Inviting Devotion Into Mindfulness Practice, with Oren Jay Sofer and Sean Fargo

Speaker 1 · 0:03Welcome everyone. Thank you for listening to our podcast today. My name is Sean Fargo with Mindfulness Exercises, and I am delighted and honored to welcome Warren J. Sofer to today's episode. Orin just wrote a book called Your Heart Was Made for This Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love, released in late November of 2023. For those of you who don't know Orin, he teaches Buddhist meditation, mindfulness, and communication internationally. He holds a degree in comparative religion from Columbia University and is a certified trainer of nonviolent communication and a somatic experiencing practitioner for the healing of trauma. He's the author of several books, including one of my favorite books called Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication. Orin's teachings have reached people around the world through his online communication courses and guided meditations and retreats. Welcome to the podcast, Orin. It's a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 2 · 1:25Thanks, Sean. It's a real pleasure to see you and be here. Thank you.

Speaker 1 · 1:31Thank you for writing this book. One of the challenges and struggles that comes up so often for people who help others is the imposter syndrome and this worry of self and how I'm going to be perceived or judged, or there's this self-judgment. I'm not good enough. Devotion. You write, Orin, in your book, that devotion expresses humility, devotion expresses gratitude and appreciation. And I think this devotion to something bigger than yourself, outside yourself, can be a key component for kind of getting out of your own head, out of your own way, kind of softening fear a little bit, and remembering why we want to help others, you know, and to come at this from this place of commitment to love and equity and social justice and alleviation of suffering. But this aspect of devotion around humility, I think, is so helpful because a lot of the times when we meditate, there's a sense of self that can arise. And if we're not aware that it's there, it can feed this sense of ego, fear, of trying to fix yourself or become a certain way in the future. And so I wanted to chat with you about devotion because it is largely missing in secular mindfulness, and it's such a key part of this humility of how we can express ourselves while we help others from the selfless place, the selfless act of love. You know, I was having lunch with Philip Moffat the other day, and he said, you know, I've been reading some of the things you write and listening to you, and you don't really talk much about your lineage or your devotion to your teachers. Why is that? It it was a really good question, and I didn't have a great answer for him at the time. But I think that expressing devotion is a beautiful quality that can be inspiring and can help reinforce the sense of humility and reverence in whatever tradition you're in. And when we're helping others, it can be helpful, I imagine, to express devotion in some way, maybe not in an overtly religious tone in many contexts. But you know, what are you devoted to that people can resonate with? And I think that can help reinforce a sense of humility, connection, and just help remind us why we're wanting to help people and practice these qualities.

Speaker 2 · 4:43Yeah. You know, that sense of being devoted to helping others is such a beautiful aspiration. And it makes me think of one of Tiknat Han's lovely teachings, which is really such a beautiful kind of synopsis, I think, of the Buddha's path, which is he says, understanding is love's other name. And that to really love, we need to understand. And I think, you know, offering support, help, wanting to alleviate suffering, that movement of love and compassion, it depends on our ability to understand, understand others. There can be a certain arrogance in wanting to help others, this kind of savior complex, and that becomes even more complicated when we start to layer in factors of power and social position. So I think that together with that deep devotion to helping others and alleviating suffering, one way of expressing that and embodying that is also the being devoted to wanting to understand, wanting to know. There's that humility of learning, being able to learn what's actually needed and how we can be of support and of service rather than making assumptions. I think devotion is a primary human need, but we don't call it that in our world today. And it's certainly not spoken about, not just in mindfulness circles, but really in very few places outside of religion in the modern world. And I think it's one of the reasons why we suffer so much, the sense of a kind of spiritual poverty or hunger inside. We feel like there's something missing without knowing what it is. So it's important to understand what's meant by that word and to take it, I think, out of the very narrow context in which it's been defined as religious devotion, devotion to the divine or the sacred or something esoteric, otherworldly. I see devotion as our willingness to give ourselves to anything completely. It's a way of relating to something with wholeheartedness, with deep loyalty, generosity, and love. When we're devoted to something, we give a lot. We give time, we give energy, we give attention, hence the examples of being devoted to a life partner, a family, an instrument, a craft, a garden. To vote contains the word vote. It comes from the Latin word vovere, which means to commit. It means we commit to something. And this kind of commitment, this kind of wholeheartedness brings a certain wholeness and that sense of coming home to ourselves. And it also lays the foundation for what is often a very long and arduous road to inner freedom and outer transformation. I grew up Jewish, reformed Jew, and so I really got a very strong dose of not only the emphasis on study and intellect and rationality, but also a certain kind of skepticism about anything kind of esoteric or mystical, and certainly any form of idolatry. So I bristled at the idea of say bowing to a Buddha image or offering incense. And it was quite a 180 from the very beginning of my practice and refusing to bow and feeling quite judgmental and uncomfortable with it, just as we share, you know, taking robes and spending a couple few years exploring the path of a renunciate. So I like to use some synonyms to help get the sense of what's meant really by this quality on the kind of humanistic level. I talk about devotion as sincerity, as wholeheartedness, as enthusiasm, or even reverence or respect. And I think it's worthwhile to look and see what we are devoted to in the absence of choosing something. Are we devoted to money, to productivity, to projecting a certain image, to trying to be perfect, to being judgmental? This is all kinds of things that we become devoted to when we don't relate to this need in a conscious way. So our need for devotion can get misplaced onto things that are not helpful, onto addiction, being addicted to work, to substances, to entertainment, even in this very kind of odd way, being addicted to self-judgment or sort of narrative of not being good enough. So when we start to recognize the importance of this aspect of being human, of being able to connect with something larger than ourselves and give ourselves to it wholeheartedly, we can be more creative and start to realize that there are all of these ways we can experience what I'm calling devotion. One of the great joys of the last year for me and having a child has been seeing how this quality of wholeheartedness can show up in simple things like changing a diaper or washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen as my spouse looks after our son. Some very beautiful ways this has been expressed throughout the ages. I think of Coleman Bark's translation of a line from Rumi, who said, There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground, or the famous line from the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Dr. King in 1965 for voting rights, and said, I felt like my legs were praying. So the sense that we give ourselves to something completely, it leverages what we're doing, it creates wholeness inside, and it fulfills us. Without devotion, we erode our capacity for fulfillment. And I think we see if when we look at history, how the really essential role devotion plays in social transformation, when we are able to be devoted to a vision of freedom or equity, it transcends our lifetime. We see things like the movement for women's suffrage, which lasted 80 or 90 years before women got the vote, or the movement to abolish slavery in England, in the British Empire, here in North America, in the United States. Or we look today at the current struggles for nuclear disarmament or turning the tide of the climate emergency. And there's that sense that when we can be wholehearted and sincere in our commitment to our vision of what's possible, that sustains us and it can carry that vision across generations. You shared that story of your conversation with Philip and his question about not talking about or showing devotion to your teachers. I think there is, at least for me, I don't know what it is for you, some of that has to do with the internalized dynamics of racism and white supremacy and this kind of message I received of needing to be the expert and know it all. And in myself, seeing how I would not acknowledge the source of things or not include my teachers or where I learned things, and contrasting that with indigenous people, many teachers of color who begin right from the get-go of not only naming their lineage, but naming their teachers. And there's a piece of feedback I got that I talk about in the book, I think in the chapter on mindfulness and applying mindfulness to our relationships and social dynamics around incorporating a point from a teacher of color colleague and not acknowledging where it came from. And so there's something there around devotion and the sense, the way that the history of our modern world and all of these different ways oppression plays out that has disconnected us from that sense of lineage and honoring our roots and talking about where we come from and where the things we learned have come from. So that lack of devotion, I think, is also connected to and perpetuates a certain kind of harm in not being connected to history and lineage in the broader sense of who we are and focusing instead on the individual, which has so many deleterious effects on our psyche and on our capacity for meaningful change in the world when we see ourselves as individuals rather than as a member of a community, a member of a lineage, and a future ancestor.

