Frida's Notebook

On empathy and imagination (with thanks to J K Rowling)

A little over a year ago I tried to put into words here some thoughts I had on empathy and imagination and what they had to do with activism for human rights and social justice. What I managed to say was:

"Ultimately, though, I believe that the strongest motivator for the defense of human rights is ... empathy. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be a Palestinian mother who watched her child die because the ambulance carrying him to the specialised hospital in the West Bank was not allowed to pass an Israeli checkpoint that I feel compelled to work towards securing the right to freedom of movement for her and for everyone else. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be an Algerian asylum seeker in New Zealand, labeled a security risk by the central intelligence agency but unable, even through my defense lawyer to see the basis on which I am accused of being such a risk, that I feel bound to do what I can to defend the right to a fair trial and a defense for him and for everyone else."

Today I watched the commencement speech that the amazing J K Rowling gave at Harvard University. I know it has been emailed and posted in various places, for good reason. It came to me from Blue Poppy, via Swirly. So I took a break from studying about how community psychologists should be committed to working with oppressed people to help achieve their goals for liberation and watched this video.

She puts it so well and I was not expecting it. Although I probably should have been expecting it, her Harry Potter books explore complex themes of marginalisation and social justice, including a fairly intense exploration of racism and xenophobia through the device of the "mud-bloods". But I wasn't. I under-estimated her and expected a speech about how important imagination is to the creative act. Which it is, of course. But she goes on to talk about how that creative act, the ability to imagine, lies at the heart of what makes us human. We, apparently unlike all other species, can imagine what it might be like in someone else's shoes and based on that creative act of imagining we can feel empathy. 

What I said in May last year was that I didn't believe that empathy was a "static quality that we are either born with or without. I think we can generate empathy, I believe we can cultivate the quality of empathy within ourselves."

I also had some ideas about how to generate empathy - they included a certain kind of travel and releasing ourselves to the transformative power of literature, art and film. I think those are still great tools for generating empathy. In fact my very next post was an exercise in using the creative power of poetry to cultivate the moments of powerful empathy that I experienced in day-to-day life in Afghanistan. But what I have been also learning, over and over again. Is the power of the simple practice of letting go, through seated meditation or whichever practice works for you, and revealing our natural warmth, compassion, imagination and empathy. 

Practicing compassion

Before I left Afghanistan I decided that the one of the key challenges of learning to live back in New Zealand would be learning how to make a positive difference to the balance of peace and compassion when it was no longer my paid job to do so.

Obviously, the first thing I have learned about this is something I learned 10 years ago - when I first started working full-time as a human rights advocate (in the Gaza Strip). What I learned there is that you can't rely on the "big" choices of your life, or on the "big" gestures, to be your compassionate practice in the world. You can't sit back and say "well, I decided to come and work as a human rights advocate in the Gaza Strip so I've made the right choice and I can relax and expect my impact to the positive".

What I learned was that it is the small choices, the daily moments in which we chose to feed the peaceful wolf, that really add up to our practice of peace in the world. I learned that if I did my humanitarian work with a heart filled with anger and fear it didn't add up to more peace and compassion in the world. Not exactly rocket-science, but I've never been too hot on maths and it took me a while to work out this simple equation!

So it was a great discovery for me when I learned, much more recently, that there are practices that can help to cultivate our natural compassion. In Afghanistan I learned that taking even ten minutes every morning to practice meditating on my true nature, my compassionate nature, which is free of ego and self-grasping and which is open and effortless, could actually begin to cultivate more presence of that nature in my day to day life.

Then I got home to New Zealand and I got to go out for walks in the sun, I was able to go for bike rides and to yoga classes and to spend delicious evenings in the company of good friends. I could go shopping at the market for fresh vegetables and cook them into gourmet meals. Life was good and filled with love and incredible yet simple pleasures.

So I stopped sitting to meditate every morning.

I went on a two day seated meditation retreat and found a wee practicing Shambhala community with whom I could sit in meditation on Thursday evenings. But I dropped my regular morning practice.

I've just recently really begun to notice the difference. But now that I see it, it feels glaring. So I'm getting back onto my morning cushion. It fascinates me how much I resist this simple practice. I avoid these ten minutes even while I happily spend 50 minutes readings blogs. I don't beat myself up about the resistance. I know it is really common. But it is kind of perplexing, to resist something so simple which has offered me so much in the past.

