Extended Part 1: WTR Through a Lens of Person of Color (POC) Identity, and Intra-personal, Inter-personal, and Group Dynamics

by Erica Peng

I have known Joanna and the Work that Reconnects (WTR) for twenty-eight years. Her heart-wisdom and work have both shaped me deeply, and also called forth my own leadership and courage to forge a path of healing and reconnection for myself and others. Below I offer a personal perspective through my own journey of identity and personal and professional development, about how powerful WTR has been for my own process of reconnection, as well as how great the opportunity is for WTR’s continued evolution.

I am the oldest daughter of Chinese parents who immigrated from Taiwan in their late 20s. I was born and raised in a small community of 15,500 in central Massachusetts. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and one of a handful in my high school of 1200 mostly white students.

While I don’t consciously remember being the “only” Chinese person in elementary school, I must have felt discomfort because every waking moment was an unconscious attempt to assimilate to the dominant majority. Permed hair, blue eyeliner to widen my eyes, avoidance of other Asian students for fear I would blow my “cover.” I rejected everything about being Chinese, including my parents. My coping mechanism was to convince myself I was the same as the people around me. That I “belonged.” I internalized an identity of being white. And Jewish.

I wasn’t aware of my internalized racism until I arrived at Stanford University as an eighteen-year-old in September of 1986. There, I was welcomed and celebrated for being Chinese-American. This challenged almost two decades of self-perception and self-worth as a white person. I couldn’t reconcile this crisis of identity so after five months of struggle, I dropped out.

My parents withdrew their support of me with the exception of a plane ticket to Taiwan for a two-month cultural exchange for “overseas Chinese” youth. Thus began what would become a two-year journey in Taiwan, China, and Thailand, where I began to integrate and embrace my Chinese heritage as part of my identity.

Given race held the most prominent pain and struggle for me, until I had processed and healed from my internalized racism, I could not access how gender had affected my self-perception and behaviors. It was not until my late 30s that I began to experience some of the impacts of sexism in how much I had rejected traits and behaviors associated with femininity and being a woman, as well as a chronic upswing in my voice when I talked.

The other significant element of my identity which was “closeted” was my innate and deep connection to the universe, global humanity, the natural world, the elements. I didn’t see this part of my reality affirmed in dominant culture norms and values, so to “come out” as an environmental activist, on top of being a Chinese-American woman, felt too risky.

Unlike my race and gender, I was able to hide my deep connection to earth and humanity. And so I did. But I lived out expressions of my Self as an “earth warrior” in ways that felt safe and legitimate by standards of the dominant culture: I learned organic farming as an apprentice and assistant instructor at the UC Santa Cruz Farm Program, I directed an organic gardening and cooking program in the Berkeley public schools, and I designed and built the strawbale house where I live now.

Entry way of Erica’s strawbale home

Sunflowers outside Erica’s strawbale home.

This was the context of my lived experience and identity when I had my first two encounters with Joanna’s work. In 1989, a friend gave me a copy of “World as Lover, World as Self.” Reading Joanna’s words about our interdependency and interconnectedness with the greater natural system was the first time I felt acknowledged and “seen” in my experience of feeling connected to the whole. Her book also affirmed and normalized my grief and despair, which I experienced in loneliness and isolation. Joanna’s words helped me understand why I felt so crazy. And reassured me that I wasn’t actually crazy.

My next encounter with Joanna’s work was almost twenty years later at a weekend workshop. Again, it was a safe haven, this time in community. At that point in my life, the part of my identity that was a child of nature, earth, and the universe, was more discarded than my race and gender. Joanna’s workshop allowed the most tender and vulnerable parts of myself that had been hidden away to be “seen” and affirmed in a community of kindreds. That sense of belonging was quite profound and it transcended differences of race and gender.

These moments with Joanna and her work were a refuge and relief – temporary freedom – from decades of emotional and psychological injury and trauma from being split and disconnected from the core parts of my nature and identity, as a result of being embedded in an oppressive global industrial capitalist system. I suffered from the impacts of self-hatred in ways not dissimilar from others’ manifestations of trauma: deep insecurity and lack of self-trust; over-reliance on external accomplishment and validation for esteem; over-accommodating others’ needs and wants at the expense of my own health and well-being; a “dissociated” state from not feeling safe in my own self and body; anxiety attacks, insomnia, and “hyper-vigilance,” an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity from consistent and unconscious scanning of the environment for potential threat.

Ten years would pass until my next encounter with Joanna at the WTR intensive in June 2016. Those ten years spanned the deepest and most impactful period of my on-going healing and recovery from internalized and embodied trauma. I give gratitude every day that I turned towards teachers, learnings, and practices that intuitively felt “right.” Each one helped surface layer after layer of trauma – and healing.

Here are three of the most significant experiences that shaped me and my on-going recovery process during that period, which I share to provide context for my perspective and recommendations:

1. Transforming Despair Into Hope Through Organization Development

In 2006 I stumbled upon the field of Organization Development (OD) at a facilitator training. I was shocked to discover that the stated core competencies were intuition, empathy, systems-thinking, and awareness of the whole. The very parts of myself I had internalized as deficient liabilities according to dominant US culture norms, were re-framed as valuable core competencies. I ended up pursuing a two-year OD Masters Program which put concepts and frameworks to a worldview I had intuited. I experienced possibilities for how my natural aptitudes and systems orientation could contribute to helping people create meaningful relationships, collaboration, and performance, in groups and organizations. This slowly began transforming the hopelessness and despair I felt from a lifetime of my core identity, intuition, and empathy for the whole not being “seen” and valued by the dominant culture, and as a result, not trusted by my own self.

2. Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Group Dynamics Through a Lens of Systems Theory, Power, and Oppression

In the first year of my Masters Program, I took a life-changing class on “interpersonal and group dynamics.” The learning format wasn’t through lectures or discussion about interpersonal and group dynamics, but rather examination of reactions that came up in real-time interactions. My fifteen classmates and I sat in an open circle in what’s called a “T Group” (training group), with three facilitators who pointed out emerging energy, issues, and dynamics. This experiential learning format was profound for me. I became aware of a huge area of cultural unconsciousness: the extent to which emotions and fight/flight/freeze responses to threat, shape our personal and professional lives and our effectiveness in relationships.

T Group was pioneered in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin, a German American psychologist, often recognized as the “founder of social psychology” in the US. Lewin is often associated with the Frankfurt School, an influential group of largely Jewish Marxists in Germany. Exiled when Hitler came to power in 1933, Lewin’s personal experience with identity, migration, power, and oppression informed his exploration into the process of denying one’s identity and promoting self-loathing as a form of coping with a dominant system’s oppression. His commitment to find effective ways to combat religious and racial prejudices laid the foundations for what is now known as T Group.

As I engaged with my classmates through T Group with the support of faciitators, I began to see how my perceptions, assumptions, thoughts, values, beliefs, etc. were shaped by my social context of current and historic systems and structures of power, privilege, and oppression. I began to understand what Lewin experienced: my own self-hatred was the result of unconsciously internalizing the values of the dominant system. I was deeply struck and saddened by this.

I realized that ultimately, we have been “colonized” by the systems and structures of our social context. These systems and structures manifest in and are perpetuated through our reactions and behaviors as we interact and engage with each other. I felt (and continue to feel) determined to disentangle my own perceptions, reactions, and behaviors from the dominant culture I was embedded in, and to become aware of how I unintentionally collude with the very system that oppresses me and others, through my unconscious perceptions, reactions, and behaviors. The T Group format offered me a concrete way to surface these unconscious processes and counter them with awareness, and the choice to exercise different behaviors. This gave me hope.

Determined to deepen my learning – and liberation – a few months after I completed my Masters Program, I was accepted to an intensive year-long training program to learn how to facilitate T Groups for the most popular class on interpersonal dynamics and leadership at Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB). My role as facilitator was to model behaviors for building safety, trust, and rapport (including taking risks to learn alongside the students), as well as to facilitate connection and understanding across difference, misunderstanding, and conflict. It was imperative we were aware of our triggers and could manage them and “self-regulate” when they arose.

Since the training in 2008, I’ve spent about two thousand hours facilitating T Groups for over seven hundred students, individuals, and emerging and senior leaders who want to be more effective with people of different backgrounds, ages, worldviews, etc. I am consistently moved and inspired by sitting in circle with others who choose to take the risk to connect with their heart and humanity, and interact with others from this place.

At the same time, despite our common desire to connect and collaborate, I’m consistently humbled by how difficult it is to connect and empathize across difference, especially when difference has shaped our personal histories of power, oppression, and trauma. Over and over I experience in myself and others, how our reactions and behaviors are largely shaped by unconscious processes which often lead to misunderstanding, disconnection, and conflict:

We are hard-wired to unconsciously scan the environment for harm. When our brain picks up perceived threat, our nervous system is “triggered” within milliseconds to react with fight/flight/freeze responses.
We instinctively perceive threat in people who are different from us. Our brain tends to register people who are racially different – especially minorities – in the same part of the brain where objects and things are processed. We are not conscious of this, believe the perceived threat to be real, and react with defensive and/or self-protective postures that often dehumanize the “other.”
Our survival instinct to focus on harm and threat leaves us with a bias towards negativity. Positive experiences and elements are present but our brain notices the negative much more quickly.
Stereotypes, prejudice, and bias are inevitable. Our brain functions by perceiving inordinate amounts of data through filters and patterns that act as shortcuts. The problem is we apply these shortcuts to people and human groups. We make inaccurate assumptions, judgments, and stories about ourselves and each other. All the time. And we believe them to be true.

It is stunning how quickly we get derailed from being present and in empathy and connection with ourselves and others. Milliseconds. The rare opportunity offered by T Group, is a safe learning environment for becoming conscious about the nature of our own triggers, perceptions, assumptions, and judgments, and for practicing critical skills (with modeling, coaching, and support) like self-regulating one’s physiological fight/flight/freeze response, and giving and receiving feedback, real-time and in moments of stress or threat.

3. Systemic Power and Oppression Embodied in Trauma

Four years into facilitating groups for the Stanford class, I began an eight-month “Somatics and Trauma” training which opened my awareness to how systemic structures and dynamics of power and oppression are embodied in our physiology and bodies through our trauma responses. I also became more aware of how my own, and others’ embodied trauma manifests in interactions and group dynamics, how to approach safely working with trauma that emerges in a group, and/or the resulting collective anxiety and fear. Consistent somatic whole-body practices facilitated transformation of my own fight/flight/freeze responses from trauma, into new embodied “postures” and internalized experience of healthy self-perception, thoughts, behavior, reactions, and responses.

After ten years of the above intrapersonal, interpersonal, and group level training, practice, and development, I arrived at the 2016 WTR intensive relaxed in my body, comfortable in my multiple identities, and grounded in my resilience. I also brought experience with group process and the power of feedback that informed how I showed up and engaged.

Full transcript of conversation between Patricia St. Onge, Ann Marie Davis and Aravinda Ananda

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Aravinda: Good afternoon to this conversation between Patricia St. Onge, Ann Marie Davis and Aravinda Ananda. Let’s take a moment for each of us to introduce ourselves.

Ann Marie: My name is Ann Marie Davis and I’m a writer. I have written a book of poetry under the name of AM Davis called “We Have Always Been the Universe” and I am currently working on a novel, tentatively entitled, this is kind of a long name… “You Were Always Waiting For This Moment.” I have been a writer. I actually went to school as an artist and I have spent years kind of just hopping from job to job where I was always I guess underutilized and just doing office work, never doing what I wanted to do, never having enough bandwidth to do anything creative when I got home. I took care of an ailing parent for years and it took a huge toll on my health and I spent some time regaining my health after she passed away and one day I thought the thing to do was to just get a job and get on my feet. And one day I got a job and something told me to leave it and I did. I just felt it in my body that I was not supposed to be there and it was so strong that I was living month to month on that salary getting… and people around me were ill and I was getting repetitive stress injuries and I left the job, and it was a bumpy road to kind of learn how to stand up straight and that’s what I did. And somehow I ended up… I started a novel a few years ago and then ended up at Canticle Farm through knowing Joanna Macy and through her knowing my work and her assistant wanting to support me – her assistant is named Anne Symens-Bucher, I hope I am saying her last name right. And yea, I’m here and Joanna Macy made all that stuff make sense to me when she drew the picture of the eye looking out of the Earth, saying that we are walking around as aspects of the earth and I was like, OK now that makes sense. If you know, Nature/Mother Earth didn’t want me working at that job and wanted me to tell stories, now that whole meandering process of my life is starting to make sense and that’s how I got here.

Patricia: [Mohawk greeting]. Hello my name is Patricia. I am Haudenosaunee and French Canadian and I am adopted Cheyenne River Lakota. I am a grandmother and a mother and a partner and I have a wide circle of friends and community. I live in a small community called Nafsi ya Jamii which is Swahili for “the soul community” and this community emerged out of a conversation based on a Howard Thurman quote that says “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do that.” So we gathered our community together, our family and friends, and as people started to answer that question this beautiful space emerged at a time when we were able to help our neighbors stay in their house by renting their backyard and so over the last five years it’s grown to include three properties and we have a little farm and a ceremony space and a sweat lodge and a meeting room and we gather together for meals and for study and for ceremony. So that’s who I am.

Aravinda: Wonderful. My name is Aravinda Ananda. I live in Massachusetts. I’ve spent most of my life in this part of the world, and I call my life’s work Living rEvolution – helping to shift the human-Earth relationship… beyond environmentalism of just making the human impact less bad to how can humans be a force for good, mutually enhancing and repairing and healing, partnering with the Earth in its self-healing. I currently do a lot of work in different areas from growing food and reconnecting people with the Earth through food, through community conversation and meditation. I also do a fair amount of facilitation of the Work That Reconnects with my life partner, Joseph, and one last thing about me is that I really enjoy sharing love with the world through food and things like brewing kombucha.

Aravinda: Now that we’ve heard just a little bit about the three of us, we wanted to turn next to how each of us became involved with the Work That Reconnects? Ann Marie do you want begin or we could shift the order if you don’t want to speak first?

Ann Marie: I can speak first.

Aravinda: Great.

Ann Marie: So I was over at a friend’s house. I have a friend named Babsie and she studied under Joanna Macy and I would go over her house and help her bake. She makes cookies and cakes and she has this home baking business and I found out about her on a skills sharing network and she would talk about systems theory and Joanna Macy and she asked me to read some of my poetry and I did and she said that Joanna Macy would love my work and I didn’t know who she was but she took me down to one of Joanna’s teachings that she has – she has a sit and a teaching on Thursday at this center in Berkeley, and so I went down there and I did some of Joanna’s work and I gave her my book and she called me on the telephone a couple of weeks later saying, “do you want to come over to my house and read poetry to me?” [Laughs] And then I went over to her house and read poetry and she said she really enjoyed my work, and she said “You must keep working. You must keep writing. The world needs storytellers.” And I took a three-day workshop of Joanna’s after I met her and like I said, my whole way of looking at myself shifted when I started to look a little bit at systems theory and I went to two ten-days since then and when I talk to my friend Babsie, I still go over her house and bake, in fact I’m going this week – she has community cafés where – she makes yummy Viennese treats – she’s Austrian – and every time we sit around talking about systems theory, my mind just gets long – I go out, I go… I can’t stay in my head when I think about this way of looking at the world, that we’re so intertwined. The last workshop I went to, I helped facilitate it, and yeah, that’s it.

Aravinda: Great, thank you. Patricia, would you like to go next or last?

Patricia: Sure. Either one. It doesn’t matter. If you’d like to go next, I’m happy to wait. Or I’m happy to.

Aravinda: Go for it.

Patricia: I had actually never heard of Joanna Macy… She had recently invited a cohort of People of Color to come and do the Work with her and in the middle of the process, I was speaking at an International Women’s Day event, and Ratasha Huff who was studying with Joanna came to me after I spoke and she said “You know, it felt like something was missing in the Work That Reconnects and what you just talked about feels like what’s missing.” And I had talked about is the significance of race and culture on social change work. So she, Ratasha, invited Joanna and me and a few people to come together so that we could meet each other and learn about each other’s work. So the work that I do, I call Deep Culture work, and it’s helping people see what’s underneath racial/cultural identity that’s more than, you know like in an iceberg what’s above the surface is about 10% of the iceberg, and so the things we often identify as culture are also about 10% of what culture really is, and it so profoundly informs how we move in the world and yet, we often don’t pay attention to it and particularly white people struggle to pay attention to it because it feels invisible to them. And so Joanna and I met. We had a great conversation. She gave me a copy of her book Coming Back to Life and I gave her a copy of my book, Embracing Cultural Competency and she asked me to work with the first cohort of People of Color to help them incorporate the Deep Culture into the Work That Reconnects. So I met with them, she was meeting with them on the weekend and then I would meet with them on Wednesday evening, and that was a very beautiful way for me to learn about the Work. I also went to a weekend workshop during that time so I’d have a sense of what/how it was being presented. When it was time for the second cohort of People of Color to come together, Joanna asked me to facilitate that work with her, which I did, and then the third cohort, she and I coached two young People of Color to facilitate the whole project. So that was how I got introduced to the Work That Reconnects.

Aravinda: Great. Thank you. I came to the Work That Reconnects through research for a book that I was working on at the time, titled Living rEvolution, also my life’s work. And I was talking with a friend who recently had attended a workshop with Joanna Macy and thought that I would really enjoy the Work and Joanna happened to be coming to Massachusetts that fall and so I checked it out and I was very interested. I got a couple of her books and I ended up not only attending the workshop with her but bringing my husband and my mother with me to the workshop. We all kind of fell in love with the Work. All three of us were there for the weekend workshop and I had the privilege of being able to continue on for another five days with Joanna. After that, the next time that Joanna came back to Massachusetts, we skipped the weekend part of the program that she was offering, and my mom, my husband and I all went to the five-day program with her, and then I also had the opportunity to go up to Guelph, Canada when she was there and have five days with her. So, I just really loved the Work at first experience in a lot of ways and since I lived in Massachusetts and Joanna was in California, I then got connected up with a regional network in the northeast called the Interhelp Network that is over thirty years old, it has been in existence for a long time. It’s primarily about doing the Work That Reconnects together. It was involved in some of the early origins of the Work, and both my husband and I have been on the Interhelp Council for the last five or six years and we’ve also started doing a bunch of facilitation ourselves, including we’ve led three young adult immersions in the Work That Reconnects and we’re about to lead a fourth one coming up next month. So, that’s some of how I came to the Work That Reconnects.

