Tag Archives: Buddhist women

Book Review: Work That Matters and Right Livelihood 2.0 for values that matter more

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Work that Matters: Create a livelihood that reflects your Core Intention
Author: Maia Duerr
Publisher: Parallax Press

Disclosure: I was provided the book by the publisher for an honest review. Maia Duerr and I have been friends for almost a decade and she know I’m incapable of not calling something for what it is. 

There are unending lists of books on how to shift, change, pivot from your currently dissatisfied life to one that is enriching (personally and financially). Some are planners that navigate the complex world of job search and selling your talents. Others tie together finding a new career with finding that hidden inner self who can flourish if just given the career shell in which to do so. Very few offer a deep dive into the center of making any change: who you are and the values that shape you. More precisely, few authors have the chops to weave together Buddhist principles of ethical living through Right Livelihood and the demands of our modern craving world. Acknowledging that the 21st century is vastly different from the socio-economic times of the historic Buddha, Maia Duerr crafts what she cheekily calls “Right Livelihood 2.0”(I’m short-forming that to RL 2.0), a way to find a value-congruent path among the challenges of today’s financial and economic potholes.

In Work That Matters, Duerr takes on this challenge with surgical precision and an unblinking gaze. She begins with the reality that we are all averse to change, even if change means realizing our dreams. Astutely, Duerr shines the light on our well-cultivated talent to turn away from anything that results in discomfort. After a chapter of getting to know her and one that lay the framework of “Liberation-based Livelihood”, we dig deep to recognize and uproot our craftiness in deluding ourselves that “here” is better than “there”. Psychologically wise, she names the resistance as it is likely to show up – the five hindrances that masquerade as social media jaunts, diligent house cleaning, re-framing the current situation as “good enough”, and so on.

After setting up the three foundations – self-awareness, resilience, and persistence – Duerr introduces each of the six keys to Liberation-based Livelihood. What impressed me is the amount of time I took on Key 1: Becoming intimate with your Core Intention. This chapter captures the current arc of practice in the secular world of mindfulness: a call to clarify our values and (as I discuss in my own research) to examine closely the incongruence we experience when we are not in alignment with those values. Thich Nhat Hanh, a teacher Duerr and I share in our own practice, teaches that our values are the North Star; the intention is to use them to navigate the waters of our lives, not to live on the star itself. Over the years, I find deeper and deeper meaning in that teaching. The most recent is that our values are not intended to carry us above the world as it is, they are not to segregate us in a holier-than-thou bubble. The dance of our actions carry us close and far from the core intention of our lives and this is where the beauty of change resides.

In Duerr’s teachings, we sense into the experience of the mileage we put in approaching and avoiding this center. The chapters contain several reflection exercises, of which the question “What is your relationship with this key?” will be the most challenging yet most rewarding. In essence, this exercise takes the measure of our congruence with our heart’s center.

In Key 3, Break Through Inertia and Take Action, Duerr ups the challenge. I can sum that up as “quit jerking yourself around.” In other words, get out of your head, you’re not fooling anyone with that perfectionist stance, and be human. Thankfully Duerr is a quite a bit kinder and offers key practices in each chapter that are detailed and incisive.

Key 6, Building Allies and Asking for Help, offers a truly challenging practice in an individualistic and self-centered world where allies can quickly become foes and survival instincts drive selfishness. The reflection exercise can evoke disappointment and sadness as much as gratitude and appreciation. I had to remember that the idea we should be surrounded by hordes of dear and beloved friends is likely a construction of our social media-infused world. Although relationships confer positive effects of good health and wellness, social psychology research shows that while we can hole a circle of about 150 friends (Dunbar’s number) we really only have a handful (maybe only 3-5) of intimate relationships. It becomes a bit tricky then know how to load the demands on our intimates when we need help. So, Duerr’s conceptualization of Key 6 is all the more important to read carefully. She defines connections as allies, not friends, drawing on the word as a derivative of alloy, the capacity of the combination to create a different and stronger material. These are connections that generate new and creative outcomes through support, sharing of resources, and creativity.

In the current environment of uncertainty and toxic, divisive relationships, Duerr’s book is a welcomed resource. We may be facing years of economic challenges and job loss is definitely going to take its toll. The gift – and gist – of Work That Matters is crucial in the face of the truth that we can no longer simply find a job ladder that will carry us to our Cloud Nine. Many of us will be confronted with losing our work and careers. The mission statements of most organizations are crafted to resonate with our ideals. The work on the ground, however, has been and remains vastly different from those ideals. But more of us will be faced with seeing the incongruence between what we believe in and what the organization requires us to believe in. And, there is a reality of survival that keeps many of us frozen in our tracks, unable to consider a change for many important reasons. Even if Duerr’s teachings don’t allow us to break away, perhaps they can help us become stealth ethicists in a world that now desperately needs some.

Book Review: In Search of Buddha’s Daughters by Christine Toomey

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“The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Buddhism’s mainstay is a constant repetitive invitation to step onto the path, enter the practice by cultivating the skills of the Eightfold Path. It’s a familiar image and anyone having embarked on such a path would easily say it’s not a straight road from here to wherever. In her book In Search of Buddha’s Daughters*, Christine Toomey’s intimate portraits of the nuns in various traditions in Buddhism offer clear evidence that the path is neither simple nor easy, not only in their individuals paths that brought them to ordination but also in the over-arching path of the legitimacy of ordination for women. Toomey crafts a biography of each nun she meets with a balanced touch of both intimate details and their place in challenging the larger religious obstacles of ordination for women.

