Two Eggs In An Ovary

An hour talk reflecting on the connections between feminism and Buddhism, how to meet the challenges of our times, and finding the middle way between anger and apathy. Delivered live to a group of women and gender non-conforming people in honour of International Women's Day.

Transcript

So I thought I would just remind us of what the blurb says.

It's always interesting when you're asked to do something because you know you sort of have an idea and then time goes by and things happen and maybe what one wants to talk about is a bit different than what the blurb says.

So this is what the blurb says and then I think I've done a good pretty good job of addressing it but I've also gone off on lots of different tangents and what I have to say is very emergent so it's very much kind of like live reflections.

So some of it also may not make much sense or may even be I mean I may even at times contradict myself so I'm just letting you know that that I am aware of that.

So the blurb was as Buddhist women and gender non-conforming people how might we respond to the current social climate and ecological crises we face in the world today.

You could add health crises to that.

What is the unique contribution we can bring to collective efforts to find new ways forward that honor all people,

Animals and the planet and what is the middle way between anger and apathy?

And I was inspired particularly because last weekend was International Women's Day so yeah I was interested in exploring like what is it that we can bring yeah and when I say we I don't just mean women I also mean trans and gender non-conforming folks so trying to be as inclusive as possible around marginalized groups within a gender paradigm as it were.

And I wanted to dedicate this talk particularly to all women trans and non-binary people who have ever lived and died on this planet having never realized their full potential and those that are still in the struggle and I would include all of us in that.

So what I'm gonna talk about just to say a bit about the background so it is very much informed and grounded in my own experience as how I currently identify is as a gender queer gay woman.

I was raised by South American immigrants in Boston in the 70s and 80s and in the 90s I moved to San Francisco and worked as a youth worker and community organizer and activist for 15 years which is the same period of time that I found the Dharma and began practicing and was ordained before moving to the UK eight years ago.

So I've been practicing for about 20 years and teaching for 15 of those 20 years.

So I feel like it's important to say that I do identify as a feminist and as a Buddhist and that I don't think that personally in my experience those identities are not contradictory to each other.

In fact I find them quite complementary and I will be saying more about that later.

So I have reflected for quite a long time and not just reflected in terms of thinking about but actually in terms of like what does it mean to embody those principles the principles of feminism and Buddhism in the way I show up in the world for a long time.

So this talk in a way is coming out of those reflections and and also quite more current reflections.

So just want to say also you don't have to agree with anything I say in this talk in fact I invite disagreement I think that's all of the topics and issues that I'll be raising are things that I think we don't actually talk enough about in society or in daily life or in particularly maybe in Buddhist centers and I want I'm inviting those conversations I want those conversations to happen and I want there to be if someone disused me I'd love to hear that and for there to be a conversation that comes out of that and an exploration that comes out of them.

So the invitation is to as you listen just be open to examining and reflecting on your own location in society so by by location I mean your conditioning where you kind of sit in the larger mandala of the world so however you identify your class your race your upbringing your heritage your political leanings all of those things add up to your particular location your experience and yeah the invitation is well there's an invitation to just try and make meaning of all of that in regards to personal practice and these issues you know if you're here I'm assuming you're interested so that's an assumption I'm making yeah about you.

So I will be sharing more of my personal story in this talk I'll be starting with that I'll do a bit of feminism 101 in case there's any in the room who doesn't know much about feminism or some of the kind of main tenants of feminism and I'm gonna be linking them back to Buddhism and making some maybe you know for me it was quite there was a few things that were quite new reflections that I hadn't actually quite consciously made before that I find really exciting.

I'll be saying about a little bit about my current reflections particularly around the role that non-violence as a principle and as an embodied practice plays and how we might show up in the world and then I'll be ending with some concrete things that we might do that support us to begin to discover how we might respond to the world and when I say we I mean like each of us having a unique response based on our own conditioning location what gets us going what we're inspired by.

So does all that make sense?

I just want to check because I had someone once not know what I meant when I said showing up so is the language okay so far for everyone you know you kind of get what I'm getting at there yeah good.

There may be things that I say that you like there may be things I'm not I don't have time to unpack that was one of the challenges I had in preparing this talk is there's a lot of things that one could just kind of unpack and the rest of the talk could just be about that but I made choices about what I wanted to go into more depth to so there's also an invitation and an encouragement to go out and after today if you're interested in those things there's lots of more information out there available that you can do your own study and research around.

