Opening to Otherwise Through Renunciation
Give it a little glam
Hi friends,
Time spent thinking about information architecture in grad school and, in the years after, doing non-profit research with machine learning tools isn’t cred I normally tout.
But recently, the way data’s been deleted, overwritten, manipulated or weaponized has given me a lot of edges to work with.
My working definition of renunciation is not one of “loss,” but opening to otherwise.
This series on the ten Perfections—virtues to practice—has, so far, covered generosity and morality or virtue. This essay explores renunciation in relation to greed, aversion (pushing away), and delusion.
Just like opening your grip doesn’t lose the fist, releasing allows for new possibilities.
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Renunciation
“Renunciation does not have to be regarded as negative. […] What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life.” — Pema Chödrön
When many Westerners think “renunciation,” they think discomfort, rigidity, a life of glum penance. It’s easy to understand why one might look at a monastic and think they’re missing out. We like our branding, our conveniences, our stuff.
Let me frame this differently. The Third Noble Truth states liberation from suffering or, if you prefer, “stressing less” is possible. Renunciation confronts its three root causes: greed, aversion, and delusion.
As the third perfection, it serves as a way to harmonize better with ourselves, others, and this finite planet.
In this light, Pema Chödrön cautions against seeing this as loss. Instead,
Renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, how we pull away, how we shut down, how we close off, and then learning how to open. […] How we actually do that has to do with coming up against our edge, which is actually the moment when we learn what renunciation means.
And talk about edges, these are some sharp times. Renunciation means choosing the medicine for the moment, whether
leaning in and tuning in, in the case of delusion, disengagement, and distraction;
loosening our grip, in the case of greed for control, protection, being “right”;
holding fast, in the case of aversion, dislike, hatred, fear.
Practitioner, free thyself. There’s not going to be a “right” “solution” to every situation.
Engaging with the edge, not bypassing or running away, is the point and the challenge, especially now.
In “It’s No Time to be Neutral,” Bhikkhu Bodhi calls for direct engagement with the United States’ “autocracy in which hate, greed, humiliation, and the blind lust for power might tear apart the country and overturn the whole global order.”
The scholar monk calls out the Western tendency to want to “transcend” politics. To the folks who might drop pith about impermanence, he continues, “by the time this regime ends, millions of lives may be lost and damaged and the entire ecosystem of the earth disrupted beyond repair.”
Precepts take precedence when monks are talking ecological collapse.
One primary method of engagement he outlines is expressing moral convictions in action. While not all of us can protest, he sidesteps ablest rhetoric by clarifying
What’s of prime importance is to join our own hearts and hands with others who seek a nation committed to unity above divisions, to social and economic justice, to ecological sanity, and to programs that aim at the upliftment of all.
But our capacity to do this depends on what he calls “internal hygiene.”
How do we take care of ourselves right now?
Transnational/intercountry adoptees: Paperslip has good info on paperwork. Gregory Luce is the go-to adoption immigration attorney and founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center. Adoptees United has an open forum on immigration issues for transnational adoptees next Wednesday (2/12).
Renouncing Hatred, Self-Aversion
“Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane.” — Pema Chödrön
This big “R” word sounds a lot like relinquishment to adoptees. The old texts also use the word “relinquishment” in some places. Awkward.
Many transnational adoptees are currently concerned with loss of both citizenship and country. Anyone remotely aware of how Asian (mostly Korean) adoption agencies and mostly white, very excited parents rushed citizenship paperwork might spare a thought for us during this “supercharged” effort to denaturalize over things like typos.
As emphasized in my last piece, the goal is to build practices of safety, belonging, and dignity. And those would include, yeah, everyone.
Cough. Everyone.
Renounce the self-aversion.
External forces are real and they matter. Still, life is happening right now. This is it.
What’s forgotten here, dear adoptees and everyone, is that we are constantly adapting. On a cellular level, our bodies periodically re-create themselves. In this way, performing ourselves into being is our natural state and default mode.
Rather than being stable entities, we are not-selves—processes of behavior in dynamic systems of meaning. Seeing this means we can loosen the mental habits and behavioral patterns keeping us aversive.
Remember: we are all—barring none—inherently worthy of love. Please enjoy your life.
Love can be more active than plastic-wrapped boxes of chocolate nested in more plastic. It can also be fierce, as in the case of wrathful compassion. Setting boundaries. Advocating for your own dignity. Protecting others.
Staying grounded while playing the full-contact sport of being alive will be a process, so be kind to yourself as you keep meeting each edge.
As forgotten relinquished immigrants may feel, we all need each other. Supporting each other across life experiences and allowing ourselves to be supported is generosity.
Things might feel messy. That’s okay. Together is how we make it.
And communication makes the world go round.
Last time, I gave one way to handle verbal ventilation to protect boundaries and bandwidth in spoken conversation.
Let’s talk about how we text.
Renouncing Greed, Control
Encrypted messaging protects the user and their network. And renunciation means leaving room for people to define “safety” for themselves.
The US government has been open/brazen about their digital surveillance. In January, officials cued us they’d be trawling our personal data. TikTokkers are talking about winter boots (or are they?), while Substack praises “free” speech.
