Stephen Batchelor summarizes of the four-fold task of secular Buddhism with the acronym ELSA:
Embrace Life
Let Reactivity Be
See Reactivity Stop
Actualize a Path
I find the notion of “letting reactivity be” to be at once sad and challenging. If feelings are part of life, then reacting to feelings is the only way we know that feelings are out there. Moreover, if we are pretty much hardwired to feel, then why would we want to deny an essential part of our basic nature?
I am particularly troubled by the idea that we should “let reactivity be” in response to the feelings of suffering. Here are some preliminary thoughts on the matter:
Every day we bear witness to global suffering because of wars, climate change, economic exploitation, famine – every horseman of the apocalypse appears to be in full gallop as I write. While calls for peace, political demonstrations, volunteerism, charity, and individual acts of conscience may call attention to these many miseries, they are slow to take effect and do little in real time to reduce the scope and intensity of the distress on the ground. While we respond with various forms of social and political engagement, we would be less than human if we did not also react to the feelings that arise when such efforts are fruitless.
At 76 years old, I am of an age when suffering is pretty much a rule of thumb. In addition to having my own aches and pains, I share the suffering of members of my family and friends who are ill, losing ground and, in many cases, dying. While I don’t relish the suffering attached to disability and grief, neither do I dismiss my reaction to such hard feelings. To me, the suffering associated with grief is less a yearning for what has gone than sorrow at one’s loss and a bridge between lived love and fond memory. Again, such reactions seem more human than shameful, especially when there is no clear path to any useful response.
When I began my meditation practice in the Shambhala community some forty-plus years ago, I remember how moved I was by the concept of the “broken heart of sadness”. The lesson was to slow down and sit with grief and sorrow – to be open to receiving what emerges from the pain of a broken heart. In our broken world, I found all this pain to be so commonplace that I wanted to push it away – to let go of suffering. From Shambhala, I learned that my pain (weltschmerz, illness, grief, whatever the cause) could be the basis for radiating what Shambhala teachers called “basic goodness”. Of late, I have come to understand that basic goodness is shorthand for the four Brahmaviharas. My practice now helps me embrace suffering at any scale, with lovingkindness, compassion, and empathy for myself and others, while maintaining some degree of equanimity through it all.
Way back when, the Buddha described suffering in terms of two arrows. The first arrow is the natural experience of mental and physical suffering or pain that arises in this human animal that we are in the context of our vulnerability and limitations with respect to life’s travails. The second arrow is self-aversion and the associated negative feelings in response to the first arrow. Our human dilemma is how to honor the lived experience created by the first arrow and let go of the delusive experiences created by the second. In my mind, the notion of reactivity conflates the two injuries without shedding useful light on how best to deal with the first arrow’s wound.
Some practitioners say that skillfully responding (instead of reacting) is evidence that one has let go of or let be reactivity: I fail to see the distinction. With all that in mind and heart, I modestly propose the following elaborations on the ELSA formulation:
- Embrace and embody all life’s manifestations – the good, the bad, the shameful, the joyful — because we are at once one and all. And we are also nothing.
- Let go of the illusions and hindrances that emerge as we experience uncovering what life brings, including the love and compassion that cause us to suffer loss, grief, and despair.
- See what really is in a spirit of equanimity while applying what Roshi Joan Halifax calls a “strong back and a soft heart”.
- Actualize the path that emerges in the spirit of lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
Far wiser folk than I have struggled to come to terms with what to do about suffering. I am grateful for their teachings, so this essay is not so much an effort to add something new as to provide my own reflection. I look forward to what others might have to say on this subject.
4 Replies to “Reflections on Stephen Batchelor’s ELSA”
Recently, I completed the year-long, in-person Bodhi College Secular Dharma Course taught by Stephen and Martine Batchelor, with Bernat Font Clos, and transcribed its 50 talks. I went on to establish ELSA Recovery, an addiction recovery group inspired by Stephen Batchelor’s teachings on Secular Dharma.
Having read your article with interest, I wonder if there might be a misunderstanding regarding the ethos behind Stephen’s teachings on ELSA. My understanding of his teachings aligns more closely with your rephrasing of ELSA than with your critique of it.
Stephen postulates that the Four Truths should not be seen as beliefs but as tasks to perform. These tasks provide a practical framework for engaging with the world and our reactivity to our experiences. Within this framework, Stephen identifies 32 skills and virtues—tools in our “toolbox”—to help us navigate life on its terms.
Far from a passive, uncaring resignation, ELSA involves actively responding —a caring and careful response — by cultivating and practising these 32 elements.
These skills and virtues include many core dharma elements, such as:
The Four Foundations of Mindfulness
The Four resolves or Great Efforts.
The Four bases of Creativity
The Five Powers or Strengths
The Seven Factors of Being Awake
The Eightfold Path
He refers to this map of skills and virtues as a “Cartography of Care,” emphasising that care is central to ELSA and threads through all 32 elements.
The brahma-vihāras—friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—are integral to this cartography and the core of ELSA. In embracing life, we acknowledge and hold space for its pain, difficulties, disappointments, and suffering, as well as its mundane and joyful moments. This includes embracing our natural human thoughts, emotions, and reactivity to experiences. Stephen does not suggest that reacting to suffering is shameful or that we should deny an essential part of our nature. Instead, his teachings encourage us to accept and embrace this human reactivity.
