Angel Kyodo Williams > Quotes

“Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”
― angel Kyodo williams

“We simply cannot engage with either the ills or promises of society if we continue to turn a blind eye to the egregious and willful ignorance that enables us to still not “get it” in so many ways. It is by no means our making, but given the culture we are emerging from and immersed in, we are responsible. White folks’ particular reluctance to acknowledge impact as a collective while continuing to benefit from the construct of the collective leaves a wound intact without a dressing. The air needed to breathe through forgiveness is smothered. Healing is suspended for all. Truth is necessary for reconciliation. Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model—the myth of meritocracy—that is the foundation of this country’s untruth?”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“As Bruce Lee famously said, “Under duress, we do not rise to our expectations, but fall to our level of training.” Hundreds of years of living in a context designed by pillagers of the land and captors of people—without sufficient intervention—naturally establishes the curriculum of the training to which we fall. Our methodologies are forged within the default mindset of colonization, capitalism-as-religion, corporation-as-demigod, domination over people and planet, winner take all, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as objects of subjugation to the land-owning, resource-controlling, very, very privileged few.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“the great fraud of the construct of whiteness is that it has coerced and convinced most white folks to no longer see their own oppression: by men over women, by straights over LGBT, by hetero fathers over their sons in arbitrating their masculinity, by capitalist values of personal acquisition over the personal freedom of one’s soul. white folks have been duped to trade their humanity for their privilege. the most insidious lie is that racism is a Black problem or colored folks problem. white folks wake up: not only oppressed people are complicit in oppression. it’s your problem, too.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“Much of what is being taught is the acceptance of a “kinder, gentler suffering” that does not question the unwholesome roots of systemic suffering and the structures that hold it in place. What is required is a new Dharma, a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the systems of suffering, that starves rather than fertilizes the soil of the conditions that the deep roots of societal suffering grow in.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“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.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“I think we’re addicted to being triggered”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“We all feel shame when we’re sitting on the cushion and stuff pops up in our head.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“Do we police because we fear we can be savages? Do our barricades from each other belie the blinds that keep us strangers to ourselves?”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“If you’re in this conversation, and you’re not in this conversation with an intention towards love—with an intention towards building and finding relationship—then it’s not the place for you to have the conversation. I hate saying that. I want to have this fierce conversation with you because I believe in connection as love, because I want to be liberated from this space in which I have to disappear because you’re inhabiting that body like the pain, the guilt, the suffering, the generations of pain and suffering, the generations of shame and guilt. Like the [realization that] “Oh, my God. This has all been going on and I’m grown up and haven’t even seen this.” That must just be devastating. I feel for white folks when I reach that place where I think, “Wow, I can’t feel as you.” But I feel for you. So we’re suffering. LAMA ROD: Mm-hm. REV. ANGEL: And the only reason you should be in community spaces having the conversation is because you are invested in the community; you’re invested in love. You’re not just trying to teach somebody or fix someplace or something. If you’re not coming to this from your open heart of love and desire to connect, even if it’s funky and awkward and you can’t get the words right and you mess it up, then you should go someplace else where you can actually feel safe enough and invested enough to have those conversations from a place of—a place of love towards love. From love towards love. LAMA ROD: Mm-hm. Yeah, I think both of us get the label of being angry. That’s why I have to keep saying “love.” Traditionally for us, that’s the way that people have shut us down. [They] put that wall up and go, “Oh, you’re angry. You don’t make any sense.” That’s why we’ve integrated love. But we have to practice through these labels of being angry. REV.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“This is a huge evolutionary leap: to be able to see past sameness and likeness as the lens through which we view our potential to care for and love one another. We've done this on the individual level, but we are now organizing on the social level. In many ways this goes against - or extends beyond - the grain of how we have been evolving. Biologically speaking, we are programmed toward beingttribal as a means of survival. We literally have to transcend an aspect of our own biology.
This ability to disrupt our programming and form new cognitive connections based on direct experience that then becomes embodied through repetition -- practice - is one of human beings' greatest attributes. In this lies the potential to overcome our basest reactions for survival and manifest our highest evolutionary potential to thrive. It is profound, and it is possible and we can see it.
May it be so.
Insha'allah
Svaha
Amen”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“The precepts are: to not create evil to practice good to practice good for others”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace

“We're not talking enough about the fear that white folks hold as a result of race. I'm not talking about fear of colored people or fear of Black people. I'm talking about fear of one's own self, because you don't know how to have the conversation, because you feel shame about where you're located in that conversation, about how to locate yourself. We all feel shame when we're sitting on the cushion and stuff pops up in our head. We come to realize everything we think when no one is looking. What's liberating is once we are like, "This is what's going on. Now I understand my behavior, which seemed inexplicable at the time.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“Turning death and destruction to new ways of seeing and being is the best offering we can make to those we have lost.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams

“I don’t have a lot of words, but I have a lot of faith. I know the road feels low and winding, and we seem to need the pain to cut to the core, to emerge from the sleepwalk of despair and feel through the numbness of disconnect and indifference. But if we let ourselves feel this, we will be better for it.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams

“But we also have to demystify this notion that somehow people of color have all the information and know it all and white folks don’t, and that it’s just like Black and white. Because it just isn’t. We have to really allow ourselves to create some space for people not knowing, not understanding, just saying stupid things. I mean stupid as in ignorant. That’s going to happen, and we have to figure out how to create room for that, rather than policing each other, so that people can actually get into the conversation. If someone is asking, there’s a willingness there. Treat that willingness as love, and treat it with love.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“As Bruce Lee famously said, “Under duress, we do not rise to our expectations, but fall to our level of training.” Hundreds of years of living in a context designed by pillagers of the land and captors of people—without sufficient intervention—naturally establishes the curriculum of the training to which we fall.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“To lean into this aspiration, you must confront the fact that “whiteness” is a social ego as void of inherent identity as the personal ego, and you have identified with it as much as your very own name, but without being willing to name it.”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation