by Joe Loizzo

Over the days since the U.S. election, I’ve heard from many in our community here and around the world who, like me, feel deeply disappointed and troubled by the outcome. While some of you have shared fears for your safety and/or the safety of your family, friends, and the world we share, others have expressed a deep sense of helplessness and despair for our collective future. 

There is no minimizing the potential harm that may come to vulnerable individuals and groups in this country and abroad from the oppressive policies of the next administration, or the extent to which their bullying rhetoric and insidious lies can provoke an even greater spike in hate speech and hate crimes than we have witnessed over the past eight years.  I hope you all are seeking out and getting the support you need to feel safe and connected through this difficult time, finding people with whom you can share your thoughts and feelings in a spirit of empathy and solidarity, and even finding the presence of mind to turn towards the healing, contemplative insights, and practices that bring us all together at Nalanda Institute.  

Given how stressful and disorienting so many find this outcome, I wanted to share some of the reflections and practices I’ve leaned on to help me navigate this event and others like it. First of all, when an outcome as charged and historic as this election takes place, it may strike us as shocking, as if it came out of the blue; it may prompt us to project our worst fears about the adverse impacts it may have down the road; it may even lead us to feel discouraged, helpless and powerless in the face of a volatile world. When I notice any of these mindsets arising, I try to bring my mind back to settle in the present moment by practicing equanimity and self-analysis (see links below) and redirect my attention to examining any deep-seated biases and reactivities that may be troubling my own mind and/or the minds of others. When my mind begins to clear and my heart open, I try my best to trace the tangled network of causes and conditions that have manifested the current state of affairs to help me hold and understand it with enough care to respond skillfully to the challenges it poses in my own life, the lives of those around me, and the world we share. 

While pundits of every stripe are working overtime to make sense of Trump’s victory, attributing it to a groundswell of economic populism, to the insidious poisons of racism and sexism in the nation’s history, or to mistakes made by Harris and her campaign, the Buddha-dharma takes a very long view and a developmental perspective on our collective future. It teaches us that charged public events like these reflect the complex interplay of current social challenges with intergenerational traumas and self-protective instincts at work deep within our personal and collective unconscious minds. So, the path to bringing equanimity and wise compassion to these challenges, traumas, and instincts can only begin with each of us working towards greater clarity in our own hearts, minds, relationships, and lives. 

What does this outcome mean for me and the communities I belong to/connect with? What does it touch in the depths of my/our embodied psyche, and why? What might it mean for those who hold a very different perspective, and what might it reflect in their own lived experience and ancestral trauma? What can I do to protect myself, my friends, and neighbors and to work with friends and allies towards the kind of world we want to create and inhabit together?

Within the Nalanda tradition, such investigation and analysis is an indispensable, ongoing part of the deeper understanding and wise care we all need to adapt and thrive as individuals and as a diverse community in a complex world. Yet investigation and analysis are not intrinsically helpful or freeing; they can also reinforce our confusion and compound our suffering. How do we know if our inquiry is leading us forward towards genuine healing and freedom or reinforcing the archaic instincts and habits that keep us locked in the past? As you might expect, the tradition not only provides guidance and methods, but also offers touchstones for checking our movement on the path. 

First of all, it encourages us to check whether our inquiry into our own minds and actions or those of others is driven by binary thinking, blame, and fear or is emerging organically from a sense of acceptance, receptivity, empathy, and care? If the former, we may need to pause our inquiry, put on our own oxygen mask, and wait for a deeper shift in our inner state. On the other hand, if our inquiry starts well and arrives at some closure, we can also check our findings by asking whether they leave us with a net gain in equanimity, receptivity, and care or feeling more upset, contracted, and/or intolerant. Here, too, if we feel the latter, we may want to double-check our findings by facing and caring for the upset they stir, and then seeing if we can hold them differently with a larger, more healing perspective. 

Another key guidepost for our reflections relates to the collective nature of the event and forces we’re facing. Within the basic logic of Buddhist social psychology and political theory, the root of our suffering, individually and collectively, is our self-protective, self-enclosing instinct to sense ourselves as not just distinct but fundamentally separate from others and the world we share. So if our reflection and processing is coming from and/or reinforcing a sense of separation rather than connection and shared belonging—of us-vs-them rather than we’re all in this together—then we will want to look deeper to face and embrace parts of us that may be feeling unsafe, alone, or unseen. 

