In August the community at Deer Park Monastery in Escondido California, a mindfulness practice center in the tradition of Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, offered the practices of mindfulness as tools along the path of healing in a cultural sanctuary for People of Color. The everyday injustices of implicit bias, micro and macro aggressions cause trauma for Black and Brown bodies daily in our society. Finding justice and balance, healing our bodies and minds from past and current trauma inside and outside, is necessary for thriving, peace, and health. For retreatants the questions came: can we practice mindfulness in everyday life after we leave the sanctuary of a retreat space? On retreat we may begin to walk for 4 or 5 days mindfully- aware of our feet as it touches the earth, watching the number of in and out breaths with each step, walk without talking to focus on the steps- but how do I continue this at home in the midst of the chaos of life’s many impingements, difficult situations? Can we eat a meal in silence when we return home- reflecting on where the ingredients came from, the nourishment being provided, chewing our rice instead of the next task we have in front of us? Can we sit quietly, for short or long periods, noticing the breath as it enters our body and distends our abdomen each day? Can we remember to take a breath the next time we are aware we are angry or fearful and notice what happens to the mind and body after that breath? Can we allow the breath to help us become aware of the knots and tensions in our bodies, using this same breath energy to open these knots and bring balance? Can we practice these little acts of remembering to begin to calm the mind and body and create space to be able to choose which thoughts we will follow and which we will let go? These are the daily acts of mindful living we practiced together at the retreat, cultivating healing, justice, inside and preparing for continuation outside once returned home.
With an intention to change the triggering that is currently abundant from racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and other forms of discrimination and gun violence our small group break-outs at the retreat were named like this: the name of a recent fallen person was paired with an ancestor/elder of renown in social justice. This pairing was intended to help us train the mind by changing the imprinting, and immediately take care of a painful trigger in the world; with strength and love of community and prevent the movement into a deeper trauma. For example, Freddie Gray was paired with Audre Lorde and the name Freddie Lorde evolved. During the retreat the name of a recently killed black trans woman-Skye Mockabee- was added to this name to be held by the power of activist ancestors and it became Skye Freddie Lorde. One of the victims of the Orlando shooting- Amanda Alvear- was paired with Geronimo resulting in Amanda Geronimo.This pairing offered retreatants an opportunity to hold the pain triggered by these recent violent patterns with the power, love, and resilience of our collective ancestors while honoring those fallen today. The names were paired in no intentional order to emphasize the intersectionality of our struggles for justice and lifted up the collective power-the matrix of power- enabled when we bring our activist ancestors together across struggles.The intention was not to repress the pain but to flip the script and offer skillful tools to help retreatants connect past and present struggles for justice and prevent the continuous imprinting of re-trauma. While not exhaustive, these historical activists sought justice from the very same injustices and inhumanity for which our contemporary brothers and sisters are still victimized.This type of sacred activism provides the spaciousness that cultivates love and healing on the cushion and off the cushion. With a heart slowly healing and opening we can then step with less fear and greater resilience into the pain while bringing the energy of love and strength of our ancestors to embrace and transform: spirit in action.
Similar sanctuaries must be offered for our white brothers and sisters to heal and to transform the suffering of hearts too long dominated by fear and separation. The safe cultural spaces for POC and non-POC allows us to unpack the individual and collective traumas so that when we come back together we can be more compassionate, not trigger each other, and act in more life-sustaining ways from a greater understanding. When we find justice inside we become an offering of justice outside. Without such individual healing sanctuaries we will continue to come together without understanding, unhealed, and predisposed to causing each other harm. Retreatants learned that in order to participate in healing the challenges outside of us, we must simultaneously heal ourselves of our traumas and seek like-minded communities on this path of healing; in order to do this we must understand and heal the history that brought us to this pain today. Relying on external means only-like policies aimed at structural racism- to transform racial and other social injustice have proven insufficient. This is evidenced by continued individual and systematic racism like the death of two black men by police last week; a widening of the gap between white and black wages.The path of self healing and inner transformation to ensure a collective transformation, social justice, remains the one that we have yet to try and therefore the revolutionary one. Dare we be spiritual revolutionaries? These cultural sanctuaries offered at retreat centers like Deer Park Monastery are revolutionary acts of sacred justice, a way forward for individual and collective liberation.
