Rev. angel Kyodo williams

"love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters."

interviews

Inhabiting Multiple Spaces

By

An interview with angel Kyodo williams

By Garrison Institute

In an upcoming “Garrison Talks at the JCC” event in New York City on August 10, “Bridging Spirituality and Activism,” Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg will discuss challenging questions about the relationship between personal and social transformation. How do racism and privilege prevent our collective awakening? How can each one of us affect the shortcomings not only of our own minds but also of our communities?

Leading up to this event, we spoke with williams about how she approaches these questions and others in her new book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

The central message of Radical Dharma is that personal and social transformation must be brought together, with an extra emphasis on those who have been historically marginalized. Do I have that right?

That’s certainly an aspect of it, but what I mean first and foremost is that the way that spiritual truth has been held in this country has been partial. People have chosen to look at particular aspects of spiritual truth. The statement that I’m trying to make in Radical Dharma is that we actually have to have a complete lens on the way in which we show up for everything and that includes how we show up in our social presentation.

Can you say more about the particular aspects of spiritual truth that have been emphasized? What’s missing?

What’s been emphasized are personal and, to some extent, interpersonal spheres of behavior and understanding. If something is inside the known sphere of my comfort zone—or relative comfort zone—then I can look at it. If it fits inside of all the ways that I have chosen to organize my worldview, then I can apply the spiritual teachings. But if it doesn’t fit inside of my worldview, then I won’t apply the teachings.

Radical Dharma‘s message is about applying spiritual teachings and truth to the entire sphere of what makes up our lives. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about is when people talk about “right livelihood,” but they don’t look at capitalism. They think, “Within capitalism, I’m going to apply these teachings.” This approach takes capitalism as a given. This is a neat cordoning off of my known sphere of awareness. I might add that this works in multiple directions. Inside social justice activist circles, someone might apply their sense of truth towards social liberation, but not necessarily to their own self-care.

Many of us find ourselves participating in systems that lead to suffering—we’ve been talking about capitalism—and want to do something about it but don’t know where to start. How do you do something about capitalism?

There is wisdom in asking, “How do I respond given my particular situation and location and reality?” That question arises out of the choice to see things clearly. How one person should approach answering that question would be different for another person—for example, it’s going to look differently for people in different places on the the income scale. Another example is that I’m not ready to tell someone that is an Alaska Native to be vegan. On the other hand, most of the people that have free access to protein-rich food choices should probably step away from so much meat consumption.

There is wisdom that arises out of the willingness to look at your situation clearly. You can look at your situation in a radical way—look at the systems that compose your reality—as opposed to picking and choosing what you pay attention to.

Can you say more about the importance of bringing personal and social transformation together? Do you approach them in different ways?

In some ways they are the same and in some ways they are different. For the aspects of a social problem that touch you personally, teachings on personal liberation are helpful. There’s a way to avoid becoming so overwhelmed by an emotion so that you’re unable to actually see a thing clearly. But that does not mean that all will be resolved by navigating only our personal anger when there is also a reason to have collective anger—and that collective anger is powerful resource of energy that can be directed. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement had to maintain a certain kind of stance that we would call angry from a social perspective in order to sustain enough energy to be taken seriously. The organizers didn’t allow the anger to consume them personally and individually, but the movement could not suddenly run off to Martin Luther King forms of non-violence and peace and happiness, because we’re not there yet.

There’s a kind of arc in our personal anger that can allow us to transmute it into a powerful response on the collective level. And in many ways, in order to get to the collective levels, we actually have to do the work internally so that it is not consuming us personally. In fact, it becomes sort of like faking the anger. You inhabit a space, but you’re not attached to that space as representing who you are, who we are, or whoever the “they” collective is. You can say that the expression of collective anger is actually skillful given certain conditions.

It sounds like you have to be able to hold multiple spaces at once.

