Judge Kavanaugh vs Dr Ford

As I watch the political drama over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination playing out on the American stage, I am saddened by how polarized we are.

You might think that as a woman and a survivor of sexual assault, I would be on ‘Team Ford.’ While I definitely see why so many of my sisters are angry and up in arms over what is going on, I refuse to choose sides because to do so is to condone the circus that has arisen, and to perpetuate the divide that separates us as genders and as a nation.

We seem to have a society filled with men who think nothing of objectifying and abusing women. This has been brought out into the light with shocking clarity in recent months.

While we absolutely do need to hold abusers responsible for their actions, I am more interested in getting to the root of the problem so that we can shift the culture in a meaningful way. What are we doing such that so many of our otherwise upstanding young men think, feel and behave this way?

What are the causes and conditions contributing to this epidemic?

Clearly something is going on at a systemic level. If we can figure this out, perhaps the next generation won’t be struggling with the same problems.

How can we do this? We need to be willing to stop and look deeply at what we prioritize as a culture, what messages we send to our young people, what skills we give (or don’t give) them, and how wide our own circle of compassion is.

Judge Kavanaugh could be any man and Dr. Ford could be any woman. He is actually serving a valuable role in teaching us about what we are creating in our boys, and there’s a chance he is also a victim in some ways. Let me explain.

Is There Really a Winner?

Men are getting a bad rap right now, and rightly so to some extent as unchecked masculinity has caused serious destruction around the world. It can be easy to forget that men also are complex creatures whom our society has led astray. They are pressurized by the media and by many institutions and families to fit a certain mold.

Male role models are often entertainers or sports figures whose claim to fame is power (often violent power), physical prowess, aggression and dominance. Implicit in this narrative is sexual conquest over women.

In a 2018 Times opinion essay, author Michael Ian Black writes:

“The past 50 years have redefined what it means to be female in America. Girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone. They’ve absorbed the message: They’re outperforming boys in school at every level. But it isn’t just about performance. To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions.

Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It’s no longer enough to “be a man” — we no longer even know what that means.”

The predominant messages of the culture for men goes something like this:

Boys don’t cry. Man up. Be tough. Make lots of money. Drink a beer. Get some pussy, don’t be a pussy.

Judge Kavanaugh is giving us the gift of showing us the shadow side of our culture and that no one is above absorbing this message of toxic masculinity. Not many of us have the strength of character at age 17 to stand up and reject conventional wisdom.

Add a few beers, peer pressure, and a brain that is not yet fully developed, and we get a situation like the one we are hearing about where there are no winners, only losers.

It must be incredibly difficult and confusing for a man to receive all these messages and then to navigate a world where women are stepping into their own power. In the current era of #metoo, most men are smart enough to suppress certain words and actions, but previous decades were different, and there is no way to police thoughts.

I know many of you are angry! Especially women who have been abused in the past (which is far too many of us). But holding on to anger is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

A Few Good Men

Rather than spending our collective energy vilifying and dehumanizing an individual, what if we came together to calmly and maturely talk about how we can rewrite the story about what it means to be a ‘good man’ and to talk seriously about how we are raising our boys, and what conversations we are having (or not having) with them?

What if we instituted social-emotional intelligence/mindfulness programs in all our schools which normalize all emotions and teach ways to handle strong emotions so that everyone (male or female or somewhere in between) has the capacity to handle whatever arises? These are skills that can be taught.

What if we had open conversations, starting at a young age, about expectations, possibilities, stereotypes, and the highest vision of what might be possible for any individual human?

Perhaps then we wouldn’t have prisons filled with men who are raging because they’ve never been given permission to feel sadness, and therapists’ offices filled with women feeling guilty and ashamed over their anger.

Boys are the ones shooting people up in schools. Boys are the ones, for the most part, who are dealing drugs, committing violent crimes, raping and stealing.

Our boys are broken. We have to take some responsibility for that.They are confused and scared. We need to give boys permission to be vulnerable and to express their feelings. I am not advocating for excusing abusers! But we need to approach the problem on both the back-end and the front-end.

The Mindful, Compassionate Revolution

Mental illness is rising in both boys and girls. We must have compassion for each other as we’ve all been wounded. Turning this into a ‘gotcha’ moment is a lost opportunity for healing and growth.

Only when we can face such challenges with compassion and introspection rather than reactivity and blame will we be able to truly heal as individuals and as a collective.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said,
“A great nation is a compassionate nation.”      

