DJATD-Interdependence
“We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.”
This month, in gratitude and humility, I offer thanks to all the generous, supportive, and wise individuals who have been engaging with me in monthly Disability Justice and the Dharma practice, whether in-person or by watching the recordings, as well as those practicing with me during the week. When I set out to offer this series last year, while I had certain aims and intentions, I didn’t really know what I was doing or how to do it. Having the opportunity to be with you as I’ve been figuring (and continue to figure) this out has been a tremendous gift that I will forever be thankful for! I don’t say this often enough: I don’t identify as an expert, a teacher, or an enlightened one. In the modern world, at least, the identity of “teacher” invokes a certain hierarchy that I am not interested in participating in. My intention is not to invite hierarchy; it’s to invite a circle of learning and growth in which I practice toward wisdom and liberation with the deconstructive identities socially assigned to me and into which I invite others to practice with those same intentions. This includes listening to each other so we can receive the valuable insights and wisdom of the whole community. Hierarchical community can easily become oppressive and fragile. Collaborative and circular community is robust, self-sustaining, and liberating.
How Did I Miss It?
“When someone ignores you, it’s an intentional display of power….Ignoring silences people.” ~ Judith Heumann, Being Heumann
The day of our Interdependence gathering was also the 49th anniversary of the Section 504 sit-in in San Franciso, California, and I failed to remark on that during our gathering this month. In fact, we were gathering on the anniversary of one the most interdependent and intersectional events in the history of Disability Justice.
During our Cross-Movement Organizing gathering last December, we looked at some contextual history of Disability Justice; the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 appears in the category Civil Rights and Affirmative Action of that history. This Act included Section 504, providing guarantees that people with disabilities would be able to access programs and facilities that received federal funding. Passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was great, but it couldn’t begin to have impact until regulations that explained how, as a practical and legal matter, it was to be implemented took effect. This space between passage of law and implementation of regulations can be used by timid or opposing politicians to kill acts of Congress by essentially refusing to allow them to go into effect, and this is where Section 504 sat when, in 1977, four years after its passage, a varied group of disabled activists coalesced to pressurize creation of Section 504 regulations that would allow its protections to go into effect. Protests and sit-ins occurred in a number of major cities across the US, but the San Francisco sit-in, at the office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which was responsible for developing the Section 504 regulations for the President’s signature, was sustained the longest, lasting almost an entire month, and consequently proved the most influential. The intersectional and interdependent nature of the San Francisco sit-in is beautifully recounted in the biography of Judy Heumann, one of the protest’s core organizers. Her biography recounts that, on April 5, 1977, disability activists held a rally in front of the San Francisco federal building and, upon Judy Heumann’s call to action, disabled rally participants stormed the federal building, demanded to meet with HEW staff, and began the sit-in. As rally participants surged into the federal building, “Blind people pushed people in manual wheelchairs, the person in the wheelchair navigating.” I will not attempt to summarize the many twists and turns of that month of occupying the federal building; no summary here could do it justice The political machinations were many, but beyond that, as Heumann notes in her biography, “For people with disabilities, a sleepover is not as simple as tossing some sandwiches and a toothbrush into a backpack. In addition to personal assistance, a fairly high number of us also require various types of daily medications and have things like catheters that need to be changed, or the need to get turned at night to avoid bedsores. Many people, of course, had come without a personal attendant, any kind of food, or even a toothbrush.” Despite this, initially, there were 75 disabled protesters and personal assistants sitting-in at the HEW office in San Francisco; that number later rose to over 100. The political challenge was great, and the obstacles to sustaining disabled sit-in participants in health was even greater. What ensued was a series of communal and logistical miracles, with protestors stepping up to care for each other according to their capacities, and allied organization stepping in to provide food, medical, political, and other kinds of aid.
