Coming from a place of love

Just back from a three-week retreat in Plum Village, France, I am an ocean of vows, convinced that this time my life has truly been transformed. I know from experience that this is most probably not the case, but still: unpacking, washing my clothes, watching the red roses outside my house, everything seems infused with the energy of mindfulness and loving-kindness. Or at least it seemed infused, until I turned on my computer and started downloading my 1000 or so emails.

I am amazed at the surge of negative energy that was brought up in me just from touching in with the stuff that I normally do - all those projects yet-to-manifest, promises unfulfilled, people who have been waiting in vain for my response on this or that, while I have been breathing in and out in a Zen monastery. I suddenly feel like a completely hopeless case again, anxiety surging through my body. Judgement day, indeed.

Now I am calmer again, after having dealt with some of the most pressing issues and having prostrated to my bedroom Buddha, resolving to become a much more reliable person in the future. The energy of the retreat is still with me, apparently, or else I would not have been able to make that subsede so easily. I am normally very wobbly when it comes to these strong emotions.

Outside everything is completely calm, which is striking bearing in mind that I am right in the centre of a 500 000-people city. Tonight is Swedish midsummer, which means everyone with a bit of sense has left for the countryside, and I can enjoy the silence and this looking at my home and my street with fresh eyes and a rare sense of appreciation.

I had a tough time during this retreat. A wonderful time also, for sure, receiving beautiful teachings from Thây Nhat Hanh and experiencing the richness of being in a community of practice, but for a while it was just really hard. A friend who was also in this retreat has a great idea for an organisation that he would like to start, and wanted to link up with various people in the Plum Village community and the Order of Interbeing who may be able to support the initiative. Intending to support him in his work, I sat through a number of meetings, which resembled the ones I normally attend in my social movement work enough for me to really feel the energy that is normally in me in those situations. Because of being in such a mindful state, I saw in great detail and in slow-motions style all the features of that energy, and I tell you, it is not beautiful.

I was really shocked at how strong my sense of resentment and negativity was. My mind lashed out at pretty much anything that was being said, judging one idea after the other as naive, simplistic, just wrong. It wasn't so much an intellectual reaction as an emotional one. I felt this strong negative energy had infused my mind completely, so that I was unable to see the difference between what was critical discernment, based on my experience, useful, and what was just this aggression that I suddenly found myself so full of. Most of the time I didn't say anything at all, I just sat there, overwhelmed by this bitterness and resentment that I didn't know was so strong in me. It was very, very painful. Where did that come from? I must have been feeding it without noticing.

I can see that I have been cultivating it to a certain extent, by keeping on doing work that I don't really believe in anymore, just because I don't know what else to do - and then judging myself and my movement colleagues.

And sitting in this monastery, this place of love, with all my aggression flooding me, I really saw that unless I can transform that energy, whatever I do in terms of social action with be misguided. I really saw it, in a much more direct, less intellectual way than before. I so want to learn how to come from a place of love in my political work.

That is all for now. A big enough aspiration, it seems.