DJATD-Sustainability
“We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.”
This month, in gratitude and humility, I offer thanks to ancient Asian wisdom that cultivated many of the nourishment practices we work with in Sangha Is All, including yoga nidra; to the memory of Sangha Is All siblings that died by ICE recently: gunned down on the street, Renee Good and Alex Pretti (in 2026, both in Minnesota), gunned down in his car, Silverio Villegas González (in 2025 in Illinois), and to the 32 other people who died in ICE custody in 2025; and also to the many others, some names known to us, some unknown, whose lives have been interrupted or ended by those seeking to expand their tentacles of power, control, and wealth instead of working to create a reality based on values of love, interdependence and sustainability.
Living with the multitude of challenges and dangers the current world presents can make it seem as though sustaining, holding ourselves together and strong, is some kind of distant dream. This is not the case. Sustaining is present in the body at all times for as long as we draw breath; we need only connect with it. Simple, but not easy since dominant contemporary western culture actively denigrates, uproots, and destroys the practices that make this connection available. Our sharing and practice this month highlights remembering how to establish and nourish that connection and return to it when it’s been disrupted.
Words
Still One of Laura’s Favorite Practice Spaces
This month, we examined the English words “sustain” and “intention,” and learned that the Latin and French origins of these words include connotations of rooting, stretching, rising, and aspiring. Examining the eight-fold noble path element samma-sankappa, or Right Intention, we see that the rooting, stretching, rising, and aspiring connotations of “sustain” are present in samma-sankappa as well. The Sangha Is All definitions I proposed for these words are reflected in the Word Bank below. Sangha Is All invites practice with words as part of the essential work of embodying and enacting our aspirational culture based on values of love, interdependence and sustainability. Words are part of what Malidoma Patrice Some calls “the Machine.” I practice with words because I intend to be connected with the natural world, not the Machine.
Sustainability Includes It All
“[Sustainable] balance requires that the entirety be recognized and embraced.” ~Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States
Any being, in order to sustain itself, must connect with, honor, and enact the requirements of its continuation. As such, elements of every Disability Justice Principle are called into our practice of sustaining ourselves. In February’s gathering, I offered a review of the Disability Justice Principles we’ve examined so far in the context of Sustainability. The following both summarizes and carries forward that examination.
Intersectionality
“Intersectionality is like “being impacted by multiple forces and then being left to fend for yourself.” ~ Kimberle Crenshaw
Our embodied experiences inform us about all of our personal intersections. Our practice of samma-ditthi (Right View) calls us to be aware of the personal effect of those impacts and also the limitations of personal “view.” Samma-ditthi is not a call to omniscience; it’s a call to understanding we are always limited and that being aware of our inherent limitations is part of what’s right. Similarly, our practice of samma-sankappa (Right Intention) calls us into respectful relationship with what is needed to sustain ourselves, even when what is needed is not what we “want,” what we crave in a way that leads to suffering. Through embodied awareness practices, we can establish awareness of our internal resistances to what is, while simultaneously knowing that we face all the obstacles that Intersectionality places on us and before us. If my view is limited, then so is that of another person who may be activating my Intersections. Knowing this does not necessarily help me know what to say or how to behave, it doesn’t alleviate power imbalances, but it can help me to be in yoga nidra with myself so that I can release and let go of whatever the other person’s limitations are and stay in practice with myself instead of trying to solve the other person.
Leadership of the Most Impacted
In our review of Leadership of the Most Impacted, I offered that Right Action (Samma-Kammanta) must follow Right View (Samma-Ditthi)
Right action that follows right view generates sustainable or supportive consequences or karma; when right action is withheld or not offered, unsustainable consequences or karma is generated. As Shakyamuni neared death, he urged his followers to make the teachings their own; this is an invitation to sustain ourselves by expanding our personal view of both ultimate and relative reality. Taking in what supports us in both relative and ultimate reality, and metabolizing that nourishment in our bodies, further supports us to authentically translate our right view into action with respect and caring for the capacities and limitations we have and generate healthful consequences. I don’t believe that any religion or spiritual tradition, including Buddhism, gives us a roadmap on how to change systems. What Buddhism does give us is a roadmap for how to be with ourselves in the midst of systemic intersectional impacts, and it calls in an awareness that when we nourish ourselves, we also nourish the system toward healthful karma. Interbeing includes me. This application of right view helps to wake me up to and embrace the kinds of actions toward systemic change that fit my capacities and inclinations and are therefore sustainable actions for me.
