How to Change while Staying the Same: A Meditation

Some of you are here because you’re regulars here, or because you saw a post on social media and wanted to check it out. Some of you are here because it’s your homework (incidentally, it’s also my homework). Whatever the case, Welcome. This post is a bit different than the usual, and features instructions for a guided meditation.

I didn’t want you to be too connected to a device via earbuds, I’ve chosen a slightly more analog route. So, if you’re here from IMS, you should have the little love note you got in class that got you here with your tea. If you’re here for some other reason, please feel free to read and then try out this meditation on your own. Lots of support below on what and how to do it.

And thanks, Sooz, for teaching me what this is, and showing me what a valuable practice it can be.

In Pursuit of Collective Community Practice

This is a ritual that I designed for you to learn and then practice on your own and to come back to again and again. It takes this form in part because the space I intended to teach it in was unavailable to do so in real time. There is something powerful and beautiful about knowing that you are stepping into a ritual space with others in real time, whether you’re in the room together not. With that in mind, I’ll be practicing this tea meditation this coming Saturday, October 5, 2019 at 8:00 am Eastern Time, in a quiet corner of my Cambridge home, if you want to try it with me at the same time, in a quiet corner of your home in Baltimore or New Haven or Chicago or Columbus or Seattle or wherever else you’ll be.

a tea meditation on change

Guidelines

1. Read all the instructions through (at least once, and likely twice) so you don’t feel too tethered to your computer or device once you decide to try it.

2. Find a good time and place to sit undisturbed. I find that early in the morning, before I’ve looked at my phone is nice: my discursive mind is still relatively quiet, and I’m able to be still more easily. (If you’re concerned that the caffeine in the tea might keep you awake, practicing this meditation before noon is wise. Having said that, the tea we’re using for this meditation—IMS colleagues—has the lowest caffeine profile of the types of tea: oolong is often consumed as an evening tea. You know your body. Choose wisely.)

3. Arrange for yourself to remain undisturbed: this might mean silencing your mobile phone or requesting some space and silence from a partner or roommate. A meditation like this is not recommended to practice outside, unless you have the capacity to exercise a significant degree of silence and solitude for yourself. You want to be undisturbed and to minimize distraction for ten to thirty minutes, depending on how much time you choose to stay.

4. Assemble your materials:

• a tea bowl or mug;

• about 1 teaspoon loose-leaf tea* (no need for a bag or filter, please);

• about 8 oz water, brought to boil and cooled to your comfort;

• a journal and a writing tool, or something else to take notes with.

  Place these materials with you near the place where you’ll be sitting. PLEASE NOTE: during the meditation, steps 6-end, you are welcome to take a quick moment and jot a few words down as they come to you, but do your best not to get lost in the act of writing or drafting. There will be time to explore your thoughts in writing (or another form) at the end. Try to sustain your dharana (single-pointed focus) on this activity.

5. Before you take your seat, take a few minutes to make sure the body is comfortable. Because you’ll be sitting for a time, it might be useful to take a few gentle stretches. For more information or guidance on how you can prepare the body for sitting, please see brief video below.

6. Once you have relieved some residual tension and are ready to be still, find your seat. This seat need not be cross-legged, but it certainly can be. If you choose to sit cross-legged or kneeling on the floor, make sure to take a mat or blanket underneath the body, as well as a cushion or bolster or two under the hips. Sitting with the hips elevated can make sitting on the floor more accessible. On the floor, you can place your materials nearby, within arm’s reach. If you choose to sit at in a chair, sit near a table that will allow you to access the materials conveniently.

7. Take your seat. Arrange your body thoughtfully so you are as comfortable as you can be, to allow sensations of discomfort from the body to subside. Let the hands rest comfortably on the knees, thighs, or in the lap. Close the eyes, or allow the eyelids to fall over the eyes, allowing only a small sliver of light to come inside; whatever the case, let your awareness begin to move inward.

8. Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale, exhale. As you continue to breathe, notice your breath. Where are you feeling the breath move in the body? What parts of the body are responding to the breath? How does resting your awareness on your breath change your body? How does resting your awareness on your breath change your breath?

9. After several moments of feeling the body and breath become still and even, of feeling the awareness move inside, open your eyes and turn to your materials. Pour or pinch about one teaspoon of loose tea into the bottom of your mug. (IMS participants, you have enough tea in your sachet for two meditations, so one cup is about half of your portion. Other folks, this is about what you can pinch in between the thumb and several fingers.) No need to measure this or be too uptight about it. Trust your felt sense of the right amount of tea. Remember, no tea bag or strainer here. Allow the leaves to be loose in your bowl or cup.

10. Take a moment to consider the tea in the cup. How did it sound pouring into the cup? How did the dried leaves feel between your fingers? Can you smell it?

11. Pour the water over the tea. Watch it stream and fall into the cup. What sound does it make as it meets the leaves and fills the vessel? Is there steam rising from the water? How do the leaves respond to the water?

12. Pick up the tea bowl or mug. How does it feel in your hand(s)? What sensations are you aware of rising from within you as you hold this bowl of tea?

