NPR Archives - Minds Valley

Maui wildfires have a huge mental health toll : NPR

mindsvalley99 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:08:13 +0000

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. visits a distribution center at Lahaina Crossing. A deadly wildfire destroyed the city of Lahaina, Maui.

Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. visits a distribution center at Lahaina Crossing. A deadly wildfire destroyed the city of Lahaina, Maui.

Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR

LAHAINA, Hawaii — The scale of the physical damage in the historic center of Lahaina is clear in its apocalyptic landscape of rubble, ash and debris.

But the scale of the inner damage can be seen in the 5-year-old girl that Maui’s chief mental health administrator John Oliver saw the other day. The girl came with her mother into the Lahaina community health clinic, next to the main burn zone, clutching a green and purple plushy stuffed animal. She seemed withdrawn and afraid.

“I got down to her level and I asked her name and how she was doing, asked about her stuffed animal. And she just offered up that ‘I’m sad.’ And I said ‘I’m so sorry, why are you sad?’ And she said ‘I’m sad because I saw a lot of dead bodies.'”

Oliver told the girl how very sorry he was, and tried to reassure her saying ‘I want you to know that you’re safe now.’

“She smiled and we continued to play for a little bit and she said ‘you know I really miss my friend.’

I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’ and we talked a little more.”

Soon the psychiatrist came in and the mom told Oliver that when her daughter says she misses her friend, it’s her best friend. And she died in the wildfire.

Counselors here describe these early days of disaster mental health treatment as a kind of triage, psychological first aid for anguish that runs the spectrum of symptoms from deep sadness and sleeplessness to exhaustion, even breakdowns.

Wildfire wreckage is seen Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii.

Rick Bowmer/AP

hide caption

toggle caption

Rick Bowmer/AP

Wildfire wreckage is seen Thursday, Aug. 10, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii.

Rick Bowmer/AP

“They’ve lost family, they’ve lost their pets. They’ve lost everything,” says south Maui clinical social worker Debbie Scott. She says for some who had to flee the flames, the initial shock is now giving way to wrenching anxiety, nightmares, anxiety, depression and sometimes anger, as the depth of the trauma settles in.

Survivors are still dealing with physical challenges like where they’ll be living in the coming weeks and months. But size of the emotional and psychological toll here is coming into sharper focus as the need for mental health support is growing. Mental health administrator Oliver calls it “the worst mental health disaster in our state’s modern history.”

“There’s a heaviness in the air that is — we’re destroyed,” social worker Scott says. “We’re not going to have all the answers right now.” She paused her private practice to help counsel the displaced at a community center in South Maui that’s been turned into a temporary shelter. “We’re coping.”

Evacuees at the south Maui shelter where Scott is working this week were offered the chance to move from shelter cots to much nicer accommodations in hotel rooms or Airbnb apartments. But several people did not want to go, Scott says, including an older man who felt safer in the shelter. Both of his hands were fully bandaged from serious burns. Scott went over and sat with him.

“I called him by his name and I said ‘listen let’s see about what we need to do to make sure you feel safe enough to get on that bus'” to a better temporary home.

Sometimes it’s the little things: he wanted his lost flip flops. Scott found them near the bathrooms. And it helped.

“It took some work but I did get him on that bus. And he was thankful to have his bags and he sure was thankful to have his flip flops. He needed his slippers, that was his need.”

Compounding the grief here, hundreds are still listed as unaccounted for. In addition, people can’t identify their lost loved ones. Only a few remains have been ID-ed so far. And some may never be found.

“If you break it down to one word we are trying to give people hope,” says 17-year veteran American Red Cross disaster mental health manager Stu Coulson. “Right now it’s all about active listening, empathy and trying to connect people with services.”

Ken Alba, a Lahaina, Hawaii, resident, carries a bag of ice at a food and supply distribution center set up in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Lahaina, Hawaii, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023. The blazes incinerated the historic island community of Lahaina and killed more than 100 people.

Jae C. Hong/AP

hide caption

toggle caption

Jae C. Hong/AP

Coulson has helped survivors navigate mental health needs in multiple, large disasters including the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., which until recently was the deadliest wildfire in modern history with at least 85 killed. The volunteer mobilized to Maui from Iowa as soon as scope of this disaster became apparent. “It’s the most devastating trauma I’ve experienced let alone that the clients I’m working with have experienced,” he says.

State and federal officials are trying to mobilize a fresh influx of mental health clinicians to help the some 65 clinicians already on the ground here, Maui behavioral health administrator Oliver says. To make that easier, Hawaii’s governor issued an emergency order temporarily waiving the state-licensing requirement for counseling.

But the need, and the hurt, are enormous. And getting care, and in some cases psychiatric medication, to the displaced scattered across the island is a mammoth task. Scott and other counselors here say in these early days of acute stress it’s not about intensive therapy, it’s more about listening and offering practical tools for comfort and care.

“Whether that is breathing, whether that is progressive muscle relaxation, whether that is mindfulness and meditative practices, just sitting, stretching, or talking story, making jokes,” she says.

Therapy animals, including psychotherapist Annie Vance’s black lab, is another tool getting deployed to help people cope

“This is my handsome boy and his name is Rio. I say he’s smart, smart and stubborn, he’s my best friend,” Vance says, introducing her nine-year-old dog. Vance lost her home in Lahaina in the wildfire. She and Rio are now volunteering at shelters and counseling Maui hotel employees affected by the fire.

