Mindfulness and Compassion
We need mindfulness to look deeply into the complex processes of life and compassion to respond wisely and with commitment to perceived suffering in and around us.
We define mindfulness as the practice of consciously observing and being present to what we are experiencing in the moment in both our mind and body, while practising non-attachment to emerging judgements, thoughts, sensations, emotions and beliefs about what is in and around us. On the path of mindfulness, we are inspired by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hahn.
Through mindfulness, we learn both to see suffering present in the world and to invite a compassionate attitude or action that seeks to alleviate suffering and to ensure that it is less likely to occur in the future. Thus, we understand compassion, following Paul Gilbert, as a motivation that helps us to respond to perceived problems with commitment, courage, kindness and wisdom, and is a force flowing in three co-existing directions: from me to myself/me, from me to you/the world, and from you to me.
Mindfulness and compassion, as we understand them, are embedded in an ethical context; they also support the quality of our being in the world and help us to see our individual lives in a web of interconnectedness and social and ecological responsibility.
Inattentive, automatic action flowing from individual, social and cultural habits often leads to increased suffering in ourselves and in the world, and unskillful, non-compassionate being with suffering creates relational and social apathy, indifference and disengagement.
By practising the skill of embracing suffering with mindfulness and compassion, and recognising its deep causes, we also learn over time to free ourselves from it – from the habit of fear, exploitation and violence – touching the deep joy of mindful living and being part of a community of beings experiencing life on Earth.
Nonviolent Communication
The process of empowering social change involves, among other things, reducing our habitual responses and consciously choosing the qualities we want to practice in our lives.
Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, saw the possibility of enacting and enhancing social change through a committed process of unlearning a hierarchy- and power-based (i.e. violence-based) way of being in the world and in communication, and practising being empathetically in touch with one’s own and others’ needs (both at the individual level and at the level of whole societies or nations), which he saw as universal for all individuals/groups and equally important, regardless of social status, background or context of human or community life.
At the same time, he saw the cause of life-threatening behaviour in attachment to unskillful strategies for their fulfilment. Unskillfulness can stem both from poor quality education at the individual level and, more broadly, from a cultural, hierarchy-based, non-life-serving narrative of human dominance in the world and development based on the use of power. An attitude of non-judgmental, deep understanding allows us to see in the person whose behaviour brings violence, a person who is trying – like any of us – to find a way to meet his or her needs, but does not, at the moment or yet, have access to non-violent strategies.
Rosenberg also noted that seeing other people and nations as evil and punishing them does not work, does not bring the change. He assumed that every person finds deep joy in acting to enrich one’s life and the lives of others (and life in general). And if one has the conditions for doing so, one will readily engage in empathetic behaviour that supports the creation of social change. And entire communities (family, school, neighbourhood and larger) are responsible for creating these conditions. So we strive to act from a level of joy and energy that comes from being in touch with a vision of life in which we can meet our needs without inflicting suffering on other people and non-human beings. We are then more in touch with our resources and abilities.
We can practice a deep respect for universal needs and learn to recognise them and empathetically, understandingly support ourselves and others in choosing strategies to meet them in a way that builds harmony and peace and supports life. We do not have to compete with each other for resources (i.e. whose needs will be noticed and met and whose will not). We can work together to hear each other’s needs and find ways to respond to them together, both at the individual level and at the level of whole societies. In this way, we increase our human access to the energy needed to transform the structures and systems that create and sustain the violence happening in the world.
Deep Ecology
Without significant changes at the level of human consciousness, none of our commitments to social or ecological transformation will be sustainable. The assumptions of deep ecology allow us to pause, to shake off our anthropocentric view of the world and man’s dominant place in it, to see the deep causes of the ecological crisis and to ask ourselves the most important questions about, among other things, who we are, what we are doing here and what we live for.
Deep ecological thinking starts from the assumption that everything that lives, including humans and other animal, plant and mineral species have a right to live, and that the human species is not the crown of creation and its needs are not the most important or the only ones to be considered. Human beings are an equally important part of the whole web of life and the evolutionary chain, and their well-being and flourishing are dependent on the well-being and flourishing of the earth’s ecosystem as a whole.
Over-consumption, or habitual or greed-driven exploitation of other species, is harmful to both man and Nature. And yet man is part of it. By caring for the Earth’s ecosystems, we therefore also care for the preservation of our species.
The development and survival of the Earth’s ecosystem is directly dependent on human action and requires the human species to limit its expansion, to curb economic growth, understood as GDP growth, that is also to slow down or stop unbridled consumption and to make choices that will serve life.
The founder of deep ecology, Arne Neass, said that we need both deep understanding and deep practice and the energy of collective action. We need a shift at the level of identity, we want to see human beings again, in a broader context – the context of a network, or circle of all living beings (as opposed to the hierarchical pyramid of creation, in which humans appear alone at the top, with the rest of Earth life below them). The solitary, separate human self can thus be expanded and enriched to the level of the ‘ecological self’. Arne Naess also argued that by limiting human identity to a narrow ‘self’ we undervalue ourselves, and impoverish ourselves from the great wisdom that comes from the experienced lives of our non-human ancestors and the species that co-inhabit our common home, the Earth.
Our task, then, is to move beyond human and species tribalism and work to remind us of the experience of connection to the web of life, so that all can and do live on Earth in peace and flourishing.