I would like you to consider a question. If you were not afraid, what would you do for the healing of the world? Not a different you, not a superhero, but as you are. If you were not afraid of losing the respect and affection of people. If you were not afraid of making mistakes? If you were not afraid of loving as much as you love? If you were not afraid of speaking your deepest truths? If you were not afraid of risking your job, or your health, or your wealth, or your comfort, or your life? Then what would you do for the healing of the world?
The warrior
Renowned Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, forged his own courage in the cauldron of the wars in Vietnam, first with the French and then with the Americans. He and his followers were active in helping villagers rebuild after bombings and providing healthcare, education, and modern farming methods to village folks. His last book before his death in 2021 is called Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. In it he says that we have in us, among other things, a meditator, an artist, and a warrior. Here’s what he says about the warrior:
“The warrior brings a determination to go ahead. You refuse to give up. You want to win. And, as a practitioner, you have to allow this fighter in you to be active…We should not be afraid of obstacles on our path… obstacles are not really obstacles. They are an accelerator of wisdom, of aspiration.”
The idea of a warrior typically calls up images of soldiers, violent conflict, and military strategy. This is not what this gentle teacher is referring to. He is calling forth in us a set of qualities truly needed to face the challenges before us. The intertwined crises of ever-deepening climate catastrophe, persistent racism, assaults on democracy, an unjust economic system, and a splintered society cannot be addressed with passivity, resignation, numbness, or wishful thinking. Qualities of a warrior are called for, what I think of as spiritual warriors fighting for liberation from suffering and for planetary well-being.
I want to acknowledge here that the process of individuals recovering their full power is different from a group rising up in collective power. But they are related. So what are some of the characteristics of this kind of individual warrior? Excellent warriors train for years, they value discipline, precision, fearlessness, and compassion. They cultivate calmness, develop enormous trust in themselves, and act with confidence and efficiency of effort. True warriors are willing to be vulnerable to express softness as well as fierceness, to be tender, open, unarmored while also being direct, alert, and firm. Spiritual warriors have no doubt about their basic goodness, their inherent worthiness. They are always practicing to be present, they are not lax or lazy. This training allows them to not shrink in the face of their opponent or suffering; they can look squarely at fear and powerlessness.
At many Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia, there are two statutes guarding the temple gate. One is Quan Yin, the image of compassion, mercy, and kindness. The other is a wrathful and frightening looking visage meant to communicate to those who enter that ill-will, ignorance and delusion have no place here. This statue represents physical force that protects cherished values and practice against corruption and impurity. This is also the spirit of the warrior. This is our potential also. We have a warrior in us. However, I hasten to add that most of us, myself included, do not usually show up as warriors. Why not?
The Pervasive Conditioning to Feel Powerless
I would like to put a spotlight on feelings of powerlessness, since powerlessness is often an unnamed obstacle to being that warrior, Powerlessness interferes with our willingness to act on our aspiration for a better world with more boldness, fearlessness, and love.
When we face the enormity of suffering on the earth, we can often feel overwhelmed, despairing, scared, and powerless.
Old and early feelings of despair, powerlessness.
One thing that has helped me is to remember that those feelings of despair, fear, or powerlessness that arise about climate change, or racism, or poverty were there long before I knew anything about those things. When we were children, we experienced so much that was wrong, things were way beyond our power to change. We were small and powerless. So, we internalized those feelings of being too small and powerless to make a difference. Unhealed, we carry these feelings with us into adulthood and project them onto the big social issues of the day.
Powerlessness is a huge barrier to humans mobilizing to limit harm and to cultivate the world we want to live in. While it is true that many people are engaged in inner and/or outer work from a place of fierce compassion, or solidarity or service, it is also true that there is a more pervasive societal denial, distraction, and paralysis about the situation facing us that needs addressing. Bill McKibben of 350.org puts it this way: “The crisis seems so big, and we seem so small, that it’s hard to imagine that we can make a difference.”[1]
How did we learn to feel powerless? In my own life, a few things stand out.
In the crib.
An early and deep lesson in powerlessness happened when I was a toddler. I have a clear memory of this. I wanted to be close to my mother. I was crying for her. My mother, a generally loving person, placed me in a crib in a room by myself to cry it out. She believed some of the child rearing experts of the day who advised parents to let babies cry by themselves because it strengthened their lungs! So, there I was, standing up in my crib, crying, the late afternoon sun slanting through the venetian blinds making striking line patterns on the wood floor. I cried and cried. I used all my baby strength to try to scoot the crip nearer to the door. I cried louder and louder. She never came. Finally, I gave up. Defeated. Powerless. I could not get what I needed, despite my best efforts. And I don’t think my lungs got stronger as a result!
List of incidents.
As I grew, I witnessed so many things that I knew deep inside were wrong but couldn’t stop them because I was too small. I couldn’t stop my father from drinking or heal the hurt that made him drink. I couldn’t stop the parents next door from beating their kids. I couldn’t stop the bigger neighborhood boys from pulling the legs off insects. I couldn’t stop the Catholic nuns in my grade school from making us children feel full of sin. I couldn’t say how scared and confused I was when we had to get under our desks to practice for an air raid attack. As a new student in the high school locker room, I couldn’t stop the bullies from picking on the weaker boys. In my later teen years, in the 1960s, on TV I watched helplessly as Black people were beaten by police and felt numb seeing raw footage of the violence in Vietnam. And on and on.
