Training in Wise Action

When my son was six years-old he got in trouble at school for stabbing a little girl with a pencil.  True story.

And yes, the pencil wasn’t yet sharpened. And yes, the little girl had in fact kicked him in the shin first. But nonetheless, there we are, my son: the pencil stabber.

Let’s bring in some irony too.

Within a month of this pencil event, a new poster (pictured below) went up at my son’s public school on the gymnasium door.

How about my daughter?

Well, she’s two going on twenty, and has already spent more time in our Time-Out Corner than my son has in his whole life.  She’s the one who will look directly at you, smile a devilish grin, and then proceed to scribble magic marker all over the wall.

These types of parenting stories are the day-to-day grist for the mill for practicing Wise Action.

To me, Wise Action, or Right Action in the Buddhist tradition, is the rubber-meets-the-road work of spiritual practice.

It is the part of our spiritual life when all those lofty values and aspirations are put to the test.

I’ve heard Buddhist teacher and author (and New Yorker) Sharon Salzberg tell a story in some of her Dharmaseed talks (that are available for download on the internet) that she once had a participant at one of her LovingKindness Retreat’s say to her: “I have no problem saying ‘May all beings be happy.’ As long as I am doing it sitting alone in my living room.”

The story is of course funny because we all know in our heart of hearts that training in Wise Action can be hard.  Not with everybody, all of the time.  But definitely with some people, some of the time it can be really hard.

Let’s take our families.

I’ve heard Jack Kornfield, another well-known Buddhist teacher, author and trained psychologist to boot, say in jest:

            When Buddha and Jesus went home, they had trouble with their family too.

I love this statement for several reasons.

One, it’s just funny!  And in our Wise Action training, a sense of humor is an absolute must.

Two, it’s so validating.  Training in Wise Action requires a radical acceptance of the inevitable truth that the purpose and goal of meditation, mindfulness, the spiritual life, what have you, is not perfection.  Jack Kornfield says:

            It is not about perfecting ourselves; it is about perfecting our love.

Which brings me to number three: this statement reminds me that practice in Wise Action will be, and I believe is designed to be, humbling.  I think the areas where we struggle to act from a place of wisdom are the colostrum of our spiritual lives.  It is why emotions like guilt and shame and rage are hard-wired into our brains.  It is just our job to use these tricky-dicky emotions for good (i.e. learning opportunities) instead of evil (i.e. self-denigration).

I have written recently about various family health crises I’ve been helping with as of late, and this intense time that has been latent with all of the fear that accompanies death and dying, has presented me with multiple opportunities to train in Wise Action.

Notice the word “train.”

I like this word, because to me it implies effort, difficulty, & imperfection; 3 ideas that often get excluded from the spiritual life of unicorns and rainbows.

Over the years I have collected a manila folder of favorite quotations that I keep, and periodically read through to remind me that Wise Action is a process by nature. 

Misstep yields correction.  Or, in other words, “we are built to make mistakes, coded for error,” according to Dr. Lewis Thomas, the famous Biology Researcher, Essayist and Harvard Medical School Alumna. And evolution would not have it any other way. 

Here are just a few that I’ve gathered:

Practice encourages us into a conscious experiment to watch without judgment, to allow the natural evolution of the process unfold. Like in the expression ‘two steps forward, one step backward,’ we notice, we watch without judgment, and we continue to realign to our commitment.  We can continue moving forward, strengthened and informed by our ‘backward’ steps.”

–Aruni Nan Futuronsky, Senior teacher at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health and author of Already Home

It starts with catching ourselves when we spin off in the same old ways. Usually we feel that there’s a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks.

            -Pema Chodron, Buddhist teacher and nun, Author of When Things Fall Apart

            You do not have to be good.

            You do not have to walk on

            your knees for a hundred

miles through the desert,

repenting. You only have to let

the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

-Mary Oliver, poet

Every moment of mindfulness renounces the reflexive, self-protecting response of the mind in favor of clear and balanced understanding.

-Sylvia Boorstein, Buddhist teacher, author, psychotherapist

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt, 20^th Century American President

I did then what I knew how to do.  Now that I know better, I do better.

-Dr. Maya Angelou, Writer, Poet, Activist, Performer

I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. When I think about calm people, I think about people who can bring perspective to complicated situations and feel their feelings without reacting to heightened emotions like fear and anger.

-Dr. Brene Brown, Social Science Researcher, Author of The Gifts of Imperfection.

I think we need these wise words to be present in our lives when we feel discouraged about our most recent “spin off” as Pema Chodron describes it.  When we fall into old habits that are no longer in line (or maybe were never in line) with our core values it can be demoralizing, and for some of us there can be an urge to give up the practice.

So we need role models and mentors to remind us of what we already know: training in wise action is a practice that is in-exhaustible.  There is no end point, and therefore requires resilience.

Resilience is a quality that seems to be rather hard-wired into some (like the child athlete who picks up a basketball and then becomes the Michael Jordan), but for most of us lay-people is more like a muscle that we just need to exercise every day in order to keep up our normal, everyday strength.

Brian Grazer, the famous Hollywood producer, has spoken about resilience in the context of his successful career in filmmaking.

In his book A Curious Mind he illustrates this point by telling the story behind the making of his 2^nd movie Splash.  He said the movie took over 7 years to produce and that was after being told “no” by nearly one thousand people about making the movie in the first place.

He says:

I know just how often people get told ‘no’ to their brilliant ideas – not just most of the time, but 90 percent of the time…Instead of spelling out the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills, they could have spelled out: N-O-N-O-NO-N-O!

So here’s my take away: in order to train in Wise Action, I will need to also train in resilience, humility, effort, tolerating imperfection, and above all humor. 

I mean, if we can’t laugh about our son stabbing a little girl with a pencil, what can we laugh about, right?!

Well, okay, maybe we shouldn’t laugh, but instead find the wisdom of the teachable moment.  Like the new poster on the door of my son’s school gymnasium reminds us, and is reminiscent of these words by the Buddha in the Dhammapada:

            The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into habit;

And habit hardens into character;

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings…

As the shadow follows the body,

As we think, so we become.

How do you train in Wise Action?