Good morning. Today, I wanted to bring up a topic of great moment and also of the moment, which is ending racism. Racism will end. And so it's just a matter of how we can hasten the day. And what from our practice, what we can bring from our practice to that effort. And of course, I'm hoping not to torture the people of color in the room with my words. Actually, I don't want to torture anybody. And I especially don't want to exasperate the people of color in the room. So a few years ago, a couple of years ago, sometime, I don't remember exactly when, there was this thing that went around to various sanghas.

[01:12]

It might've been on Facebook, might've been in Lion's Roar, I can't really remember. But it went out to what we call the convert sanghas. So we may have had Asian teachers, but we converted to Buddhism as adults or youth. And in particular, the message was to the white people in the convert sanghas, just because often those sanghas don't reflect the same diversity of their neighborhoods or their environments, their towns, their cities, et cetera. So, you know, we really don't want to be replicating disturbing conceptions that are actually what we came here to liberate ourselves from. And the tone of this, to me, as I remember it, I remember the tone was sort of like, come on, white people, we need to up our game here.

[02:18]

So there were some of us in the sangha, we were sort of like cornering each other and saying, shouldn't we do that? We wanna do that. We should do that. Let's do that, you know? And it took a while. Oh, and I just wanted to say that this is a real thing of like bringing self and others across, right? Because if I, as a white person, raise my consciousness about this issue, I'm freed again from these flawed and toxic ideas. And also I'm making space for people of color in that, in freeing myself. I'm making space and helping free others. So, um, so I'm just saying it's very congruent with our practice to be looking at this issue. So, um, we were muttering to each other for several months and finally we, then Alan brought this curriculum.

[03:28]

So this, so the idea is there's this white awake curriculum. And it's a six part thing. And so a group of us sort of identified each other and we started to do this. We worked our way through this curriculum. And the idea was that we would sort of pilot it because we didn't feel Like we knew enough to sort of offer it and that we could lead, we could lead such a process, you know, so we thought, well, we'll go through this process and we'll learn about it and then we'll offer it to the Sangha. And I know there are many, many, many other people in the Sangha who would be interested in such a thing. And so actually if you, I'm just putting a public service announcement here, if you are interested in pursuing that in the future, Judy Fleischman and Peter Overton sort of convened where they were sort of the touch point for our group and they are willing to take your names and keep in touch with you.

[04:34]

So, the way I feel about my own white privilege, it's like somebody sold my soul for me and gave me the money. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm gonna take your soul, you don't need it, and here's $5,000. And I'm like, wait, what? Or I'm like that Jack Benny joke, your money or your life? Well, I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Or maybe I'm even like, no, don't do that. Give me my soul back. But I'm spending the $5,000. I keep spending the $5,000. I can't figure out how to stop spending it. And I think that I would, if I was faced with that choice now, just cold, I think there's at least a better than 50-50 chance I would make the right choice with everything I know now about my soul and about privilege and access to resources and everything.

[05:45]

But that's not how it works, right? They get you when you're a kid, you know? I, because I raised two kids, I had the opportunity to observe, you know, a whole cohort, a couple cohorts of children. And what I observe, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree, children are little bundles of desire, right? Intense, passionate, raw desire, unmediated by the frontal cortex. And I can imagine, you know, I don't know if it's not exactly put this maybe this directly in words, but in the fable that I'm making up a little sociological fable for you this morning. You know, if I was told, if we were told, you get more because you're the boy. You get more because you're the oldest. You get me more because your skin is paler.

[06:47]

You know, I think most of us are like, whatever, just give me the candy, right? We don't care about the reason. We're focused on the candy. And maybe there's a few people who get into the reason, like, oh, I'm the boy, or, oh, I'm the oldest boy, or, oh, I'm the pale skin, I'm the pink skin, I'm the white skin person, and make a little station for themselves out of it. But I really think most of us are not thinking that way. We're just thinking, whatever, just give me the candy. And then maybe, let's see. It's actually kind of hard to teach sharing to children, to teach the value of sharing. So like you've got a ball, and a ball is a really cool thing. Mine, my ball. But then if you actually want to play, you have to let go of the ball and let the other kid have it for a minute, and then they have to let go too, right?