Christine Toomey comes to this topic with impressive credentials. A polyglot and twenty-year veteran covering foreign affairs for The Sunday Times Magazine, she has been shortlisted for a number of articles and won the Amnesty International Awards for two hard-hitting articles on the murder of young girls in Guatemala and a “school of assassins” in the US. (Toomey’s articles are available on her website here.) Her approach to these topics and writing style are uncompromising, making her softly even-handed approach in Buddha’s Daughters an interesting read.

As with most seekers who write of seeking, Toomey’s journey began with a growing awareness of her own suffering, both in her personal life and as a result of her exposure to world scale tragedies.

Buddhas-Daughters“After so much time spent shedding light on some of the darkest corners of humanity, the consequences of such tragedies have become frighteningly familiar….

…In the months before I embarked on this journey both of my parents died…. There had been painful losses before this, but the shock of losing both my parents so suddenly and within just a few months of each other brought my life to a standstill. I felt at a crossroads. After so much time spent bearing witness to the suffering of others, I realized I barely knew how to handle my own.”

– Christine Toomey, Preface, In Search of Buddha’s Daughters, pp. 9-11

Perhaps it is this rawness and deep sensitivity that make Buddha’s Daughters a process book rather than one that offers facts and details about the characters within. The authenticity of this book is not only that Toomey writes about the topic and people but that she actively takes part in their lives, brief though it may be. Certainly Toomey also doesn’t shrink from the facts of the unfairness and even misogyny of complete ordination that is withheld from women in some Buddhist traditions.

Toomey’s journey begins in Nepal with the nuns trained in kung fu at the Druk Gawa Khilwa nunnery near Kathmandu. I feel for her struggle with the 4AM wake-up call and the challenges of following an intense schedule. However, it gives a sense of an embodied approach to her perspective – part biographer, part historian, part social commentary. From Nepal (with a side trip to Lumbini), she proceeds to India and Dharamshala where she explores the deep suffering of Tibetan refugees, especially the nuns who have survived torture in Chinese prisons. I’m deeply affected by one interview with the nun, Dhamchoe who had been imprisoned in Drapchi jail, the largest prison in Tibet. The nun, no longer wearing her robes and working in a cafe in Dharamshala, speaks of her commitment to hold onto her life as a nun despite no longer having the outer form of robes and community. When asked if she wouldn’t prefer to live in sangha, Dhamchoe speaks of her feelings of impurity because she cannot say she holds “no hatred towards (her captors).” This stands in such stark contrast to the anecdote about the Dalai Lama’s astonishment that people would feel self-loathing (see here).

Toomey then goes to Burma, interviewing nuns in the Theravada tradition – in which resides the strongest resistance to full ordination of women. She weaves a solid history of the growth of Buddhism in Burma (with a description of Bagan that makes me want to avoid it were I to return). Interestingly, Toomey skims over the British occupation that galvanized Ledi Sayadaw’s laicization of Buddhist meditation in an effort to protect Buddhism against colonialism (see here) thereby missing out the source of the momentum of Buddhist practice that eventually gave rise to the mindfulness juggernaut (which she visits by coming home to Oxford and the Oxford Mindfulness Center at the end of the book).

It is here in the chapters about the nuns in Burma that the topic of ordination for women reaches it’s stride. The controversy of the nun Saccavadi and the ensuing political battles between monks and monasteries which saw Ajahn Brahm banned from speaking on the topic at the UN Vesak Day in Vietnam in 2009 and Bhikkhu Analayo writing an articulate argument on the legal status of ordination. At the micro level, it becomes clear from Toomey’s interviews that there is a grassroots movement alive that is supporting the education and support of women who wish their commitment to the Dharma is valued as more than housekeepers for monasteries. Toomey also makes an insightful comment that many male supporters of women being ordained have been affected by a personal history of an absence of significant women in their lives (loss of connection with mothers, sisters, etc.); this gives them an appreciation of the power of the feminine as part of healthy growth.

Toomey travels then to Japan (interestingly Korea with its long history of ordained women is not on the itinerary), winds back through North America, and then home to the UK & France. Perhaps the Western stories are impacted by a different cultural perspective but I had trouble feeling the same tension and dynamic between the characters and the storyline. Perhaps it is that these women are not as embedded in cultures that find it unimaginable to value women beyond the utilitarian. I don’t suggest that Western nuns have not had their own deeply wounding struggles with systemic bias and rejection; there is ample evidence of sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of teachers. Something has shifted in the tone of the book and I’m very willing to think that it may be more my own resistance to something in these women’s stories.

Chapter 19, however, is poignant. There is a palpable feeling of coming home in Toomey’s words. While I’m an “early-adopter” of MBCT (at least that’s what publishers keep telling me when they send me MBCT books to review), I did find the foray into Oxford’s MBCT center a bit off-center, having nothing to do with Buddha nor his “daughters”. Still, I’ll grant Toomey that detour simply for being one of the few journalists who actually took part in an 8-week program and completing it before she wrote about it.

All in all a powerful testament to the female spirit and the necessity for the feminine in Buddhism.

*Published in the UK as The Saffron Road: A journey with Buddha’s Daughters.