Intersectionally, consider this list of varied supporters who provided food, political interventions, logistical support, rallying cries to the larger community, and financial means to bring the protest to a successful end when the Section 504 regulations were signed on April 28, 1977, twenty-four days after the San Francisco sit-in began, exactly as they had been previously been drafted by disability community members and supporters:
Kitty Cone, Center for Independent Living staff leading Committee to Save 504
Delancy Street Foundation (working with drug addicted and formerly incarcerated community)
Salvation Army (working with disabled community)
Cecil Williams and Glide Memorial Church
Norman Leach of the Council of Churches
California Governor Jerry Brown
United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez personally
Brad Lomax and The Black Panthers
Regional Assistant Director of HEW Bruce Lee
California congressmen George Miller and Phil Burton
Buttercup Restaurant
Brick Hut Lesbian Cooperative
Werner Erhard, founder of est
Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, who later became leader of the NAACP
Evan White, ABC News
Willie Dicks and George Robinson of the International Association of Machinists
Mayor George Moscone
Luther Place Memorial
US Senators Harrison Williams and Alan Cranston, original sponsors of Section 504
Stuart Eizenstat, President Jimmy Carter’s chief of domestic affairs
The entire modern history of disability justice is intersectional and interdependent. This history asks each of us to open our eyes to the imperative that intersectional relationships and support flow in all directions.
Words
Last month, I wrote that, “when unexamined, words can have a flattening or deadening effect”. The Section 504 protestors had to fight vehemently against deadened perceptions about them held by politicians, the media, and the general public, in order to be heard and achieve their goal. Forty-nine years later, while we are recipients of many benefits accomplished by our lineage ancestors, disabled people today are still too often confronted with ignorant pre-conceptions of our abilities and worth. For our own sake as well as others’, we must seek out and right language that relegates us to the sidelines. This month, we worked with several words in the Interdependence principle, “need,” “liberation,” “state solutions,” and “interdependence.” We saw that words have long allowed desires to be conflated with requirements (dating to Middle English, 1066-1500 CE, a thousand years or more after Shakyamuni’s time), and that liberation connotes not only freedom from bondage but also nobility, joy, and love. In last month’s blog, I also wrote that “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.” In examining the meaning of “state solutions,” we reminded ourselves that “solution” means not only the answer to a problem, but also dissolving, loosening, or unfastening, resonating with how dissolving the manas underlying a problem is essential to its removal. Because this principle specifically negates state solutions, in its plain language it is a call for both individual and community solutions.
The eight-fold noble path element we examined this month is Samma-Vacca. Because the Sanskrit word “vacca” is directly translated into English as “speech,” the common white Western dharma translation of “Right Speech” is literally accurate. As disabled people, we understand “speech” to include all mediums of communication, like signed language for instance. In order for us to exist in interdependence with each other, and to voice and create ourselves wisely, we must consciously use our speech, whether through our voice, our actions or some other means, including words and actions that we choose to withhold, to aim towards balance with, and support of, the true nature of reality.
Observing all this, a question arises: how we do arrive at reciprocally given reliance upon, and confidence that, the conditions necessary to perform basic daily activities and satisfy basic daily requirements will be created and maintained by our community?
Intersectionality, Interbeing, Interdependence
Intersectionality - My “disability” isn’t necessarily a “problem,” but the invisibilzation of my experiences and requirements around how my body functions certainly is. ~ Sangha Is All
Our first gathering last September centered on Intersectionality; in it I introduce the concept of a Third Arrow. Classical Buddhism, which originated over 2000 years ago, offers two Arrows in respect to suffering, a First Arrow, representing an objectively difficult or painful experience, and a Second Arrow, representing our response to it, which, when unskillful, can lead to increased mental and emotional suffering.
Living in a disabled body, I frequently find western teachings on “suffering” to be muddled; while any given teacher’s instruction may seem to be clear in a step-by-step sort of way, the discussion of what suffering is tends to focus almost exclusively on the Second Arrow, our response to an objective event. I believe focusing on the “response” has tended to give rise to teachers and practitioners who fail to understand and accept that objective suffering exists and is an appropriate matter for practice by all beings, both the suffering and those observing the suffering. What’s more, many contemporary teachers and practitioners I’ve encountered seem to say or imply that the physical discomforts, intellectual challenges, emotional disconnections, and many other objective experiences that arise from living in disabled bodies, when acknowledged at all, are “Second Arrows,” not real conditions or events, and that we should practice with them in the same way we might practice with grief arising from a broken arm or death of a loved one. This is simply not the case. This misunderstanding, this lack of awareness, is consequential, not just for disabled folks but also for “normatively” enabled practitioners. It ignores the intersection of objectively painful and challenging experiences with the real bodies in which they take place. And it creates a collapsing of real perspective and understanding in normatively performing bodies that can lead to interpretations of our experiences as a “disabled” being as “invalid,” of us being “disabled” or “invalid” rather than a whole, natural beings.
