Healing Our Way Home

INTRODUCTION

As Black Buddhists and as members of BIPOC sanghas—communities of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color— we hold multidimensional lineages and cultures grounded in the lives of our ancestors that continue today to point the way to individual and collective love, compassion, resilience, liberation, and understanding. We have inherited gifts of song, land, wisdom, food, dance, poetry, stories, and other practices that support our daily lives. We honor this ancestral legacy that keeps us moving forward in our lives. 

We also know that we live in urgent times of overlapping crises: a recent global pandemic, climate chaos, economic inequality, heteropatriarchy, racial and political polarization, and continued “coloniality” (the set of attitudes, values, ways of knowing, and power structures upheld as normative by Western colonizing societies, which serve to rationalize and perpetuate Western dominance). These are similar and yet different crises from those our ancestors experienced. Our ancestors passed down ways of rising up and healing from the disturbances and destruction of their times, ways that can serve us in these times. We believe this book, made especially by and for BIPOC, is an offering to support us in reclaiming and remembering our spiritual roots. 

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We invite you to join us in exploring this book, to practice, to listen, rest, restore, experiment, play, and create new and nurture old pathways and practices, to be in community and to rediscover ease and well-being within yourself. This book is a resource to support you in acknowledging the fullness of your life as it is and in cultivating practices to support your spiritual growth.

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The connecting thread that brought the three of us together to write this book is that we are each students of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as practitioners and Dharma teachers in the International Plum Village Community and Order of Interbeing that he founded. Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced “tik nyat han”) is known by his students as Thay, which means “teacher” in Vietnamese. Thay was a Zen master who came to be known in the West for his work to end the American War in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Our Backgrounds and Spiritual Journeys

Valerie Brown: I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and on my street were people of many different backgrounds, cultures, and races: Puerto Rican, Haitian, Irish, and Italian. My parents were immigrants to the United States, my mother from Cuba and my father from Jamaica. All these groups of people lived on the same street. Everyone had relatives from somewhere other than Brooklyn. Everyone spoke languages other than English and, as a kid, visiting other kids on my street was like traveling from one country to the next: from Italy to Ireland to Haiti and so forth. I grew up with the idea that the world was a big and complex place with all different kinds of people. That experience laid the foundation for a strong sense of acceptance of people as they are, for a sense of togetherness and belonging even among differences.

My parents had a violent on-and-off relationship that left me fearful and insecure about what would happen to me. After years of struggling to make their marriage work, my parents split for good. My mother worked as a maid in the Hotel Manhattan and as a barber to support three kids as a single parent. Every penny went to send us kids to Catholic school, and I never spent one day in a public school. It was in Catholic school that I fell in love with the rituals of spirit, the scent of incense, and the Catholic Mass, with reading the Catechism, and singing. I loved the silence and stillness of daily Mass.

My life changed abruptly when my mother died when I was sixteen years old. My father returned but it didn’t work out. After months of physical violence and verbal abuse from him, I grabbed a sheet, got some of my clothes and things and tied them up in it, threw the bundle in the back of my boyfriend’s car, and we drove away from the house. I didn’t see my father or my brothers for years thereafter. I was eighteen.

I started running from myself, from life at that point. I was running from poverty, running from violence, running from trauma, running toward becoming somebody, running toward finding a sense of belonging that I’d had as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. The journey led me to undergrad, graduate, and law school and then to the ‘Big and Important’ Job as a lawyer-lobbyist. The only problem with the job was that it was killing my spirit and killing my soul. It was killing off a part of me that I knew was important but felt distant.

The search to reclaim this lost or hidden part of me led me on a spiritual journey that included taking solo pilgrimages all over the world, to studying Kundalini yoga, and then studying mindfulness meditation with Thay and the Plum Village community. However, it was that day I attended the public talk at Riverside Church that set me on a spiritual path of awakening and introspection about the meaning and purpose of my life. Unprepared and awkward, I began studying mindfulness meditation at night after work and on weekends. For many years I was a “closet meditator” and hid my practice because at the time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the practice of meditation was not widely accepted and certainly not so in the legal profession. After practicing for years with the Plum Village community, slowly I began to change from the inside out. The change came gradually, over many years.

There were many turning points, and one important event was a moment of great stress and overwhelm in my work life. Like many people, when I felt overwhelmed by stress and hit a wall, I decided to take myself on a hiking vacation. I chose the mountains of New Mexico. I climbed to the top of a big hill, took off my backpack, and probably for the first time in my life I really looked up at the sky.

I sat there motionless with my back against a fallen tree in a jaw-dropping moment of being fully present enough to see and to feel the sky and the clouds move in a slow-motion dance above my head. I thought: Where have I been all this time and not noticed? What was I doing?

In that moment I realized not only was I alienated from the natural world, but I was also alienated from myself. That day led me on a quest of self-discovery and self-transformation, which led to letting go of my high-powered career that paid all the bills but wasn’t serving my fullest potential. As scary as that was, I kept going, immersing myself in the study and practice of mindfulness meditation with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village community, Kundalini yoga, pilgrimage travel, and leadership development. Today, I am clear about who I am, what I offer, and how I can serve and support BIPOC and others who may be on a similar journey of transformation. These events led to this moment and the writing of this, my fourth book.

Kaira Jewel Lingo: I grew up in Chicago and Nairobi. My mom is Black, from the West Side of Chicago, (her people came from Mississippi in the Great Migration via Oklahoma and Wisconsin), and her family was working class; she was a first-generation college graduate, earning a teaching degree. My dad is white, from Houston, Texas, and grew up upper middle class. He is a Christian minister and lay Buddhist Dharma Teacher. Their backgrounds were distinctly different though they were both called to work for social justice and live a life of spiritual meaning and service.

