DJATD-Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity
“We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.”
This month, in gratitude and humility, I offer thanks to Lama Rod Owens, who cultivated the Seven Homecomings practice we engaged in during our monthly practice. Lama Rod has said he developed this practice because he wanted to call in support from more sources than just the three jewels of classical Buddhism. In developing the Seven Homecomings practice, Lama Rod recognizes and cares for his needs, while also encouraging us to recognize and care for our own.
Words
We must practice with words as important cultural tools, tools that can be used for good or ill. When unexamined, words can have a flattening or deadening effect. “Disabled” people experience this every day, how being labeled with that word can shade us in the eyes of others as incapable or even incompetent when actually we are whole, vibrant beings full of interests, skills, ideas, and capacities.
This month, we examined the words “solidarity,” with its connotation of shared interests and unity among diverse individuals, and “commitment,” with its connotation of a pledge of future action that governs or restricts present action. We looked at how this month’s principle calls in collective liberation, not just liberation of disabled people, liberation of everyone. Etymology teaches us that the word “collective” expresses a singular form of a whole consisting of a plurality of individuals. Thich Nhat Hahn’s teaching of Interbeing and Sebene Selassi’s teaching of “we belong to it all” resonate with this. Sebene points to the “’Doctrine of Two Truths’—the absolute or ultimate truth of interconnection and the relative or conventional truth of difference.” Interbeing teaches that we are all made of non-me elements, we are all the same and different at the same time; embracing this awareness is the bedrock underlying collective liberation. Interbeing and “we belong to it all” guide us toward the love that is inherent in every me and non-me element Love, I suggest, is the governing force and restriction on present action that commitment to cross-disability solidarity and collective liberation impose. I like to say that same-ing is just as problematic as other-ing, that they are flip sides of the same coin. When I “same” someone, I am creating the space for other-ing to exist. Only in a whole consisting of a plurality of individuals who are both different from and the same as each of us, co-existing in Interbeing and belonging to it all, can we truly be free.
The eight-fold noble path element we examined this month is Samma-Samadhi, commonly translated in white Western dharma spaces as “Right Concentration” Use of the word concentration presents problems because, in the West, “concentration” tends to point to a thinking process in the mind and not to the whole person. For this principle, I prefer a word that points to the whole being. In You Belong, Sabene Selassi writes that her favorite translation of Samma Samadhi is “Right Togetherness;” I like this suggestion and suggest Samma Samadhi also could be translated as Right Interbeing. Because my sense is that this principle also explicitly connotes an experience achieved through practice, I also like Right Distillation. Added to the Word Bank this month is Sangha Is All suggested definition of Samma Samadhi.
What the Mana?!?
”And you may ask yourself, “well, how did I get here?” ~ “Once in a Lifetime” lyrics, co-written by The Talking Heads and Brian Eno
“…manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self. But this is not always good for our survival” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
Five hundred years before Jesus was born, major wisdom traditions were teaching and practicing being together with the true nature of all that lives, calling humans to inter-be with each other and all of the natural and phenomenal world. Yet today we find ourselves in a world that seems to be in increasingly vitriolic and unceasing conflict with itself. Buddhist teachings on manas helps to illuminate at least part of how we got here. At the simplest level, manas are simply false concepts and motivations that humans are naturally inclined to. They include greed, attachment to life, hatred, conceit, wrong view, uncertainty, and bewilderment.
Embodied awareness calls us to understand that humans, with our unique frontal cortex, are naturally inclined to create false concepts and that our false concepts tend to propel or motivate us into actions that frequently do not serve us as individuals or as members of the natural world. Awareness is not blame or criticism and, while awareness invites inquiry, it does not require that we micro-analyze any situation so that we can state as “fact” how Manas A led to Non-Serving Action B and on up through the chain of thoughts and events to fully “explain” the current circumstances; while embodied awareness invites acceptance, the practice of inquiry does not make us helpless in the face of circumstances that do not serve us or the natural world. Practicing inquiry with embodied awareness can help us to see our manas and those of others more clearly, to more clearly discern between serving and non-serving actions, and its purpose in nurturing these insights is to grow resilience and capacity. Inquiry invites us to ask, even when we see overwhelming “evil,” how that perception might help us to grow. Shakyamuni said that community is everything for many reasons; one significant reason is how a community practicing toward common values and ideals provide essential support when we are perceiving and metabolizing overwhelming circumstances.