Okay so my story so it's interesting giving a talk at a women's plus class when my own gender identity is is shifting all the time sometimes I feel like a woman sometimes I don't feel like a woman sometimes I feel like a man and I feel like I'm non-binary so genderqueer is the best word I've found so far to describe what's going on for me but when I was reflecting for this talk and thinking back to my own kind of particularly childhood one thing that I remembered was that I was never really that bought into the stories about gender that I was told as a young person I was it was a I was raised Catholic and there were some pretty strong clear gender norms laid out from a very very young age and in my family there were two boys and two girls so it was all very kind of like clear like I got to do this my brother's got to do that so that for me there was a lot of questioning around that very early on.

I had always felt like performance to me and particularly my late teens and early adulthood I played around quite a bit with genders performance so sometimes I'd go out dressed as a man and sometimes I'd go out dressed as a woman you can imagine in San Francisco in the late 90s how much fun I had doing that but also how interesting it was to see how differently the world responded to me and I learned a lot from that experience.

So as a young child it was clear to me that there were variations in terms of biological sex like genitals basically and other sort of physical attributes but what wasn't clear to me was why that then meant that people were called boy or girl and then expected to act a certain way dress a certain way be treated a certain way respond a certain way so all of that I found very confusing and also very limiting like I do remember being quite small and feeling quite oppressed by the whole thing you know not being allowed to play soccer with the boys getting yelled at if I climb trees which you know they sound mundane but as a young child you know we're just our energy is just freely flowing you know we're so pure and then there's just all these things happening all the time they're trying to ring fence us in a particular way that's quite violent actually and I also figured out quite early on I think I might have been like 12 or 13 when I figured this out was that when people didn't know what gender I was so a tomboy and sometimes people were confused me and think you know be confused and think I was a little boy and that that moment of confusion what that was about for people was that that meant that they didn't know how to treat me and then that that treatment had something to do with whether or not I was considered better or worse than so that I could see the stratification in that whole dynamic although obviously at that age I couldn't articulate anything about that or talk about it in any way so there's all that around gender going on and then also there was just an awakening to the problematic nature of of the world you know the world being a deeply unsatisfying place as I learn more and more about injustice and inequality so the first I remember being at the dinner table not wanting to finish my food and my mother saying you have to finish your food because they're starving children in Ethiopia and I remember going what like really like it went in straight in and what they're starving children and where like what are you telling me and for her it was just something you say to a kid to get them to eat their food but to me it was like this devastating piece of news and then of course I had lots of questions about that which my parents didn't have the patience to really go into answering so things like that just you know growing up in an age of nuclear proliferation and the fear around that you know we used to have drills in school I'm sure some of you might remember this where we had to hide under our desks and things like that I don't know did you have that here we had that in the States anyways okay so yeah so I was aware of you know yeah these deep injustices basically and that the world was a messed up place and then another thing I remember being quite disturbed by was learning about the hole in the ozone layer and the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest those two things kind of coming into my consciousness around the same time and again being like how could the adults have let this happen like just being actually feeling like really deeply betrayed by adults like Greta Thunberg talks about this really well now I feel like she's who I wish I could have been when I was 16 you know like how could you have let this happen and my reflections around that led to a really clear seeing that the adults didn't know what they were doing and we're just pretending to kind of know how to write things it was all again like a kind of performance yeah and then another thing that came in it probably around 16 15 or 16 was also a very clear sort of looking ahead and imagining my life and on this in this particular world and seeing that things probably were just gonna get worse before they got better so I sort of had this sense of this isn't really heading in the right direction yeah and it wasn't something again it wasn't something I could take I could articulate it was more like a felt sense that this world is deeply flawed and things don't seem to be moving in a very good direction and then just to add on top of that the deepening realization around my own sexuality and again being raised Catholic I was told from a very young age a story about what my life was gonna be and it was really clear to me it wasn't gonna be that I wasn't gonna get married and have a bunch of kids and being a nice housewife I was gonna go in a completely different direction so there was a lot of internal conflict around that and then I got completely sidetracked so I was gonna save the world and then I got sidetracked because my mom got cancer and died when I was 16 and I basically went into a very deep depression and lots of self-harming and suicidal ideation and somehow managed to get a bachelor's degree while all that was going on and moved to San Francisco and kind of came out of the fog five years later and