13. Lift the bowl to your face. Consider the bowl. What color is the tea? Take a breath. What are you able to smell? What can you feel on your face? What are the leaves doing in the bowl with the water?

14. Take a sip of the tea, and if you’re able to, hold it in your mouth for a moment before you swallow. What flavor or quality pools in your mouth as you hold the tea there? What flavor lingers after you swallow? What does it taste like? What does it remind you of?

15. Notice, if, in your first sip, you caught a leaf in your mouth or on your lip. Notice your reaction to this: how do you respond to this leaf? What does your reaction to this plant matter have to teach you? How will you navigate loose leaves in your tea?

16. Take another sip of tea, and then allow the mug to rest on the table or in your hands. Notice: what new sensations might be available in your body? How is the tea affecting your breath? Where do you feel the breath now? Has it changed from before?

17. After a time, take another slow sip of tea. How has the color of the tea changed? Has the texture changed? Has the flavor changed? How are you registering this change in your body? How are you meeting this change: is it positive? Negative? Neutral?

18. Continue this way, slowly drinking the tea one sip at a time. Note how the tea lands inside you, what you feel as you drink it. Note how it changes, and how you integrate (or struggle to integrate) those changes. Note how the tea tastes relative to how it smells. Consider these sensations and what they make you think, or what you feel. Take your time. Abide with this process and its sensations.

19. As you come to the end of your cup, consider what the leaves are doing in your cup. How have they gathered, or separated? Place the rim of the bowl or mug around your nose and mouth and take a deep breath, inhaling the residual fragrance of the tea. Pinch a few tea leaves between your fingers. Rub them together. How do they feel? What can you smell lingering on your fingertips left over from the tea leaves?

20.   Before you tidy up, take a few minutes to reflect in and with your journal. Questions and prompts to help guide you:

• How do you feel now, relative to how you felt at the beginning of this meditation? Is this because of the act of consuming the tea, or is it the process and attention you paid to it? What other processes might you practice or engage in with a similar level of attention? How you can you open yourself to their lessons?

• What did you notice about the way the tea changed, specifically what did you notice in your body and what were your mental or emotional reactions to the changes? What do these sensations and reactions have to teach you about change? Were there parts of you (physical/mental/emotional) that wanted to leave or disrupt this meditation due to the change? Were there parts of you that were willing or able to stay present despite the change?

• Change is an inevitability of life: seasons change, neighborhoods change, our bodies change, our relationships change, the world is changing around us. Some of these changes we may find easy to tolerate, or even welcome. Others may be confusing, off-putting, or downright frightening. In the Hebrew Bible, God promises Israel, “I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O Children of Jacob, have not perished.” (Malachi 3:6) In words of encouragement and clarity, the writer of Hebrews offers, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (13:8) The manifest world around us changes, but we can find the capacity to experience change with grace and curiosity in our God. Let us remember what endures: not God’s law, but His love; not Her wrath, but Her welcoming; not Their capacity for vengeance, but Their capacity for generosity and transformation. These verses remind us that to be strong is to be tender. We’re invited to be open to experience and accept change; not to resist or deny change, nor demand things go back the way they were, but to choose to lean into change with open eyes and a soft, brave heart, buffeted by love, which never fades and never fails. What did you notice about this practice that you might draw on when you must support those parts of yourself that are struggling with or resistant to change?

21. As you reach the end of your reflection, feel free to conclude as you are led, with prayer, mantra, or breath. Used tea can be composted.

*A note about tea: if you’re participating in the meditation ritual for my Intro to Ministry Studies class, you were gifted a tea sample to use. If you’re choosing to try this meditation on your own, feel free to use any loose-leaf tea you like. Note that tisanes—herbal blends that aren’t strictly tea—may behave differently than green, white, oolong, or black teas used for a meditation like this.

IMS participants have been gifted either a sample of Formosa Fancy Superior Oolong Taifu oolong tea, or a sample of Hibiscus (Jamaica) petals to use for those caffeine-free. Again, the Hibiscus is likely to behave a bit differently than the oolong, but either are possible to use.

A photo slide show for some visual guidance…

…and a short video of some stretching suggestions to do before taking your seat. Please remember, this video is optional, it’s not at real speed, and I did my best to make it accessible. Feel free to adapt it or ditch it entirely and skip right to meditation.

31 Days of Contemplative Practice

The regulars in this space will know that I love me a month-long challenge, particularly of a photo nature…

There are so many FEELINGS here, y’all! I have my hands full bearing witness to the feelings of my first-year community, not to mention my own! And the vibe of intellectual superiority at the sacrifice of wholeness is real, embedded in both the structure and the vibe of this place, among students and administration. Don’t get it twisted, there are so many communal practice spaces and events, student-led and admin-sanctioned, for de-stressing and eating and talking and feeling.

And: the specter of intellectual rigor, the valorization of white-supremacist constructed, patriarchal, hierarchical learning process, the “don’t ask me to move or feel, I just gotta WORK” vibe is REAL here.

Like, it’s REALLY REAL.

I did not take this picture. But I have it set as my home screen because I think it is a gift to smile at the frowning faces I meet here all. the. time.

I’m not complaining. I know where I am and I know what I’ve chosen. Not my first rodeo. I dig rigor, and I can handle it in this context and form. Let’s Get Into It.

