Good afternoon. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me here. So for those of you that weren't here yesterday, I read yesterday from what is a new collaborative book for me called Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love and Liberation. I read from chapters that referred to, talked a little bit about race yesterday and today I will talk about love and liberation. I'm sure the race will find its way in there somewhere too. One of the interesting features, actually, of the three co-authors is that as we were working on the book, we kind of came together after doing these conversations across the country. And we had them then transcribed and then we all live in different parts of the country.

[01:05]

And so we got ourselves an Airbnb place in New York City and sequestered ourselves in a house together to work on the transcripts and try to just like make sense of like, what is this? What will the conversations be like? We had already decided by that point that we would mix up the conversations. And so they're fused together. You can't really tell where a passage takes place. And so it's as if there's a conversation on race, a conversation on love, and a conversation on liberation. But really, that was the result of all four conversations, and we kind of brought them together, and they're woven together reasonably well, we think. And then we thought about the other parts of the book, and that was sort of new. We hadn't really actually thought of bringing it together this way, but there were a lot of things that existed in the conversations, but they called for some context and some way for people to be thinking and to get a kind of lens on what we were doing and what we were trying to communicate.

[02:21]

But we realized that there were a few things that were often going to come up and then one thing that we hadn't really thought about. So one thing that would come up is like, how is it that we, as I mentioned yesterday, how is it that we as people of color, we as black folks survived really choosing a path in what is a predominantly white in this country, obviously. And for all of that is true. For Rod, it's a little bit different because he's in a Tibetan lineage. And so his immediate teacher is Tibetan. And many of his sort of, you know, teaching lineage, as he looks back, is Tibetan. And there's a lot of opportunity for him actually to relate to Tibetan people who... in his experience were much more familiar and kind of had a lot of the sort of similar cultural norms in some ways to black people, more so than black people had to white people.

[03:26]

And also there's not the layer that racialization in America has brought. And also his teachers, therefore though, didn't have the experience And as he would say, you know, so they didn't care that I was black. They would tell him, you have to do the same work and you have to work just as hard. And he did the traditional three-year llama retreat where they're sequestered and they have a kind of small group of people that they're with. But it was, which is very funny and very interesting. It was only as we were actually working on the material that we realized the other thing that we had in common is that all of us were queer. And it actually hadn't, occurred to us really as we were doing the conversations. It came up in the conversations, but for us as a group, it's such a given that we hadn't thought about how it impacted the way that we approached our survival within the Dharma.

[04:29]

And one of the things that we talked about in terms of how that was a part of how we came here was that we had already had to navigate, each of us in our own lives, a guarding, right, of our identity, right? A choosing our, like, this is how we understand ourselves, and then to kind of push people back in our lives, much younger for each of us to say, like, this is who we are. We had to claim who we were fully. And we all felt that that practice and that choice to claim who we were fully younger in our lives in terms of queer identity had a lot to do with being able to be comfortable and not navigate as much around race later on as we entered into spiritual practice. And so we ended up with a chapter, to begin with, we ended up with a chapter on home leaving and what we had to leave behind, because we each had to leave something

[05:34]

behind in order to engage these communities. I'm not necessarily saying that it was a bad thing. There were bad things. We had to leave all kinds of things behind. But that's one of the chapters. And then we talk about what it is that we bring forth. And then we ended up with this very, I think, fun and useful chapter called Bringing Our Whole Selves, A Theory of Queer Dharma. And so we talk... and give kind of testimonial that was like an entirely new conversation. It was the three of us got on a phone call. I was in Istanbul, they were in California and Boston. And we got on this phone call and we taped that conversation and then we transcribed that to kind of pull this chapter forward. Radical Dharma emerges from a lineage of insurgents that is about bringing our whole selves. We can't marginalize others or ourselves as part of our pursuit of liberation, personal or political. We couldn't have arrived here without a fuller and fuller fullness.

[06:35]

The leaders of anti-racist movements have always included people of many sexual and gender orientations. And throughout our conversations, the deep connection between personal liberation and social transformation is increasingly clear. It is embodied. In the following, we share testimonies and dialogue on the dharma of sexuality and gender identity and how they have been part of our own practices of personal liberation. So this is from my testimony. Queerness paved the way for my entering the dharma. Rather than trying to colonize, commodify, or compartmentalize it, I could let it enter me. I could let painful truths that had been hidden away emerge on my cushion because through choosing queerness I had already had practiced choosing to be free. I knew what it meant allowing myself to be seen and that fully accepting myself is an inherently binding agreement of allowing others to fully accept themselves. Letting my bisexual lovers be who they are rather than insisting that they choose...