“I’ve taken him to my sessions and people just love him. We get talking about the dog and we get talking about how are you and what happened to you,” she says, “and it gives a nice entrance into the conversations that need to be had.”

But who counsels the counselors who’ve had to flee a deadly wildfire and lost their home? Vance admits both she and Rio are weary. Vance and these other mental health professionals underscore that the fire survivors will be reckoning with their wounds for a very long time.

After she recently went to buy some much-needed clothes, she says Rio gave her a forlorn look.

“I ran out of the house with the dress I had on and one other and Rio got back into the car and he gave me this look like ‘mom I just want to go home. Are we going to go home now?’ And I just looked at him and cried and I said, ‘Rio honey, I want to go home too, but we don’t have a home anymore. But we’ll make the best of what we’ve got.'”

And she told Rio: ‘we’ll help each other get through this.’

Source link

The post Maui wildfires have a huge mental health toll : NPR appeared first on Minds Valley.

With a simple question, Ukrainians probe mental health at a time of war : NPR

mindsvalley99 — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 16:19:31 +0000

Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska heads the country’s mental health campaign, called How Are You? She says the country is still overcoming the legacy of the Soviet era, when the government sometimes said dissidents had ‘psychiatric problems’ and locked them in mental institutions. She’s shown here meeting with students in Paris last December.

Julien de Rosa/AP

hide caption

toggle caption

Julien de Rosa/AP

KYIV, Ukraine — How are you?

In Ukraine, this question is much more than a casual conversation starter. It’s an invitation to express how you’re coping with the war.

“This question becomes like a form of love, an act of love. We ask because we understand that it’s a part of our inner therapy,” said art historian Halyna Hleba.

Hleba is one of the curators of a large art exhibit — called How Are You? — featuring scores of works created by Ukrainians since Russia launched its full-scale invasion 18 months ago.

The paintings, sketches, sculpture and video are on display at Ukrainian House, a sprawling cultural center in Kyiv. The exhibit goes well beyond art, trying to get visitors thinking — and talking — about their mental health.

Hleba wrote the words stenciled onto the wall at the beginning of the exhibit, which fills the five-story center.

“We have changed and adapted to the realities of the war,” Hleba wrote. “Psychologists say it is required to accept the current reality of war because remaining in constant tension and states of shock and stress is counterproductive in the long run.”

A painting by a Ukrainian artist depicts the war at an exhibition at Ukrainian House, a cultural center in Kyiv. The exhibit features works produced since the full-scale Russian invasion last year, and is part of a larger effort to encourage Ukrainians to discuss mental health issues.

Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

Kateryna Malofieieva/NPR

Ukraine can calculate the agony of war in many ways: lives lost, homes destroyed, families turned into refugees.

Yet there’s also trauma that’s harder to measure — this collective mental health crisis the war has inflicted. Men and women, young and old, soldiers and civilians are all trying to cope.

Ukraine’s First Lady leads the campaign

The wife of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Olena Zelenska, leads this national How Are You? campaign.

In a recent podcast, she said, “I am very pleased with the words and the tone of this program — kindly and friendly. It’s not a paternalistic approach.”

A painting at the ‘How Are You?’ art exhibit in Kyiv. The cell phone depicts an air raid alert that Ukrainians receive when a Russian air strike is underway. The background shows a famous World War II photo of Soviet troops capturing Berlin.

Greg Myre/NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

Greg Myre/NPR

She notes some Ukrainians, particularly the older generation, are still wary of raising mental health issues. This can be traced directly to the Soviet era, when the government often claimed political dissidents had “psychiatric problems” and locked them up in mental institutions.

“This fear still exists,” she said. “But people need to understand that it is no longer the case. It’s different now. That’s why we need to inform people, and help them understand about mental health care. It’s not scary.”

More Ukrainians are seeking help, said psychologist Oksana Korolovych, adding that many therapists like herself are being overwhelmed with requests for treatment.

For Korolovych, the war’s trauma is personal. She lost her husband to a Russian missile strike last year, just days after he joined the military.

“Ukrainians have been living in a permanent state of bereavement for the past 18 months,” she said. “When I was experiencing bereavement, I lived through the experience with other widows who also lost their husbands.”

She’s also been surprised by some of the responses she’s received from patients.

Anecdotally, she says, more married patients are now coming to her saying they want a divorce.

Also, some Ukrainians have been emboldened by the way the country has responded to the Russian invasion. In some cases, they’ve shaken off past feelings of helplessness.

“We are learning how to get out of this position as a victim. We are learning how to ask for help,” she said.

An online test for anxiety and depression

A recently formed Ukrainian company, Anima, is trying to nudge this process forward.

Nueroscientist Sergiy Danylov (left) and Roman Havrysh are co-founders of Anima, a company that has developed an online test designed to screen for signs anxiety or depression. They say the test can be used by civilians or members of the military, and is already being used by some military psychologists.

Greg Myre/NPR

hide caption

toggle caption

Greg Myre/NPR

“I just wanted to bring it to the wider public and to diagnose depression and anxiety as widespread problems,” said Roman Havrysh, one of the co-founders.

Havrysh and his business partner, neuroscientist Sergiy Danylov, have created a rapid online test for screening both civilians or soldiers.

The person sits in front of a computer as images appear in rapid succession, two at a time, side by side.