realized I needed to completely change my life and that's when I found the Dharma so I didn't kind of do I sort of imagined I was gonna become some sort of politician or activist or something I didn't pursue any of that because I was kind of in my own personal mess but what was clear to me was that in order to respond in any way to the world I needed to sort myself out first I couldn't really be of help or service to anyone if I was a mess so the word love in particular became very important at that point in my life like I need to learn how to love and accept myself first and then I can hopefully manifest love out in the world and then just to say you know since I found the Dharma I have really thrown myself into that and my kind of work as a youth worker and as I said you know doing community organizing and things in San Francisco I did start to step into that work and then I sort of had a made a choice to step into more wanting to kind of constellate my life more fully around Dharma and Dharma teaching in particular which led me to move to the UK and get much more involved with the movement and particularly with supporting the development of secular mindfulness in this country so I've been doing that for the last eight years so in a way I perhaps I did step quite fully away from activism for almost a decade and I feel that now I'm sort of circling back and rediscovering those younger parts of myself and trying to integrate that more and step back into that world but bringing the Dharma with me so for me right now I'm in an active process of trying to figure out how to marry Dharma with yeah how we meet the challenges of our world so I should say a little bit around how I got more interested in feminism in particular so when I went to university I studied women's studies which there is no such thing anymore women's studies now it's all gender studies which is good it's a good updating of that field and also sociology so I was particularly interested in the intersection of gender identity sexuality and politics and also the way in which society is structured and how structural inequality inequality leads to the oppression of all categories of marginalized groups so gay women trans gender non-conforming people of color economically disadvantaged immigrants disabled religious minorities etc etc and this is one of those things I won't unpack but I also saw clearly the link between the oppression of marginalized groups and the climate catastrophe so these things are not disconnected there's actually a very deep historical connection between them which I won't I won't go into but you can ponder upon and and then you know bringing us up to present day so it's sort of stating the obvious but yes we are I think we could all agree we're facing climate catastrophe it's obvious to me the proliferation of unchecked capitalism the perpetration of unending war particularly on the part of the United States my country of origin growing nationalism and then we've got this sort of intentional and consistent manipulation of the media which is I think actually one of the most dangerous things facing us as a society the fact that we don't know what we don't know and what we think we know may not be true and people are being manipulated so when I look at all of these various issues that we're facing as a global society also one thing that's very clear to me and I'm sure is clear to you is how deeply rooted they are in the cliches so this is where I'm gonna start making connections to the Dharma in case you're wondering is this a Buddha Center and art this is a Dharma talk so greed hatred and ignorance are the three you could say views or mental states that the Buddha specifically named as the root cause of all of our suffering and they only ever take root and grow in the hearts of human beings so they're not things out there not forces out there that we can't control they come from here and then obviously they proliferate in a collective level so you could say and this is something that I'm also deeply in touch with this but you know as a society where we are in a way deeply deeply cut off from our true nature so another tenon of Buddhism is that we have this pure innate nature that is that is deep love and interconnectivity but we're just completely cut off from it well not completely but in a lot of ways quite cut off there are times when we're not cut off and and that's that can point to our capacity for liberation but as a society we are deeply cut off we are divided both internally and and with and against each other and we're also cut off and divided from the earth the earth which we are not separate from so all that sounds very dark but there is hope so I'm gonna say a bit about how feminism I have this heading here how feminism and Buddhism go together like two eggs in an ovary so I'm gonna say a bit about that but just to say in regards to the state of the world you know and again this is pointing to the connection between the dominance and degradation of women and other oppressed groups animals and the environment that you know as long as we keep going in that vein my view is that we're completely and totally screwed and that we need a totally new model for everything so we need a radically different way of figuring out how we're gonna live together as a global society and I believe deeply that women plus and people from for example black and indigenous communities are uniquely qualified to support the development of those new models I don't think they can come from the people who have been in charge up until now so we will play an essential and hopefully leading role in bringing about those new models we have to we have to do it it's it is what is required now okay so how are you doing shall I keep going okay okay so the two eggs in an ovary so I'm gonna quote bell hooks now is one of my most favorite feminist thinkers so black lesbian female Buddhist feminists American if you ever have a chance to meet her go for it she's amazing I did meet her once so she's in her book feminism is for everyone passionate politics she wrote simply put feminism of is a movement to end sexism sexual exploitation and oppression feminist thinking