[07:38]

was a practice of queer radical dharma because it meant finding where I was threatened by a sense of inferiority when stacked against men and the potential loss of the love that that raised. When I realized that queerness couldn't be limited to sex and sexuality, that to choose queer expressed something more profound about who and how we are, I had to shift my worldview to one that sees beyond binary truths handed to us to yoke ourselves into a system of control. To hold queerness as a practice is to be in active radical acceptance of everyone and all things as they are. So one of the fun things that often comes up in terms of the conversation about... I'm going to dip into race and love at the same time. excuse me, race and liberation at the same time, is that in Dharma communities people want to kind of understand the people of color problem.

[08:47]

So this is a dialogue between Lama Rod and myself. Yasmeen was actually the coordinator and after the fact she then contributed essays and became a very full part of the whole project. This is myself. What I get to hear is largely about white folks who are trying to figure out how to fix the people of color problem. That's what people ask me all the time. How do we invite more people of color? What I don't hear is this. I'm suffering. I'm experiencing trauma. What is it that I can do to help myself? Lama Rod says... I think it says a lot about Sangha when the line is, well, we need to be more diverse. How do we get brown bodies into these seats? I don't care about brown people populating the Sangha because that's just a distraction for me. I'm interested in the healing piece. I'm interested in looking at how we're suffering, how we're creating these relationships that actually exclude people.

[09:53]

I don't use the word diversity and I rarely use the word racism. I think we have this programmed response to these words and we have to disrupt that by transforming the language a little bit or by using more precise language. The suffering of whiteness. The trauma of whiteness. Let's look at our suffering. How do we practice in such a way that we're restoring our humanity? How can we instigate that kind of transformation? Because healing is also transformation. And I say... How do we practice in such a way that we restore humanity? That suggests that our humanity has been compromised, that the humanity of white folks in particular has been compromised. Well, the humanity of this country is compromised. One of the sisters over here spoke about embracing our history, which is an act of reconciliation. How do we say that our country is really a very violent place? We have a very violent history. We can wave the flag around and talk about democracy, but how can we see the reconciliation models that we've been seeing in other countries, like South Africa, for instance?

[11:03]

That's healing, you know? That's saying, oh, there's trauma. We have historical trauma as a country, as communities, as different-bodied people, a different racially-identified people. There's trauma we have to start bringing to the surface and articulating the hurt, the guilt, the pain, and holding space for that. I don't see that happening in our communities and myself. For too long, these communities have circulated around the healing that has to be done for people of color, even reconciliation, even in South Africa. The lens that is conventionally held is that there's healing to be done, but largely that that healing has to be done on behalf of people of color. I may have to say I'm sorry as a white person, and I may have to deal with some guilt and shame, but who's really being impacted has heavily focused on people of color, different people. Oh, women are suffering. Oh, queer people are suffering. Oh, black people are suffering. But for me, there's been too little conversation allowing space for the unearthed suffering of white folks, almost because of the power dynamics involved and almost because we have been so racialized into saying, if I'm white, I'm supposed to feel bad for people of color.

[12:16]

but there's zero space for white folks to really claim suffering around living in a racialized society. There's no space, it seems to me, for white folks to actually get down to the conversation for themselves. Even folks sitting there feeling it and they're like, hmm, I better not say anything. It can't even be acknowledged that there is any suffering for white people. I just don't see how we can ever expect that this dynamic is going to change if we can't allow people to fully claim their own suffering. And that's what the Dharma is actually about. It's about allowing people the space and the opportunity for discomfort so that they can touch their own suffering. And this focus on other people's suffering for me, frankly, is a distraction. It feels like we've spent decades now tiptoeing around other people's discomfort. I think there's some degree of relief that people feel. I think that some relationships may grow in those conditions. But in my experience, when the shit hits the fan and people are in contraction, when the economy turns upside down, when the spaces that people live in start to change, when more people of color, more marginalized people enter the room, when people contract, they go back to those places of unaddressed suffering and the behaviors that we experience as racialized behavior, like microaggressions and so on, continue.