One image is mundane — an empty chair or a desk. The other is graphic and often disturbing — a malnourished child, a dead body on the battlefield, a cobra about to strike.

The sharply contrasting images appear for just a second, and are then replaced by two more. By measuring eye movements to the millisecond, the test seeks to determine a person’s unguarded reaction.

“You can’t lie with your eyeball,” said Havrysh. “We track it. We have those tiny, millisecond windows where you don’t control, consciously, your eye, and we track it.”

There’s also a multiple choice questionnaire. The visual test and the questionnaire each provide a score from zero to 100. They say the higher the scores, the more likely a person may have anxiety or depression.

The founders emphasize this is not a diagnosis. They compare it to a blood pressure monitor you might use at home. If you consistently get high readings, you may want to seek treatment.

“People can Google us easily and come to the platform and test themselves,” Havrysh said. “We also distribute it through military psychologists and hospitals working with military personnel to help them diagnose incoming patients.”

In one battalion, the test has been used for several months to help screen troops. During this time, 40 of the 600 soldiers were temporarily taken out of combat roles.

Most returned after several days, though a few were reassigned to non-combat positions.

Danylov, the neuroscientist, said troops need an elevated level of vigilance while in combat. However, he added, “You can’t be in this state of hypervigilance for a long time.”

Troops who remain in combat for too long become vulnerable to an anxiety disorder, he said.

“When they return home, two or three months later they may start having panic attacks,” he said.

A range of approaches

The military is also organizing peer-to-peer discussions among troops after they go through a combat rotation.

“If we have a quite intensive battle, we understand that we need to have a decompression, or debriefing, for our soldiers,” said Dr. Vladyslav Syniagovskyi, a military psychiatrist.

“Inside of this group, we are discussing the most traumatic events during battle, he added. “We found a lot that is very useful for mental health. It’s a first step for treatment and for healing.”

He says preliminary data suggests perhaps 15 percent of Ukrainian troops suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress — a figure roughly in line with studies of U.S. troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oksana Korolovych, the psychologist, believes the figure is even higher for Ukraine’s civilians. But she also sees some encouraging changes as the war grinds on.

“Last year, people were asking how to live through the war. Now people ask about how to live after the war. We already have a sense of victory in our consciousness,” said Korolovych.

Ukrainians, she said, are learning “how to defend borders. They’re defending physical borders on the front-line of the war, and defending personal borders in their own lives.”

Kateryna Malofieieva contributed to this report.

Greg Myre is an NPR national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.

Source link

The post With a simple question, Ukrainians probe mental health at a time of war : NPR appeared first on Minds Valley.

Dan Harris’ mindfulness journey changed his career — and life : NPR

mindsvalley99 — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 10:03:22 +0000

Dan Harris meditating.

Ten Percent Happier

hide caption

toggle caption

Ten Percent Happier

Dan Harris meditating.

Ten Percent Happier

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’m addicted to possibility.

It’s not exactly “grass-is-greener” syndrome. It’s more like the excitement that comes out of the place in between change. When you’ve altered course – and in your heart of hearts, you’re not sure if it was the best choice – there is so much possibility in all the unknowns ahead.

I’ve made a lot of changes in my life. I’ve lived in three different countries, eight U.S. cities. I’ve bounced around in all kinds of jobs: teacher, retail salesperson, bartender, news producer, war reporter, radio show host. You get the idea. At one point I was working for an NPR show called the Bryant Park Project out of New York and a recruiter from ABC News called me up. A few months later I was starting over again in a new city – Washington, D.C. – with a new company in a medium I had zero experience with – television. It was terrifying. It was also exhilarating, the newness of it all.

When I was there I met this guy named Dan Harris. Well, I didn’t really “meet” him so much as say words into a camera after he said my name. Dan was one of the anchors for ABC News at the time and it often fell to him to read the introductions to my stories on the air. We had actually met in real life a few years earlier when we were both reporters covering the religion beat – me for NPR and him for ABC. But in 2008-2009 I was the correspondent and he was the bigwig anchor who I thought was destined to sit in that chair for the rest of his career.

In 2014, Dan Harris published a memoir that was also a beginner’s guide to meditation, called 10% Happier. It became such a hit that he made a huge change himself. He launched a meditation app and started a podcast all about mindfulness, and eventually left his job at ABC to focus on this new venture full-time.

When I started this whole spiritual search, and this radio series, I knew right away that I wanted to talk with Dan. I wanted to understand what had happened to provoke such a big change in his professional life. And as someone who has, at times, fallen under the spell of change – as someone who was for many years always on the move – I wanted to understand what he has learned by sitting still.

The cover of Harris’ bestselling book that changed his career.

Ten Percent Happier

hide caption

toggle caption

Ten Percent Happier

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rachel Martin: Part of your origin story is this moment that you had on set when things started to go haywire in your brain.

Dan Harris: Yeah, I’ve been dining out on this freakout for a while. But yes, on the set of Good Morning America in 2004, on a warm June morning, I was filling in for Robin Roberts and I would come on at the top of each hour of the show and read some headlines. I had filled in for her many times before so I didn’t have any reason to foresee what was about to happen. A few seconds into my spiel, my lungs seized up, my heart rate started to rise, my mouth got dry and it became impossible for me to speak, which is very inconvenient if you’re a news anchor. And I had to bail out and toss it back to the main hosts of the show. It was just terrifying and humiliating.

