Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 86

This is what I woke up with today.

About 25 years ago a man in my spiritual tradition thought it would be a good idea to write and publish a book about how women are spiritually inferior to men. Many years later he apologized. The book is no longer in print.

I’ve been feeling into the anger arising in my body lately. It feels a lot like the anger I still feel about that book. For me, the apology didn’t erase the harm caused by his actions. And taking a book out of print didn’t fundamentally address the cultural issues that still fester under the surface of my spiritual community.

Here’s the thing. The book in and of itself was a real punch in the gut. But what was worse was all the time and energy I spent over the first few years of my spiritual life dealing with it. Time and energy that could have been spent simply getting on with my spiritual practice ended up being spent trying to figure out if I wanted to be part a tradition that peddled such bullshit.

I was a young, queer, gender non-conforming feminist. And when I first came to the dharma, I hated myself and the world. There was no way I was NOT going to react. And there was no way I was NOT going to need space and time to process the effect of seeing such views in writing by an esteemed teacher in my tradition.

Lots of time, and lots of space.

I am so grateful to the women around me at the time who so generously gave their emotional labour to meet me in that space of anger, confusion, and pain.

Years later I met my now partner while they were working at a Buddhist centre. We eventually moved in together. Day after day they’d come home with yet another story of a meeting with a young person who was struggling with the same thing I had struggled with.

Day after day they met with (mostly) young women facing the same anger, confusion and pain. Day after day time and energy that could have been spent looking at the nature of mind, or discussing the arising of the klesas (afflictive mental states), or exploring conditionality, or contemplating impermanence was instead used to process the trauma of knowing that the spiritual tradition you loved, the one you got so much out of, had made so many good friends in, was also the one publishing such complete and utter bollocks.

Putting into print views that you’d been fighting your whole life to swim upstream against.

I often think about the time and energy spent by generations of women before me with not just other women affected in the same way, but with the men who agreed with the views in the book.

Trying to educate. Trying to get them to understand. Trying, trying, trying.

This is called emotional labour and it’s fucking exhausting.

I’ve been reading a lot about emotional labour over the last couple of weeks. Articles by Black folks begging white people to stop putting the burden of educating them on their shoulders.

To learn takes time, humility and receptivity. To want someone to explain things to us so that we can understand is a certain kind of laziness and an abdication of responsibility for our own growth and change.

The best kind of learning isn’t comfortable and requires the whole of us, not just our heads. To really learn something requires a willingness to let go of everything that came before, to edge into the unknown and the unfamiliar, to have a radically honest collision with something completely alien to us so that it may change us in all the right ways.

Racism and the experiences of Black people is not something that can simply be explained in one straightforward exchange. It’s a deep, complex interrelated web of thousands of years of oppression exacted on an entire people, the descendants of whom carry the burden of it to this day. Right now.

Racism is not just the views of some people about some other people that sometimes ends up in someone being hurt or killed. It is an entire system, multiple dynamics playing out across all aspects of public life.

And it also lives within. Anyone living in the world today has been affected by racism, raised in a racialized world, whether or not we know it or can feel it.

When I don’t understand what’s happening I think, good. It’s good for me to be confused, totally confused. Confusion might just be the launch pad from which the rest of my life might lift off, if only I’m courageous enough to sit in the discomfort of my utter confusion.

I try and notice any need to defend. Where is it coming from and what or who does it serve?

I try and notice my need for clarity and striving to know. Why do I need clarity? Why do I need to know? Who or what is my need to know serving?

And once I’ve done that I notice the quality of attention I’m bringing to what I might find. As one of my students just today described it, the eyes with which you look at something. The lens you bring.

When it comes to my anti-racist work, if there is an agenda there that isn’t about deeper understanding and empathy, isn’t about growing into the ally I know I could be, then I stop. Just stop. I go back to step 1. Confusion.

Then my work is to examine that agenda. What is it all about? What is it in me that carries that agenda? Who or what is it serving?

Now the work for all of us, no matter who we are, is to examine our lives. An unexamined life is one half lived.

Examine what you’ve been given and what you haven’t. Examine the conditions that have led to that.

Examine the views about what you deserve and what you don’t. Examine the conditions that have led to that.

Examine your views about other people. What they deserve and what they don’t. Examine the conditions that give rise to these.

Examine the ways in which you move in and through the world. How you walk, talk and interact with places, people, things. Examine the conditions that led to this.

Examine the assumptions you make every day, moment by moment, about what is and is not possible for you and why. Examine where these assumptions come from, what they are built on, and what keeps them in place.

Examine what you consider “good” art or writing or music and what you consider “bad” art or writing or music? Why is that?

I’m sorry if I come across as preachy or morally superior or like I’m just virtue signaling. That is not my intention. But I am tired. And I’m not even Black.

I don’t assume I’ve got it all figured out. I know racism also lives in me like a heavy stone in my heart. I am willing to do this examination myself, and willing to sit alongside others who are also willing.

But what I’m not willing to do is educate people who aren’t ready to do the heavy lifting that is being asked of all of us right now.

Because the world desperately needs all of us to truly, deeply, unequivocally believe that Black Lives Matter. And that they matter enough that we’re willing to do something about it.