I don’t do a lot of praying for things expecting divine interventions and miracles. But nevertheless I pray every day. I bow and meditate and as I’m doing that I’m keeping in mind certain things I’m working towards, certain changes I’m looking to make in life so I can be the starting point of bigger changes in the world.
I’d like to share the people I’m praying for recently because I always want you to know where your monetary and energetic support goes to. By supporting me, who else are you supporting? I like it when the value I give to others is multiplied so I’m hoping you feel the same sense of value multiplication when you invest into me.
First I’m praying for a friend who’s feeling a bit out of options at this particular point in time. Doesn’t everybody go through these types of times? What makes this person so special? This is my general approach to coaching and because of this I don’t really differentiate my coaching dependent on the recipient of the coaching.
I was talking with this friend and I was providing my usual offerings. But with time I’ve gotten to learn when we’re not on the same page in terms of communication and that sense has been tingling. After a few back and forth discussions that tingled this sense I decided to drop all of my existing intents and started over, because there’s gotta be something I’m missing. So instead of me offering thoughts to my friend, I asked my friend to directly ask me for what they want from me.
The friend explained their situation and why the situation is so tricky at the moment. The friend is doing everything they can to make ends meet, go for new opportunities whether they’re provided by someone else or they’re making the opportunities themselves, living modestly and responsibly. But even as they’re doing that, things aren’t looking that good and my friend is tired of their life looking this way.
And this conversation is how I learned about the vastly different life that deaf people go through. My friend is deaf.
The job market is really tough right now in general. My usual advice in this case is, lower your expectation and find a job that’s “beneath” you because in a situation where nothing is being provided at your level, something below your level is better than nothing at all. But for deaf people, even the simplest minimum-wage type jobs can be inaccessible because it requires hearing, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Can’t do fast food work or cashiering. Can’t wait tables. Can’t do retail. So I’m not saying NOTHING is available, but the options are severely limited simply because of one disability. This gives arising to an interesting problem: while they can’t hear, they can serve the deaf community and get jobs in those areas. But if you had ONE social network you relied on for virtually all human connections in life… Wouldn’t that get tiring super easily? It’s like the small town syndrome times a hundred.
And now here’s where the downsides start to synergize. When deaf people need to communicate with hearing people who don’t sign, they always need to accompany an interpreter. So while interpreters’ costs are usually covered for crucial areas, they’re NOT for what would be ordinary life events for deaf people.
Suppose I’m going for a Buddhist retreat. I pay for my flight ticket and pay for the retreat. Then I do everything and come back. For my friend, they have to pay for two people because retreats aren’t usually covered by insurance or aid. Same with flight tickets. And while they’re there they constantly need to take double the time for communication while others zip on by. This is not only taxing in terms of cost, but taxing in terms of effort and energy.
Zoom calls always require a relay interpreter and while that works out usually fine I sometimes invite people to my home to get a more in depth coaching experience. I can’t really do that with my friend because communication isn’t necessarily easier with them simply because we’re next to each other. The only way communication becomes easy is if I learn signing. Then you learn that there are multiple sign languages in English alone…
So with all of this, is it any surprise that deaf people face a higher risk of economic hardship compared to hearing people? In America education for deaf people seems to be covered well by the ADA but man, when I researched the reality for deaf people in Korea it was extremely depressing. All disabled people get merged up into one “special needs school” and the teachers don’t have specialized knowledge/skills to teach deaf students in particular. So with that low level of education, of course you can’t get higher level jobs — and you can’t even get low level jobs!
Also deafness is normal-presenting; so it doesn’t have the psychological effect of disability. In terms of mental health deafness doesn’t actually correlate that much to suicide, what contributes to suicide the most is depression. But guess what deafness tends to correlate to..? Depression. And will the study account for deafness when a person commits suicide while being a deaf depressed person? That will also vary so even the statistics aren’t conclusive.
I’m working with my friend to get their intuition based business up and running more actively because they’re actually more than capable of providing value to hearing people. But years and years of this kind of life will weaken any person’s executive abilities. What’s impressive about my friend is they’re continuing to go on and making the best opportunities out of themselves; they’re reaching out to me as a bonus, not as the last lifeline. I really respect that about my friend.
Secondly I’m praying for a friend in jail. This friend was my student for my business coaching program but for legal reasons I’m not going to get into explaining in this writing, they’re in jail. I recently got a way to contact them and they told me how their life has been. My impression was that they’d be in one detention center since their sentencing began but they told me that they’ve been transferred seven times.
In each of the transfers there were physical and sexual abuse. They addressed the abuse by getting my friend in solitary confinement where they denied medical calls. Prior to their sentencing they’ve been serving a home arrest time and for some reason that time was not accounted for in their sentencing and that needs resolution, their business manager stopped operating the existing business so the business is nowhere now.
I read recently the Guardian article about the Canadian person detained by ICE. That was a very revealing piece about the state of for-profit detention centers in the United States. I wrote previously about my experience as an international student and an immigrant. My friend also happens to be an immigrant; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re going through this kind of a detention experience.
This gets mistaken a lot for a soulless kind of a comment, but when I say everybody deserves to be happy — doesn’t it also include deaf people and people in prison? My friend in prison is not a violent criminal, it was a white collar crime and yet they’re placed in a dangerous holding facility along with violent criminals. I’m not trying to argue for segregation, I’m not saying there’s a different weight between crimes. What I’m trying to say is, while my friend didn’t commit a violent crime don’t violent criminals also deserve to be happy? If the facility is dangerous for my friend, isn’t it also dangerous for everyone else? Let me elaborate on this statement a little bit more because again, it has ample room to be mistaken for double-harming the victims.
When we do something, it incurs a reaction. When we break the law, we have to get the punishment for it. But there is a very big difference between accepting the punishment from a state of mind free of suffering vs. accepting the punishment from a begrudging, vengeful mind. When one enters a state of freedom from suffering (which is what I’m referring to as happiness), that is when they clearly see the action-reaction, cause-effect relationship of the things that they did. This is when actual repentance and reformation happens. Punishment from a suffering state of mind only gives birth to the next generation of vengeance because they will believe that it is unfair that they get this kind of a treatment for something that they totally had the right to do, from their perspective.
Victims also deserve to live in a state free of suffering. All the advocacy, repairing of damages, accounting for settlements and such — these can be done without suffering and pain. Suffering only makes the pain of the past worsen without doing anything in the current now to heal their lives.
As usual, I’m also praying for the teenagers of Hawaii and the people who have lost their homes in the Los Angeles fires. With this writing I hope to have shed more light on the causes I care about at the moment, and it would be great if this writing was a motivation for you to join the movement in making meaningful changes to these situations.