This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline
Appropriate action — one of the factors of the Eightfold Path — might sound like it requires a clear map: know what’s right, then do it. But Linda suggests the emphasis in reflective meditation sits somewhere different. Less about arriving at the correct answer in advance, and more about learning from the movements we actually make.
Starting With Experience
Rather than beginning with a fixed idea of what appropriate action should look like, the practice starts with what’s actually happening. What do we feel? What’s being perceived? What action is arising in response?
Reflection afterwards isn’t about judging what we did. It’s about understanding: where was the harm? Where was the care? What conditions shaped that moment? Over time, this process refines our sensitivity so that our actions become more aligned with our ethical values — not through discipline alone, but through paying close attention to our own experience.
Following the Harm
Linda has been prone to tears lately — welling up at kindness, and at what’s happening in the world. The tears don’t stop her from acting, even when her actions don’t have a perfectly clear direction.
Ten years ago, she founded Sati Sangha after being hurt and shaken by unethical behavior and its mishandling in a former community. That experience directed her attention toward power dynamics between teachers and practitioners. Recently, she and Nelly received an invitation to a conference on teacher misconduct. They declined — not because the work isn’t important, but because that particular ground has been well-tended in their own community. Their attention has shifted.
Increasingly, she finds herself turning toward the broader climate of harm — the abuse, violence, and authoritarianism shaping current national life. And she notes the irony: here she is again, looking at power dynamics, just on a much larger stage.
The Bandwagon Question
Linda has spent most of her life keeping politics at a distance. She came to the Dharma partly because spiritual life seemed clean in a way politics never did. As a middle-class white woman, she had, she says honestly, the luxury of thinking politics wasn’t really about her.
That has changed slowly. And as it changed, her mother’s voice surfaced: *don’t jump on the bandwagon.* She looked up where the phrase comes from — a literal wagon carrying a band in a parade, something lively that drew people in. Her mother’s version meant: don’t follow a popular trend without thinking.
Linda holds that warning with respect, and then sets it down. She doesn’t feel she’s following a trend. She’s following the harm. Even when harm isn’t directed at her personally, she can sense it moving through communities, through systems, through other people’s lives. It’s like secondhand smoke — you may not be holding the cigarette, but the effects are still in the air.
Acting Without Certainty
What’s shifted, she says, is that she no longer needs a perfectly worked-out plan before she moves. She used to. She wanted pure motivations, a clear direction, something untainted. Now she’s more willing to follow her experience and let that be enough — to ask what she can actually do, to make choices that are concrete rather than abstract, and to learn from what happens.
Appropriate action doesn’t require certainty. It requires attention, reflection, and the willingness to keep asking: what moves me to act? And what does that tell me about what I value?
