Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Confront An Injustice
Today's Exercise: Confront An Injustice
[Preparatory Note: finding an injustice to confront will be the easy part of this exercise. The world is full of unkindness, unfairness, oppression and cruelty. In this case, you do not have to actually confront the person or entity that is creating the injustice face to face. It will suffice if you confront the injustice in some sort of public stand. This can be by leaving a blog comment in response to a publicly printed news article describing the injustice. It can be done by calling out the injustice in a public forum. The rules of engagement are that 1) your confrontation must occur in the public eye and 2) it must be done in a forum that is likely to be viewed or reviewed by the person or entity committing the injustice. You confrontation must be 3) non-violent, devoid of hate or the language of hate and 4) you must speak or write more than 100 words in defining the confrontation (tweeting will not suffice).]
Find a quite place to contemplate and establish a breathing meditation of long inhales and equally long exhales for 2 minutes.
With a relaxed mind, spend 5 minutes contemplating the acts of injustice that make you sad. Notice that we are not considering acts of injustice that make us angry. Acts of injustice that make us sad have already tapped into our natural sense of compassion and we want our confrontation to come from our compassion.
Select a forum to take your stand. Instead of taking a stand against the injustice, formulate your stand in favor of the thing that should exist in place of the injustice. This may take some thinking. Notice that you will have to weed through your own negative emotions to locate the positive statement that you are going to make.
Take your stand and fill the space occupied by the injustice with a statement of your stand for what should be in the space instead. Follow the rules of engagement noted above and make sure that your real name is associated with your stand. Make it clear to the world that it is you that is standing up for whatever you have chosen to champion.
Training Note:
Human beings are natural complainers. They can talk for hours about what is wrong without ever considering a solution to their woes. In a universe that is often indifferent to fairness, we tend to develop negative emotions when we see an act of injustice. This doubles the damage. There is now an injustice and a complaint, but still no antidote to the injustice has filled our thinking. Injustice must be confronted with its antidote in order to provoke a solution. An injustice confronted with a complaint is just a bigger problem. If someone is being treated unfairly, it does little to complain of the ill-treatment unless we can state affirmatively how the person should be treated. Consider these two statements: "fight racism"; "demand equality". One destroys and the other gives birth to something beneficial. True confrontation is never an assertion against something, but rather an assertion in favor of a beneficial alternative. This is a much more powerful way to remedy injustice in the world without creating additional damage.
Karmic Benefits:
Hate, Even Hate Of Injustice, Is Destructive: destruction comes from power being asserted against something that exists. An alternative form of change that avoids destruction is transformation. Transformation begins by asserting what should exist as opposed to asserting what should be destroyed. Transformation harnesses the natural syntropic power of creation rather than using destruction as a precursor to change. Destruction leaves wounds and wounds slow the evolution of transformation. The vapor trails of the two methods are substantially different and, often, so are the results.
It Is Much Easier To Stand For Rather Than To Stand Against: standing against something causes the opposition to push back. This enhances the conflict without doing much for resolution. This is not to say that conflict does not have a place in the evolution of the world, clearly it does. In many cases, however, conflict is often the byproduct of unskillful confrontation rather than a situational necessity. A skillful confrontation opens a path to resolution from the start.
Why Empower Your Opposition: because conflict empowers the opposition it is frequently self-defeating to use it as a method of change. When we push against the status quo, the status quo pushes back. Conflict favors the perpetuation of the status quo. Confrontation between an injustice and its alternative does not automatically frame conflict. Sometimes, stating an alternative provides a moment of illumination that allows confrontation to transform into agreement. It should be noted that confrontation and conflict are not the same thing.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
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