Meditation broadens our perspective and deepens our courage. The spaciousness of mind and greater ease of heart that arise through balanced awareness and compassion are fundamental components of a resilient spirit.

In co-leading the retreat, People Who Care for People: Tools for Resiliency at the Garrison Institute, I found myself reflecting about caregivers . Some practice caregiving professionally, as nurses, first responders, chaplains, non-profit attorneys; others in their personal lives, as parents, children, siblings, friends. As difficult and pressured as caring for others can be, as tiring and overwhelming as it often becomes, many express a very powerful happiness at being able to serve.

An important element in how we keep going is being able to touch that happiness, broadening our perspective beyond what we see just in front of us, reminding us of our deepest motivation and what we care about most. In a challenging environment, facing our own or others’ suffering, we need to draw on inner resources.

Whether you care for a young child, an aging parent, a difficult-to-understand teenager, a client at work with no clear resolution to their problems in sight, any skillful relationship of caregiving relies on balance — the balance between opening one’s heart endlessly and accepting the limits of what one can do. The balance between compassion and equanimity. Compassion is the trembling or the quivering of the heart in response to suffering. Equanimity is a spacious stillness that can accept things as they are. The balance of compassion and equanimity allows us to profoundly care, and yet not get overwhelmed and unable to cope because of that caring.

I have been involved for several years in a program run by the Garrison Institute, bringing the tools of meditation and yoga to domestic violence shelter workers, and then to shelter supervisors and directors. These people are very much on the front lines of suffering, dealing daily with their clients’ issues of betrayal, heartbreak, fear, anger, humiliation. They might be survivors of trauma themselves. They might receive very little institutional support. They inevitably rely on inner resiliency to sustain their work over the long term.

Our premise has been that fostering greater balance of heart and mind is a key to that resiliency, and that one valuable avenue to cultivating this balance is meditation practice. Meditation helps us see our own difficult mind states — such as anger or fear or a sense of helplessness — with compassion instead of self-judgment. It also provides a refuge during life’s storms by helping us connect compassionately with others, no matter the circumstances.

Especially in times of uncertainty or pain, meditation broadens our perspective and deepens our courage. The spaciousness of mind and greater ease of heart that naturally arise through balanced awareness and compassion are fundamental components of a resilient spirit. They bring us an unusual kind of happiness, one not determined by the conditions we find ourselves in, not defined by the amount of “success” or “failure” we saw in our efforts today. Meditation helps us return, again and again, to this unique happiness.

And that in essence is what unplugging is about — not hating our habits of news consumption or social discourse — but being willing to experiment with our time and attention, the core treasures of our lives.

When I did a CD kit called Unplug, a few of my friends chuckled. “You have to plug it in to get directions on how to unplug,” one witty pal pointed out. True enough, and perhaps somewhat ironic, but also not a problem.

Sometimes our issue seems to be an excess of technology, but actually it is an excess of distractedness, an inability to settle and simply be. One colleague was once leading stress reduction sessions for someone who complained that he didn’t have enough time in the day, that he felt disconnected from his family, and that he was plain stressed out. When asked to describe how he typically spent his time, he described reading an average of four newspapers and watching an average of three television news shows each and every day. My colleague simply suggested a reduction to two newspapers and one television news show, which changed the man’s life. He reconnected to his family and became a lot happier. Are we reluctant to step away from what we are used to just because we get used to it, even though it is bringing us more discontent and dissatisfaction than actual joy?

Often when people come on retreat, like the ones we lead at the Insight Meditation Society, it’s not grappling with meditation methods or a group of strangers that concerns them most — it is undertaking silence apart from communicating with a teacher, unplugging from the normal ways we use speech to find distraction from what we are feeling and sensing. People come and express their apprehension about being silent. At times they say something like “My partner thinks I just cannot remain silent for three days or seven days.” Once someone came and said, ” They are taking a betting pool at my office about how long before I break the silence.”

But almost always, at the end of the retreat, silence is one of the components of the experience that people point to as having been the most beautiful. It’s as though, for once in our lives, we don’t feel compelled to fill the space, but can simply be. We don’t need to present ourselves to others as interesting, or funny, or cynical or hopeless — we can unplug from all of that and connect much more fully with our genuine experience as it actually is.