Yes. An interesting thing about racialization in this country is that groups of people that are marginalized are much more used to inhabiting multiple spaces. They’re much more accustomed to belonging to both a collective as well as being an individual. And, frankly, they’re much more often viewed in terms of their collective identity.

So are you suggesting that the teachings need to be adapted in different ways because people inhabit different spaces?

It alters everything, right? This is why we need diversity in teaching. If you’re not accustomed to inhabiting space in a collective identity, you don’t know how to teach about inhabiting space in a collective identity. You don’t know how to teach about navigating the emotions of a collective identity as opposed to the personal identity. It’s not about shaming people who teach in a certain way. It’s just to say that one of the reasons we need diversity is because you wouldn’t even know how to speak to certain particularities. In the same way, I wouldn’t know how to speak to the particularity of being a person that’s of the original nations of this land. I can point at it, but I don’t have the grieving sense of the loss of a connection to these lands that my people once owned, and so on. I have other experiences and can teach accordingly.

Beyond Privilege: a Q&A with angel Kyodo williams

By

To make diversity real, says Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams, Buddhists must look deep into their own hearts.

Brooklyn Zen Center executive director Greg Snyder has spoken of a mind-meld that’s gone on between you and he, and BZC guiding teacher Teah Strozer. Let’s talk about that connection.

I’m a New Yorker. I lived in Fort Greene and had a little sitting group, an offshoot of my main practice home of Village Zendo. Coincidentally, I called it Brooklyn Zen Center because I believed that the practice could arise in the community, from the community. Most places of practice that I saw didn’t feel like that. They had a feeling of separateness. I knew that in order for Buddhist practice to take root amongst peoples not defined by a particular Western, white, middle-aged, middle-to-upper-middle-class construct, the practice had to go and meet people and not just expect them to come and find it.

ajdavis_20140920_47591
Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams. Photo by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

I eventually went to California, and coming back and finding that this Brooklyn Zen Center was really doing the work of welcoming was an incredible relief to me, especially because they were doing it in such a compassionate, humble, present, and transparent way.

 

How does that way manifest?

Many centers say, “Oh, we want to include people so let’s invite them to come.” But because we, as Western-worldview, dominant-paradigm folks have not done our work, we actually don’t know how to be welcoming. An invitation is a gesture. Welcoming, though, is open-armed hospitality. It’s in the heart. I think that what Brooklyn Zen has that many places don’t is in its leadership: people who continue to truly examine their own hearts and are willing to address the barriers and the hindrances to being welcoming.

How can we make fundamental changes in ourselves so that we can be welcoming, not just inviting?

Meditation is awesome, but it’s not fast enough. People need to get trained. Training amps up the intensity, bringing things intentionally into our view so that we can work on what’s there to be worked on.

What will that training help address?

The paradigms and the worldviews of white Western privilege, which have been developed for no other reason but to bestow privilege on a very small group of people and to create separation. That’s what the construct of whiteness was for right from the beginning.

This is not about bashing anybody for who they are or for their skin color. This is about a construct that was developed purely and solely in order to create separation and now that construct needs to be deconstructed. If we don’t do that, that separation will live on and it will do so, shamefully, in the midst of teachings that are so profoundly gifted with a language, with an approach, with a methodology, to unseat separation.

It’s been some fifteen years since you presented these issues in your acclaimed book, Being Black. Are you writing?

I am. [You can read an exclusive excerpt of william’s book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, written with Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, inside the September 2016 Lion’s Roar magazine. —Ed.] One thing I’m working on, that speaks directly to all this, is a book about my own shocked recognition that I have spent many years—in the vernacular of black folks back to the days of slavery—keeping my head down.

How so?

By trying to stay smaller than was organic to the situation and to my experience, because I didn’t want to draw the ire of folks in the dharma world. And even though we don’t have any singular institution of Zen or Buddhism, there’s a power structure, one that is often unspoken. We can recognize it if we look at the Buddhist media and see who’s there—who are we being told to look at and listen to, and who is wielding those structures and who seeks to influence them. Many people I’ve spoken to say they don’t feel free, particularly folks of color and, in some traditions, women—each tradition has its own stuck place.