teaches us all especially how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life the soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination so I just I love that definition because it's so grounded in in values that are really really important to me I'm quite Buddhist so she uses the language of liberation love and non-violence and then the fact that feminism seeks to end exploitation oppression of all people so even though it's called feminism it's rooted in the experience of women it a true feminism in my view and I know many others is about oppression of all peoples and animals and the environment so it's a holistic ending of those oppressions so put quite simply when you hold feminism and Buddhism up to each other the thing that I see there is that both traditions if feminism can be referred to as a tradition are deeply concerned with ending suffering they're both concerned with ending suffering and they just are coming at it from different points of view but they're not mutually exclusive so another beautiful term from bell hooks is what it means to be to create and and sustain a beloved community so community rooted in love and connection and non-violence and to me that you know that the value the Buddhist value of Sangha very much upholds the same ideal of beloved community where all are safe truly safe and have access to resources and opportunities to thrive and then she uses this language of dominance which I'm I used to have a lot of issues with the word dominance but I'm learning to love it as something that points quite clearly to a dynamic in our world and also because we've all had had experiences of dominance I don't think you can be born into the world and not have felt dominated in some way by another person or a dynamic in our world and then the language of non-violence which is a direct antidote you could say to dominance so non-violence that seeks to address dominance in all its crudeness and its subtlety so one thing that you may what may help you in this reflection as I continue is to think in terms of both internal and external so this is what I've been doing in my own personal practice for a few years now is exploring the ways in which I allow some parts of me to dominate other parts of me and how violent that is in my own internal landscape and then how that then unconsciously informs how I am with others and in the world and how violent that is and that this can be quite subtle sometimes okay so I just want to unpack another aspect of feminism that I feel has very strong connections with Buddhism so this is the honoring and upholding within the feminist tradition of the power of personal experience and testimony so one of the things particularly in the development of feminism in the 60s was for there to be a a credence and validity placed on personal testimony as directly to kind of directly oppose a more dominant model of sort of cold hard objective facts as the only valid information to make decisions about how we organize ourselves around so and also in relation particularly in the 80s to a political move towards kind of blaming people's personal problems on their own personal failings so in a way you could say that through the honoring of personal testimony and experience feminists were and are still questioning sort of where truth exists what is true whose truth matters and and how our personal truths are deeply connected and informed by the kind of water we swim in together and also reliant on larger truths and phenomena so you can't sort of just look at one person's problem and try to solve it on the individual level you need to look at the larger systemic issues that that person's life is deeply conditioned by so you could say in this way our stories matter and they matter deeply and that might sound to some Buddhists slightly controversial because aren't we supposed to be seeing through our stories and not believing our stories so this is one of those areas where it might feel contradictory but actually what's important is that we get really really clear about the ways in which we've been conditioned so who are we who do we think we are how have we shown up in this world how we've been conditioned where have we come from how have our experiences and views been shaped by our personal experiences how is that different from other people's and by looking deeply into our own conditioning that's how we sort of realize the truth of interconnectivity for example and who and what we actually are when you see through that but to quote I think it's Lao Tzu who said in order to know that a person a certain person doesn't exist first we must know how they do so we need to fully and completely understand otherwise we're just in a way you could there's a well-used term you know we're just bypassing something we're not actually dealing with and being radically honest with ourselves about how we show up in the world so what does that have to do with Buddhism well the Buddha was asked how can we know that what you teach is true and his response was go and see for yourself so take my teachings try them out and see if they work for you and that's how you'll know so the Buddha actually used personal experience and testimony as the only valid data point for whether his teachings worked so for me that's a really clear link between the two traditions in that the teachings are only ever both tested and realized through people's personal understanding and then their willingness to pass that on to other people it so the teachings are not reliant on a hierarchical model where someone has knowledge and they're just passing it down to someone else and that we rely on that person to give us that knowledge we don't have to surrender or sign up for anything in particular or believe in anything in particular all we have to do is try it out and trust deeply trust in our own experience so this deep trusting in our experience is a it's a very radical act because in our world that's constantly being undermined you know don't don't believe what you what you think is actually happening out there believe what Trump tells you or tweets so it's it's it's very counter cultural so personal experience and