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This month, our sangha gatherings will again explore what Engaged Mindfulness means and how we can use the lessons we learn to bring more justice, generosity, compassion and awakening to our world.
On Monday, Magda will facilitate the evening with a guest facilitator, Marisela Gomez.
Dr. Marisela Gomez is one of the organizers of the Village of Love and Resistance (VOLAR), a Dharma teacher and follower of Thay’s teaching for the last twenty years, and has first-hand knowledge of how territorial injustices have affected East Baltimore residents. While acquiring her MD, PhD and MPH at John Hopkins University, she did extensive research in the area surrounding John Hopkins Hospital, one of the poorest in Baltimore.
While we understand that each individual is free to engage in any way they desire, the Engaged Mindfulness working group is emphasizing the theme of territorial justice this month. In keeping with this, we will be supporting VOLAR through OHMC donations.
Please enjoy reading Magda’s essay on engaged mindfulness and VOLAR below.
After our meditation period this week, we will hear more about the engaged mindfulness projects of VOLAR and have time to ask Marisela questions on the practice of love and resistance and VOLAR. Some questions you might reflect on for Monday:
What does engaged mindfulness mean to you?
How do you practice engaged mindfulness when you leave your meditation cushion and go out into the world? How else might you like to practice?
How are you challenged by engaged mindfulness?
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ENGAGED MINDFULNESS
By Magda Cabrero
Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) coined the term ‘Engaged Mindfulness’ to describe how Buddhists maintained their mindful practice while responding to the suffering caused by the Vietnam war.
Thay explains that Engaged Mindfulness does not just involve self-help. While it helps us feel more strong and stable, it also makes us more connected to all beings and committed to their happiness.
Engaged Mindfulness involves cultivating the seeds of understanding (Prajñā) and compassion (Karuna) in all of us. We cannot cultivate compassion without cultivating understanding. If we have compassion and wisdom, we will find ways to practice meditation while helping other people.
One of my favorite ways to understand Engaged Mindfulness is in terms of what Thay calls the Continuation Body: “What we produce as thoughts, as speech, as action, [that] continues to influence the world.” When I pass, I know that my immortality will only depend on these things. My Continuation Body is immeasurable and timeless.
Engaged Mindfulness depends on our mindful steps. Engaged practitioners seek to cultivate lotuses of generosity, love, compassion, understanding and awakening in pursuit of a better world village.
Two concepts I consider essential are Interbeing and Nonviolence. These have been central to the lessons I have learned from my best spiritual teachers: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thay. Gandhi, King and Thay believe that no true justice is ever achieved through acts of violence or acts derived from separateness. They are deeply grounded and aware of suffering and its root causes. They used peaceful means to reduce suffering and were committed to the concept of mutuality. These luminaries were convinced that spiritual practice is the basis for all social action. Their Continuation Bodies are forever here to guide us.
OHMC’s Engaged Mindfulness Vision Statement can be found here.
NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE
Gandhi, King and Thay’s firm commitment to nonviolence inspires my Engaged Mindfulness practice.
In his posthumous book Where Do We Go From Here?, Martin Luther King expresses his deep admiration for Gandhi and his nonviolent resistance efforts in Africa and India.
King also expressed that he believed nonviolent resistance to be an essential and powerful tool to raise consciousness. “If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way,” he writes. Hate is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated; too great a burden to bear.
In a parallel way, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us that nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity. Nonviolence itself is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally.
Thay provides a list of ways to engage in nonviolent action, drawing on historical experience. My favorite example is when people in Vietnam brought their family altars - the most sacred objects in their homes - onto the streets, relying on their culture and tradition to oppose the forces of destruction. “This was an act of love,” Thay writes.
INTERBEING
Thay teaches that the illusion of separateness and the myths of inferiority and superiority need to be challenged through an Engaged Mindfulness practice that focuses on Interbeing.
In every example of territorial injustice I have looked into, I have found that the myth of superiority has been used to validate it, whether this injustice takes the form of land usurpation, human dislocation and placement in ghettos and shantytowns, educational segregation and destitution, or environmental deprivation. This myth has often been promulgated by people in authority, such as physical anthropologists and doctors, and has given rise to dogmas supported by well-respected institutions. One of many examples of the use of such dogmas to justify atrocities is President Andrew Jackson’s push for the Indian Removal Act, which he signed into law in 1830. The law authorized forcing Native American tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi.
Both Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh believe that separatist views have no place in true justice movements. King writes: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Thay asked his teacher in the root temple in Huē if he could adopt the Dharma name One (Nhat) Action (Hanh), which suited his aspiration to renew Buddhism as an Order of Interbeing (TIêp Hiên).
Thay proposes a Global Ethic which involves the Buddhist awareness of nonduality and of the interconnectedness of all things. It is based on observing and understanding the world with mindfulness. He writes: “We have to sit down together, as people of many traditions, to find the causes of global suffering. If we look deeply with clarity, calm and peace, we can see the causes of our suffering, uproot and transform them, and find a way out.”