One thing I’m intrigued by is a kind of magnetic pull I’m feeling toward contemplative practices. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: my spiritual practice has been contemplative for years. But this feels different. I’m thinking about the subversive nature of folks who choose a cloistered life, particularly femme folks. I’m thinking about where we pursue quiet, how we hear that still, small voice when it literally feels like the world is falling down around us. I’m thinking about these early mothers and fathers of the Christian tradition who were looking for God in their own face, in the faces of folks who made them crazy, in the faces of their leaders and congregants and community members, in the face in the mirror. What is the contemplative practice here, in this Pitta-pregnant learning institution? What is it on the sidelines, or in the thick, of suffering and oppression? What is this THING?

I realized today that my social media portals, this one included, have become a kind of verbal processing place, a place where I think out loud to try to understand what I can’t yet. My husband thanks you for holding some of the burden of listening.

So, starting today, on my Instagram Feed: 31 Days of Contemplative Practice. I don’t know what it will be. Real. Not always pretty. Thoughtful. Messy. Attentive. Genuine.

I’ll use a hashtag, #31DaysofContemplativePractice. Look if you’re curious, join me if you’re interested. Let’s see what we find.

So here’s Day One. An image of Parvati that I colored years ago and placed on my altar. Hindu goddess of sacred marriage, the Divine Yogini, she who seeks to bring God to her with the tapas of her practice. I’ve felt an abiding connection to her, to this yearn, to this work, though, to be fair, I’ve never spent ten thousand years standing one-footed in a stream chanting Om Namah Shivaya. (Although, we have been working on balance in my ballet class.) Looking at her reminds me of what the power of personal will can manifest.

Attendez-moi

A dream: Mister and I are hosting a party in our home. Not our old home back in Chicago, nor our new place in Cambridge. This place is like places we’ve been, familiar, but unusual: wide curved entries from living room to dining room, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are full but not bursting, comfy chairs and our own blue sofa; warm, inviting, neat but lived-in. Andrew Reilly is there, and so is Nick Ward, and some other of our friends. There is music and wine and easy conversation.

I pull out my phone and begin swiping through Instagram. On the screen is a friend, a black woman I love and admire and respect deeply for what she is making in the world and what she is making the world with her work. She is in three pictures where she is literally showing her ass. Photo one features her lying on top of her partner. The two of them are perched on the top edge of their own couch, he has lifted her dress up near her hips, and the closest hip to the camera is bear. His hand holds her butt cheek lovingly, but his face is turned away from the lens. She is smiling at the viewer and laughing, one knee bent, playful and carefree. Showing off. In photo two, she’s bent over at the hips, pointing her butt right at the camera and pulling her cheeks apart. This is too intimate a shot for me, and I keep scrolling and ultimately clatter the phone down to a table nearby, never finding out what the third picture was in the trio of ass shots.

“Now see,” I say aloud to the party, “this is why I can never put pics of my ass on Instagram. Because I want to be a minister. You can’t put pictures of your ass on social media if you want to be a minister, it just won’t work!”

“What do you mean?” someone asks, and I try to start explaining about how ministers don’t show their ass.

*

On the first day that I encountered him—an orientation parade of faculty hawking their classes to incoming students—my Intro to Ministry Studies professor, Matthew Potts, invoked Lizzo’s performance at the VMAs. Is there a clearer, stronger, more vocal or more evocative preacher or minister (he didn’t use these words but maybe oracle? priestess?) in our popular American culture, he asks. He says we’ll unpack this word and this concept, of ministering, and all of the beauty and the struggle, the good and the bad, of it. We’ll look at what we mean when we use the word: what do we talk about when we talk about ministry? What are the different ways it’s shaped, etc. etc.

It’s a compelling idea, and as a first-year MDiv, I can’t avoid taking it anyway, it’s required.

But invoking Lizzo is what put my butt in a chair in his class.

*

Some of you know, I’ve written before about what I think about when I hear the phrase, “woman of God.“ When I continue to think about it, I remember that passage from The Bluest Eye that we all read over and over again in Fiction I as one of Morrison’s countless and pristine examples of a model telling: those young women who are from Mobile and Aiken and Nacogdoches, who don’t sway their hips when they walk and who don’t put lipstick to the edges of their lips and who worry worry worry about the ends of their hair. The model of a black female pastor (or preacher, somehow minister means something different) is as evocative, the same model only more so, is as clear for me. I lay in bed thinking about this dream. What’s clear is that I don’t really have a desire to take semi-nude photos of myself and put them on social media, but that there’s something I feel like I’m not able to do or be if I step into the role of Pastor. Preacher. Minister.

