"気を付けて: Take Care of Your Self"

"気を付けて: Take Care of Your Self"
Alec Davis, Westmoreland UCC
August 17, 2025

You may have noticed that the title of this sermon is in Japanese – you should have seen Pete Davis’ face when he asked what to post on the marquis outside.

The phrase is pronounced ki o tsukute and it roughly translates to the English beside it – take care of yourself; please be careful. It’s what you’d say to someone who’s leaving, to wish them well on their way. That first character ki is one of those words that doesn’t cleanly translate to English without losing some fidelity. You could say it means energy, spirit, presence, breath – you find it words like Genki (which means healthy, or vigorous), which you use when you say “how are you” – Genki Desu Ka? Is it so that you’re well? It’s also in Aikido (the Japanese martial art that I practice) Ai – harmony, joining / Ki – vital energy, spirit / Do – way, or method; the practice is about harmonizing your own ki with your partner’s rather than opposing it. And so ki o tuskete is composed of ki – energy and the verb tsukeru which is to attach. It is a wish that one will fasten their attention. Be mindful. Take care. 

This summer, I completed my 10th year as music director here at Westmoreland, so this community has provided a 3 month sabbatical, beginning in September – I’m very grateful for the opportunity to rest deliberately and to tend to my own spirit; so I’ve tried to reflect deeply on what it means to practice self-care which feels pretty fraught these days. This Japanese phrase provides, I think, a good way in – that true self care is self-nourishment, not avoidance of difficulty or self-pampering. And that nourishment emerges from the way we pay attention and apply our energy to the here and now, and certainly the practices that help to cultivate that very attention.

—

What do we need self-care from? 

What are some silly or exaggerated examples of self care?

What are some substantial ones?

We’re going to do a little exercise. This may feel a bit yucky, but I promise there’s a way through. So do your best.

Overwhelm in the Face of Crisis

• Climate catastrophe feels both urgent and unchangeable.
• Gun violence, racism, and systemic injustice persist despite decades of activism.
• Democracy feels fragile, and many feel like they’re watching slow erosion without tools to stop it.
• Wars, mass displacement, and suffering worldwide provoke grief and helplessness.

Isolation vs. Community

• Post-pandemic disconnection still lingers.
• Social media simulates connection but often leaves people lonelier or more reactive.
• Many are hungry for deep, intergenerational, in-person relationships – but don’t know how to cultivate them.
• Even progressive folks sometimes feel spiritually starved, unsure how to return to mystery or sacredness.
• Distrust in institutions includes churches – but the hunger for meaning, beauty, and ritual is real.
  

Compassion Fatigue & Burnout

• Constant exposure to trauma and injustice leads to emotional numbness.
• Many caregivers and justice-seekers feel their wells have run dry.
• “Self-care” is marketed, but doesn’t touch the deeper spiritual thirst.

Should we keep going?
Do you feel that in your chest? In your gut?
The powerlessness in the face of such vast suffering?

That is NOT a very fun feeling is it? 

But that is a very, very powerful teacher, so it’s important to be able to recognize it.

So if you don’t feel it yet, please, add something else onto the pile. 

-What are the personal pains you’ve been dealing with?

-What’s that long-standing problem that has been following you around?

-What’s have you swept under the carpet of your life? Yes, that one. If you’re honest with yourself, you thought of it. Even if you didn’t open the file, you at least saw the label. Ugh… Right about now you may be thinking “I knew I should have stayed home today” or “can we get to the good part now?” or “I don’t want this feeling – that guy is making me feel this way - I wish he’d stop”

Think about the scenario where you did indeed take a spa day today – are these problems still real? Yes of course. But do you feel that same feeling that you do after thinking about all this? No.

There is something vitally important here, and the mistake people usually make is that you either have to white-knuckle through and take the burden or disengage. But can we learn something about the nature of problems themselves, and in the process learn something about thinking and about attention?

