A Marine And An Army Veteran

This article is related to two previous articles. The first one is on Jon Kabat-Zinn‘s consultation with top leaders in the United Kingdom last week about cutting health care costs (see Mindfulness In Health Care) and yesterday’s article about US Marines getting mindfulness training and yoga (see Marines Learning Push Ups For The Brain).

An Orchid for Peace

On April 8, Paul Tingen posted his comments on the OI¹ discussion forum about the Jon Kabat-Zinn article in The Guardian: can mindfulness be taught without values? Since then, there has been a couple of dozen responses from various OI members since then, the most recent one appearing today.

In  of his responses, Paul provided the link to the New York Daily News article which prompted my article about the US Marines.

This is one of the liveliest discussions I’ve seen on the OI discussion group and there have been many exceptional replies and cross replies.

One of the caught my attention and I received permission to include it quote it in full. It was from Beth Howard and she has two sons who served in the military. She is an OI member, which means that like me, she is a practicing Buddhist.

Here is what she wrote in full:

Dear Thay² and dear friends,

Thay teaches that Buddhism is made of only non-Buddhist elements.

Therefore, OI members are made of only non-OI elements and people serving in the military are made only of non-military elements.  It is good to remember these things.

I am the mother of a 27-year-old active duty Marine, with ten years of service and two deployments to Afghanistan and also mother to his twin brother, an Army veteran, with a Purple Heart, who served in Iraq.  I am among the luckiest of mothers, as both my sons have returned from the wars.

Needless to say, there is much suffering which occurs in combat, but global communication has also changed the experience of being at war.

Most people deployed to war can now communicate with their family and friends on a regular, sometimes daily, basis.  This can be a blessing, to be able to check in with your family’s life and to celebrate your children’s growth and achievements.  But, sometimes, the news from home is not good.

My sons said that the people they served with who suffered the most on deployment were those whose civilian lives disintegrated while they were away.  These are the same difficulties which civilians face: financial worries; single-parenting challenges; loved ones dying; and relationships in turmoil or ending, with the added pain of sometimes learning about it first on social media.

In a situation where work demands that your safety and the safety of others requires the ability to focus on the situation at hand, these difficulties at home can be a powerful and dangerous distraction and mindfulness would be a valuable tool, to help face them, just as it is in civilian life.  I hope that mindfulness will be offered to all service members and their families, before, during and after deployments and that our Sanghas will be open and welcoming to veterans and their families.

Could our practice be misused?  The short answer is yes.  I have been a yoga teacher for more than a decade.  Yoga has sometimes been used inappropriately, but it is still a very strong and useful practice.

Students often come to yoga for purely physical reasons, i.e. they just want to look better.  I never minded what brought students through the door, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual reasons, because yoga is a mind-body-spirit practice.  You get it ALL when you practice and you cannot ever really separate one part out from the others.  I believe that mindfulness practice is like that also.  You can’t really separate the ethical practice of mindfulness from mindfulness itself, though certainly you can emphasize it more or less.  But, I believe that the very heart of mindfulness practice leads to more ethical behavior.  It just might be that having more mindfulness taught in the military will not produce better killers, as feared, but instead, will lead to an end to war and to a new way of resolving global conflict.  This is my hope for our future.

We all have the seeds of war and peace inside of us.  Hopefully, we will continue to water our seed of peace every day.   When my sons first joined the military, I had a conference with one of our monastic brothers on retreat and I asked, “How might I best support my sons in the military?”  The brother replied, “How lucky your sons are to have a mother who practices.”  He then suggested that I continue to write and communicate with them.  I began a practice of writing for peace.

How lucky we are to have an Order of Interbeing who practices and I know that we will continue to communicate beautifully and compassionately into the future with all of our brothers and sisters, military and civilian alike.

Please, accept my apologies, if this is comment is too long for this forum, along with deepest gratitude for your patience and kindness in reading it.

With Much love,

Beth Howard

Chan Niem Do / True Land of Mindfulness

This comment touched me in several ways.

First of all, her boys “have returned from the wars.” This is wonderful for her and for them to see their mother and learn from her.

Secondly, Beth’s “hope that mindfulness will be offered to all service members and their families, before, during and after deployments and that our Sanghas will be open and welcoming to veterans and their families” is totally aligned with my feelings about offering mindfulness training to military personnel. As I said before,

My hope is that instead of using mindfulness for their personal gain, bankers and politicians will have an awakening in which they reach out to their fellow beings and actually do something about poverty, health care, and global warming.

Lastly (for now!), Beth wrote, “You can’t really separate the ethical practice of mindfulness from mindfulness itself, though certainly you can emphasize it more or less.  But, I believe that the very heart of mindfulness practice leads to more ethical behavior.” This echos what I wrote about in Mindfulness In Health Care.

We also need to send loving kindness and compassionate blessings to all mothers (and fathers) who have sons and daughters in the military. Even if we oppose the war, these people deserve to have the lives of their children preserved.

So, what are your thoughts about mindfulness in health care and / or in the military? Let’s keep this lively discussion going.

¹OI is short for the Order of Interbeing – a world wide organization of meditation practitioners in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Each one of us has promised to live our lives in accordance with The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings.
²“Thay” is what Thich Nhat Hanh is called by his followers.