Mirror of the Mind

An anecdote about sanctimony and self-revelation

Peace Valley Park — Bucks County, PA

Once upon a time near the forever-ago beginning of the pandemic, when lockdowns were ongoing and the world was scrambling to comprehend what this massive disruption might mean to our future, I wrote an essay for my blog on the challenge of groundlessness—that excruciating experience of no toe-hold, of wholesale uncertainty from which there is no escape. It was a reflection on how to use the unbearable discomfort of the situation to grow towards peace by cultivating equanimity, by living in the moment without resistance.

I meant every word when I wrote it, and earlier this year I published it again, to my Substack, because having reread it a year and a half later, it still sounded true.

It also made me cringe with embarrassment—self-exposure.

Because looking back through the intervening months I was confronted with the extent to which I’d abandoned those principles and practice. In fairness, I think it was less hypocrisy on my part than it was a losing of my way; it wasn’t that I stopped trying to walk my talk so much as I forgot all the words. I failed to attend to the moment and to the habits of a present mind.

And so I strayed far off the path I’d set for myself, from a way of being I believe in and had encouraged and hoped for others. Indeed, through year two of the pandemic I took a hiatus from the practice of peace. I am now in process of recovering my direction, and my self.

So, what went wrong? And why bother writing about it?

The first question has a simple answer: I started spending too much time imbibing the awful news of the day. It was the psychological and spiritual equivalent of a body striving towards wellness on a diet too heavy in simple sugars and processed foods. It doesn’t maintain good health, much less build it. One ends up feeling sick and depleted with little question as to why.

What calls me to write about it is the fact that our world is slipping undeniably into chaos and every single one of us, through our choices, contributes to the process one way or another. Either we add to humanity’s uproar or we help calm it down. Either we buy into the madness of ego-driven energy, or we wake up, get clear, and let it go. But more on that in a minute.

Another reason to write is that my failure isn’t unique. It’s mundane and relatable, which is the reason it’s worth mentioning. Falls and wake up calls are simply part of the journey for anyone paying enough attention to realize they’re on one.

Also, we learn from each other’s mistakes, which makes them perfect fodder for reflection. Because peace is a group effort as much as it is an individual aspiration, and seeing ourselves in each others’ failures, as well as our successes, can inspire solidarity on the path. Renew our energy for the project.

So, about buying into madness and waking up, let me illustrate how obvious and subtle that might be with a story from my own personal archive of defaults into ego-drama . . . .

You may recall this past February the news was dominated by the spectacle of Canada’s “Freedom Convoy”—the thousands of truckers who united from all corners of their nation to drive to its capitol in protest of health mandates they saw harming livelihoods in their industry and country.

Depending on whose footage you watched and whose reports you believed, they were either an unruly horde of hooligans and bigots or a courageous throng of everyday heroes; either a signal threat to societal order or its final defenders. Information and social media were awash in stories and opinions on the matter, and so, of course many people took sides, as we humans are wont to do.

I certainly did and I’m not here to claim I shouldn’t have. Because the practice of peace isn’t about being a silent or passive bystander. It’s not about refusing to speak against wrongs or call out injustice. It’s not about advocating neutrality or disinterest. It’s about how we take our stand. How we hold other people in our heads, and especially our hearts.

The practice of peace is about using the energy of love in our stand for what is good and true.

So when it came to the drama of the truckers’ protest and its polarized narratives, I didn’t find myself feeling particularly hostile or hardened towards people with whom I disagreed. I understood their expressions of passionate conviction and purposefully held space for them in my heart. With one exception.

A fellow proponent of peaceful practice.

This person didn’t post on social media about the protest while the turmoil was underway. Instead she shared—as she often does—inspiring quotes and positive aspirations about living in harmony with others and being accepting of differences and declining to be judgmental and compassionless.

It wasn’t until the protest ended, the streets of Ottawa cleared by police action, that she finally shared an opinion on the matter. A derisive remark mocking those who had championed the Other Side.

My side.

You can imagine how I pounced on her inconsistency. My indignation was visceral, launching my imagination into a reel of fantasies in which I constructed exquisite gotcha! responses with nothing more than her own pious words quoted back at her, showing her up as . . . perhaps not a fraud, exactly? But as flagrantly flawed and fallible. A pretender to peace.

Someone who is not nearly as kind and loving as she tries to present.

For almost a week, I fell into conjuring righteous scripts for my mental theater, providing myself a restless yet satisfying stream of entertainment until, caught up in my umpteenth iteration of the perfect takedown, a disquieting thought suddenly dropped into my reverie, jarring me into awareness with its embarrassing clarity:

Neither am I.

Abruptly, I saw myself unmasked. My own flaws and fallibility glaring in their flagrant affinity with those of my proxy-nemesis. Here I was, for days beyond her single-sentence critique, showing up in my own life as a pretender to peaceful practice. Here I was, dwelling smugly—gleefully—on her failure to live up to her best self even as I failed to be my own. She was no more an imposter than I; I was no less an imposter than she. And oddly . . .

. . . that became a cleansing, humbling realization. A relief, actually. Because it pulled my own basic humanity back into focus, where the possibilities of unhooking myself from the sanctimony of my certainty and consciously cultivating a quieter mind, a softer heart, could breathe, find space, expand.

Then a small miracle occurred. Suddenly awake to the frenzy of my ego-energy, the mortification of it alerted me to a moment for gratitude: here in my lap was a conspicuous opportunity to recalibrate and return to the path of peace, to the conscious effort towards inner calm. Egolessness. It felt like a gift, recalling me to these words I’d written in an earlier essay on resisting the siren call of contempt:

There is a Buddhist teaching that instructs “Be grateful to everyone.” It urges us to intentionally nurture a sense of gratitude not just to those who provide us what we want, but to those who provide us the things we don’t: those everyday discomfiting opportunities to confront our ego. Cultivating gratefulness to those who challenge our self-attachment may sound like an improbable path away from contempt, yet when we commit to seeing our enemies as indispensable to our awakening we come to see them as they truly are: just fellow journeyers on the road. And as we foster a spirit of thankfulness for their role in revealing our ego work, we are naturally drawn from antipathy and scorn into the deeper comfort of a conscious heart. We are softened in ways that strengthen us. In ways that can extend our reach towards peace.

Since that moment when I recognized my rampaging ego in the mirror of my mind, when my compatriot in peaceful practice served as the instrument of my self-revelation and refocused my attention, I’ve experienced a little burst of appreciation whenever I think of her. A little glow of goodwill. It has left me in awe of how readily gratitude rearranges our perceptions, can take us from hostility to warmth, from resentment to thanksgiving.

And as I experience the ongoing tumult of ego-driven energy within and around me—all that sound and fury of clashing tribes and competing values and comforting certainty—it keeps me re-committing to observe my mental mirror and to return, as often as I am reawakened, to the promising open space that is peace-bound self-reflection and a grateful, softened heart.