Discernment through Play and Social Connection
From Long-Term to Broad to What if...?
Hi friends,
What dizzying times we’re in. Today’s topic is on discernment, navigating between what feels urgent and what's actually important.
This essay continues our list of ten ways to practice in daily life, the Perfections. From the basis of generosity, one can build morality/virtue. After, one can move on to releasing fixed views to build capacity for otherwise. Discernment helps us focus on what matters.
Light Hive uses dharma-inspired frameworks, performance research, and play to explore identity and the polycrisis. Subscribe for an essay every other Monday.
Discernment
Discernment helps recognize and release the causes and conditions of suffering.
Check that again: causes and conditions. This interplay between causes, conditions, and skillful responses is today’s topic.
Knowing work stresses you out is useful. You can then begin to parse where that work stress emerges elsewhere. And knowing that work stress derives from a feeling of financial obligation to your family and a sense of finding value in your productivity is likewise useful.
Knowledge is power only when it empowers you to act. This is where discernment comes into play.
To quote from Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation of the Majjhima Nikaya:
What, having been done by me, will be for my long-term harm & suffering? Or what, having been done by me, will be for my long-term welfare & happiness?
The Buddha responds, well, what do you want to cultivate? What are your actions currently cultivating?
Elsewhere, Thanissaro Bhikku writes, “As the question makes clear, ‘doing it right’ means searching for a happiness that lasts.” This is in contrast to the short-term, hedonic pleasures certainly known to the early Buddha—a prince without knowledge of things like aging, illness, and death—made convenient with late-stage capitalism.
As you can see, traditional discernment depends upon a futurity that feels fantastical to some today. Our planetary crisis is accelerating at an exponential rate. At the end of 2024, Dr. Peter Carter, reviewer on the International Panel on Climate Change and Director of the Climate Emergency Institute said, “It really is time to panic.”
So if “long-term” was truncated before the new administration, what does discernment mean today?
For me, right now, it’s turning those “long-term” visions to broader heart practices. Still not giving in to the hedonic treadmill, complacency, or despair, we must insist that lovingkindness—metta—is not a fluff practice or idealistic wish.
Without depth of time, it is more important to practice compassion, equanimity, and joy for all beings. What, having been done by me, will be for the long-term welfare & happiness of fellow beings?
This essay discusses ways to approach and apply discernment across complex systems, from our bodies to complex global systems.
Let’s start close to home.
Personal Discernment
Prioritizing focus and (re)framing to benefit all beings begins with you.
Dear friend: how are you?
Close your eyes and drop into your body. Rest for a breath or two. How is your heart? How is this breath? How tight is your mind?
So many of us have been told our bodies are fundamentally unworthy. We can “play hard” because we “work hard” because labor is our primary function. We relate to our bodies as things to be “repaired,” as if mechanical.
Remember: this body is a complex system. This body has lived experiences, sensations. This body bleeds when pricked. This body is emotional, is fallible, is finite.
I feel great aversion to the claims that people are not overwhelmed right now, as if overwhelm in the middle of a political, economic, social, and ecological crisis would be wrong or weak.
I’ve read so many lists on what we “should” be doing with our time right now. Call your representatives. Protest. Make signs that make you look witty and pretty, so you don’t look unhoused. Go to therapy. Volunteer. Are you exercising? Have you eaten?
Have you read this article? Have you signed this petition? If those aren’t for you, what about this useful list of ways to build community and be of service to others? And, assuming you have a job, you’re still pulling your weight while order collapses, right?
Overwhelm is natural.
In this context, I have seen a lot of self-judgement for not doing “enough.” People can’t do everything, so they default to business-as-usual. They disengage and, at least in my circles, communicate shame about their personal inefficacy.
Not engaging makes the overwhelm get bigger.
Rosa Parks’ lifetime of activism was noteworthy because she sat. Finding the balance between fighting for a future and insisting on kindness is discernment. We need each other to not check out. We are the safety we create.
And we must start within our own bodies, because our problems are global.
Global Discernment
Discerning causes and conditions can be a source of overwhelm and opportunity.
Western school systems teach us chemists do not need communication strategy. Music is not musicology is not ethnomusicology is not math. Engineers have no need for theater, or queer studies, or psychology.
With this context, we fall out of practice with cognitive flexibility. Exacerbated by algorithmic rabbit holes, we are less capable of seeing the connective tissues. We are less likely to learn the useful strategies to analogous problems.
No one knows what they do not know. Yet few want to ask questions because that would, of course, confirm they don’t already know everything.
Friends, these times require a range of tools and strategies.
One of the reasons the United States in the 1960s is so glorified wasn’t the success of political movements: see where those ideas are today, in what Adam Serwer calls “the great resegregation.”