Patricia: I forgot one piece which is that right when Joanna and I were co-facilitating, she was finishing up the new edition of Coming Back to Life and she asked me to write a chapter on the Work That Reconnects in relationship to communities of color and so I felt really honored to be able to contribute something to the book.

Aravinda: Excellent. So, the last structured question for this conversation is that the three of us have been invited by Molly Brown, the editor of the Deep Times journal to produce a special issue of the journal looking at race and culture and their influence on the Work That Reconnects, and so the next question is just why did we say yes to this invitation.

Aravinda: So, I mentioned these young adult cohorts, immersions in the Work That Reconnects that I have been involved with, and on the co-facilitation team starting in 2014, and they really shifted my experience with the Work. The first cohort that we led, it was a group of fifteen young folks age 18-30 there was only one participant of color in that group and she withdrew after the first meeting and it was really painful for a lot of folks in the cohort, some of whom were very good friends with her and so it brought up for us, what is it like to be in Work That Reconnects spaces if you are the only, or one of the only people of a marginalized identity. And so this actually started stirring up some of my own work on identity which I hadn’t really attended to for much of my life. I come from a mixed raced family: my mom’s family is black and my dad’s family is white… my skin is very fair so I have an enormous amount of skin privilege and I think I have operated quite easily in white-dominant spaces. Since this first cohort, my relationship and ways that I saw the Work were really shifting and I started to see things, notice things, that I hadn’t noticed before and so that kicked me off on a journey of exploration with rethinking the ways that I was approaching the Work and some things about the Work itself. The second young adult cohort that we led, we again had only one participant of color. She stayed through the cohort for the whole time and I feel was very generous in sharing some feedback and also everyone in the group provided our facilitation team with some really strong feedback and requests for anti-oppression awareness to be named at the start of a group’s time together. They had suggested that Chapter 12 in Coming Back to Life , the chapter that Patricia mentioned on learning with communities of color, that it should have been Chapter 1 in the book instead of Chapter 12. And so our facilitation team really took that to heart and we did a lot of I guess internal reorganization about how we were approaching the Work in terms of framing. And for the third cohort that we ran, we started experimenting… with shifting some of the framing. And the way that we have run the cohorts is that the first experience is part of a larger intergenerational group and so for that first meeting with the third cohort when we were trying to bring in some of this new material, we got a lot of pushback from primarily older folks in the group – older, all identified as white folks. So I got strong feedback in both directions – one that I couldn’t continue to facilitate this Work with integrity unless I attended to this feedback that I was receiving and also that I really needed to grow in my skill if I was going to be able to do it. So I had a lot of personal motivation on this topic. I had the pleasure of attending two facilitator gatherings – one in September 2016 and one in February 2017 – looking at some of these issues within the Work That Reconnects. And I’ve had a great desire to share learning with the wider community about it, but I’ve struggled… with how to talk about it and how to articulate it. So when Molly proposed working on this Journal with Ann Marie and Patricia I just felt so grateful and relieved and excited at this opportunity, so that’s some of why I said yes.

Ann Marie: I can go next. Thank you.

Aravinda: Fabulous. Thank you, Ann Marie.

Ann Marie: You’re welcome. I think that when Molly asked me to be an editor, I said yes immediately because there was so much that I knew needed to, I knew that the Work That Reconnects needed a lot of work around white supremacy. Just because white supremacy is so ubiquitous in everybody’s experience from the time we are born, you know, it determined where I was born because my mother had to go to a different hospital, because she was African American, than where she worked. I just know that my experience from a very early age has been different than from white America and I know that my perspective is much broader because I live in two worlds. You know, I live in the world as a descendent of a slave, and that’s very… and I see the remnants of that every day of my life, whereas white people, I believe, not because of anything they’ve done, but just because they’re born in this culture where the momentum is there already. The momentum of white supremacy is already there in this culture that we’re all born in. So I’m not… so that momentum just gets picked up by everybody born, no matter how well-intentioned and it’s internalized. It was internalized by my parents being the descendents of slaves and the descendents of stolen native people and the descendents of their oppressors’ rapists. I’m visibly black and mixed race due to those circumstances and each one of those situations has influenced my existence and when I went to the Work That Reconnects I do a lot of filtering like oh, that, when they did one thing in particular, the Gathering the Gifts of the Ancestors, you know I filter out that some of my people were… you know they were hunter gatherers for a long time and they didn’t go through the different phases that white culture calls normal, they have stayed hunter gatherers for a long time and worked with the land differently and settling and doing the kind of farming that Europeans did. And I also… it was also very difficult being in those two 10-days because of the way that white people doing this Work… the way that they handle racism sometimes is well-intentioned but very painful for People of Color and I thought this would be a chance to address that audience that is trying to deal with issues of white oppression and are doing it in ways that need, still need some work because they still need a lot of healing and also to just… I, yeah, maybe even to keep reiterating the point that race is everybody’s issue. It’s not an issue for People of Color, but it’s an issue for everybody. And white people are impacted by racism in really intimate ways as it forms their egos and it’s very damaging and it’s very deep and it can’t be just brushed aside and left behind because we’re not in a post-race culture and we won’t be until we make efforts to heal what white supremacy has done to everybody. So I said, “yes.”

Patricia: Thanks Ann Marie, and Aravinda. So when I was invited to be on the editorial team, I wanted, I was curious to see what it would be like to work with both of you and I was interested in exploring that. Also I’m, I’m so aware of how unconscious bias works and I’ve been working with it a lot in my own life and also with lots of different communities and groups and organizations and that’s been my experience with the Work That Reconnects is that a lot of people are operating from a place of unconscious bias and I thought Deep Time journal is a great venue to elevate some of those unconscious ways that we engage into a higher level of awareness so that people will be able to notice it more easily and readily and my hope is that that will impact our capacity to do the Work in a way that is more culturally based and I agree with Ann Marie that very often that notion of racism or race gets relegated to communities of color, like that’s a problem for them… for us. In reality it’s a problem that was established by the owning class of white men who started the United States, that some people call founding fathers. So it’s embedded in our history from the very beginnings, from the moment of contact between Westerners, and again primarily men, and indigenous people on this continent, in Africa, in Asia. Everywhere that settlers went, well first conquerors and colonizers, and then settlers, the same patterns of behavior and attitudes toward the people who were already there emerged. And it continues to be infused in so many of our interactions because it was normalized from the very beginnings of these interactions, and so I see it a lot in the Work and the people who are facilitating the Work and in the people who are participating. And it lands and impacts people in very significant ways and I think that the Work That Reconnects because it’s rooted in a systems approach is a perfect context in which to look at systemic forms of oppression, and so I think that, I am hoping that this issue will be a way for people to begin to explore that from a place of curiosity and I really hope that it doesn’t come from a place of shame, because nobody is served by that. And so, the way, I’m really interested in and excited about the way we are laying out the issue because I think People of Color would benefit from, or could benefit from a kind of support and guide for how to navigate the Work. And so your story Ann Marie is pretty common, I mean Aravinda your story of one or two People of Color in a group of twenty or twenty five seems to be what the formula is, certainly was in my weekend workshop. And last summer when we did a ten-day that Joanna asked a couple people to help co-facilitate, People of Color, there was a very intentional commitment on her part and Anne, Anne’s part to make the group more diverse, and so that changed the way the Work got done. I think, so I think that this is an opportunity to explore and to kind of spread the seeds of exploration of what it means and it builds on the two meetings that folks had to, to look at this question of decolonizing the Work That Reconnects and I deliberately did not want to call this issue “Decolonizing the Work”, because decolonizing has now become this high fashion terminology. Everyone’s trying to decolonize everything and we’re doing it generally with colonized minds, and so the decolonizing process – people don’t understand what the colonizing process is – and so it’s difficult then to try to decolonize anything if you don’t understand in the first place what the elements of colonization are, and so I think it’s become sort of a hip thing, particularly since Standing Rock and I am not interested in feeding that frenzy, and that’s why I want to look at… why I’m excited that we’re calling this the issue that really explores the impact of race and culture on the Work That Reconnects.

Ann Marie: I wanted to say something that struck me when Patricia was talking. If as we are doing this Work That Reconnects and as we are attempting to save ourselves from ourselves and save the planet from ourselves, if we don’t understand how we got here through, I believe, I am not a scholar, I’m a poet, but I see patriarchy and I see white supremacy on this… that’s behind the momentum of the planet dying the way it is, and if we can’t really just dig into how we, how so much of that is us… as a Person of Color that is assimilated into this culture, if I don’t look at the ways that I have internalized it, and if white people don’t see just how pervasive that mindset is, all we’re going to be doing is putting bandaids on a problem because this world that we created, I believe, is a physical manifestation, an out-picturing of our mindsets and beliefs and thinking, ways of thinking. All of us. Not just certain people who have a lot of money and power, but I believe that the Earth, that, that we are, if we are as we believe, you know, parts of the Earth running around on the surface, our thoughts have driven us to the point where we are melting the ice caps because of our belief system that just, in ways that we haven’t examined, that just goes out into the world and just decimates it until it looks like our thoughts is what I’m trying to say. What we’ve done is an out-picturing of our thoughts. And so we’ve got, we have to know ourselves.

Patricia: Yep, I would just add Ann Marie that I also think capitalism is the third stool. So it’s you know, misogyny, racism and oppression and capitalism.

Ann Marie: Yeah… Yes…

Aravinda: Yes. Yes to all of that.

Ann Marie: One of the things that is really difficult to talk about to white people for me is how they consider the cure for white supremacy as rejecting themselves as being white and taking on aspects of different cultures. I have seen that a lot in progressive communities – people, white people adopting culture from People of Color and it’s always been… I don’t know, it’s probably someone said it and it rang true with me, that the way to heal being part of the white supremist culture is to realize that you know before white people were relegated to the concept of whiteness, they were indigenous to somewhere and they had practices to heal them from trauma, they had culture to nourish them, and in this time they have cultures that they can reconnect with without appropriating from People of Color. And I have always been that with white people not wanting to hear that because they’ve invested a lot, maybe invested a lot of energy into whatever culture that they’re, what I call, appropriating. And I don’t even think that when this happens that it’s even healthy. One, because I think that when there’s just some kind of action and reaction to hurting people and… at this point in history it’s not the time for people of European descent to take anything else from People of Color. And it’s just a painful act for People of Color and whether White people want to believe that or not, it’s still a painful act. When I reached a certain age, when I started seeing patterns, it became painful for me to see White people appropriating from my culture and I think that just on an energetic level you cannot get any kind of good medicine from the culture that you are taking from when you are hurting the people. For that reason alone, I believe that people who do appropriate may think that they are getting medicine, but I think energetically it’s, it is a net loss. And there are other reasons too, but I think at this time I just wanted to put it out there that there is a lot of pain when I go to gatherings and somebody whips out a Djembe drum and I don’t, even if I… I will just be blunt and say that personally, I don’t get the same kind of healing from it that I do when I hear… just like when I play it myself, or when I’m in a circle with other people of African descent playing the djembe drum, I get medicine from it or I get healing from it. I remember once when I was just listening to these drums in the background at an event and I said to another Black woman, “Why is that, what’s wrong with those drums?” And I’m not trying to cruel or anything, but this is what I said, and I turned around and it was a person of color leading them, but it was White people playing the djembe, and I think that there might be some kind of… there is something standing between, like when you have this energy floating around of… of taking, there’s something standing between you and whatever it is in the culture that is supposed to heal, there is something standing between you and that healing. And that is why the drums were just irritating instead of healing when I heard it. And I say this a lot and it hasn’t landed on fertile ears from white people so far. I mean they haven’t taken it in at all. I mean, and I don’t know, some do, you know, but most of the people who are engaging in taking culture from other people, which is what I call it, and there’s probably some momentum behind why it’s so irritating and hurtful to me now that in 2017 that momentum is just, one of the things that needs to be healed.

Patricia: Yep. I would say that in my observation one of the reasons that when we appropriate other cultures we can’t get the medicine is because we’ve confused the yearning, which is really authentic. So, all of us in one way or another – some voluntarily and some by force – have lost touch with our indigeneity, which is when you say “everybody is indigenous to somewhere,” that’s, I agree with that, and that indigeneity is what gets lost when you are stripped of your land, when your children are taken away, all of the ways that we colonize people. But it’s also taken away when you voluntarily move on, when you reject your ancestry in order to assimilate. It’s a very… You know it’s not the same process because you are not being forced to do it, but it is a process of losing your sense of self. And so when people, as people are recognizing that they’ve lost that, and so often you know in my experience White people will say “well, I don’t have a culture” and that’s why they’re drawn to other cultures, and in my experience it’s indigenous culture, but I know that it happens in other cultures too… So when we can’t understand that there’s the yearning, which is real, and the ways that we attempt to address that yearning or fulfill that emptiness that we feel from being separated from our indigeneity, we try to fill it with what looks familiar or looks accessible and so that’s why you have people doing African drumming or trying to do ceremony – indigenous ceremony – who you know, people who are playing other people’s instruments but also doing other people’s ceremonies and practices. And I think that it’s important for White people to understand that they’re moving away, they’re moving against their own need. The need to find, to reconnect with their indigeneity is real; the attempts that they make at it are often not. So that’s why they can’t get the medicine, or that’s why they can’t… the hole that they are trying to fill doesn’t get filled by somebody else’s culture. And so I’m excited that Pheobe, that we’ve asked Pheobe Tickle to write an article for this edition because she’s wanting to address that in really practical ways and I think that that’s exciting and I think as White people begin to recognize that it’s not that their yearnings are something that’s wrong, it’s the path that they take to try to fulfill that yearning that does damage to communities of color and I agree that it also does damage to their souls.

Ann Marie: Yea. Thank you.

Aravinda: Yea, thank you.

Ann Marie: Another thing that I notice when I am, maybe not specifically in the Work That Reconnects, but when I’m just going through the world, I do this thing that’s not very healthy, but it seems like I am kind of an accountant for people, for what seems to be unfairness. Like, I look at everything that’s going on in my family and probably a lot of families with, just, like with my ancestors having been slaves. I had one of my great great grandmothers is, I don’t remember, I just remember her face. Her mother was stolen from her tribe when she was five. She was indigenous and I knew her daughter, and they took her and I saw a picture of her – she was dressed at the turn of the century like a White person. And she suffered. I mean, the suffering is so deep and great and I feel like that I carry those things around in me and I just carry that pain around in me. And I think of my great great grandmother – the daughter that I knew, and I look at my, her, one of her daughters – I didn’t know my grandmother, but I knew my grandmother’s sister and she looked White, so I know that in rural Arkansas, that she did not have an equal relationship with a man, she was raped in order for my aunt to look white and nobody could talk about it because they were my dad, and everybody in the family was so traumatized by living in that culture that they could not bring themselves to think about it because it’s so dangerous to get angry that you could get lynched. And so I look at how my family walks around and I look at what we commonly call white privilege, I may be even rethinking that term because maybe we’ve all been wrong and there’s no privilege, because I just act like the karma police when I’m saying… You know karma isn’t real, that my family suffered more and then white people run around with a lot of living on the best land, having opportunity, having freedom, and maybe it’s not apparent that… I’m not saying that… I don’t want people to suffer, but it seems like Black people don’t get away with anything. You know? Like when I was a child, I couldn’t be a child. You know I had to, you know I’m not allowed to, like I was taught in so many ways how to act when I’m in public, you know this fearfulness because we’re not allowed to like just be free children. You know we’re taught ways of going through the world cautiously and not have the freedom of just running and screaming and having a good time or we’ll be thought of as threatening, and yea. But maybe, I don’t know, I just walk around with the feeling that karma is lopsided, but, somebody tell me that I’m wrong. I don’t know. OK. But that runs through my mind a lot, when I’m just, as a citizen of America that doesn’t feel like a citizen very often.

Aravinda: That’s real, Ann Marie what you were just naming about a citizen who doesn’t feel like a citizen. I think that that’s real in Work That Reconnects spaces because the greater social systems that we are a part of show up in Work That Reconnects spaces. Work That Reconnects spaces don’t exist in isolation from all of the cultural conditioning that people have received over their lifetimes and so there’s a real inequality in that respect. I have a lot of appreciation for the way that I’ve heard Sarah Thompson talk about, she said “While we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together differently.” And so I think that that really comes to bear on the Work That Reconnects because there is a lot of emphasis in the Work That Reconnects in us all being on the same planet and a part of the same planet and all in this together in that way. And at the same time it’s true that because of systems of oppression and social conditioning, we experience things differently, dramatically differently. And so there are a number of pieces up for me, one of which is integrating a greater awareness in reality into the context in which the Work That Reconnects is being done. So I’ve, aside from a trip to Canada, which is still North America, I’ve only done the Work That Reconnects in the United States. Things may be very different in other countries, I’m curious about learning what it’s like in other places. But there is this history of colonization, brutal colonization and slavery in America, and that wasn’t the history that was taught to me in public school when I was in school and so there is just this wild myth, I think, in reality and worldview that doesn’t match up with how things have gone out, dominant worldview in play that doesn’t match up with how things have played out. And so, yeah, that is present in the Work That Reconnects. So one of the ways I would like to see the Work shift and evolve is with the framing and naming. The Work That Reconnects currently, the way it is framed, clearly names capitalism, and so bringing in those other two systems of oppression that were named earlier either as patriarchy or misogyny and white supremacy and racism – it would just make the Work that much more richer, for me, if it incorporated that aspect of reality. And then the second piece for me about how people experience the Work differently based on their social conditioning is not only of great interest to me but also care and concern. Given my care and empathy for people, I want to only grow in that, and so one of the things that I am exploring with my upcoming workshop and working with my facilitation team, we’ve been working on some community guidelines that we’re going to propose to help set up a transformative learning community, so that when things arise, dynamics arise, harmful oppressive dynamics arise in our interactions, as they are likely to do so because the social conditioning comes with us everywhere, how can we engage them and be with them and not ignore them, and so this is really new for me, but it, it speaks to, I’m not remembering which one of you said it earlier, but the piece about healing. When harm has happened, how can we move toward healing and repair, and so naming it feels like a good first step, but that’s not the only step, so I just have so much curiosity around the Work That Reconnects that has this foundation in a systems approach, moving toward greater integration with exploring how systems of oppression operate and how they show up in workshop spaces and how can we dismantle them when that social conditioning shows up. So, those are some of the things that I wanted to bring in.

