discrimination

contemplating sunset with …Valerie Brown

Today, I would like to share the words of Valerie Brown, How to Fight Without Hating:  Lessons in Power and Love. Valerie is an ordained Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition and a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). 

‘“Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love.’  
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

‘“Get in trouble: good trouble, necessary trouble.’ Congressman John Lewis

“As Black and Brown people, we are in the fight of our lives.  Our lives are constricted by systems and structures that foster discrimination and injustice. The legacy of violence, especially unlawful police violence, perpetrated against Black people, Asian people, indigenous people, people of color, differently abled people, people of various gender identities and expressions and sexual orientation, and others who are marginalized, is our constant reality. This is compounded by the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Asian, Latinx, immigrant, un-housed, and low-income communities, which are among the hardest hit, grossly under-resourced, and devastatingly vulnerable.  

“Our hearts and our supports are broken open by grief, fear, and anger.  How do we fight injustice and not hate?  How do we fight injustice and support ourselves?  How do we deepen our resolve for a more just and equitable world in an unjust and inequitable world?

“Recently, I attended a gathering of more than 600 Black and Brown people hosted by Liberate, an app designed to support mindfulness and mediation for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and BAME Black Asian and Ethnic Minorities).  The speaker was Ruth King, an important figure in mindfulness community especially among BIPOC. She guided us through a powerful meditation, calling us to invite the power of our ancestors and descendents to guide, protect, and support us, and to engage our innate inner resources and resilience toward a strong and calm heart.

“During the hour-long deeply healing and moving Zoom video conference session, an important question emerged from the chat:  

“How do you fight injustice without hating?

“Initially, I was intellectually intrigued by the question, which then settled in my own heart.

“How do you fight injustice without hating?

“In the Plum Village tradition of mindfulness meditation founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, hate is likened to seed that lies dormant in the consciousness of the mind, along with many other kinds of seed-like emotions, including despair, shame, indifference, openheartedness, warmth, delight, and many more. These seed-like emotions become ‘activated’ by thoughts, words, and actions of life’s daily events. For example, someone cuts you off in traffic; the seed of anger gets activated.  You have an uplifting conversation with a friend; the seed of gratitude is touched. We live our daily life this way. 

“In Plum Village mindfulness practice, we learn to notice and become aware when these seed-like emotions are touched within us, to notice what the emotion feels like in the body, and to bring awareness to the feelings and bodily sensations, taking care of these emotions by calming and soothing the body and mind. 

“Taking care of the emotion of hate is an ongoing, daily, and moment to moment practice, especially now at this time when Black and Brown people are under attack from unlawful police violence, unconscious bias, and disparate treatment of Blacks during the COVID-19 health crisis.  As a Black woman, my daily practice is to notice the sensation of hate, which often feels like a flush of fire in my face that spreads across my chest to a dull pain in my heart.  I recognize that this sensation ripples outward in my body, in my words, and in my action. With this recognition and insight, I begin not only gain agency over my feelings, my words, and action, I recognize how I can support myself. 

“So, what is skillful action is required at a time of hate, fear, and violence?

“Congressman John Lewis has said, ‘Get in trouble: good trouble, necessary trouble.’  These are times that call on us to get into ‘good trouble’, which eradicates unlawful police violence and oppression, which dismantles social conditions of health disparities among the most marginalized people, which challenges deeply discriminatory educational systems.   These ‘good troubles’ include taking to the streets in peaceful institutions, exercising our right to vote, and bringing communities or color together to heal and to act.

“As an individual and as a society, we have been given specific instruction from countless people who sacrificed their lives through the Civil Rights Era and other social movements in how to take compassionate action in the face of violence, anger, and fear.  We are instructed to meet police violence with non-violence.  We are instructed to meet racist structures and systems with diligence with inner resilience born out of compassionate action.  We are instructed to meet hatred with an open heart and to cultivate heartfulness because love, compassion, kindness, and peace are bigger than a heart constricted by hate, discrimination and violence.

“This is the skillful action toward radical power and love.”

Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC

Skyscape image created with Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/320s 28mm 400 ISO edited with Capture One 20

geography doesn’t create justice….

My mother once described a job interview for a dietary postion within a small community hospital in which she was asked if she could cook. She described how she  directed the woman’s gaze to the various pictures of her children that were placed about her living room and invited the woman into her kitchen to show her that she, indeed, as a mother did and could cook.

This question, was experienced by my mother as an example of discrimination…a prejudice of deafness.  As I listened to my mother’s story, I understood the question as appropriate to the job. What I interpreted to be discrimination came from the environment in which the interview occurred…not at the hospital, but within the privacy of her own home.

How many job interviews take place within a job applicant’s home?

Being a child of my mother’s and a female, I believed I came to understand discrimination, oppression, and  marginalization, both personally and through my mother’s life stories.   As a child, she was required by state law to attend a deaf school and initially attended a school that was close enough to the family home to allow for weekends with the family.  Yet, because the school was located out of state, she had to enroll in a state school much further away,  Consequently, she was then only able to be with family during specific holidays. This is of a time when letters were her only course of connection with her family.

Also, the school she attended had a policy prohibiting communication through the use of sign language as a means to assist the students to fit in with the “hearing world.”  I smile today, remembering her pride as she described the opposition to this policy.  She and her classmates would gather together in an attic, at night, to teach one another how to speak in sign.

The events of today have invited me to reflect upon my own behaviors — and even my reaction to my mother’s job interview experience —  and to see them as being influenced by discrimination, marginalization, and oppression especially in light of my understanding of “microaggression.”

Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership. In many cases, these hidden messages may invalidate the group identity or experiential reality of target persons, demean them on a personal or group level, communicate they are lesser human beings, suggest they do not belong with the majority group, threaten and intimidate, or relegate them to inferior status and treatment.

…microaggressions are active manifestations and/or a reflection of our worldviews of inclusion/exclusion, superiority/inferiority, normality/abnormality, and desirability/undesirability. Microaggressions reflect the active manifestation of oppressive worldviews that create, foster, and enforce marginalization. Because most of us consciously experience ourselves as good, moral and decent human beings, the realization that we hold a biased worldview is very disturbing; thus we prefer to deny, diminish or avoid looking at ourselves honestly. Yet, research suggests that none of us are immune from inheriting the racial, gender, and sexual orientation biases of our society. We have been socialized into racist, sexist and heterosexist attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. Much of this is outside the level of conscious awareness, thus we engage in actions that unintentionally oppress and discriminate against others.

~ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/201011/microaggressions-more-just-race

 I have come to realize that to there are no benign questions…and that a small section of my indignities towards another arise, in part, from my own denial and ignorance.  Awakening to the suffering of others and to the unintentional harm I have caused others brings tears to my eyes as well as leaves me floundering in how to apologize.

It is my hope this sharing of Br Phap Man’s video, “Inclusivity and Justice”, is a small step  that brings about a healing awakening that overcomes walls of various shapes, formations, and sizes.

I am them, they are me

EmptyName-219web

The awareness of “I” emerges from a reflection of the stream of experiential consciousness that awakens when one becomes aware of being observed by an internalized watcher or seer who is felt but never known. This wavering consciousness, an “I”, knits together streams of memories, thoughts, feelings, and interactions in such a manner that formulates an awareness of continuity, striving, identity, as well as an sense of other.

Buddhist psychology suggests that the personal self that we experience, perceive, and conceive arises from five material and non-material elements: our bodies, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. These five categories of self introduce us to the nature of our being. We are the five and the five are us. Whatever we identify with, whatever we hold to as our self, falls within this collection. Together they generate the whole array of thoughts, emotions, ideas, and dispositions in which we dwell, “our world.”

Buddhism notes that these five elements, neither singly or collectively, constitute any permanent unchanging self, nor is there to be found any self apart from them. Hence the belief in a permanent solid self proves to be a mere illusion as we find a self riddled with gaps and ambiguities that appear coherent because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our minds.