testimony has the bedrock of Buddhist practice and teaching and then another thing that I've been reflecting on is interconnectivity and that again in a way as you as you pull at the threads of people's experiences of oppression so again going back to the feminist movement you know there was a lot of and there still is a lot of you know debate and criticism within feminism about who's who who's feminism yeah so feminism as a white women's movement actually sometimes actively ignored the experiences of women of color or didn't include them in a particular kind of way but once you start pulling at the threads you can't you can't really identify one oppression without addressing all of them so the interconnected connectedness of suffering and that our suffering is conditioned by the world we live in so yes obviously Buddhism is very concerned with what our response is but there's also real things we might be able to do to address unnecessary suffering so you don't say to someone who's suffering you don't say to a refugee in a refugee camp can you just work with your suffering and try and meet it creatively we try we have to actually as a global society seek to meet basic needs and support people before asking them to work creatively with their suffering so yes we need to be committed to creating a radically different world than the one that we've inherited and my way of doing this lately because I felt so overwhelmed and I was using the word the term impotence earlier just interesting word around this particular crisis we're facing just now that I'm just doing it in every moment I'm just in every moment I don't want to wait until I'm awake to be a nice person like I'm just gonna smile at everyone on the street and say hello to the transit worker behind this sheet of glass at my local Overground station and if someone's struggling on the street offer help and you know I'm just this radical acts of love and care and trying not to put the blinders up even though the temptation to do that can be quite strong sometimes so this idea of what it means to fully embody non-violence in the world so I just want to share with you a model I've been working on and again it might come across as slightly controversial but I'll try and unpack it and this comes out of the questions around you know how how does my own spiritual practice support me and how I show up in the world and also how can my practice support me in discovering the unique contribution I can make and so it goes like this so this is the model so it's it's a question it's it's sort of questions I've been asking myself so if the spiritual is personal and what I mean by that is you know we can be given the teachings but we can't just mechanically follow a set of rules or just do as we're told by our teachers we have to make sense of the teachings in our own lives and based on our own conditioning so everyone's path it's quite beautiful everyone's path is different yet there are these universal truths that that we can kind of agree to and work alongside and within so when I say that the spiritual is personal I just mean that aspect of our practice that is deeply unique to us and that only know we can know within our own hearts how that change is happening for ourselves no one else can do it for us so if this personal if the spiritual is personal and the personal is political which is a fundamental tenet of feminism I think I've already unpacked that quite a bit around personal experience and testimony so we're all whether or not we're prepared to admit it and for some of us it may be more obvious than others we are all deeply affected personally by the policies that govern our society either positively or negatively so politics has an important and real role to play in shaping our personal lives so if the you might see where I'm going with this so if the spiritual is personal and the personal is political then the spiritual is political a plus if a plus B equals so if the spiritual is personal and the personal is political then the spiritual must be political yeah that's what I'm playing around with deeply controversial thing to say maybe not for us I don't know how that lands with you but I have I have some friends I have some Buddhist friends who would disagree with me say yes thank you I appreciate that affirmative comments it feels right to me yeah so yeah there's something you know that there's a few American Buddhists teachers who I'm in close connection and dialogue with around these issues and they're basically saying you know you can't really say you're Buddhist and be going for personal liberation if you're not up for supporting collective liberation and when when we talk about collective liberation we're not just talking about liberation freedom from suffering and awakening on a spiritual level but even just the most basic and fundamental levels so I thought I would use the coronavirus actually as an example of this because it's such a perfect example for me of revealing how deeply interconnected we are so it's it's this amazing confluence of the effects of dominance so you know we know that the virus started due to illegal and unethical farming practices so there's something about and this isn't the first time this has happened many of the epidemics that have arisen in the last couple of decades have been due to issues with farming and the way that we treat animals as a global society so I'm not trying you know I'm not specifically blaming the Chinese here I'm saying this is a global problem so we've got this model of dominion over animals that has led to the creek like we're literally making ourselves sick basically by the way that we that we do agriculture and then that's having this effect and then on top of that we've got this perfect storm of late-stage capitalism that clearly can't deal with the burden and governments that are slow to respond or responding in what I this is a personal view but inappropriate and irresponsible ways and then we've got this kind of like confusion which I can't even believe that it has to be debated where it's like oh do we what do we prioritize the health of the public or the economy I don't know what should we do there hmm