—

I’d like to explore the nature of the problem a bit deeper through two voices – Dr. Iian McGhilchrist; philosopher, psychiatrist, theologian, and I daresay the most important thinker of our time; and Jiddu Krishamurti, the deeply insightful writer and speaker from last century, who shirked being called Guru, Sage, Teacher, often saying instead that he was just “pointing things out.” 

McGilchrist’s central theme is that the divided brain reflects two radically different ways of attending to the world. That is, both hemispheres are involved in every task, but they bring to it their own way of attending. He’s not talking about the old, simplistic “left brain = logical, right brain = creative” cliché, but something more profound:

The left hemisphere specializes in grasping, manipulating, and narrowing attention. It breaks things down, categorizes, and abstracts. It gives us maps, words, tools. But it can’t see the whole.

The right hemisphere specializes in broad, open, sustained attention. It sees the whole, perceives relationships, lives in metaphor, and connects us to what is embodied and alive.

He would say that the Right apprehends the world, while the Left comprehends the world. 

He proposes that in healthy cultures, the “Master” (the right hemisphere) leads with its broader, relational vision, while the “Emissary” (the left) serves by handling detail and execution. But we’ve flipped this balance: the emissary has usurped the master. We overvalue analysis, abstraction, bureaucracy, and technology – and undervalue presence, intuition, interconnectedness, and sense of the sacred. 

We certainly need both, and McG is fond of saying “I’m not trying to vilify the left, it is, after all, my second favorite hemisphere” – but it is the left in the first place that poses things as either/or, while the right as both/and, and we need both either/or and both/and. Our culture places so much importance on knowledge, which is obviously very useful, but do we understand that all knowledge and all concepts are representations of the world and not living truth? Concepts are ways the brain takes what is true and what is alive – right here and now in this room before you – and turns them into ideas that can be grasped, understood, manipulated, logic’d about, but the world as it is, is dynamic, ungraspable because it is not represented, not separate.

The left hemisphere frames things in terms of discrete problems that require solving, but then it limits both the questions and possible solutions to its own toolkit – measurable, linear, technical approaches. It rarely considers solutions that come from relational insight, intuition, or holistic perception – the domain of the right hemisphere. Our experience of the world, and indeed of ourselves, is directly related to the way we attend to it, as McGhilchrist often exhorts, and therefore attention is a moral act. 

Friends, our attention is being harvested 24 hrs a day. We seem to already know this.

Our societal tools are designed for this because it works. 

All tools and all technologies will be used towards the noble and the malicious – this is not up for debate just because we use the word “should”. 

Every spectacle designed to pull us into a state of reactivity, to keep us caught in cycles of fear, outrage, or desire. To react is to fall into the trap – to ignore is to be complacent in the face of terrible suffering. What choice do we have? Says the hemisphere which sees things in terms of dichotomies? It’s not as if we can solve problems without paying attention to them. 

Yes, of course – but the lesson from the brain hemispheres is that kind of attention you pay makes all the difference. Are you only paying attention to the content or are you also paying attention to the function? We are growing weary from channel surfing so we turn the TV off, but do you know how the TV works? 

Krishnamurti puts it in terms of conditioning. 

“Are you aware that you are conditioned? Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say “that is an oak tree”, the naming of the tree which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree?” – do you hear how he points to the same difference in attention as McGhilchrist? How much of your experience is couched in conceptual frameworks?

“Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are … the moment you have a conclusion or start examining from knowledge, you are finished, for then you are translating every living thing in terms of the old.” – Do you hear how subtly, he is saying “what is your relationship to your own thinking?” Do you know that your thoughts are just thoughts? That your concepts are just concepts? That the story you tell about yourself and the story society tells about itself are REpresentations. 

How do you represent the taste of honey?