[13:33]

So we can all be in good behavior, and I feel that that's what we've had in the Dharma for the last 40 years. good behavior dog. It's largely progressive, not 100%. And we have this progressive liberal way of talking about race. Either I'm colorblind or I'm okay with colored folks in theory. But the reality is that people of color are not feeling welcome. They're not feeling welcome and they're not feeling welcome because they're not, and they're not not feeling welcome because there aren't enough POC scholarships. Yes, thank you. POC is People of Color. So I wrote this chapter and it has a funny title. It's called It's Not About Love After All. And it begins with a quote from Bell Hooks. We have witnessed the way in which movements for justice that denounce dominator culture

[14:35]

yet have an underlying commitment to corrupt uses of power do not really create fundamental changes in our societal structure. When radical activists have not made a core break with dominator thinking, imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, there is no union of theory and practice and real change is not sustained. It is precisely because the dictates of dominant culture structure our lives that it is difficult for love to prevail. So this chapter is really the other side of the equation in which we speak to people that are in activist movements and are probing our relationship to social justice movements and where they may be missing some information that could be useful. I've been mulling over the role of love in movements for well over two decades now. I feel a sense of calling to activist work, ushering in the third wave of feminism and changing minds about the so-called apathetic Generation X. Our cross-country voter registration drive felt significant, and I felt like I was part of something making a difference.

[15:49]

Not too much later, after I dropped anchor in a spiritual practice, the conflicting idea that seemed almost normal became increasingly apparent. Like many activists, I was alarmed by the destructive behavior of my comrades and colleagues, and confounded by how it could be possible we could ever create the world we wanted to live in if we could not be the change. Although we were young women with good models for kindness towards each other, much of our work was driving against this or that, and to drive so hard and so fast required fuel, and that fuel was anger. So I then go on to talk about my spiritual practice. I was captivated by the Bodhisattva ideal. The most prominent Avalokiteshvara is he who looks down on and his body is female in Chinese or the one who hears the cries of the world. In Bodhisattva I saw Sojourner and Ella Embedkar and Malcolm. The Sojourner Truth and Ella Baker, Bimral Embedkar, who brought...

[16:55]

Buddhism back to the Dallas, the Untouchables in India, and Malcolm X. In their infinite wisdom and boundless compassion, they responded to the cries. Even though liberation is available to them, they hold it off until every person can be awakened to. What I didn't hear is that I need anger to drive my response. I lived by this ideal for many years. I extrapolated and built upon the concept of the awakening warrior as I'd heard it translated in Tibetan teachings. Strongly influenced by Trogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings on the enlightened society of Shambhala and the qualities of warriorship needed to achieve it, warrior spirit became a central theme of my work. I advocated for this more balanced approach to fiercely address injustice from a place of empowerment as a warrior. but one that was ultimately committed to peace rather than aggression. This path recognized the clarity and resilience brought about by cultivating one's inner life and recognizing the ego as the ultimate foe to be vanquished.

[17:58]

I saw this as a more sustainable path, especially for black people, whose road to victory in the external landscape would likely be a long one given the deep entrenchment of the forces of oppression set against us. In response to the events of September 11th, I wrote what became known as the warrior spirit prayer of awakening. The verse became an affirmation of how I wanted to be in response to the challenges of the world and eventually became the penultimate call of the practice community I eventually founded. May all beings be granted with strength, determination, and wisdom to extinguish anger and reject violence as a way. May all suffering cease and may I seek find and fully realize the love and compassion that already lives within me and allow them to inspire and permeate my every action. May I exercise the precious gift of choice and the power to change that makes me uniquely human and is the only true path to liberation.

[19:05]

May I swiftly reach complete, effortless freedom so that my fearless, unhindered action Be of benefit to all. May I lead the life of a warrior. Last for now. I think. I knew that little blue piece of paper meant something. Oh, there you go. It's a pink piece of paper today. Oh, there we go. So back to it's not about love after all.

[20:05]

The thing about our pain and our suffering is that until it is met and seen for what it is, it doesn't go anywhere. It's like the dark places in your refrigerator, things hidden in little containers that you refuse to open because you don't quite remember when it got there. So instead of opening and facing the smelly containers you find, you ignore them and eventually run into an infestation, an overgrowth of mold and spores and bacteria and things that can kill you because you didn't want to deal with them when they were just plain stinky. Be with the suffering. The first... The very first thing the Buddha taught, the first noble truth, was that we have to come to terms with the fact that the nature of life is to experience confusion and discomfort. That by the fact of our birth, old age, sickness and death are in our future, and we are thus inclined to suffer. In our culture, so much is oriented towards moving away from that experience and finding ways to deaden it.