And that in essence is what unplugging is about — not shunning our stuff or hating our habits of news consumption or social discourse — but being willing to experiment with our time and attention, which are the core treasures of our lives. Can we step out of some ruts, and consider times of just being with what is, rather than numbing out or spinning away through needing excess external stimulation?

At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don’t want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music. But because I am no longer on a silent retreat, I suddenly feel like I cannot just quietly drive — I must completely fill the empty space with some kind of sound. When I see that, I can then bring my hand back to the steering wheel, feel my breath, feel my body, notice where I am. And feel the delight of having stepped away from what I actually didn’t want to begin with. That’s the great relief of learning how to unplug.

Take rest. Let the process of your practice unfold all by itself. Let your healing have its own rhythm. Keep paying attention to your experience, but don’t make an enemy out of anything, including sleepiness.

My teacher Dipa Ma came to meditation practice out of great suffering. Dipa Ma went through so much suffering in her life. In accordance with the Indian custom of that time, she was put into an arranged marriage when she was twelve years old. She left her parents and joined her husband in Rangoon, where he was working, when she was 14. She said she was extremely lonely and cried a lot. Her husband was very gentle, though and they grew close and fell in love. That happiness was tested by their inability to have a child, and his family’s urging him to put her aside and take another wife, which he refused to do.

After waiting 20 years for their first child, a daughter died three months after birth. Four years later she had her daughter Dipa. The next year she became pregnant again, but a son died at birth whom she never saw. As Dipa Ma mourned the death of her children, her health deteriorated badly.

Just as she was making some peace with her losses, she was discovered to be suffering from a serious heart condition, and her doctors feared she might die at any moment. She was 41 at the time. As she faced her frailty and possible immanent death, her husband, who had been in fine health, came home one day from the office feeling ill and feverish, and shockingly died later that day. Her daughter Dipa was five years old.

Dipa Ma said, “I had been suffering so much, and then this terrible blow.” Broken-hearted, Dipa Ma felt as if she was dying herself of grief. She couldn’t sleep, and on the other hand, she couldn’t get out of bed. She was absolutely dysfunctional, yet she still had a child to raise. One day a doctor said to her, “You’re going to die unless you do something about the state of your mind. You should learn how to meditate.”

Dipa Ma considered this advice carefully, and decided to try. She sought out a monastery where she could practice meditation, but she was so weak that she had to crawl up the temple stairs in order to get into the meditation room.

This is how she describes her initial experience:

When I started doing the meditation, I was crying all the time because I wanted to follow the instructions with full regard, but I couldn’t because of sleepiness. Even standing and walking I needed to sleep. So I was crying that for five years I could not sleep, due to sorrow, due to lamentation, due to weakness, due to other suffering. But as soon as I started meditation, I could only sleep.

Of course, generally speaking, we don’t really want to sleep a lot in meditation. Though we work to develop tranquility, calm, and peace, we also work to develop energy, interest, and investigation. It is the balance of all these states that we generally seek.

But this is what her teacher, Angarika Munindra, said to her, “It is a very good sign, because for the last five years you were suffering so badly you could not sleep, now you are getting sleepy. So, go mindfully. Do the meditation as instructed.”

In other words, “Take rest. Let the process of your practice unfold all by itself. Let your healing have its own rhythm. Keep paying attention to your experience, but don’t make an enemy out of anything, including sleepiness. ”

And sure enough it did unfold. Dipa Ma continued to sit, and sleep. “But then one day,” she related, “all of a sudden, I came to a state where my old sleepiness disappeared and none came to me even when I sat for some hours.”

Right Effort in Dipa Ma’s case meant simply not giving up, while not deriding or disliking her experience. Sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping more, and then one day waking up. Believing in her own capacity to be free, she was steadfast, and the fruits of her practice were extraordinary. In meditation practice, Dipa Ma transformed her grief into love for all. She understood so deeply the fragility of life, the times of loss and pain, and the fact that no one is exempt from these. I never saw her meet anybody with anything other than luminous love and compassion, no matter who they were. There seemed no such thing as exclusion from her heart, because there is no such thing as exclusion from vulnerability in life. Her own suffering taught her that.