by Tom
Recently I stumbled across the phrase ‘toxic positivity’, which graphically conjured up unhelpful ways of dealing with the challenges of everyday life, even before I read further.
Toxic positivity
‘… involves responding to genuinely distressing situations or experiences with excessively positive attitudes, thoughts, and behaviours. Positivity becomes unhelpful, or ‘toxic’, when we minimise authentic emotions, such as sadness, fear and grief by pushing these away with statements such as “don’t worry about it”, “it will be fine”, or “things happen for a reason”.’
Such responses, well-meaning as they may be for those who wish to be helpful, can be damaging in two ways. First, they deny the reality of what we are experiencing. Second, they may, consciously or otherwise, tend to the place the blame on ourselves for the situations we may be facing, e.g. ‘if only you would follow such-and-such a practice you would be fine’.
The practice of Ordinary Mind Zen, of course, takes a different approach, though there may be some superficial similarities. Certainly it calls for compassion towards whomever is suffering – self or other. But it also suggests acknowledging – or even embracing – the distress we feel rather than trying to change or deny it.
Joko Beck talks of ‘… the god we actually worship … the god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness’ and points out ‘we have many ways to cope with life, many ways to worship comfort and pleasantness. All are based on the same thing: the fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness.’ And she concludes ‘only when such attempts fail us are we ready to begin serious practice’.
So, it seems to me, it is only through our moment-to-moment awareness of ‘life as it is’, rather than life as our egos would design it, that we can begin to transcend our ‘self-centred’ dreams and move towards lives of compassion for self and others. Such an approach does not entail passivity in the face of perceived adversity but rather, as the Buddha proclaimed, a ‘middle way’ between asceticism and self-indulgence that both acknowledges our condition and enables us to act skilfully if needed.