He distinguishes between unmindful habitual reactivity, which can hinder wise and caring responses, and a mindful approach that allows us to engage with wisdom and care. The practice of “letting reactivity be” is not about apathy or indifference but about creating space to fully embrace suffering, leading to the deep inner pain of truly engaging with the world. This is exemplified in the concept of the “broken heart of sadness,” which invites us to slow down, sit with grief and sorrow, and open ourselves to the insights that emerge from this pain.
Your observation that “our human dilemma is how to honour the lived experience created by the first arrow and let go of the delusions created by the second” resonates deeply with Stephen’s second task: letting reactivity be and go. This approach does not conflate the two injuries but instead encourages embracing and observing reactivity. By doing so, we break free from habitual reactive patterns that obscure clarity and hinder appropriate responses.
Stephen teaches that by allowing unhelpful reactive thought patterns to “burn out” without feeding them, we free ourselves to respond with wisdom and care. This does not mean we will always get it right—an ethics of uncertainty acknowledges that our responses may be imperfect. However, through reflection, learning, experimenting, and bringing creativity to our actions, we cultivate the ability to respond more skillfully when similar situations arise.
I hope this clarifies how Stephen’s teachings on ELSA align with your elaborations and why his framework offers a profound, compassionate approach to living and responding to life’s complexities.
Very much agree with you Cathryn. There seems to be a misunderstanding of ELSA here. And for me the words ‘letting be’ are a much better fit than ‘letting go’ as the former implies a compassionate, mindful and equanimous responding to whatever we are faced with, as opposed to the latter’s unskillful, unhelpful conditioned reactivity.
Thank you, Janet, for inviting your secular dharma readers to share our thoughts on suffering—thanks for your compassionate discussion of suffering here, for your sensitive reflections on ELSA, and for so skillfully opening this discussion. Your comments overall call to my mind something that impressed me deeply which (I think?) Stephen Batchelor wrote: We suffer because we care. For me the challenge of practicing the second task of ‘letting reactivity be’ goes hand-in-hand with sadness, as you write; and, at the same time, I find it inspiring and uplifting to meet this challenge. (Also, I think of “reactivity” as a large frame of reference for kinds of experience in which the static of stress predominates.)
I realized after reading your thoughts on ELSA that I’ve contextualized these tasks differently, and consequently I have a more appreciative view of ‘letting reactivity be.’ I’ve gradually begun to see the fourfold task of ELSA as a facet of Batchelor’s Cartography of Care, (*see request below to upload this text) which he’s taught in online seminars I’ve attended in past years. I love this evolving teaching. In mindfulness practice on and off the cushion, I often alight onto some feature of this profound and distilled text. Like you, there he draws in and aligns the tasks with the brahmaviharas.
(Disclaimer: My idiosyncratic take on aspects of the Cartography which follows is very much filtered through my own practicing with it. ) Situated in the matrix of the Cartography of Care, the first great and unending task—to embrace life— entails approaching suffering in the whole context of experiencing my human condition. The fact of being alive means that we exist on the same horizon with others, where sometimes we suffer, sometimes thrive, grieve and rejoice, care, become disinterested, kind, cruel, and so on. An “existential mindfulness” of the first task sensitizes us to internal and external conditions of the given moment, and over time this further sensitizes us to our complexly mutable and shared human existence. My experience is that in mindfully practicing the first task, our interconnectedness is palpable, and the binary framework of the individual and the collective begins to reconfigure itself. We resolve to embrace human experience with the love and caring kindness of the first brahmavihara.
I understand the second brahmavihara of experiencing compassion to unfold in the wake (stillness) that emerges from ‘letting reactivity be.’ The inescapable fact of the second task is that reactivity arises; “letting it be” is part of a process of recognizing this fact. Having resolved to embrace life, I experience the shock, revulsion, and desire to repudiate aspects of the human condition in myself and others at the same time that I experience the tenderness of longing to protect us and help us survive and flourish. As the reactivity of compelling and aversive pressures diminishes, the stillness of ‘letting be’ arises. I believe this is because compassion, in taking responsibility for suffering, lessens suffering. I recall that Batchelor—perhaps in After Buddhism?—describes nirvanic freedom as an experience of coming upon a “clearing in a jungle of reactivity.” The process of letting reactivity “be”’ is like the felt sense of discovering such clearings. For me, then, the experience of ‘letting reactivity be” embodies nascent moments of becoming compassionate.
The deepening and valorization of these experiences—the third task—unfolds into the ethical agency of the eightfold path–the fourth. There, with the uncertainty of outcomes and without guarantees that preclude risk, I can cultivate a middle way that lessens suffering and fosters flourishing in myself and in others. ‘Letting reactivity be’ allows me to show up on the horizon of existence where the misery I encounter along that path can be met with compassion.
I don’t believe, however, as in traditional buddhism, that perfect freedom from suffering—a final nirvanic endpoint—will come about through practice. Instead, I undertake practicing the tasks for the developmental growth it enables (even into old age), for the consolation it engenders (which I need), and for the support of courage it fosters to act within an ethics of caring about, for, and with one another.
*PS: Dear Mike, is it possible to upload in this thread a recent iteration of the Cartography of Care? (I have one that I can email to you). Metta, Anne-Laure
Responding to Anne-Laure, you can find Stephen Batchelor’s cartography of care, as revised on December 2, 2022, at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1njvH8bfwrtJks00BWeMHbo9JzzkXt0Mb/view?usp=sharing