I’ve been reading articles about what “religion” and how we (mis)define it, and the harm that comes when we use language without deeply reflecting on its history and consequence, and so now I’m hung up on defining what words mean. “Preacher” in the lexicon between my ears, is very clearly a black man, who sweats and shouts at the front of his congregation, who is mopped and hydrated and attended by the ladies’ auxiliary like groupies attending to some hot, bare-chested R&B artist that I don’t know the name of (I imagine D’Angelo or Usher, but that’s just showing my age), who are”baptized by the Holy Spirit” and who convey the Word of God with such urgency and vehemence that I sometimes worry over their heart health and blood pressure. Preacher is a noun. Pastor is both a noun and a verb: the noun by which you refer to your Preacher when you speak to him or about him—”Good Morning, Pastor Daniel,”—or the act of leading and guiding members of one’s flock (parish). Minister… minister is often a verb. You minister to someone by bringing food, or visiting when they’re in the hospital, or praying with someone when they’re in a low point. Minister as a noun is… the head of a congregation, a white man in a collar with a soft voice, sincere and unassuming, the American equivalent of the Anglicans’ vicar.

See all the pronouns up there? See the absence of my own reflection in all that?

There is a Lot of baggage for me to shed.

*

If the lexicon between my ears is flexible, then there’s a chance that my work at HDS and elsewhere will allow me to practice embodying any one, or all, of these roles. I was thinking that the role of spiritual leader was initially something that one stepped into, and then shed, like the vestments that are part of so many communal, organized ceremonies. But maybe it’s not that at all; maybe it’s more like a ritual, like an experience that changes me, not a thing I can put on and take off again, but a part of myself that I open up to and become. Whatever the case, a thing I’m clearly wrestling with is that there’s some version of being me that equates to “showing my ass.” Being playful, loudmouthed, vulnerable, vulgar, being sexual, being angry, being frightened, being overcome, being overwhelmed, being saturated by delight and feeling: so much of this feels like how I move through the world, and evidently I still don’t believe I can be this and be of service in spaces where I’d be perceived as a spiritual leader. So much of my personal perspective on the New Testament is colored by Paul and his tortured relationship with his own body, and how we have to subjugate ours to pursue and access closeness with the Divine. So much of Tantra that created a doorway for me back into divine spaces and experiences was the idea that having a body is a most marvelous means by which we relate to and with the Divine. Evidently I’m too human to be of service to God and to others; some part of me is afraid this study and this work is going to require that I rein myself in, that I quiet down, smooth it out, that I become some version of myself I don’t recognize or like. I’m already grieving her loss in my dreams.

(I can also feel some past behaviors showing up within me, now that I’m back in school, that I thought I’d retired literally decades ago: that over-eager, insecure desire to please; the submission of my will to folks I perceive as people with more power and wisdom than I have, who nevertheless aren’t living my life or my education; that voice that says, “you didn’t give us homework”—which I’m certain won’t be expressed because there is NO SHORTAGE of work to be done here, but still, I’m all juiced about assignments. I mean, I make no apology for how excited I am to be learning in a context and structure like this, flawed and challenging and sometimes downright lonely as it is. But I want to remember the confidence and experience and wisdom that I have. As the most active participant in my own education, I get to decide how this goes. I don’t have to revert to childish ways of navigating a big, scary world.)

Bringing your whole self has to be part of this work. Folks can tell when we’re being inauthentic, sometimes even when we can’t. So the honesty that it takes to be vulnerable, mistaken, disappointed, out of reach—shadowed—is a real part of the human experience, especially right now, with a planet on fire and world leaders determined to dismantle, disassemble, and destroy any chance we have for connection and understanding across our difference. There’s something real in the willingness to let the discouragement touch you, and not feel like you have to float away in the bliss and the ether. And, I’m constantly humbled and encouraged by my sibs who remind me of the power of joy, delight, pleasure, and care: as a means of appreciation, as an act of resistance, as maybe even an act of worship. I delight in the power of my lungs when I sing or chant (or scream); I am grateful for the meaningful mirror of friendship when I email my brother from another mother and dwell with him in his deep sensitivity of his manic experience; I marvel in the perfect blue of the October sky just after sunset; I am grateful for the practice of union every time I touch my husband. I can’t be any less delighted, or angry, or moved, and hope to share with others their own human experience.

And.

Isn’t there something that I need, something that I’m supposed to know that they don’t know, in order to function as a leader? Isn’t there a thought or a comfort that I’m supposed to have that they need? What am I actually even giving anybody? It’s not a ton of words to distance themselves from their feelings or experience? So what is it?

So what does minister, or pastor, or preacher even mean? I don’t know yet. Writing sermons is a part of my homework assignments, maybe. I’ve never written a sermon before. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever written a sermon: I’ve never taken a passage of the Bible and used it as inspiration for a point I want to make about how we walk through the world and how we can do so with a teeny bit more kindness or courage or patience. I can tell stories and write blog posts, I can be thoughtful and vulnerable and generous, and maybe even humorous. But I don’t know if I can minister. I don’t know if I can preach.

I try to remember that there is no Before and After, there is only during. That, like you, like all of us, I am in a state of both Being and Becoming, and though there might be a day when someone stamps or signs a form and says I’m ready and I go and do The Work, that it’s a kind of extension of the work I’m doing now, and have been doing since before I got to Cambridge, maybe even before the words “divinity school” were a part of my narrative. It’s easy to forget that when you take ideas like presence and compassion and generosity, like embodiment, ritual, love, joy, grief, and wrap them in theory and then read page after page after page, only to write paper after paper after paper. Maybe that’s why I have this space: to practice remembering that there’s only a certain point to which the mystery and the relationship of where spirit and matter intersect can be theorized or made academic. After that, it’s all about showing up.

