Image by Gerd Altmann 

In this Article:

• Why is self-care crucial in today’s fast-paced world?
• How can self-care help manage life's constant demands?
• What are the benefits of prioritizing self-care for mental peace?
• How does self-care contribute to more effective work and personal life?
• Practical tips for integrating self-care into your daily routine.

Balancing Life’s Demands: There’s Only So Much We Can Do

y Peter Coyote.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.  ~ ThomasMerton

In the same spirit of helping yourself first with an oxygen mask, we need to consider self-care. We’re awake twelve to eighteen hours a day. There’s a certain amount that is required of us every day if we are going to treat our lives respectfully with the attentiveness they deserve.

Maybe it’s doing the laundry, caring for children, or being available to them. These pressures never disappear and are never done. As soon as you get the laundry washed, dried, folded, and put away, you’re already filling the laundry hamper for the following week.

The question then becomes not What are we going to do as much as How are we going to do what we must? In the spirit of calmness, with full attention and humor at our own failures, or being blown like a leaf in the wind, constantly interrupted by random thoughts and impulses?

If I were a Yanomami Indian living in the Amazon, when gold-miners and timber cutters invaded my land, threatening my home, I would have to put my ordinary life on hold. I would have to go on war footing to protect my land and my way of life. That’s precisely what Indigenous people are doing in the Amazon and at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where Native people are resisting the imposition of an oil pipeline crossing their land.

Chevron lost a $9.5 billion lawsuit for poisoning an area the size of Rhode Island in the Ecuadorian Amazon (and simply refused to pay the fine). Numerous American corporations are invading Indigenous tribal areas to extract their exotic timbers and precious metal like gold, silver, palladium, rhodium, platinum, and tellurium “required” by our cell phones and computers for exports for their profits and our comforts.

These efforts are degrading the environment, threatening the lives and cultures of Indigenous peoples, but it is difficult for us to connect our beloved cell phones and computers with this destruction. There is nothing about Buddhist practice that demands that we be nice about this.

If You Want To Do Something

If you feel deeply that you want to do something, before you do anything, think deeply about what you can do and the best way to maximize your efforts. I have a list of things that I can do. But that list is overwhelmed by the scale of the list of things that I can’t do.

I can’t read every political email begging $8 for a political candidate. I can’t read every letter saying, “If you just send us $100, we can do it.” I have received ten fundraising requests from a candidate to whom I once sent money.

What I’m trying to get at is that neither myself, nor the Indigenous Yanomamis, nor Native Americans nor African Americans can live on a permanent war footing without destroying our lives to some degree by surrendering to bitterness, frustration, rage, or despair.

Even people who are on a war footing—Ukrainians at this moment—still discover and foster pauses where they can sing, rest, walk outside, and play with their children. These are not idle concerns. They are vital to our health, and if we want our solutions to be healthy we have to be healthy to conceive them.

The Pace at which We May Save the World

The pace and scale at which we live will be the rate at which we may save the world. That pace should be measured by determining a pace and constancy that we can keep going indefinitely. It’s important to search our psyches and inventory our needs and priorities to discover our limits. Those limits can be expanded by bathing in meditation and by exploring your fundamental intention and then practicing it with constancy. What do I most care about constantly, just like breathing?

When you align yourself with your fundamental intention you have embarked on “a path with a heart,” and your life will probably go well.

In my experience, Buddhism expresses the largest intention that includes all options I’ve ever encountered. That’s because absolutely nothing—human or nonhuman—is excluded from Buddha-nature.

Finding the path with a heart and adhering to it as consciously as we can, consciously dedicating those free moments left after caring for children, family, community—all the myriad responsibilities that we have—will strengthen the boundaries of a dignified, orderly, productive life, the Grand Story that Buddha has introduced us to. If we’re not going to burn out and quit, we’ll have to set a pace and parameters that we can observe for the rest of our lives.

One of the deepest lessons of my life began at ten years old, the first summer my dad put me to work under our ranch foreman, Jim Clancy. Every day I worked for eight hours with Jim and our hands, Walt Poliskewicz and Bill Jelinek.

What I learned from those men was pace, standards, and constancy. They did everything at the same speed and to the same degree of thoroughness. They worked, took a break, had a beer, made repairs, rolled a smoke, played on the local softball team—all at the same relaxed, concentrated pace. This was their life, and they could not afford to burn out.

As a culture, we appear to be in ceaseless, restless motion, impelled by our anxiety to “get enough” done.

In the early 1980s, James Carse was invited to participate with a group of mathematicians to investigate game theory—the mathematics and probabilities of winning conflicts or minimizing losses when you cannot win. Carse was not a mathematician, so he developed other ways of expressing himself. Here is the entire first chapter he published in a book titled Finite and Infinite Games:

“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

There are serious implications for everyday life in this simple chapter. For instance, sporting events are finite games, played to be won. However, without rules and norms they cannot exist. So, if a basketball player should suddenly seize the ball in both hands and race down court, people would be outraged, because they understand that the difficulty of avoiding interceptions while dribbling is one of the ways we judge the skill of participants, The difficulty handicaps everyone equally and makes it a game.