• Language
• Direct Experience

How do you represent a chord? … 

• “C Major” – Emotional coloring
• Direct Experience
• “What music I love expresses to me are thoughts not too indefinite for words, but rather too definite”
• Nietzche “In comparison to music,” he wrote, “all communication through words is shameless. The word diminishes and makes stupid; the word depersonalizes, the word makes what is uncommon common.”

What is a book? …

What I hope is starting to become evident is that our relationship to our own thinking and the way we pay attention has a lot to do with how we experience the world, and consequently how we solve our problems and practice self-care. That the task at hand is about seeing clearly the nature of what is oppressive. 

Krishnamurti, we musn’t think that self-care is simply escapism, but quite the opposite: 

Why is it that we escape from actual facts? We are afraid of death – I am just taking that as an example – and we invent all kinds of theories, hopes, beliefs, to disguise the fact of death, but the fact is still there. To understand a fact we must look at it, not run away from it. Most of us are afraid of living as well as of dying. We are afraid for our family, afraid of public opinion, of losing our job, our security, and hundreds of other things. The simple fact is that we are afraid, not that we are afraid of this or that. Now why cannot we face that fact?

You can face a fact only in the present and if you never allow it to be present because you are always escaping from it, you can never face it, and because we have cultivated a whole network of escapes we are caught in the habit of escape.

Now, if you are at all sensitive, at all serious, you will not only be aware of your conditioning but you will also be aware of the dangers it results in, what brutality and hatred it leads to. Why, then, if you see the danger of your conditioning, don’t you act? Is it because you … lack energy? Yet you will not lack energy if you see an immediate physical danger like a snake in your path, or a precipice, or a fire. Why, then, don’t you act when you see the danger of your conditioning? If you saw the danger of nationalism to your own security, wouldn’t you act?

The answer is you don’t see. Through an intellectual process of analysis you may see that nationalism leads to self-destruction but there is no emotional content in that. Only when there is an emotional content do you become vital.

If you see the danger of your conditioning merely as an intellectual concept, you will never do anything about it. In seeing a danger as a mere idea there is conflict between the idea and action and that conflict takes away your energy. It is only when you see the conditioning and the danger of it immediately, and as you would see a precipice, that you act. So seeing is acting. Most of us walk through life inattentively, reacting unthinkingly according to the environment in which we have been brought up, and such reactions create only further bondage, further conditioning, but the moment you give your total attention to your conditioning you will see that you are free from the past completely, that it falls away from you naturally.

Do you see why music is so important in the context of spirituality? But not because it is inherently important, it provides the chance to set the thinking and commentary off to the side and just experience it directly, simply, for exactly what it is and nothing more. And there is no path to experiencing the divine that is not like this. Not represented. The moment you say “ah, I see the connection between the text and the scripture, how astute” or think “how lovely” or “oh I would have done that differently” – you have put an overlay on what was already sufficient. That goes just as well for the musicians performing it, and so I have often said that it is not the title or text which makes a piece of music sacred, but the quality and fullness of attention brought to it, both as performer and as listener. 

There’s a Zen quip that says two monks were watching a beautiful sunset, and one said “ah … what a beautiful sunset” and the other said “yes, but a shame to say so”

Gibran quote: “Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.”

Listening to music with your full attention and watching a sunset are indeed two ways to nourish the spirit. As is any activity that engages your full and open attention – rowing the Potomac every morning, cleaning your home without distraction or a wish for it to be done already, singing full voiced in the shower when no one is watching – whatever you can do with enough attention that there is no room for the commentary, no room for your egoistic self, which is itself just a collection of ideas. The antidote will involve subtraction much like a sculptor removes marble to reveal the already present structure within. To see clearly your current must be slowed enough to let the silt settle to the riverbed. The best teacher is always what is right in front of you.