Universal experience.
You have your own examples, some better, some worse. I think seeing wrong things and not being able to stop them because we were little is a fairly universal human experience. The truth is that every human baby–innocent, pure, beautiful, sacred–is born into a traumatized world full of suffering and oppression, even in the best of situations. Fairly quickly, the full range of our humanness gets whittled away, or criticized, or stomped out, as we learn how to fit into our family expectations. And then twelve years of schooling ranks us and tells most of us that we are “average.” What is an “average” miraculous human being?! And then, pile on racism, sexism, classism, and adultism that tell most of us that we are not good enough, smart enough, or worthy enough. Whew! It’s no wonder that many of us feel powerless. Hardly anyone survives childhood and adolescence with their full self-confidence, power, and fearlessness intact.
Let’s be clear. We can feel powerless, but we are not powerless.
Of course, there are actual forces, policies, laws, structures, culture, and state power that reinforce feelings of powerlessness. And many of us have been scared by experiencing or witnessing the use of power to silence, jail, or even kill individuals who stood up to injustice, or used to crush larger resistance movements. But the reality is that collectively people have tremendous power. If factory workers walked off the job, if students refused to go to school, if information workers blocked electronic communication, if consumers boycotted products, if truckers stopped hauling freight, if bank clerks stopped processing money exchanges, then the whole social system would come to a halt. The people have tremendous collective power.
But feelings of powerlessness limit our warrior nature.
I hope it clear by now how pervasive the conditioning is to feel powerless, and how that keeps most of us feeling small, keeping quiet, going along to get along, not questioning authority, settling for comfort, entertainment, and distraction, accepting injustice, or conversely, finds us complaining, blaming, criticizing others, and otherwise acting out our discontent. This is not the way of a warrior. I hope is it also abundantly clear how important it is to transform our feelings of powerlessness to release our greater agency, confidence, and ability to make a different. The perfect storm of social issues is asking this of us. This is key to individual and collective liberation. So how might we do this?
Practices to transform feelings of powerlessness.
I would like to mention some practices that have helped me heal feelings of powerlessness.
Cultivating wise view shows up as a starting place. By view I mean what is the story that I am or we are telling about who we are. Is the story that we are greedy, competitive, and individualistic? Is it that we are inherently wholesome and altruistic. Did God confer on us dominion over nature to use the earth as we please, or are we inseparable from nature and are asked to live in cooperative respect with the earth? The story we tell impacts how we think, speak, and act. We each have views and they are worth exploring to see how they shape us. As for my view, I try to see that, despite outward appearances, inside each of us is a miraculous, unbroken, beautiful being. I think that by nature we humans are inherently worthy, deeply caring, enormously intelligent, immensely powerful, naturally cooperative, infinitely creative, and innately joyful! And any other way we show up is the result of unwholesome messages or experiences that came our way. This is especially true of me, and it is especially true of you! Furthermore, as challenging as this is for me at times, I also believe that those I think of as the opponents or the “bad guys” are likewise inherently good and worthy of respect, even as I work to stop or inhibit them from causing more harm. This view allows me to engage them in civil dialogue which can increase the chances of creating more understanding and possible mutual cooperation. No guarantees of these outcomes but at least it usually leads to reducing hostility.
Commitment to transform my feelings powerlessness. Another practice is to make a commitment to not believe my feelings of powerlessness and to do what it takes to heal and recover my full warrior capacities. I need to summon courage to recognize, examine, and feel the old feelings in order to transform them.
First, I try to recognize and question each thought or feeling that arises that says, “I can’t do it,” or “It’s too much for me,” or “I’m not smart enough (or strong, or brave, or powerful enough).” I can challenge such self-limiting thoughts with a counter thought: “I can do it,” or “This is not too much for me to handle,” or “Let me at it!” Sometimes I’ve used this image to counteract fear: “Where does a 900-pound grizzly bear sleep, in a hollow log? In a cave? Anywhere she wants!”
“I’m obviously completely incompetent.” Sometimes I use a lighthearted approach that I learned from an early teacher of mine. If I were thinking of some unnerving challenge ahead of me, he would ask me to repeat after him: “I am obviously completely incompetent, and totally inadequate, to handle the challenges that reality places before me. However, fortunately or unfortunately, I am the best person available for the job!”
“This is my home.” Many of us have been thoroughly drenched in messages about being separate. This tends to reinforce feelings of powerlessness. It leads us to develop what I call “habits of separation.” For example, whenever I find myself feeling better than, inferior to, critical of, disdainful of, hateful towards, threatened by, scared by, powerless in relation to another person or a group of people, I can be sure that I’m caught in a reactive habit that separates me. This is not my fault. The conditioning is relentless. These habits of separation tend to keep us divided from each other and weaken our efforts to mobilize greater solidarity in challenging injustice.