Martin: So what changes did that provoke?

Harris: It’s not a neat and tidy story where I had the panic attack and then became a Buddhist. That’s not what happened. But I did make some immediate changes, one of which was that I stopped doing drugs. Part of the panic attack was fueled by the fact that after having spent many years in war zones I, very stupidly, started to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine.

I learned that even though I hadn’t been doing drugs that often, and I wasn’t high on the air, it was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for somebody who had a preexisting proclivity for anxiety and panic to have a panic attack. So I quit doing drugs, I started seeing a psychiatrist very regularly for many years and then eventually through a combination of psychotherapy and my beat as a religion reporter, I stumbled upon meditation and that made a really big difference for me.

Martin: You’ve spent many years at this point thinking about mindfulness, but it’s really changed in America — I mean it’s a huge industry now. As someone at the center of the American mindfulness movement … is mindfulness the same as Buddhism?

Harris: No.

Martin: Are you a Buddhist?

Harris: Yes.

Martin: You are?

Harris: Yes. I’m a Buddhist and mindfulness is not the same as Buddhism. Mindfulness as it’s currently practiced in the West is, in my opinion, a great thing. There are critiques of the modern mindfulness movement that I actually think have validity, and yet I still think it’s a great development, a positive development for the species, frankly.

One of the critiques is that in the West we’ve taken one of the active ingredients of Buddhism, mindfulness, and pulled it out of its original context, and that can lead to some misunderstandings. I think that’s actually true as far as it goes, but I don’t think it should doom the entire enterprise.

Mindfulness was one of the qualities of mind that the Buddha, a genius who lived 2,600 years ago, talked about to his followers. You can kind of understand mindfulness as a quality of self-awareness that allows you to see how chaotic your mind is without getting carried away by it. We have this rushing river of thoughts and urges and emotions, but we don’t have any visibility into this nonstop cacophony in our minds, and because we don’t see it clearly it just owns us most of the time. And mindfulness is a way to kind of step out of the Matrix and to see how wild the mind is – to see the contents of your consciousness so that you don’t get carried away by it.

That’s an incredibly useful thing that the Buddha talked about, and I’m glad that we’re practicing it increasingly in the West. And there’s all of this evidence to show that meditation or mindfulness meditation techniques have all of these benefits for the brain and the rest of the body, and even for our behavior. But that’s not the whole Buddhist story.

Martin: Right. So these things are separate. You can practice mindfulness and not necessarily ascribe or define yourself as an adherent to Buddhism.

Harris: Absolutely.

Martin: Is the difference then that mindfulness is Buddhism without the sacrifices that the religion mandates?

Harris: Buddhism is such an interesting thing or not-a-thing to consider. Is Buddhism a religion? Yeah. Is it a philosophy? Yeah. Is it a science of mind? Yeah. It’s so many things and I think what is true is that you can practice parts of it. So I’m a Buddhist, but I won’t sit here and pound the table and say that enlightenment and rebirth are real because I don’t have any evidence.

Buddha was very clear – this is why Buddhism appeals to skeptics like me – he was clear that we should not take anything he said at face value. The phrase he used in the ancient Indian language Pali is “ehipassiko,” meaning: Come see for yourself.

Rachel Martin and Dan Harris were once coworkers at ABC News.

Screengrab via Wayback Machine

hide caption

toggle caption

Screengrab via Wayback Machine

Rachel Martin and Dan Harris were once coworkers at ABC News.

Screengrab via Wayback Machine

Martin: As someone who’s known you from afar for a long time – I mean, you were the anchor guy who read my intros to my [weekend reporting] – this is a big evolution for you, Dan.

Harris: Yeah.

Martin: It’s a big change. But I guess I’m interested in the process by which you arrived at this point. When you were first introduced to meditation, did it take you a while to start to identify as a Buddhist?

Harris: Oh yeah. And I’d still say I’m a secular skeptic in some ways. One of my favorite descriptions of Buddhism is that it’s not a thing to believe it; it’s a thing to do. And I see Buddhism as a set of practices that help you understand fundamental truths in your bones.

What changed my mind about Buddhism was recognizing that this practice that I was doing, this practice of meditation, was rooted in this ancient tradition that had this incredible intellectual infrastructure around it. That took my secular mindfulness and made it just way more interesting.

Martin: Do you think Buddhism works in American culture?

Harris: Yeah. One of the hallmarks of Buddhism is that it adapts to any culture it enters. I think that’s largely beautiful and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is in its origin, an Asian tradition. And uh, I think one of the mistakes I think I’ve made is to get overly focused on the scientists and the western teachers and to deemphasize the Asian roots of this practice; that’s a mistake that I’m trying to rectify as my career progresses.

I think it’s quite easy for white people in white-dominated Buddhist communities to lose sight of the roots of the practice. And I would just say that that’s a blind spot that should be looked at.

Martin: What do you think about the corporatization of Buddhism in America?

Harris: I think I lean toward both-and here. Like this is a cliche, but you gotta speak to people where they are. I’m interested in what works to make people happier or less miserable, however you wanna frame that. And I also think the critiques of the corporatization, what’s often called McMindfulness, that can be true at the same time. I agree with some of the critiques and I feel that at the end of the day more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness. I’d rather see this stuff get out there even if it’s not the way I would personally do it.