[07:52]

It's hard to learn. It's really, it's hard to learn. And, you know, then I think there's also a small percentage of kids or children or adults who instinctively from the beginning make a different choice, you know, make the other choice. I call to mind a couple stories. to encourage myself. There's the story of the little girl whose best friend had cancer and she shaved her head because her best friend lost her hair. It was not a sacrifice. It was a very joyous – I think I saw them on the Today Show or something. I saw them somewhere. It was a very joyous thing. And I also think of the story in the Special Olympics, you know, when one kid fell near the beginning, I think, and another one of the kids, so they're in a race, a running race, and one kid falls down.

[08:58]

And another one of the kids hears him crying and goes back and gets him, helps him up, and then they run over together. And again, a very joyous choice, not just for them, but for all of us. It's that... What matters, you know, what matters? The connection is what matters. Not winning, not being the pretty girl yourself or worrying about your own hair, you know? It's about what matters, right? So I was thinking, If racism is something people of color have to deal with every day, then I want it to be something that I have to deal with every day.

[10:02]

I don't, I can't, I'm not saying that my little fable about children really explains the entire kind of really astounding theft and toxic history and phony science and phony religion that has come into play and continues to come into play in white supremacy and racism. I don't have any explanation, but that's the one that I have felt my way into understanding for myself for now. And I'm happy to hear other people. what you feel your way into. So then the question is, what can our practice bring to the table here? So always, we start with mindfulness, and in this case also, starting with mindfulness. We always try to think, how can we bring our practice into our everyday life, right?

[11:17]

This is one way, this is how you do it. Mindfulness. When you are out and about, you're identifying people and different skin colors, right? Watching what your mind does, watching the thoughts that come up based on identifying the different skin colors or the non-thoughts. Thoughts and non-thoughts. I listened to this thing on the radio. This really is everywhere, I have to say. I don't know whether it's because I decided to give my talk on this, but it's everywhere. And I listened to this thing on the radio and it was saying that white people tend to think about their beliefs. Like, I believe all people are created equal. That's important. That's an important belief and I believe that. And we are somewhat careful. We try to learn how to be careful with our words.

[12:19]

And those are important. And according to this, people on the radio, people of color are also very tuned into body language, which as a white person, I tend to be somewhat unconscious of. For example, one of our members here told me that after this lecture, we're gonna go out to the tea table and have tea together. And she mentioned how one time, at least one time, as she was approaching the tea table, someone grabbed their purse and held it close to them. That's an example of being very unconscious with your body language. So it's a wonderful thing just for our own selves to not be so unconscious, to bring awareness and mindfulness to our bodies. And especially in this regard. Good for me, good for others.

[13:22]

So, I mean, we can't make it safe for people of color unless everybody is doing it, right? It's a permeable membrane here. So it's going to take real investigation, real study, real thoughtfulness, real mindfulness, history, the current situation, diving in, just really diving in. And we're lucky, we're so lucky right now because there's all this stuff, right? There's all these people's voices are finally coming to the surface. There's this big unfurling of voices. So you can do the novels, you can do the history books, you can do current events, you can do podcasts, you can do YouTube videos. There's just so much. And so to really Take this moment, you know, take this moment.

[14:35]

And I think that we really need to bypass guilt and shame in this regard. And actually, I think more accurately, guilt and shame are kind of a bypass in some way. I think that, so when I let myself not be bypassed by guilt and shame and just settle into information, reading these various books, and it's hard, there are some of them are hard to read. The history is kind of hard to take, at least for me, I notice. If I bypass the guilt and shame, I feel really, really sad. That's the main feeling. Really, really sad. Sad about what's been lost, all the harm, all the pain, all the suffering, and the wrongdoing of perpetrators and how that's going to roll back to them with suffering.