Using a wider lens, by February, an unelected billionaire was in the treasury. Now government data experts are “terrified” by the data-driven coup. There are rumors ICE is manipulating Google search results to give the impression of more raids than actually are. If true, we see how this 2025 government + data = fucking yikes.
Extra caution makes sense, so folks like this federal worker wrote a simple explainer as to why Signal, the free industry standard in secure messaging, would benefit everyone in this political climate. Wait, everyone?
Imagine you just received a text. The sender is someone on the government radar for one of their many nonsensical, retaliatory, or cruel reasons. You’re now connected.
It’s a link to a public social media post about immigration. You click and spend slightly longer than average skimming the comments. You exchange a couple more texts before heading to Google maps. You then call your friend and speak for five minutes. Soon after, your phones share a GPS location.
These are examples of metadata, that can be used to paint a very variable, highly interpretable picture of you and the people with whom you message.
Regular texts have little privacy. When messaging cross-platform (iMessage and Android), along with metadata, text contents are vulnerable.
While both Signal and WhatsApp use the same underlying [Signal] protocol, their approaches to user privacy diverge. WhatsApp, owned by Meta, collects and monetizes user metadata.
Lean in: the female-led Signal, by design, cannot. There is no metadata. This is one reason why the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it a “basic” tool for digital self-defense.
Dear readers, it doesn’t matter how logical, credible, or pleading I am. My greed to get people on this app gets responses that look and feel like
Thanks, I’ll look into it myself at some point in the never. 👍
I believe I’m right. I also believe their hesitancy is not about me.
I know I’ll only ever own my actions. So, my response is to use Signal myself, continue telling the world and hope, for their sake and mine and their entire network, these stragglers join me later. Renunciation.
Narratives of judgement and self-doubt (Was I not clear enough?) run strong in my head. Letting these and other, deeper narratives go is an ongoing, iterative release.
Un/fortunately, now is the time to practice that. Rebecca Solnit’s new newsletter Meditations in an Emergency highlights that while “this is an emergency,” full-stop, this is also a time of emergence.
A time to let new ways replace the old.
Renouncing Delusion, Permanence
Stories help us understand the world through character, consequence, and systems of meaning. They motivate narrative and systemic change.
Allowing more to exist is a core facet of mindfulness. And in this material world, belief in one static story about a predetermined world is not just delusional, it actively harms.
As Soraya Chemaly writes in The Resilience Myth,
Believing that your story is the one absolute truth is nihilistic. It forecloses the possibility of communication, compassion, and cooperation and, instead, fosters distance, division, and domination. There is no room for questioning and revising beliefs, for self-reflection, or the introduction of meaningful new evidence. It’s a recipe for stagnation, conflict, and political disintegration.
For Chemaly, narrative change is the most promising tool to respond to sociopolitical and ecological pressures.
They say, “the only way out is through.” Changing the way we talk to each other about those and other complex issues, foster new frameworks, and build new visions is how we get through. Imaginative play invites this practice.
While play may not always directly influence climate policy, public health, or “political disintegration,” it sparks dialogue (and wonder, curiosity, exploration) at one of the most emotionally-wrought places: the kitchen table.
Talk about local action.
Narrative adaptation is central to Ben Robbins’ game, In This World. It asks worldbuilders, the players, to examine the “unchangeable” and practice releasing their grips on certainty.
From the game description:
Nations have borders. Police have badges. Dragons breathe fire. You work for money.
That's the world we've come to expect. But in this world—the world we create together—we can question those assumptions and imagine alternatives.
This conversational game can be serious and practical or fun and light. As with most things, it all depends on the group that gathers. The point is to navigate, negotiate, and cultivate collective imagination.
Players begin by naming things that are “true and obvious” about the current world. Over the course of the game, they decide on things that will stay the same or change, and details about what each of these things look like in action across several worlds. What will stay the same? How will we adapt?
I recently met the visionary game designer, expressive arts therapist, and shaman Maria Mison, but needed to cut our conversation short. I would be protesting the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles decision to stop providing gender-affirming care to their trans patients. She wished me well and noted this:
“Go out there, rah, rah, have fun. Give it a little glam. We need joy.”
I’m thrilled to bring you our conversation soon.
In the meantime, play to foster connection, to experiment, to adapt. At the very minimum, try to have a laugh meeting your edges.
Joy lives on the other side of renunciation.
Dine-in and Takeaway Practice
Note when you get reactive. Without judgement, see if you can soften around it.
You know my insistence on Signal?
What has your mind been stuck on, pushing away, refusing to accept recently? All is welcome: political, Yellowjackets’ return, Justin Baldoni, the price of eggs, the Super Bowl (just know I don’t know football).
As this arises in your daily life: does this insistence, expressed in this way, cultivate vitality? What would choosing otherwise—while remaining engaged—look like?
Creative Coalition: March 2, 3-5 PST
The Creative Coalition centers mindful play—a different game each month—to work with change, practice interpersonal safety, and open to otherwise.
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.
The “play” will look like a conversation that takes place via Zoom and Google Docs. 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 destroying Hell-A in Dead Island 2.
Cosigning any love for 'In This World.'