Uplifting Black Buddhist Voices
How the Dharma is expressed is different for each individual person because it is intrinsically made out of lived experience. Dharma isn’t intellectual, it’s somatic. It’s interdependent.
As a Dharma teacher, it’s important to me to uplift voices of other teachers because I want you to hear things from all kinds of perspectives, so that you can engage with your own experience of Dharma. Today I’m uplifting some resources here at Somatics + Solidarity from Black Buddhists.
In recent days I’ve attended a few events of the solidarity & sense-making variety - St. John’s Beloved Reclaiming MLK Day service, the Organization for Black Struggle’s 45th Anniversary celebration, and PROMO’s strategic plan community leaders meeting. This moment that we are all in, not just in our own country, but abroad, is ripe for change. And when I zoom out to hear the underlying themes present in these spiritual + political spaces, a few things surface:
Interfaith & cross-movement solidarity
Healing (mental, emotional, spiritual) is REQUIRED at the core of our organizing & movement work
None of us can do this alone, we all have our lane
RADICAL INCLUSION
When I not just hear those things, but feel them, deeply somatically in my body, in my history with trauma, in witnessing my timeline of my own mistakes and the mistakes of others, in the suffering we are party to on our smartphones 24/7… I lean on the Dharma. Because the Dharma is setup to meet the complexity of all that arises, the entire breadth of our humanity. The Dharma presents a pathway that reconnects the parts of ourselves we have exiled, the parts of society doing or experiencing the most harm, and the severed wounds of unbelonging to each other, to the planet, that we as an entire Earthen ecosystem need right now in profound ways.
Dharma is PRAXIS.
Dharma gives us tools to tend to wounds AND gives us steps to take to untangle root causes and cultivate a world based on safety, belonging, dignity & gardens.
And the thing about writing on Dharma, and teaching it, is the “come and see for yourself” (or ehipassiko in Pali) nature of it… that Dharma is MEANT to be adapted to the practicer. How the Dharma is expressed is different for each individual person because it is intrinsically made out of lived experience. Dharma isn’t intellectual, it’s somatic. It’s interdependent.
Black Buddhist Resources:
📖 “Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love & Liberation” Lama Rod Owens + Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams
📖 “Mindful of Race” Ruth King (available on Libby)
📰 The Buddhist Path That Transformed Tina Turner
📹 Compassion & boundary setting with Lama Rod Owens
📹 Trauma and the Dharma of Collective Resiliency with Lama Rod Owens
🎧 A Perspective On Socially Engaged Buddhism on MLK Day
🎧 Justice is What Love Looks Like in Public: Celebrating Dr. King's Legacy of Love
🎧 Grief, Refuge, and Liberation
I highly encourage you to click, learn, read, listen and reflect (especially if you do not identify as Black). And then ask yourself, in what ways can I take action in my day to day life to uplift these experiences & teachings to make them real, and in solidarity with the current timeline of humanity to leave the world a little better than I found it. Drop a comment and tell me what you uncover.
You can reference these, and many more resources for learning about Dharma, meditation, somatic healing, Buddhism & solidarity at my FREE RESOURCES tab on my website.
May you know continued joy & pleasure.
May you know regenerative resources & relationships.
May you know radical contentment & liberatory disobedience.
May you always remember & know your inherent value, worth & dignity.
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
In Solidarity,
-Deanna Sophia Danger-
p.s. If you’re on my website, newsletter list, you definitely got this mailer earlier this month. I’ve decided to do away with my website blog, and concentrate my energy & creative direction here at my (yet rebranded again) Substack instead… so I’m just moving over this post, and I really wanted you to have the resources again because we can’t uplift Black Buddhist voices enough.