This is why I’ve used all my vacation time the last couple years to attend meditation retreats at Dai Bosatsu Zendo – a Japanese Zen Temple in the Catskills – and why I’ll be devoting my entire Sabbatical to a three-month long monastic training residency. Doesn’t that sound lovely and relaxing? Some of you are laughing because you know these retreats have a grueling schedule, with a schedule of 18+ hrs a day devoted to silent meditation and other activities which will readily reveal to you the kind of attention you are paying to them. It is a safe place to devote everything you’ve got to seeing into the nature of seeing, and in the process there is blood, sweat, and tears, great ecstacy and utter austerity. They have been by far the most difficult, exhausting, yet rewarding experiences of my life –- and while I would sign my name on that statement, I do not recommend it casually.

But I will say, if it is intriguing to you, I hope you visit me while I’m there. There will be two “Intro to Zen” weekends which allow you to experience all the aspects of monastery life without the full intensity of the retreats – one in mid September, one in mid November. Certainly don’t let my description scare you – If you take anything away from this talk, I hope it is that you should be mindful not to be a victim of ideas, including the ones that come from me. It’s a method that appeals to me, and so it is my spiritual home, but the lessons are available everywhere if you know how to look, including right here at Westmoreland, our communal spiritual home. 

To wrap up this very wordy exhortation against wordiness, I’ll read parts of a message I sent to a friend recently, who asked their facebook community – “how are you preserving yourselves in this time when evil is in power and the unrelenting, devastating, paralyzing cruelty and fear and suffering all around us makes you feel like your heart is permanently ripped out of your chest?”

I responded: 

Ultimately, you have access only to your own experience (even when it is your own experience of others' emotions). If, from that sensitivity to others, comes compassion and a call to action, then you must let yourself also be the recipient of your caretaking.

You are not merely your body; you are the conscious awareness that underlies your whole experience. You are the Tamagotchi, and you are the one charged with caring for the Tamagotchi; Self-care as an idea has largely been hijacked by perverse economic incentives, crossing into self-centeredness, used as an avoidance mechanism. True self-care is self nourishment, and is our fundamental responsibility as a living human because it provides the capacity and sustainable energy for compassion and love, which is our natural state. 

Both everything good and everything bad that we can say about the totality of human behavior is but a stand-in, a shorthand way of thinking about 8 billion individual interconnected lives. Therefore, one of the most self-less things we can do for the world is care for ourselves and solve our own bs, so that we do not add to the clamor which we summarize as "society". For we are the pixels in an image that, when zoomed out, looks like war, fascism, racism, hate, greed. But that zoomed out image is by its nature an illusion; an emergent shared mental construct that is only real because we treat it as real (just like authority), as separate from the simple reality of our own individual humanity x 8 billion. Of course, we nevertheless *must* act.

But when we act from external authority, from "should", we immediately create internal conflict, even if we work towards a worthwhile and necessary value – and conflict always leads to more conflict. To act from natural compassion is to see the state of the world and the state of the self with clarity. When you approach a cliff, the body reacts with fear and immediate action, because you SEE it, not because you SHOULD react. When you cultivate the clarity of seeing into yourself, into the ways you are conditioned by the world and by your own physicality, then there is no should, there is only the compassionate action you feared you wouldn't take unless you forced yourself to be a "good person", but really it is as natural as breathing, totally sustainable, and most of all, YOU are included in it. Your care of self and care of other is not separate; for fundamentally, there are no others. 

So remember that you are loved – I often hear this sentence in my head in Tim Tutt’s voice, because of how often he reminded us of this. You Are Loved. If you insist, you can say the quiet part out loud – You Are Loved by God; by the Source of All Being; By the collective unconscious, By the Universe. Not a love of volition but a love which is inherent, which is beyond all qualification, which is inextricable belongingness. You need not seek it, as Rumi says, but merely to seek and find the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. 

You are loved, and you cannot be otherwise.

You are loved, so let yourself be one of the people who participates in that love.

You are loved, so find ways to see it clearly.

Thank you to this community which has supported me this last year during a difficult time of life, and which continues to be a life-giving presence in my life. While I am away, and at all times, please take care - ki o tsukette.