Patricia: I think you’ve really framed it well, what the challenge is, and in my experience, the naming it often falls on the People of Color in the space which is very exhausting and so I think there’s an element of the Work that needs, and it, the fact that it’s rooted in a Buddhist worldview is helpful in that way, but I think that there needs to be more explicit, or it would be useful to have more explicit conversation about mindfulness. I think the Work That Reconnects can sometimes take you out of the space that you’re in and into the world, like the work has to be done in the world to other people or for other people or with other people, and the mindfulness in the space itself can be lacking. So, looking at what it means to be mindful or to pay attention to the dynamics that are happening in the room, and to create – I think the agreements is a really important way to – it can be a very useful way to get to some of this stuff. And I think having those agreements be really concrete – like, what’s the language we’re going to use when we notice that there’s oppression happening in this space. So that people not only know that they have permission to talk about it but that they get support creating the language that is then a shared language. So everyone agrees that when something happens, we’re able to say, whatever, you know: “Can we take a time out?” “Can we pay attention to this?” Whatever it is. Or “I’m noticing this…” Some concrete language that then gives people something to hold on to so that they can actually move forward and not feel paralyzed and because as Ann Marie said early on – People of Color are always the ones who are noticing, because that’s the legacy. When you think about power, people in power rarely recognize their power, but people who don’t have power in a particular dynamic, never forget it. They just can’t, because it’s so… they feel it at every level, and the same it true in group dynamics when you have a community gathered and something is going on, the people who are perpetrating, don’t notice it. So that’s a practice and a discipline that you, that we have to cultivate to be able to pay attention in a way that recognizes both the intent and the impact, so that, and by having shared language, I think it helps people feel like they have permission, and more than permission, they have an invitation, to actually pay attention in a different way so that they can address things as they come up. And it falls on the facilitators to not be so inflexible. You know, sometimes a facilitator comes in, “here’s our agenda – from 9-3 we’re going to do blah, blah, blah” and they break it down, and then something inserts itself, and they freak out. That’s my experience with Western colonized facilitators. Is that time becomes the prime focus and they lose all kinds of opportunities because their agenda is getting messed up. And so I think that that’s one really concrete thing that facilitators can do is look at how am I holding time and how am I holding the agenda so that what, and what is the objective, what kind of learning am I interested in seeing happen in this space. And if it’s collective learning, and if it’s restorative, and if it’s not extractive, and if it’s not colonizing, then they’ll be able to make more space for the things as they come up to be addressed, because I would say, even as we notice things, we often don’t create the space to address them, and so noticing them is not that helpful, if they don’t get addressed. It’s sometimes helpful for the people who are, you know in a dominant group, but it’s not that helpful for the whole group.

Aravinda: Thank you.

Anne Marie: Thank you. I am wondering how. I know that I have witnessed how painful it is for people to notice that they have been affected by racism and that even if you say well you were born in it and it has the momentum of 600 years, as soon as I bring up racism, people are triggered, I’m talking about White people, and there is so much pain that they experience, that I just want to get up and leave the room and let them process it among themselves and not be there, for, for me to like take care of them or whatever it happens and I don’t how, it depends on where people are psychologically, but I don’t know how somebody is going to notice that, that they’re in a position of power even, because it’s so painful, why would somebody be ready to go through that, I don’t know.

Patricia: Yea. Yep. That came up last summer at a ten-day that I was part of the facilitation team. Some, the young, Ann Marie you were there, the younger women of color came to me and said, “We’re having all kinds of things going on here that nobody seems to be paying attention to.” So we talked about it over lunch and then Joanna was incredibly gracious when we said we’d like some time in the agenda. So she said yes and so we started to tell what the experience was – that the women were having and what we noticed – that was so interesting – was that when they spoke in front of the whole group, they didn’t share the same things, that they weren’t comfortable sharing the same things that they had shared over lunch. And so they ended up softening the telling and moving right to the healing. So, they would say you know “this is the thing that happened,” and then, you know “this exercise helped me move through it.” And so after everybody had spoken, I noted that the conversation in front larger group was very different from the lunch group, and one White guy from the group said “I really appreciate that recognition… you know you telling us that.” And he asked, “what can we do when someone tells us something that has been painful for them?” So he was asking the very question that you are asking Ann Marie, and what came out of that was a recognition that white people, because white culture is so hyperindividual focused, when People of Color experience a dynamic in the room, often they’re able to see it as a collective experience. Sometimes they experience it just very personally. But often they experience it more collectively. So when they report out what’s going on, they might start with “this is what happened to me,” but they then sometimes can see it as an element of the group collective behavior, and so they… so my suggestion to this young man and to the whole group, was that when somebody says “you did this or you said that and it bothered me or it hurt, or you know it felt racist, or sexist or whatever, homophobic, or xenophobic, or ableist or ageist or whatever it is, that you hear it and then take it. Not just hear it, but really take it in. Then, in your mind recognize that it is part of a bigger system that you’re in, that you’re swimming in. Look at it through that lens of systemic oppression, so that you can have some distance from it, or a different lens on it is more accurate than distance, you can look at it through a collective and historical lens, so that it doesn’t bring you right to shame or defensiveness, it could bring you to curiosity or it could bring you to a kind of historical awareness, or whatever, it might generate a different response than personal shame. Or defensiveness. Because those two are paralyzing and they are useless for everybody in the room. And so once you are able to lift it up into a structural or systemic lens, then you can take it in again, personally and say, “so what’s my role? So I don’t have to take the whole weight of every, of conquest, and of slavery and misogyny and of all of that. I don’t have to put that all on myself. I can hold what I just did, in that context and then begin to address it, recognizing that it is not just me that’s an idiot. It’s me that has a colonized mind that has hurt somebody else who has also got generational trauma.” So it helps to give it enough spaciousness so that you can engage it, rather than be afraid of it. So I hope that that’s one of the things that the facilitators of the Work That Reconnects are able to really get trained up in is figuring out how to recognize when dynamics are in the room and then how to hold them in a way that you can move through them toward healing rather than get paralyzed by shame.

Aravinda: Yes. Thank you for that.

Ann Marie: Yes. Thank you. Yea, I don’t experience… You’re right Patricia – there are ways that I, that my mind has been colonized and experience, and I take a lot of things on, that are a result of systemic racism that has to do with this momentum of 600 years, but when I do that, I know I’m doing that. I know that, that I’m in this culture. I’m able to look at it instead of just staying in this hyperindividualistic mode. I don’t do that. I look at myself, because of what I have internalized, I can watch myself, and to take on things that have nothing to do with me as a human being but me as a part of the structure and I think that if I was really hyperindividual, I just don’t know. It would not be good, for me. And there must be some kind of freedom in not being hyperindividual and just realizing it’s part of a system.

Patricia: Absolutely. Yep. And I think because, because you’re African American, you’re bi-cultural. You have, you have both – the internalized oppression and the rootedness in your own cultural strength. And that’s how I feel about being indigenous. That I am, while I’m both the colonizer and the colonized in my own body, but I think it’s time for White people to let go of the anxiety that they feel about making a mistake. That the other part of Western culture that really is destructive to souls and spirits – it’s this idea, this fantasy of perfection – and so people get so afraid of mistakes that they don’t move. They don’t allow themselves to see what’s really going on because they live with this veil of – somebody called it “white polite” – and it’s pervasive. And I think the Work That Reconnects gives people an invitation to go deeper – to go deeper in their relationship with the world – and the world includes historically marginalized and currently marginalized communities. And there’s a difference between doing that on a philosophical level and doing it for real. So, my invitation to the Work That Reconnects is to stop trying to be perfect and work harder to be real. Because once we’re real with each other, these conversations can happen in a way that people can grow and actually create the kind of transformation that we’re all looking for.

Aravinda: Well that feels like an excellent note to potentially wrap things up.

Ann Marie: Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

Patricia: Great.

Aravinda: Super, well thank you so much, I really enjoyed this conversation, there is so much rich stuff here.

Ann Marie: Thank you both too.

Patricia: I enjoyed it too.

Welcome to this special issue of Deep Times journal

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Welcome to this special issue of Deep Times journal focused on the impact of race and culture on the Work That Reconnects.

In Sarah Thompson’s article on the “intersectionalization” of the Work, she clearly names how while we are all in this Great Turning together, we are in it differently. This issue speaks to some of the differences in experience. Throughout this journal you will find many references to the acronym POC. If you identify as a Person of Color living in a racialized society such as the United States, this acronym needs no definition – it has likely shaped your daily experience since birth. If this fits your experience, we hope this issue will be of benefit to you as you navigate the additional complexity of participating in a body of work that has historically been so Eurocentric and where the conditioning of society reappears in intrapersonal, interpersonal and group dynamics.

For the reader from nations outside of Turtle Island (North America), many of the reflections in this journal reflect the pain and turmoil of living in a racialized society rift with interlocking systems of oppression. While racism has some unique history on the North American continent, colorism and systems of oppression are manifest throughout the world with the manifestation of social systems of ranking, European imperialism, patriarchy, misogyny and capitalism.

In occupied United States – the political authority under which we three guest editors live – people of European descent – their economic interests, their experiences, and their feelings – have been centered for centuries. With this journal we three editors have made the conscious decision to shift that dynamic.

Rather than following the traditional spiral of the Work That Reconnects completely, this special issue is anchored in these four sections:

a first section in support of POC navigating this Work and the beautiful directions they/we are taking it with an interview of Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and pieces by A.M Davis, Patricia St. Onge, Wilson Riles, Ratasha Huff, and Jaq Nguyen Victor;
a second section delving into what do we mean by we? with an audio (and written) recording of a conversation between us three editors and a poem by Signature MiMi;
a third section with invitations particularly to white people to take greater responsibility with pieces by John Powell, Eric Peterson, Aries Jordan, and Zilong Wang;
and a final section about seeing the Work with ancient eyes and some suggestions for how to go forth with this Work in better relationship with contributions from adélàjà simon, Sarah Thompson, Erica Peng, and A.M. Davis.

For more context about the why of this issue, some readers may wish to start with the interview/conversation between us three guest editors.

There has been a long painful history of extracting labor from people with darker skin color without compensation. With this journal issue, please compensate authors as generously as you are able to. We have invited each contributor to put a Paypal or Venmo link at the bottom of their article so that you can gift them directly. As guest editor Ann Marie Davis elaborates about the gift economy:

I think that there are different interpretations of the gift economy and this is my take on it. The PayPal links are much like a begging bowl that Buddha carried when he offered his priceless teachings for free. I don’t liken myself to Buddha or my words to his, but I think that there is a priceless quality to storytelling in the year 2017.

I have heard the term white privilege used and I believe that white people have economic privilege on the whole, and I also believe that the economy was founded to insure the wealth of white corporations, and today that means billionaire corporations, and then white people in general, with former slaves and indigenous people left out of the benefits that the lands and the owning of bodies bestowed upon the remainder of the culture.

Consider your gift a gift of gratitude and a gift of positive feelings toward the people who have written for this issue. I consider my storytelling a gift to the earth, to change and transform the observations of us beings that came from earth as we heal from the patriarchy and white supremacy that has resulted in the crises of the political and biological environments, and the crises in our hearts and souls.

Thank you for reading and for giving in return for the many beautiful gifts and potent medicine shared by this special issue’s contributors.

If you are interested in using any of the material in this issue, please check with the author first.

May this special issue serve healing in this Work and of the entire world, between which there is no separation.

Guest editors Patricia St. Onge, Ann Marie Davis and Aravinda Ananda, August 2017

Deep Times editor Molly Brown invites folks to submit articles, poems and artwork for consideration for publication in the November issue via email to: deeptimes@workthatreconnects.org. The deadline for submissions is the end of September.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel in conversation with Ann Marie Davis

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Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Ph.D., is an author and ordained Zen Buddhist priest in the Suzuki Roshi lineage. She created the Black Angel Cards: 36 Oracle Cards and Messages (Kasai River Press), which are being used around the world as a tool to help access one’s true nature and to ease suffering especially for black women. She is the author of a popular Kindle free e-book/essay Be Love: An Exploration Of Our Deepest Desire. Her recent book, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender with a foreword by Buddhist scholar and novelist Charles Johnson, is available now at Wisdom Publications. For her complete biography and an extended list of her publications see Zenju.org

Ann Marie Davis, whose pen name is A.M. Davis, was born and raised in Oakland, California. She is storyteller/poet, a speaker on behalf of the Earth. In 2007, she walked away from her job to devote her life to her creativity. Upon attending a silent meditation retreat, she found space of time in her racing mind, and discovered that she was not her thoughts. This led to daily meditation, retreats, and becoming part of the East Bay Meditation Center community. She recently discovered Joanna Macy’s work, and the trajectory of her life finally made sense. You can find more of her work at annmariedavis.com.

Excerpts follow of a conversation between and Ann Marie Davis and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel on April 25th of this year in her home in East Oakland. You can also listen to an audio recording of the full conversation by clicking here or on the Soundcloud link below.

The Way of Tenderness

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

On your website, it says that you “apply spiritual teachings to our lived experience in the context of race, sexuality gender and hold these experiences as gateways to absolute freedom.”

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

There’s a long list of places in which individuals and people are marginalized in society. I feel that these things that we’re dealing with are the exact gateways to enlightenment, which is kind of funny because they leave that out completely on spiritual paths. But yet people are there, embodied in various ways and having experiences because of that. If we didn’t have those experiences then the path would just be pretty boring and dull and we wouldn’t be there. We wouldn’t even have any suffering to work on.

It has to be included. That is to me is the way of tenderness, because people usually push it off. And it becomes very abrupt. Like, “You can’t bring that here.” Or “Why are we talking about race?” Or any of these things that are of the world. But we are of the world. The Way of Tenderness to me is to bring this forward. I always say, why would we be given all of this to ignore as we go through life trying to be well and do better? I know there are lot of books on race, sexuality and gender from some great teachers. I don’t feel like I’m teaching that in this book.

“The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality and Gender.” The “through” part is the most important part of the title. Working through it, not around it. There’s a lot of teachers I learn from, Angela Davis, and bell hooks, and Alice Walker, Tony Morrison, all of these great teachers that came before me, we’ve learned a lot from them. June Jordon. There’re so many. And I am not speaking in the realms that they spoke in, although they do combine spirit in some of their work. I felt that I wanted to talk about it from the realm of dharma, our spirituality because they’re not taught there. They’re not considered dharma teachers, yet they are. The dharma is life. I thought to try to talk about it differently, as much as I could. I don’t know if I succeeded, but to talk about it in a different light, to try to push open what I felt was becoming a stuck dialogue, like for the last 20 years, two decades, the same conversation. People were learning words and sounding like they’ve been to diversity training or something. And people were working and it was annoying to me. Because I felt like now it’s a time as human beings we can go a bit deeper. Now that we’ve gotten the critical analysis down and to a certain extent, some may be just coming to it. That’s okay. But I feel as those who know it, we are the ones that have to go further to take this movement, and bring it, and integrate it into our lives. Not just my talking about it all the time.

Embodiment and Oneness

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

So do you think that the American approach to this teaching without race is American or do you think it just got filtered through the American culture? I feel like they’re not talking to me. I feel kind of left out.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yes. It’s generalized. I actually feel many of the pioneer teachers are actually taking the teachings from where they got it, India, China and Japan, and while there are many differences, especially in India where there is the caste system, the other places were a bit more homogeneous. And so oneness was easy to talk about. We’re all Japanese, we’re all Chinese. But here, when you get to this country, you’ll have something else. You’ll have a different landscape. The teachers who came before, which were mostly white men, they were original pioneers, shaped the teachings to their like.

They really like it kind of amorphous not fixed, not colored, not raced, genderized or sexualized. They just decided, this is not part of the teachings. And so as I studied I realized, like you said, you do not feel like you’re there when they’re talking about “we’re all one.” Not when you go to the store. Or when the police stops you or whatever. Or they say only men can do this and women can’t. These are the kinds of things that have to be spoken to in this country because that’s who we are.

I do think the oneness without the balanced-ness of life is true. It’s there, but there also is the relative experience of life. They both are together. They’re both one. They’re married together. But people really like the absolute world of balanced-ness. We love to talk about oneness, and peace, and harmony and all of these things. And they think the minute you bring your life in, the relative truth is felt to be like, “Oh no, you just took away the balanced-ness.” But that’s impossible because it’s all together. It’s all one.

We have nothing to do with peace and oneness. It’s just there. There is a oneness that already exists before any of us opened our mouths or opened our eyes to this world. We don’t take that away. Our work is to work through the relative truth of our lives, to understand the nature of life through these bodies that we have. Then through that you meet the balanced-ness. You meet peace. You meet silence. True silence. Not just quietness. True silence. And true stillness and peace.

That’s just based on my experience of walking the path and studying myself, which is important in learning how to be a practitioner of Buddhist teachings. I feel it’s a miss when people want to just be in absolute world and everything else. You remain silent, and if you speak then you must not be enlightened. I am totally the opposite. If you speak, you are probably more enlightened to me than those who don’t. Those who don’t are still grappling with how to integrate the balanced-ness into their everyday life.

How do you do that if you’re not speaking to your embodiment, even if you are a white male, wealthy, homosexual? You should look at that. Study it. It’s important. It’s not just for us to study. Those who aren’t in the dominant culture. Everyone must study. Why dominant? Why non-dominant? Why superior? Why inferior? What really is that? And that is what’s worth studying when we’re on any path.