The apparent hierarchy that exists in some of our spiritual structures is there to support us but it’s being leveraged as a mask for power structures and privilege. In some places of practice it’s very male or heterosexual; in some places it’s other things. But pretty much all over the place, it’s pretty white.

So is what you’re writing part memoir, part guidance for feeling empowered enough to no longer be quiet, or, as you put it, “small”?

Part memoir, part guidance, and a lot of critique. I’m also working on a collection of observations on our society, through what people would call a Buddhist lens. I would just say a lens of liberation. I look at what gets in the way, including the parasitic capitalism that we have not just as an economic structure but also as a religious structure. Capitalism has become a religion—many religions actually deify it at this point—and because of that, we’re letting it run amok with no real thought about how to change it.

Does something like the People’s Climate March, which BZC was quite involved with, suggest that things are starting to turn around?

Hopefully the climate march is a disruption of a system that is consuming itself and all of us with it. The march did come from “the people”—it originated out of environmental justice organizations, not out of typical green groups and NGOs. It came out of brown and black and economically disadvantaged white communities, and indigenous peoples. It’s about across-the-board disruption. It’s about understanding that climate change is a leverage point for us to look at all of the failures, limitations, and places of separation and breakdown in our society.

What does “disruption” mean? Does it mean voting with our dollars? Does it mean that if we don’t like what’s going on in the media, we become the media? What kinds of forms will disruption take?

Everything. First and foremost we need to take back our power, and our power exists in our participation in all of these structures. It will be a challenge because we were weaned on this system. We are bred to consume. And, so, for us to break our own chains is just as difficult as it was for blacks to resist the slavery that they’d been born into for generations and was all they’d ever known. The idea was that that system would continue forever because, once you had bred someone into the system, they didn’t know anything else.

Are you hopeful?

Not in the sense of tomorrow, but I’m hopeful that the seed has been planted, that the irrelevance of the systems that continue to privilege small groups of people is laid bare now. We’re in this wonderful moment of going, “Oh, this doesn’t work. There are no winners in this.”

How are we going to convince the captains of industry that they’re not winners?

I don’t think we need to. It’s like, “How are we going to convince the plantation owners to let go of their slaves?” We didn’t. We had to snatch the slaves from their arms.

There’s no such thing as being neutral. You’re either playing along with how things are or you are disrupting them and turning them on their head. Those are the only options.

Pursuing the possibility of a new monastery, as BZC is doing, seems like a major step forward.

I don’t think I’ve ever been excited about a monastery before. [Laughter].

Why you are excited about this monastery?

Because I can see myself there, whether that’s my physical body or not. I think that Greg and Teah and the leadership will plant the seeds for a deep practice home. The Western Buddhist world has spent too much time saying, “Oh, if we want people of color to participate, we can’t expect them to do real, deep practice.” With that attitude, people of color will never be fully accepted. As soon as Being Black came out, I was completely chagrined that I had invited people of color, through the book, into a place that was not welcoming. The good news is that BZC rings true. And the monastery, if it happens, will also be a place that is welcoming, and that’s a start.

Read the original interview here: http://www.lionsroar.com/beyond-privilege-qa-angel-kyodo-williams/

“Nurturing Self and Activism” – interview with Omega

By

akw-public_headshot2.jpgRev. angel discusses the ways nurturing your sense of well-being results in outward action that doesn’t feel like struggle.

When we commit to acts of self-care, first we open up a channel of communication with our nervous system, current and past and future. We open up a channel with all three worlds of our self that says, “You matter.

In this interview with Omega Institute, Rev. angel speaks about the critical need for and value of practices such as self-care and stillness. She also reveals how the notion of “working with” situations and releasing the use of the word “struggle” liberates her action on behalf of all.

