Black and Buddhist by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

I turned toward Buddhism and Blackness at the same time. I am forever grateful for that synchronicity. I read the books of the American Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck and the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. I began to sit with a Buddhist community. Rather than run from one sense pleasure to another to try and escape the pain of my life, I began to turn toward myself. To meet the confusion and despair directly, I had to face the grief of not knowing my ancestral culture, see the ways I internalized racism, and choose changing my consciousness. As I began to turn back to my Blackness, it was Buddhism that helped me embrace what I had rejected. I read the work of Black feminists like Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, bell hooks. I devoured This Bridge Called My Back, a collection of essays edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, feminist authors. They helped me see clearly the self-rejection I perpetrated when I reached for white culture. Black music and arts began to fill my ears, eyes, and body with a different consciousness. Having never danced much in my life, for me, movement became one way into what Lorde calls “the erotic as power.” Erotic referring not to the sexual (only) but to a life lived through the senses. She says:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.4

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