A Soft Heart

I own three books by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Over the years I've read some of her other books too. It seems I can just open one on any page and find something meaningful. Yesterday I picked up this one, and right away, I wanted to post everything I read.

She talks about war and peace, a bit in the broad sense, but quite quickly, she get personal. “War and peace,” she says, “start in the human heart....as long as we justify our hard-heartedness and our own self-righteousness, joy and peace will always elude us (26-27). She reminds us “that the people who we get so upset at, they eventually move away or they die...but the negative seeds that are left in our mindstream, the impact of our hatred and our prejudice is very long-lived. (27-28).

Here is what she suggests.

[W]hat I'm advocating here is something that requires courage—the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is because when we don't do the habitual thing, hardening our heart and holding tightly to certain views, then we're left with the underlying uneasiness that we were trying to get away from. Whenever there's a sense of threat, we harden. And so if we don't harden, what happens? We're left with that uneasiness, that feeling of threat. That's when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace. (28-29)

This presidential election process we're in the midst of seems like a mini-war. I read or listen to certain candidates, and I do harden my heart. Can one actually find tenderness in politics?