​We have witnessed the way in which movements for justice that denounce dominator culture, yet have an underlying commitment to corrupt uses of power, do not really create fundamental changes in our societal structure. When radical activists have not made a core break with dominator thinking (imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy), there is no union of theory and practice, and real change is not sustained.… It is precisely because the dictates of dominator culture structure our lives that it is so difficult for love to prevail.

—bell hooks

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​Without inner change, there can be no outer change, without collective change, no change matters.

—Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei​

I have been mulling over the role of love in movements for well over two decades now. I felt a sense of calling to activist work—ushering in the third wave of feminism and changing minds about the so-called apathetic Generation X. Our cross-country voter registration drive felt significant, and I felt like I was part of something making a difference. Not too much later, after I dropped anchor in a spiritual practice, the conflicting ideas that seemed almost normal became increasingly apparent.

Like many activists, I was alarmed by the destructive behavior of my comrades and colleagues, and confounded by how it could be possible we would ever create the world we wanted to live in if we could not be the change. Although we were young women with good models for kindness toward each other, much of our work was driving against this or that, and to drive so hard and fast required fuel, and that fuel was anger.

vehicles to freedom:  what’s your ride?

Starting out five hundred to six hundred years before the Common Era, the historic Buddha taught for over fifty years. His teachings naturally evolved over his own lifetime, and he died leaving a significant wealth of discourses. By the fourteenth century, what was referred to simply as the teachings of the Buddha had virtually disappeared from the land of its birth in India. As the teachings found themselves in different countries stretched out over hundreds, then even a thousand years, different aspects were focused on.

​​​​​​First Turning—Hinayana, Smaller Vehicle

Arhat Ideal: Codes of Conduct and Liberation for One’s Self

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​Not long after finding my place as an activist for social justice, I came up against the need for not just reacting to what was happening in the world, which gave me a sense of purpose, but developing a way to look at what was happening, which provided a sense of meaning. I found a second home in cultivating a spiritual life.
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​Though I didn't originally think of it that way, my formal Zen practice and training were teaching me to find a more restful place that I could abide in within myself despite the chaos and calamity of living in, and being surrounded by, an unjust society. 

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It also gave me a way to be in response to sometimes overwhelming situations that could just lead me to a downward spiral of anger and negativity. I didn’t know a lot, but I knew that I didn’t want to live a life driven by anger and rage. I could see that many activist elders and now my younger counterparts had fallen into that vortex, and it seemed difficult to get out once you were caught there.

the wake-up warriors

Second Turning—Mahayana, Greater Vehicle

Bodhisattva Ideal: Compassion and Liberation for the Sake of Others

The Zen community I eventually became engaged with did not frame its cultivation of peace as a passive practice because we had a set of vows that I took to heart. In fact, the reason I decided to make a home with these particular folks was precisely because, as the Zen Peacemaker Order, they were explicitly committed to social action.

I was captivated by the bodhisattva ideal. The most prominent Avalokiteshvara is “he who looks down on” and is embodied as female in Chinese, or “the one who hears the cries of the world.” In bodhisattvas, I saw Sojourner and Ella, Ambedkar and Malcolm. In their infinite wisdom and boundless compassion, they responded to the cries. Even though liberation is available to them, they hold it off until every person can be awakened, too. What I didn’t hear is that I need anger to drive my response.

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I lived by this ideal for many years; I extrapolated and built upon the concept of the “awakening warrior,” as I’d heard it translated in Tibetan teachings. Strongly influenced by Chö­gyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings on the enlightened society of Shambhala, and the qualities of warriorship needed to achieve it, warrior-spirit became a central theme of my work.

I advocated for this more balanced approach to fiercely address injustice from a place of empowerment as a warrior—but one that was ultimately committed to peace rather than aggression. 

In response to the events of September 11th, I wrote what became known as the Warrior-Spirit Prayer of Awakening. The verse became an affirmation of how I wanted to be in response to the challenges of the world and eventually became the penultimate call of the practice community I founded.

