Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 91

This evening I joined roughly 300 other people on the first session of a five-week course on Harriet Tubman and the dharma led by American dharma teacher Spring Washam.

If you don’t know who Harriet Tubman is, a good place to start is Season 2, Episode 6 of the Netflix series Underground.

A few things jumped out at me about her story, which we only started to dip into today. Firstly, she never believed the narrative that she was a slave. In her own mind and heart she always rested in the truth that she was free, not the property of anyone, no matter what anyone else said or all the evidence to the contrary.

Secondly, she led herself and later hundreds of other enslaved people to freedom using an underground network of Black and white abolitionists who risked their own safety and lives to help her.

Thirdly, there were many more she could have saved if they had been able to go with her, but they couldn’t. Escaping slavery meant risking their lives, leaving behind everything they knew and the people they loved and entering an unknown future.

Imagine being born into slavery. Slavery being the only thing you know and yet somehow you’re able to see through the illusion. It was this clear seeing that gave Harriet the courage to imagine freedom.

So it is with dharma practice. In order to even begin we have to be able to see that another way is possible, beyond delusion. We have to be courageous enough to imagine that kind of liberation for ourselves and others.

Harriet worked at night, in the cold of winter. Even the word “underground” evokes an earthiness to what she did. Going through the darkest, most hidden parts of the landscape between enslavement and freedom to finally realise true liberation.

So it is with dharma practice. We have to be willing to descend into the furthest reaches of ourselves, what we’re all about, what makes us tick, and the habits that keep us circling, circling in our own cesspool of suffering.

There’s no ascension without descension. Even Jesus had to die and be buried for three days before his re-birth. This movement into the unknown, the shadows, where fear threatens to annihilate us is not just an inconvenient part of the path, it is the whole of it.

Imagine tasting freedom, then turning back and risking life and limb to help others to gain it, only to find that some would rather stay in their shackles. This is how white dominance works. It keeps us all shackled to the lies of separation and supremacy so that we can’t even imagine a different world.

So it is with the dharma. Delusion takes root in the false view of separateness. All the strategies to maintain that delusion, to keep the self-construct at work, reinforce the false view and blind us to what else is possible.

Some have no interest in pursuing freedom. They don’t even realise they’re under an enchantment.

But what strikes me most about Harriet’s story is that even after she liberated herself, she could not feel fully free until all her people were free, and she worked tirelessly her entire life towards realizing that vision.

So it is with the dharma. If you think you’ve found freedom from suffering and yet you don’t long for the liberation of others, you don’t feel their pain in your own heart, then I tell you that the freedom you have found is not true liberation.

It may be peaceful. It may be deeply tranquil. You may feel content and happy. But you are not awake.

I am on a path of awakening that includes waking up to the conditions that lead to suffering both within my own heart and in the world around me. What I am finding on this journey is that more and more I am drawn back to the relational nature of reality.

The implications of this are that I have to keep looking at the ways I continue to cut myself off, from my own true nature, but also from that of others. I can only relate to the best in others when I am in relationship to the best in myself.

So what gets in the way of being in relationship?

Now the work is to get curious about this. How can I embody a fierce, uncompromising meeting with everything that is unresolved within me?

And how can that embodiment support an authentic, uncontrived meeting with the “other” so that I may know others as myself?

Because this is my deepest heart wish. To know others as myself, to be known by others as themselves and to create a world together that honours the bond forged of that knowing.