[21:14]

whether that's through addictions to Facebook, television, drugs, or alcohol. You have to figure out what place are you not feeling? What part of you are you rejecting? What aspect are you not loving? What truth are you not willing to accept? In my experience, whatever we're not facing about ourselves is never as bad as the idea we are referencing ourselves off of. I'm gonna repeat that. In my experience, whatever we are not facing about ourselves is never as bad as the idea that we are referencing ourselves off of. The funny thing is that somehow when we get caught in our stuck ideas about ourselves, we create better images of who we are and we simultaneously believe worse images of who we actually are. So we create fantasies and we believe fiction. Neither of those things abide in truth. It's easier to leave these parts aside, at least to our conscious mind, than to begin to consider if we will be able to survive the grief of facing them.

[22:20]

It's easier to just claim our progressiveness, to claim our enlightened hearts and spirits or our radicalness and commitment to the struggle. So you can't possibly be racist or sexist or transphobic or think your spirituality is more real or you're just better than to actually have your despair show up for you. In truth, We have to integrate our wounds into our understanding of who we are and what we are really capable of so that we can be whole human beings. Only from there can we begin the process of healing the brokenness, the brokenheartedness within ourselves that is then the foundation for beginning to heal that in our larger society. We cannot have a healed society. We cannot have change. We cannot have justice if we do not reclaim and repair the human spirit. We simply cannot. Imagining anything different is to really have our head buried deeply in the sand of hundreds of years of a culture of domination, colonization, the theft of the land, the theft of a people from their land, and the continued and ongoing theft and appropriation of peoples and cultures on a day-to-day basis that every single one of us is colluding with and participating in consciously and unconsciously.

[23:36]

Learning to be with suffering as an experience is part and parcel of what it means to learn to live. And it radically alters our relationship to all of life and to the suffering of others. If you are invested in alleviating suffering, whether as an activist or change maker or someone who's committed to life because you hear the cries of the world, it's important to understand that you cannot even recognize the suffering of others without fully acknowledging the despair of your own suffering. It turns out that far from dragging you down, one of the most liberating things you can do is to come to terms with the fact that some form of your suffering will always be there. To really be present with that unhooks us with the constant anxiety of trying to make it go away. Paradoxically, once we release the proposition that we are going to get rid of the suffering, then the potential to alleviate that suffering becomes possible. Pause there.

[24:43]

Open our space for not questions. I hear sometimes people say, well, it's a comment, but it's a question, and they want to make a question. So I really want to open this to dialogue, and so statements are welcome, and cross-dialogue. It doesn't all have to be addressed to me. I'm happy to be here and maybe facilitate, or I might even have to referee at some point, but... which is exactly where this should be happening. But please do. Let's open for conversation. Please say your name for the purposes of our recording. Heather. So I'm curious with regard to the suffering of white people, and when you read that, I'm wondering in your conversations, you're and Mama Rod, and you have these conversations with people. What has been the The response of, I mean, obviously white people aren't monolithic, but what have been some common responses?

[25:46]

Because I think people would find that kind of shocking. Like one of the moldy, dark places in the refrigerator of the white people's social psyche, if you will, that you've heard them respond or react to when that's brought forward, that it's really also, you know, pay attention to your own suffering. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Lumrod says it's great suffering. He says, you know, people always come to him and they say, like, you know, how can I help? And he says, the way that you can help, he says, white folks come to him and they say, how can I help? And he says, you can go and work and you can go and do work on the front line of your own struggle. And that's not expected because a lot of us as progressive people have been programmed to like worry about other people's suffering. And then we go and throw our attention out there. And so what we actually have heard plenty of, and I think a lot of openings in our conversations, is certainly copious amounts of guilt and shame that attends the experience of white progressive and liberal America, wherever people sit.

[26:59]

We have certainly also heard a lot of just plain unaware, lack of awareness, like, I had no idea. And a lot of grief. And one of the things we talked about a lot was particularly the location, if you're radicalized in any way or politicized, the location of cisgendered white men. And the fact that there is literally no room for complaint, for acknowledging of the suffering of straight white men to say, I'm suffering. because it is seen as taking up too much space when they're politicized. I mean, obviously out in the world, there's a whole bunch of straight white men taking up a lot of space and furthering a lot of dominant culture behavior. But I think that the lack of access to being able to really acknowledge true suffering shows up as this kind of form of aggression

[28:02]

that we see and experience and then we react to, and then we're in this vicious cycle. That's one thing. One of the other things that we've talked a lot about is the role of white women to protect patriarchy. And that has then hindered women being able to bond across lines of color around the particular suffering that women experience as a result of patriarchy. but the threshold of race hinders that. And so as a result of the racialization, women are disabled from actually pushing back as a whole against patriarchy in the same way, and this is how the structure was set up, that people that are held down in lower class positions, in socioeconomic class positions, The racialization keeps them from being able to actually confront ruling class.