Warrior-Spirit Prayer of Awakening

योधात्मनः प्रार्थना बोधनस्य

yodhaatmanah praarthanaa bodhanasya

May all beings be granted with the strength, determination and wisdom to extinguish anger and reject violence as a way.

सर्वे मानवाः आप्नुवंतु शक्तिं निश्चयं प्रज्ञां च

क्रोधं प्रणष्टुं हिंसां परित्यक्तुं च सदा

sarve maanavaah aapnuvantu shaktim nishchayam 

pradnyaam cha

krodham pranashtum hinsaam parityaktum cha sadaa

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May all suffering cease and may I seek, find, and fully realize the love and compassion that already lives within me and allow them to inspire and permeate my every action.

सर्वबाधाः विरमंतु च मृग्याणि आप्नवानि

पूर्णतः अनुभवानि च प्रेम करुणां च पूर्वमेव

मयि स्थिते च मनुमन्यै ते विश्वसितुं व्याप्तुं

च मम सर्वकर्माणि च

sarvabaadhaah wiramantu cha mrigyaani aapnawaani

poornatah anubhavaani cha prema karunaam cha poorvameva

mayi sthite cha anumanyai te wishvasitum wyaaptum

cha mama sarvakarmaani cha

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May I exercise the precious gift of choice and the power to change that which makes me uniquely human and is the only true path to liberation.

योजानि अमूल्यपारितोषिकं वरस्य शक्तिं

परिवर्तितुं च यथा मां करोति अद्वितीयत्वेन

मानवं चास्ति एकः एव मार्गः मुक्त्यै च

yojaani amoolya paaritoshikam warasya shaktim

parivartitum cha yathaa maam karoti adwiteeyatwena

maanavam chaasti ekah eva maargah muktyai cha

May I swiftly reach complete, effortless freedom so that my fearless, unhindered action be of benefit to all.

गच्छानि पूर्णस्वातंत्र्यमनायासेन यथा

ममाभयानवरोधकर्माणि सर्वेषां हितं कुर्वंतु

gachchhaani poornaswaatantryamanaayaasena yathaa

mamaabhayaanawarodhakarmaani sarveshaam hitam kurwamtu

May I lead the life of a warrior.

मम जीवनं योधस्यास्तु

mama jeevanam yodhasyaastu

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​beyond allies

Third Turning—Vajrayana: Indestructible Vehicle

Liberation in This Lifetime

As I began to feel as powerful as the bodhisattva was, compassion, solely, was not enough; I wanted also to confront the things that existed in my self that got in the way. I wanted to go to the heart of change by cultivating indestructible qualities.

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By this time, I had read bell hooks’s earth-shattering book, All About Love. I was inspired to take up the investigation of love more rigorously. My experience with Zen—in fact, with most of the expression of the white Western-convert Buddhism I was in contact with—was that, though compassion was an ever-attending partner to wisdom, love was hyphenated into a concept that felt more neutral. 

Lovingkindness, a common translation of metta, promoted good behavior but lacked the fire of fierce love I knew and felt in my colored upbringing. Even the joy that was considered one of the Four Immeasurable Qualities was denatured, and the Zen folks, myself included, seemed to prefer the last Immeasurable Quality, equanimity. I found the warmth of love, if not always the word, expressed in Tibetan teachings, in Advaita, with my yoga tribe. bell’s work brought me back to a more explicit naming of and focus on love as a motivating force for change.

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​​​Fourth Turning—Mitrayana: Friendship Vehicle

Liberation by Collective

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My intense interest and eventual certainty about the connection between inner change and social change led me to go beyond studying what made change possible in people and think about how deeply powerful change could be scaled to movements to affect many people—by reaching a critical mass of change-makers who could, on their own terms, cultivate indestructible qualities, but, all working together, could create movements that weren’t about a small handful of individuals doing things on behalf of the many but enrolling people in the deep project of their own liberation.

meetin​g suffering

be with the suffering

​In our culture, so much is oriented toward moving away from that experience and finding ways to deaden it, whether that’s through addictions to Facebook, television, drugs, or alcohol. You have to figure out:

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What place are you not feeling?

What part of you are you rejecting?

What aspect are you not loving?

What truth are you not willing to accept?