So for now, with gentleness and compassion, I'm nudging myself back onto the morning cushion. Just for a few minutes every day. To practice cultivating compassion so that I can access my compassionate nature more freely when I need it out here in the world.

16 Days

The wife of my colleague agreed to let me take her photo this week on the condition that her face was obscured. She was shy, but still friendly to a strange woman who turned up outside her house trying to speak Dari to her even though she only speaks Pashtu. Duh

This week I've been emotionally triggered what feels like a thousand times a day. I'm heading into my very last week in Ghor and my emotions are heightened, but the events of the week were fairly intense anyway.

Between last Friday and today the good people of Ghor have experienced tribal conflicts in Shahrak which had in the preceeding week culminated in an ambush on a police convoy killing the District Chief of Police and at least five of his soldiers, plus two tribal elders in the vehicle with him. The police this past week set out to rescue three men abducted in the ambush. Officially this rescue was to recover police officers but according to some local sources they were armed men from one tribe who had been travelling with the police to carry out attacks on the other tribe's villages. In any case the police operation seems almost certainly to have been complemented by reprisal attacks from the other tribe which were either ignored or actively supported by the police.

I don't know what kinds of feelings are generated in you when you read this kind of report. Pema Chodron talks about the reversion to numbness in the face of an overwhelming sense of helplessness. That seems to be a common response in much of the world, and understandably so. As for me I feel angry and sad at the same time about these events, and yes, I feel some hopelessness.

The week went on. This week was the first week of the international campaign "16 Days of Activism to Eliminate Violence against Women" (let's just say "16 days" from here on in, huh?). In my part of the world this week was marked by a grenade attack on the home of the Head of the Department of Women's Affairs, a grenade attack on the home of the female Provincial Prosecutor, renewed death threats against another woman holding a position of public office and rumours about the Head Teacher of the Girls High School.

I struggle to know what to do with the sadness and anger that is generated by these attacks. The morning after the first grenade attack I was at her house, and she was calmly showing me where the windows where smashed, where her car was damanged and where she shot a bullet into the door of her own car as she grabbed a gun and fired wildly in response to the attack. She took calls as we talked and thanked me for coming to see her and she asked me how my trip to America was - she herself having just returned from a trip away. I watched her and tried to learn from her how to behave under these circumstances.

Three days later she called me to her office, asking me to come alone and therefore without a translator. I went and we struggled to understand each other but in the end I got the point. She wanted to know what I was doing to push the police to find the person who attacked her. She was insisting that I should personally do more. My reaction? Not anything I'm proud of. I was overcome with a wave of anger.

It was anger born out of frustration because I have been meeting the responsible security officials, I have been exhorting them to do everything they can to find whoever is doing this, but they look me straight in the eye and tell me whatever they think I want to hear and I know that these meetings are achieving nothing.

So was I really angry at her for asking me to help? Of course not.

I was angry at the people who threw the grenade in the first place, for not having the courage and the decency to come out and publically speak their minds rather than sneaking around at night throwing grenades, putting children at risk and terrorizing those people in this town who are standing up for what they believe in.

I was angry at the Chief of Police for not putting an end to this - in a town of 10,000 people I cannot believe that it is impossible to find and arrest the person who has carried out five such attacks in the past month.

I was angry at myself for being so entirely useless in these circumstances.

I was angry at the journalist who had been visiting for two days, giving the impression that Afghanistan and it's stories of grenades and improvised explosive devices was a great lark, a 'boy's own adventure'.and who seemed disinterested and distracted from the real stories all around him.

For several days I allowed all these triggers to feed the angry, despairing wolf and by Wednesday as I sat in a special ceremony to mark the "16 days" I was on the verge of tears the whole time.

I was aware of the young Lithuanian soldiers patrolling the perimeter on foot specifically because I was here. Because by standing alongside the Head of Women's Affairs to give our speeches at this occassion I was now putting myself at risk of grenade attack. I thought about the risk that this entailed for those young men and I thought about their families at home.

I thought about why I needed to be at the ceremony and about all the other people who had agreed to come and stand up for women's rights. The Deputy Governor, one of the local Mullahs, the Head of the Provincial Council, the Head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. I thought about the people who, by sneaking about at night and throwing hand grenades, were trying to undermine all that this ceremony stood for.

I watched five young girls sing a song based on the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and I wondered which one of them might be killed, maimed, beaten, raped or tortured in the years to come. I watched five beautiful boys stand up along side those girls and participate in a battle of the genders quizz. And I thought about which of those beautiful boys would end up hating his life, beating his wife, consumed by anger and hopelessness.