[29:05]

And that's why racialization was set up, right? Was to make sure that low-class folks, which were the Irish at the time and the Germans and, you know, as time cycled the Jews, like as they came in, they got allowed access into whiteness. so that they would not then bond on a class level that'll enable people in ruling class, owning class, to remain in those positions and let people fight amongst themselves around race, right? And so that's the structure of race and the founding of this country. It's not the same in every country, but that, and I was actually having a great conversation. with Diego in the bookstore the other day about why it's so different in the Americas even, right, in South America, North America, that racialization in America is a very special, in the United States is a very special and particular thing. Its founding is based on it in a way that is not necessarily true, why racialization exists in other countries.

[30:13]

It's not, the founding was not locked in. Like literally the premise and how the country was built and its economic gains were based on the division of races. If we didn't have the division of races, then the country would not have progressed in its economic viability the way that it did because 200 years of unpaid labor is a whole lot of money for people to build on. And then it followed by another 100 years of holding people back through Jim Crow laws because, again, people did not want to lose free and low-cost labor. And we now see that in the modern prison system. We now see that in different forms that transcend race but are still racialized because it affords lower-class people and this is one of the things that also came up, and I think really kind of opened for people, the recognition that many, I want to say poor white folks would begin to start seeing.

[31:24]

Oh, I, my lack of, of, What is it called? Mobility, right? My lack of mobility is made okay by the fact that I'm not black. My lack of mobility as a white person is made okay by at least I'm not Mexican. My lack of mobility, right, so the ways in which our economic structures hold people back that are white people, right, is assuaged by, but at least I'm not of color. And so we saw a lot of that kind of unpack in real grief and loss and awakening. It's a long answer, but I think it kind of helps sort of open some things up. Yes. Can you please say your name? My name's Laura. Speaking from my own experience, I'm back home.

[32:25]

There's a, I think in groups of young feminists, whenever we, whenever people start events or discussions or, you know, anything that we decide to do. It's usually met with a lot of told policing, so we say we are being suppressed or we are not given the safe chances. People say, well, you should be less angry because you're not happy yourself. You know, you should be kind and ask politely and not be bossy because women shouldn't be bossy, they shouldn't be angry. Yes. So I think quite often within these circles, anger's experience is very empowering. Not to tell us what to feel, but to be angry and we're acknowledging it. So James, you kind of combined that with your ideas of letting go of that anger. How do you think, James? Yeah, I think that... So there's a way in which, you know, anger is, I want to say, metabolized as fierceness, if we sort of talk in sort of spiritual terms, right?

[33:38]

So there's a lot of fierce deities in the Tibetan pantheon that really allow for, like, a self-righteous, like, meeting something and the challenge of something with fierceness, right? And a passion that is... useful and skillful, right? So Manjushri doesn't go around like tickling people with that sword, right? It's cutting through the delusion. Now, if the anger though, right, as a sort of energy is burning us up, right, then that's not useful. It has it metabolized, right, so that it's not catabolizing, it's not eating us up. But if you transmute the energy of anger into it, into fierceness, then it actually expresses itself differently, expresses itself actually as love. It expresses itself as love on behalf of kindness to ourselves and an acknowledgement and a regard of who we are as women.

[34:43]

It expresses itself as a compassion for honoring the humanity of all of us equally. Again, if that energy comes forth, it comes from love. It can be fierce, but I would say that we're just, as Lama Rod was saying, it's not precise language. When though the anger is something that eats us up, and all we're thinking about is what we're doing against someone else and we're reacting to someone else, then we're actually not thriving. And we're not able to have our joy coexist with the potential that we have for meeting our suffering. I'm letting it go. You're not going to go? Okay.