[15:48]

You know, I feel angry and I feel hopeless, sort of like angry, hopeless, angry, hopeless, angry, hopeless. But in between, in the middle, sadness, real sadness. I meant to, when I brought up the mindfulness, I meant for us all to take a moment of mindfulness. So let's do that now before I go on. I've thrown a lot at you. Let's just feel how we're feeling right now, turned up or not. When we do mindfulness, it can be our body and breath. That's our anchor.

[16:53]

and then feelings, and then our ideas and thoughts and memories, fantasies. Another great practice, particularly for those of us in the privileged position, is sympathetic joy. I think that part of the, I'm thinking of it kind of like infection, the infection in my mind of racism is to sort of feel like that's the norm and that's the center stage is the white person and then the supporting players, you know, or something like that. So now we're in a time when there's more center stage of different kinds of people, different looks, different colors.

[17:57]

And so some people might feel a clutch there. I don't know. I was raised, personally, I was lucky enough to be raised to fight racism, so I've always I felt a lot of sympathetic joy, you know, down through the different eras. But I understand how someone might not. And then, and that's the time to practice sympathetic joy, which is a wonderful practice under any circumstances. It's what we do if we feel that little clutch of envy or jealousy. Not to deny, not to deny, you know, start with how you're feeling. But then if you connect, if you can connect with the other person, then there's that joy bubbling up. And it's real. It can be an energy source and a place to return to.

[19:03]

Another practice, this is if we really want to blow our minds. You know, the Tibetans have this practice of imagining that with reincarnation all down through history, everybody's been your mother. And they mean it in the good sense. Sheesh. You know, everybody has nurtured you or been the person you feel most connected to. And so we could do that. We can imagine that we've all been every color of person at some point in history. We've all been the settler. We've been the Indigenous person who had their land stolen. We've been this enslaved person. We've been the enslaver. We've been the forced laborer. We've been the enforcer. And so when we, we don't have to identify so strictly, you know, like actually when we think of as Buddhists, as Buddhists, we can feel a lot of kinship with indigenous wisdom, whether indigenous African or indigenous American.

[20:25]

As Buddhists, I can feel a sense of my ancestors. You know, I went to this panel that was like the indigenous grandmothers, and one of them was saying that her grandmother, her practice that she received from her grandmothers was generosity, humility, and present-mindedness. I mean, sound familiar? You can't get much better than that, right? And so I can identify. The reason why I identify with the settlers more than the indigenous people is because of the $5,000, right? I'm getting that. I have that $5,000. It links me. Otherwise, I would pick the present-mindedness over the $5,000 every time. So I'm winding down here a bit.

[21:34]

One of the things we read in our group, one of the pieces of curriculum was this article that was in the Atlantic Monthly by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it was called The Case for Reparations, and I would recommend it. It's one of the best things. I recommend it as one of the really best things we read of many good things. And so it's a long, it's a very long, well-researched and it has a lot of history and everything in it. And so, but at the end, he comes to this paragraph where he says, and so we must imagine a new country. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt, a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal, a revolution of the American consciousness, and a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

[22:50]

So when I read that, for some reason, what I thought of instantly was our bodhisattva ceremony that we just did. And I was thinking, is there a way to do some kind of, to do a ritual? Could there be a ritual that would address this issue in some way? And in my mind, you know, ritual can get underneath things. go to a deeper place. So I, you know, in support of my pals in this group, I worked on this, on a revised version of the Bodhisattva Ceremony with some very specific language about racism and looking at the precepts, specific ways precepts have been broken and such. And we actually tried it out a few days ago. We're gonna make some changes and I think most of you know I'm gonna be going to Tassajara for three months pretty soon.

[23:59]

So sometime when I get back, we'll offer this to people who are interested and try it out and continue to explore the ways we can have a spiritual deep spiritual revolution as part of this project. I wanted to close, so what we ended up using, the ceremony, I found it kind of heavy. It's intense to hear about these things that have happened. And so we ended up using as what we call the echo or the dedication of merit, this thing that Alan found in Shantideva, who was an Indian monk. He wrote this thing called the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life. It was one translation.