I looked up the definition of the word “minister” today, and it read, “to attend to the needs (of someone.)” In French, the verb attendre means “to wait.” I read this and think about ministering like waiting. Waiting on. Waiting for. Waiting with. Lingering. Dwelling. Tarrying. Maybe ditch the preposition entirely. Just wait. Just sit with me a minute and let our bellies rise and fall with the movement of our breath and see what happens. Everything. Nothing. Let’s just wait.

Where do I plug in?

Mister and I have been talking a lot about leadership.

Hm. That’s not really right. We’ve been arguing. About why he’s so passive and I’m so aggressive in public.

The scene: a grocery store. It’s a Sunday, so even more crowded than usual. Mister is steering the cart, I’m behind him, holding onto his t-shirt, and we’re threading our way around displays of crackers and moms with carts that are too big (like, with the race car on the front, I know shopping with small kids with short attention spans is a pain, but really the idea to stick a race car on the front? Nope), and young folx distracted by their phones and not paying attention to the space around him. We reach an opening, and instead of stepping into it and through it, Mister pauses, and lets one, two, and now THREE people cut him off, delaying our forward movement. On top of which, one dude is JUST STANDING THERE, and doesn’t move until I ask him to.

It makes me so angry when I’m among other people who take from me what I haven’t offered, and do it without acknowledging me. I’m not proud of it, of how angry I get, or how petty it might be, but it just steps on so many of my buttons. I’ve spent a lot of life feeling invisible, feeling like people can’t see me, which is hard to pull off, because I feel like a large, dynamic being who takes up a lot of space. I’ve never blended in, and while I didn’t always love what sticking out meant, I’ve learned to use it to my advantage. It makes me furious when people spend energy ignoring me on the street, and at the same time assume I’ll just move out of their way. I’m not afraid of folks running into me, and it happens a lot because I don’t move out of the way of folks who pretend I’m not there.

Mister, on the other hand, said that invisibility was a kind of protection for him, coming up. He stuck out like a sore thumb, he said. Learning to be invisible, to avoid the fray, and wait it out, is how he likes to roll. He’s the kind of person who knows not making a decision is its own decision.

I think I can understand this. We were both raised in the Midwest, as people of color who grew up in cultures of white supremacy. I feel like I have to say, in case it’s not clear, that the dominant culture in most of America is one of white supremacy (and really, that “most” is just me soft-pedaling): the culture around us perpetuated systems, institutions, and privilege that made white people and white culture “better” than us. Because we were one of few, if any, people of color in our classrooms or schools; because we were new to the neighborhood; because our parents looked different or sounded different than the other parents in after school pick-up or open house nights; because we had different hair or different skin, ate different food or wore different clothes; because we were anything other than what the white folks around us defined as “normal” (white): we stood out. Sometimes that means teachers misspelled or mispronounced our names. Sometimes it meant kids—and adults—touched us without our permission, treated us like objects and not people. Sometimes it meant we experienced verbal assault, threats, intimidation, and violence at the hands of white people who saw us and noticed us as not-them, who sublimated their fear and confusion into rage and put us on the other end of it. Sometimes we watched our parents rage and seethe at the fear and frustration that they experienced, that they couldn’t hang onto the dignity due to any human being because someone else had snatched it from them and made them feel hurt, scared, alone, and that they couldn’t protect their kids from it. Sometimes we experienced that same rage and fear without our parents, and we couldn’t tell them about it because of the shame.

This is just how it is to grow up as a person of color in America.

It’s not an exaggeration. It’s not even a unique story.

(I’m supposed to say things are better now, right? The world is smaller, Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa and our first black president, and all the ways we see and understand each other. But that’s not a story I can tell. I write this less fresh after shooters in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio (not that far from where we both grew up) killed people, citing racist, xenophobic rhetoric that has also com from the White House. What has happened is that lynch mobs have gotten more sophisticated: they have semi-automatic weapons, and corners of the internet where they goad one another out of dealing with their own struggle and into hatred and destruction of others, and they have an emboldened body of subculture that believes that hatred of and violence against others is their right. )

So when Mister says that being invisible serves him, I think that’s the alternative he’s remembering, and who wants to stay in that experience.

But I can’t. I don’t like living in a world where white people ignore me and dismiss me, where I pretend that if they can’t see me then it means they won’t shoot at me. Because I don’t believe it’s true.

“Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family, and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt.”

— David Whyte, "Consolations"

It’s also is worth mentioning that when I discussed this frustration with a dear friend, when I told her that i have to take up space, because concession feels like being made to shrink, and not like generosity or sharing, that she pointed out that my husband is a man. In some ways the world parts for him in a way it doesn’t for me: there is some permission, some space, some access that he has that I don’t. That’s worth me remembering. He certainly doesn’t exploit this fact, he doesn’t lead his movement through the world pelvis-first, as it were—and he could, because I have encountered (we all have) men who literally and figuratively move through the world this way, and it’s only because women and folx can no longer tolerate being subjugated by that misogyny and patriarchy that it’s starting to change. But despite the fact that Mister doesn’t abuse his male privilege, he’s identified as male all his life and that’s been privileged all his life, so he doesn’t always recognize it either.