Anti-Capitalist Politic
“[Sustainable] Balance requires that the entirety be recognized and embraced.” ~ Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States
Prior to European arrival on the continents now known as the Americas, a concept of balance prevailed, instead of the concept of individual accumulation brought forward by colonization and capitalism. With balance, there was no need for a concept of disability since balance with the entire natural world, plants, animals, waters, mountains, and peoples, could be achieved by any body. Each person need only honor and offer their own gifts and capacities in support of the community to achieve balance. Indigenous cultures also used a seven-generation principle that required considering seven generations into the future about the impact of decisions being made in the present day. This deep interrogation of impact requires both careful deliberation and careful implementation that US politics never even touches upon. Seven-generation consideration was an indigenous framework for establishing samma-ditthi.
Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing
In our review of Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing, we interrogated intersectional baselines around passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
Retrospective interrogation practice helps us to understand the past, its influences, conditions, and requirements, and, through the past, we better understand the present. The current US political situation, in which a powerful person seeks to bulldoze through significant change by activating disparate interests using catch-phrases and fomentation of fear rather than connection to baseline, can be understood as a confluence of disparate interests, conditions, and requirements that lend themselves to colonization by words of hatred and separation. Current US power-based politics is based on chaos; confrontation with chaos is a call for me to be in clarity and right view. How can I help to detach fear-activated people from chaos if I am not established in my own clarity? By seeking to understand the baselines of disparate interests, we gain insight into which of them might fit together with our own interests as well as an understanding of how these interests might fit. Then, with a clear voice of understanding, we can call in the relationships and movements that are most likely to support us in the creation of a relative reality based on values of love, interdependence, and sustainability. Sustainable, life-affirming change requires disparate interest, cross-movement insight, respect and organizing.
Recognizing Wholeness
“The indigenous world looks while the industrial world overlooks…” ~ Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Belonging
Traditional/indigenous worldview, valuing balance and using ritual to call individuals into relationship with the true nature of reality, has been replaced by worship of sociopathy, the accumulation of most by a few, leading to a prevalent sense of loneliness, disembodiment, and disconnection. Even prominent contemporary researchers, like Brene Brown, fall prey to these feelings. We, as disabled people, are easily isolated; as such, we embody valuable experience with unpleasant conditions that many non-disabled people are coming into relationship with and politically activating against for the first time. From the wisdom of our deep experience, our example alone can teach and lead on the imperatives of interconnectedness, interbeing, and wholeness. Sharing our insights and experiences may be one of the medicines that the world most needs today.
Moving Deeply Into Abandoning Rituals of Disconnection
Whatever we do repeatedly, consistently, becomes ritual. In this sense, we can’t escape ritual.~ Recognizing Wholeness blog post
When we begin to understand the culturally sanctioned coping patterns we’ve been engaging in as rituals of disconnection, (social media, on-demand streaming, drugs and alcohol, and so on), this awareness itself is a reconnection. Through this reconnection, we begin to restore our personal power. I encourage you to reread the section of the Recognizing Wholeness blog post on Abandoning Rituals of Disconnection where I described the practice of rituals of disconnection in modern western society. Living with the disconnection inherent in capitalist culture is painful; it’s okay if, even as we begin to recognize them, we can’t leave all the rituals of disconnection we’ve adopted behind at once. Acknowledging that we can’t change everything at once is embodied awareness, not a reason for self-criticism. It’s being with what is.
This kind of accepting, non-critical noticing slows the lived process down and makes room for consideration of other choices, of new rituals that connect rather than disconnect. Any “activity” that’s embodied can become a ritual of connection; some examples are yoga nidra, singing, sighing, gardening, restorative or adaptive yoga, Thai chi, cuddling your pet, blinking your eyes, or watering your plants; your body will tell you what activities are most supportive of and accessible to you. Evan passive “activities” like breathing, blinking, following the heartbeat, or feeling the lungs expand and contract, when performed in awareness of ourselves in the present moment become rituals of reconnection, of embodied awareness. By metabolizing routine “activities” into rituals of embodied awareness, our capacity to abandon rituals of disconnection is strengthened, and our capacity to choose embodiment over disembodiment becomes more available. To paraphrase Rumi, when we engage in rituals of disconnection, we are washing ourselves in disconnection. When we engaged in rituals of embodied awareness, we are washing ourselves in connection.
While the steps may sound simple, the practice is not easy. Engaging in embodied awareness practices will release sadness and grief that our practices of disembodiment were designed to separate us from A strong, unexpected emotion may arise while we are blinking in an embodied way. Staying with whatever arises is the essence of embodied practice. Sadness, grief, anger, disgust, despair, all are part of natural, embodied living and as such are appropriate for embodied awareness practice. As Thich Nhat Hahn, known as Thay, or “teacher” in his community, teaches, emotions we experience as unpleasant inter-are with emotions we experience as pleasant. We can’t have one without the other. Abandoning rituals of disconnection moves us into practice with all of our experiences, pleasant and unpleasant, by simply noticing them, noticing that they naturally arise and, when we stay with them in uncritical acceptance and noticing, also naturally fall away in their own time. In this way, we can claim our grief, we can claim our sadness; we can experience that they are ours but they are not us; we are the awareness observing them.
