Janet tapped the remote control for her television. She tapped again. She explained that she wanted to find the Spanish cartoon channel for her toddler, Carlos, so she and I could talk. Her younger child, 8 months old, slept soundly in the bedroom, within earshot. Carlos, toy car in hand, looked anxiously at the screen, then squealed in delight as cartoon figures bloomed on the screen. The boy was delighted, and so was Janet. In a dark T-shirt and stretch pants, her hair in a bun, she curled up on her sofa. I was already sitting on a dining chair next to the sofa. Janet smiled and said, “Now . . . we can talk.”
I reached for my tape recorder because I was in Janet’s Maryland home to speak with her about the worst moment in her life. The interview was part of my research for a book I was writing about Chagas, a parasitic disease that afflicts about six million people, mostly from South America, Central America, and Mexico. A doctor had put me in touch with Janet, and when we sat for the formal interview, I had been in her home for some time already. I had met her baby, Luis, played catch with Carlos, and admired the work Janet and her husband had done on their home, including clearing the yard of what had felt to her like miles of poison ivy. There had been small talk, fun talk, baby talk. She called the baby “Amorcito,” or Little Love. She smiled at her toddler more than I had thought possible for a mother. And now we could talk about what had happened to her family.
A journalist, I already knew the facts. These had been spelled out in a 2016 medical journal article. Luis had been born prematurely. He weighed four pounds, and the doctors could see that parts of his very tiny heart were already damaged. The newborn spent about two months in the neonatal intensive care unit, where the medical team discovered that the child and Janet had Chagas, which can cause cardiac problems (and even turn deadly) for one-in-three people who are infected. While most transmission of the parasite happens through contact with triatomine insects, it can also occur during pregnancy when the mother is infected.
Janet’s son was fortunate. He had been diagnosed. Most newborns are not. They don’t show signs of the infection, and no state in this country has screening guidelines for congenital Chagas even though the disease is more common than fifteen other diseases for which newborns are screened. Diagnosed, little Luis received life-saving treatment in the hospital.
While I knew what the physicians had written about Janet and her baby, I couldn’t write the story without hearing how she had walked through those days. She began by telling me that she and her husband, who worked for a construction company, had spent every day for two months with Luis in the NICU. “He was in an incubator. At night he’d be there alone.” At home, at night, away from her baby, Janet stared at pictures of him on her cell phone: a wisp of a baby, his hair like dark eyelashes, the tubes and wires a spider’s web around his tiny frame.
Janet’s eyes brimmed with tears. Her voice trembled. She glanced at the recorder between us and swallowed her tears.
Ientered journalism school and Buddhism more than two decades ago, in my early 20s. Over the years, I wrangled my work schedule so I could attend weekly meditation sittings, and I listened to dharma talks on cassette tapes, and then on CDs, and eventually online. I saved my vacation days so I could join meditation retreats. However, for many years, if anyone would have asked me how Buddhism informed my work in journalism, the question would have surprised me. My work was one thing, and Buddhism another. It was like having two good friends I had never introduced but who would, on occasion, run into each other. I would be following along to a guided loving-kindness meditation and find myself sending metta to a mother I had interviewed earlier that week for a story. I learned that the silences during interviews reminded me at times of the silences with a sangha. Still, if prodded, I would have denied that anything concrete about the dharma could be brought into my work life.
When I met Janet, I had been out of “J-school” for seventeen years, and I had to finally admit that nothing in my training had taught me how to show up in that moment for her. Yes, I had been instructed on how to get information and write concisely. I had been taught to not get complicated with attribution and instead to write “she said” or “he said.” I had been told to gather the facts and arrange the facts in a way that made sense to a reader who had a sixth-grade education.
But back then, there was little, if anything, taught to journalists about being trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive. It was taken for granted that our jobs revolved around the worst moments in a life, the moments when babies are born prematurely or when toddlers die in fires or when teenage boys bleed to death from gunshots. No one spoke about secondary trauma for journalists who repeatedly bear witness to the stories of people surviving horrific situations. The only notion that a journalist was having a hard time was when the person took time off from work for rehab. The rest of us were supposed to work with the bluntness of a male-dominated profession in which, historically, men took care of themselves by drinking too much. In my 20s, I asked a reporter-turned-professor, a white man, probably in his early 60s: “How have you seen journalists change over the years?” He grunted, “You all don’t drink,” and then as if it were an annoyance, he added, “Journalists today are health-conscious.”
There were guidelines on how to carry out trauma-informed journalism, and so I began to wonder: How would it look to practice dharma-informed journalism?
The irony is that journalists are technically trained to be mindful. We are supposed to spend most of our time in the present moment. I was trained that way. I was supposed to be alert to the person I was interviewing, to what they were wearing, where they placed their eyes, if they sighed, or if their voice broke. I was trained to devote my attention to the places about which I was writing: How many bookshelves in the community organizer’s office? How many chairs filled at the meeting? How many calendars of half-nude women in the manager’s office?