 

Read the interview here: http://www.eomega.org/article/nurturing-self-activism

“Social Justice and Buddhism” – interview with Omega

By

akw-public_headshot2.jpgRev. angel discusses how inner transformation is directly linked to social transformation

In this interview with Omega Institute, angel talks about how we can access curiosity, courage and vulnerability in our most difficult moments and thus foster the conditions needed to build a just society.

“The deeper we go into our suffering the more fervent the wish for the well-being of others. We act. We act because our inaction is felt as a participation in that suffering.”

— Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei

“How To Lead Like a Spiritual Warrior” – interview with Omega

By

angel sat down with Omega to discuss how we can lead like spiritual warriors

Rev. angel took some time with Omega Institute to discuss the ways we can “transcend the stories we make up in our own minds about ourselves and our shortcomings” and build a more just society. Read the interview and get timely insights on being an effective leader.

 

“If we’re willing to be complex in our solutions and our willingness to look at things, and not be slave driven by economic imperatives, and slow down and meet each other—we can do this.”

— Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei

akw-public_headshot2.jpg

How to Lead Like a Spiritual Warrior An Interview With angel Kyodo williams

By

williams_angel_kyodo_web_1An Interview With angel Kyodo williams

Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace angel Kyodo williams says we can be the kind of leaders that reduce burdens not create them.

Omega: To be a spiritual warrior—an archetype in all traditions—you’ve said we need to “transcend the stories we make up in our own minds about ourselves and our shortcomings…. It’s the labels that we apply and that are applied to us that box us in, break us down, and wear us out.” How does this apply to women, specifically, who want to act in service to the greater good?

angel: We all get handed these stories, right? Every one of us—we’re born into a family, a time, a region, a culture. We get handed a story about what we look like. As we express our capacities we get stories about whether we are more or less capable. Not only do we get individual stories, we get collective stories. We miss a great deal when we only pay attention to the story that’s been handed to us and we’re not intimately connected to the deeper story of who we really are—as Buddhists say, before our mother was born. We come encoded with a deep memory of who we’ve always been but when we arrive on the scene our focus is turned toward the external. We forget we have that operating information about who we always are.

In this society and age—even as we have fought and pushed back and challenged it—women have taken on the story of being inferior to men, of the inability to accomplish things without men. Many of us have taken on the story of needing men in order to feel complete in a sexual or romantic way, and the story of the impact that the treatment of men and fathers have on us. This is something that we carry forward with us and there are limitless possibilities of what kind of stories those could be, good and bad.

But we have been uniquely gifted as women with an embodiment of receptive energy—the ability to be receptive where stillness can arise. Feminine energy enables containing and holding and opening up the space to allow more and others in. Because—whether we do it physically or not—life ushers forth, creativity ushers forth, from the feminine. And because of that we are intrinsically oriented against destruction of life and of creativity.

Of course there are natural, creative destruction cycles. But because creativity ushers forth from the space of the feminine we know that it isn’t our role to interrupt the creative flow. So it is women that are much more likely to insist on the justice that is necessary for us to have a thriving society that is spacious and equitable for all people. Because the energetic life force ushers forth from us, we understand that it all has a right to be here and a right to thrive until it’s natural, organic cycle comes to an end.

So women have a responsibility to set these stories—that hinder our responsibility and limit our role as the carriers of creativity, as the generators of a greater and greater container that can hold all of life—aside.

Because these stories are fairly random, right? I got born this time to these people in this culture in this society. And I would have been someone different had I taken up the stories of another time, another set of parents, another region, another culture, another side of the country, speaking another language. So how much really of that is you? So why don’t we start choosing the stories that we’re going to take on? Why don’t we choose the stories that most enable and empower us to meet the fullness of our role and responsibilities as the energetic force that supports life and thriving and creativity?

Omega: Is this kind of spirituality an antidote to the “individualistic materialism” you say has become a form of religion in Western culture?

angel: Yes. Like a spiritual warrior, you have to get trained in the skills to interrupt this incredible organism of destruction. So I’m not saying people should just run out and start doing any old thing, but rather develop one’s capabilities. The capacity of the heart and the skill sets to be able to say, “I’m not going to be slayed by playing the game with a fantasy that that’s how to stop it.”