Post-COVID, an abundance of virtual practice spaces now exists, and most of these are just as normatively focused as their in-person counterparts. Access is most often taken for granted, thereby excluding folks who have specific neuro-cognitive, perceptual, and physical access requirements. We do not show up in practice spaces when they are not accessible to us AND when we do not show up, the normatively enabled participants present are fooled into a concept of general normativity applying to practice that excludes us. Further, they are denied the sophisticated and rich wisdom and experience that disabled individuals cultivate through our daily relationships with our bodies. The experience I have when there is refusal to acknowledge and validate my intersectional identities is what I call a Third Arrow, an objectively painful experience that arises and is directed toward me solely due to my “disability;” it’s objectively difficult and painful when my intersectional identities are invalidated, when I am told, like Emma DeGraffenreid, that for my “claims to be valid” I can be one identity or another, but I can’t be the whole of what I am. There are many practical, objectively experienced barriers that arise as a result of this confused thinking in normatively abled folks involving matters like employment, school admissions and performance, and child play ground equipment. The source of this Third Arrow is the community, the individual(s) who deliver the blow and the culture that nurtures this ignorant treatment of disabled folks’ objective experiences. Practicing with Intersectionality and the Third Arrows that intersectional ignorance deliver, can keep us on sane and steady ground when we are not supported in the communities in which we find ourselves.
Interbeing - “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 Earthlin Manuel, The Way Of Tenderness
Thich Nhat Hahn talks and writes about Interbeing in many contexts. It’s in a section on “The First Door of Liberation” that he first elaborates on the concept of Interbeing in his book, The Art of Living, Throughout his work, Thay illustrates in many ways that our “individual” existence is the result of, in fact depends on, a complex and cooperatively interacting system of “others,” microbes, plants, animals, chemical elements such as oxygen, and so on; we could trace this web of interdependence infinitely. When we understand and accept this deeply, when we allow ourselves to embody this wisdom, we know that we inter-are with everything around us, everything that came before us, and everything that will come after us. This insight changes everything. NASA recently concluded a mission around the moon and back called Artemis II. Upon Artemis II’s return, crew member Christina Koch eloquently expressed being struck by the insight of Interbeing on this mission. She said, “When we saw tiny Earth, people asked us what impression our crew had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe….A crew is a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked….I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me,” she said,. “but there’s one new thing I know, and that is, planet Earth: You are a crew.” She doesn’t say humans are a crew, or rich people are a crew, or flamenco dancers are a crew, she says “Earth.” Both Christina Koch and Thich Nhat Hahn are inviting us to understand that, in order to live, in order to survive as a species, survive as a planet, we must understand and respect that we inter-are with everything.
Think back to our discussion of manas last month. In last month’s blog, I wrote: “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.” Any view of our “selves” that does not include Interbeing is not yet free of manas, the “projections of superiority and inferiority” Zenju Earthlin Manuel refers to. Without freeing ourselves of such misconceptions, the door to liberation, the path to experiencing “authentic compassion, wisdom, love, and interrelationship” is clogged, largely inaccessible. We get stuck in beliefs that liberation and freedom from bondage are the same thing. In most circumstances, freedom from bondage is a very good thing, except of course when you need to bind a wound or swaddle a crying child. So other characteristics, other beliefs and aspirations, are necessary to fully achieve liberation, characteristics like nobility, joy, and love that inquiry reveals have been right there in the meaning of the word “liberation” all along.
