Week Sixty-One: Moving Away from Discouragement

Watching Oprah the other day, on a rare Friday when I was able to be at home doing paperwork, the special guest was Maya Angelou, on the occasion of her 74th birthday. As I listened to Dr. Angelou speak, I found myself moved, nourished, and inspired. One of the subjects she discussed was hope, how to go forward when we experience trauma or deep discouragement in our lives – individually or collectively. Her comments got me to thinking about how easy it is to be drawn into discouragement by the barrage of negative news we receive every day about national and international crises currently unfolding at home and abroad and how active we must be in responding to it.

Part of my response to discouragement has been doing the tonglen meditation I described a number of weeks ago (see the Meditations Page for a detailed description of this meditation). Another response I use is to look for beauty around me, usually the beauty found in nature. Or, I might take myself to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the beauty of the creative artistic expression of people across time and from different cultures.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to be curious about those sources of inspiration and hope that you find most effectively help you move away from discouragement. Most importantly, the experiment invites you to work with these sources of inspiration actively, to use them as you would vitamins or food, to fuel a state of mind that is able to elicit a sense of possibility, even in the face of present-day grief, sorrow, anger, or concern for the future. Be sure to allow mixed feelings, as they are also part of the natural flow of awareness in daily life.

The goal here isn't to eradicate the fear, sadness, or powerlessness we may feel from time to time in the presence of global events and circumstances that feel beyond our control. The goal is to offer ourselves the benefit of remembering that we can still hope, and act from that hope, in our daily interactions with ourselves and others. As you do this experiment, notice how your responses to yourself and the world around you shift as you move in and out of discouragement and a sense of possibility. As always, there's no right answer here, no way you are supposed to be or feel. Instead, there's another opportunity to explore how it is to be you in the world in a more conscious and skillful way.

Click Here for Other Weeks in This Series:

Home Page