Speaker 1 · 13:35Thank you for sharing that. While also making it clear that I was not trying to distance myself or separate myself, but I had reverence for all traditions, or at least most traditions.

Speaker 2 · 15:11It's a beautiful way of putting it, and just that word reverence really really rings true for me. It's about that sense of gratitude and reverence rather than separating ourselves or elevating ourselves. Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 15:23Yeah, I think for me it's an ongoing practice of learning how to express devotion and reverence, without disrespecting others.

Speaker 2 · 15:34But it's also without sort of romanticizing or fetishizing any of these experiences, whether it's a sense of connection to lineage or a teacher or having spent time in robes. For me, it's so much it has to do with where it's coming from inside. And in terms of the way I talk about the heart and the integration of the heart, I mean, it's right there in the title, your heart was made for this. I'm really coming out of not just the Buddhist tradition, but Asian thought in general, where the heart and the mind are not separate. It's really understood that these different capacities we have rationality, intellect, analysis, and also feeling, sensitivity, intuition, that these are connected as part of a whole. One of my favorite quotes about this is from the German nun and teacher and great practitioner, Ayakema, who said about our spiritual practice, you can't do this with half a person. We need both the heart and the mind. And I think the same is true for anything we do really in life, whether it's parenting, work, or working for change in our society.

Speaker 1 · 16:42Beautiful. Thanks for sharing all that. You know, one of the effects of patriarchy in our modern-day culture, as you write, has been the elevation of the intellect as the highest form of knowledge and the devaluation, and in fact, active suppression of traditional ways of knowing, like intuition, emotion, and embodiment. And in relation to this quality of devotion, in terms of at least secular mindfulness, this quality of devotion is not talked about very often, at least in the circles that I'm in. What are we devoted to? And how does mindfulness and awareness meditation relate to devotion? And it's easy to think of devotion as a religious undertaking, but as you write, devotion can be to a spouse, an instrument, a practice, a garden, a quality, the sacred. And many of us are devoted to something, whether we're conscious of it or not. And some things that we're devoted to may not be so wholesome or helpful in our lives, but back to this Ayakema quote of you know, we can't travel this path as half of a person. In my own experience, I was a Buddhist monastic for a couple years, and the monastic name given to me, my monk name, was Dhammiko, which is one whose faith lies solely in the Dhamma or truth of the way things are. And for a long time I related to that from the head. And I would think about what the truth is, what the truth means, and I would have this head-based devotion to a head-based form of truth, and my heart had not been cultivated to sense into the way things are, and from this head-based approach, I was prone to judging what I felt was ignorant, broken, and so I would judge people, I would judge events, I would judge myself, and I would compare how things should be with how things were, and I would try to fix people and fix myself, and there was a sense of shame and guilt in me because I wasn't always living according to the way I thought things should be. But when I started to cultivate the heart and relate to experience and phenomenon from the heart, there was a sense of safety that arose and a sense of acceptance and a much fuller feeling of devotion to what is not the way things should be, but the way things are and the way people are, and that spirit of compassion sustaining our hearts and our minds that brings energy. For those of you who want to learn more about Orin, go to his website, check out his courses. I highly recommend him. His website is orinjsofer.com. You can find his book on anywhere you buy books, including Amazon. Well, on behalf of myself and my kids and their kids, and five or six more generations. Thank you for writing this and thank you for your time.

Speaker 2 · 22:23Pleasure to be here. Thanks, John.