I want to say that I can acknowledge that there’s a difference between a white guy cutting me off in a grocery store or shoulder-checking me on a sidewalk, and a white guy gunning me down in an act of domestic terrorism.

But is there?

The victims in El Paso were in a Walmart. Shopping. Buying chips and soda and peanut butter. Smelling peaches to see how ripe they were. Calling their eight-year-old over to see if this striped shirt would fit him so he could wear it back to school in a few weeks. Picking out a card for their Abuelita’s birthday. They were just doing life. What if the shooter had done them the same way—unflinching, thousand yard stare fixed on his face, striding around and demanding with his energy that folks move out of his way. And the first person who wouldn’t would eat the first bullet he fired?

I don’t want to hide, or soften, or wait as a strategy for self-preservation. I deserve to exist as much as anyone else who is drawing breath on our planet, their first or their last. I want to be treated as fairly for my presence.

You never know what someone else is going through, Mister says. I was walking down Diversey Avenue one day, east of Lincoln, and I saw this car parked at a really odd angle, like straight up, perpendicular to the street. All kinds of wrong. And I walked by and looked in this car, and I saw this woman : SOBBING. You just never know what someone else is going through. So if it means they get to the counter faster, or we have to stand behind them and wait a little longer, it’s okay.

He’s right, I think. And: we don’t get the benefit of that doubt when we are going through. We get attitude from the dominant culture and lectures about being good neighbors. If I pull over sobbing, the best I can expect is a verbal assault from someone about “women drivers” and the worst is a run in with the local police, which could end in any number of terrifying and tragic ways.

I don’t know yet if I believe that people are basically good or if they are desperate, hungry primates with no real capacity for altruism. But I know that I am angry. I have a deep, like the-layers-of-my-heart-muscle deep, desire for all of us to experience fairness. When that is violated, even in a small way with small consequence, I am furious. My husband’s capacity to allow others to treat him (and often by extension us) in ways that I view as unfair is at once mystifying and maddening. It’s hard for me to articulate how mad it makes me.

I believe that there’s an endless capacity of patience and compassion available to me, to all of us. I that all I have to do is choose to connect to it, to open up to it, and out it comes.

But that first step is a doozie.

I don’t have it in me to give when others are taking. I lack the capacity to wait when my turn has been stolen by someone else. I can’t wait quietly while I watch other people steal, rather than share. So if that’s really what I’m being called to do, that gift has to come from Elsewhere.

Where is the overlap where justice triumphs, where power surrenders, and where compassion forgives? Where is the space wherein our up/down, majority/minority, have/have not dualism is just no longer relevant? Is it Socialism? Is it Heaven? Is it in relationship with others, or on the mountaintop all alone?

I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for this. I read something today about a kind of split that can happen when we awaken to our Divine nature but fail to integrate it into our conditioned, everyday self. Perhaps I’m in this split: feeling torn between the ardent desire to see God looking back at me when I look into the eyes of others, and furious at instead seeing their small, petty, desperate nature, and responding to them out of my own small, petty, desperate nature. I sit and ask for the capacity to integrate, I ask for growth on how to treat others better than I want to; and I know this means opening myself up to more behavior that is hurtful.

There’s a balance point on the tip of this somewhere. I’m trying to find it.

Kashmir: in Light and in Shadow

There’s a photo that I bought at a Chicago art fair years ago that hangs on my wall. It’s of a pole on a city street, on which a mark of graffiti is scrawled in paint. YOU ARE FREE it reads in the foreground, city life continues in the background. I love this photo because it’s always felt like a kind of reminder to me. Look at yourself, Jessica, the words seemed to say, you’ve come so far, you’re capable of so much. You are as free as you decide to be, your own bondage or liberation is as close as your willingness to recognize it.

It hangs over my desk right now. I look up at it when I’m working and try to stay inspired, try to remember all that’s possible.

Lately though, when I think about Kashmir, it sounds less empowering and more ominous. It sounds like the voice of colonizers. You are the kind of free I am willing to bestow upon you, the picture says. You are free because I say so, and never forget, I can take that free away whenever I choose.

*

Islam has five pillars, or practices that are to be adhered to by members of the faith:

• Shahada, or the sincere recitation of the Muslim profession of faith;

• Salat, or engagement in ritual prayer five times daily;

• Zakat, or giving to the needy;

• Sawm, the observance of fast during Ramadan; and

• Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Conversion to Islam, like conversion to any faith, is a decision not to be entered into lightly, but once you know you’re ready to step into the faith, it can be a quiet, private affair. You recite the Shahadah, and in order to be made a legal part of the community, you do so in front of other witnesses or local leaders of the faith. Immediately after you recite the Shahadah, you take a bath or shower. This act of purification washes away the dark of your past, and symbolizes your rebirth. Because Islam is a state of perfection, you are said not to convert, but to revert, to the state in which you were born.