[25:02]

Anyway, I'm gonna read it to kind of, it's sort of a vision for the future, maybe. May all beings everywhere, plagued by sufferings of body and mind, obtain an ocean of happiness and joy through the merit of this ceremony. May no living creature suffer, commit evil, or ever fall ill. May no one be afraid or belittled with a mind weighed down by depression. May the blind see forms and the deaf hear sounds. May those whose bodies are worn with toil be restored on finding repose. May the naked find clothing. The hungry find food. May the thirsty find water and delicious drinks. May the poor find wealth. Those weak with sorrow find joy. May the forlorn find hope, constant happiness and prosperity.

[26:04]

May the frightened cease to be afraid and those bound be freed. May the powerless find power and may all people think of benefiting each other. Shall we have some discussion? Karen. Well, I could. I could do I could give you one. Since the beginning, killing and many forms of violence have been used to enact racism, including attacks on indigenous people, enslaved Africans, other groups of color.

[27:09]

And we decided after the test that we're going to list more lynchings, prison killings, police killings. So it's kind of a call and response, so that's the call. And then the response is, we vow to protect lives, prevent and protest all forms of killing and violence, and work to make amends for what has been lost. That's just an example. Yes, Sojin? Yeah, so I mean, I'm making something different. I'm not making something less personal, more like, how could we own what's happened that we didn't do?

[28:10]

How can we make it bigger instead of it being personal? I mean, I think those people are dead. They can't. do anything about this. So we're the only people who can do something. Mary? Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Could you describe a little bit about what the curriculum or what the process was? Yeah. Yeah. So there were So there was this readings and it went over kind of like your personal experience and then history, institutional racism, and what can be done, what we can do now, or what is being done, what you are doing. And then, so we did the reading and then there was some dyads. The meeting would often start with, after we sort of convened, we'd have dyads. with particular prompts.

[29:12]

And then we tried different things. We tried, there was, you know, just discussion, open discussion or counsel, which is a more controlled kind of discussion. I think that we're, other people in the group can say we're, we, I don't, I didn't love all the reading. Some of it, some of it was so good and some of it was just to me kind of light, too light, you know. And I think that, you know, there's this woman Rhonda McGee at USCF. She has this thing called Color Insight. She has like really mindfulness practices directed about this that are more specific. I think we could maybe mix some of those in. So we're kind of like wondering what to keep and what to replace with other things that we might think are more effective. You know, it's so six meetings. I mean, it's that big, you know, and it was just a beginning.

[30:16]

Alan? I meant to say that. Thank you. opportunity to One thing that somebody said in one of those readings that has been a touchstone for me is like, no one's ever done this before.

[31:47]

I mean, people have been fighting racism since the beginning and they've had different eras, there have been different approaches and there's a lot of inspiration coming from the past, but at the same time, we're going to make mistakes. We're going to blow it and maybe this talk, you know, maybe I blew it with this talk or maybe it'll be food for information, you know? So we just have to kind of go forward with our sincerity and our best effort and our sympathetic joy. John? We all do this all the time, and what Bell Hooks suggests is that we white folk get together alone and embarrass ourselves privately before we completely reinforce the stupidity that we've been practicing for decades.

[32:55]

So, that said, I think we should all take a vacation and go someplace like Club Med and work on it. Yeah, you got $5,000, so you can afford it. Peter and Judy? It's also my experience that everywhere I look, this topic is about bookstores, and TVs, and movies, and discussions with friends. And somehow, I don't know whether that's real or it's just a change because of what you do for a living. But it seems like there's a wealth in the way in which you can handle it. Sue was before you, and then Judy. Hi, Sue. I appreciate that a lot.

[34:38]

I'm glad to see it. right? right now jim here uh... the the joy

[35:58]

and the anxiety around how I perceive myself and how each of us perceives ourselves. So even when I hear this word people of color, for me what comes up is if I were to hear the word Jewish, since I identify as such. And here's someone speaking for me, so to speak, as a group of Jews are like this, and we should listen to Jews, and to use that word, we. And I think one of the things that I really learned, and I'm still really deeply exploring in this study group, is just to be willing to say that, you know, and look around the room away the peg, this is the box.