I know! Great thoughts for feeding the despairing wolf right, right?

Finally when the ceremony was over I came home and let myself have a good cry. I just let the anger and the sadness wash out of me.

When the crying was over I wrote. I wrote for myself, I wrote to the journalist, I wrote to friends who would understand and share with me in the pain. I wrote out the anger. I wrote to the other side. Sometimes, for me, writing is what I can do when I am too filled with emotion to sit in meditation. Sometimes writing is what I need to do first.

Then I sat, and I tried to get in touch with my natural openness, my natural warmth, my natural intelligence. Here are some of the things that came up for me:

Maybe the journalist was not callous and shallow. Maybe he was out of his depth and a bit overwhelmed. Maybe the sarcastic humour was a cover for confusion or even fear. Maybe the distracted twitchiness was not because he found the people around him uninteresting but because he didn't know where to look first, he didn't know who to talk to or what to make of it all. Maybe a little more kindness from me would have made all the difference.

I have to confess I didn't get quite that far with the guy(s) throwing the grenades. But I did find myself much less overwhelmed with emotion everytime I thought about them.

When I think about how hard it is for me to deal with all these emotions I have to stop for a moment and give respect to the people who are more directly affected by all these events. If it takes me a week to figure out how to stop reacting to the triggers and get back in touch with my basic goodness and my belief in the goodness of others then what does it take for the families in Shahrak whose fathers, brothers, sons were killed in the ambush? What does it take for the women whose homes have been attacked by grenades in the night, scattering deadly shards of glass across the room where their children sleep?

In these moments the cycle of violence makes sense to me, and I find myself coming back to the drawing board about how I can make my small contribution to peace in these times of war.

Simply letting go

a little stream of consciousness this friday morning. - which for some reason comes without capital letters... i don't think i think in capitals.

in my work i feel as though i have moved through the initial six months of chaos and confusion and found a few foot and hand-holds, a way to climb slowly but surely out of the pit of hopelessness and overwhelm and up onto a platform from which i will know how to begin.

if i look back i see something interesting - i dwelt in the chaos because i couldn't find my way out, because none of my traditional tools (listing, planning, mapping, discipline and order) were working, because i couldn't make it happen. i didn't stay there because i knew there was goodness and truth in staying there. but you know what, i really think there was.

these shapes that are now appearing (small but well formed little projects, wonderful collaborations and networks) could not be forged by force from the chaos, they refused to take shape when i was trying to control it. now, some long weeks after i finally let go a little more, they are coming together in their own ways.

now, as they come together, is the time for lists, plans, maps, discipline and some order. now they have come into their own they are ready for some structure. now i am in my natural element, with big sheets of white paper and piles of sticky notes (anyone from the NZHRC who still reads this blog may smile at this image, i was for a while there famous for my sticky note planning method).

so now i look back and see myself sitting in the midst of the chaos, of the hopelessness and despair and i wonder, what were the things that helped me most to get through this process? well, for a while i wasn't really getting through it, i was just hanging on for dear life and railing against the pain of it all. during that time i tried to use all the techniques that were known to me - physical exercise, discipline, routine, stability. none of these things helped.

evenutally i gave up, i threw my hands up in the air. actually i threw my hands out towards thew world and said - i give up, i don't know what is wrong, or why nothing will work. and i think that 'i give up' must be about as close as i could get at that time to 'i let go'. doesn't it sound easy? 'let go' you'd expect it to be so much easier than hanging on. and maybe in the end it is (i'm still learning). but initially, when i was feeling lost and confused and without ground, the scariest thing in the world was letting go. the waters were swirling madly about me and hanging on seemed the only sane thing to do.

but i gave up, and somewhere in the giving up was the seed of letting go. i think that the last four weeks of a regular meditation practice have done wonders for my ability to let go. i'm also learning that letting go is not the same as giving up, that i can let go long before i get desperate enough to give up.

i'm still using a guided meditation tape for my morning meditations, although i think it will be time soon to try it alone. but for now i alternate between richard miller's 'yoga nidra' and ian gawler's 'practice of mediation'. ian, in particular, has a lovely way of saying 'simply letting go' and i find his voice coming to me, whispering in my ear about 'simply letting go' at different points through the day. it is not an unwelcome voice.

what helps you to let go?