Humility

We’ve been talking about humility lately in the Buddhist gatherings that I attend.  This word is a little screechy for me.  In a prior blog post I’m Retired Right?  I wrote about how being humble didn’t suit me.  I wrote about wanting to live out loud.  So what is this humility thing?

When I read about humility, specifically in the book  “Dharma Breeze” by Nobuo Haneda,  I discovered a different explanation of humility.  Nubuo is speaking specifically about Shen Buddhism.  Nobuo speaks to our “evil.”  Now I know what you may be thinking; evil is badness!  Evil is when I take the covers from my partner, or I jump in front of someone in the checkout line of the grocery store.  No? You think evil is something harsher?  To you, evil may be when someone kills someone, or when someone denies refugees entry to our country.  Well, those things are evil.  But Nubuo’s message is more nuanced than that.  Nubuo is telling us that when we are making a choice from a place of ignorance, we are doing evil.  So if I am walking in the forest, and I don’t take the time to look at my feet, I may not notice that I’ve stepped on a delicate flower.  Here, I believe I am doing a fine job of walking in nature, of taking care of Mother Earth.  But yet, since I did not look down, I hurt another living being.  When I am brought to the awareness of, “uh-oh, I killed a flower,” I then have a sense of what Nubuo is talking about in humility.  I recognize that I really do not know everything.  I am really not aware of everything.

While this little story is a very simple way of looking at evil and humility, we can certainly go deeper.  Just think about white privilege.  What privileges do I have that I am not even aware of?  If I want to go running in the dark, I don’t have to worry that I look suspicious.  As I travel through our COVID-filled world, I have no concerns for how I look in a mask.  Not being aware of this privilege is a kind of ignorance, an evil.  When I recognize my privilege, that is humility.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts over the past 18 months or more, you might have noticed that there are many musings about body image and fat.  The frequency of this topic is no coincidence.  During my COVID staycation, I have decided to study the impact of diet culture on our society.  As a result of my studies, I am getting ready to sit for an exam to certify me as a weight neutral and diet recovery coach.  With all these new and neutral messages about my body and other bodies, all the messages about how harmful dieting can be, I’m inspired to write about these topics often.  In addition, the more I learn about these topics, the wiser I believe I am becoming.  Ah...what is happening to the humility?

Recently, I decided to give my knowledge the ultimate test.  I decided I would collaborate with a friend who runs workshops on authentic relating.  These workshops used to occur weekly.  First in person, then on Zoom, and later in person with masks.  With the shifts and changes in her life, the workshops came to an end in the fall of 2020.  She was eager to restart, but needed a space to hold the workshops.  I was eager to start sharing my knowledge of body awareness and diet culture, but I needed the confidence and audience to get started.   Once my friend found out about my studies in body awareness and dieting, she concluded that this information would be a perfect topic for a future workshop.  We decided then and there to collaborate, and my basement provided the perfect space to hold the event.  I was psyched!

As the date of the event grew closer, I became apprehensive.  Was I really all that?  Did I really know my stuff when it comes to diet culture and weight neutrality?  Was my humility of my knowledge coming through in my apprehension?  I wrote copious notes.  I made a detailed script.  I practiced the script over and over.  When the day of the event came, I went skiing.  I figured that skiing would be a good way to calm my nerves and take my focus off of the event.   When I got home I had a violin lesson.  My focus there was fractured, my mind was on the evening coming up as opposed to the notes on the page.  I decided to just “chill” before the event after the violin lesson.

In the end, the event went well.  There were 10 attendees.  I knew my material.  One attendee raised an issue that wasn’t in my material.  That was fine; I wanted people to raise issues that they faced around bodies and diet.  I fielded the question comfortably.  

As I covered the material, my co-lead asked questions of the people in the room.  “Do you remember a time when someone said something about your body (good or bad) and how you reacted?”  “How does your body show up in privilege?” And, “Have you ever felt uncomfortable with the body of someone else who was in your life?”  Hearing these questions. I felt at ease.  I felt like these questions were ones I had answered before...until I heard that last one.  I thought about other people in my life and how I have viewed their bodies.   In my time studying bodies and diet culture, I focused on my own feelings.  I focused on the feelings of the people around me who wanted to talk about bodies and diet culture.  But what about other people in my life?  I realized there were times I passed judgement on people.  “Yeah, they may have pains in their knees but if they just did a little yoga...” Or “I’ve seen them eat and they don’t even know how to spell the name of a vegetable, let alone eat one.”  I suddenly felt ashamed.  I even felt evil.  There I was, touting awareness and intelligence around diet culture and body acceptance, yet I wasn’t practicing what I preached very well.

So let’s talk about shame for a minute.  Shame is that super icky feeling I get when I realize I did something I didn’t mean to.  And here’s the thing about diet culture - it’s pervasive.  It’s everywhere.  It’s on our TV, magazines, in our restaurants, supermarkets, and in our daily conversation.  It’s hard to realize and hard to escape.  It’s an unconscious bias.  That doesn’t make it right, that just makes it harder to recognize.  But in that moment of mulling over that question I recognized it!  That’s something, right?

In feeling my shame, I decided to have some compassion for myself.  I know that I have been exposed to diet culture for years, probably my entire life.  That said, I don’t have to agree with it.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, fighting the battle against the diet industry can and will be an uphill challenge.  What is the best way for me to fight?  With humility.  With humility I can face my own biases and start to know what I didn’t know, realize what I didn’t realize.  Acknowledging the evil within myself isn’t so bad.  Really if I’m discovering awareness, it’s all good.