Of course, this is not to bypass the real threats or harms we’ve experienced or actually face, but rather to ground our inquiry in our basic trust in ourselves, our humanity and potential, our communities and guides, so that we can understand more fully and engage more skillfully with whatever differences or challenges we face in the world.

It should be clear from these general comments that the dharmic approach to social and political life is radically counter the logic of bipartisan politics and the binary structures of racial, gender, and economic division baked into the dominant culture of the U.S. I believe the countercultural stance of the dharma is precisely the medicine we need, individually and collectively, to move beyond the toxic culture on which this nation was founded, a culture based on the separatist logic behind white supremacy, patriarchy, and extreme capitalism. It offers us a powerful antidote to the othering biases embedded in our individual and collective unconscious, and a clear way through the state of division, inequity, and alienation that dominant culture has wrought towards the shared belonging and flourishing we all long for, need, and deserve. 

In this, the visionary counterculture of Buddhism is deeply resonant with the counterculture that has gradually helped this nation move towards its full potential: the progressive movement for full equality and real social justice. This egalitarian populist movement has countered the dominant culture of the U.S. throughout its history, starting with the abolitionism that fueled the Civil War and the womens’ suffrage movement following it, continuing through the civil rights movement of the 1960’s and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, and culminating more recently in the #MeToo movement of the early 2000’s and the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

While cultures feel bigger than all of us and set in stone, the fact is that they are very human, constantly changing collective constructions. Like a kind of living software embodied in our caregivers, teachers, mentors, friends, and neighbors, they are imprinted into our conscious and unconscious embodied minds in the course of our early development and adult socialization, albeit in different ways based on our social location. The good news is that the dominant culture only lives and breathes within our own socially conditioned body-minds, the body-minds of our fellow Americans, and the institutions we collectively inherited and maintain. Here is where the contemplative insights and practices of the Nalanda tradition offer a potent complement to our nation’s progressive movement that can help us dismantle the dominant culture’s toxic code within and around us and help clear a way forward for us to rewrite our future as individuals and a community. 

This is why, as I continue to share my shock, grief, and deep concern about where we are as a nation today, the greatest source of direction, meaning, and purpose I can imagine to help us move through and past this point is to do what Kamala Harris urged us to do in her concession speech: roll up our sleeves and get more invested than ever in cutting the roots of the toxic culture poisoning our political life, institutions, and nation. Of course, working at the root cause of what ails us all in this way is deeply sobering and must give us pause. It commits us to a lifetime and generations of working painstakingly together towards freedom and radical transformation. 

At the same time, working at the root empowers us to keep coming back to our full capacity for greater clarity, resilience, and skill, helping us stay awake to real and present dangers and opportunities while also enabling us to engage more effectively and consistently with them as they arise. In particular, it can help open us to engage and support those friends, neighbors, and communities in the cross-hares of this latest backlash of the nation’s dominant culture of violence, oppression, and hate: especially the BIPOC community, the LGBTQ+ community and women of all backgrounds. 

By investing in the practices of equanimity, self-analysis, and wise compassion, we can simultaneously support a long and a short game that can keep us from getting thrown off balance, even by such major setbacks, and keep us persistently moving forward as Kamala urged us, towards a world of shared belonging and global flourishing. 

I leave you with my favorite passage from one of the most inspiring and beloved of Mahayana Scriptures—a sutra on the lifelong, intergenerational work of psychosocial healing, liberation, and change—The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti. A passage I often return to when I can’t find the space to see a way forward, it describes a dialogue the Buddha had with a group of bodhisattva altruists seeking to envision and co-create a society whose citizens learn to break free of their toxic conditioning and develop a buddha’s wisdom and spiritual faculties, a society called “a buddha field.” The passage recounts a dialogue in which Shakyamuni reminds one of their number that our most creative work to change our world begins by engaging the boundless space of our shared human potential and its infinite possibilities:

Then the young Licchavi Ratnakara…asked, “What is the bodhisattvas purification of the buddha field?”…The Buddha said, “A buddha field of bodhisattvas is a field of living beings…A bodhisattva embraces a buddha-field to the same extent that he causes the development of living beings….to the extent that living beings are introduced to the buddha-gnosis…to the extent that living beings increase their holy spiritual faculties. For example, Ratnakara, should a bodhisattva, who knows full well that all things are like empty space, wish to build a buddha field in order to develop living beings, he might go ahead, in spite of the fact that it is not possible to build or to adorn a buddha-field in empty space.”