Working with manas as individuals is complicated. Over our lifetime, we’ve each accumulated lots of different manas, for instance, individually inherited manas by virtue of our cultural lineage, and social conceits constructed from our individual capacities to think and experience. We may have experientially developed conceits based on the ways that we’ve interacted with our families and people or systems in the world. Today, and at all times, we live subject to socially and politically imposed conceits. It’s complicated to work with and try to untangle our false and unwholesome concepts from our valid and life-affirming beliefs because, in the process of living, the false interacts with and gets entangled with the valid. Imagine in your young life you had a caregiver who was critical and unaffectionate. While your experience of that person may have felt harsh and unsatisfying in certain important and valid ways, they also provided you with forms of necessary care that you experienced as positive, like food or clothing or shelter or education. The intermingling of painful and harmful experiences with the supportive and affirmative ones helped to create your own manas that might include, for instance, bewilderment (I don’t understand why that person treated me as they did) and hatred (I’m so angry at them for treating me that way). All of this is part of the natural experience of embodiment. People are imperfect and they treat us imperfectly in ways we experience as confusing and contradictory; developing manas around this naturally happens when our complicated human brains try to make sense out of confusing and contradictory experiences in ways that allow us to continue. We humans tend to try to choose, to remember, to value and affirm only one aspect of our past experiences and relationships, to recompose our picture of that imperfect caregiver as either a “bad” person or a “good” person. This oversimplification is also manas, an egotistical conceit that we can and must reduce the complex motivations and actions of another person into an easy binary of” good” or “bad”, but that is not possible; we cannot reduce another person to either “good” or “bad” any more than we can reduce ourselves to “good” or “bad.”
Our manas are natural because they arise organically from our bodies, capacities, and experiences. The natural arising of manas is part of what underlies Shakyamuni’s first Noble Truth, life involves suffering. While manas arise naturally, as Thich Nhat Hahn teaches, they are not always good for our long-term survival. Excrement also arises naturally from our bodies, but when excrement arises we do not keep it around. We are both glad that excrement arises, because we need to expel waste from our bodies in order to maintain bodily health, and we know that wallowing in it will create unhealth, so we dispose of it. Manas are like the excrement of the human frontal lobe. They arise naturally. They may even serve a purpose; they may help us to learn differences between supportive and unsupportive, healthful and unhealthful, kind and unkind, and once we have learned we need to keep the learning and dispose of the manas. Sebene Selassi asks, “How do you acknowledge differences and inequities yet also hold a firm conviction that fundamentally we are all irrevocably interconnected and belong to each other?” This is the paradoxical work of holding both, of processing the reality that we were and are both supported and unsupported, loved and unloved, protected and unprotected, in such a way that our body-mind can find peace and ease.
Systemic Mana
“’Systemic mana’ is]…the cultural and collective expression of comparison and competition that is expressed through societal norms (at its most benign) or hierarchy and oppression (at its most violent).” ~ Sebene Selassi, You Belong
In her discussion of “systemic mana,” Sebene Selassi points out that false beliefs can become organizing principles. When we look at manas as a naturally occurring human phenomenon, we can begin to see how the complexity of individual manas becomes expressed in the social systems that individuals create, that when individuals with common manas ammas power, they enact systems designed to work in harmony with their particular delusions. As ugly and painful as living within a system based on someone else’s manas may be, we can also begin to see that, for those individuals, their choices are consistent with what their manas tells them is life affirming. This means that, while we are doing the difficult work of untangling the manas in our individual consciousnesses, we are also navigating social and political systems built upon the complex manas of people in power; these can be people who embrace greed, attachment to life, hatred, conceit, and wrong views instead of trying to uproot them. Sebene Selassi suggest, “We don’t think our way to belonging; we retrain our mind to find ease.” Working with manas is like trying to undo a troublesome knot. When we pull hard on it, it gets tighter, but if we relax and take the pressure off, we have a lot better chance of picking out the knot. We will live in greater ease, no matter the systemic circumstances, when we allow our personal manas to help us learn and dispose of them as waste.