I have found it useful to practice with phrases of connection like: “I am intimately connected with everything and everyone,” or “I vow to wake up from the delusion of separateness.”
One time I was in Newark International airport waiting between flights. I found myself making up stories about other passengers, and they were not flattering stories. I said to myself, “John, what are you doing! You know nothing about these people! Stop!” So, I devised a phrase which I’ve used many times since when I am in a public space like an airport, a supermarket, or a subway. I look around and say: “This is my home, and these are my people.” When I do this, immediately my attitude shifts. Judgment gives way to curiosity and tenderness toward them.
Complaining, blaming, criticizing. When I find myself complaining, blaming, or criticizing, I can be sure that I am expressing powerlessness, a feeling that I can’t change the situation. To help get out of that trap, I’ve made a commitment to propose solutions rather than complain; to ask a person whose view I don’t agree with to tell me what brought them to their view; to refrain from demonizing anyone or any group, but to assume they suffer and wish to be happy, just like me, and that we have more in common than in conflict. These efforts go a long way toward counteracting my feelings of powerlessness.
Explore the roots. These kinds of thoughts and practices are in the right direction. But to loosen the grip of powerlessness, more is needed. We need to explore the roots in safe settings. In my experience, I’ve needed to recall early messages and incidents that made me feel powerless, maybe replay the incident with an ally to accompany me, so that I don’t feel alone in facing the feelings, like I was went it originally happened. I have had to allow myself space to cry, to tremble with fear, to feel anger arise, and to laugh. A therapist might be skilled in providing the safety for this work. Or we might get with a friend or ally to exchange “listening time” to help each other peel off the old feelings of powerlessness.
Deep listening partner. The most direct and profound practice for transforming my internalized feelings of powerlessness has been through weekly co-listening session with a friend over the past nearly 40 years. I listen to him for 45 minutes, then he listens to me for 45 minutes. No advice, no trying to fix each other. Just offering each other our undivided, respectful, warm attention. In the safety of this protected space I have been able to explore and release the early childhood and more recent hurts in ways described in the previous paragraph, including experiences that laid in feelings of powerlessness, and increasingly uncover my innate capacity to care, to think clearly, and to act more fearlessly, which has allowed me to be more effective in social change work.
I encourage you to develop a deep listening partnership for yourself. Ask a friend, a trusted practitioner, a partner. Use equal time turns of whatever length you both decide on. Take turns. The listener listens with full undivided attention without offering advice or comment, just offering presence. The speaker decides what they wish to share but agrees not to use the time to criticize the listener because this usually makes it hard for the listener to keep listening! Both the speaker and the listener try their best to accept and encourage the release of feelings like tears, shaking, anger, and laughter.
Summary of practices. To review briefly, here are ways I use to transform powerlessness.
· Always keep my wholeness in mind, and the wholeness of others.
· Learn to recognize feelings of powerlessness, and then act in direct opposition to the powerless feeling, despite how scared I feel.
· Loosen the grip of early experiences of powerlessness through emotional release.
· Heal from internalized oppression that told me I was not sufficient.
· Learn about those who acted in the face of tremendous odds and succeeded, especially those who stood up against injustice.
· Notice and counteract feelings of being separate from others when they arise. “This is my home and these are my people.”
· Cultivate the awareness that I am not alone, and don’t have to do it alone.
· Tackle challenges as if I were the best person for the job, no matter my feelings to the contrary.
· Notice and appreciate myself every time I refuse to act on my feelings of powerlessness.
Wet blanket. The main message here is that feelings of powerlessness lie like a wet blanket over our capacity to think, love, and act more boldly to bring about the personal and social transformation that we want. Multiply this by eight billion people, and you can sense the enormity of this collective obstacle. Conversely, we might imagine the powerful upwelling of social solidarity, creative action, and loving relations that would be released by healing those early conditioned feelings of powerlessness.
Making a pledge. I would like to invite us all to make a vow of sorts to undo and heal our internalized feelings of powerlessness in order to assume our full warrior nature on behalf of healing the world, each in our own way. Using the phrase we used earlier, I invite you, if you feel comfortable, to think of a difficulty you are facing, and to say out loud:
“I am obviously completely incompetent, and totally inadequate, to handle the challenges that reality places before me. However, fortunately or unfortunately,
I am the best person available for the job!”
Free from our feelings of powerlessness, just imagine what we could do for the healing of the world!
John Bell is a Buddhist Dharma Teacher in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. He lives near Boston, MA. He is a founding staff and former vice president of YouthBuild USA, aninternational non-profit that provides learning, earning, and leadership opportunities to young people from low-income backgrounds. He is an author, lifelong social justice activist, international trainer facilitator, father and grandfather. His blog is www.beginwithin.info and email is jbellminder@gmail.com. His most recent book is “Unbroken Wholeness: Six Pathways to the Beloved Community.” He is also a co-founder of Beloved Community Circles for Mindful Action. (22)
[1] Bill McKibben. “It’s Not Entirely Up to School Students to Save the World.” The New Yorker. May 24, 2019