so you know we can't again you can't pull it one without the whole thing kind of falling apart and it just goes to show how deeply vulnerable and fragile this system kind of like technology when it works it works but as soon as it doesn't it doesn't and it's so obvious that our system isn't working for us and it hasn't been working for us for a long time and then the thing that kills me the most is that you know the most vulnerable amongst us will be the ones that suffer the hardest and bear the burden of this and doesn't I don't see a lot out there in terms of movements to try and address that so yeah the pandemic is revealing the vulnerability of the status quo and how decades of policies that value profit profit over people can immediately impact our capacity to respond quickly and effectively but also what it's revealing and this is where I I must be a you know forever optimist because I'm always looking for the opportunity in things and yeah this thing about how deeply reliant we are so I saw something recently on social media saying that our personal health is literally in each other's hands quite literally and so I've been thinking about how we meet and overcome this challenge being you know intimately connected to our ability to collectively commit to taking us care of ourselves and each other so if everyone could collectively commit to that we'd be in a much better place so yeah so how might we practice with the pandemic so this is I'm gonna share a lens that I use in my own practice that I think is helpful so this is a lens of in any moment of adversity when things feel really hard and stuck and it's so clear that we don't want what is happening to see that moment and the conditions in that moment as a path to liberation yeah which is very counterintuitive because our habit is to want to turn away from and push that away and try and find another way some kind of magical path of least resistance yeah but actually resistance is fertile there's it's fertile ground for something else to happen so how might we make use of this opportunity from a spiritual and feminist point of view well first and foremost I find it quite interesting that the very attitudes and skills that we as a global society we need right now are sort of historically archetypally obviously feminine qualities so we need care we need nurturing we need collaboration we need calm we need non-violence I'm not saying men are violent it's not that cut and dry but there's something about those kind of yeah again sort of traditionally feminine qualities that are needed desperately right now so I've been yeah I've been reflecting on how can I keep manifesting softness gentleness counteracting that internal habit to want to put up walls or get harsh so I'll just is it alright if we go for another ten minutes I think I'll be done after ten minutes is that okay all right so I want to say something about because I've been speaking quite on a big scale so I want to talk about personal practice now I've already started to edge into this a bit so how many of you familiar with the with the Buddhist saints or Bodhisattvas have you heard of Bodhisattvas before so yeah so beings that have put off their own enlightenment to commit to not not fully realizing for themselves liberation until all beings have been liberated and I find it the sort of ideal of the body sapa both deeply unsatisfying and also deeply inspiring so both things can be true yeah so realizing that actually it's impossible to save all beings that as an impossible goal but also still then committing to trying to giving it a go and I often think of this as also a paradox because according to Buddhism there there are two truths so there's relative truth there's this what's sometimes referred to as sub-saric or cyclic existence is unsatisfying world that we're in where there is suffering and then there's also absolute truth which is the truth of our innate purity our capacity to be fully awake and on the absolute level this is gonna completely probably blow your mind because it blows my mind every time I think of it but on an absolute level nothing ever happens and there's no beings to be saved I don't expect I don't really know what that means I don't expect you to so that's the paradox of the Bodhisattva is yes acknowledging that there is suffering there's being suffering we need to respond with compassion how do we do that and then actually there's nothing to be done and so for me there's this dynamic which exists in a kind of timeless spaceless place where I'm leaning into the suffering of the world trying to respond with compassion exploring what that's like what my own unique version of that might look like and then sometimes just resting back surrendering giving up letting go I don't know what to do allowing myself to be confused allowing myself to be angry allowing myself to also to rest we need to rest we can't constantly be out there all the time saving people we need to have that time so there's a movement between engagement and I wouldn't say disengagement because in a way that movement back is part of engaging but it's it's restoration rest care so to the question for me about you know how to respond to the world isn't so much about whether or not to get involved in some way but how to do that and I think it's up to each of us to find our own way into that so and our own answer to that question so part of our spiritual path is discovering the role that we might play in the world the way that meet we might fully show up how our energy can freely move outward in this compassionate response to suffering and then and then being committed to whatever comes of that exploration so it's not something that can be planned it's not like we can map it out and then it all goes according to plan but where it starts is turning towards our own experience particularly our own experience of suffering so the first noble truth you know there is suffering suffering is here it's not just out there it's here first and foremost and it's in the way in which we turn towards and meet our own suffering that we then can learn firsthand and embody how we might meet that in other people but if we can't do it here