Together We Are One by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2011-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

WOUNDS CAN BE HEALED

A few mornings ago at five a.m., my wife had just returned from walking our dog, and as she was coming in, she said, “Oh, I just got hit by a raindrop.” We looked a little closer and it wasn’t a raindrop, it was a frog! A tiny little frog! I just started laughing! It was so wonderful to see this tiny little frog, not afraid of us. I decided it thought we were its neighbors, and it was coming in for a cup of tea.

So the reason so much discomfort comes up around the topic of race and ethnicity, is because it is like the frog at the door, and we ask, “What are you doing here?” It has a chance of opening us up! It’s an opportunity to practice with our own individual pain and suffering, and also a chance to practice with the collective store consciousness of this society and transform it.

When we’ve been wounded, the practice is not to allow that wound to be touched. But many people of color experience a society that keeps touching the wound, a second, third, and fourth time, and when it seems everything’s okay, you turn the corner and ahhh! You get hit again! So it’s hard to get the wound healed. That’s why people need to be in an environment without the person who wounded them. It doesn’t matter if the one who did the wounding knows they did it. That’s not what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with the fact that somebody got wounded. That somebody got hit. Someone got harmed.

It’s not racist to have people-of-color-only spaces. Racism is power. It is institutional, social, political, and economic power. It’s the capacity to decide who gets to live where based on who will sell a house to whom. And everybody knows it. It is the capacity to tell some people that their mortgage rate is ten percent and other people that their mortgage rate is six percent, and that’s how it is. Everyone attending a people of color retreat has experienced ongoing, systematic institutional suffering because of the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, or their way of speaking. Some people of color have experienced that and don’t even know it, don’t recognize it. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. If a bird flies over and its droppings land on your back, just because you don’t know it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

A people of color retreat is an opportunity to specifically work on deconstructing the carefully assembled notion of the self-esteem complex—the notion that we believe ourselves to be superior, inferior, or equal to someone else. We need the space to do this because we have a formal society that says one thing, and an informal society that behaves completely the opposite.

The first retreat I went to with Thay was a veteran’s retreat happening within a larger retreat. Thay talked about the veterans being so close to the flame of their own

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