The Wisdom of Nondiscrimination

The theme of the 90-day retreat I recently attended at Deer Park Monastery was: The Wisdom of Nondiscrimination. I really like this verbiage. For me, it’s a lovely dharmic re-framing of such topic threads as inclusivity & diversity, when it comes to my own personal growth work centered around matters concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation (RGSO).

After spending a fair amount of time better educating myself on what it means to be white, I was unexpectedly ushered to walk through another door: what it means to be a woman. And all the while, I’ve been actively engaging in learning more about human rights issues concerning my LGBTQIA+ friends. I’m not so sure these threads can be fully separated from one another. RGSO are very much interconnected.

As I have a great interest in continually developing my abilities to better understand, feel compassion for, and be not only more accepting but embracing of people of varying RGSO, I recently started asking myself: Now what? As in: What is my next move? What is my work now, moving forward?

Here are some small steps I’ve identified that I can do:

Reading books & poetry by BIPOC writers (and also more females)

I have been putting intentional and conscious effort into searching out and reading books and poetry by BIPOC writers, in an effort to infuse my worldview, thoughtscape, and influences I am choicefully on-boarding with the voices, experiences, perspectives, and insights of people in the BIPOC community.

Here are some books I’ve especially enjoyed reading in the past year, all of which are written by BIPOC writers:

• All About Love by bell hooks
• American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa
• The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns by Matty Weingast
• Words Under the Words by Naomi Shihab Nye
• America’s Racial Karma by Dr. Larry Ward
• My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
• Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Angel Kyodo Williams, Lama Rod Owens & Dr. Jasmine Syedullah

I have also been infusing more female writers into my world as well, as I found that I leaned more so in the direction of male writers. In looking deeply into my views about male/female gender roles, I discovered that I trusted male writers more; I gravitated to them more because I subconsciously gave them more street cred (a cultural messaging instilled in us all by default).

Clicking on news articles centered on RGSO stories/challenges/human rights concerns

We all gravitate towards reading & engaging with different kinds of news stories. Over the course of my self-propelled learning about what it means to be white and also what it means to be a woman, I realized how much I especially tended to avoid clicking on articles that centered around race or women’s rights.

To help combat this, I’ve been making a concerted effort to step outside of my typical go-to comfort zone when it comes to reading news stories. For example, there are a number of Indian reservations in my home state of Montana. Thus, I have been clicking on articles in my local news that focus on tribal matters, issues, and updates. I have been informing myself recently on a news story about a local woman, a young mother of native race named Jermain Charlo, and the currently active awareness campaign centered around her disappearance in 2018, as MMIW (missing & murdered indigenous women) is a realm I’ve been especially delving into.

The Five Powers

The way a day
starts without question (faith)

The way she goes on living
even all these mute wheelchair bound years
after her stroke (diligence)

The way these elder mountains
teach me how to root down & look up (mindfulness)

The way any one of his poems
fill me to the brim like
thanksgiving dinner (concentration)

The way my neighbor’s porch light
flicks on any time a car passes by (insight)

Mindful Eating

When I go to Deer Park Monastery (DP) for annual personal retreat stays, one of my favorite parts of our schedule is breakfast. At DP, it’s the only meal held fully in silence, and I dearly enjoy sharing silence amid the company of other practitioners. I also deeply appreciate having the support of the community to help me practice being fully present while eating. Mindful eating at breakfast time is one of the things I miss most in having returned home from DP a little over a month ago.

As part of a weekly practice I’ve been doing for 2 or 3 years now that I call Mindful Morning Saturday, I apply the practice of mindful eating to my morning meal. But it’s not the same. I don’t mind telling you that practicing the art of mindful eating when I am by myself is really difficult for me. And it’s difficult because mindful eating in large part is all about mono-tasking and I have a strong habit energy of multitasking when eating (I’m sure you can relate). My pattern is to eat AND watch a show or eat AND check email or eat AND talk with my husband or eat AND engage with some kind of chore or task around the house.

While I have the aspiration of working my way into enjoying more of my meals in the spirit of mono-tasking, I’m starting small by choosing one meal a week (Saturday morning breakfast) in which to practice mindful eating. Mindful eating is an area of my practice that I feel very much like a slow work in progress amid.

Yesterday, I watched a short talk by a Zen teacher I really enjoy, Jan Chozen Bays, in which she talked about the how to’s of mindful eating. (To watch it please click here.) Her talk gave me a little extra needed boost in my continued process of reentering back into my home life after spending 3.5-months away on retreat at DP.

This morning when I sat down to enjoy the full span of my breakfast as my one and only activity (see pic above), I kept Jan’s teaching in mind. One bite at a time, I kept reminding myself. When my attention would stray, I would gently call it back to focus on what I was doing. Rinse & repeat.

Tangle of Tomorrow (a poem)

In the tangle of tomorrow’s
uncertainty, flowers become
weeds to get lost in.

There is no close substitute
for learning ways to live
feet planted in the moment.

Tomorrow is nothing if
not a theory made possible
by the actions of today.

Sometimes I think there
is a me I can point to;
hold onto; grab by the

shoulders and press down
into place. Then I
remember better and turn

myself back into the
collage of parts & pieces
I really am.

It’s a sobering reminder
of what is most important
when I am able to set down –

if even only for a minute –
the me that has spent a
lifetime trying too hard

to become who
I already am.