It’s kind of like looking on a garden. Now, why is that plant? What would make that plant survive and thrive and what would make this plant? What’s happening with this plant? Why isn’t it surviving when there’s all this beautiful soil that the earth has provided? Then you have to go and work with it. You work with that plant to help that one survive. You may have to move it around and all these kinds of things. That’s why we have maybe people of color groups, or women’s groups, or groups in which the soil could be generated toward the life of that particular embodiment.

Anger

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

So what advice would you have for activists of color? We’re trying to stay grounded while we do the works that ground us into some kind of spirituality. And then we have to be immersed in painful times. You talk about tenderness being underneath anger and I’ve had a hard time getting away from anger because it’s easier.

Even when I’m angry, it’s still excruciating to just watch everything. And I think it’s more immediate for people of color. I think it’s always been and it’s not new. And I read that you worked through that. Tell us why it’s important?

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Well, I haven’t worked through it. I work with it still. And how to work through it differently. And it used to take me out. Anger had me. It still can get a grip. It’s very… I had a wonderful thing called hypertension that helped me realized that how much of that restriction was going on in my body. And I didn’t want to take the medications, because the medications lead to everything else. Then you’re going to have liver, kidney… it just keeps going. I didn’t want to live that way and I knew… I feel people of color had rage, which is an accumulation of anger. Sometimes when people are talking about anger in the Buddhist realm, it’s like it’s not just a little bit of something happened yesterday and it pissed me off. It’s more of, like you said, it’s generational. I believe it’s embodied too. It’s imprinted in us as well. What I came to study was that… and say a lot… I just did a talk on anger with Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And what I said in there too was that anger is a fire, right. It’s fire. And we are in the time of fire right now and great fire. I think it’s not a mistake that we’re here and this is happening. I think this coming, this time, it could have happen 10 years ago or 20 years ago. But I think this time it’s different because we have a different understanding of what we need to do, and better skills on how to do it. And a better capacity on how to do it. Even though it’s hard, I do feel we have a better capacity to deal with what’s happening now. I don’t advocate getting rid of anger. I advocate finding when to use it and when to diffuse it. When to use it and when to diffuse it. Because it’s going to be there as a human being. Every human being has anger. And so we have to find when is the use of it going to lead to your end result, what you want, or when the use of it is going to hurt you. When it’s destructive, it’s a fire and it is just going to take you out. Then maybe it will. Maybe we will burn to the ground in it. And in that, in ash, just like a volcano. Volcanoes create new earth. In there is new earth, so maybe we’re not going to be able to maintain even what we believe. Or maintain all the justice systems we put in place. So maybe all of it is breaking down; the justice systems, the injustice systems. All of it together is burning down and something new is coming in. We just don’t know what it is. We’re so used to our justice systems. They’re used to their injustice system.

And so what’s going to happen now? So, I don’t advocate that as activists, whatever our activism is – it could be in any realm – that when anger comes up, you shouldn’t be angry. I disagree with that. I think you are angry and then now what? How are you going to use it? How are we going to hold hands in it to do the work and not create it? Because we’re starting to do it between each other. I’m noticing, even in the activist world different factions are starting, because it’s all over. It’s a fire everywhere. We’re not exclusive of that. We’re not going to be excused from the burning. I feel it’s important for us to find, “Well, maybe this is a time to diffuse and this is a time to use.” Like I said, if you know it’s going to get to your end result and not without destroying people, or harming people, or hurting people. But to be clear.

So, how does one use anger when you’re overwhelmed with it? If you’re the kind of person that gets where anger takes you out, then you can’t use that anger. If you have an anger that you feel you can use, you see something… I mean I write through that. That’s what that book is. There’s a lot of fire in that book. It’s just written with the water, but it came from the fire. What is the anger showing me? Because fire is illuminating, right? It’s illuminating. You can see. Or you may not see because you’re so overwhelmed with it. It’s the most overwhelming emotion that we have, is anger. The anger, if we can see through it, then that’s the anger we can be effective with, if we can. If we’re overwhelmed, then our work is to work out how to diffuse the overwhelmness and there’s a lot of ways to do it. Our way is meditation. And my Zen lineage is Zazen in meditation to help to not get rid of it, but to be able to help us see through it even though we’re overwhelmed. We’re overwhelmed. We use the breath and we use various other chanting, other rituals, ceremonies. It’s everything, not just breath. It’s all studying the teachings. All of these things, to help see through the anger, rather than just being overwhelmed. There is a way of transforming that overwhelm into something, an anger that you can use. Beginning to look at your story of yourself and where is it coming from. Is your anger… not only is tenderness beneath anger, but there is grief, and sadness and shame, feelings of inadequacy. Right now we feel like we lost. And there really is no winning and losing. We haven’t lost. We haven’t lost anything. We have to know that. There’s no winning or losing. Let’s not play their game.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Explain how there’s no loss.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

On a relative level, yes. We’re losing healthcare, education. That’s the absolute voice saying there is no loss. There is no winning and losing. What is happening is things are changing. We need to pay attention to what is changing and what needs to change. I tell my students, just please stop eating the poison. I’m telling myself that, because if we’re not going to have health and we didn’t have it before, then we have got to, better get your garden together, and you better start sharing, and you better do your best, because this is not going to happen for you.

Maybe we don’t want it to (happen). How many pills do you need? Maybe we don’t want that system. Maybe a new system will come through of a health system that’s more like what we want. More holistic. More dealing with our mental wellbeing, because the mental wellbeing is connected to the physical wellbeing, altogether. So, when someone says you’re thinking a certain way, “Oh well, okay. You’re feeling this way, so let’s deal with your kidney, but also let’s deal with your emotional wellbeing at the same time.” Try to bring it together.

Maybe we’re looking for something. We know we want that, we want that. Every four years it’s going to put it in, next four years take it out. Next four years put it in, next four years take. Are we going to go through that? I don’t know. I don’t care if you’re a person of color or not. It doesn’t matter. Just if you’re a living being. We all cannot live that way.

When (anger) comes up, really know where you’re at. I was listening to… I guess it was a scientist. I don’t remember names. That anger comes up in the frontal lobe of the brain and that’s the same place that happiness comes up in. Anger feels really good. It feels really good. And that’s why it’s very hard to let go of, very hard to work with because you’re feeling really good at being angry. And it helps you from feeling hopeless and helpless. It’s to understand that. To understand you’re in that realm. But to really see if in fact this anger is going to lead to something effective for everybody. That takes a little bit of time. It doesn’t mean that you’re not (angry). I don’t think we could ever not be. I think that’s just being human.

The reason why it’s so big and overwhelming is because anger’s up here [points to her forehead]. All other emotions are other places. Anger is quite the juice that we were given as people, animals, everybody. All the animals have it too. They’re just like us and they have to decide, “You know, am I going to go after that there? Is it worth it? Yes, my cubs.” Or whatever, whatever they’re doing out there, they decide when, where, how, what. They don’t just have haphazard killing. We’re like really interesting species here. I feel we’re going to be learning. I’m glad to be alive right now, even with how horrible it is.

But I don’t allow my mind to be fed with all the stories. Even when a legislation is taken, and this is taken and that is taken I’m not focusing there, because I can’t. You know why? If I’m focused there I can’t sit here and talk to you. We cannot have a conversation. I cannot use my energy to bring wellness, and to bring transformation and to bring peace. I need my energy and I’m not going to be sucked up there. I don’t care what he is doing or it or what is doing. I don’t care about his hair. I’m not interested. I don’t care about his wife. I’m trying to get prepared for whatever we need to be prepared for. I’m not going to be distracted by that. Because whatever’s going to happen, we better be right here with each other. Right here. Right here with each other, otherwise we’re not going to make it. That’s how he won it, because everybody’s so focused on the tweets. His name was evoked, invoked, invoked, invoked and I said, “Oh my God, this guy is going to win.” Just because we keep saying it. Whether we’re saying good or bad things, that doesn’t matter. That is the way of a psychic mind. It goes with what’s invoked. He is better than any commercial ever, because he just keeping saying the name over and over and over. People started getting it, but he was in already. The voices that he represents, we’re not sure who they are really. They’re not sure themselves. Because they never probably said, “Oh my God, we have our own president.” Whatever. These voices were unacknowledged and unheard.

They were unacknowledged and when it happened they go, “Oh. We forgot they were over there,” or we just didn’t think…” And then they just use the same tools we use, Facebook and Twitter, and there you are. They making sure they do something every week. They’re making sure, just to keep us–

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Even if it’s a distraction from the biggest bomb ever.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Right. Obama did the same thing. As soon as he got in. Afghanistan. Because that’s how we live. That’s how we survive. This country survives on the selling of bombs and missiles and we sell them to countries so that they could fight with us on an equal plane. They used the bombs we bought. You know they’re not building missiles in Afghanistan. They buy them from us. We’re the suppliers, all over the world. Then we said “now we can have a war because now we have even weapons.” Our industry is war. It’s very lucrative. They may just bring in a particular kind of machine gun into Africa, into the Congo. Little by little. Here’s some money and then right behind the money are the guns.

Peace

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I just don’t know what to make of the human species, because everything we do just feels so crazy. Like self-annihilation. Just running on crazy. Maybe you could speak to it. I have to be the peace and I’m not the peace.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

You are. You are the peace. You are the peace. Don’t ever say that. You are the peace. Just because you might not feel what you… because we think peace has to be a certain thing. It’s not. It is what it is for you. And it is what it is what you see. You’re doing the work and it is very discombobulating so it might not feel peaceful, which is another thing than peace. But you are peace.

To be peace sometimes is to do this work. These fires that lead people like Angela Davis and Martin Luther King to do. And say. It’s these fires. And can’t we say they’re peace too? Malcolm X and all these people who took their fires, saw something and decided, “I’m going to do this even though it’s crazy and it feels crazy.” I think the craziness is just part of being human, part of life. Life is not very neat. We would like it to be. So when we’re really feeling like “Oh my God, it’s just…” that is your time to just pause.

When do you rest? You have to rest. You have to rest everything. And like a soldier, they have to go. Warriors, they go away, go fly, they come back to the hut. This is old now, ancient times. Get up rejuvenated and out. You go again. This is from the beginning of time. This, what we’re dealing with is just different. But it’s from the beginning of time. And where it’s going lead, we don’t know.

I think eventually the earth does its own thing. The earth dumps us off. “Shhhhhh.” The earth takes care of itself. That’s what it is. It takes care. It says, “Okay, no more water. No more good air.” Then only the things that can go underground… It’s only those animals. That life survives.

Then something else comes from that. This is not new. This is the way. Historical ecology is really amazing, and we’re a part of that, and we’re in the middle. Where we’re going, we don’t know. We talk about change. Well, the climate’s been changing from the day we were born and before that, and so now it’s going towards something else. The earth is going to do what it’s going to do. And we can help do some things for our part, or just to stop the destroying. But are we doing that for our benefit or for the earth only?

Are we really trying to just survive?

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

She’s better off without us.

The Practice

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

She might be. Well, I’ve been practicing for 30 years. It’s my life. Sometimes when people say, “What’s your practice?” I say, “Well, I don’t have one.” I feel like that. I don’t have a practice. I have a life that is filled with the things I learned during my practice. It’s quite natural for me to I feel mostly in a meditative state from the time I wake up to the time I go sleep. Even if things are happening and they’re really awful, because awful things can happen during the day. The microaggressions for being who I am, what I look like and how I move.

I used to be very hurt by some actions. I would go into my job sometimes just in tears from being harassed, for being queer, not having hair and all kinds of things. It doesn’t matter what color, what race. It’s just like, “Okay.” So that’s why I don’t lean toward, oh, all black people. But, then they kind of have a problem with queerness. You lead toward queerness and you have problem with whiteness. There’s just no place. I had to find my life and be able to live it fully.

The sitting practice of meditation which I did very intensely… That’s because that’s my nature. I don’t think mediation’s for everybody. I can see sometimes students. I don’t think that’s their practice. Maybe they should drum, be a drummer, which I was. I learned drumming and it had the same meditation in it. You have to find something that brings you into concentration and stillness. It doesn’t have to not make noise.

So you could be a drummer. You could paint. You could dance. Sing. And if it brings that to you. If you’re just singing, and you’re a performer, and you’re always thinking about your song, then that’s probably not your stillness practice. You have to have something in your life that makes you still. I think I have it quite naturally after all these years of practicing.

After sitting so long and chanting, and doing rituals, and ceremonies and other practices, that those things have helped me to make stillness very much an under occurrence, like it’s in my blood now. It’s like the medicine so deep I can’t hardly be anything else, which sometimes could be problematic. Because when you’re supposed to be a little bit less still it’s hard for me to move out of that. I have to say like, “Okay, this is not the time for that. You need to make a move here. Really take a stance. You’re getting a little too comfortable in that stillness.”

Love

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

How do I take a step toward loving people? I think it’s kind of a goal to move from just hatred to love and I feel like I’m kind of stuck with people who can’t see my humanity. And I don’t want to be robbed of my humanity further by hating them. I have no idea, so maybe you can help.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah. Do you hate you?

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I am still recovering from my childhood where I was taught to hate myself because of internalized racism. So, that’s where I am. That’s the answer.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yes, because that’s where the hate is. And it’s so hard to work for that love out there, and waiting for that love to be returned. You’re just constantly opening your heart and constantly wanting to be received as who you are. It would be so sad and I still can feel the sadness of those times when I wasn’t acceptable.

I’m not acceptable in this world as who I am. To the way they present it. Individuals may, accept me, but not generally.

I go places sometimes and it got to the point I wouldn’t even go to the store almost, because I got so tired. I’ve been actually attacked. Right here in Berkeley by some students. I don’t know. I think I’m like a target. Like a walking target somehow. Maybe because I’m short or something like they can just jump on this one. “Look at her. She’s a dyke,” or whatever, but they don’t even know. Maybe I’m not. I’m like “is there a sign on my back?” I think I’ve had people run from me. Just run to the other side of the street.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I’ve had people walk across the street when they see me. Or just stop still. Grown assed men.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Right. And stare. Yeah. That is a horrible feeling. And so I think the only way I could work with it and stay alive, because my goal is to stay alive, but to live fully. Not just be alive. I don’t want to just like, “Okay, I’m alive.” I want to enjoy life just as much as I see everybody else walking around.

What I did is begin to see what parts of myself I really hated. I don’t like the way I look. How did I get there? I don’t like the way I look. And I had to work really hard at seeing that I was really beautiful. It’s like, “Oh my God, I’m beautiful.”

I remember the moment. I said, “Wow. I should have known this all my life. Oh my God, I’m so beautiful. I’m so African. Oh my God, look at my nose.” My body, I thought I was fat and I said, “Oh wait a minute, this is the African body, so anybody that has a butt is fat.” But I’m going to have a butt. I’m African. That doesn’t mean you’re fat. It’s just a different shape.

I actually learned this at Zen Center, because I was there. “You have to go in and live in the center.” How many black people do you think were there?

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

You. Just guessing.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Okay, so yeah, and one or two others. And I wanted to run out the door so many times and something said, “Stay, stay, stay because this what you’re dealing with now is what you’re dealing with in the world, and if you could get this here in this container where at least there’s the dharma. You could say, “excuse me.” Because the teachings are there. You will see something of yourself. That’s what I did. I began to see this beautiful gorgeous black woman and not superficially. Because we had a lot of black pride, and all that, and the name changes and all that. But deep down, a lot of us didn’t move.

I could see the ignorance of even my own self. I started calling it “internalized treason” as opposed to “internalized hatred.” I could still know that even in all of the oppression there was still love. Like in the moment, like “Oh my God, I’m the only black thing here, queer thing, black queer, oh this is too much.” Then I turn away from myself and accept what they’re saying I am, which is this strange creature that shouldn’t be here.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

So you have some kind of awareness that you’re doing it and that removes it?

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah, the pain. Pain is the awareness. As soon as you hurt, as soon as you start suffering, because that’s what the practice is about. A lot of people, they think of practice is to become calm. The practice is when you’re in pain. If you’re not willing to look at it, I always tell people, go to the beach and have fun. Have a cook out. If you’re not really wanting to do all of that, you don’t have to. It’s not required. But for me it was required. Because I wanted to live fully and liberated.

That pain and that tenderness, that’s why I said that’s the way of tenderness, the way of tenderness is to go through this tender place. And there’s different levels of it. There’s a paralyzing tenderness. Then it kind of moves to more subtle quiet grief-like (tenderness). Then there’s the liberated one in which you’re still tender, but you’re just like [she claps] on. You’re there and so that’s how you’re present. And so that’s the indicator. As soon as that comes up, like oh, somebody walked across the street, you have to let that be them. You have to let that be their fear. When the pain for you comes up, you comes, you can, next time the next person comes, walk stronger and faster and make them run faster across the street. You know? Just like, “Woo, move.”

Sometimes I use it. I’m like, “Oh good. I’ll get up and sit here and I know no one’s going to sit with me.” No one sits with me on the bus. No one. They will not in public places? No. No one sits next to me.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Black people don’t?

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Black people, they’re very, I would say oriented. Like, queer people they’re not going to sit. They don’t know what I am. Now, they don’t know if I’m transgender. And I’m not. Because everything now is, there’s suddenly no… lesbians or queer people, because they’re so busy trying to be welcoming to the new movement. And I can understand it. I don’t care if they confuse me with that. I haven’t had a problem with being confused with gender fluidity. I don’t have a problem with it.

Suffering

But it’s interesting that people are still… no matter what happens in the country I’m still the pariah. It’s just the way I’ve lived all my life.

All my life and I’ve learned, and through the practice, I had to have a practice to survive. Otherwise I think I would have committed suicide. And I’m really sure about that, because I thought about it a lot and I didn’t do it.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Thank you for not doing it. You know, there is New Age notion that you bring whatever you embody, like you just bring more of that into the world. I had this idea that, like when I see a lot of suffering, sometimes I get so affected that it knocks me down. I’ll see suffering, then all of a sudden I’m there with somebody, and it just feels so painful sometimes.

