Last night at Floating Zendo

Last night was the annual visit/teaching from Beth Goldring, a Buddhist nun who runs a chaplaincy program in Cambodia ( http://www.brahmavihara.cambodiaaidsproject.org). Her theme was "letting go". While at work in Cambodia, Beth and her group go to places the like the National AIDs Hospital to visit the patients and help with care. They also do outreach to prisons to bring in nutrition (the diet is very poor so ailments like beriberi are common) and to help with inmates with AIDs.

While she was on one of her visits to the prison she was approached by an inmate jailed for pedophilia who asked for Dharma teachings--her response was that if someone asks to be taught, you say yes. She promised to get permission from the Warden to do services.

What she found out was that the Warden had been looking the other way. Now that she asked to do something, she found she needed a government permit to do anything in the prison, even bring in food and visit the AIDs inmates. She and her org were now faced with mountains of paper and miles of red tape to get back into the prison. Letting go for her meant facing the reality that her program could shut down with out the right cooperation of people besides herself. The office ground through the piles of papers and three months later they were able to go back to the prison. In her absence things have been moving forward. She expects the hospital will even have a quite room to do services. Letting go, meant taking herself out of the way and letting the importance of the mission itself drive the work



After services Beth needed someone to give her a ride back to where she was staying in Menlo Park--. I was still thinking of  what kind of internal shift would result in giving up life in the United States for a life of actual poverty serving others in even greater poverty--seeing suffering and death on a daily basis. As a nun, the work in Cambodia isn't just a volunteer project--it is her actual life calling.

One of the folks who came to listen brought up the topic of "right livelihood". Beth commented its hard to do in the US--most people are in an ambiguous middle ground that doesn't necessarily look like "right livelihood".

In my own work, I often feel like I'm fighting to get things to happen--at war. Finding the right livelihood in my own work has more to do with how I do things especially how I interact with others. I think of all the interactions I have with people day to day and try to remind myself (not always in time) that what every I do or say to another, I do or say to myself. How can I create peace, alleviate suffering and make things better? Its easy when everything goes well but when things go off the rails, maintaining a peaceful attitude and seeing myself in others (especially the ones yelling at me) doesn't come naturally at all. And when there is a setback, how do I keep moving forward? And when do I need to "let go" and take myself out of the way for the benefit of all?