Ralph De La Rosa - Dont Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

If you are fallingdive.

Joseph Campbell

Samsara davanala nada lida lokah. Being caught up in this world is like sleeping in a forest fire. These were the first words from my lips each morning during my brief foray into Vedic monasticism. Fresh out of a cold shower at 4 a.m., wed gather in the temple room to sing the mangal aarthi (or most auspicious ceremony in Sanskrit). Its striking that this celebratory, devotional ritual opens with such a grim admissionthat the forest fires of crisis (be they personal or global) are not only inherent in this life but that they become so normalized that we can fall asleep in them. Yet, its only a matter of time before a burning ember lands on our pillow.

The mangal aarthi is far from a manifesto of cynicism, though. This particular stanza is intended to incite a liberating sense of urgency. It connotes, Seeing this, we must refuse to rest on our laurels. We must rise. We must find the path home. We must make sure no one is left behind. We cannot put this off until tomorrow. Its a call to confront the status quo of our lives. A needed kick in the arse for a somnambulistic human race. It points us toward a secret truth known to the ancient yogis and meditatorsthat the trouble and disaster inherent in this life can become an endless wellspring of inspiration when we know how to meet it. The old-schoolers knew about a door to freedom that opens when we turn toward our distress and its sources rather than away from them. They also knew that this was not a religious or sectarian truth but a universal one that belongs to us all.

The devotional hymn, or kirtan, goes on to speak of an ocean of mercy that is capable of extinguishing the heat of the suffering world. It tells us that such a boon could only be delivered through the strength of intelligent self-inquiry combined with courageous, compassionate action. The ocean of mercy is formed by our willingness to embody a better waya deeper way, a daringly heartfelt way, a humane way both fierce and tender in its approach. It is then made manifest when we stand for and enact that very way in the world. The verse, then, frames meditation and wakeful living not as a set of personal stress-reduction techniques but as a systemic approach to life, one that is capable of informing our responses to the most calamitous of situations. The verse frames meditation as a form of disaster preparedness.

The disaster, my friends, is here.

Like sleeping in a forest fire. I appreciate the disruptive honesty of this phrase now more than ever. Our world is burning, being ravaged by the gross misuse of power right before our eyes. At the time of this writing, three-quarters of the way into 2019, weve had more mass shootings than days of the year in the United States. Record-breaking climate disasters abound with increasing frequency amid the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency. Approximately fifteen thousand undocumented immigrant children sit in over-crowded cagesalone, traumatized, separated from their loved onesin some two hundred for-profit detention centers in unsanitary and unlivable conditions. White nationalists in openly racist organizations have not only come out of the closet, theyre being retweeted and referred to as very fine people by the president of the United States. Working poor and middle-class families continue to struggle mightily while violence, police brutality, and drug addiction soar in impoverished, disproportionately black and Latinx communities.