Practice is Everything and Everything is Practice
“The art of happiness is the art of living deeply in the present moment.” ~ Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
In The Art of Living, Thich Nhat Hahn teaches that we are not limited to our physical bodies, that we inter-are with everything. Related to this, he teaches that we have at least eight bodies, two of which we focused on in examination of Sustainability this month, the Spiritual Practice Body and the Community Body.
The more we engage in embodied awareness practices, the more we build, nourish, and strengthen our Spiritual Practice Body. We deserve to feed and nourish our Spiritual Practice Body; it is, Thay teaches, “what helps us to overcome challenging and difficult moments.” Does this seem paradoxical, that in challenging moments we choose embodied awareness practices in order to nourish our embodied awareness practice itself? But that is exactly how it works: by our choice to nourish our embodied awareness practice, we nourish and strengthen it and thereby our Spiritual Practice Body. If you want to be strong enough to ride your bicycle to work every day, you start out by riding your bicycle every day however much you can. You build your bicycling “muscle” until it can serve you in riding all the way to work. In order to use your spiritual practice as support at any time, you start by feeding and nourishing it however much you can, including during “unpleasant” experiences and times of challenge. Thay says, “every time you take one peaceful step or one mindful breath, your spiritual practice grows. Every time you embrace a strong emotion with mindfulness and restore your clarity and calm, it grows. Then, in difficult moments, your spiritual practice body will be right there with you when you need it.” In other words, practice is everything and everything is practice. Breaths taken mindfully are spiritual practice breaths. Breaths taken autonomically are good; it’s good to breathe, and, by the way, “autonomic” literally means “involuntary.” Autonomic breathing helps to create healthy balance in the physical body and, normatively, it does this without our conscious effort. Breathing with embodied awareness, whether we breathe normatively or require assistance to breathe, helps to create healthy balance with our experiences and our presence in the world at the same time that the physical body is autonomically balanced.
The Community Body is at Sangha Is All’s core. “If we want to grow on our spiritual path, we need a community and spiritual friends to support and nourish us,” Thay tells us. Sangha Is All and every gathering we offer is an invitation to spiritual friendship. Spiritual friendship is nourishment for our sustainability, and a place of refuge from the everyday and extraordinary storms of life. It’s true that many times we practice by ourselves. We “sit” alone in our practice posture. When that moment of anger or unhappiness or confusion arose, perhaps our spiritual friends were not physically there. That’s why we practice together when we can, so that we can know our spiritual friends support us even when they cannot be physically present with us. Listening to, caring about, and offering non-judgmental presence to our individual sorrows and difficulties, joys and good fortune, builds our Community Body. We are living in times in which the community body around us is being activated by chaos. Just as we nourish the clarity of our right views, we must also grow, nourish, sustain, and value our Community Body in order to help creative a reality based on values of love, interdependence, and sustainability The more we practice spiritual friendship and community in this way, the more we become the medicine that helps those who have been consuming chaos to become well themselves.
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Thank you for gathering with me to examine Sustainability and being a valuable part of Sangha Is All. I’m looking forward to being with you again in March for sharing and discussion on Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity, when we will further explore the practice of community and building the Community Body.
I send gathering reminders including the Zoom link, to everyone on the Disability Justice and the Dharma mailing list each month. Register for monthly emails from Sangha Is All by emailing me at laura@SanghaIsAll.org. Until our next Disability Justice and the Dharma gathering, utilize the resources linked below, revisit any of our recordings, and, if convenient, join our weekly Embodied Awareness practice on Thursdays at 1pm US central time. The link for Embodied Awareness practice can also be requested by emailing me.
Sangha Is All Word Bank:
Dharma – essentially truth, or the true nature of reality.
Disability –(a) having a natural body that performs natural functions in accordance with its unique capabilities;
(b) a label applied in ableist culture to create an artificial division between people into prescribed “normative” and “non-normative” categories for purposes of exclusion.
Intention - A stretching out, straining, exertion, effort, aspiration, thought and purpose of awareness.
Multi-Cultural Wisdom on Wholeness and Belonging (Indigenous language)
Noble Disciple - a person who practices for awareness is one who seeks the true nature of reality, tires to look straight into the true nature of reality, has perfect confidence in the true nature of reality, and is always seeking to arrive at the true nature of reality.
Sustain – To hold or root ourselves up from below, to stretch up in order to provide for ourselves the necessities of life.