Interdependence – We need [stories] as a way of contemplating human existence because when we only look at the individual, [when] we only look at ourselves, it’s too small, it’s like looking at a microbe through a massive microscope….It’s the drop of water to the ocean, and when you look at the ocean it gives your psyche more breathing space…” ~ Clare Murphy
Interdependence = Intersectionality = Interbeing ~ Sangha Is All
Discussion around Intersectionality and disability can easily center on manas, on the ways that ignorance of the unique nature of each human body’s resources and capacities can result in injustice. This discussion is good. Unexamined manas persists and liberation requires that manas be illuminated and uprooted. The flip side of that coin requires that we also illuminate and celebrate all the healthful and life forward talents and capacities present in different intersectional identities, and how these talents and capacities serve the liberation of all beings, the Section 504 sit-in being one small eample of this kind of noble, joyful and loving intersectional victory. In discussing Intersectionality above, I wrote that Third Arrows are a community problem. For interdependence to exist, given the manas that exists in human minds, communities need a frame like Intersectionality that enables them to perceive and, consequently, treat disabled folks as whole beings, not as a disabled people, but as a valid and whole beings. Intersectionality stands in the doorway to liberation, holding the door open.
Many Buddhist teachers talk about paradox, about seemingly irreconcilable elements that nevertheless co-exist (like me, a chronically ill person who is also very healthy), that point to deep wisdom, and can lead to uprooting manas. The wisdom of Interbeing shines a flood light on paradox of all kinds. This is different than being a miracle drug or panacea; light reveals but does not “cure” the problem. Thich Nhat Hahn relates a story about learning, in the 1970s, of a murder, rape, and suicide that took place when a boat of Vietnamese refugees was attacked by pirates. He tells us his struggles were immense. “The feelings of sadness, compassion and pity were very strong.” His sympathies naturally flowed toward the injured. Other feelings arose toward those who caused the harm, and perhaps feelings arose around his inability to prevent such things from happening. As a Buddhist monk, he knew his calling was love for all, not for some. “As a practitioner,” he says, “we cannot let the feelings of anger and helplessness paralyze us.” But how? How is it possible to get free from anger and paralysis and extend love to the perpetrators of such an attack? The insight of Interbeing proved to be the way to his freedom, an understanding that perpetrators of harm suffer from manas and other conditions that drive their actions. In this way, perpetrators of harm are just like recipients of harm. Thich Nhat Hahn accomplished so much in his lifetime, his words and voice still carry with them the embodiment of peace. Those of us who haven’t practiced as long or as diligently as he may mistake the comfort we feel from the content of his words, the impact of his voice, the body of his work, for “the point.” They are not the point. The insight of Interbeing includes the paradox that getting to ease involves struggle. Being human means that there will always be something to practice with, to struggle with. Being willing to struggle, being willing to practice, is the point. If I needed a glass of water and one was sitting right there, I’d reach for it. The insight of Interbeing is sitting right there. Reaching for it is practice.
These contemplations on Intersectionality, Interbeing and Interdependence involve the stories we tell ourselves. If we tell ourselves that a violent story about murder, rape, and suicide is about the perpetration of an evil event by evil people, we will ultimately find ourselves paralyzed by anger and helplessness. If we tell ourselves that a story about over 100 disabled people occupying a federal building to get their rights is about the incompetence, untrustworthiness, and sliminess of politicians, we will ultimately find ourselves locked in a perpetual battle against unknown political powers and their perceived opposition to us. As both Clare Murphy and Christina Koch observe, the perspective we take has real consequences. If we make the story about only our “selves,” we lose energy. If we make the story about the entire cast of characters, no matter how we might want to shade them individually, we can breathe, expand, learn, and grow. Clare Murphy’s observation is an echo of Rumi: “you are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop.”
Holding Both
“The truth is that suffering and happiness inter-are….[and] both are impermanent” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
Earlier I asked, how do we arrive at reciprocally given reliance upon, and confidence that, the conditions necessary to perform basic daily activities and satisfy basic daily requirements will be created and maintained by our community?
We could say that the way we meet each other's needs must be fueled by awareness of the intersectional way in which we do not lead single-issue lives, an awareness that informs us that, as Sebene Selassi puts it, “Although we are not one, we are not separate. And although we are not separate, we are not the same.”
We could say that an awareness that we inter-are with all the conditions in the world, the favorable and the unfavorable, the violent and the non-violent, the pleasant and the unpleasant, moves us closer to harmony with the true nature of reality, and that, if we are “to experience authentic compassion, wisdom, love, and interrelationship” we must allow the first noble truth, that life involves suffering, to be a paradox in which life and suffering interplay with each other in search of balance.