I had the good fortune, early in my career, to accompany a more seasoned journalist as a translator, while she interviewed Latinx migrant families in the suburbs of New York City. The stories largely revolved around family separation and fear of the police and fear of anyone with any kind of power including elementary school teachers. Sometimes, when a community member shared a difficult emotion, the journalist would pause. A tiny swell of silence would rise in the room. Sometimes the journalist would say, “I see,” never revealing how she felt about what was being shared. If the hurt of the families moved her, it was not there on her face. She did not wince. She did not sigh. She simply repeated the same statement to every family: I see. I see. I see. And then she paused and moved on to her next question.
I was young and taking furious mental notes on how to be a good journalist. I see, I said to myself. I can say: “I see” or “I hear you.” I can confirm that I heard the person, that I saw what they were saying, and that I can stay, as the journalism professors liked to say then, “objective,” meaning, uninvolved.
There was only one problem: I was involved. So was the journalist whom I was observing. We were involved in that we were human beings listening to painful stories. We were having feelings and thoughts and ideas. No, we did not have to share our reactions with the people we were interviewing, perhaps, but what did we do with the grief and the shock? How did we tuck away our despair?
Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma reported in 2015 that, depending on the job and the country, anywhere from 4 percent to almost 60 percent of journalists have post-traumatic stress disorder, with those in Korea and Mexico experiencing the highest rates. I suspect rates are higher among journalists working in the United States who have covered family separations among migrants, mass shootings, police violence, and sexual assaults. And at the moment, the situation is most dire in Gaza, where Palestinian journalists are reporting while they and their families face famine.
The good news is that the journalism industry has changed. It’s easy now to find best practices for trauma-informed journalism. Much of the advice is rightly focused on how journalists work on traumatic stories, on how sometimes a journalist might need to shift the interview to a different topic or even stop the interview. A journalist has to consider whether the person can actually give their consent to be interviewed, especially those who have been the victims of sex trafficking. But the guidance on how a journalist takes care of herself is a bit more of a patchwork situation. The Dart Center offered a half-day mindfulness workshop, though that was years ago. Ken Armstrong, a ProPublica reporter, put his skills to work and composed eight pages of self-care tips culled from reporters across the country. Meanwhile, journalist and wellness coach Leslie Rangel, who bills herself as a “news yogi,” offers yoga workshops for journalists, speaks at journalism conferences, and recently published, with Dr. Kate West, the book Journalists Break News: Don’t Let it Break You.
I never thought about what Buddhism could offer journalists until I started working on this book about Chagas disease, which required me to spend years interviewing patients including some whose hearts had literally come to a stop and who had been saved by medical interventions. I did not, however, only interview patients.
In Houston, I squeezed into a tiny windowless office at a county hospital to speak with a cardiologist whose patient had died of Chagas. I was so preoccupied with my questions about the county health care system and the racial inequities in health care and the many ways that so many people in this country die because of public policies that I did not realize at first what was happening to the doctor. She was digging into the pocket of her lab coat. She was reaching for a tissue. She was crying.
There were guidelines on how to carry out trauma-informed journalism, and so I began to wonder: How would it look to practice dharma-informed journalism?
Janet told me that when her baby Luis was in the NICU, she and her husband woke up every day in tears, distraught. She said to her spouse: “We can’t go like this to the hospital. We have to take good vibras,” good energies. A doctor had told her that whatever she felt, the baby would feel too, and so Janet committed herself to pouring love and positivity into her baby. She referred to her newborn as “mi amor” and “mi niño.” She reminded him that he was strong, that he was loved.
What Janet described—sending love to her baby—reminded me of the Tibetan practice of tonglen (the practice of “sending and receiving”), and that is what I did as a journalist with her. Not after the interview. Not the next day. Right there during the interview, as Janet cried, I brought my attention to my breath and began to practice tonglen.
I had been taught to do tonglen by imagining that I was breathing in the pain of others as a dark color and then exhaling love as a light color. With Janet that day, I skipped the colors and pictured instead that she was carrying a stack of thick books. The books turned to smoke. I inhaled the smoke, the books, the bundle of hurt she was carrying. On the exhale, I visualized puffy clouds and blue open skies. I did this very quickly, in mere seconds: smoke, smoke, books, books, puffy clouds, blue skies.
We resumed the interview, and as I interviewed her and her husband several times over the next two years, I came to think of tonglen as a central part of my dharma-informed journalism—as necessary as the notebooks and pens and audio recorder. I began to wonder what it might look like if journalism schools offered courses not only on podcasting, feature writing, and the fundamentals of news reporting, but also on tonglen and other teachings from a variety of Buddhist traditions.
What would it look like to be guided by equanimity in journalism more than objectivity? What does the precept of not taking what is not offered mean in working as a journalist? Or any other profession, for that matter? These are some of the questions I am only now beginning to ask as I experience my two “good friends,” Buddhism and journalism, spending more time in each other’s company.