Conversion to Hinduism is a different story. There is no prayer to be uttered, no allegiance sworn that cloaks you in the faith. There are rituals you can perform as part of the practice of Hinduism, but no one need attend your puja and affirm or dismiss its authenticity. There is nothing in particular you need to wear or marking on your body. It’s not just a religion, it’s a way of life. Some might say that Hinduism is a faith identity you’re born into; you can’t convert, and if you weren’t born Hindu, you can’t become Hindu. It seems both expansive and insular in that nature, but only insular, I suppose, if you’re attached to wearing a label. If you know what you believe but don’t need to call it something special, carry on.

I know very little about both of these religious traditions. For now. But I feel safe saying that on general principle, there isn’t any reason why Islam, an Abrahamic faith with roots in middle Asia, and Hinduism, a tradition that’s come out of the Indus River valley, can’t peacefully coexist. I feel the same way about the children of Isaac and Ishmael, though, and I know folks would line up around the city to tell me I’m wrong and the many ways in which I’m wrong. On top of which, the faith I was raised in has the blood of people on it’s hands from all over the world, starting with the blood of a Jew. So maybe it doesn’t matter what I think. It just matters that here, now, in this iteration of our world, whatever it is and whatever we’ve become, we’ve warped our faith practices so thoroughly that we can’t live in peace with others who practice differently.

*

The first time I went to India my husband and I had a driver. It’s not as posh or as special as it sounds—though in a nation like India, where the echelons of both poverty and wealth extend farther than the U.S. by an order of magnitude, it might have been a privilege that most Indians that we met couldn’t experience. For two weeks we put ourselves in the care of a man and his tiny white Toyota (stocked daily with bottled water, gum, and candy, for Mister’s comfort and pleasure, he reminded my husband repeatedly), and he shuttled us from city to city, where we met different tour guides who took us on the routes: Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Hanuman temple, evening marketing, and once or twice even to temple to worship with the guide. The tour guides changed depending on the region, but they were always men. (There are probably many reasons why this is: I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for a woman to navigate all the paths our guides had to: not because she wasn’t capable, but because of how hard it is to be a woman in India.)

More than once we noticed that he driver and the guide would talk politics. Mister would be listening to the front seat conversation, while I was gazing out the window. He would open up his Notes app and his thumbs would dart a few seconds across the screen and then he would show me:

They’re talking about politics.

I’d type back:

how can you tell?

I heard the guide say the name Modi.

Prime minister, right?

He’d nod. I’d look into the middle distance of the car, the console between the front seats, and try not to betray my listening. They were speaking a language I don’t understand (Hindi? Urdu?), but they seemed to be in agreement, not necessarily with Modi, but perhaps with each other about Modi.

I’d sigh and stared out the window at the throng of pulsing traffic. I didn’t know a lot about Modhi, except for that he represented a Hindu nationalist party, which I found troubling because it had shown a lack of capacity to tolerate anything other than absolute agreement from its citizens and colleagues in government. What has our world become, I wondered silently, what does it mean that nationalism is so popular—and so destructive—in so many places?

*

I found out about the conflict in Kashmir a few weeks ago because my Mister asked me about it. If he hadn’t, I’d have had no idea, and not much in my feed or sphere—perhaps to my shame—notified or educated me about it. When I made a bit of effort, I found a few articles, and I couldn’t sit still, I was so sad and uncomfortable about this news. There’s a line out there about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, but I think that maybe too many of us being comfortable with the oppression, censorship, marginalization, and abuse of others is what’s led us to our current world state of affairs. Children are being abandoned, separated from their families, neglected, On Our Watch, for fuck’s sake. So: I can be comfortable with the discomfort of waiting for school to start, the anxiety of not knowing if I’ll be able to take the classes I want to, or how much books will cost, or if I’ll be able to hack it at this fancy new div school or if I’ll just make a fool of myself; I can tolerate all that. But I can’t get comfortable with the discomfort of watching the government of a nation disenfranchise their own citizens and call it leadership. It’s happening all over the world, you bet, and that’s no reason not to feel it or care about it in South Asia.

It’s beyond my capacity to begin to articulate the historical and societal origins of conflict between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. I just don’t know enough. I know that there are periods of history wherein peoples ran or rode or sailed across lands and seas to minister, or to discover, or to use, abuse, rape, or pillage, and it happened in many directions and over hundreds of years. I don’t know if any of us have clean hands when we look at the behavior of our ancestors. There is no moral high ground. So rather than try and tell this story badly, I’ll try and put what’s currently happening in terms we can understand.

Reminder: this is sophisticated stuff, and the picture I’m going to draw here is high level. It doesn’t take into account any kind of nuance or sophistication of American History, and it glosses over a lot. I’m not any kind of historian, or Indo-scholar, or even a journalist. I’m a yogi and a teacher and a student, and woman of color devoted to the liberation of all people in this plan and on every plane.