Martin: Yeah.

Harris: Are you meditating?

Martin: So it’s interesting you should ask. I tried right after 10% Happier came out, and then like most people, life happens and you don’t anymore. My excuse forever was that I had this job that I had to get up super early in the morning for, and if you don’t carve out that time in the morning then you can’t find the time.

And then there have been different periods where a bad thing will happen to a family member or something and I’ve tried to get back into it. There’s just a lot of dark stuff in your head sometimes and it takes real skill I think. It’s hard, Dan.

Harris: I didn’t ask that to get you to beat yourself up. I hear two things in there that I think are really legit. One is it’s hard to find the time. That’s super true. And the second is that it’s hard to do the practice. Even on a good day it’s hard to meditate because the mind is all over the place. But if you’ve got something upsetting going on in your life, well it’s quite possible you’re going to get a front-row seat IMAX movie of that if you meditate.

Martin: Right.

Harris: All of that is true. I guess I would just say that everything we know about the science of habit formation and human behavior change is that one of the most successful things is to start very small. Aim to do one minute most days, or two minutes. That can be a really good way to start.

As for the practice itself and how distractible we are, people often tell themselves a story about how they’re bad meditators when they get distracted. But it is the waking up from distraction and starting over that is success. The whole point is to get distracted and start again and again and again. Because when you wake up from distraction you’re seeing how wild your mind is. And then when you see it, when you get familiar with the chaos of the mind, then it doesn’t own you as much. That’s mindfulness.

Tune in Sunday nights to NPR for Enlighten Me with Rachel Martin during All Things Considered.

Source link

The post Dan Harris’ mindfulness journey changed his career — and life : NPR appeared first on Minds Valley.

Buddhists reflect on what their faith means to them. : NPR

mindsvalley99 — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 14:30:10 +0000

Ayyā Somā (left) and Bhante Suddhāso (right), the co-founders of Empty Cloud Monastery.

Ayyā Somā

hide caption

toggle caption

Ayyā Somā

Ayyā Somā (left) and Bhante Suddhāso (right), the co-founders of Empty Cloud Monastery.

Ayyā Somā

Mindfulness is mainstream. There are mindfulness retreats that will set you back thousands of dollars. Entire sections of libraries and bookstores are devoted to the subject.

My kids learn mindfulness and meditation techniques in their public elementary school. Before my weekly yoga class starts, the teacher says a bunch of stuff about mindfulness, and setting intentions for our downward dogs and plank poses.

On the whole, I think mindfulness showing up in our culture in new ways is a good thing.

However, I do think there’s something off-putting about the “mindfulness industrial complex” – the expensive getaways and self-proclaimed gurus, who make promises about personal transformation they can’t necessarily keep.

And I’ve been looking for something different. I wanted to understand the theology that birthed the modern mindfulness movement. I wanted to understand how, by training your mind, you could actually create some kind of divine connection to yourself, to other people in your life, or even to a higher power.

In all this spiritual seeking I’m doing these days, it was time to go deep on Buddhism.

My mom was a lifelong Presbyterian who served as a church deacon, and hung artisan-made crosses around her house. But I also have clear memories of her sitting on her black meditation pillow in front of the window in her bedroom, eyes shut, breathing deep and audibly.

She had books by the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh on her bedside table. Like a lot of Americans, she didn’t see Buddhism and Christianity as contrary to one another — they could be complements.

I wanted to understand what that could look like. My mom died 14 years ago and I can’t ask her, so I have to figure it out for myself. That means doing my own research and having my own experience with Buddhism. And what better way to do that than spending time at an actual monastery?

Now, I do not want to suggest that showing up at a Buddhist monastery for three days taught me everything I need to know about Buddhism or mindfulness. Obviously not.

But it did help me understand why more and more Americans are converting to Buddhism, or even, if they don’t go all in that way, they are finding elements of that tradition that they can incorporate into their own spiritual life and identity.

So where do you go to learn about the ancient wisdom and revelation of the Buddha? New Jersey of course. And a monastery called Empty Cloud, which seemed perfectly on brand.

Yes, I, too, want to be like an empty cloud! So my producer Lee Hale and I drove five or so hours from Washington, D.C. to West Orange, N.J.

Two Buddhist monks run Empty Cloud. Their names are Ayyā Somā and Bhante Suddhāso. Ayyā Somā is Italian, and before she shaved her head and put on the robes, she was a fashion journalist.

Empty Cloud Monastery in West Orange, New Jersey.

Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

hide caption

toggle caption

Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

Empty Cloud Monastery in West Orange, New Jersey.

Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

Bhante is a soft-spoken guy from Colorado with small, round glasses. He grew up in a conservative evangelical family and found Buddhism after college.

They welcome us with tea and give us the basic instructions for staying there: No makeup or any other physical adornments. No fancy clothes. Monks always eat before the lay people like us who stay there, and, even when it’s not an official silent meditation time, everyone needs to walk around sort of quietly and keep conversation at a moderate volume.

I spent most of my time with the Empty Cloud monks inside the monastery for meals, meditation, and dharma talks — which are like sermons or spiritual lessons.

But we did take one field trip — just a few miles away — to the campus of Rutgers University, where five of the monks walked into a frat house. Yes, it sounds like the beginning of a problematic joke. Even the monks recognized how surreal the scene was.