We are living in a time when political powers throughout the world are violently attempting to impose manas-constructed ableist racial hierarchy in many ways including, in the US, through immigration “enforcement.” We cannot undo the manas of another person but, without manas-fueled micro-analysis, we can shine our awareness on them and seek to understand more about how the systems enabling these powers came to be and see how systemic manas constructs both favorable and unfavorable stories in order to maintain its grasp on human consciousness. The more we free ourselves from these false narratives, the more we can become instruments of freedom for others.
Colorism, Whiteness and the Racialized Taxonomy of Linnaeus
”What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”~ Audre Lorde, The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
Society in ancient India followed a caste, or class, system, in which lighter-skinned people were afforded higher status. This evolved over time in such a way that birth began to determine one’s caste. The colorism the underpinned the caste system was well established at Shakyamuni’s time (around 400/500 BCE), and I flinch whenever I see the word “unfortunate” in Buddhist texts because of how that word echoes the label “untouchable” that was applied to those of India’s lowest class, people who were considered to be so low as to not even be assigned a caste . Colorist-related concepts evolved by the 17th century in the colonial United States to produce the first laws known to use the word “White” to restrict individual human behavior. A review of Jacqueline Battalora’s Birth of A White Nation, a short and helpful work with deep academic rigor, helps us to understand the motivation behind these laws. Battalora explains that English laborers came to the colonies as tenants, bond servants, or apprentices and that, while their arrival status is unclear, initially, African laborers worked alongside English laborers under much the same housing, economic, legal, and social conditions as English laborers, and that significant documentary evidence suggests that marriage, child-rearing, and general cooperation and mutuality existed between these two groups. She traces how colonial law began to break from traditional English law in order to ensure that more children would be born into servitude, thus enriching European landowners. Increasing motivation to shore up European landowners’ economic and social dominance spurred the creation of antimiscegenation laws with the ultimate aim of “functionalizing” motherhood for women of European descent and appropriating “motherhood as production” in women of African descent. The first such restricting colonial laws used terms like “British and other free-born” to describe the restricted category of women. In 1691, the language first became “British and other White” women, creating the concepts of whiteness in law. Effective in governing the behavior of women of European descent, the newly created legal category of “White” was then used to strip men of African descent of rights to vote, own property, and possess weapons. All of this was done to break up any notions of commonality between those of European-descent and African-descent, thus shoring up landowners’ ability to extract value from both groups. In these efforts and laws, we can see intentionally created systemic manas geared to value the wealth and power of some over the humanity of others who were simply easy to categorize in law.
By the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist and physician who coined the term homo sapiens, published a taxonomy that became the bedrock for racial biases that continue to influence science and medicine today. Linnaeus’ supposedly “scientific” and overtly hierarchical, classification system reflected his own personal racialized manas. Here are Linnaeus’s “scientific” categories:
Americanus rubescens (indigenous peoples from the Americas) were described as having straight, black, and thick hair; gaping nostrils, beardless chins, and “unyielding, cheerful, and free” behavior.
Europaeus albus (people of Europe descent, as was Linnaeus himself) had plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes and were “light, wise, inventor[s].”
Asiaticus fuscus (people of Asian descent) had blackish hair, dark eyes and were “stern, haughty, greedy.”
Africanus niger (people of African descent) had “dark hair, with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips” and were “sly, sluggish, neglectful.”
Over several editions, Linnaeus’ taxonomy used “race” as a valid subclassification of homo sapiens that have ever since been used to arrive at different medical treatment assessments and protocols based on race. In the 10th edition of his taxonomy, published in 1758, Linnaeus suggested two new manas-fueled categories:
Homo ferus, or wild children, and
Homo monstrosus, or individuals Linnaeus considered to be abnormally shaped by their environments, such as those from the high mountains (“Alpine dwarfs,” “Patagonian giants”), the “Hottentots,” and European women with artificially constrained waists.
