This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline
Continuing the week’s exploration of right livelihood, Linda brings the teaching down from the abstract and into the present moment: a moment that, for her, is heavy with grief and outrage. This is one of those talks that doesn’t tidy itself up. It simply stays close to what’s true.
Livelihood as Staying Alive
The English word says it plainly: *live*lihood. What do we do to stay alive? How do we stay alive?
Right livelihood is one of the action spokes on the wheel of the Eightfold Path — but Linda is careful to point out that action doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It comes from intentions, motivations, thoughts, and feelings. So livelihood isn’t just about behavior. It’s about the inner and outer movements of sustaining a life.
In reflective meditation, that definition gets widened. Livelihood isn’t only employment. It includes preparing for surgery, caring for an aging body, grieving losses, staying in relationships. It includes the internal work that no one else can see — the work happening quietly inside a meditation sitting. And right now, for Linda, it includes the work of trying to remain sane.
What Came Up in Meditation
In her sitting the previous day, Linda found herself contemplating a question that had surfaced in the group: what keeps cycles of harm going? Wars repeating, cover-ups repeating. She knows the stock Dharma answer — greed, hatred, delusion — but sitting with it, the question felt unanswerable.
And then she heard the birds outside. Beautiful neighborhood birds, she says, a little like a Disney movie. Nature continuing its cycles, imperfectly. Babies being born somewhere. People falling in love. Meals being cooked.
Then the grief came in — waves of it, around the U.S. bombing of Iran. She’s no stranger to the pain of living and dying. Illness, loss, and accident led her to the Dharma in the first place. But this felt different. Harm that’s intentional, cultivated, weaponized. It hurt in a particular way that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around.
The Work of Metabolizing Outrage
The path, Linda says, doesn’t happen outside of all this. You can’t go get calm first and then work on the Eightfold Path. It has to come in the midst of everything.
So what does right livelihood look like right now? For her, it means sustaining some sanity. And that requires more than one person. She needs support, conversation, community. She’s fortunate that her work isn’t solitary — and yet it includes solitude. Meditation alone, then coming together to share. Then solitude again. There’s something stabilizing in that rhythm.
The other part is not letting hatred take over. She calls it the work of metabolizing outrage — and knowing your own needs seems to be at the center of that. Though she holds that lightly, aware that so many people in the world right now are living with harm they didn’t choose and don’t have the luxury of reflecting on.
Parroting the Teachings
Linda is honest about where she is as she writes this talk. She felt like a parrot, she says — reaching for what she knows, the things she returns to when complex thinking isn’t available. Impermanence. Community. The changeability of states.
On other days, creative ideas come more easily. Complications are clearer. Insights feel alive. Today that feels further away. But she also knows it’s likely to shift. Maybe by lunch. Sometimes it’s that quick.
And sometimes, she says, the most important work — the most essential livelihood — is simply staying human in human times. That’s what she’s asking for today.
