffering of it. And this need for kind of recovering and recuperating and making sure you’re resourced so that you can keep getting up in the morning and doing the work you’re trying to do, much less go to class and do your homework and have a thriving life, is something that I think a lot of people are starting to come around to. But I would also say that there’s something else to it as well, which is that if they don’t actually live the life that they’re trying to preserve, then they’ve already kind of lost the battle.”
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray
So, I hope whatever challenges you might be dealing with in your life, that you might find in your life, that you might find some way to join in with a choir, to lend your voice instead of becoming quiet. To lend your strength and be supported in turn.
For a class this week, my students and I were re-reading Stephen Mitchell’s version of the epic Gilgamesh. Each time I come back to this text, I am always drawn to a quote from when Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight Humbaba, and work to encourage and support one another to persist in the face of disaster:
Two boats lashed together will never sink. A three-ply rope is not easily broken.