"love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters."
Join Rev. angel with all other Internationally recognized leaders bring to life a curriculum that spans topics ranging from body shame to abolitionism, from embodied ecopsychology to somatic resilience.
Monday, March 28
3-4:30pm PT / 6-7:30pm ET
Join the revolution of coming home to deep connection and rediscovering how it can truly transform our lives and the world!
Register now:
https://see.revan.gl/esjc2022
Rev. angel has joined as Director of Strategic Development for the upcoming Embodied Social Justice Certificate program.
Hosted by The Embody Lab, the certificate program brings education and practice together through a substantial curriculum, embodied community lessons, and over 20 internationally recognized instructors. The ESJC goes far beyond “summits” that present on similar themes, but are not connected.
Explore a body-centered approach to collective liberation and heal the wounds from injustice and transform social systems in yourself, your community, and beyond. Learn more in our ‘Meet the Faculty’ event on April 1st and join the ESJC journey.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams joins Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas as one of the panelists on an online course on Dr. James Cone’s groundbreaking book Black Theology & Black Power.
From their website:
It has been more than fifty years since the publication of the Rev. Dr. James Cone’s groundbreaking book Black Theology & Black Power, yet the concerns and themes raised in this book continue to resonate today. Reflecting on his book, Dr. Cone wrote “I wanted to speak on behalf of the voiceless black masses in the name of Jesus whose gospel I believed had been greatly distorted by the preaching and theology of white churches.” Through this two-day course, the Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas invites students and community members to reflect and study Black Theology & Black Power in light of where the country and church are today and its transforming implications for our faith and actions. Notes: Pass/fail. Cannot be taken for reading credit. Auditors are expected to attend all class meetings.
Please join us for a frank conversation between Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Rev. Kosen Gregory Snyder as a part of this ongoing series on Dharma and Justice at Union Theological Seminary.
In his teaching regarding the eight fold path, the Buddha used the word, sammā, to characterize view, intention, action, speech, livelihood, mindfulness, effort, and concentration. Usually translated as “right,” the word can also suggest thoroughness, connectedness, and wholeness. How do we understand the work of justice in this way? How can we meet our violent histories and current realities from this place of right justice that endeavors to heal without reproducing false harmonies and relationships of subjugation?
Each day will feature a morning session (11am ET) and evening session (7p ET) to help anchor our days in shared practice and courageous conversation.
Wednesday 9/9: Creating Brave Space
Evening: Creating Brave Space, with Micky Scottbey Jones, Michelle Johnson, Carinne Luck, and Kerri Kelly.
Thursday 9/10: Healing The Whole
Morning: Rase-based caucus, with Micky Scottbey Jones, Michelle Johnson, Carinne Luck, and Kerri Kelly.
Evening: Healing the whole, with Ruby Sales, and Rev Dr Jacqui Lewis.
Friday 9/11: Showing Up For Each Other
Morning: Honoring our collective grief, with Stephanie Ghoston Paul, and Michelle Johnson.
Evening: Showing up for each other, with Prentis Hemphill, and Francisca Porchas Coronado.
Saturday 9/12: Building a Politics of Care
Morning: Finding your place in the movement, with Carinne Luck.
Evening: Building a transformative politics: how we win, how we govern, how we create the future, with Nelini Stamp, Rev angel Kyodo williams, Anasa Troutman.
Sunday 9/13: Resilience for the Long Haul
Morning: Resilience for the long haul, with Micky Scottbey Jones, Michelle Johnson, Carinne Luck, Kerri Kelly and special guests.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Rusia Mohiuddin co-facilitate their signature breakthrough embodiment/somatic-based training: Practice Justice in a 4-day retreat format.
The Practicing Justice retreats use a somatic lens to un-layer, unpack & reveal the many ways oppression limits our ability to align our leadership with the values & principles that drive our work. By awakening deep understanding, this training enables individuals to generate new pathways towards a whole & complete shape that can hold our true individual & collective leadership potential in service of our liberation.
Somatics is a methodology that combines the biological & social sciences to provide a framework for analysis & action. at its core, somatics posits interconnection & balance of mind, body, & mood.