They went to campus to do something called “almsgiving.” Meaning they hold a bowl and wait for people walking by to offer them some food, since monks of this Buddhist tradition can’t make or buy themselves meals.

They’ve all got shaved heads and they’re wearing traditional orange robes with sandals. Tevas seem to be the preferred brand in this group.

They situated themselves in a line in front of a shopping mall full of retail shops and casual dining options. They definitely stood out, and at one point the mall manager came out to see if they were staging some kind of protest.

She let them be, but the monks weren’t having a lot of luck. People walked by and smiled, but they didn’t really get what was happening.

So a young woman who’s staying at the monastery called up a friend of hers who is a student at Rutgers. He rallied his frat brothers, and they showed up a couple minutes later to escort the monks a couple blocks away to their frat house, for takeout tacos.

A handful of college guys, mostly wearing pajama pants and hoodies, show the monks into the main living room — and yes, it is a SCENE. Red solo cups lying in one corner. A box of Franzia wine and random hot sauce on one table. A bong on another. The whole place smells like weed. Ayyā Somā makes small talk with the young men, and asks what a fraternity is really about. Just to be clear — she doesn’t understand what a fraternity is because she’s Italian, not because she’s a monk.

Monks from Empty Cloud Monastery visit a fraternity outside Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey where they were offered lunch.

Lee Hale

hide caption

toggle caption

Lee Hale

Monks from Empty Cloud Monastery visit a fraternity outside Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey where they were offered lunch.

Lee Hale

One of the guys responds. His name is Michael Porucznik. “It’s like a social group, mostly, I would say.”

To be honest, all this feels sort of awkward. I’m a little worried these guys might be messing with the monks. But, they’re respectful and they’re asking legitimate, thoughtful questions. The mom in me is sort of proud of them – even though it’s clear that some of them are ditching class.

Ayyā Somā asks the students what inspired them to make offerings.

Michael sits up on a worn-out red couch and sort of stutters into his answer. “I very much admire people who discipline themselves to like a specific aspect of life. And I feel like it’s also good karma.” Everyone laughs. “We also think it’s good karma,” Ayyā Somā replies.

Chatting with a bunch of monks for a half an hour isn’t likely to turn these guys into Buddhists. But who knows what seeds the conversation has planted in their 20-year-old brains?

And that’s sort of the deal with Buddhism. There’s no proselytizing. In the car on the way back to the monastery, Bhante Suddhāso tells me it’s just the opposite. “Buddhists play hard to get,” he says.

Which is maybe why it’s appealing to a lot of people: Buddhist monks might end up at your frat house for tacos, but they’re not going to knock on the door to try and convert you.

In fact, most of the time, they’re at their monastery doing their own individual spiritual work.

Just before the pandemic, they moved their home base from Queens to this center in West Orange.

They got a great deal on the place from the Augustinian monks who had lived there before. The Catholics were downsizing and moving west, and Ayyā Somā and Bhante Suddhāso, the co-founders of Empty Cloud Monastery, needed more space.

“They were just really overjoyed that another group of monks wanted to take over the monastery,” Bhante Suddhāso told me.

The building itself has a medieval castle vibe. There’s a stained glass window in the meditation room with an image of Noah’s Ark on it, and there’s a cross on the roof.

For now, the monks jokingly say the cross stands for the four noble truths — which Ayyā Somā says can be distilled to this from the Buddha’s teachings:

“All he ever taught was suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the way out of suffering. So that’s all we are practicing is that, um, for the cessation of suffering.”

Which sounds great, right? No one wants to suffer. I don’t want to suffer. But I needed to understand why pulling away from modern life, the way monks do, alleviates suffering.

Because it’s no joke what they have to give up. They pledge to live in celibacy. No meals after midday. No intoxicants of any kind. No pop culture. No money.

“The word renunciation for some people has a negative connotation,” Bhante says. “But for us, renunciation means recognizing that we don’t need something in order to be happy.”

For example, he explains, “When I was a lay person, which was a very long time ago now — 15 plus years ago – I needed to always have music playing.”

If it wasn’t music in the car, he was listening to headphones. “Like, it was just constant. And so, then getting into this life, it’s like, well, one of our rules is that we don’t listen to music. So, clearly, I thought I needed that, but I don’t need it.”

“Do you miss music, though?” I ask. “No,” he replies with a laugh.

Ayyā Somā chimes in: “Essentially, from the fear of missing out from FOMO, we go to JOMO, the joy of missing out.”

They point out that this level of renunciation only represents about 1 percent of Buddhists worldwide.

I still don’t understand exactly what these two get out of this really restrictive life. What is Buddhism freeing them from personally?

And I really want to know what they make of the fact that when I Googled “Buddhist retreat,” a whole slew of places popped up where I could probably also get a hot stone massage and a facial peel.

The monks of Empty Cloud Monastery worship with members of the public. The monastery opens its doors to whoever is curious about Buddhist teachings.

Suparman W/Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

hide caption

toggle caption

Suparman W/Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

The monks of Empty Cloud Monastery worship with members of the public. The monastery opens its doors to whoever is curious about Buddhist teachings.

Suparman W/Courtesy of Empty Cloud Monastery

As I was about to ask this question, we hear a bell ring and Bhante Suddhāso tells me we can take up the matter in the dharma hall.

