Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 85

Every time I lead a meditation these days I hear George Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe.”

I’ve been reflecting on how, as a meditation teacher, I can support people to bring awareness to the breath without causing harm during a time when so much rides on the breath.

Coronavirus disproportionately attacks the breathing of Black bodies and racism seeks to take it away entirely.

How can I come into intimate, sacred contact with the breath, my breath, this breath, while knowing that others in the world literally can’t breathe? And how can I ask others to do the same?

Knowing that for Black people, breathing free is still an ideal yet to be fully realized.

I’ve been reflecting on why the breath is so important to the meditator. In the Tibetan tradition, the breath is closely associated with the energy body, the more subtle body that is not separate from the physical body, co-emerging with it, and giving it life.

The breath is life. To say I can’t breathe is to say I can’t live.

And to say I can’t live is to say that in this world, the one each and every one of us lives in and participates in and co-creates with each breath we take, is to say that one’s energy is not able to fully manifest in this world.

Over the weekend I watched the memorial for George Floyd held in Minneapolis last week. The Reverend Al Sharpton gave the eulogy. He talked about how Black folks have never been able to realise their full potential because white people have always had their knee on their necks.

I have spent long periods of time, usually on solitary meditation retreats, contemplating the suffering of the world. I’ve reflected on, as Langston Hughes so poignantly put it, the dreams deferred.

I’ve mourned the loss to the world of the talents, gifts, knowledge, wisdom, discoveries, inventions and innovations of Black folks I imagine were never free to manifest under the suffocating weight of institutional and structural racism.

Even now, when Black people are leading in the fight to end racism, I’m sure they’d much rather be getting on with manifesting whatever beauty they are meant to bring to this world.

But we’re not there yet.

As a Buddhist I am committed to supporting myself and all beings to realise our full potential. This intention implies a movement towards seeking out any ways in which potential is thwarted, and working to liberate it.

Racism is one of the most dangerous forces in our world today impeding the progress of millions. To be Buddhist is to be anti-racist, if you’re willing to take a stand.

As a queer, gender non-conforming person I know discrimination. I know what it’s like to be treated differently simply based on aspects of who I am that I can’t change. I know what it’s like to feel held back and down, to not have the same opportunities as my cisgendered, heterosexual counterparts. To have to prove myself in ways they never have.

I can’t ever know or understand what it’s like to be Black in this world. But what I do know is that it took me a lot to overcome the stifling, sometimes suffocating feeling of being a queer person in this world.

And I had it good. In almost every way that matters I’ve experienced incredible privilege, my light-skin being a big reason why. I can’t even begin to imagine what it feels like to also face economic inequality, lack of access to a good education, and the constant threat of police brutality and state sanctioned violence, fear of death no less, not to mention the day to day micro-aggressions and discrimination doled out at almost every turn.

I’m so grateful to my Black friends who have, over many years, been generous and kind enough to tell me about their experiences of being Black in this world. To trust me with their stories. I’ve also learned about the Black experience through my own efforts to educate myself.

But I can never know them or fully understand. Never.

To breathe free is to feel that the air belongs to us. That we are as deserving of life as any other life form. To feel this is to know that breathing, being with and in the breath, bringing awareness to the breath, is as radical as it gets.

If what the world wants is that some of us can’t breathe, then I want to support this radical reclaiming of the sacred act of breathing. And in order to support that radical reclaiming, I can’t simply instruct people to turn towards the breath.

First I have to be willing to play my part in dismantling all the structures currently in place, including in my own heart and mind and that of others, that deliberately or unconsciously impede the breathing of others.  

I have to be up for challenging whatever blocks the living of Black lives in this world and the unique manifestation that comes of a life fully realised. Otherwise, as the late dancer Martha Graham put it, “it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”