We might notice that the stories we tell ourselves around all of this are an expression of our interrelationships that also creates our interrelationships. Robert A. Johnson tells us, “personal suffering begins when we are crucified between … opposites”. This is what Shakyamuni meant by suffering, not that objective suffering isn’t real, but that crucifixion is a choice, that when my mind state around something that is objectively painful or difficult heightens my challenges, as opposed to allowing them to flow through and be impermanent, more difficult and painful things happen, and that I have a choice in how this goes forward. While paradox is not inherently comfortable to the human mind in its current state of evolution, we can choose not to be paralyzed by the notion that “contradictions” must somehow be “reconciled”, instead focusing simply on holding the truth of paradox. Attempting to reconcile contradictions in a world that is constantly creating them ultimately means choosing either crucifixion or filling your own quiver with Third Arrows. Embracing paradox chooses comfort with difference. We can choose to hold the seemingly contradictory aspects of paradox the way we might hold an injured child, allowing what is confusing and uncomfortable to us, like the child’s pain, to exist while we also allow whatever comfort we can provide to flow into soothing the confusion and discomfort. This is the challenging and essential work of holding both.
***
Thank you for gathering with me to examine Interdependence and being a valuable part of Sangha Is All. I’m looking forward to being with you again in May for sharing and discussion on Collective Access.
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, for the remainder of this month meeting on Thursdays at 1pm US central time, starting on May 8 meeting on Fridays at 10:30am 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.
Free – nobly, joyfully, lovingly not being in bondage and having the capacity to act according to one’s own will.
Intention - A stretching out, straining, exertion, effort, aspiration, thought and purpose of awareness.
Interdependence: reciprocally given reliance upon and confidence that the conditions necessary to perform basic daily activities (like rising, dressing, and interacting with others), and satisfy basic daily requirements (like sheltering, toileting, eating, healthcare, and resting) will be created and maintained by our community.
Liberation –setting free, the action or process of becoming free.
Multi-Cultural Wisdom on Wholeness and Belonging(Indigenous language)
Need -The conditions required by my humanity to perform basic daily activities (like rising, dressing, and interacting with others), and satisfy basic daily requirements (like sheltering, toileting, eating, healthcare, and resting).
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 Vacca (Right Speech) - Consciously using speech, whether through our voice, actions or some other means, including the words and actions we choose to withhold, to aim toward creating balance with and support of 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
April 7 - Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden: Where Can I Go Without You, Spotify or YouTube
April 7 Links:
Kimberle Crenshaw, The Urgency of Intersectionality
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Living
Zenju Earthlin Manuel, The Way of Tenderness
Clare Murphy conversation with Matthew Sanford, When Words Fail
Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual – Power, Healing, and Community
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
April 7 Quotes:
“When facts do not fit with available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem.” ~ Kimberle Crenshaw, The Urgency of Intersectionality
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”~ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“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 Hahn, The Art of Living
“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 Earthln Manuel, Zenju Earthlin Manuel, The Way of Tenderness
Although we are not one, we are not separate. And although we are not separate, we are not the same. ~ Sebene Salassi, You Belong
We need [stories] as a way of contemplating human existence because when we only look at the individual, [when] we only look at ourselves, it’s top small, it’s like looking at a microbe through a massive microscope….It’s the drop of water to the ocean, and when you look at the ocean it gives your psyche more breathing space…” ~ Clare Murphy conversation with Matthew Sanford, When Words Fail
“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?” ~ Sebene Salassi, You Belong
I am he, As you are he, As you are me, And we are all together. ~ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, I Am the Walrus
“I am defined as other in every group I’m part of. The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression.” ~ Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (10/3/79 entry)
“For some incomprehensible reason we often refuse this paradoxical nature of reality….Personal suffering begins when we are crucified between these opposites. If we try to embrace one without paying tribute to the other, we degrade paradox into contradiction. Yet both pairs of opposites must be equally honored. To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing….The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of conflicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities.” ~ Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow
Ways to Practice Together Until Interdependence on May 3:
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.
Living Mindfully With Illness Together, a weekly mindfulness practice group for folks living with illness or disability and their caregivers. Click here to sign up.