And I kind of react by thinking, “how am I going to ever be joyful and peaceful because now the world is in such a state?” There’s just suffering everywhere, and I’m trying to hold it. And then I judge it, because I’m holding all this suffering and I’m like, “Wow, now I’m suffering.”

And the world is messed up and I’m just grappling and wrestling with all this.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah. I know the feeling. And I remember when suffering changed for me and how I view it. I’m a very sensitive. It sounds like you’re a sensitive person and most of us are if we’re awake. We’re sensitive and so when we see tragedy and war, it’s like what’s going on over the country, the Syrians, everything, everywhere.

I think there is a way in which that our being connected and feeling is important, that we actually have an intimacy with the suffering that we see and feel. That’s what’s happening. So now, do we allow this to be just a place of intimacy so that we can continue doing what we do? Or is it a place in which you now become so overwhelmed by it that you’re not going to be effective in the work around what the suffering is?

What we can practice to be happier, peaceful or joyful is to let that go. That will steer you into a manufactured joy and peace and happiness. What we’re looking for is a kind (of joy and peace and happiness) that can exist alongside the suffering. What I found out around suffering, is that I kept looking. At one point I could say, “I suffer the suffering to suffer the suffering and I stop suffering the suffering.” Which meant suffering was no longer a center. It existed, but it wasn’t center stage.

Center stage was what I do in my life, and how I do it, and how I impact people and how people impact me. Looking like that. And then knowing suffering has visitations and I can look at it. One thing we get tired of is, “Oh, there’s so much of it,” but then I became more excited about suffering because I could see something in it that I could use. Like I said, the book, a lot of that is my suffering, too. As you see, there’re some stories in there.

You can bring your creativity through, your activism through as long as it’s not coming from the place of injury. Now, if I had written that book from how injured I was in those experiences, it would have been a different book. It would have way different feeling.

Not that it (would have been) a better or a worse book, but it would have had a different feeling. I didn’t write that book from that place, from that place of how wounding it feels when someone runs across the street when they see me and really all I want to do is say hello. It’s not from that place. I’ll be suffering, but at the same time it doesn’t take over my entire moment, my entire life.

That takes practice. It takes a lot. It doesn’t happen instantly. When I say practice, it’s practice looking at yourself, and holding yourself and understanding the nature of life and the ignorance of people today and before, because we don’t feel interrelated, we don’t feel like we’re in relation. And I don’t feel in relation. I’m kind of glad some of the people who walk across the street, because I don’t want to talk to them. Then I have to say, “Oh, you’re the same way. Oh, there is a way in which you…”

Not that I am in control, though. I can’t make power, because of certain people who can just… “If I ignore you, you’re dead.” Like what we have now in this country. These (people) ignore whole populations… we’re going to struggle, like what’s happening now.

You still have to understand it. You still have to understand interrelationship, and the ignorance, and to not buy into it and to create more pain. When suffering arises, when the fire arises, think of it as a volcano in the new earth that will be made. You just can’t see it, you can’t feel it and you may not be able to design it or shape it. Sometimes we just pick up the fire too quick. We’re like, “Ah…” and just burn. Let it do its thing. Let it become the new earth.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Just sounds like you just have to have faith and patience, and just keep centered.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

And take time out. I feel like a lot of us don’t take the time out. I’m talking to myself too, in terms of just stopping, resting and listening. Just take time out from it all, because maybe you’re addicted to it. Find out if you’re addicted to all of that chaos. But you’ve got to stop. If you’re addicted to it, even your work in it, then is from the addiction. Or you’re constantly hurt. Then your work is from the work.

You got to want to come clean. You want to come clear. You want to come full. You want to come well. You want to be ready and concentrated as much as possible to do the work. When we’re not… I love this thing Thich Nhat Hanh said, because we’re all trying to be compassionate, especially activists. We’re trying to be compassionate and do compassionate action and he said, “If you want to be compassion, you got to have energy.” I was like “What?”

He said, “You have to have energy to be compassionate. If you’re tired you’re not going to have any.” That’s true. You don’t have a minute. You don’t have time for anything or anyone and you just become more and more angry, more irritated, and frustrated and so you have to stop and build energy. Take time to just be in the world and see it all happening. Watch it all happening. You don’t always have to be in the middle of it. It’s hard not to be if you’re kind of addicted to it like you’re if on Facebook, something happens and then you’ve got to chime in.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

Or you’ve got to run to the airport just as I did. Yeah, I did. I ran to the airport when I heard, “He’s detaining people!” and I was on BART and I was down there holding a sign. I think it’s really important what you said. I know it while I’m on BART that it’s important for me, even though I don’t see it, for me to just be centered in the world and not to be sucked in.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

And allow other people to come in, not just always you. Something simple like chanting. When you’re chanting with people, everybody’s chanting, some people take a breath and somebody else’s chant comes in there. And somebody else is going and their breaths just go different as you listen and chant. Singing’s like that.

And there is these moments when you’re not singing and someone else sings that note and sings that song, that word while you’re breathing. Then you come back in. And then they get to breathe.

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I love that. I think that’s key.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah. We can’t just go “Ph….”[outbreath] You die. You die. You die. We’re not built that way. We’re not. We’re not built that way. I mean we can run it that way. It’s kind of like running a car. It can run, and run, and run, and run. It can go a hundred and twenty miles. We don’t drive it that way every day. It’s like looking at where the spaces are, taking the space and taking the breath and the movement. Yeah. There are ways, all kinds of metaphors that are right there in front of us.

Fear and Letting Go

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I look at things. I have to figure things out. Like, “I’m going to stay safe if I could just figure out everybody, if I could figure out everything and if I could just solve every puzzle.”

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah, get it. I think that’s a way of dealing with fear. Fear is under anger a lot, one of those emotions that drives anger and so I always tell myself and others, too. Like when I get to that place of great fear and it’s very intense, I just like, “Okay, just stay there. Just be afraid and see what’s going to happen.” I mean it could be a little thing for me.

That’s how much fear I have. Like if someone’s making a reservation for me, like someone just did. We’re going on a trip and I usually make the reservations because of my fear and my obsessiveness in what has to be there. And so I just took a breath and allowed the fear to exist and yes they did make a mistake on the reservation. I could see myself getting more intense about it. And then I shot off an email. Like, “This is what I’m going to do if this doesn’t work out…” Then they had already changed it, the mistake. It was already done.

If I had just waited a little longer. I think it’s that we’re traumatized with all of the things that have happened, so we try to manage our lives so that none of that happens again. Guess what? All the managing is still happening, right? It’s better to kind of just let go when you can and just have the fear and be fearful and see how big it is getting. Like, “If I don’t do that, this.” And then see.

Then suddenly maybe this happens. And then see, “Why is this happening?” There’re so many experiences I have with this daily because that’s how I am. I have someone make a soup. I’m a really good soup maker and I say, you make the soup. And it just wasn’t the soup I wanted. When I saw it I knew. I had a fear she wasn’t going to make the soup the way I wanted it. Then I had to look at that. Because then what you do is you start managing people and they don’t enjoy that. Or managing projects and everything gets tight.

When the soup came, it actually was the perfect soup. What I wanted was more creamy and I didn’t need a creamy soup. I needed exactly what she made, exactly what she made that day with broth and lentils. I said, “Wow.” I didn’t need what I wanted. I didn’t get it. This one I let go. I let the fear ride. I let it ride and it came to (that) I was getting what I needed.

That hyper vigilance leads to hypertension and hypertension leads to death. It leads to stroke. We’re all traumatized and people who have strokes are traumatized and the trauma is not dealt with. So I just try to help myself with practice, as much as I can in the breath and noticing when I’m doing what I don’t want to do or when it’s something that I shouldn’t do that’s going to put me in that much danger. Then I need to not do it. I think we have to (ask) what is dangerous and what isn’t. Is it really danger there or is it perceived?

You’re really trying to get clear of what’s perceived and what is really there, what is really there. We learn this in relationships, too. With friends and intimate relationships. We learn, especially traumatized people, it’s okay now. What are they going to do? Okay, wait a minute.

So there’s a real need to understand. One, you are traumatized and it’s generational for many of us. So then understanding that and knowing that what you’re perceiving may not be exactly what it is.

Suzuki Roshi has a great line and I use it sometimes when I really get crazy. That is, he always said, “It’s not always so.” And it’s really hard to hold it when you go, “Yes it is, yes it is, yes it is.” When you’re really like that, like “Yes it is,” just throw in there, “Not necessarily. Not always so.” And to see if there’s just a little bit of something there to just unlock and release you from that, that “Yes it is, yes it is.”

Just to say it may not be. Just be very gentle. Be gentle with yourself. Be gentle and say, “Mm… I’m so intent on this. Maybe it’s not so.” Then you may have me go, “I knew it was,” but that’s okay too.”

Then you go, “Now what?” Mostly it’s not always so. Mostly what’s in our mind probably about ninety-nine percent of what we think about other people, and other things, and other places is not true. Mostly it’s not true. Mostly it’s not.

Like when the people walk across the street from you, it’s not true. See? It’s in your minds. It’s a perception in their mind.

They didn’t get you, you just probably (want to) say, “Hello,” but their perception is running wild. Their psyche is like…

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

“…She’s mean!”

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah. Because of TV and movies. You get accused of things that it’s amazing sometimes when I’m still considered a thug at my age.

I was like, “Okay. Well, maybe my brothers and sisters they are thugs. So they’re not bad people.” They’re not bad people, what they call thugs.

They’re not, but they treat you like that. Like it’s a bad thing. And so it doesn’t matter if I have a PhD or I’m an ex-convict. I am an ex-convict in the world. I’m not a PhD person. I’m not a priest. I’m an ex-convict. They don’t see nothing but that. And I rap. They think I’m the age of rappers. I mean people treat me like that. I can tell. They don’t see. They can’t see or they don’t know the difference.

Even right in some of my own community. I’ve gone to Buddhist retreats, conferences. There was this woman. Tibetans wear red robes. Zen, we wear black. I had black on. I did a talk. The woman in red got all of the accolades and praise and they told her how good her talk was. So, they can’t even see (and this is in the Buddhist community) the difference. They couldn’t see the difference between me and her because of the dark skin. So, it’s a perception. What we see.

And then, what do we see? We have to be doing it too. It’s not one way. It’s not just a particular race or a particular sexuality, a particular gender. Everyone does this. And then when we speak of oppression, that notion of misperception leads to someone’s death. Or in excess, that perception becomes part of the system of oppression. That’s what we’re working on as activists. That part. That’s the danger. We all do it. But when it becomes part of whether someone gets fed or gets to leave the airport, because they’re a Muslim, then that’s the part where that perception becomes dangerous. And that’s what we’re working against and for. Peace of all people, freedom for everyone.

Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

ANN MARIE DAVIS:

I still have a lot of triggers. If I go to a Work That Reconnects (event) or something. And there is just all this cultural appropriation. I wonder, “now, this is painful. Am I supposed to say something to them? Do I work on myself?” And I don’t know what to do with that. It seems like a hot bed of appropriation, in activists.

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL:

Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. And appropriation of cultures definitely I hear you saying this rampant. But I feel that their own cultures have been erased in so many ways and made invisible for themselves that they can’t see what culture is. I think that their attempt to take on that sometimes is an attempt to be crossing into space, to be cross-cultural. But it’s appropriation.

Appropriation is when that group or that person is taking on something from a culture and using it to their own benefit without even acknowledging where they got it from. There’s a group of young people in Europe who started selling these Miswak sticks that they chew on in many indigenous cultures (in) Africa and Haiti, and they’re selling them as a new toothbrush, and they just found out about it, and they’re the ones that know about it. This happens because (they are the) ones with the access. They have the access. Media access, the money to bring forth other people’s medicines, and music and food and all of kinds of things. When one uses it to one’s own benefit and it’s not there for their learning or their transformation.

Like, you could say that for me. I’m in a Japanese tradition. I have Japanese clothes, a Japanese robe, a Japanese name. Everything’s Japanese and I’m not Japanese. I have to be careful how I use that and what it means to me. Of course I’ve shaped all of this to my own way and being. But at the same time, am I using this practice for my life or am I out there now hocking myself as some person who knows all about the Japanese or Zen and the people? And I’m not. I cannot and I will not.

I feel that even in Zen, there is a lack. There’s a lack of Japanese presence. There’s white Westerners and then there’s Japanese. And they have their own places because they want to. For one, because they’re doing it differently than we do. And then there’s the Western World. It’s very complicated.

If you feel fit to support Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel and the sangha please do so. General Donations to support Still Breathing Zen Meditation Center/Yudo-ji can be made through PayPal here. Still Breathing Zen Meditation Center is small with big work. They are a community with a commitment to peace. All donations are tax deductible under the fiscal sponsorship of World Trust Educational Services.

Gratitude and support for Ann Marie Davis’ work can be directed to: https://www.paypal.me/hazeloutlaw

Coming Back to Black Life

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by Ratasha Elise

“Mother, loosen my tongue, or adorn me with a lighter burden.”
― Audre Lorde

In September of 2012 I resigned from my job as a Teaching Artist & Experiential Workshop Facilitator in a program for Boston Public High School students. It was meaningful and well paying work in which I had the task of guiding students through the conception, research and development of groundbreaking and “impossible” ideas, at the intersection of art and science. In addition to leaving my job, I also walked away from a scholarship for study at a popular music school in Boston. Having lived in various cities along the east coast, I was moving west for the first time in my life.I had come to see how even the most hope inspiring and non-mainstream institutions still managed to replicate the toxic norms of the corporate and industrial world. I was sick of it.

I had come to see how even the most hope inspiring and non-mainstream institutions still managed to replicate the toxic norms of the corporate and industrial world.

I’d received an opportunity to continue my learning outside of institutional walls, and I accepted it. I was going to study an experiential process for personal and societal transformation known as The Work That Reconnects. This spoke to me deeply. I could not have been more excited. I’d already been very impacted by hearing Joanna Macy speak and had attended a 10 day intensive in The Work That Reconnects earlier that year. I’d concluded that both she and the process she’d spearheaded were beyond brilliant. My insistence on figuring out why so much suffering and toxicity in this society, coupled with my background in arts education and experiential group facilitation had primed me. I was very clear that this was the next step on my journey to giving everything I am, in service of healing and transformation. In sharing my desire to learn directly from Joanna, with her assistant Anne Symens-Bucher, I also found out that there were other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) activists already living in or near the Bay area, who shared the same desire. There was talk of pulling us together to be trained as WTR facilitators. After I attended an additional 10 day intensive on the west coast, I was asked to be one of the co-facilitators of the group alongside Joanna, and Adelaja Simon.

In those early days, I started out with the intention of learning what I could, in order to eventually facilitate WTR in my own community. At the same time, I felt that my African Ancestors who were subjected to unspeakable suffering and somehow managed to remain human, had much to teach the world about what it really means to be human. Let’s be clear. I do not wish to indulge in a spiritualized romanticization of their suffering. There is nothing beautiful or hopeful about the hell that they were dragged through. It was and remains abhorrent. Period. Full stop.

Also, I believe that their legacy includes lessons on how to access the place where humanity meets divinity, and how to surrender your whole being to the Spirit world. I shared some of these thoughts with Joanna and Anne before ever leaving the east coast. I felt that the WTR would be an incredibly transformative tool for healing, clarity, and empowerment.

Over time, it became clear to me that it wasn’t so much that BIPOC was missing the WTR, as it was that the WTR and the broader community surrounding it, was missing us, as well as the awarenesses and frameworks that would create space and safety for us.

Over time, it became clear to me that it wasn’t so much that BIPOC was missing the WTR, as it was that the WTR and the broader community surrounding it, was missing us, as well as the awarenesses and frameworks that would create space and safety for us. This realization takes nothing away from the WTR or those who shaped it. This realization was based in an acknowledgement of the value, brilliance, and richness still very much alive in BIPOC communities. It was also based in an understanding that the WTR pulls deeply from the wisdom of Indigenous peoples around the globe. BIPOC cultures in the U.S., while surviving ongoing genocides, enslavement, displacement, colonization, and forced assimilation, still retain major elements of their indigeneity within their cultures, including those who were force migrated away from the land they are indigenous to.

I vocalized the need to tell a deeper truth about the relevance of racial history and cultural differences multiple times, in multiple ways. I also expressed the need to create better safety for people of all marginalized identities along the lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability. I spent many hours thinking, speaking, and brainstorming with a few friends and even convened a fledgling small group to find a creative way to add anti-oppression and power equity into our WTR work and community lives. Chief among them were Adelaja, and WTR community member Jo Bauen. Then, when I heard Patricia St. Onge speak about racial awareness and the culture of whiteness in early 2013 at an International Women’s Day Event, waves of grief and relief moved through me. Inwardly, I thought “She is the missing link.” Also because she was an older woman with white skin, I thought that maybe she would be heard and received, in a way I had not been. I asked her to meet with me. When we met, I learned more about the work she did in the area of justice for Indigenous Peoples. I learned that she had actually published a book on cultural competency. I also learned about the extreme lack of financial support, and economic injustice she was navigating as a Indigenous woman doing absolutely essential work in the world. To be candid, this last thing completely pissed me off to hear. It was at that point that I decided to introduce her to Joanna. I already felt that her work in cultural awareness was much of what was missing from the lens and framing of the WTR. I held a quiet hope that she would gain more access to material resources and networks that would support her life and her work. Admittedly, I wasn’t explicit about this. Back then, my tongue often got hijacked by white fragility, a term coined in the work of Robin DiAngelo. Today I am vocal and unapologetic in my assertion that “solidarity” with communities of color must also take tangible, material forms. This is not to be confused with charity or white saviourism. It is about restoration and reparations.

Today I am vocal and unapologetic in my assertion that “solidarity” with communities of color must also take tangible, material forms. This is not to be confused with charity or white saviourism. It is about restoration and reparations.