This powerful image of how we—as individuals and a community—can use the wisdom of emptiness to clear our hearts and minds of the biases and toxic emotions that lock us into cultures of domination and to envision and co-create within that space of human potential a beloved community that frees and connects us all, has always given me a sense of resilience and perseverance at times like these when all hope seems lost. 

As liberating as this hopeful vision may be, the second key teaching from Vimalakirti brings the lived experience of the bodhisattvas’ work down to earth and closer to home. That is the teaching that being engaged in the collective life of a society or polity from a place of unconditional wisdom and compassion isn’t all space and light, but typically feels like a vicarious sickness in which we feel and sense in our own hearts, bodies and minds the burden of confusion and suffering binding all the beings around us. This is what Vimalakirti calls “the sickness of the bodhisattva” or “the sickness of great compassion.” Listen to this passage in which the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri, visits the lay-activist Buddha Vimalakirti and learns that he is not sick in any ordinary sense but with the vicarious burden of feeling and holding the suffering of his community:

Manjushri declared…Householder, whence came this sickness of yours? How long will it continue? How does it stand? How can it be alleviated?”Vimalakirti replied, “Manjushri, my sickness comes from ignorance and the thirst for existence and it will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings. Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I also would not be sick. Why? Manjushri, for the bodhisattva, the world consists only of living beings, and sickness is inherent in living in the world. Were all living beings free of sickness, the bodhisattva also would be free of sickness. For example, Manjushri, when the only son of a merchant is sick, both his parents become sick on account of the sickness of their son. And the parents will suffer as long as that only son does not recover from his sickness. Just so, Manjushri, the bodhisattva loves all living beings as if each were his only child. He becomes sick when they are sick and is cured when they are cured. You ask me, Manjushri, whence comes my sickness; the sicknesses of the bodhisattvas arise from great compassion.

So the bottom line of Vimalakirti’s profound wisdom teaching is that we need to practice working at holding the cognitive dissonance between two seemingly contradictory realities: the reality of the boundless potential of human individuals and societies for awakening and liberation; and the reality of how painfully limited real individuals and communities are right now given their conditioning in the toxic delusions of separation and the afflictions of fear and hate. The work of holding that cognitive dissonance is where the rubber of the bodhisattvas’ way of life meets the road. It is the profound practice Vimalakirti calls “the tolerance of the ultimate ungraspability of all things” (anupalabdha-dharma-ksanti). 

If and when you feel ready to turn to the practice of the bodhisattvas’ purification of the buddha field, here is a list of next steps I suggest:

  • Try this equanimity meditation to settle, center, and clear your heart and mind
  • Try this equal empathy practice to expose and work through your dominant cultural biases about the diverse people in our lives and world
  • Try this practice of self-analysis through the four keys to expose and dismantle the familial-social identity habits that anchor your dominant cultural biases
  • Try this ocean of loving kindness practice from Rahshaana Green, inspired by Rhondha Magee, to awaken the altruist’s spirit of love and compassion for all beings
  • Attend one of our racial/gender affinity groups to get support understanding and undoing your racist/patriarchal/dominant cultural conditioning.
  • Read some of the writings of Buddhist critics of our dominant culture like bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, and/or Where We Stand: Class Matters.

*New resources as of December 5th, 2024:

  • Try this brief practice of the compassion chain reaction to stretch your capacity to extend threads of loving-caring awareness openly out to all beings everywhere
  • Try this audio meditation on the Clockwork vision of world transformation, based on the Kalachakra prophecy for the future of our human community and our planet earth