When we withdraw belief in the destruction, it will collapse. We have a deep habit. All the new books in science say if you want to stop a habit the best way is to replace it with a new one. If we can begin to work on strengthening the habit of tuning into, and moving, in love and self-care—healing the places of generational pain and suffering; healing the places of division in our own hearts that keep us separate from the people in our lives, and the people across the road, and across the border—if we develop those habits it will be much easier to divest ourselves of the habit of belief in this system of destruction.

Omega: How do leadership, power, and hierarchy function together in an equitable and holistic community?

angel: I think we’re naïve when we try to flatten something. Hierarchy is a natural response to the diversity of needs that exist in society and the diversity of attention in social orders. In order to focus attention and advance the needs of societies, communities, organizations, homes, families, etcetera, true leadership is a relief. Because it frees each of us to pursue the things we love with a sense of being able to entrust the steering of the ship—not over the edge of the world but pressing forth into the glory of the horizon and the possibilities of new oases of nourishment and places where we can have shelter and be creative and thrive.

So the best placed leadership reduces burdens rather than being a form of oppression. That’s the relationship I have to leadership and hierarchy in its best expression.

In the best situations leadership is not a fixed idea—one person leads forever. Rather an emergent leadership in which whoever is most suited toward the task at hand is the leader, people that came before or have particular capacities in that moment, and we all are developed and well socialized enough to follow well, be responsive to that leader, and relate to leadership not as something that hinders us but something that moves us forward. So we give over our full resources to make that leadership successful because the leadership is acting on our behalf. It’s not separate from us.

In terms of like social organizations, any organizations that want to engage in a just society that is in any contact with people that are marginalized must have those populations within its decision making body. Not just to act or advise but in decision making, meaningful capacities to exact power. Or those organizations and institutions are irrelevant. They’re just waiting to find out, because they’re already irrelevant.

It’s a very Eurocentric Western paradigm—we know what people need, so we know how people think. No, we need to know how people move in a space, how they sit at a table. Do they sit in circles or across from each other or in rows? All of that teaches the cultural expression and diversity. Diversity opens new windows of insight into how can we organize space for the whole. Everybody gives up a little bit of room so we can all fit into the circle comfortably.

As it turns out, we all don’t need the same amount of space so it doesn’t have to be equal. It has to be equitable. We don’t drink or eat the same amount. Some of us need to be in the sun more often. Some of us need access to art. We’re really different.

If we’re willing to be complex in our solutions and our willingness to look at things, and not be slave driven by economic imperatives, and slow down and meet each other—we can do this.

We forget. I fully trust that the people that seem like they don’t want to meet us have just forgotten. And we should hold space for them so that when they come to their senses and they remember, it’s safe for them and we’re not against them. We’re for them.

Read the interview here: http://angelkyodowilliams.com/talks/how-to-lead-like-a-spiritual-warrior-an-interview-with-angel-kyodo-williams/

Threading Anger Through Love

By

threading-anger-through-love_300x227angel Kyodo williams, Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, describes how we can practice shifting anger from a destructive to a generative force.

Anger is capable of pointing us back to love. It arises as a result of an offense to what we love. If we can use anger to reconnect to love, then that anger—the response that we have to injustice, pain, and suffering in the world—can be a generative force rather than a destructive one.

When we thread anger back through the core of what we love, the response can be fierce and powerful but not consuming. This is a very subtle point that is often not understood—that we can, in fact, have fierce responses that begin from a place of anger about injustices and pain that are greater than any person or community should have to bear. But, that anger must be taken and threaded through and then anchored and rooted in what we love. When we anchor it in love and allow ourselves to also be cognizant of the suffering that we are experiencing as a result of our loss, pain, and the injustice, we get back again to that place that doesn’t want anyone to suffer like we are.