Taking this discussion further, when we hold a rose we see that it also is composed of multiple elements, some tangible – leaves, stem, thorns, petals, stamens – and others intangible – scent, color, memories.  If you were to remove any of these constituent parts, would you find an consistent, unchanging entity know as “rose”? As we are unable to find a permanent rose in the absence of any one of these parts, we are also unable to find an enduring rose in any one of these elements.

deconstruction2

Contemplating the absence of an enduring and solid rose, is the mental “knowing” of the rose within the dynamics of I, the subject, and the rose, the object. To hold a rose is also to hold in your hand all the elements that make up both the tangible and intangible: the sun, rain, soil, eyes, nose, touch, consciousness, etc.

Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, “When we look at a chair, we see the wood, but we fail to observe the tree, the forest, the carpenter, or our own mind. When we meditate on it, we can see the entire universe in all its inter-woven and interdependent relations in the chair. The presence of the wood reveals the presence of the tree. The presence of the leaf reveals the presence of the sun. The presence of the apple blossoms reveals the presence of the apple. Meditators can see the one in the many, and the many in the one. Even before they can see the chair, they can see its presence in the heart of living reality. The chair is not separate. It exits only in its interdependent relations with everything else in the universe. It is because all other things are. It is is not, then all other things are not either.”

sunbursttree2web

The words of Thich Nhat Hanh invites me to imagine the multiple phenomena present within both the rose and chair—sun, earth, rain, bacteria, worms, horticulturist, carpenter—to list a few. When I explore the elements within the horticulturist, my mind visualizes parents, doctors, teachers, grocery clerks, farmers, machinists, seamstress, etc. To extend this contemplation to the seamstress brings me to consider what elements are within designer labels: silk, bombyx mori, Chinese sericulture, organic nutrients, incubators, glass containers, designers, paper, sewing machines, laborers, mulberry trees, and the person who identifies herself with designer labels.

So…what elements are within a person who has an interdependent relationship with the phenomena of designer labels? If we were to remove all of the elements within labels what or who would actually be removed and what sense of “I” would remain?

What kind of world would it be if she and I came to honor and respect our interdependence with the seamstress, migrant worker, sales clerk, janitor, secretary, unemployed, homeless, negated other, rose and chair? If she and I saw that “I am them, and they are me?”

In summary, I draw upon Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing, “…An awakened individual vividly sees the non-chair elements when looking at the chair, and realizes that the chair has no boundaries, no beginning, and no end.

” …To deny the existence of a chair is to end the presence of the whole universe.

sources:
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun, My Heart
B Catherine Koeford, A Meditative Journey with Saldage

discrimination…

“Further, O Mahamasti, the five categories are: Appearance, Name, Discrimination, Suchness, and Right Knowledge.

“O Mahamati, what is Appearance? Appearance is what is seen in colors, forms, figures, which are distinctive and not alike, –this is what is called Appearance.

summeriii

“O Mahamati, depending upon this appearing of things, there arises Discrimination, saying that ‘this is a jar’, ‘this is a horse, a cow, a sheep, etc.,’ that ‘this is such and such’, ‘this is no other things’ –this, O Mahamati, is called Name.

“O Mahamati, depending upon these objects thus named, their characteristics are distinguished and made manifest, whereby such various names are set up as cow, sheep, horse, etc. This is called the Discriminating of mind and objects belonging to mind.

“O Mahamaati, when one surveys names and appearances even down to atoms, one never sees a single reality, all things are unreal; for they are due to the Discrimination stirred up in one’s deceiving mind.

“O Mahamati, when is known as Suchness is non-emptiness, exactness, ultimate end, self nature, self-substance, right seeing, –these are the characteristics of Suchness.

“By myself and the Bodhisattvas and [other] Buddhas who are Tathagatas, Arhats, and All-knonwing Ones, it is said that though names differ the sense is one.”

An English translation of an excerpt of Bodhiruci’s translation cited in, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, pp 26-28.

https://youtu.be/QpIPgQPfQp8?t=6s