Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 425, and I want to talk about demons.
I wasn’t a kid who had monsters under my bed, but in my childhood room, the wallpaper would move in the night in a sinister way. These giant pink and purple flowers would become demon-like. They would expand and move around the walls and make creepy noises. I would watch them getting bigger and more menacing. As I drifted off, they’d be shifting and changing and making weird sounds. They weren’t scary, exactly, but they weren’t friendly, either. Sometimes I can still see them now when I close my eyes.
I never told anyone, not even my mother. I didn’t want anyone saying I was making it up. I knew those demons were real.
I still have demons, even though I don’t have that wallpaper anymore. My big demon these days is fear. Sometimes it makes sinister noises but more often it just arises whenever I bump up against pain that’s too much to bear. Pema Chodron talks about this in Chapter 8 of The Places That Scare You, her first chapter on compassion. She says, “compassion practice is daring. It involves relaxing and learning to allow ourselves to move gently towards what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.”
I feel like as lawyers we have so many opportunities to practice with moving gently towards what scares us, and instead we’re taught to tighten or harden. After all, the law is an adversary, or aversive, system – same root word. And what most of us have learned – and those of us responsible for legal education and training have taught – is how to be the kinds of warriors who unsheathe our swords and strike. Because the object is to win. Chances are we haven’t had the opportunity to explore, or haven’t been taught – or haven’t taught or modeled or mentored, if we’re in those roles – how to move gently at all.
Take a prosecutor. She’s supposed to be as aggressive as possible. The dominant legal culture says, the defense is her demon. Maybe just because they’re adversaries but also maybe to blind her from seeing the defendant’s humanity. Or take a defender: same thing but towards the goal of the defender not seeing the humanity of the prosecutor, and instead, demonizing her? In civil matters it’s not different: the person on the other side isn’t smart, opposing counsel can’t write, the judge is biased…and all of them are demons. In immigration work, ICE and the courts are the demons; in family law the other side is monstrous. And so on.
Because to see their humanity is to literally not be able to relate to them as the enemy. As demons. To see their humanity is to care, which is too scary because it might mess up our case. To see them, and to see their suffering, is to move gently towards them, and what kind of adversary system would we have then? How effective would we be then? So instead, we “other” each other. We are aversive or we back away in fear. More fundamentally, we forget – if we ever really took note – that we belong to one another. And when we forget that, or forget to recollect it, how can we truly care?
And yet we do – not “care,” necessarily, but belong to one another. We’re aware of what’s going on halfway around the world and down the hall, and the ways that “there but for fortune” – good or bad – that person in battle could be us, that person winning the Nobel prize could be us, that woman dancing, that man in despair, the homeless child, the immigrant at sea in a boat – all could be us. And when we look inside and see our own suffering and our own potential, it matches up, in small ways and large. We see, with our own eyes, with our own hearts, that we simply are not different, no matter how differently we look or speak or dress or dance or pray.
We see this but it can feel theoretical, just like on a theoretical level we know we’re not different from anyone else standing in a courtroom or conference room. But how do we really take this in? I would say, through our bodies.
Kate Johnson, a meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, writes, “As we pay attention to the dance of sensation across the field of our awareness from moment to moment, fear and sadness sometimes present themselves to be known and healed—whether or not we have invited them. …If we turn away from [our bodies], overwhelmed by the multitudes they contain, we will miss the wisdom they have to share with us about how freedom happens at the cellular level, at the level of muscle and bone.” And I would submit that compassion happens at the level of muscle and bone, too.
And that it is available to us. And yet still we turn away, or I do. Why? Because we’re afraid. Because we fear that if we let in our common humanity, let it into our muscle and bone, really turn toward our commonality and investigate the way it inhabits our bodies, we’ll be overwhelmed. Or as I’ve said before that I’m afraid will happen to me, we’ll start crying and never stop.
But still, this is our task, this letting in of our common humanity, and with it our fear, which is not different from the fear anyone else encounters, moving gently towards both because they scare us so much. I would even go so far as to say that this task is specifically ours as lawyers…but it may be new, and unfamiliar. It is not the task of solving problems, but of being with our clients, our opposing counsels, our partners, ourselves, in ways that enable us to see our common pain and suffering. Our common humanity. As Pema reminds us, “compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well, can we be present with the darkness of others.”
A relationship between equals. Including our demons. And knowable only by turning towards our own inner darkness and knowing it well.
And I suspect not once, or twice, or for one week or one month or one year, do we have to take the time to learn, and know, our own darkness. I suspect this is the work of a lifetime. I suspect we have to do it for as long as we live.
Let’s sit.