Turns out, monks are highly scheduled people. It’s time to move to a different room, where we join the other residents — the lay people who stay at the monastery for days or weeks at a time. We’re all situated on individual meditation pillows, with the monks facing the rest of us at the front of the room. Everyone sips tea and eats small pieces of cheese and dark chocolate … the only approved evening snacks.

There’s a big golden statue of the Buddha on the mantle above the fireplace. Bhante Suddhāso pets Teddy, the black monastery cat, and I get another swing at my question.

I ask him what he makes of how mindfulness has made its way into the mainstream of American culture. Like, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

“I think it’s mixed,” he tells me.

“The Buddha does identify mindfulness as being a wholesome characteristic of mind, so wholesome in the sense that it’s, it’s beneficial that it brings happiness, it leads towards awakening,” he explains. “But it’s still only one factor of the eightfold path. So, if one is only practicing mindfulness, then at best you’re practicing, uh, 12.5% of Buddhism. Which is not a complete path to awakening. So it’s kind of like if you’re making a cake and a cake calls for eight ingredients, and you’re like, well, I’m just going to leave out seven of those ingredients. Well, that’s not a cake, that’s a bowl of raw eggs.”

Here at the monastery they’re interested in the whole cake. Which involves rising before sunrise, chores in the house and the yard, and finishing your meals before noon. Being on this path also means letting go of the big things you can’t change, and focusing on what’s happening in your own consciousness.

I’ve dabbled in meditation over the years. I started as a way to deal with my own grief after my mom died from kidney cancer.

But the longest I’d ever sat and tried to meditate was, maybe, 15 minutes. So, when it was time to go down to the meditation hall for an hour of silent sitting, I was a bit freaked out.

I situated myself on my meditation pillow, my eyes closed, and took in some deep breaths, like everyone else was doing.

This wasn’t a guided meditation for beginners. There were a few monks in the room with about six other residents, and it was clear they knew what they were doing.

Me, not so much. Bhante Suddhāso had told me to come up with a mantra and just say that over and over. He suggested the words “loving kindness,” so I went with that.

Breathe in, breathe out. Loving kindness. “Yes,” I thought, “I am killing this meditation.”

Then it started to unravel: “Are they seriously not going to feed us dinner? Did my kids get a ride to baseball tonight? How am I going to sleep here? Wait, no … Loving kindness. Loving kindness. Kindness. Do the monks get to pick out their own robes? Does Ayyā Somā miss make-up? It’s really hard to do a smokey eye.”

Needless to say, I didn’t reach any higher level of consciousness. But there were people who seemed to have.

When I snuck a peek during the meditation, I caught a glimpse of this young woman named Katie McKenna. She’s not a monk, but she was sitting perfectly still, no fidgeting. And she was always smiling. She had definitely figured something out.

I caught up with her later and we chatted for a bit. She said she’s been a Buddhist for about 10 years. She was laid off from her tech job earlier this year, and after that happened, she hightailed it to her happy place – the monastery.

She tries to visit monasteries whenever she can. She used to suffer from a lot of anxiety, but she says Buddhism has changed that: “I hardly ever have anxiety anymore. I just feel a lot of joy.”

“I grew up in Indiana,” she continued. “So, there’s a lot of Christianity around around me. And I feel like people would just proselytize and tell me, like, this is the way. So I feel like I’ve just had this innate trust with Buddhism because there was this teaching – to come and see for yourself.”

I asked if there was any part of her that wanted to go all in and become a monk?

“Yeah. That does come up for me from time to time. It’s come up for my boyfriend, too, actually. We broke up for a little bit in September, briefly, ‘cuz we were both struggling with, like fully giving ourselves to the relationship because we both had this inclination in our mind towards monasticism.”

They stopped watching TV and movies. No music. No dinner. They meditate for long periods of time every day.

“The cool thing about this path,” she says, “is, it just starts happening to you.”

It definitely wasn’t just happening to me. I mean, I’d only been at this for a few days, but I was more interested in a form of Buddhism that let me live in my actual life. I needed to talk to someone who wasn’t about to shave her head and move into the monastery.

I found Sudha Ram.

Sudha wasn’t staying at the monastery like the others, but she lives in the neighborhood and comes over a lot.

Within a few minutes of talking with her, it becomes clear that she has endured a lot of disappointments in life. And right now, she is working through problems in her marriage. She tells me that Buddhism has taught her things that her Hindu faith never did.

“If you don’t love yourself and put yourself in front of others, who’re not gonna give you love, you’re not gonna be successful. So I give loving kindness to myself. I give loving kindness to the other people who need to be given loving kindness. That helps a lot because the anger, the rejection, and, you know, the ill feeling, come often.”

I think she’s about to share more about her relationship with her husband, or her kids, or something about work. But she starts telling me about her dog. A golden retriever named Simba who died not long ago. The dog came to her in her dreams.

“He came to me and he said, ‘mom, what did you learn from me?’ I had to think, what did I learn from him? I know he was very loving. He was a golden retriever. He loves people, he loves pets, he loves everybody.”

“So I said, ‘yeah, you are very loving.’ And he said, ‘Mom, you are very loving, too. But you still have judgment. You still judge. I’m not. I love everybody. So that’s the difference.’ ”

I know how bizarre this sounds. I’m sitting in the basement of this Buddhist monastery, talking with this woman I barely know, about her dead dog who talks to her in her dreams. And tears are welling up in her eyes and then in mine.