it's very very hard to do it there you know that saying physician heal yourself you know I that resonates strongly with me because I was raised by a surgeon who didn't take care of himself and now he's old and frail and not very well and it's like oh you fixed everyone else but you never took care of yourself it's so painful so we need to to meet it here and then figure out okay so the extent to which I can love myself is the extent to which I can love other people the extent to which I can meet anger in my own heart is the extent to which I can be with it out there in the world these two things are deeply connected so meeting our experience and specifically how it feels to be us so get interested in how it feels to be you whatever that means but since this is a women's plus class and this talk is about international women's they also perhaps how it feels to be a woman or whatever your agenda gender identity is yeah so how does that feel in this world to be whatever aspects of your identity are important to you and then the next thing that I've been working on which I find really difficult which you know is surprising because I like to think of myself as a good communicator and someone with clarity but I find it very very hard just doesn't speak from that place and have the courage to speak from that place especially if I know it's gonna piss someone else off because I'm deeply conditioned not to anger anyone now it's curious isn't it why as women or gender non-conforming people have we been being conditioned not to upset anyone maybe that's because if we actually spoke up and shared our experience things might have to change someone else might have to give up some power that they have or some privilege that they have so finding the courage to speak from that place to share the effects that sexism misogyny racism classism ableism homophobia etc have had on us directly how it has been a conditioning factor for our suffering and you might be familiar with the three feelings in Buddhism so I find this also a deeply liberative practice and teaching so really there's only ever three things going on so when we feel into how does it feel to be me either there's something that we like there and we're drawn towards and we want more of that's pleasant there's something unpleasant we don't like we'd rather not have we want to get rid of we resist that's unpleasant or we just don't know what's going on that was my experience this morning I don't know it's just all out of sorts it doesn't feel quite right but I don't I can't articulate I don't really know what's there so there's a numbness or ambivalence or apathy but my main experience has been to feel deeply frustrated and angry that's been my of all the cliches afflicted mental states that's been my go-to it's my in a way my I'm comfortable there and I've worked a lot over the years around that and how much of that is actually appropriate and valid and important and how much of it is just me getting myself all worked up and and then navigating that dynamic with other people so anger anger has both brought me to my practice and also been with me on the journey but I have felt the relationship shift dramatically and I can say with confidence now that it is possible for me to be really angry like to have there be anger arising in my being based on injustices that I experienced either directly myself or see other people experiencing and yet not allow that to overtake me so I don't become an angry person there is anger and I can speak an act from a place of love that also includes that energy that is angry so it's possible to communicate my anger without being angry if that makes sense or to share my frustrations but not from a place of frustration but anger is such an unbearable mental state and emotion at times and again it's we're so deeply conditioned most of us probably generally tip to block it or suppress it so I was saying before you know we're not supposed to say unkind things or things that are challenging or that people don't want to hear so so this is what I found in my own practice and also with in dynamics with people that have come on retreat and in classes with me is that the the general trend is anger arises and we either immediately block and suppress it or indulge it and get completely caught up in it and both of those strategies are not wise or helpful in the long run and are very much based in egoic clinging so we're either identified with it fully and it becomes us and we don't and that's a narrow view and we can't see or have any perspective beyond that or it just gets totally suppressed and the danger in that suppression is that we can't block one emotion without blocking a whole other field of emotions so for a long time when I was blocking my anger I just got really depressed because there was nothing else I couldn't feel joy I couldn't feel happiness nothing else was available anymore so one of the practices I found really really helpful is practices that support us to find joy within ourselves and in particular the practice the practices around Deanna or higher or more ecstatic one could say all of this language I find deeply problematic mental states and for me they're not even mental states they're quite embodied experiences of energy moving through they're being more flow and and feeling like I can tap into a very deep sense of wellness and joy within myself that's not dependent on external factors so I in my teaching I tend to want to help people to get into those spaces if they can even if it's just for short periods of time on retreat because they they can give us confidence that it's possible even amidst a lot of suffering to also be able to to find joy in our own it felt experience no matter what's happening externally actually so another thing I would encourage all of us to do if we're interested in getting in touch with our anger is to find a safe place to do that with people that are safe to do that with and feel free to try and express it in safe ways that don't harm yourself and others and learn through that process fully feeling it like feeling the energy of the anger really letting it actually manifest and and bearing it and practicing