It appears the European medical establishment at the time was so enthralled by whatever advantages it perceived a taxonomy to provide it failed to pick out the manas that fueled how the categories within it were defined. Or perhaps simply the favorable description of their own group was enough to shortstop real inquiry. African Americans in particular have been dying from this failure ever since. Personally, I find Linnaeus’ language, effectively used to impose systemic mana, eerily prescient of Hillary Clinton’s creation of the term “superpredator” in support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
Ellis Island was good, right?
“The defective immigrant…would attempt purposeful and shrewd shams in order to enter the United States.” ~ Kim E. Neilsen, A Disability History of the United States
Growing up in the US, I remember Ellis Island, a major port of immigrant entry into the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, being portrayed as a shining example of the US’ largess and commitment to democratic values. Chapter 6 of Kim E. Neilsen’s A Disability History of the United States uncovers the systemic manas at work on Ellis Island, teaching us that “defects,” “derangements,” “oddity of dress,” arbitrarily perceived indicators of sexual perversion, race, and other randomly judged characteristics were used on a minute-by-minute basis by Ellis Island inspectors to label potential immigrants as generally undesirable or “likely to become a public charge,” and thus deny immigration. One example Nielsen gives is of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, who went on to become a leading engineer at General Electric and a pioneer developer of electric cars. Steinmetz was initially rejected for immigration at Ellis Island in 1889 because he was 4’3” tall, hunch-backed, Jewish, and traveling third-class. Protestations of his brilliance and talents were ignored. Only when his traveling companion, Oscar Asmussen, flashed a wad of cash claiming it was Steinmetz’s instead of his own, was Steinmetz allowed to immigrate. None of Steinmetz’s actual capacities were ever investigated by the inspectors at Ellis Island. He was judged according to their prejudices about his physical appearance and only Oscar Asmussen’s cash secured immigration for him. Nielsen offers a second and more heart-rending example in the story of deaf blacksmith Moishe Fischmann who was refused immigration in 1913, despite a written, well-paying job offer and commitments for lodging and monetary support from family members already living in the US. Fischmann managed to secure a rare appeal hearing of that ruling but, despite clear evidence of his capacities and support, and the presentation of a second even better paying written job offer, immigration officials judged him likely to become a public change due to his deafness and refused him entry. As fundamental as the events at Ellis Island were in shaping the population of the United States, true stories like these do not appear in high school US History textbooks. Their appearance would undercut the manas-serving illusion of a benevolent Ellis Island in the minds of US citizens being molded to see themselves as the recipients of a just and democratic heritage.
Choosing Conscious Evolution
“Some people have spoken of a new species called Homo conscius, humans with the capacity of being mindful.” ~ Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
It’s not easy for me to research and talk and write about our world’s systemic manas. I can feel overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of oppression in that history. As I am researching and talking and writing, in order to practice what I believe is healthful and supportive, I must consciously remind myself to choose love. It's hard to choose love at times when I see individuals who have power over me and all the natural world choosing not-love. It can be really hard not to get swept away from choosing love into opposing not-love. Opposing not-love may frequently be necessary, as it clearly is today, but it also isn't necessarily choosing love. When I choose to oppose oppression and not-love, at the same time I also need to choose to center myself in choosing love. Anger, frustration, and fear are all emotions that can arise when facing an oppressor; it is natural for me to practice with them, and my practice calls me to make every skillful effort not to be them. This means that rather than focusing on all the things I don’t want, the things that cause me to feel angry or frustrated or fearful, I can choose to focus on the love and care and support I want to help bring into being. In conversation with bell hooks, Thich Nhat Hahn said, “Be angry, it’s okay. But not to practice is not okay… By taking a look at your anger, it can be transformed into the kind of energy that you need—understanding and compassion.” While many teachers ask us to extend understanding and compassion to those who harm us, we must understand that this is a deep and skillful practice that we cannot force ourselves to be ready for. It’s best to start by extending understanding and compassion to ourselves, understanding what we are afraid of, having compassion for our frustration, offering love and care to our fear. Until we learn to love and care for ourselves, we cannot deeply, consistently, and reliably extend love and care to important people in our lives, to our friends and neighbors, let alone to oppressors. It may feel, at times, that anger provides energy, and this may be true momentarily, but this kind of energy cannot healthfully be sustained. When anger is consistently fed, it leads to violent language and behavior, rejection of “others,” isolation, a persistent sense of vulnerability. When understanding and compassion are fed, particularly when fed in supportive community, they lead to the experience of expansiveness, health, strength, and capacity. In discussing words, I suggested that love is the governing force or restriction on present action that commitment to cross-disability solidarity and collective liberation impose. In inhuman and overwhelming circumstances, we may not feel like we have a choice, but this is the practice of powerlessness. We always have the power and agency to choose love, starting with love and care for ourselves. Choosing love restricts us from exercising our anger, from giving in to our hopelessness, from believing our frustration illustrates a true lack of choice. It’s not the easy choice, because choosing love does not always provide a clear course of action, but it is the wise and skillful one.