Imagine that, as the United States was forming, the state of Texas, which used to belong to Mexico, wasn’t annexed to the US, but was rather claimed by both countries. Texas is America, and Texas is Mexico. Imagine Texas as a fertile, beautiful, verdant landscape, home not only to lush, nourishing plants and vistas, but also full of resources that both nations are interested in claiming. Imagine that the people of Texas share cultural and identity ties with Mexico: they share a language, and more deeply and powerfully, they share a faith, a faith that the people of the US don’t share nearly to the same degree. Imagine that because both countries place a claim on Texas—meanwhile Texas just wants to be free to be Texas, neither Mexico or the US—the Mexican American war was a longer, bloodier war, fought repeatedly on and off over the course of thirty years or so. (and imagine these wars fought in the 20th century, without the generous blurring of the dust of history. Imagine this war as bloody as World War II, as visceral as Vietnam, and as hair-trigger sensitive as a bar brawl between a drunk Cheesehead and a drunk Bears fan. Or a drunk Celtics fan and a drunk Lakers fan.) Then imagine that Texas is able to have a kind of peace, a detente, if it will allow itself to be folded into the US and given special status. It isn’t a state per se; it has representation in Congress, and many of the benefits of statehood, but it determines its own destiny. It’s like a protected territory. This doesn’t please Mexico at all: after all, the people of Texas are the people of Mexico. They worship the same way, they live the same way. They feel like the US is bullying them and the Texans. But they’ve lost too much of their own resources and citizens in war, and they can’t keep fighting. They do have one weapon, they know that the US can match but can’t beat. But using that weapon is mutually assured destruction, and they just haven’t come to that point yet.

As far as the Texans are concerned, this isn’t a great solution either, but it promises them something that looks like freedom. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell, and we take what we can get when we’ve been ostracized and oppressed for so long. )

Then imagine that POTUS, in his… “wisdom” decides to without precedent and warning, revoke the special status that Texas has enjoyed for the last thirty years and make it a state. Its governor, representatives, any and all self-determining capacity that Texas had is gone. That special status treaty that Texas signed is as permanent and valuable as what POTUS uses to wipe buffalo sauce off his weak chin and his thin lips. There is no Texas, anymore. There is only America… and as a show of the unity this choice illustrates, the US sends troops in to occupy the streets of Dallas, Houston, Austin, El Paso, and San Antonio. Along the Rio Grand, hard-faced men with massive semi-assault rifles are posted every 40 feet. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and any other social media outlet you’ve ever heard of are all dark now, no content in our out of Texas. In fact, no power in or out of Texas. Cell phones are useless bricks in pockets and backpacks. No school. No banks. No operations of any kind. Just millions and millions of citizens who want to be free to live as they choose suddenly swallowed up and absorbed into a government that calls itself democratic. Imagine that for the better part of this month, the entire state has been protesting this occupation, violent, Byzantine, and you don’t know about it because the blackout in Texas is so thorough and the propaganda in the US media is so effective. US reporting says that the American government thinks this is a great idea, that so do most Texans, and that any protests have been handled peacably. There have been no violent outbursts, absolutely none, and any reports of Texans being beaten bloody and lame by American military forces are simply… untrue.

I’m not saying this is original, that it hasn’t happened before. It might sound like a really common story, common at the very least in our own democracy.

And ain’t that a bitch.

Neemrana, Rajasthan, 2017

*

My favorite reporting about this has come out of The Atlantic. It’s nuanced and it’s global and it’s Paying Attention. You can read about it here, and here, and don’t forget about Al Jazeera. There’s a piece in the New York Times, too, about India—the world’s largest democratic nation—illegally rounding up and arresting Kashmiri citizens in the days before Kashmir’s status was revoked; and if there’s video footage, make sure you watch it.

*

So what, Jess? This really does happen all over the world. Freedom has to exist between an individual’s ears, because if you look closely you’ll see the myriad ways in which millions of people are bound, oppressed, and enslaved every day. What else is new?

To answer that question, I have to talk about Chimamanda Adichi and “The Danger of the Single Story”, her TED talk, which entered my life while a grad student and teacher at an art school in Chicago. In it she argues that it’s easy for us to spend our time in the ignorance of thinking we know a place, a people, a faith, because we know one story of it.

What’s the single story of yoga being told in this country, in the industry, of which I am a part? Peace, love, and harmony? Everything is one? We’re all light? Divine is within you as it is within me? I’m sure I’ve said this kind of thing before, and meant it. But I owe it to the people and culture of India, the home of this tradition where I find a place for myself, and by which I earn my bread, to dig deeper than that. Despite what you heard at the gym or Core Power, yoga is a part of this culture, historically if nothing else, and embedded in that culture are the same spectres of oppression, misogyny, hierarchy, and abuse as are currently showing their hideous, harmful faces in our country and culture, as well as others. If I teach yoga without acknowledging the shadow side of where it comes from, I’m lying to myself and to every student who steps into my class or looks at my content. If I tell a story of yoga, of India, that isn’t informed by all the things that India is—by its diversity of faith traditions, by its politics, by its history and its contemporary identity—I’m telling a single story. I’m telling a folk tale, and not the truth.

So I’m paying attention. It’s not easy to choose to stay informed, especially when there’s so much heaviness and sadness and destruction to keep learning. So I’m also practicing gratitude, and actively pursuing the things that bring me joy. And, I’m watching the world’s largest democracy intern its citizens. I’m feeling some kind of way about the fact that this national leader thinks he can force people to be what he wants them to be. I’m watching and wondering if I can return to India, and what it will be when I get there.