Our most fundamental spiritual commitment as evolving souls is to honor human diversity. If we can’t aim to treat everyone with respect and compassion no matter how fundamental our differences are, we’ll be held back in our journeys by that attachment to separateness. 

Note that I wrote “aim to.” Getting it right every time is impossible. And the love I am talking about needs to start with ourselves. Faced with offenses against human kindness, hard, miserable feelings naturally arise. We have to forgive ourselves – and to try to forgive others. We have to get back to “aiming.”

Like many of you, I am heartbroken, angry and fearful about the recent American election. At a practical level, I don’t plan to give up. I don’t plan to cope with the hurt by taking refuge in some dissociated state of trying not to care or to feel. I’ll spend the rest of my days on earth fighting in my own way for fairness, kindness, inclusiveness, and a viable human future. 

That’s my outward commitment. Here’s my inward one.

There’s a simple saying I once heard from a Buddhist teacher. It’s helped me to keep my balance when I am faced with stormy, difficult emotions: Take what arises as the path. Whatever happens, it’s always a chance to work on yourself. It’s always the path. 

This is never about rationalization or a “flight into light.” It’s about a commitment to being vulnerable. Emphatically, it doesn’t take the hurt way. But it affirms our fundamental belief as spiritual seekers that nothing happens randomly, that the universe is an incubator of higher consciousness, and that whatever happens can be turned into an opportunity to work on ourselves.

With the recent election, I find myself pulled into a vortex of awful feelings. I’m torn between murderous fantasies and the urge to not feel anything at all. But if I try, I can still find a place of equilibrium, perspective, and even peace in myself too. That takes effort and I can’t sustain it – I can only experience it in glimpses before I am pulled back down into the hell-worlds. But I know what I am looking at: it’s the Higher Ground. 

Even misery can be used as a path to getting there. It can even accelerate the process, just because of grim necessity.

If you’re hurting, I hope these thoughts might grant you a few moments of peace before we return to our sacred work.