​In my experience, whatever we’re not facing about ourselves is never as bad as the ideas we are referencing ourselves off of. The funny thing is that somehow when we get caught in our stuck ideas about ourselves, we create better images of who we are and we simultaneously believe worse images of who we actually are. So we create fantasies and we believe fiction. Neither of these things abide in truth.

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It’s easier to leave these parts aside, at least to our conscious mind, than to even begin to consider if we will be able to survive the grief of facing them. It’s easier to just claim our progressiveness, to claim our enlightened hearts and spirits or our radicalness and commitment to the struggle—so you can’t possibly be racist, or sexist, or transphobic, or think your spirituality is more real, or you’re just better—than to actually have your despair show up for you. 

In truth, we have to integrate our wounds into our understanding of who we are and what we are really capable of so that we can be whole human beings. Only from there can we begin the process of healing the brokenness, the broken-heartedness within ourselves that is then the foundation for beginning to heal that in our larger society.

We cannot have a healed society, we cannot have change, we cannot have justice if we do not reclaim and repair the human spirit. We simply cannot. Imagining anything different is to really have our head buried deeply in the sand of hundreds of years of a culture of domination, colonization, the theft of this land, the theft of a people from their land, and the continued and ongoing theft and appropriation of peoples and cultures on a day-to-day basis that every single one of us is colluding with and participating in consciously and unconsciously.

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Learning to be with suffering as an experience is part and parcel of what it means to live, and it radically alters our relationship to all of life and to the suffering of others. If you are invested in alleviating suffering, whether as an activist or change-maker or someone who’s committed to life because you hear the cries of the world, it’s important to understand that you can’t even recognize the suffering of others without fully acknowledging the despair of your own suffering. 

It turns out that far from dragging you down, one of the most liberating things you can do is to come to terms with the fact that some form of your suffering will always be there. To really be present with that unhooks us from the constant anxiety of trying to make it go away. Paradoxically, once we release the proposition that we are going to get rid of the suffering, then the potential to alleviate the suffering becomes possible.

the grand central station of presence

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​What could be both the motivation and the destination?

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It seems to me that for people to develop any of the qualities that were important for nurturing people’s inner life—their sense of commitment beyond instant gratification, the long-term investment that it takes to dismantle such daunting and interrelated structures of oppression—we had to use a new approach.

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To be in touch with their situations, to the suffering that they felt as a result, not to mention the power of being seen as others are present with them, they can then travel on to compassion, to courage, to caring, to love.

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We don’t have to fix people at all. We have to trust the evolutionary draw that is. What pulls you forward is presence. Presence is what motivates people and what you get out of it. As you choose to be more present, you are more present. What does presence allow? It allows us to see ourselves and others. By choosing presence we learn to let go of our own discomfort, and experiencing ourselves in a trusting way allows us to trust others more. As a result, we are drawn deeper.

every body home

Predatory capitalist greed has deeply ingrained a self-worth confusion into our psyche. We associate our value as human beings with our financial worth. Our relationships are governed by the shadow game of acquisition. We can never have enough. The result is a devastating disconnect to a felt sense of our experience.

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​Even with meditation, we remain mesmerized by the elusive possibility of one day becoming the elite. We contort our bodies and fling our values into suspension in the air between the seat of our soul and the elusive brass ring. How can the core remain intact if the appendages are hyperextended into the posture of overreach that consumption lust seduces us into?

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​I introduced embodiment practice to invite people back home to their felt experience. To disrupt the disconnect among head and heart, aligned thought, emotions, and action that a no-longer citizen, but consumer society, fosters. I believe anyone engaged in the practice of liberation must actively discover it in their own being, and having a body-based or somatic practice is a direct way to reclaim connection to their psychophysical connection to themselves.

social change

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Transformative Social Change as applied to efforts and just change was the way in which I tried to speak to, articulate, and concretize something that I knew intuitively. It is a theory of change, so it is living.

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In order to not just organize people against a this or that only to fall away again, it seemed important to support people in a recognition of the potential for liberation.