FOR THE CHILDREN
The American Manifest Destiny concept was first introduced by journalist John Louis O’Sullivan in 1845. This myth turned into a providential dogma of expansionism, used to justify many acts of violence including the Mexican American War of 1846-48. With the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, Mexico lost 55% of its land. Mexicans living in the territories ceded to the United States lost their status as land owners. Mexican-American children became racialized, second-class citizens and lost a variety of legal and civil rights, including the right to attend school with white children. They soon began lagging academically.
Even the best-intentioned school principals and teachers have not been able to reverse the devastating educational effects of territorial injustice. For The Children: Lessons From A Visionary Principal documents everything that Principal Madeline Cartwright did to help the low-income children of Blaine Elementary School in Philadelphia. But at the end of the school day, the children returned to the slums, a forsaken and deprived territory.
I recently saw an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman called “Separate but Equal” that deepened my understanding of what it feels like to be an African American child like Frederick Douglas, seeking to receive a quality education soon after the end of slavery. The character Anthony is adopted by former slaves who are the first African Americans living among whites in a Colorado Springs community. The newly opened Freedmen’s school in the nearby shantytown cannot provide the more advanced education that Anthony, who has been home schooled, needs. His desire to attend the white children’s school causes controversy. The teacher insists that Anthony’s presence will be disruptive. Dr. Quinn asks her, “Aren’t you a teacher?” Dr. Quinn’s son, Brian, who is close to Anthony and has a deep sense of morality, refuses to attend the school and writes an editorial for the newspaper. The two children’s nonviolent resistance actions start the village’s process of moral transformation.
The courage of African American children who attended newly desegregated schools is described in Wilma King’s African American Childhoods. One of my favorite accounts is of Melba Pattillo, a young student who survives the tumult at her high school in part because she reads a book written by Mahatma Gandhi that her grandmother gives her. She employs nonviolent resistance tactics and plays mind games to gain control of the negative situations created by her tormentors.
Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, many children offered remarkable lessons in courageous nonviolence. Many members of the Emmett Till generation were expelled from schools and incarcerated for their activism. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the Birmingham Children’s Crusade. By May 10, 1963, after eight days of protests, the city agreed to desegregate businesses and free all protesters from jail. The children’s commitment to nonviolence secured victories for the Civil Rights Movement.
VILLAGE OF LOVE AND RESISTANCE
The Village of Love and Resistance project that our Engaged Mindfulness working group has decided to support this month aims to promote territorial justice for the residents of East Baltimore. Its name reminds me of my historical teachers’ core lesson: that true justice is only attained through loving acts that foster nonviolence and interbeing.
Dr. Marisela Gomez, in addition to being a dharma teacher and follower of Thay’s teaching for the last twenty years, has first-hand knowledge of how territorial injustices have affected East Baltimore residents. While acquiring her MD, PhD and MPH at John Hopkins University, she did extensive research in the poverty-stricken area surrounding John Hopkins Hospital. Documented in her book Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore are the ways in which the presence of the powerful and prestigious hospital has affected the abandonment and rebuilding of East Baltimore.
Seeking to learn more about this project, I met Dr. Gomez at the VOLAR project’s site near John Hopkins Hospital. She first took me through a building that her organization is planning to convert into a cooperative living complex founded on a solidarity-based, non-exploitative economic model and providing affordable housing units for seven people. She then showed me the abandoned church next to that building, a much bigger space with several levels, which they will convert into a Community Hub. The Hub will foster community entrepreneurship by using a community investment trust fund model to encourage small-dollar investment by residents. East Baltimore residents from five zip codes will be able to participate in the development and growth of VOLAR’s Community Hub by becoming co-owners. The organization will also invite other individuals who share their goals to invest. The Hub will serve a variety of functions, including community wellness, job training, office space, and a community organizing academy for all ages.
Dr. Gomez told me that she practices engaged mindfulness every day and that it is in projects like this that she puts Thay’s lessons into practice. “This,” she said, “is what Thay expects from us.”
When our Engaged Mindfulness working group met with Dr. Gomez, one of our members asked her: “What about the children?” She answered that children also have an important place in the project’s leadership and development goals.
Dr. Gomez last took me to the space where the garden will be. Their intention is that it will include a labyrinth and an area for walking meditation. I envision this garden as a Village of Love and Resistance for the children of East Baltimore.
We invite you to join us by practicing engaged mindfulness throughout the month and, if you are moved, by donating to VOLAR. You can donate to Volar through the OHMC website here and OHMC will match donations up to $500! Your gift to OHMC will be tax deductible, as always, and if you are already making a recurring donation, it will automatically be directed to VOLAR.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gomez, M. (2013). Race, class, power, and organizing in east Baltimore. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
King, M.L. (1968). Where do we go from here? Chaos or community. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
King, W. (2008). African American childhoods: Historical perspectives from slavery to civil rights. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.
(Magda's Book Review of African American Childhoods)
Macdonald, V.-M. (2004). Latino education in the United States: A narrated history from 1513-2000. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.
Raff, J. (2022). Origin: A genetic history of the Americas. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group.
Thich Nhat Hanh (2020). (4th Ed.). Interbeing: the 14 mindfulness trainings of Engaged Buddhism. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
Thich Nhat Hanh, et al. (2019) (2nd. Ed.). True peace work: Essential writings on Engaged Buddhism. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.