Mindfulness helps us to see through the illusion, to see ourselves in the other and to extend our circle of compassion out to include all living beings; to not get caught up in the drama but to observe with equanimity and to discern the best way to move forward, keeping in mind the interconnectedness of all.

Perhaps the most complex concept the Buddha taught is that of ‘No Self.’ According to him, we don’t exist in a fixed or static way, but as an ever changing mix of physical sensations, feelings, perceptions, responses and the consciousness which flows through us experiencing it all.

The sense of self comes when we grasp at or identify with any of the above and create a separate self we call “I, me, mine’ which we define in many ways, including gender and political beliefs, and then create suffering for ourselves when someone threatens that sense of self.

One master said: “Your identities make all your problems. Discover what is beyond them, the delight of the timeless, the deathless.”

Mindfulness expert Jack Kornfield explains it this way:

“Deep meditation can untangle the sense of identity. There are, in fact, many ways in which we can realize the emptiness of self. When we are silent and attentive, we can sense directly how we can never truly possess anything in the world. Clearly we do not possess outer things. We are in some relationship with our cars, our home, our family, our jobs, but whatever that relationship is, it is “ours” only for a short time. In the end, things, people, or tasks die or change or we lose them. Nothing is exempt.

As we open and empty ourselves, we come to experience an interconnectedness, the realization that all things are joined and conditioned in an interdependent arising. Each experience and event contains all others. The teacher depends on the student, the airplane depends on the sky.

When we truly sense this interconnectedness and the emptiness out of which all beings arise, we find liberation and a spacious joy. Discovering emptiness brings a lightness of heart, flexibility, and an ease that rests in all things. The more solidly we grasp our identity, the more solid our problems become. Once I asked a delightful old Sri Lankan meditation master to teach me the essence of Buddhism. He just laughed and said three times, “No self, no problem.”

Don’t I Have a Right To Be Angry?

Of course! Anger serves a useful purpose and some say if we aren’t angry, we aren’t paying attention. The problem comes when we don’t transform our anger before speaking or acting.

From a Thich Nhat Hanh monk:

“As a collective energy, fear and anger can be very destructive. We make the wrong decisions if we base it on fear, anger, and wrong perception. Those emotions cloud our mind. So the first thing in the practice that we learn from the Buddhist tradition is to come back and take care of our emotion. We use the mindfulness to recognize it. People are so convinced that anger and all this energy will produce change. But in fact it’s very destructive, because you’re opposing. Opposition wastes energy. It’s not healing.

Emotions can be good. Passion can be good, and compassion is very passionate. But compassion doesn’t waste energy. It includes and it understands; it’s more clear.

Compassion is not sitting in your room; it’s actually very active and engaging.

Trump is not an alien who came from another planet. We produced Trump, so we are co-responsible. Our culture, our society, made him. We love to pick somebody and make them the object. But it’s deeper than that. We have to see him inside of us.

We’re shocked because we found out there’s a member of our family that we’ve been ignoring. It’s time to listen and really look at our family.

We are afraid to engage, but you can dialogue and debate. It requires a lot of practice to sit there and listen, and not judge so you can understand.

Engage in protest, but not from a place of anger. You need to express your opinion, and you need to go out there and say this is wrong. But don’t do it by saying hateful things. In a way, we Buddhists look more at energy than personality. That helps us be wiser.”

No-Self is Not Apathy

Some people use the concept of no-self as a “spiritual bypass” and a way of avoiding getting engaged in the world. This is misguided and undermines genuine spiritual development. Deep practice helps us engage in even more skillful ways.

All great peacemakers have come from this place, and we can feel how their energy and efficacy is different: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi.

I Want to Take Action

You can take the exact same action but with a different intention in your heart. One is skillful, and one is doubling down on the problem.

It is impossible to transmit all these teachings through a blog post, so I suggest reading Thich Nhat Hanh or Pema Chodron (as a starting point) if you want to learn more. The inner transformation only comes through engaging in our own inner work, preferably with the guidance of a skilled teacher.

Someday we may look back and thank Judge Kavanaugh for being the catalyst who helps usher in a new age of compassion, that redefines healthy masculinity and what it means to be a ‘good man’.

Let us begin.

Compassionately yours,

Erin

PS- If you want to cultivate some equanimity and mindfulness for yourself, you can sign up for my FREE 7-day mindfulness challenge here.

I work one-on-one with people doing individual coaching to help you find your inner peace. Click here for more information.

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