[35:46]

Yes, please. Actually, in a continuation from yesterday, I was going to be the first white person to ask you a question. But we've been out of time. So, I had an online conversation with a few people yesterday. The first person noticed someone else's behavior, and they weren't, the person asked me the question, it wasn't for this culture, and they said, is that white guilt? And I was like, well, it looks like white guilt to me, but I just got this behavior, so I just didn't accept it. And the person asked me, what is white guilt? And I defined it as best I could. And I said, well, would you be open to just asking an angel to define that personal? That I've defined white guilt? This is the end of the story. And the person said no, because it might make white people uncomfortable. And I realized when he said white people are allowed to ask me questions that I have, I've refrained from raising my hand because I didn't want to make the other white people comfortable.

[36:52]

And I... guilty for not asking a question. So would you define white guilt and maybe frame it in the way you were talking yesterday about suffering being white? Well, what I will define is the way that I view white guilt because obviously I'm not having the experience of white guilt personally. I have lots of experiences that are shared, but that's not one of them. But I do have a sense of allyship with white guilt and the suffering of whiteness and whiteness as a construct. And so the way that I see and relate to the notion of white guilt is that people, white folks, take on a sense of being beaten down by this terrible thing that has happened and I can't do anything about. And so...

[37:52]

I'm diminished, right, in this sense of heaviness and burden by the things that my people have done that I don't know how to fix and I can't repair. And so I feel guilty and I'm extra humble. And you can feel it, right? I'm extra humble in spaces and I am afraid to talk about race. And it becomes a diminishing experience that doesn't allow us to meet each other. Right? And you're going to make mistakes because, you know, this is like a messy situation. We've got ourselves in here. But those of us in this room didn't create the messy situation and we can't unpack it until we're willing to throw our hat into the ring and make mistakes and to challenge each other and say, well, you know, Angel, I don't think I'm feeling any white guilt here. And then we can have a conversation about that. So white guilt is that experience of, you know, any kind of guilt, but it's a kind of a holding of the collective experience of whiteness and an inertia, I think, that comes as a result of that, in which people make themselves small as a way in which to respond to the pain of racialization and the...

[39:10]

lack of understanding or feeling empowered about being able to do anything about it, including being the recipient of privileges that they didn't ask for but that still come to them merely as a result of white skin, whether you ask for it or not, you're going to get it, and carrying the burden of that. Is that? Okay. There it is. And I know I'm wearing my little rakasu, and it's kind of like a little protection factor, but challenge is welcome. So I want to say that challenge is welcome, right? I'm wearing my rakasu in deference to the community and being here, but I move around in mainstream circles all the time. I'm not tender. And I could not have, someone said to me that I couldn't have done this if I was like soft skinned and not willing to be challenged.

[40:16]

You think I'm speaking quietly? I have a low register to my voice. I think it's not, yeah. Nickname is Dragon. Yeah, that's my totem. So, no tender here. things in my head. My name is Maitreya. I'm here. I'm here in retreat. I'm standing here. Thank you. You're welcome. I think that, I think for me, I work in criminal justice. I work in prison a lot. So it's, for me, they're just, the white guilt thing. The white privilege is so prevalent in the work. And I work with a lot of people that I think we all are probably a lot what you're describing sort of in terms of this progressive white people, right? And it's like the conversation around race and our work has barely gotten started because it's so to white work.

[41:22]

And our claims are so overwhelming. And it feels incredibly self-indulgent to talk about feeling like I'm missed out. But... Privileges come with, there's a lot of really unnamed losses that come with them. So being raised by liberal people, I didn't have any conscious races growing up, conscious races, right? And until I was in Moscow, I didn't even really identify as becoming a race, Like, they're quintessential white privilege, right? You didn't have to think about having a race. And my sadness, I mean, I'm really grateful to hear your approach, because I do go around, you know, I work in the system.

[42:24]

I work in the system. I'm trying to get people out of prison for my job. So... But I... Yeah, I would really like to move from a place of just utter, like, feeling trapped in this to somehow, I mean, a completely existing paradigm into a different relationship. Thank you. I think that the motivation, which is why I love being able to especially be in... in Dharma communities to talk about this is this word of liberation, right? This concept of liberation that sits for us, a lot of us sort of is like a little bit amorphous, right? We're just like, well, enlightenment, I'm not really sure. And so that's what I spoke about yesterday.