[37:20]

And at the same time, we swim in these seas of construct. So, I was talking with Lynn Fine, who's a co-founder of a group called Mindful Peace Building, and then the founder of Songbird, who's a teacher. And one of the things that Mindful Peace Building did was have a roots retreat, and that's what it was called, to go down to And I'm talking about going to other sites of great suffering and transformation. And sites of refuge. And so that word is really kind of with me when I... The word roots. The word roots because it also encompasses our relationship, our, right, how I identify, with the trees and the smoke. It's choking, and how to be with that as me, and you, and we.

[38:23]

So I feel like this phrase that I think in Radical Dynamics, How much time do we have, Gary? Oh, hi, Andrea. It's a good question.

[39:26]

It's on my mind a lot. So that's one way it's different. I think I'm more, I'm more aware that I mean, these are weird ideas, just like other weird ideas that I practiced with that come more personally from my childhood. And so, it's very moment to moment somehow. And I don't know how, you know, I mean, I have, people of color that I love. And I hope that this will make me easier to deal with. I don't know. So I don't know. That's a really good question. I'm going to think about that. Thank you.

[40:55]

So another? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Many years ago, when the song got smaller, and I asked everybody what their backdrop was, some people didn't know what it was.

[42:27]

Some people didn't know what it was. Thank you. I feel like I was instructed to make sure I didn't go over and I haven't seen anything from you. Is it because... Okay, okay. Gary, then Denise. And each of those things, just being aware of my feelings inside, the compassion that comes up in me for when somebody is hurt, is so strong compared to what it was when I was 30 or 40 years old.

[43:51]

I mean, what you're bringing up is self and other, right? I mean, whatever, under any circumstances, the suffering is there when we're stuck in self and other. We're confused about same and different, we're stuck in self and other. So, yeah, looking at that. Denise. And my mother had been reading books from international stories about children around the world.

[45:37]

So all of that, along with my ancestors, who were quite British, and traded with the Indians when they were told not to. All those things, I was thinking about how it contributed to who I am today, and my ancestors, and my father's side of the cuisine, white privilege. And to kill Native Americans and French people. All those things. That said, forget about that, is we do have a choice. We can do something with our white privilege. We can do things like spend out several hours a week with people of different backgrounds. We can say hello on the street to people and be kind. We can do those things every single day. They're available to us. I was just going to the EPS store, and I saw this guy getting into his car, and he was African American, and he had a pair of boots on, and I just

[46:49]

streets fighting for helping Muslim people in some way. And I held a big event, a nice single person. Thanks. Deb? I think it's such a human trait to, at a glance, try to decide if someone is similar or different.

[48:46]

Whether it's a matter of clothing, or style, or class, or many, many different signifiers. And in that moment, it was such an opportunity for self-awareness as opposed to self-consciousness. And it seemed like a way to bring our practice to individual interactions in a way that we can continuously notice when we think someone is different than someone, or even the same than someone. I want to append my comment with the thought that when we speak of we, as we do any of this work, that we only means all of us in this endeavor. there might be some group of white people who get together and discuss self-awareness and bias and et cetera, but I like the idea that when we're talking it has to be purely community-based.

[49:54]

Right on, right on, yeah, right on. Megan? Did you find, in the course of the work, any sudden awareness of something that you could give love and help yourselves? I think as individuals, we all did. Yeah, I think so. I can't call anything, I mean, I've talked about some of mine here this morning. I think a lot of it is about the we, the pronouns. I mean, like you hear yourself saying, They and we, the Native Americans are they and the settlers are we. And then you realize, well, wait a minute, I'm not connected to either of those. Why is it that way? And then it's, you know, I mean, it's complicated. So I think that we all had moments of, yeah, Tim was in the group. Maybe he wants to say something. practice and all that stuff.

[51:32]

I think we're done. I'm happy to talk to people more outside.

[52:31]

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