Ultimately, it was decided that Patricia would spend some time facilitating the POC cohort on the topic of Deep Culture, in the Fall of 2013. Multiple times during this period she told us that our respective cultures already had a lot of elements of the WTR embedded within them. I heard her each time. Yet, at that point I had only begun to glimpse what she meant. A few months prior, I’d returned home to North Carolina for replenishment and repair. I reached out to the beautiful community of artists, cultural educators, and healers I had been a part of. I told them that I desperately needed a Sista Circle to happen while I was home. A Sista Circle is an informal gathering of Black Women to share time, energy, food, laughter, and affirmation. They quickly obliged. This is one of many times the love of Black Women figuratively and literally saved my life.

…there is no way to overstate the energetic difference of being in a space where there is no need for the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual labor of constantly explaining things so fundamental to your life experience, and doing cultural translation work for people who never have to.

I must take a moment here to note that there is no way to overstate the energetic difference of being in a space where there is no need for the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual labor of constantly explaining things so fundamental to your life experience, and doing cultural translation work for people who never have to. People who consequently rarely realize the depth, value, and right to be compensated for this labor.People who usually haven’t done enough work on their own to meet us anywhere in the middle, thus positioning us to have to constantly do their labor on top of our own. Their labor on top of our own. Their labor on top of our own.

Damn. White people still feel entitled to our labor. This is a continuance of slavery era dynamics that have yet to be disrupted, and far too often is unseen by those who are privileged enough to be on the receiving end. This too is a manifestation of white supremacy that can take a steady toll on the minds, hearts, bodies, and souls of BIPOC. This is one of the reasons that having access to, and increasing the availability of exclusively Black healing spaces is so direly important to me and many others in the Black Liberation Movement.

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” ― Arundhati Roy

During the aforementioned Sista Circle in North Carolina, I’d considered sharing some elements of the WTR with the women who were gathered. I was listening for inner guidance on how and when to proceed. Folks were talking and connecting organically, and I was led to just let it be. Eventually I began to share a song, an old Spiritual with some new lyrics of my own. Spontaneously, without planning, preparation, or instruction, we all began to form a circle and hold hands. To be clear, this isn’t an automatic part of every event of this nature. Everyone joined in the singing of the song. And after a few rounds, people began to take turns speaking about what they were grateful for. Again, spontaneously and unprepped, we went around the circle until every voice had been heard. Yes, we went into spontaneous ritual and the first stage of the WTR spiral.

“Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.”
― Audre Lorde

The preparation for this occurrence and countless others like it, is embedded deep in the soil of our culture. A culture that has suffered endless attempts at dismemberment, disrememberment, and annihilation. Yet, we still have a fresher memory of how to be present and in our bodies enough to connect and move as an intelligent organism, operating from a place beyond our intellects that intimately knows and honors the flow of Life through every living thing. Yes, people who were, and continue to be labeled and treated as “uncivilized savages” in order to justify dragging them across an ocean and locking them into perpetual and still ongoing systems of unpaid and underpaid labor, have a fresher and more recent cultural memory of what it truly means to be human. So too do the myriad of indigenous peoples around the globe, and immigrant (forced and free) communities that managed to hold onto and/or reclaim pieces of their indigeneity, and therefore the foundations of their humanity.

Not all of us have so deeply forgotten that we are connected to something larger and greater than our individual ego identities. For many marginalized communities, that is all that has actually kept us alive. Many of us remember how to dance upon the Earth in sacred communion with Her and each other, and have constructed unique and culturally specific ways to fan the embers of this remembrance. Not all of us are so deeply shriveled into culturally socialized patterns of pathological narcissism that have turned basic human gratitude and generosity into things one must effort at. For many BIPOC communities, it’s embedded in the culture. Cultural history and differences are real. This bears repeating. Cultural history and differences are real. It’s not enough to simply know we’re all connected. It’s important to be mindfully aware of the history of how we’re connected as well as how our norms and worldview differ. Every culture caught up in the settler-colony called the U.S., is not in the same boat. Nor do we come from the same starting place. Nor do we all require the same medicine. Every assumption otherwise, is a manifestation of white normativity, white supremacy, and white domination.

It’s not enough to simply know we’re all connected. It’s important to be mindfully aware of the history of how we’re connected as well as how our norms and worldview differ. Every culture caught up in the settler-colony called the U.S., is not in the same boat. Nor do we come from the same starting place. Nor do we all require the same medicine. Every assumption otherwise, is a manifestation of white normativity, white supremacy, and white domination.

Not the kind that hides behind white sheets and burning crosses, but the kind that is so sophisticated it hides in plain sight. In the minds, hearts, and on the tongues of “well intentioned” white folks. I have walked a road paved with such intentions.

Recently the sheets have come off, and burning crosses have been augmented by tiki torches. It is easy to be offended by such overt displays of white supremacy. It is another thing altogether to make the connection between the physical tiki torches used in Charlottesville, VA and the psychological, emotional, and spiritual tiki torches “good white folks” in every region wield on a daily basis. Please hear me when I say, the latter has enabled the continued existence of the former. One of these proverbial “tiki torches” is the prioritization of the feelings and comfort of white people over the humanity and safety of BIPOC. One of the many things I learned during my time in California is that those who are used to having both comfort and safety, often have a hard time differentiating between the two. White people’s hurt feelings and bruised ego identity get equivocated with the actual humanity and dignity of BIPOC, and we are generally expected to respond with patience, calmness, politeness, and gentleness. We are then met with surprise, confusion, and dismay, when we stop showing up in spaces where we know we are likely to be re-traumatized by this behavior.

When we share space together, we do not have the same things at risk. I’ll say it again. We do not have the same things at risk. Feelings, comfort, and ego identity are constantly conflated with humanity, dignity, and actual safety. This false equivalency and the failure/refusal to recognize it, becomes the graveyard of countless relationships and group convenings. And yes, it is a form of white supremacy, domination, and psycho-emotional terrorism.

This society is full of structures that violently displace white folks portion of the shared pain of humanity onto the shoulders, backs, and necks of communities that have been chronically gasping for air for centuries. Centuries! Prioritizing the work of dismantling these structures, is not optional. It is just as dire as any environmental crisis one can name, because it is the original environmental crisis. Furthermore, the underlying root cause of them all, is one in the same. Whiteness is a culture that does not know itself. Because it does not know itself, it cannot truly know others. It certainly cannot know what medicine(s) other cultures need. The people whose Ancestors traded their indigeneity in for collusion into a racialized patriarchal system of economic oppression, must quickly and boldly learn to tell the whole truth about what was given up, the grief and insatiable spiritual hunger that took its place, and the massive harm disproportionately sustained by BIPOC. Furthermore it is direly necessary to take responsibility and make amends for harm caused, and to engage the specific individual, family, and cultural work of reclaiming one’s Ancestral inheritance. Actively learning to build a norm of full and deep truth telling, at the very least to one’s own Self, is also not optional. It is not something we have the luxury of getting around to … eventually. It is part of our Sacred contract with Life itself. It is one of the primary ways Life moves through us, and is therefore fundamental to the dance of being human in a body.

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” ― June Jordan

After my time studying the WTR and aspects of Deep Culture, I immersed myself in African & African American Studies. After spending so much time submerged in whiteness, I knew this was the way to begin to put the fractured pieces of my psyche back together, as well as the next step on the journey of clarifying my life’s work. The wisdom and insight that was waiting for me was beyond extraordinary. In their brilliance, creativity, and commitment to Life, I found that my Ancestors had hidden fragments of a roadmap deep inside the recesses of our culture. Hidden far from the invasive eyes and awarenesses of those who told them, and continue to tell their descendants to “Assimilate or Die.” This roadmap illuminates our way back home, to ourselves, to our sanity, and to the non-negotiable reclamation of our Human Rights. Some of these map fragments were hidden so deep, their protection required a great amount of pretending. In efforts to protect them, and our very lives, we pretended at assimilation to appease white rage, violence and sheer savagery. Behind the veil of double consciousness described by W.E.B. DuBois, we learned to weigh the risks of not meeting the white demand for deference and ego coddling. We were forced to pretend for so long, at some point many of us forgot we were pretending.

Like a mad insomniac scientist, I have spent the last 3.5 years excavating and gathering as many of these roadmap pieces as I could find. I have spent many a midnight hour, communing, singing, and dancing with my Ancestors. I beseeched them to take hold of the life force within this vessel, use my voice, guide my hands, order my steps, and illuminate my path to completing the work they have asked of me.

There is much talk about Diversity & Inclusion in liberal/”progressive” white spaces. I am currently of the belief that the inclusion of BIPOC in white spaces is more of a gift for white people, who stand to benefit immensely from being exposed to the realities that imbalances of socio-political power and dominance shield them from. Inclusion is not true justice or equity. As a process oriented thinker, I think a lot about the steps needed to get from where we are to where we need to be. There are so many things that need to happen on the preliminary side of racial justice that get recklessly skipped over in the rush to “come together” and achieve “unity.” We are adults. This vital work is not about the warm fuzzies or any kind of superficial emotional affect. There is too much at stake. If an individual is violently kidnapped and brutalized, for any length of time, the immediate priority once they’re physically freed should be an enormous amount of care and concern for their physical, psycho-emotional, and spiritual well-being. It would be assumed that they need time and space away from their attacker(s) and other triggers to learn to feel safe again, and to figure out exactly what kind of support they need to return to wholeness. I happen to believe this is just as true for groups of people. To me, culturally specific healing spaces that center the culture of the marginalized, rather than adding it as an aside, are essential. They support us in reclaiming our whole selves, and preparing to have the conversation about what true liberation, justice, and equity can really look like.

To me, culturally specific healing spaces that center the culture of the marginalized, rather than adding it as an aside, are essential. They support us in reclaiming our whole selves, and preparing to have the conversation about what true liberation, justice, and equity can really look like.

“Finally I was able to see that if I had a contribution I wanted to make, I must do it, despite what others said. That I was OK the way I was. That it was all right to be strong.” ― Wangari Maathai

I remain inspired by Joanna Macy, and those who worked alongside her in integrating and systematizing much of what many indigenous and BIPOC communities often know and do naturally. I have been tasked with developing a work that is heavily influenced by the WTR, and that centers the indigenous West African spirituality that has always been at the core of Black American spirituality. I formed and am in collaboration with a cohort whose identities currently include Black cis-women, femmes, queer, low income, and disabled people. We are actively seeking independent funders for this work. We’re in the process of creating an independent fellowship program that will support deeper research, study, and synthesis of the two aforementioned areas along with music medicine, somatic healing, and Joy DeGruy Leary’s work on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. The Voices and Lives of those multiply marginalized at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability will be centered and fully held in this work. It is from a place of Embodied Liberation, having excavated our whole selves, that I believe we will be best positioned to engage with white folks who have also been committed to doing both their own and their Ancestors’ unfinished work.

Ratasha Elise is a Black Love & Liberation Singer, Voice Doula, Healing Justice Facilitator/Consultant and Racial Justice Consultant. Paypal contributions may be sent via http://paypal.me/Ratasha. Her Venmo ID is: @Ratasha-Elise. Offers of other material support for her work, and larger tax deductible donations administered by her 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor can be made via email to chocolatesoulrevival@gmail.com.

A Story of Whimsical Lightning

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by Jaq Nguyen Victor

Jaq Nguyen Victor doing some “digging & demanding” for justice. Logo by Kale Cordero. Photo credit: Daniela Dusak.

My personality is intense and playful, like whimsical lightning. Would it surprise you to know that I am a therapist? Usually we think of healers as steady, soft-spoken souls, full of gentle sacrifice and patience. Or, at least, I do. Sometimes I feel like the rainbow-colored sheep of the counseling psychology field. But 2017 has been a year of embracing the flavors and textures of me that stray from the stereotypical image of a therapist. And I owe immense gratitude to the Work That Reconnects (WTR) for guiding my path towards self-celebration.

Today, I am the Founder and Director of Dig & Demand (D&D)—a radical training program for queer trans 1st, 1.5, 2nd generation diasporic Vietnamese artists. Its mission is to dig deeply and demand daringly for the collective threading of our resilience. The name “Dig & Demand” sprouted from a seed inside my heart during my 6-month WTR training for people of color at Canticle Farm. Two glorious human beings, Barbara Jefferson and Adelaja Simons, facilitated our cohort, which was the most emotionally vibrant and safe group that I had ever experienced in my life. From then on, I became determined to bring the WTR back to my Vietnamese community, namely at its queer and trans intersections.

So I watered this seed for the next two years, with my mentee at my side, Trang Tran, who is also the Founder of QTViet Cafe. I created a curriculum rooted in eco-justice, trauma-centered drama therapy, and liberation psychology. Trang applied for a Wellness In Action (WIA) grant for us. Then in the Spring of 2017, we launched Dig & Demand at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants (CERI), sponsored by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Services (ACBHS). It was nothing short of a dream come true.

We then conducted interviews with different leaders in the queer trans Vietnamese (qtViet) community. Allow me to share excerpts from our conversation with organizer Tracy Nguyen.

What are you digging for in your life?

“I’m digging for authenticity. I think in a world where we’re inundated by politics, ideology, people, and just like so much information, it’s hard to know what’s real. And so I yearn for it.”

What are you demanding?

“So easily are we dismissed by our parents. I think about what it will look like to finally sit in a room together and talk about the hard topics, talk about the complicated histories, talk about the politics that divide us. Even while we’re organizing on the streets, our parents are at home voting a different way.”

What do you know about the qtViet community?

“When you navigate your life in ways where you always have to be a fraction of yourself, the moment where you get to be whole, together, and everyone is experiencing together that wholeness, it just creates these multiple layers of comfort, happiness, and extremely rooted validation of who you are. And in that moment you get to be whatever you want.”

Next, we held a focus group and orientation session to harvest even more feedback about Dig & Demand from the community. Here is what we found out.

What was your experience of the Dig & Demand curriculum?

“All the times when we talk about oppression, it can feel really heavy. But we were able, through the puppets, to talk in a different way. It felt like uplifting to talk about oppression, if that makes sense.”

“I’m used to sitting around groups that are trying to do this. But there’s just no balance. And it was really, really wonderful to be able to laugh.”

“I just want to talk about this with my parents. But I don’t know how to say it in Vietnamese or how to explain. But this gives me a different perspective to learn about other stuff that I wouldn’t in the community.”

Why is Dig & Demand needed?

“I think it could be a therapeutic way for all of us to process current things together. Oftentimes I find myself at work, just reading the news, not sure how to bring it to the work that I’m doing.”

“It’s like Intentionally carving out space to build up people’s creativity. That doesn’t happen for us. Creativity is one of the few things that we have to claim for ourselves and is in our power.”

“it just allows us to have a space where we don’t have to compromise ourselves, and that’s very vital to survival, yes.”

After that, we gathered a crew of qtViet participants to embark on this journey with us. Over the next 10 weeks, plus 1-weekend intensive, and 2 rehearsals sessions, Dig & Demand grew in a soil that was unique, intimate, safe, uncharted, and most of all, playful. The WTR spiral model very much guided us. But I added culturally affirming goals, like building up our vocabulary for expressing our emotions in both Vietnamese and English. I incorporated multimodal art interventions, everything from sand tray to puppets. I even introduced an embodied form of improvisational play called Developmental Transformations (DvT). I invite you to watch this qtViet evolution here: https://vimeo.com/221643896

Dig & Demand focus group learning about the WTR “Spiral Model” with puppets and snacking on Vietnamese sandwiches

Dig & Demand exploring the WTR “Open Sentences On Gratitude” exercise with sand tray

Dig & Demand getting silly in group play using DvT

Dig & Demand connecting deeply and non-verbally in the WTR “Milling” exercise

The Spring 2017 cohort for the Dig & Demand program culminated in 2 final performances. One in San Francisco at Mission Cultural Center sponsored by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC), and the other in Oakland at Eastside Arts Alliance sponsored by QTViet Cafe.

In San Francisco, we turned the theatre into a vibrating cube of anti-capitalist energy by declaring “I love you!” again and again. It was such a simple, yet subversive act. In the words of one of the participants, “The most important thing that I came home with after this whole process was this super novel idea of one’s worth as a human not being conditional on anything.”

Dig & Demand sharing bilingual activities for audience members pre-show in San Francisco

Dig & Demand’s version of the WTR “Spiral Model” plus shovel & mic in San Francisco

Dig & Demand in full anti-capitalist love mode, declaring our unconditional humanity in San Francisco

In Oakland, we blurred the lines between hard work and play, Vietnamese and English, even performers and audience members. In the words of another participant, “Growing up as a refugee and having parents who were immigrants, always on survival mode, there was no room for emotions and intimacy. As a result, I always found sanctuary in my intellect and my mind. What this space helped me do was deliberately and intentionally live in the heart space and communicate without language, or in a different language.”

Dig & Demand doing WTR “Opening Through Sound” exercise in Oakland

Dig & Demand in WTR “Honoring Our Pain” shovel ceremony in Oakland

Jaq and their mom sharing a high five of pre-show solidarity in Oakland

On a personal note, it was powerful to have my mother present at our shows. There’s something about authority figures for me and the gut reaction to hide my whimsical lightning-like therapist self. But I managed to do it, despite a stomach full of nerves. I stepped out on stage, and I revealed myself capable of directing a crew of qtViet artists as stewards for our collective liberation. It was also incredible to have my mother be so vocal and unabashed about celebrating me as her queer and non-binary trans Vietnamese-American child. What a truly magical and unforgettable experience of intergenerational healing. You can watch all the warm fuzzies from San Francisco here: https://vimeo.com/223079582 and Oakland here: https://vimeo.com/225361503.

Allow me to end this story of whimsical lightning in gratitude. I bow to my WTR community in playful humility. Thank you for offering me a deep sense of belonging and allowing me to share Dig & Demand with you. Keep a look out for our Fall 2017 cohort! We are expanding the program to focus on diasporic queer, trans, people of color (qtpoc)! If you would like to learn more, please email diganddemand@gmail.com.

