For several days, I lived inside the kind of pain that hollows you out. Not just physical pain, though that was real enough, but the accumulated weight of years of being managed into silence. Then one morning, steadied by rest and a small mercy of pharmacology, I made a decision. I reached out to my supervisor and contacted a VP directly. I handed them a log of everything that had happened since January 1984.

Could I be fired? Yes. Likely? Probably not. But something shifted the moment I sent that message: my supervisors no longer controlled the narrative. And with that shift came a question I could not stop turning over in my mind.

Would a spiritual person — a Buddhist, a Christian, a person genuinely trying to live with compassion — have done what I did? I have been sitting with that question. Here is what I have found.

Buddhism teaches us not to cling — not to outcomes, not to pride, not to the self. It is easy to misread this as a call to passivity. To absorb. To endure. To smile gently at the boot on your neck and call it equanimity.

But that is not what the Buddha taught. The Dharma is not a doctrine of self-erasure. The Five Precepts include not causing harm — but they extend to the harm we allow to be done to ourselves when we have the means to stop it. Tonglen practice asks us to breathe in the suffering of others and breathe out relief. It does not ask us to manufacture suffering by remaining silent when we could speak.

Protecting yourself is not a betrayal of compassion. Sometimes it is the only compassionate thing left to do.

When we are in pain — deep, sustained, demoralizing pain — the mind can confuse suffering with virtue. We tell ourselves that enduring it quietly is noble. In reality, it may simply be fear wearing a spiritual mask.

I keep wondering whether Jesus would support what I did. On the surface, the Sermon on the Mount seems to counsel the opposite: turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, love your enemy. But read more carefully, and a different picture emerges.

Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers. He called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs to their faces. He told his disciples to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. He did not passively absorb institutional corruption — he named it. Publicly. At considerable personal risk.

Turning the other cheek was never meant to mean turning a blind eye to injustice.

I believe Jesus would have understood going to the VP. Not as an act of revenge — which it was not — but as an act of witness. I bore witness to what had happened. I trusted a higher authority with the truth. That is not contrary to the spirit of the Gospels. In some ways, it is exactly what they ask of us.

Lessons Learned

Here is what I would tell anyone standing where I was standing:

  • Document everything. Not as a weapon, but as a form of integrity. A record is not an act of aggression — it is a refusal to let reality be rewritten by people with more institutional power than you.
  • Going above is not going around. There is a difference between sabotage and transparency. Informing a senior leader of a pattern of harm is not disloyalty to the organization. It is, in fact, loyalty to what the organization is supposed to stand for.
  • Pain can be a teacher, but it is not a prison sentence. Buddhism does not instruct us to stay in burning buildings and observe how fire works. At some point, we are called to move.
  • The fear of the consequence is often worse than the consequence itself. I lived with dread for a long time. The moment I acted, the dread did not disappear — but it lost its authority over me. That is what courage feels like. Not the absence of fear, but action taken despite it.

The question underneath the question

I suspect the real thing I was asking — when I asked whether Jesus would support what I did — was not a theological question at all. It was a permission question. I was asking whether I was allowed to protect myself. Whether doing so made me a bad person, a bad Buddhist, a bad Christian.

The answer every tradition I respect seems to converge on is the same: You are allowed. More than allowed. You may be called to it.

Compassion without boundaries is not compassion — it is depletion. The bodhisattva vow is to liberate all beings. That includes you.

I do not know how this will end. I may face consequences I cannot predict. But I am no longer a person waiting to be told what the story is. I have given my account to someone who can do something with it. And I did it not out of anger — though I have known anger — but out of something quieter and more durable.

I did it because the truth deserved a witness. And I was the only one there to give it one.

If you are in a situation where silence has become indistinguishable from complicity — in your own suffering — I hope this finds you. You are not betraying your values by speaking. In many cases, speaking is the most faithful thing you can do.