in a way where we can create enough space in our internal landscape for it to to just be fully felt and be allowed to move through and what I can suggest but I what I know from my own experience and what I would suggest is that that can lead to a really clear sense of what might come next so we then have a clarity about how we might respond to whatever's brought up that anger another person ourselves a situation out in the world clarity and and a wise compassionate response and then just to end with this question about what's the middle way between anger and apathy so I don't know what the middle way between anger and apathy is but my current reflection is that it's probably the same as the middle way between identification with experience and suppression of experience so anger as we talk about it on a day-to-day level when we're caught up in it and we become angry and we perhaps act unskillfully from that place or this act of suppression which in a way is just turning the anger in on ourselves and create a lot of both mental and physical pain so the middle way between identification and suppression is what I've been talking about so engaging with the felt sense in the body the feelings as they're arriving in the moment listening deeply to the part of ourselves that that comes from for me it's often quite a young part that feels like things aren't fair and then trusting what emerges in the process trust is quite an important quality in this way of working okay so I'm just gonna list a few things that maybe we can do I hope that these sound concrete and practical to you so first and foremost I would invite you to examine your own life not just now but your whole life go go all the way back to your birth and then go all the way back to what happened before you arrived who did you come from who were your ancestors what were their lives like you can engage the imagination in this because you might not know I don't know very much about my ancestors but I know enough to know that they probably wreaked quite a lot of havoc on other people in the world and I've had to sit with that and work with the guilt and shame that comes up around that so I examine your life and what your story tells you about your own experience in the world how you're showing up in the world right now the wisdom you carry as well as the trauma you might carry and how you are already affected complicit or active regarding the crises we face in the world so without judgment just look at you know where am I turning towards and being able to be with things that are painful and hard where am I complicit or apathetic and where am I and how am I affected as well so that's the first thing examination I love this language of radical honesty so practicing radical honesty with yourself and others as you engage in that examination so find people close to you that you can talk to you I was actually I'm writing a book with a close friend of mine at the moment and we met yesterday to talk through some of the in the book and right towards the end of our meeting we started to talk about you know living in a racialized world basically and how as light-skinned people we can't get away from the fact that we are also racialized and that sometimes racist thoughts arrive in our mind and it can be appalling like where did that come from and it's not that that means that you are a racist it just means that you've been conditioned in a certain way and gotten messages and you've swam in it your whole life and these thoughts appear what are you gonna do about that so that's the kind of radical honesty I'm talking about you know it's it's squirmy we don't want to talk about it find people you can talk to about it and have that conversation educate yourself there's tons out there books resources movies courses trainings if there's something that you're like I really want to know more about that educate yourself I just put plane tickets to go to the states and go on a radical Dharma training I don't know what's gonna happen because it's in May and the airline I booked with this going under at the moment but you know I want to I want to talk to other people are interested in the intersection of Dharma and politics so I'm gonna go and be in a room with them I didn't have time to go into this more fully but the importance of pleasure oh you know part of the dominance and suppression of women plus people in the world was taking away all the ways in which we might appreciate and enjoy life and have some pleasure it's important that there's websites out there that teach women how to have orgasm it's that's important that's a political act so let yourself fully in and completely enjoy the experience of being alive that is a radical act as a deeply politically radically act radical act and then let that experience of pleasure and joy inform your practice and your activism if you are an activist trust that the more you allow yourself to feel joy the more you'll be able to feel other things like grief and anger and sadness but also courage and conviction to act so all of that becomes available we become more alive right sing dance these are also liberative activities the activities that can support what it feels like to be liberated even if it's temporary it can give us a flavor of what liberation might feel like the joy the spontaneity of liberation this is one for me personally I really really need to work on take care of yourself really take care of yourself and other people this language of radical self-care yeah you know how often do we say yes when we really want to say no that's another thing we could get radically honest with ourselves about practice saying no and then finally commit to transforming your relationship with yourself first and foremost fully embodying non-violence towards your whole self yeah the Buddha had a lot to say about that I'm gonna stop there so thank you for listening and for coming along with beyond this rather sacred astray me through these issues and things

Reviews

Loved this, i appreciated your articulation of the bodhisattva paradox. We are studying the contributions of Dr Ambedkar here in Melbourne - many of us contemplating how we best show up!