The decade was noteworthy because, after a period of extreme repression—where, for example, queer pulp writers needed to mail zines via USPS, keeping their stories and each other alive due to censorship laws—people were outside, marching, chanting, teaching each other.
One core facet of Buddhist practice is the unfolding understanding that we inter-are. We are interconnected and the impacts of (all) our actions ripple out. According to the old texts, there are 84,000 legitimate ways to practice.
One core problem with the polycrisis is the unfolding understanding that we inter-are. All of these siloed, already complex, problems are presented as discrete, not intersecting on one finite planet.
One timely way to illustrate the polycrisis can be found in the World Economic Forum 2025 Global Risks Report’s interconnections map. This survey tracks their perceived economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological interrelated planetary risks. Each node is significant in its own right, but the connections matter.
Looking at our interconnected crises, it becomes clear that impact in one area can have spillover benefits in others. Focusing on the connections and intersections is where most interesting change happens across scales.
According to 900+ economists, the biggest issues aren’t inflation, asset bubbles, or debt. They view our weakest links as societal inequality and a decline in well-being. Fostering interaction among these “separate” nodes shows us that social cohesion might be as important for climate action as technical solutions.
Dr. Peter Carter, the guy who told us to panic in the first section, asks us to focus on the connections.
And it's very important for us to connect the dots as often as we can to the cause of this death and destruction: the corporations, the fossil fuel industry, the banking corporations, and the big economy governments.
These global challenges require new ways of thinking and talking together. At the same time, we really need listening practice. All of that can sound very intimidating in a good year, and especially this one.
This is where yarning and play—from bowling to baking to the Creative Coalition—can be handy.
Connective Discernment
If the personal is political, the interpersonal is polycritical.
Because of how things interrelate, it is a given we all have something to offer as nodes in a larger system. Your worldview, your cultural practices, your questions are valuable.
Here, one might turn to what Tyson Yunkaporta calls “yarning,” playful “what if” banter across disciplines, generations, ideologies, and sociohistorical identities. Yarning as individual nodes in localized, complex systems can save the world, as Yunkaporta writes in Sand Talk. Yunkaporta:
it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. […] In fact, sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole.
Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like—connect, diversify, interact and adapt.
Simple guidelines that foster connection, diversity, interaction, and adaptation is core to Ben Robbins’ In This World that asks
What if we woke up tomorrow and something happened that changed our world? What would happen next? How would our future unfold?
Two to six world-builders make and explore a world together, imagining evolution.
The first stage of the game is beginning with brainstorming topics. Robbins’ provides examples: cities, law enforcement, dating, nations, education. This will become the central thread of the game across worlds. If the worldbuilders focus on “cities” for example, the game will center on what cities look and feel like across worlds.
Keywords for a city might be roads, buildings, neighborhoods, utilities, mass transit. This leads into statements that the group decides can be true—building a shared sense of place—which will then evolve as the game progresses.
In this world, neighborhoods look like little boxes on the hillside….but in this world (world 2), neighborhoods look like circular villages without need for major roads.
Here’s where specialization and diversity are key: one can change the world, keep something the same, or add detail. Urban planners are as welcome and as useful as ukulele players.
In This World is a gift of structured yarning. This is practice discerning what matters, what changes, and looking again to build more detail with a group.
Once we honor our individual nodes, we can imagine beyond them, to the things that hold us together.
Takeaway Practice
An eating meditation.
Eating meditation is the slow, reflective awareness of eating. I’ve done this with grapes, cookies, and in one particularly chilling meditation, an ice cube.
In the case of a grape, look at it. Smell it. Hold it. Is it dense? Soft? What color is it?
As you put it in your mouth, roll it around a bit. Feel the skin. Consider the taste, texture. I encourage you to chew on it for longer than comfortable, experiencing decay and dissolution. (This part is particularly interesting when the food is something you really like.)
Consider the production process, the supply chain, the store clerks, the number of people that made that grape happen. Offer gratitude to those people.
Creative Coalition: March 2, 3-5 PST
The Creative Coalition centers mindful play to practice interpersonal safety, opening to otherwise, and connecting across differences.
Come explore change and imagine possibilities beyond our current narratives using Ben Robbins’ In This World as our guiding structure. You do not need to buy it to play.
Together, we’ll start with what we know, explore differences, create new worlds, and reflect on what these possibilities and processes mean to us.
Pay what you can!
25% off code = Hive25
50% off code = Hive50
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please ask for the link via email or DM.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee, everyperson at Light Hive, and continuing lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. They are neither a mental health provider, nor an authorized teacher in any Buddhist lineage. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and are currently so upset about Grace in the second season of Bad Sisters.