Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World

May I recognize my limits compassionately, just as I recognize the limitations of others.

I care about your pain yet cannot control it.

I’ve learned that to continue to be worthwhile to myself and others, I need to be revitalized by finding a place of peace, over and over again.

In the moment, we’re always entering that unknown. And we do what we do, because it’s what we feel we need to do. But that is quite a task. So we keep connecting to something that will energize us and keep us going—our values, a vision of life as it might look, those who have come before us, and one another.

This application of mindfulness is distinct from intently focusing on developing concentration or one-pointedness. It works with cultivating the broader awareness, the kind of “network looking,” the clear comprehension (sampajanna) we’ve been looking at.

It’s important to keep track of the vastness of an issue, but working to try to change things for one person, or one set of people, isn’t nothing.

We may, through force of habit, disparage ourselves by considering our actions to be inadequate or resign ourselves to their seeming mediocrity, but we can’t possibly know the ultimate result of what we do.

A systems approach helps shift us from formulaic, mechanical responses to issues to fluid responses that see the interconnected and constantly changing elements that keep emerging.

The sati part (mindfulness) is sometimes called bare attention, a single-pointed awareness of what is happening to us and in us, without falling sway to interpretation, to holding on or pushing away.