In the Art of Living, Thich Nhat Hahn wrote about evolution and the possible emergence of a new species, homo conscius. He pointed out that the ways we learn to adapt to the stress, anxiety, fear, and despair of the modern world becomes part of our spiritual and genetic heritage, part of the evolution of our species. He called out how every new “development” in human evolution was the result of learning, learning to walk erect, to use our hands, and most recently to use our minds. I’ve described how our minds naturally create manas, and I’ve given some examples of how manas have been used to create systems of oppression. Systems of oppression are not new. The caste system in India dates back to Shakyamuni’s time and colorism quite possibly predates that. Also in The Art of Living, Thay said there are two ways to adapt in any current situation. The first is practice, “the way you think, the way you breathe, the way you walk are kinds of protection.” This resonates with what I offer about awareness of capacity in protest or opposition to not-love While disabled and chronically ill people are not necessarily going to be in the streets chanting and carrying signs, we can still think, breathe, roll, walk, and lie with intention, peace, love, compassion, and understanding. The intention, peace, love, compassion, and understanding we create in our bodies is a gift to ourselves and is communicated throughout our environment, even when we are alone with our plants. Our environment communicates with all the environments around it, even if we can’t see or feel that. Thay and other teachers have offered that happiness is not the destination or goal, it’s the practice or the path, that the way to happiness is to practice happiness. My practice is imperfect. Very imperfect. But I can return to it again and again with the intention of creating balance, harmony, peace, love, compassion, and understanding, even if I just cursed someone out at the grocery store. The skill of feeding love, understanding, and compassion when I’ve made a mistake or am under stress is essential for evolution to homo conscius. At the same time we want oppression to end, practice calls us to turn the wheel of evolution toward love, care, compassion, and understanding. We must be the change we want to see in the world.
In the Art of Living passage I quoted above, Thay does not explicitly enumerate a second way to adapt, but he does talk about spiritual transmission. “We can all contribute to helping Homo conscius—the species that embodies mindfulness, compassion, and enlightenment—develop and continue in the world for a long time.” We transmit what we have learned through our practice, and “the fruit of your learning will be inscribed in every cell of your body and be transmitted to future generations.” Thay is describing conscious evolution, the intention to evolve personally into thinking, breathing, rolling, lying, walking, and living with intention, peace, love, compassion, and understanding. Evolution is not an isolated phenomenon. A call to homo conscius is also a call to intentional community, because it is in the company of others who are practicing with the same intentions that we are most supported in our individual practice. As Shakyamuni said, community is everything. Being in community as disabled and chronically ill people can be challenging, and so we must give ourselves grace around how and where we can “show up,” even if it’s only with our plants. How gentle must we be with ourselves if we are to find our own way into continuing this work in whatever ways and at whatever scale our capacities allow? Can we affirm that however we are able to practice is enough? Can we loosen the soil of our minds so that wisdom teachings like these can seep through whatever unsupportive thoughts and emotions and ways of being we’ve inherited and penetrate our hearts? These are skillful questions that can serve us in our intentional evolution toward homo conscius.
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Thank you for gathering with me to examine Cross-Disability Solidarity and being a valuable part of Sangha Is All. I’m looking forward to being with you again in April for sharing and discussion on Interdependence.
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:
Commitment – With others, sending forward dedication to a future promise that governs and imposes healthful restriction on present action.
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.