Jaq Nguyen Victor. Photo Credit: Robbie Sweeny and This Is What I Want Festival

Jaq Nguyen Victor is a Vietnamese, queer, non-binary trans, and neurodivergent artist, healer, and activist based in the Bay Area. Currently, they are finishing a M.A. in Drama Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies. They received a 2017 Soma Award for “Outstanding Activism” from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and a 2015 nomination for “Best Featured Actress” by the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Circle. To see more of Jaq’s work, visit www.JaqNguyenVictor.com

A personal African Identity told to practitioners of the WTR

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by Wilson Riles

Count me among those who believe that our (homo sapiens’) linages, traced either collectively or individually, cannot be sharply divided or characterized into one clean ethnic, tribal, or national designation. Human history is not easily divisible in to Black, White, Red, Asian, and Hispanic, really. However, I also join with William Loren Katz when he says, early in his book, Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, “Those who assume that a people have no history worth mentioning are likely to believe they have no humanity worth defending.”

We all swim in a sea of illusionary, unnatural discontents that evolved over the centuries of our existence here on this planet since the dawn of the agricultural revolution that exacerbated our disunity. WTR guides us to reopen our hearts and our minds to the appreciation and understanding of a less-illusionary, more holistic Weltanschauung that experiences the connections that are present and that appreciates and forgives the antagonistic pleiotropy of our so-called civilizing cultures.

That I, as an African American, have naught but a foreshortened and indistinct whisper of a personal linage beyond my grandfather is an abrogation of my humanity that I feel as I might feel a missing limb. My exploration of that missing knowledge of myself should not be seen as an attempt at disunity nor of blaming. I see it as an effort to find balance and wholeness.

That I, as an African American, have naught but a foreshortened and indistinct whisper of a personal linage beyond my grandfather is an abrogation of my humanity that I feel as I might feel a missing limb. My exploration of that missing knowledge of myself should not be seen as an attempt at disunity nor of blaming. I see it as an effort to find balance and wholeness. I feel called to uncover what history took from me: a solid sense of my ancestors that goes as far back in history as will give me deep knowing of full connection and identity to humanity in all of humanity’s splendor and degradation. I believe that I stand today with more than just the heritage of an enslaved people.

This is not a mind-thing. It is an emotional connection with my personal indigeneity. Emotions, particularly deep emotions, are impossible to describe. We can recognize aspects sometimes through our empathic faculty, including the childhood ‘mirror’ cells in human brains that allowed us to learn to be human in the absence of language. It is family, extended family, historical family, and a culture that does that ‘teaching’ of those ‘mirror’ cells and the shaping of our conscious symbol making.

Language provides a marker of that which is empathically recognized. These, external markers for ancestor appreciation and signs of the importance of personal identification with ancestors, blare-out at me in many places and in many ways. We have, for example, the “begets” in the Judeo-Christian texts. And we have in many Native American cultures the introduction of oneself to an unknown person through the recounting of the names of ancestors. And there are surnames. All of us learn through stories that get ‘worn’ and shaped into myths and rituals that guide us.

I can only say that my grandfather was a slave as a child and that my father was named after him and I was named after my father. Our surname, Riles, is undoubtedly directly or indirectly derivative from some plantation owners name. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a ‘straw boss’ who was hired by the owner of the land to keep sharecroppers ‘in line’ through the use of a horse and a gun. This grandfather was thought to be a son of the land owner, even though this parentage was denied by the landowner. I was told that one of my great-great grandmothers on my mother’s side was a full-blood Native American; although the tribe and the circumstances have remained unclear. The rest of my linage is untraceable and is naught but whispers and personally-detached generalizations.

My lack of an articulable, traceable linage is the consequence of conscious, deliberate acts.

My lack of an articulable, traceable linage is the consequence of conscious, deliberate acts. This fact is galling to me but it did not hinder my desire for connection or my search for connection.

It is one thing to voluntarily give up one’s heredity and indigenous culture and to ‘luxuriate’ in an adopted national culture that is affirming and supportive of one’s individual identity; it is quite another thing to have personal heritage torn away and indigenous culture severely suppressed and to be left struggling in a foreign culture that is denigrating and dehumanizing.

It is one thing to voluntarily give up one’s heredity and indigenous culture and to ‘luxuriate’ in an adopted national culture that is affirming and supportive of one’s individual identity; it is quite another thing to have personal heritage torn away and indigenous culture severely suppressed and to be left struggling in a foreign culture that is denigrating and dehumanizing. Historians have records that show that stolen Africans were severely discouraged from using their tribal languages, were quickly separated from fellow tribal members, had their families broken apart, were stripped of tribal symbols, and had their practices suppressed. For an indigenous people whose personal identity is inseparable from family and community, these conscious acts of enslavement were extreme and landed, almost, mortal blows that many did not recover from. As a community, African Americans have not healed and there is no form of reparations that can repair what was done.

In 2006 I heard of a small group of geneticists who had graduated from Howard University who had collected a sampling of DNA from individuals from tribes in all parts of Africa. They called themselves African Ancestry and they offered the service of comparing client’s DNA samples to those in their collection to evaluate which tribe one’s DNA was more similar on one’s mother’s side and on one’s father’s side. The roots of this ‘science’ are riddled with active racism. That African Ancestry is peopled by African American graduates of the premier African American educational institution that was founded by the first director of the Freedman’s Bureau offsets some of my emotional trepidations about relying on the machinations of a science that was originally used to dehumanize my ancestors. I sent my sample to them hoping that knowledge that seemed to be denied me might be uncovered.

Three weeks later I received a report that on my mother’s side my DNA best matched with the Ga people of Ghana. On my father’s side my DNA matched best with the Bamileke of the Cameroons. I sat with this information for many months. In 2009, I received some corroboration of this connection when my older sister went to Ghana and went to the area occupied by the Ga people. Because of her facial contours, she was greeted as a member of that tribe. Ever since then I have had numerous occasions to introduce myself and identify myself as a descendent of those tribes. This has felt good even though this conclusion is based on scientific judgements and assumptions that I am not capable of making. I know nothing of Ga or Bamileke language or culture and there are no experiential, historical connections that I know about. This is a thin thread or whisper upon which my identity hangs. This is truly analogous to a ‘phantom limb’ sensation and like those physical sensations when a limb is amputated, my sensations of connection are not free of pain.

This is truly analogous to a ‘phantom limb’ sensation and like those physical sensations when a limb is amputated, my sensations of connection are not free of pain.

In 2014 I took the other DNA test. This one made more general comparisons of collective continental genetic drifts. These results “reflect genetic ancestral affinity…to a reference data set of 5 populations:” Indigenous America, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and India Subcontinent. My admixture percentages were evaluated as 78% Sub-Saharan Africa and 22% Europe. Although this test has become the most popular ancestral genetic analysis, I found it minimally helpful. Recognizing the major role that sexual exploitation played in the U.S. enslavement industry, no African American should be surprised by the revelation of significant European ‘affinity’ in their ancestral genetic compliment. Neither should 40% of African Americans be surprised by having an admixture of Indigenous American heritage.

However, Africa is a continent named after an obscure North African tribe by the Romans. Almost no immigrant from the continent would consider his/her identity African until they had spent some time in the U.S. or Europe; they feel that they are Ghanaians or Ethiopians or members of the Ga tribe or they are Fulani. It is almost meaningless to consider oneself African outside the concretized, imbedded-in-culture, institutionalized racism of Western civilization. After all, all humanity can say they have African heritage since the human race originated there. This second DNA test allows us to continue to sit comfortably, essentially in the constructed illusions of white supremacy. It leaves the gap in my knowledge of myself still unfilled.

Having some information of my personal linage is a blessing. It allows me to remain open to the discovery of more connections and deeper emotions. I believe that I am less subject to the anticipation of more and direct pain in the rediscovery of self. I can sense my own indigeneity. I am less inclined to deny that to others.

Wilson Riles was appointed Administrative Assistant in 1976 to newly elected Alameda County Supervisor, John George. He worked with George fighting for a decent health care system, alternatives to incarceration, against apartheid in South Africa, for bi-lingual education in schools, and housing and services for the homeless. In 1979, Wilson Riles ran and was elected to the Fifth District seat on the Oakland City Council. Wilson served on the Council until 1992. He is the son of Wilson Riles Sr. who was elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California in 1970. As a Council Member, Riles engineered the City’s commitment of $1.3 million from the Redevelopment Agency for the schools’ Academies programs. He was instrumental in the defeat of the INS establishment of a privately run detention facility in Oakland. Riles was the principal Council member responsible for both Oakland’s Anti-Apartheid Ordinance and Oakland’s Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance. Wilson served as Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Pacific Mountain Regional Office, from 1991 to 2001. Wilson is the partner of Patricia St. Onge. He is the father of six daughters and grandfather of seven. PayPal contributions can be sent to his email address at wriles@pacbell.net

Two Peoples, One Fire

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by Patricia St. Onge

Collages by Patricia St. Onge

I’m Haudenosaunee (Mohawk) and French Canadian, adopted Cheyenne River Lakota. My daughters are all that and African American. Between us, my partner and I have 10 grown children (6 daughters and their spouses); straight and queer, Black, Indigenous, Chicano and White. I’m a member of Idle No More SF Bay, and part of a circle of indigenous grandmothers. I sit on the edge of the Movement for Black Lives as a mother, loving and supporting my grown children, some of whom are fully immersed.

My daughter Karissa shared a Facebook post that expressed frustration about the outpouring of support for Standing Rock that looks different from the support for BLM. I understand the frustration. I also know that we romanticize Indigenous people and lifeways in much the same way that we demonize Blackness.

The post led to a rich discussion about the connections between Standing Rock water protectors and the Movement for Black Lives. I know there are delegations of BLM folks who’ve been to Standing Rock to stand in solidarity. There’s an intuitive sense that the two are interconnected. I have some thoughts about how to put language around it.

There’s something about this moment that feels like a phase shift. I think of a historical phase shift as akin to that spit second when water turns to steam. If you don’t know how evaporation works, it can easily seem spontaneous, even magical. We do know how evaporation works. Heat has to be applied to the water; it simmers, and then boils for some time before it actually turns to steam.

The heat that led to this national phase shift got turned on at the moment of contact; when Europeans landed here. As soon as the Nations already here saw that the colonizers’ intentions were to take everything they wanted, without recognizing they were meeting their relatives, there emerged a culture of resistance. A spark was lit. Across the waters of our Mother, Earth, another spark was lit when the Westerners landed in Africa. As people on both continents were captured, enslaved, murdered, raped, the spark in each land grew.

In our time, Black lives Matter, and the Movement for Black Lives turned the spark once again into a blazing fire. They heated the water, past its long, long simmer. They turned it to a rolling boil. When Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and neighboring Lakota Nations saw the black snake of the prophecies materialize in the form of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), they were lit by the fires that had been rekindled by the Movement for Black Lives. The two flames live in the hearts and minds and spirits in both communities. Like my children, they both live in many bodies as well. There’s no need for ‘Oppression Olympics’ here. Black people and Indians come from the same fire.

There’s a long history of that fire burning, sometimes blazing, other times just barely a spark. Looking back on first contact with settlers on both continents, when it was clear that neither People could be fully subjugated in their own homelands, Gambians, Ghanaians, Sierra Leonians, by their own names for themselves, were shipped over to this continent uprooted and stripped of the capacity to speak their Native languages. Children were sold away from their families. The spark of language and ceremony was kept, barely alive, by the ancestors who were praying for and thinking about the generations to come. In all the ways they could, they resisted dehumanization.

Here on this continent, in neighboring communities, the spark grew; also in secret, as ceremonies were outlawed. Children were extracted from families, sent to boarding schools, or adopted out. Still, the spark grew; sometimes rising to flames bright enough to light the hearts of those who had lost touch with who they really were.

Then, the poisons would come; hoses, dogs, bullets, crack and alcohol; tools of oppression meant to steal the souls of those on whom they were unleashed. But, because of the spark of resistance, the poison water, while it had some effect on its intended targets, splashed back and deadened the souls of those who were pouring it out.

When the Pope and the Monarchs sent Europeans, who were just finished devastating the Moors (Muslims) via the Crusades, out the “discover” “new” lands, they sent them with what they saw as God’s mandate to claim any land they found for the monarchy. God was on their side as proclaimed in the Doctrine of Discovery. Armed with that sense of purpose, there was no room in their hearts and minds for curiosity. They expected to meet no humans along the way. So, they didn’t see any; instead they saw property. From this lack of imagination, the inability to see the relatives who stood in front of them, grew the need to see everything and everyone as a commodity. The land had no sovereignty. It became real estate. The water wasn’t a relative, it was a ‘thing’ to extract, exploit and destroy. This is the legacy of the settler world view. Yet, as all that happened, and continues today, the spark of the flames of resistance continues to grow. The descendants of those colonized and those enslaved can find courage and strength in the legacy of the fire. Some of the descendants of the colonizers are waking up to their legacy too.

My invitation is that we, Indigenous and Black Peoples, find the courage in our legacies, and come together as relatives, to continue to come back to the fire. Together, as we liberate the land, the water, the air, and all our relatives (four legged, swimmers, flying ones, standing ones, etc.), we will find our collective liberation.

In that space of liberation, may we unleash our imaginations to build on the legacy of resistance. As the Hopi say, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Patricia St. Onge is the founder and a Partner at Seven Generations Consulting and Coaching, where all of the work is culturally based. Deeply rooted in the concept of Seven Generations, we honor the generations who have come before us, are mindful of those yet to come, and recognize that the impact of the decisions we’re making now will last for seven generations. Patricia has worked to support progressive social justice movements for all of her adult life. She’s worked as Executive and Interim Director of more than a dozen non-profits. Patricia is adjunct faculty at Mills College in Oakland CA and Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Of Haudenosaunee (Mohawk) and Quebecoise descent, and adopted Cheyenne River Lakota, Patricia is a member of Idle No More SF Bay, and The Peoples’ Nonviolent Response Coalition. Between them, she and her life partner Wilson Riles, have ten grown children and eight grandchildren. She is part of a growing community called Nafsi ya Jamii (The Soul Community), an urban farm and retreat center in East Oakland, CA. PayPal contributions can be directed to the following email address: wriles@pacbell.net

Poem: They Say That We are the Ones

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by A.M. Davis

The ancient pain of my ancestors

came to me

in a dream.

He was disguised

as a three-year-old child

looking up at me

wanting to be held

but since I have been wary

of this particular pain

for so long

I would not let him rest

his child’s head on my shoulder

because he has left me

tired and tender

after handing me

his jagged-edged anguish

so many times before

so I let him pull on my leg

and look up at me

as I remained unmoved.

Once before

he came to me

disguised as a lover

when I was uninitiated

in his ways.

After he

wrapped himself

into every corner of my mind

he showed me

what he was made of:

Unsolved pain

gathered from slave ships

and sugar plantations

and from death marches

to reservations.

He held in his belly

a heavy loneliness

a longing

that voyaged across oceans

to build bridges and railroads

across river and prairie.

He carried

the cold and hard replacement

for every warm drop of blood

ever spilled onto a battleground

since time immemorial.

He was

that bottomless famine

that every human heart

that had ever been brutalized

and left to die alone created

as he was the remnant

that his heart left behind

after it tumbled

into the void.

This pain came to me

tugging at my leg

while holding

his dark night of the soul

behind that baby’s face.

You, he said,

are the one

I have been waiting for

wanting you

to finally see me.

Ann Marie Davis, whose pen name is A.M. Davis, was born and raised in Oakland, California. She is storyteller/poet, a speaker on behalf of the Earth. In 2007, she walked away from her job to devote her life to her creativity. Upon attending a silent meditation retreat, she found space of time in her racing mind, and discovered that she was not her thoughts. This led to daily meditation, retreats, and becoming part of the East Bay Meditation Center community. She recently discovered the Joanna Macy’s work, and the trajectory of her life finally made sense. You can find more of her work at annmariedavis.com.
https://www.paypal.me/hazeloutlaw

Guest Editors In Conversation: Patricia St. Onge, Ann Marie Davis and Aravinda Ananda

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This conversation between the guest editors of this special issue is available in three formats:

1. Listen to the full audio recording of this conversation.

2. Read the full written transcript of the conversation.

3. Read some highlights/excerpts as follows.

Aravinda: Welcome to this conversation between Patricia St. Onge, Ann Marie Davis and Aravinda Ananda… the three of us have been invited by Molly Brown, the editor of the Deep Times journal to produce a special issue of the journal looking at race and culture and their influence on the Work That Reconnects, and so the… question is just why did we say yes to this invitation.

Aravinda: … I mentioned [refer to full interview transcript for context] these young adult cohorts, immersions in the Work That Reconnects that I have been involved with, and on the co-facilitation team starting in 2014, and they really shifted my experience with the Work. The first cohort that we led, it was a group of fifteen young folks age 18-30 there was only one participant of color in that group and she withdrew after the first meeting and it was really painful for a lot of folks in the cohort, some of whom were very good friends with her and so it brought up for us, what is it like to be in Work That Reconnects spaces if you are the only, or one of the only people of a marginalized identity.

And so this actually started stirring up some of my own work on identity which I hadn’t really attended to for much of my life. I come from a mixed raced family: my mom’s family is black and my dad’s family is white… my skin is very fair so I have an enormous amount of skin privilege and I think I have operated quite easily in white-dominant spaces.

Since this first cohort, my relationship and ways that I saw the Work were really shifting and I started to see things, notice things, that I hadn’t noticed before and so that kicked me off on a journey of exploration with rethinking the ways that I was approaching the Work and some things about the Work itself.

The second young adult cohort that we led, we again had only one participant of color. She stayed through the cohort for the whole time and I feel was very generous in sharing some feedback and also everyone in the group provided our facilitation team with some really strong feedback and requests for anti-oppression awareness to be named at the start of a group’s time together. They had suggested that Chapter 12 in Coming Back to Life , the chapter that Patricia mentioned on Learning With Communities of Color, that it should have been Chapter 1 in the book instead of Chapter 12.

And so our facilitation team really took that to heart and we did a lot of I guess internal reorganization about how we were approaching the Work in terms of framing. And for the third cohort that we ran, we started experimenting… with shifting some of the framing.

And the way that we have run the cohorts is that the first experience is part of a larger intergenerational group and so for that first meeting with the third cohort when we were trying to bring in some of this new material, we got a lot of pushback from primarily older folks in the group – older, all identified as white folks. So I got strong feedback in both directions – one that I couldn’t continue to facilitate this Work with integrity unless I attended to this feedback that I was receiving and also that I really needed to grow in my skill if I was going to be able to do it. So I had a lot of personal motivation on this topic.

