Mushin Abby Terris, Guiding Teacher
We hear a lot of outcry about wanting our freedom. What is freedom for you? For some, it’s freedom to love whomever we love. For some it’s freedom to hate whomever we hate – to exclude, to insult, to harm.
The blatant selfishness that is meant by individual freedom in this culture is a distortion of the true freedom that is available when we recognize and live the Bodhisattva Way. The Way of Wholeness. Buddhist practice points us deeper, beyond what we like and what we don’t like. Practice continually makes clear that none of us are free until all of us are free. Free from the suffering of viewing our life as separate from all of life. Free from living by preference, reactivity, hate, greed, mistaken identity. These are the poisons that we can all be dosed with before we know who we most essentially are.
If I get attached to my feelings of hate, my thoughts and words have to maintain that view, articulate it and I pass it freely around through my actions, my speech, and my “vibe”. On the other hand, we are all endowed with the ability to know spaciousness, openness and be awake to interdependence, i.e. that my “self” is composed of “non-self elements” as Thich Nhat Hanh phrases it. We don’t need to convince anyone with words when we express an open mind and heart, in our bearing. We share the experience immediately with whomever we meet, through the quality of our presence, wordlessly.
At a time like this, and always, may we share the patience and kindness that flows as true freedom. The freedom that comes with knowing who we truly are.
❤️ Mushin