So when yet another black child, teenager, or young person is killed, the response should be fierce. But if it’s rooted in love and that love is connected with a deep touching into our suffering, whatever the reaction, there’s no wish for destruction of life or for the suffering of others. Love has a wish for the deconstruction of that which is false and that which harms. That’s the right place to go. Love never expresses itself as wishing harm.

The nuance is challenging because anger is a fire energy. And it often burns so hot we’re not able to see through into love.

Looking Beyond Practice to Cause

I want to say, especially thinking about Martin Luther King’s quote about riots as a voice of people that have not been heard, that I’m making these observations within a privilege of not having had that amount of injustice hoisted upon me.

I would like to believe that if I were directly touched in a material way by these injustices, that having a practice and an understanding that arises out of that practice, would enable me to root my anger in love. To anchor it and take that thread and loop it in love so that my activity would manifest as a loving expression. But I cannot imagine or speak to what it means for people that haven’t had that practice and have had that kind of injustice. I can speak from the seat of comfort and privilege, but I’m not prepared to denounce in any way what it does to the human psyche, the human heart, when your humanity has been so denied.

I think we have to be careful about asking a humane response from people who have been dehumanized so often for so long, from the beginning of the building of this society.

We should endeavor to know what it is that produces serial killing at the rate at which it’s produced in this country, in this society. Do we blame the serial killers or do we blame the society when we know that the percentage is so high and so specific to our country?

I have a friend who says, “There is no personal experience.” There’s no such thing. And so I can’t demand of anyone a merely personal response. We can’t keep going along and saying, we are collective, we’re connected, and then say, but individually they should do X, Y, and Z. You’re not an individual. No one’s an individual. We’re all active in the web of actions, reactions, and experience.

Read the interview here: https://www.eomega.org/article/threading-anger-through-love

“Social Justice & Buddhism” — an Interview with Omega Institute

By

williams_angel_kyodo_web_1An Interview With angel Kyodo williams

In this interview, Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace angel Kyodo williams talks with Omega about the path from inner work to social change.

Omega: You’ve said, “The heart that hurts is the very same heart that heals.” How do we build a bridge from personal to collective healing, and apply inner gentleness to systems and structures that urgently need to alter?

angel: I think it’s incumbent upon us waving our flags about inner work during such a pressing experience of social ills and destabilization to respond—at least as best we can.

One main challenge of approaching transformation in society through inner work is that people think it means focusing on others: “If I feel this way about that person….” Then we’re up against a struggle to navigate all the people not in our tribe or chosen collective. Our society is broken and we are challenged with a systematic structure that has kept us divided. We mistakenly think the way to get beyond it is to have compassion for other people in a sort of bland way and it’ll all get better, but that hasn’t been working.

My sense of the path from inner work to social change is for each of us to be much more intimate with our own self, and the brokenness and suffering that we ourselves experience.

That’s not to be mistaken with a fixation on me, me, me, but rather a true, intimate relationship (which is Buddhism’s stamp) with our own suffering. When we touch suffering deeply, it becomes very apparent that we would not want anyone to experience the suffering. So that we’re not saying, “I know the suffering of my broken heartedness. I know the suffering of being witness to prejudice and people being marginalized and mistreated and denied opportunity. But I can’t touch them because it’s too hard.” It takes courage and practice and a developed capacity to really touch the heart of our own suffering because it feels uncomfortable. We’re not taught to tolerate discomfort—but quite the opposite—to get away from discomfort as quickly as possible and paper it over with television and Facebook and all manner of things.

So touching inner work to social transformation is about willingness and touching the heart of our own suffering, out of which arises an organic understanding that we would not want anyone else to experience such suffering and, therefore, we wish for their well-being. The deeper we go into our suffering the more fervent the wish for the well-being of others. We act. We act because our inaction is felt as a participation in that suffering.