I had the pleasure of attending two facilitator gatherings – one in September 2016 and one in February 2017 – looking at some of these issues within the Work That Reconnects. And I’ve had a great desire to share learning with the wider community about it, but I’ve struggled… with how to talk about it and how to articulate it. So when Molly proposed working on this journal with Ann Marie and Patricia I just felt so grateful and relieved and excited at this opportunity, so that’s some of why I said yes.

Ann Marie: I think that when Molly asked me to be an editor, I said yes immediately because there was so much that I knew needed to… I knew that the Work That Reconnects needed a lot of work around white supremacy. Just because white supremacy is so ubiquitous in everybody’s experience from the time we are born, you know, it determined where I was born because my mother had to go to a different hospital, because she was African American, than where she worked. I just know that my experience from a very early age has been different than from white America and I know that my perspective is much broader because I live in two worlds.

The Way It Was….Mobile, Alabama, 1956 | Series 1/5
A family taking a break at segregated water fountain. Gordon Parks, photographer.

You know, I live in the world as a descendent of a slave, and that’s very… and I see the remnants of that every day of my life, whereas white people, I believe, not because of anything they’ve done, but just because they’re born in this culture where the momentum is there already. The momentum of white supremacy is already there in this culture that we’re all born in.… so that momentum just gets picked up by everybody born, no matter how well-intentioned and it’s internalized. It was internalized by my parents being the descendants of slaves and the descendants of stolen native people and the descendants of their oppressors’ rapists. I’m visibly black and mixed race due to those circumstances and each one of those situations has influenced my existence and when I went to the Work That Reconnects I do a lot of filtering like oh, that, when they did one thing in particular, the Gathering the Gifts of the Ancestors, you know I filter out that some of my people were… you know they were hunter gatherers for a long time and they didn’t go through the different phases that white culture calls normal, they have stayed hunter gatherers for a long time and worked with the land differently and settling and doing the kind of farming that Europeans did.

And I also… it was also very difficult being in those two ten-days because of the way that white people doing this Work… the way that they handle racism sometimes is well-intentioned but very painful for People of Color and I thought this would be a chance to address that audience that is trying to deal with issues of white oppression and are doing it in ways that need, still need some work because they still need a lot of healing and also to just… I, yeah, maybe even to keep reiterating the point that race is everybody’s issue. It’s not an issue for People of Color, but it’s an issue for everybody. And white people are impacted by racism in really intimate ways as it forms their egos and it’s very damaging and it’s very deep and it can’t be just brushed aside and left behind because we’re not in a post-race culture and we won’t be until we make efforts to heal what white supremacy has done to everybody. So I said, “yes.”

Patricia: Thanks Ann Marie, and Aravinda. So when I was invited to be on the editorial team, I wanted…, I was curious to see what it would be like to work with both of you and I was interested in exploring that.

Also I’m, I’m so aware of how unconscious bias works and I’ve been working with it a lot in my own life and also with lots of different communities and groups and organizations and that’s been my experience with the Work That Reconnects is that a lot of people are operating from a place of unconscious bias and I thought Deep Time journal is a great venue to elevate some of those unconscious ways that we engage into a higher level of awareness so that people will be able to notice it more easily and readily and my hope is that that will impact our capacity to do the Work in a way that is more culturally based and I agree with Ann Marie that very often that notion of racism or race gets relegated to communities of color, like that’s a problem for them… for us.

In reality it’s a problem that was established by the owning class of white men who started the United States, that some people call founding fathers. So it’s embedded in our history from the very beginnings, from the moment of contact between Westerners, and again primarily men, and indigenous people on this continent, in Africa, in Asia. Everywhere that settlers went, well first conquerors and colonizers, and then settlers, the same patterns of behavior and attitudes toward the people who were already there emerged. And it continues to be infused in so many of our interactions because it was normalized from the very beginnings of these interactions, and so I see it a lot in the Work and the people who are facilitating the Work and in the people who are participating.

And it lands and impacts people in very significant ways and I think that the Work That Reconnects because it’s rooted in a systems approach is a perfect context in which to look at systemic forms of oppression, and so I think that, I am hoping that this issue will be a way for people to begin to explore that from a place of curiosity and I really hope that it doesn’t come from a place of shame, because nobody is served by that. And so, the way, I’m really interested in and excited about the way we are laying out the issue because I think People of Color would benefit from, or could benefit from a kind of support and guide for how to navigate the Work. And so your story Ann Marie is pretty common, I mean Aravinda your story of one or two People of Color in a group of twenty or twenty five seems to be what the formula is, certainly was in my weekend workshop. And last summer when we did a ten-day that Joanna asked a couple people to help co-facilitate, People of Color, there was a very intentional commitment on her part and Anne, Anne’s part to make the group more diverse, and so that changed the way the Work got done.

So I think that this is an opportunity to explore and to kind of spread the seeds of exploration of what it means and it builds on the two meetings that folks had to, to look at this question of decolonizing the Work That Reconnects and I deliberately did not want to call this issue “Decolonizing the Work”, because decolonizing has now become this high fashion terminology. Everyone’s trying to decolonize everything and we’re doing it generally with colonized minds, and so the decolonizing process – people don’t understand what the colonizing process is – and so it’s difficult then to try to decolonize anything if you don’t understand in the first place what the elements of colonization are, and so I think it’s become sort of a hip thing, particularly since Standing Rock and I am not interested in feeding that frenzy, and that’s why I want to look at… why I’m excited that we’re calling this the issue that really explores the impact of race and culture on the Work That Reconnects.

Patricia: Yep, I would just add Ann Marie that I also think capitalism is the third stool. So it’s you know, misogyny, racism and oppression, and capitalism.

And I have always been that with white people not wanting to hear that because they’ve invested a lot, maybe invested a lot of energy into whatever culture that they’re, what I call, appropriating. And I don’t even think that when this happens that it’s even healthy. One, because I think that when there’s just some kind of action and reaction to hurting people and… at this point in history it’s not the time for people of European descent to take anything else from People of Color. And it’s just a painful act for People of Color and whether White people want to believe that or not, it’s still a painful act. When I reached a certain age, when I started seeing patterns, it became painful for me to see White people appropriating from my culture and I think that just on an energetic level you cannot get any kind of good medicine from the culture that you are taking from when you are hurting the people. For that reason alone, I believe that people who do appropriate may think that they are getting medicine, but I think energetically it’s, it is a net loss.

And there are other reasons too, but I think at this time I just wanted to put it out there that there is a lot of pain when I go to gatherings and somebody whips out a Djembe drum and I don’t, even if I… I will just be blunt and say that personally, I don’t get the same kind of healing from it that I do when I hear… just like when I play it myself, or when I’m in a circle with other people of African descent playing the djembe drum, I get medicine from it or I get healing from it. I remember once when I was just listening to these drums in the background at an event and I said to another Black woman, “Why is that, what’s wrong with those drums?” And I’m not trying to cruel or anything, but this is what I said, and I turned around and it was a person of color leading them, but it was White people playing the djembe, and I think that there might be some kind of… there is something standing between, like when you have this energy floating around of… of taking, there’s something standing between you and whatever it is in the culture that is supposed to heal, there is something standing between you and that healing. And that is why the drums were just irritating instead of healing when I heard it.

And I say this a lot and it hasn’t landed on fertile ears from white people so far. I mean they haven’t taken it in at all. I mean, and I don’t know, some do, you know, but most of the people who are engaging in taking culture from other people, which is what I call it, and there’s probably some momentum behind why it’s so irritating and hurtful to me now that in 2017 that momentum is just, one of the things that needs to be healed.

And so when people, as people are recognizing that they’ve lost that, and so often you know in my experience White people will say “well, I don’t have a culture” and that’s why they’re drawn to other cultures, and in my experience it’s indigenous culture, but I know that it happens in other cultures too… So when we can’t understand that there’s the yearning, which is real, and the ways that we attempt to address that yearning or fulfill that emptiness that we feel from being separated from our indigeneity, we try to fill it with what looks familiar or looks accessible and so that’s why you have people doing African drumming or trying to do ceremony – indigenous ceremony – who you know, people who are playing other people’s instruments but also doing other people’s ceremonies and practices.

And I think that it’s important for White people to understand that they’re moving away, they’re moving against their own need. The need to find, to reconnect with their indigeneity is real; the attempts that they make at it are often not. So that’s why they can’t get the medicine, or that’s why they can’t… the hole that they are trying to fill doesn’t get filled by somebody else’s culture…. I think as White people begin to recognize that it’s not that their yearnings are something that’s wrong, it’s the path that they take to try to fulfill that yearning that does damage to communities of color and I agree that it also does damage to their souls.

And so I look at how my family walks around and I look at what we commonly call white privilege, I may be even rethinking that term because maybe we’ve all been wrong and there’s no privilege, because I just act like the karma police when I’m saying… You know karma isn’t real, that my family suffered more and then white people run around with a lot of living on the best land, having opportunity, having freedom, and maybe it’s not apparent that… I’m not saying that… I don’t want people to suffer, but it seems like Black people don’t get away with anything. You know? Like when I was a child, I couldn’t be a child. You know I had to, you know I’m not allowed to, like I was taught in so many ways how to act when I’m in public, you know this fearfulness because we’re not allowed to like just be free children. You know we’re taught ways of going through the world cautiously and not have the freedom of just running and screaming and having a good time or we’ll be thought of as threatening, and yea. But maybe, I don’t know, I just walk around with the feeling that karma is lopsided, but, somebody tell me that I’m wrong. I don’t know. OK. But that runs through my mind a lot, when I’m just, as a citizen of America that doesn’t feel like a citizen very often.

Aravinda: That’s real, Ann Marie, what you were just naming about a citizen who doesn’t feel like a citizen. I think that that’s real in Work That Reconnects spaces because the greater social systems that we are a part of show up in Work That Reconnects spaces. Work That Reconnects spaces don’t exist in isolation from all of the cultural conditioning that people have received over their lifetimes and so there’s a real inequality in that respect. I have a lot of appreciation for the way that I’ve heard Sarah Thompson talk about, she said “While we’re all in this together, we’re all in this together differently.” And so I think that that really comes to bear on the Work That Reconnects because there is a lot of emphasis in the Work That Reconnects in us all being on the same planet and a part of the same planet and all in this together in that way. And at the same time it’s true that because of systems of oppression and social conditioning, we experience things differently, dramatically differently.

And so there are a number of pieces up for me, one of which is integrating a greater awareness in reality into the context in which the Work That Reconnects is being done. So I’ve, aside from a trip to Canada, which is still North America, I’ve only done the Work That Reconnects in the United States. Things may be very different in other countries, I’m curious about learning what it’s like in other places. But there is this history of colonization, brutal colonization and slavery in America, and that wasn’t the history that was taught to me in public school when I was in school and so there is just this wild myth, I think, in reality and worldview that doesn’t match up with how things have gone out, dominant worldview in play that doesn’t match up with how things have played out. And so, yeah, that is present in the Work That Reconnects.

So one of the ways I would like to see the Work shift and evolve is with the framing and naming. The Work That Reconnects currently, the way it is framed, clearly names capitalism, and so bringing in those other two systems of oppression that were named earlier either as patriarchy or misogyny and white supremacy and racism – it would just make the Work that much more richer, for me, if it incorporated that aspect of reality.

And then the second piece for me about how people experience the Work differently based on their social conditioning is not only of great interest to me but also care and concern. Given my care and empathy for people, I want to only grow in that, and so one of the things that I am exploring with my upcoming workshop and working with my facilitation team, we’ve been working on some community guidelines that we’re going to propose to help set up a transformative learning community, so that when things arise, dynamics arise, harmful oppressive dynamics arise in our interactions, as they are likely to do so because the social conditioning comes with us everywhere, how can we engage them and be with them and not ignore them, and so this is really new for me, but it, it speaks to, I’m not remembering which one of you said it earlier, but the piece about healing. When harm has happened, how can we move toward healing and repair, and so naming it feels like a good first step, but that’s not the only step, so I just have so much curiosity around the Work That Reconnects that has this foundation in a systems approach, moving toward greater integration with exploring how systems of oppression operate and how they show up in workshop spaces and how can we dismantle them when that social conditioning shows up. So, those are some of the things that I wanted to bring in.

So, looking at what it means to be mindful or to pay attention to the dynamics that are happening in the room, and to create – I think the agreements is a really important way to – it can be a very useful way to get to some of this stuff. And I think having those agreements be really concrete – like, what’s the language we’re going to use when we notice that there’s oppression happening in this space. So that people not only know that they have permission to talk about it but that they get support creating the language that is then a shared language. So everyone agrees that when something happens, we’re able to say, whatever, you know: “Can we take a time out?” “Can we pay attention to this?” Whatever it is. Or “I’m noticing this…” Some concrete language that then gives people something to hold on to so that they can actually move forward and not feel paralyzed and because as Ann Marie said early on – People of Color are always the ones who are noticing, because that’s the legacy.

When you think about power, people in power rarely recognize their power, but people who don’t have power in a particular dynamic, never forget it. They just can’t, because it’s so… they feel it at every level, and the same it true in group dynamics when you have a community gathered and something is going on, the people who are perpetrating, don’t notice it. So that’s a practice and a discipline that you, that we have to cultivate to be able to pay attention in a way that recognizes both the intent and the impact, so that, and by having shared language, I think it helps people feel like they have permission, and more than permission, they have an invitation, to actually pay attention in a different way so that they can address things as they come up.

And it falls on the facilitators to not be so inflexible. You know, sometimes a facilitator comes in, “here’s our agenda – from 9-3 we’re going to do blah, blah, blah” and they break it down, and then something inserts itself, and they freak out. That’s my experience with Western colonized facilitators – that time becomes the prime focus and they lose all kinds of opportunities because their agenda is getting messed up. And so I think that that’s one really concrete thing that facilitators can do is look at how am I holding time and how am I holding the agenda so that what, and what is the objective, what kind of learning am I interested in seeing happen in this space. And if it’s collective learning, and if it’s restorative, and if it’s not extractive, and if it’s not colonizing, then they’ll be able to make more space for the things as they come up to be addressed, because I would say, even as we notice things, we often don’t create the space to address them, and so noticing them is not that helpful, if they don’t get addressed. It’s sometimes helpful for the people who are, you know in a dominant group, but it’s not that helpful for the whole group.

Aravinda: Thank you.

Anne Marie: Thank you. I am wondering how… I know that I have witnessed how painful it is for people to notice that they have been affected by racism and that even if you say, well you were born in it and it has the momentum of 600 years, as soon as I bring up racism, people are triggered, I’m talking about White people, and there is so much pain that they experience, that I just want to get up and leave the room and let them process it among themselves and not be there, for, for me to like take care of them or whatever it happens and I don’t know how, it depends on where people are psychologically, but I don’t know how somebody is going to notice that, that they’re in a position of power even, because it’s so painful, why would somebody be ready to go through that, I don’t know.

So he was asking the very question that you are asking Ann Marie, and what came out of that was a recognition that white people, because white culture is so hyperindividual focused, when People of Color experience a dynamic in the room, often they’re able to see it as a collective experience. Sometimes they experience it just very personally, but often they experience it more collectively. So when they report out what’s going on, they might start with “this is what happened to me,” but they then sometimes can see it as an element of the group collective behavior, and so they… so my suggestion to this young man and to the whole group, was that when somebody says “you did this or you said that and it bothered me or it hurt, or you know it felt racist, or sexist or whatever, homophobic, or xenophobic, or ableist or ageist or whatever it is, that you hear it and then take it.

Not just hear it, but really take it in. Then, in your mind recognize that it is part of a bigger system that you’re in, that you’re swimming in. Look at it through that lens of systemic oppression, so that you can have some distance from it, or a different lens on it is more accurate than distance, you can look at it through a collective and historical lens, so that it doesn’t bring you right to shame or defensiveness, it could bring you to curiosity or it could bring you to a kind of historical awareness, or whatever, it might generate a different response than personal shame. Or defensiveness. Because those two are paralyzing and they are useless for everybody in the room. And so once you are able to lift it up into a structural or systemic lens, then you can take it in again, personally and say, “so what’s my role? So I don’t have to take the whole weight of every, of conquest, and of slavery and misogyny and of all of that. I don’t have to put that all on myself. I can hold what I just did, in that context and then begin to address it, recognizing that it is not just me that’s an idiot. It’s me that has a colonized mind that has hurt somebody else who has also got generational trauma.”

So it helps to give it enough spaciousness so that you can engage it, rather than be afraid of it. So I hope that that’s one of the things that the facilitators of the Work That Reconnects are able to really get trained up in is figuring out how to recognize when dynamics are in the room and then how to hold them in a way that you can move through them toward healing rather than get paralyzed by shame.

And I think the Work That Reconnects gives people an invitation to go deeper – to go deeper in their relationship with the world – and the world includes historically marginalized and currently marginalized communities. And there’s a difference between doing that on a philosophical level and doing it for real. So, my invitation to the Work That Reconnects is to stop trying to be perfect and work harder to be real. Because once we’re real with each other, these conversations can happen in a way that people can grow and actually create the kind of transformation that we’re all looking for.

Aravinda: Well that feels like an excellent note to potentially wrap things up.

Ann Marie: Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

Patricia: Great.

Aravinda Ananda resides in occupied Massachusetts. She is on a journey of learning how to come into right relationship with Earth and all beings and seeks to assist others on this path. She calls her life’s work Living rEvolution and has been working on a book of that title for the past 10 years – asking the question – at this late hour, how do we each want to show up and give ourselves in service to Life, in service to healing, liberation, justice and transformation? She frequently co-facilitates with her partner Joseph and is currently a part of the leadership teams of the northeast US Interhelp Network and the evolving worldwide Work That Reconnects Network. Coming back into sacred relationship with the body of Earth through food is one of her passions. Monetary appreciation for her work can be directed to: PayPal.Me/LivingrEvolution