And I get that her grief and loneliness are bigger than this story. And we hold hands briefly across a table. And I share my own losses with her. And none of it is healed, but there is a comfort in that shared intimacy between strangers.

Letting go may be the Buddhist precept for ending suffering. But I think, just as important as the letting go is the letting in. Letting monks into the frat house. Letting a journalist into your monastery. Letting a stranger into your grief.

Yes, the ultimate enlightenment happens internally — when you free your mind from attachment and longing. But awakening also happens when you are willing to step into the breach with someone else. To be present in their pain and have them witness yours.

Pali is the ancient language of Buddhism, and Ayyā Somā told me that her favorite Pali word is “kampa”.

“Which literally means ‘trembling together.’ Sometimes we focus a lot on our trembling, or the trembling of the other person. But we don’t realize that it’s actually the same trembling, and we’re all trembling together.”

Buddhism may teach that the individual has the power to ease their own suffering, but true contentment requires us all to care about each other. It’s not just about being alone in our mind on the mat. Buddhist monks still have to engage with the rest of the world. And the world has to engage back. We share our stories with strangers and absorb one another’s grief.

We tremble, together.

Source link

The post Buddhists reflect on what their faith means to them. : NPR appeared first on Minds Valley.

HBO’s ‘The Idol’ offers stylish yet oddly inert debut episode : NPR

mindsvalley99 — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 09:10:29 +0000

Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn.

HBO

hide caption

toggle caption

HBO

Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn.

HBO

The big questions about HBO’s The Idol weren’t quite answered by its super-stylish, yet oddly inert opening episode Sunday.

The series, starring Lily-Rose Depp as a pop star who has come through a mental health crisis and gets seduced by a hipster club owner/self-help guru/cult leader played by Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, drew savage reviews after two episodes debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in France last month.

And a Rolling Stone expose suggesting the show’s producers amped up the nudity and sex to a disturbing degree, turning it into a toxic, male-oriented fantasy, raised concerns about what story, exactly, The Idol was going to tell.

To be honest, there are moments in Sunday’s episode which seem close to that mark. In one scene, Depp’s character, Jocelyn, pleasures herself while choking herself; in another, after a friend tells her Tesfaye’s character Tedros has a “rapey” vibe, the pop star says “I kinda like that about him.”

Of course, there may be women who feel that way about humiliation, pain and sex. But it also feels a lot like the male gaze in action — what a roomful of guys might think a woman’s reaction would be, rather than a choice that feels authentic.

A story that’s rarely subtle

Euphoria creator Sam Levinson is a co-creator and executive producer of The Idol — with Tesfaye and Reza Fahim — while also directing and writing the episodes. So it’s no surprise that some moments in The Idol recall the steamy, sordid vibe Euphoria’s party scenes conjured so well — including a sequence in Tedros’ club where he seduces Jocelyn to the pulsing beat of Madonna’s Like a Virgin (the episode also features the pop star’s handlers comparing her to Britney Spears, in case viewers didn’t catch the incredibly obvious comparisons to real-life, unpredictable blonde divas).

Abel Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp.

HBO

hide caption

toggle caption

HBO

Abel Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp.

HBO

“Pop music is like the ultimate Trojan Horse,” Tedros tells Jocelyn, unleashing one of a great many lines in The Idol that sound profound but kinda aren’t.

What may be most surprising about The Idol’s debut is how little actually happens in the first episode. The narrow scope of the action reveals a story stuck in a claustrophobic bubble, offering bursts of nudity and sex to distract from how little is actually happening onscreen.

This is a show that dispenses with subtlety, at least in the first episode. Jocelyn’s handlers — including Hank Azaria and Dan Levy — are as vulgar, focused on commerce and oblivious to their client’s pain, as you would expect, even as they try to gauge how she’ll react to news that an explicitly sexual picture of her is public and trending on Twitter.

(Her eventual reaction is so blasé it doesn’t make much sense, especially when she frets later about whether her new single is so pandering it makes her look bad. Isn’t revenge porn worse, especially for a pop superstar?).

Every scene laboriously ladles out hunks of backstory. Jocelyn is aiming for a comeback after what is described as a “nervous breakdown,” possibly brought on by the death of her mother. But the pop star hates the new single her handlers are pushing, feels worn out and unenthusiastic about her work and is ripe for seduction by a dangerous man her assistant/best friend derisively calls “rat tail club guy.”

Some may focus on the bizarrely erotic scene that closes the first episode, where Tedros covers Jocelyn’s head with her robe, whips out a knife and cuts a hole in it where her mouth is (like I said, this show is not subtle). But that moment seems so cartoonishly provocative, that criticizing it feels like playing into the producers’ hands — spreading word about the show by fixating on a moment that’s mostly undercut by awkward storytelling.

Larger concerns unanswered

Still, the larger concerns about The Idol — is it an exploitive male fantasy posing as an empowerment tale, or an ode to power, wealth and fame masquerading as a critique of it — are tough to judge from the first episode. Put simply, not enough happens to truly know where this story is headed just yet.

What is obvious: The inventive and surprising storytelling that made Euphoria so special is nowhere to be seen here. And it will take a heaping helping of that small screen magic to salvage the next five episodes of this too-predictable story.

Source link

The post HBO’s ‘The Idol’ offers stylish yet oddly inert debut episode : NPR appeared first on Minds Valley.