However, the United States of America is an infinite game. We play to keep the game going. Prior to President Trump, we never suggested ending the game when a president’s term was over. However, the same necessity for rules about norms and laws apply.

If players go to any length to win, and seek advantage by violating the rules and norms, they are ending or at least threatening the game of America.

In politics, conventional wisdom dictates that those who do not pursue every means to win are not trying hard enough and are somehow violating their responsibility to their constituents. They are overlooking that their argument never considers that they might be violating their responsibility to the game of America itself.

Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but if our goal is to keep the infinite game—humanity, the planet, our nation—alive, it can only be done within the limits and strictures of rules and norms.

It is only today, after nearly fifty years of submitting to the rigors and forms of Zen practice, that those lessons have permeated my muscles and marrow; where my ideas about myself have softened to the degree that whispers of intuition can intercede and restrain my often overbold impulses and return me to plumb. Failing some similar understanding, our public life begins to resemble gerbils running on an exercise wheel, mistaking our effort as progress and deluding ourselves that we are getting somewhere.

When I read Thomas Merton’s quote today, I can see that he’s reminding me of the wisdom and sanity in understanding that there’s only so much we can do.

In closing, I want to share one last quote to consider. It was written in the mid-eighth century CE by Shantideva, an Indian Buddhist monk, philosopher, and poet whose reflections on the overall structure of Buddhist moral commitments reach a breadth and theoretical power that is hard to find elsewhere in Indian thought. He was a major influence on Tibetan Buddhism, and one of his two major works, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, is described by the Dalai Lama as his favorite religious work. Shantideva says:

When one sees one’s own mind to be attached or repulsed, then one should neither act nor speak, but remain still like a piece of wood.
When my mind is haughty, sarcastic, full of conceit and arrogance, ridiculing, evasive, and deceitful, when it is inclined to boast, or when it is contemptuous of others, abusive, and irritable, then I should remain still like a piece of wood.
When my mind seeks material gain, honor, and fame, or when it seeks attendants and service, then I will remain still like a piece of wood.
When my mind is averse to the interests of others and seeks my own self-interest, or when it wishes to speak out of a desire for an audience, then I will remain still like a piece of wood.
When it is impatient, indolent, timid, impudent, garrulous, or biased in my own favor, then I will remain still like a piece of wood.

Remaining still like a piece of wood is an apt description of zazen meditation. What I appreciate about this quote is that it catalogues so precisely much of the content that crosses our human minds. It doesn’t pretend to be less than fully human and does not require that of us. What it does do is urge us to contain our negative thoughts and urges.

We’ve all experienced these thoughts and feelings; we all know what those words mean. We’ve all caught ourselves swirling in mental realms that are not necessarily wholesome and positive.

Shantideva reminds us that we can check everything, keep it all behind our teeth and within the stillness of body. We don’t have to overreact because someone frightened us when they cut us off. It probably wasn’t a personal insult, but we’d rather feel powerful (aggressive) than frightened.

To stay stock-still is a kind of discipline that comes from being concentrated—which is to say, too balanced to be thrown off your game. Suzuki-roshi referred to such a state as “being the boss of everything.” When you are the boss of your internal states, when you can hold whatever arises with equanimity, being neither repelled nor attracted by it, you are the boss of everything.

Buddhist practice is based on the disciplines of patience and constancy. To live and practice in the world (as opposed to in a monastery) one must be very patient. Ordinary humans are impulsive, angry, vengeful, deluded, and change slowly.

When you see through those feelings and impulses and understand that within this world and those imperfections enlightenment exists; when we realize that human thoughts, feelings, impulses, sensations, and consciousness are as transparent and empty as soap bubbles, we still must develop patience to deal with the many who may not yet have considered or experienced this.

We are all stuck within this delusional world. There is no other place to be. Buddhists included, so we should be cautious about insisting that our way is the best way. If we are going to be helpful to others, we have to help people see for themselves, and most of what they will see is the way we behave and comport ourselves. We can’t hurry them along by insistence . . . or ourselves. We can remain still.

Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Inner Traditions International.

Article Source:

BOOK: Zen in the Vernacular

Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is
by Peter Coyote.

In this engaging guide to Zen Buddhism, award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote helps us peer beneath the Japanese gift-wrapping of Zen teachings to reveal the fundamental teachings of the Buddha and show how they can be applied to contemporary daily life. 

Revealing the practical usefulness of Buddhist philosophy and practice, Zen in the Vernacular shows how Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of everyday life.

For more info and/or to order this book, click hereclick here.  Also available as an Audiobook and as a Kindle edition.

About the Author

Peter Coyote is an award-winning actor, author, director, screenwriter, and narrator who has worked with some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. Recognized for his narration work, he narrated the PBS series The Pacific Century, for which he won an Emmy award, as well as eight Ken Burns documentaries, including The Roosevelts, for which he won a second Emmy.

In 2011 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and in 2015 received “transmission” from his teacher, making him an independent Zen teacher. He is the author of several books.