Omega: Communities around the country are struggling to respond to violence with grace. How do you reach for curiosity as a tool to access courage and vulnerability in difficult moments?

angel: I access curiosity by being curious about my own feelings. When I enter a situation and notice that I’m experiencing discomfort or I’m disassociated or cut off from my feelings, I become exquisitely curious about that. Where is that feeling of disconnect arising from? What could it be? I follow it with the curiosity of a child. They don’t just run in and throw the closet open but follow the breadcrumbs of this tiny piece of experience: this way that my stomach feels clenched; this way that I notice the room got darker and more narrow; this way that I notice that dark face in front of me brings a little bit of quickness to my breath. What is it about this dark face that should bring a quickness to my breath? What is actually there?

You’re following breadcrumbs, not saying, “Hey, you’re some person I’m feeling some anxiety and fear about. I don’t know where it comes from, but let me come and hug you.” Rather, what is this experience of contraction or disconnect with the human being in front of me?

If I really feel out of sorts, I might get in touch with the grief that generally attends our loss of contact. If we’re feeling disconnected, right behind it—if we can stay planted right where we are instead of running away from the feeling and the space—we’ll notice that hidden behind that experience is a very subtle sense of grief. Because we’re fundamentally oriented to be connected to one another, so we can’t experience anything but grief when we are disconnected. Our anger and reactivity, our running away and taking flight—all of that is a result of being mortified that we’re having an inappropriate experience of our humanity. We are experiencing loss—a moment of disconnect from our own humanity.

If we are not trained, we may react by lashing out. Just like small children react to being frightened by screaming, crying, hiding in a corner, or running away. It is maturity that enables us to stay put and notice the sensations and be curious about where they’re coming from and follow the breadcrumbs back to the connection.

Omega: People often walk a self-conscious line between belonging in, or even “representing,” a larger community and expressing their individual uniqueness. Diversity is a strength, but many movements, and individuals, experience internal fracturing. How do we practice holism as individuals and collectively?

angel: Problems arise when someone gets the idea they have the right understanding or view on how the whole should express itself and doesn’t allow for the unique permutations that are the gift of diversity. We become controlling about how people ought to show up or do things.

On the other hand we can become obsessed with expressing our uniqueness precisely because we don’t feel like we belong. We can get overly engaged with the need to express ourselves. That’s a direct response to not feeling seen.

These two things are connected. When the whole doesn’t try to make everyone conform but realizes a plethora of diverse expressions of the whole as valid, then individuals can soften because they truly belong and they don’t have to assert an obsession around identity.

All we’re grappling with fundamentally is our sense of overwhelming separation. We’re just kicking and screaming and thrashing because we want to belong. And we need that, as a socially organized primate, right? We need to belong.

This society was built on division right from the beginning—division was not only fostered, it was constructed, then fostered, then institutionalized, and then concretized in law, in all ways.

Imagine a family unit—what would it be like for children to feel so cut off from what is now their family? To be told in so many ways, you are not really a part of this family. You don’t really belong here. We didn’t really want you. And if you are going to be here, the only way you can be here is at a great disadvantage, so that your lack of belonging is assured.

At the heart of what ails so much of marginalized communities, is how much they want to belong, which we never really say, and we don’t say that what ails so many white, hetero, cis-gendered men is their wanting to belong, and not. What if we could say, “Oh, here’s what’s happening: We are brokenhearted because we feel forced in this society to cut ourselves off from our humanity in order to maintain this outdated, always demeaning, dehumanizing structure that was designed to afford privileges and economic advantage to a few on the backs of many”? We all are graded in that way, and in pain as a result.

If we can’t belong, then we want to be special. We want to be a celebrity. We all have our own personal media platforms. How crazy is this? I’ve got four of them myself. It’s like The angel Show and I’m always directing and producing and writing and projecting out this angel critter. We just really want to belong and be seen. The social media and technological moment that we find ourselves in is such a very strong expression of exactly what is going on with us. We want to be heard. We want to matter.

Read the interview here: https://www.eomega.org/article/social-justice-buddhism