Why is reflection ethical? And is it? Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer have a conversation about ethical reflecting.
If you are independent or teach on your own, start writing your own code of ethics.
If you are with a sangha – review and edit your sanghas codes in light of what we are presenting. Considering your own values, what changes might you suggest?
Draw or describe a picture of what your community looks like: a tree with many branches at different heights and levels, a triangle, a circle, row of houses connected by fences… If independent, draw how you fit into the larger community where you teach.
Circles of Conditionality Exercise: print out this handout and fill in the circles for yourself, your student, and the larger context.
Circles of Conditionality Exercise: print out this handout and fill in the circles for yourself, your student, and the larger context.
Conversations
1
Discussion Topic: Implementing ethics
How will you implement the codes that you wrote? Where will the code lead to new behavior – or not? In our last sangha, we did not even have a code. This whole course is how to implement it. Not a straight shot. We [those of you who are here] have a focus and deep interest. How do we make this alive for others? For most folks it is just another policy until something really goes wrong. Many of us wish/want to believe it won’t happen to us, solely because we are doing really good spiritual work. Yet ethical transgressions keep happening. What a dilemma.
2
Discussion Topic: on ethical binds/ demands
- Compassion & Dispassion – being impacted by our subjective worlds and using our reactions wisely.
- Compartmentalizing / putting ourselves aside while needing to be in touch with ourselves regarding our own projections and reactions.
- Caring for people that we wouldn’t naturally care for. Stretching but also “faking it”.
3
Discussion Topic: Projection
Buddhism does not directly talk about this dynamic of projecting our trauma and woundedness on the world and others to create enemies and perpetuate interpersonal ethical misunderstandings. And, yet it is implied in many of the teachings. Which teachings in your tradition?
As a teacher there are conditions that support others to come to you with their concerns. What do you take up? How to discern? When is it projection? What supports are in place in your life, in your sangha? People you feel safe with to help you discern?
4
Discussion Topic: Burn Out
The term “burnout” is a relatively new term, first coined in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, in his book, Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. He originally defined burnout as, “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.” The term burnout can fit and miss what’s going on with regard to ethical transgressions in Buddhist communities, as it suggests a failure of resourcefulness and resilience. Can burn out, in and of itself, be a symptom of something larger?
– If you don’t acknowledge the pain that you’ve caused and you don’t make reparations, there is no apology.
5
Discussion Topic: Learning, unlearning, relearning
Ethical curiosity requires learning, unlearning, and relearning. Consider how our needs and fears are dependently arisen with the words from Audre Lorde.
Writer Audre Lorde on acting in the face of fear: “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs … and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
Source: Sister Outsider