Continuing to Explore "Wise Hope" with Jean Haley This Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

Last week Jane talked about “wise hope.” Roshi Joan Halifax describes it as the “radical uncertainty” that comes from acknowledging that we cannot know what will happen in the future. 

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of impermanence…. as well as the truth of suffering— both its existence and the possibility of its transformation, for better or for worse.

With the Presidential election less than three months away, I can see both the wisdom in this approach and the difficulty in practicing it. My mind is easily consumed with scenarios about the future, some scary and some exhilarating, even though I know they’re illusory.  

Times like these are where the rubber hits the road in dharma practice. Ajahn Chah said “when you can’t go up, down, or anywhere, then your practice really begins.” Wise hope asks of us that we not go anywhere, that we stay right here --- with all its messiness and uncertainty -- so that we can choose suffering over non-suffering in the next moment. So that we can be free.

Angel Kyodo Williams, a Zen teacher, activist, and writer, writes 

Outcomes are not our business. We don’t get to decide the outcomes. The quest for certainty, for purity, is all bound up in white supremacy. This quest for having the answer, knowing exactly how it’s going to unfold, being able to control, to dominate – it’s dominator culture. Free yourself. Get yourself out of that. Because if you’re not working to get out, it’s got you.  

If you’re committed, if you are on fire, if you want to change what’s happening in this country, then rout out the thing that is stuck in you. 

These are powerful words. (If you want to read more, you can find them at https://www.lionsroar.com/your-liberation-is-on-the-line/.) Please join us this Sunday as we share our wisdom, offer support, and perhaps acknowledge what’s stuck in us.  As Angel Kyodo Williams says, none of us are free until we’re all free.

All are welcome. Registration and Zoom information available here.

With metta (loving-kindness),
Minneapolis Insight