[43:25]

Like we're just kind of going for a kinder, gentler suffering. And I'm like... I'm like down with the whole liberation thing. I'm like down for the whole enchilada. I came here for that. And when I looked around and I realized like, oh, we're doing like a, you know, polite thing. I was like, that's not what I came here for. And I can't afford that. As a queer black woman, I don't have the privilege to de kinder, gentler suffering. I'm going for liberation. because this kinder, gentler thing doesn't work out for me so well. I'm so down on the totem pole that it doesn't work out for me. And so I threw myself into practice with this kind of a fierceness. Like, I'm getting out, right? I'm getting out of this... burden of suffering, not relationship to suffering, right? But the burden of suffering and carrying the burden of being black and carrying the burden of being a woman and carrying the burden of being queer, carrying the burden of feeling bad because I'm light-skinned and black and then I have, you know, I have privileges for being light-skinned and black and I'm masculine and queer and so I have privileges from that because I don't even see a whole bunch of things that like...

[44:44]

straight women go through. I don't even deal with that. I'm like, what? I don't think of men like that. I'm like, men are like, blah. Right? So I have like all these other, these privileges that also operate, right, as a result of kind of taking on other dominant culture things that are operating for me. So I think this motivation to be liberated, right, like forget at the highest sense can carry us through these personal ordinary sense of the ways in which we're trapped and stuck, right? To have this really high bar of liberation for the sake of it. And then there's social liberation, and there's personal liberation, there's liberation within our communities, and then there's all of that stuff, and it's underneath it. But to hold regard for oneself, that you not only desire, but you're entitled to full-blown, unabashed, unequivocal liberation is the motivation that we need to cut through our own silliness about being shameful about it or feeling guilty about it.

[46:02]

And so when people would look at me and say, oh, at a retreat, right? Do you know that Martin Luther King Day is celebration is gonna happen here, I could be like, mm-hmm, check, because I'm not gonna cede my liberation. This is working for me. This practice is working for me, and I'm not gonna cede my liberation to someone else's BS, right? So I stopped ceding my liberation to people's individual foibles and the low-level microaggressions that were kind of a constant part of my reality. And I was just like, okay, you go ahead and work with that, right? You go ahead and work with that, because I've got bigger things to pursue, and it's my liberation, and I'm entitled to it. And this sense of entitlement to it is a huge, huge thing. And to be in a black body, to be in a queer body, to be in a female body, and to be like, yeah, liberation, that's mine.

[47:11]

Then we should go back to the other thing, love. So this love of oneself is the pathway to liberation. So that utter regard to really love oneself. And that means unpacking your suffering and figuring out what are you holding back? What is it that you're not loving? And then I want to say that's a big question on a social level, right? Like, what are you missing as a white person, right, that keeps you from being able to see people of color as they are, that keeps you from being able to love them unabashedly? Because it's not what's about them that's happening, it's what's happening in you, right? It's not that you don't love people of color. It's just something that is inhibited, limited in yourself. that is unconscious for most of us. And that's actually what's keeping us from loving each other across boundaries of race and class and gender and all of these things.

[48:21]

And that's what's keeping us from our social liberation. We're enjoying this time, this kind of discussion for a life. One thing I want to go on is to my atmosphere. Suffering is from the state that something or anything is permanent. If we see everything is permanent, we do not suffer.

[49:33]

But Nora said the expectation to change anger as a reaction to the expectation or that kind of body or quite guilty that also from maybe I can say social identity or social ego which is outside from outside of ourselves the soul is outside of ourselves and those are I see Yeah, like I said yesterday, I really appreciate and glad to hear that people there applying their mind to the activism.

[50:36]

Well, I really believe that reaction is what want to avoid social expectation, social identity inside us, from outside, from relationship, or from environmental circumstances. We reacted to that kind of concept. Yeah, it's a concept. It is kind of labeling as a prominent thing we are getting we are going to get involved in that cycle of endless exchange of the reaction the other then we get other so

[51:43]

Today, there's a lot of activism. Internet, information, transportation, activism can happen more easily. But I've never seen this one activism where it is successful with really reacting. The civil rights movement, I really love that because they were trying to not react to that. violent or some oppressing attitude or concept of the government or laws or white society or anything like that because they persist to be not reactive to be not seen that exchange of the concept of the or permanent concept So, yeah, like what it is, I hope the, hope the Dublin system has brought this to a radical, applying the same mind, has not reacted to any sort of people.

[53:10]

It's not only interested in our separate apps which is conflict or confront to ask. So here's how I was up to the graph activity or something. They are a little bit learned about the social psychology and the life. People don't really reflect people separate from the internal clique literally. Freak. So in the civil rights movement, 50 years later, we didn't dissolve anything.

