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Ultimately I think Buddhism gave me a lot of tools to deal with AND transform the itching feeling that “things as I perceive them are in dissonance with the story my culture is telling me about the things” that I had since childhood
for years I wondered, is that feeling accurate? am I sensitized to it by childhood experiences both good and bad? Is it fully a distortion caused by developmental trauma? Buddhism helped me parse it. I also think it’s why I was drawn to study climate change.
the story was that things that aren’t human are dead matter-objects- which can be consumed perpetually for human needs, people are cruel and competitive by nature and this is actually good, the past is over & the giant unresolved episodes of violence have no impact on the present
and I could feel that these things were not as true as the assumptions powering the structures of my family, my school, my world. at various points this created an incredible amount of depression and loneliness and it’s why I can understand why people end up
completely losing their sense of shared reality and I have empathy for people who fall prey to emotionally convincing charlatans who offer a relatively simple description of why they feel that way
without explicitly weaving a compassionate narrative of our shared humanity into our explorations of the nature of reality we can end up in some pretty dehumanizing and ultimately fascist places
even Buddhist communities can fall into this - it’s almost as if neoliberalism provides the conditions for any inquiry or practice to become ... idk is it hyperbolic to say life destroying?
now that I live in the woods I am really going for it 
Though I haven’t been practicing formally for a few years, it sticks out to me how compassion is emphasized as a counterbalance to emptiness- the dizzying idea that nothing has any inherent nature- in Buddhism. Emptiness w/out compassion practice can lead to dehumanizing others.
I was always drawn to the idea that compassion isn’t a feeling but an emergent property of the universe, one that we can create the conditions for it to arise, especially in a relational context. I felt like this was what was happening during occupy wall st
I’m diving back into this as I think about social work and climate change and disaster governance
As usual if you have any recommended reading on any of the topics mentioned I would love to hear it