Solidarity – The whole, well-kept, uninjured awareness of shared interests that recognizes common interests and produces common goals.
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.
Samma Samadhi (Right Togetherness / Interbeing / Distillation) - The practice and experience, arising from concentrated intention and clear focus, of being put together or in union 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)
March 2 - Bill Withers, Lean on Me, Stevie Wonder, Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing
March 2 Links:
Recording - Disability Justice and The Dharma-Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing
Sebene Salasi, You Belong
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness
Brittany Kenyon-Flatt, How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race
March 2 Quotes:
“Each of us has a multitude of influences, various identities, and countless experiences. Furthermore, things are bananas out there. We are presented with a dizzying array of choices every day—what to eat, use, read, watch, follow, post, support, say, believe—choices that align us with particular ideas, values and communities…or not. In any moment, we may feel like we belong to one thing and not another. I belong to this community, to which others don’t. belong to this statement, definitely not that one. I belong in this space way over here. Or perhaps I belong nowhere. The truth” we all belong to it all”. ~ Sebene Selassi, You Belong
“…you call me Vietnamese. You may be quite sure that I’m a Vietnamese monk. But in fact, legally speaking, I don’t have a Vietnamese passport. Culturally speaking, I have elements of French in me, as well as Chinese culture and even Indian culture. In my writings and teachings, you can discover several sources of cultural streams. And ethically speaking, there’s no such race as the Vietnamese race. In me there are Melanesian elements, Indonesian elements, and Mongolian elements. Just as the flower is made of non-flower elements, so am I made of non-me elements. The insight of interbeing helps us touch this wisdom of nondiscrimination.” ~ Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
“…anytime what we're fighting for brings us into conflict with the legitimate needs of another group of people, it's a sure sign that the picture is too small. ~ Aurora Levins Morales, blog post 10/30/2013, Bigger IS Better
“About 30 years ago [late 1980s] I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word ‘togetherness,’ but I finally came up with the word ‘interbeing’. The verb ‘to be’ can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves alone. ‘To be’ is always to ‘inter-be.’…We inter-are with one another and with all life.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
“…in the practice of Buddhism, samadhi is the power to maintain insight alive in every moment, so that every speech, every word, every act will bear the nature of that insight. It is a question of cleaning. And you clean better if you are surrounded by sangha-those who are practicing at exactly the same time.” ~ Thich Nhat Hahn, Lion’s roar bell hooks conv with Thich Nhat Hahn
“Manas [conceits] keeps saying, ‘This is me; this is my body; this is mine.’ Because manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self. But this is not always good for our survival. Manas cannot see that we are made only of non-self elements and that what it considers to be a self is not actually a separate entity. Manas cannot see that its wrong view of a self can bring us a lot of suffering and prevent us from living happily with freedom.” (stardust) ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
“’Systemic mana’ [comparing mind is]…the cultural and collective expression of comparison and competition that is expressed through societal norms (at its most benign) or hierarchy and oppression (at its most violent).” ~Sebene Selassi, You Belong
“We don’t think our way to belonging; we retrain our mind to find ease.” ~Sebene Sealssi, You Belong
“Human beings evolved from Homo habilis [“handy man”] to Homo erectus [“upright man”] before we became Homo sapiens, [“thinking man”] and every new stage in our evolution came about as a result of learning. Some people have spoken of a new species called Homo conscius, humans with the capacity of being mindful. The Buddha belonged to this species. His disciples, and disciples of these disciples, also belong to this species….They have learned that with mindfulness there is concentration and insight—the kind of insight that enables them to live their lives more deeply and avoid danger. And by living, they learn.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
“Transformation happens in practice not by getting somewhere or gaining something but by recognizing the here and now.” ~ Sebene Selassi, You Belong
“Probably the most troublesome pair of opposites to reconcile is love and power. Our modern world is torn to shreds by this dichotomy…”. ~ Robert A Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
“There are many possible meanings or experiences of spiritual liberation as it emerges from within. I experience it as freedom from projections of superiority and inferiority among sentient beings. To experience liberation in such a way is to experience authentic compassion, wisdom, love, and interrelationship.” ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness
Ways to Practice Together Until Interdependence on April 5:
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.