Recognizing –To again get to know, become acquainted with, learn, inquire/examine something.
Samma Dhitti (Right View) - A perspective reflecting a balanced and intentional gaze toward a profound understanding of the true nature of reality.
Samma Sankappa (Right Intention) - Seek out, nurture, and encourage thoughts and intentions that are in balance with the true nature of reality.
Samma Kammanta (Right Action) - In all aspects of life, consciously engaging in activities that seek to create balance with the true nature of reality.
Samma Ajiva (Right Livelihood) – Engaging in means to earn one’s living, regardless of the economic system utilized, in equanimity and balance with the true nature of reality.
Samma Vayama (Right Effort) - Cultivating and nurturing our full, complete, very best, vigorous effort infused with focused and concentrated will so that energy can be brought into our Right Actions with dedication and persistence.
Samma Sati (Right Remembering / Mindfulness) - Vigorously and persistently cultivating and nurturing a dedicated practice of re-knowing and re-constructing the Wisdom and Moral Discipline to be with ourselves, others, and the world in a way that is both authentic to us and supports and is in harmony with .the true nature of reality.
Wholeness - the inherent quality of our own healthy, sound, genuineness.
Sangha Is All Playlists
September 7 – Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate Debe and Kala
October 5 - Robert Macht Vishnu and Pelawak
November 2 - Average White Band – Pick Up The Pieces and Sly & The Family Stone – I Want to Take You Higher
December 7 - Community - Christmas Infiltration, Adam Sandler - The Chanukah Song, and Gayla Peevey - I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas
January 4 – Chantress Seba, Rising Into the Light
February 1 – Deva Premal, Gayatri Mantra (a 28:27minute looping version can be found here)
February 1 Links:
Recording - Disability Justice and The Dharma-Sustainability
Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Urgency of Intersectionality
Roshi Joan Halifax, A Vision of Buddhist Leadership: Early Teaching of the Buddha
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States
INTERVIEW] Kimberlé Crenshaw: Liberty. Equality. Intersectionality. An antidote against fascism. By Francesca Coin, 6/26/2020
Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual – Power, Healing , and Community
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks
February 1 Quotes:
“Intersectionality is like “being impacted by multiple forces and then being left to fend for yourself.” ~ Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Urgency of Intersectionality
“As the Buddha was facing death, Ananda requested that he give a final teaching. Buddha shared that he had taught them everything he knew and that they needed to make the teachings their own and not look to a special leader or teacher for guidance. He indicated that the sangha should model itself on the so-called parliamentary system of Vajji. He did not intend for it to have a single person as its leader.” ~ Roshi Joan Halifax, A Vision of Buddhist Leadership: Early Teaching of the Buddha
“Balance requires that the entirety be recognized and embraced.” ~Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States chapter 1, pages 1-2
“I would say, intersectional failure is the consequence of a political vision that is meant to be transformative but it fails to fully interrogate many of the baselines upon which it is activated and in that failure it makes itself vulnerable to political conditions that actually rob the movement of its ability to do what it even claims it wants to do.” ~ Kimberlé Crenshaw: Liberty. Equality. Intersectionality. An antidote against fascism
“The greatest shock that American culture has on traditional people is the notion of speed….. “ AND “…it appears that the indigenous world looks while the industrial world overlooks…” ~ Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Belonging, page 15
“In today’s society we are so busy we don’t even have time to take care of ourselves. We’re not at ease with ourselves. We find it difficult to take care of our body, feelings, and emotions. We’re afraid of being overwhelmed by our suffering, and so we run away from ourselves. This is one of the defining characteristics of our civilization.” ~Thich Nhat Han, , The Art of Living, pg 197
“My name, Nhat Hahn, means ‘one action.’ I spent a long time trying to find out which action this was. Then I discovered that my one action is to be peace and to bring peace to others. We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we’re not doing anything we’re wasting our time, but that’s not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving, and this is what the world needs the most. We all need to train ourselves in our way of being, and that is the ground for all action. Our quality of being determines our quality of doing.” ~Thich Nhat Han, The Art of Living, pg 99
“The work of rebuilding may take thousands of lifetimes but this work was already completed thousands of lifetimes ago” ~Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living, pg 104
“If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” ~ African proverb
Ways to Practice Together Until Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity on March 1:
Sangha Is All Embodied Awareness Practice, Thursdays at 1pm CT
Southsea Sangha’s Earthworm Sangha, a monthly meditation group run by and for disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill people. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find more information and to register.
Bodhi Bodies, a monthly practice group run by and for disabled people as part of the World Interbeing Sangha (Thich Nhat Hahn’s Plum Village tradition). Click here for more information and to register.
Mindbody Solutions, yoga and community offerings.