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Transformative Social Change applies to what used to be called Liberation Spirituality, but I insist we not limit it to spirituality and look at it as an emergent movement. Agnostics, atheists, or even humanists can go through this process. History is there (Gandhi, King, etc.), but this new iteration is unique in that both Eastern and Western views are being held by an individual, and it’s no longer associated around a singular or dominant spiritual, religious tradition or cluster (Abrahamic, Dharmic, etc.) or even of any religion or spiritual tradition at all.

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On the one hand, Transformative Social Change is inherently spiritual, but not in the sense of a particular tradition. To call it merely spiritual is arrogant as it suggests that we have a corner on the market of what is spiritual—and by association, what is not. It is naive. Spirituality, by its nature, has a whole expressive range. Transformative Social Change looks specifically at “what is the trajectory?” and “what is the vehicle?” of the desired change.

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Spiritual tradition is comfortable with paradox, whereas many political movements are not. But all truth is paradox. What it is to live in a space of transformative change is to engender greater and greater comfort with paradox. So that paradox becomes something that we not only acknowledge but also live more truthfully. We discover that Truth is relationship. And relationship is.

the language of love

The theory of Transformative Social Change was designed to do exactly what bell hooks speaks of, to unite theory and practice, providing an identifiable yet adaptive, concrete yet flexible, rigorous yet permeable path to breaking with dominator culture through direct experience. Through praxis. But having folded behavior, motivation, community, suffering, presence, and embodiment into a theory of a truly transform­ative change, I was still challenged by a phenomenon I couldn’t quite make sense of.  

​​​​where’s the love?

My life is full of rich relationships to white people. I have been in community with and traveled among many of them, and know of many more who would fiercely claim they are motivated by love. I’m speaking of my fellow Buddhist teachers and practitioners, tribes of yoga practitioners, even legions of progressive activists who focus on change in “rights” and entitlements but shy away from justice, which would impact the positioning and access to those things that are inalienable to human thriving. 

Most painfully, they are not sufficiently motivated by their sense of love to courageously confront capitalism and its white knight of supremacy as a systemic purveyor of mass suffering. Neither are they willing to see their own belief in the superiority of whiteness play out in everyday interactions as unconscious bias, micro-aggressions, and a tendency to exert control over cultural norms and space. They find a never-ending litany of excuses to maintain power over rather than power with—to dominate.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to say that they were not committed to love, and yet, they are not activated into responding to the obvious, pressing injustices of society. 

What dawned on me is that not only has white supremacy robbed red, Black, brown, and yellow people of the spirit-­given human right to life and liberty, it has also so thoroughly programmed and policed white people as to who and how they could love—determining entire groups of people unworthy—that the entirety of our descended culture suffers from a severely atrophied relationship to the most animating, enlivening, equalizing force gifted to the human experience.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

—Elie Wiesel

How else could the imaginably decent, moral, ordinary white people stand to live in proximity, much less partake, in open-market slavery? 

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Generations of people allowed their children to witness the sale and degradation of other human bodies. This most unnatural of arrangements, executed for nothing more aspirational than the privilege of financial gain, required the compulsion toward compassion for other beings to be systematically uprooted and replaced with widespread indifference. 

For generation upon generation, white America has traded its humanity for privilege.

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Even our great social currency of language is anemic when it comes to expression of love. Sanskrit, the language of religions, has ninety-six words for love. Persian, eighty. It has often been shared that Greek, which we borrow from, has six words that can help us make distinctions: agape, eros, ludus, philautia, philia, and pragma; but most of us cannot recall them, much less have an active understanding and practice.​

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The politics of respectability and the hidden rules of politeness that silently govern white belonging to “proper society” demand that love remain personal. The further the love is from some norm, the more behind closed doors, in the closet, relegated to corners of guilt, laden with shame it must be. The result of having “privatized” love is we are not comfortable with its raw, unabashed, unapologetic, unmitigated expression. Love for one another, especially across lines of difference, has been taboo for the overwhelming part of our national lives.

the measure of justice

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Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. 

                                       ​                                                                —Cornel West

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The only thing white people have that Black people need, or should want, is power—and no one holds power forever….And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the Blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.

                                                                   —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time​​