The use of somatics in leadership, begins by examining unconscious practiced behaviors, established by our interactions with family, community, & society throughout our lives, that blocks us from taking empowered action on our own behalf & ultimately aligning our behavior with our values & principles. it continues by establishing physical, emotional, & mental practices that shake up & shed these binds.
Applications are welcome in this site: http://universalpartnership.org/apply-pj/
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Just as London was beginning to be set ablaze by Blackberries, I was bracing myself for the current Hollywood reboot of Planet of the Apes. The 2001 remake starring Mark Wahlberg left me mortally wounded, having claimed itself a “revisioning” of the original story and movie, it managed to not only leave every racist/colorist myth in place, it was elevated it to a spiritual plane by being robed in pseudo-Himalayan garb so that the apes were a cabal of ill-compassionate, slave-owning monks and priests. It was one of only two movies I’ve ever walked out on with my only regret being that, at the time, I still harbored some naive hope that it would play out differently than it appeared, such that I suffered through it for far too long. Hence my as-yet-unhealed scar to this day.
In my defense, my wariness was not solely the product of ancient wounding. The earliest trailers for the movie depicted the apes in a decidedly more ominous tone. They were clearly no different than the “copycat criminal element” that has rained mayhem down upon London. My mind conjures up images of Dean Winters, who personifies Mayhem in the ticklish Allstate commercials. Rather than one intrusive black-faced raccoon inhabiting the roof, there are thousands of carbon copy black Dean Winters with hoodies and cellphones coming out in droves to inhabit every imagined safe corner of the UK’s big cities.
It was all well and good when it was just the downtrodden Tottenham, home to a similar outbreak in 1985. Police and politicos swore it was isolated to the disenfranchised few using the death of Mark Duggan as an excuse to spruce up their wardrobes. It wasn’t conceivable that it was a spark in the tinderbox of social unrest that lines the overcoat of the world.
There’s been much commentary about how caught off guard the UK prime minister David Cameron was by the unrest. What this conveys to me is that he is sleeping through a revolution. The world as we know it is in revolution. Literally a wave of discontent is encircling the globe country by country, region by region, both dismantling and reorganizing lines of class, culture and caste.
Who “the People” are changes at every turn—indeed, in the movie, they aren’t even people, but they are the People—the People are the shape-shifting stewards of our humanity who rise up cyclically to counter the forces that would have us tread backwards in our evolution by vying to protect the status quo. They are slaves, farmers, migrants, workers the world over that see the abundance of earth’s resources hoarded by privilege so rewrite the lines of distribution to carry us one step closer to achieving humanity. It is invariably a painful process as it meets with resistance borne of fear. But it is inevitable. We are a forward propelled species. Stagnation is death.
Oscar Grant, Khaled Said, Mark Duggan:
Unjustifiable deaths are the symbolic awakenings of consciousness. The cathartic cognitive break brought on by the disruption of meaning-making. We can no longer make meaning out of the conditions we find ourselves in.
We’re prone to miss this moment as revolution because its form is markedly different than what we typically look for. There are no leaders, no central figures. And with humbling executions of grace, there is comparatively little violence. Even from Mayhem, the gangs, guerillas and gorillas.
And still…this revolution beckons and calls for our evolution. It is:
and we will not rest until we get there.
Our consumer-driven culture has wrenched the vitality out of life so that it no longer matters that—as the prescient King noted—I may not get there with you. I’m willing to take the blow and the fall if it means you’ll get there. And like Caesar, I’ll exercise compassion for the unwilling participants of a system in which the only true enemy is oppression. But someone has to get there.
So apes will rise, and we will fight our way across bridges and through blockades to return to the place where our eyes can survey the land in safety. Where our minds can rest easy and our breath can rise and fall in freedom. The place where no one has to come to save us from being lost amongst our own kind.
—yours in truth, aKw
dedicated to all the People that strive on behalf of our humanity.
angel Kyodo williams, the “change angel,” is Founder Emeritus of Center for Transformative Change. She now serves as a Senior Fellow and Director of Vision. A social visionary and leading voice for transformative social change, she is the author of the critically-acclaimedBeing Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace.
Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
Facebook: Like angel here
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Web: http://angelkyodowilliams.com
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Tunisia. Egypt. Yemen. Bahrain. Libya.
The last few months have borne witness to a powder keg of successive uprisings by Arab Peoples throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The desperate act of a Tunisian vendor—setting himself on fire in protest of his cart—and means of livelihood—being taken away—was a stand for self-determination that has been amplified by Arab People reclaiming their dignity one county at a time.
If nature abhors a vacuum, then indeed, it resists none more persistently than a vacuum of natural selfhood. When the breaking point of lack of fulfillment meets with the illuminating function of self-awareness, human beings, like nature, seek to restore balance.
When this happens collectively, We Are All Khaled Said…
…and the People rise.
This (r)evolutionary imperative to see manifest condition in which one can thrive is more ancient, more deeply rooted, and thus more powerful, than the inclination to oppress others for one’s own warped sense of self-gain.
In a global, media-drenched world, awareness of self is expedited by the sheer number of other self-expressions to compare one’s own expression (or lack thereof) to. Thus the cycle of being lulled to sleep by paternalistic promises–only to be rudely awakened by a nightmarish loss of freedom–is quickened. We come to terms more rapidly with the reality that as soothing as it may first appear when we are young and naive, we do not want to have everything taken care of by the Great Hero Father. Hence our empires rise and fall more swiftly than ever. Dictators, monarchs, aristocracies and elite parties beware: you are remnants of the past even before you take your corrupted seats these days. When your fabricated means of distraction falls away, the People will rise.
Beyond survival and security, self-determination is the underpinning of justice. When corrupt leaders falter on the first two, the last is the restorative penance that must be paid. Beyond simple survival, being able to determine our own path is the hallmark of self-expression, self-fulfillment, and most importantly, self-love.
In insisting upon the removal of decades-long dictators, the People reclaim their fundamental, inalienable right and responsibility to determine their own path. A right they have come to recognize has been obscured and hampered by individual men projecting an image of themselves as the sole reflection of an entire People:
It would appear to the untrained eye that these Arab Peoples were ruled by different men, but to the eye of the astute, each dictator was a differently dated carbon copy of the other, and all of them mere proxies for fear.
But the People eventually stay the Iron Fist, lift the veil and see the cowering figure clinging to power is neither God nor Hero, just a small, desperate man. Emboldened by their commitment, empowered by their collectivity, liberated from the shackles of fear, the People rise to find liberation from the shackles of oppression.
Questions abound as to how the all-knowing US didn’t see such a wave of revolutions forthcoming: America’s deep-seated racism and perceived religious-cultural superiority conspire to make the quiet swelling of a sea of brown and black People calling for their freedom with fearlessness, grace and unwavering determination a political improbability. To see them do it in succession, leaving the realm of mere anomaly? Impossible.
Having paid so much to keep them divided, we simply lack the imagination to conceive of Arab Peoples bonding together in solidarity to restore the dignity and rightful place of their own. How else could we justify funding the suppression of their beautiful brown selves for so long? How else could we be so confused as to whether we should continue to underwrite Mass Muslim Control rather than proclaim the side of the People the only righteous side to be on?
Even as we witnessed it with our own eyes, we clung to our reductionist, divisive values: it was the youth, it was the educated, it was the middle class, it was the non-religious. No matter that many of the largest protests formed after Friday prayers. Even more un-humanizing, it was Facebook or Twitter. Make no mistake: no matter the vehicle or tool, it was the People.
The brown, red, black and yellow People of this country can learn volumes from the hopefulness and vision expressed by our Arab brothers and sisters. If invested in transformation of society beyond the policy win, past the campaign, despite the funders, our own organizers can benefit from the study of revolutionary change—rooted in the mass power of collective love for the People that unifies, coupled with the individual compulsion for self-determination—that will always eventually transcend fear.
When that happens, we the People, too, shall finally rise.
—yours in truth, aKw
dedicated to the power of the People. may they rise again and again.
—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)
angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.
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Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart
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