[54:12]

which is why we have Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and so on and so forth. So it's fallacy to think that the Zen mind is going to dissolve the social construct because the social construct exists in relative space. And so it's still necessary to challenge it. And we should be careful that we recognize iterations of things. And what I mean by that is what may look like reaction at one point, right, becomes a developed capacity and a practice to be able to respond from something different. In order for the nonviolence movement to take hold in the Civil Rights, and America tends to forget this, it was like over a decade and a half of what you would call reaction, right, as people... actually work through the practice of how do we respond with something different and from a different place.

[55:15]

And many Black people would disagree that the civil rights movement was, you know, I mean, it was certainly insufficient. That's obvious on a social scale. And so there's challenges there. And I don't... I want to be careful, right, to say that I'm not just saying like, oh, the activists should have Zen mind. I'm also saying the Zen mind should have some activism, right? I'm saying that the Dharma communities would do well to investigate the cocoon of personal pursuit that keeps us in a privileged space from actually navigating the social circumstances that do, in fact, impact people. And I want to name with respect to you that it is most often people that are positioned in a dominant location that want to have the conversation about it's all in our minds and we should, you know, transcend our thinking, right?

[56:21]

So it tends to be men in this culture, it tends to be white men that are like, it's all, you know, relative and, you know, it's, it's, it's impermanent and it's great. This is impermanent. And this, this form of impermanence is actually working for people in male bodies is working for people in white bodies is working. Right. And so you kind of go down the totem pole as you get further away, further away from dominant position or the, the, the highest social position as created by the construct. And, and people have to be more concerned with the, day-to-day reality and impact of the relative conditions on their bodies and on their lives. This is not just like we're just thinking, you know. And so maybe it's impermanent, but it's making kind of an impermanent life for a lot of us. And we need to actually navigate that too. Because for some of us, the social conditions, as impermanent as they are, are having the result of shortening the lifespans

[57:23]

and certainly diminishing beyond repair the thriving of how we live in our day-to-day lives. We live under the burden of feeling a threat. I, from sitting where I am, I take this thing off and I am out in the world. This is what I get seen as, and I worry about the cop that's driving behind me, whether I'm gonna get pulled over, and I was just saying. I have to remember phone numbers, and I tell my practitioners, if you are of color, you must remember phone numbers and stop using your phone because the first thing that will happen is they're going to take away your phone. You're pulled over, then you take away your phone, and then say, go ahead and make a phone call. You don't have a phone number in your head because our mobile phones are just like that, right? So there are relative things that we have to navigate. And it's actually a great conversation somewhere. Lamar and I talk about that, right? Talk about being still, right?

[58:26]

Step outside. He's out of his robes. I'm out of my robes and out of my rock suit and all of that. And we are still in these bodies. And that's what we get. And whatever. So we sort of play these roles of like we hold some position and seek here. And then we have to navigate the reality of being received as brown people. He's a six foot two person. Black man with a big body and queer. And so he has to navigate that reality. We can do both. So I want to talk about the meeting more than I want to talk about, right, than I want to suggest. And the meeting is not a marriage, right? So I'm not saying, you know, all go run out and become activists. And I'm not saying activists all run out and come and start doing Zen. I'm talking about learning from each other and recognizing where we have a loss in terms of our sense of balance in relationship. And at the end of the day, what I'm really talking about, what radical dharma is really about is relationship, and what relationship is about is love.

[59:29]

Yeah, so our mind is definitely in the workplace. like everyday, day to day, deal with society, something like that. And came to hear and experiencing this time, Sangha, the first time in my life, and I think, as Duda said, if you can't have right friend, or right master, or right people around you, go along, like your heart is dry. to see the truth or maybe the very self or something. Maybe we have to avoid the kind of strong bad influence. Dealing with society is kind of nearly impossible, maybe? Because it's too much forbidden to speak over constantly.

[60:47]

But then we disappear from relationship with the world. Then we disappear from relationship with the world. Because no matter what kind of sangha we create here, we have parents, and we have friends, and we have lovers, and we have our families. We are part of society. We're social creatures. And so... We can't create cocoons that remove us from society because then all we're actually doing is recreating another kind of false reality that doesn't leave us in touch. And that's really what the book is very much talking about. I think we're going to end formally. And you can continue the conversation. And ideally, we'll continue the conversation until we rectify it and bring ourselves into wholeness again.

[61:49]

Thank you so much. Thank you.

[61:52]

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