My parents met in Fifth City, a globally recognized human development project on the West Side of Chicago that stimulated urban renewal and empowered this inner city community economically, politically, and culturally. They married in the early 1970s.

One of the biggest influences on me, after that of being born into an interracial family, is that my parents had entered a religious order that was a quasi-monastic life for families. They both took vows of poverty and obedience and raised their children in voluntary simplicity, as part of an engaged Christian residential community called The Order Ecumenical. The Order had a mission to renew the church, locally and globally, through living and working with the poor, and ultimately it set up human and village development projects in every time zone of the globe.

Though our community was multiracial and international, I was raised in a predominantly white cultural context. We lived outside of, and probably in resistance to, mainstream, consumer-driven, nuclear-family US culture, and even as many aspects of our lives were radically against the stream, whiteness was still the norm. As humans we are all a product of our conditioning, and so despite the best of intentions, racism, like sexism and patriarchy, were an unavoidable reality. This was decades before the deeper work of white awareness, unlearning racism, and dismantling patriarchy began that is so important and more commonplace today.

I grew up in an old, eight-story insurance building on the North Side of Chicago, transformed into residential housing for many families, and I was cared for communally with at least a hundred other children. As a child I also lived for four years over a noisy bar in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, and also in rural areas of Kenya, which gave me a first-hand experience of the huge difference in economic realities in the Global South and the Global North. As a teenager, I was fortunate to be able to spend a summer with a family in Puebla, Mexico, and later lived for a year as an exchange student with a family in Goiania, Brazil. These early experiences learning different cultures and languages opened me up to the beauty and power of Latin American culture and helped me not center the US experience as the standard for everything. Being in Brazil also gave me the opportunity to connect with the African Diaspora in my body and led to many years studying capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art, both as a capoeirista and as an academic.

I am also grateful that when I was with my mom’s side of the family, I soaked up the love and wisdom of five generations of hard-working Black women who put family first and foremost. The struggles and triumphs of my mom, along with my great-grandmother, grandmother, and aunt, and their gusto in preparing our delicious soul food Sunday dinners nourished me, body and spirit. Because my dad was a part of the Civil Rights’ Movement and worked closely with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), growing up I had the chance to spend time around luminaries like Coretta Scott King, the Hon. Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and others when we attended SCLC conventions and spent time in their homes as cherished friends. I read shelves of books about the Black Freedom Movement, all of which set me early on a path of seeking to understand and uproot racism, both for the ways it had helped to break my family and for how it cripples our society.

While we speak in this book from our shared Black and BIPOC experience, we are well aware that the Black experience is not homogenous. Just as there are many shades and hues of Blackness, there are many flavors and nuances of Blackness due to our various ancestral lineages, languages, religious practices, histories of migration, and cultural evolutions. I speak from the experience of a Black, biracial, multicultural woman who has also been deeply influenced by my white father and the predominantly white communities I grew up in and have been educated within. Growing up mixed, both racially, economically, culturally, and internationally, I have often had the paradoxical experience of being an outsider while at the same time able to fit in most anywhere. The economic, racial, and cultural advantages my father has and has been able to transmit somewhat to me, and my lighter skin give me a privilege I try to see clearly without shying away from it, nor taking it for granted.

I spent fifteen years as a Buddhist monastic, and this has profoundly shifted and given direction to my life. One of the things I have been most impacted by is the spiritual training we are each rooted in and speak to in this book. This spiritual practice has helped me to relate to and befriend myself and my emotions so that I feel more whole and truly loving of myself and all my ancestors. 

Marisela Gomez: Born in Belize, I migrated to New Orleans at age thirteen. In Belize we were all Creole, mixed race and ethnicity descendants through colonization of Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Mestizos (mixed Native Indigenous and Europeans). In the US, I translated Creole to Afro-Latina.

At the age of seventeen, I enlisted in the Air Force. After four years in the Air Force, I continued with college in New Mexico and then moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1989, where I completed two masters’ degrees and an MD/PhD doctorate and medical degree at Johns Hopkins University. My medical training continued with a pediatric internship, a residency in public health and preventive medicine, and a fellowship in mental health and substance use.

In Baltimore the work of rebuilding healthy communities in historically marginalized Black neighborhoods became my area of organizing and research. In 2000 I began practicing mindfulness and meditation, which eventually led me to taking a year off in 2007 to journey to Plum Village in France. This turned into almost three years, the last year and a half living at Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York. After leaving the monastery, I spent another eighteen months in solitary retreats in Baltimore; Belize; Puerto Rico; Barre, Massachussetts; Rehoboth Beach; and Smith Island, Maryland, before returning to Baltimore.

I came back to Baltimore a changed person; some transformation had taken place and made me want to understand how more could happen. My life purpose had been about justice before going to the monastery. On returning to “the world,” the purpose of my life became love as justice. I understood that for collective healing and justice to be present, my individual healing was at the base. These days I continue to find ways to merge mindfulness and social justice as the way of rebuilding healthy and just communities through my work with Village of Love and Resistance (VOLAR), a Black-led nonprofit in East Baltimore committed to land stewardship, healing, and economic development. Baltimore and Beyond Mindfulness Community (BBMC) is my home sangha and an amazing group of folks keeping me on the path, as well as the Awakening through Race, Intersectionality, and Social Equity (ARISE) sangha in Thay’s tradition.