Just One Question | Rev angel Kyodo williams: How Do We Find Joy In the Heart of Our Suffering?

Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.

Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris: We hope you enjoy. So Mallory, what do you have for us this week?

Mallory: This week I wanted to share a conversation with Tami and Reverend angel Kyodo williams. She’s a Buddhist teacher and an author who works a lot with what she calls radical dharma. It’s a spiritual practice that doesn’t shy away from suffering — it’s actually focused on going directly into that suffering.

Chris: Okay. That reminds me of our episode with Zenju a few weeks ago, where she was talking about embracing the darkness.

Mallory: Tami asks her something that I think a lot of us wonder about. Reverend angel has said that if we go deeply into our suffering, right into the heart of it, we’ll find our joy. And Tami basically says, “Wait, really?” All you listeners know when Tami says, “Wait, really—”

Chris: Really? That’s my favorite.

Mallory: We’ve basically been taught to avoid our pain and sort of package it away in a box and put it on the highest shelf in the closet.

Chris: Yep.

Mallory: But what Reverend angel is saying is that part of finding joy and experiencing joy is not ignoring that box, but actually pulling it out, dusting it off, and diving into it — and defeating the fear that you have about that suffering, this fear of suffering that all of us seem to have.

Chris: I love that counterintuitive spin on it. You can go into the suffering and the fear in order to find your joy.

Mallory: Right.

Chris: All right. Well, here are Tami and Reverend angel exploring the question: How do we find joy in the heart of our suffering?

Mallory: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: Reverend angel, you said something that really caught my attention — that if we go deeply into our suffering, right at the heart of it, at the center of it, I think you said, is where we’ll find our joy. And I noticed as you said that, I had a question mark come up inside me. I thought, really? That’s where I’m going to find my joy, right in the middle of my deep suffering and the world’s deep suffering? Really?

I so appreciate the fearlessness with which you talk about being with our suffering, and I want to understand more how you feel people can cultivate that kind of fearlessness in themselves. I think for some people, when it comes to facing intergenerational suffering or the pain in the world, there’s a part of them that just freezes and puts up a defense and says, “I can’t do it.” And here you are speaking so eloquently about just walking right in.

Reverend angel Kyodo williams: Yeah, I think we have been, as Spike Lee would say, bamboozled and hoodwinked into believing that our joy exists in some kind of other place. That when we finally get to this other place… And I think that the Western expression, and the way that we have put forth the conversation about Buddhism and dharma in general, has also helped to cultivate that sense of, “Oh, there’s this other place that we’re going to get to, and once we arrive at that other place, it’ll all be better.”

And really, the place that we most need to go deeply into and to tend to is the place — the places — in which we are most ignoring, the places that we are most avoiding, the places where we are most suffering. Because when we don’t touch our own suffering, what we do is actually create more suffering. We expand the darkness around us. Ignorance is deepened, and we allow ourselves to create — I want to say — roadkill. We leave behind roadkill of suffering in terms of how we relate to other people, how we relate to the world, what we allow to unfold in terms of patriarchy, in terms of racism, in terms of xenophobia, which we’ve seen quite a rise of in our country in the last little while. We allow those things to happen because we feel overwhelmed by it, because we’re not tending to the suffering in ourselves.

So when we get into the suffering and what it is that we are avoiding, we are relieved. We are relieved of that sense of fear and becoming small and trying to fit into smaller and smaller containers. And that’s where our joy is found.

I’m not saying that in the middle of our mess there’s a big ice cream cone. That’s not what I mean by finding joy in the midst of our suffering. I’m saying that we find our joy because we are relieved of a sense of fear and ignorance. That is what keeps us from being able to directly experience the joy that is actually always there, always available to us in life.

This is the main subject that I’m interested in these days: that it’s time for us to practice what I call, and enter into what I call, a radical dharma. And “radical” — we sort of freak out about that word, because we have all kinds of strange connotations of it in this country. But when I say radical, it comes from the root radix, which means whole, or complete. So to have a complete dharma, to have a complete truth. And the complete truth means to be willing to investigate not just the parts of ourselves that feel like, “Eh, I can navigate that, I’m ready to get to that,” but rather to be really willing to cultivate our sense of skill.

It’s sort of like entering into the cold beach water. You put a toe in, and you put a foot in, you get an ankle in, you get in up to your calf and then your knee. But you have to be willing to keep stepping in further and further in order to be able to swim in the great ocean of life that is available to all of us.

And so we have, I think, out of our cultural proclivity to package things, generated and passed on a kind of relationship to our inner life, to our spiritual life, to our practice life, to dharma, that is packaged and well maintained and stuck in a particular place, where we put it on Tuesday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. And really, the idea of such a powerful and potent practice as meditation is to draw the lens back as far as we possibly can onto the entirety of our lives. And so that is the entirety of our trauma, the entirety of our wounding, the entirety of our history, the entirety of how we take care of ourselves, how we relate to ourselves and others. And when I say others, not just the others that we feel comfortable with, but the people that we feel most other from.

For me, that’s a radical practice. And so my own practice has been to keep saying, “And where have I not yet looked?” And to be willing to investigate the places that I have not yet turned the light of the dharma on, to turn the light of my practice on, to invite into my meditation practice — and really to sit with those places and allow what is true for me and what is real for me to come up, and to do that without judgment. And to feel what I feel, and to allow that to simply be there, and then to carry on from there.

And I think that what it is, is not so much that I’m choosing to be a warrior, but rather that when we clear the things that are in our path — when we just take care of the stuff that’s in our path that’s hidden because we’ve been taught to avoid it and to make it go away — what emerges is the warriorship, the fearlessness that is actually just true for all of us. It’s how we come.

Chris: This has been Just One Question. You can listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge that this conversation was taken from on your preferred podcast platform or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.