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Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging
A singular work of poetic prose exploring otherness and belonging—and what it means to be truly at home. A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging examines the interface between inner and outer sanctuary, and the ways they affect one another. “Sanctuary” is the home we can return to when our lives are under threat, where we can face what's difficult to love, and have a place where we can truly say, “I am home”—and spiritual teachers often emphasize sanctuary’s inner dimensions, that “our true home” is within. “Homelessness,” in turn, can be viewed as a forced experience or one in which there is a spiritual void in being or feeling home. Drawing from her life as a Zen Buddhist priest whose ancestors labored as slaves in Louisiana, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel explores the tension between oppression—based on race, religion, ability, class, orientation, gender, and other “ghosts of slavery”—and finding home within our own hearts. Through intimate personal stories and deep reflection, Manuel helps us see the moment when the unacknowledged surfaces as “the time we have been practicing for,” the epiphany when we can investigate the true source what has been troubling us. This insightful book about home and homelessness, sanctuary and refuge offers inspiration, encouragement, and a clear-eyed view of cultivating a spiritual path in challenging times.
- GenresBuddhismNonfictionZen
122 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 3, 2018
24 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 10, 2018
This is a gorgeous slow burn of a book. Read slowly. Pause. Re-read. Savor.
Listen to my interview with the author:
https://www.stitcher.com/s?eid=560213...
Listen to my interview with the author:
https://www.stitcher.com/s?eid=560213...
April 12, 2021
Read this for a class. It is a short read and had some very profound insights.
September 27, 2025
Wow! Manuel's ability to feel into specificity without projecting unique blamelessness is heart-breaking and hopeful at the same time. Deep bow. Much gratitude.
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P3 […] finding refuge, or sanctuary, from acts of hatred must be offered along the path of finding our true home.
P6 Patience is more than waiting and hoping. Patience is taking the time to love what is difficult to love.
P7 […] the act of creating sanctuary as a response to the hunger for home.
P10 […] to shape religions to my own sense of home is to create sanctuary.
P11 We were each asked by the group leader, “What was your deepest loss?” The leader was concerned we might seek what we feel we are missing from our future students. [NOTE: Use for therapist training too]
When projection or transference becomes part of a teacher-student relationship, it needs to become conscious.
P19 In one sense, at the core of sanctuary is the failed quest to find home in the places we live.
P20 If the spiritual quest to find home within were enough, what do you do when your soul cannot live in peace on the land that is your birthright?
P23 Surviving meant assimilation. Not fitting in meant never feeling welcome, body and spirit never being at home.
These experiences of displacement followed me into adulthood and produced a perpetual fear of homelessness because of how I was embodied.
P28 When the journey of finding home takes ancestral homelessness into account, we begin to understand the need for sanctuary in a new way. The hunger for home is deeply layered. When seeking a vision of being healed, multigenerational displacement motivates within some of us a desire for our indigenous lands of origin or to create sanctuary or shared community with those of similar ancestral origin, places where we can enter life fully without fear. We need places to breathe and heal our disconnection from the earth. Our spiritual journey requires us, first of all, to understand the pain of the loss of our ancestral identity and to experience the extent to which we have wandered. This loss of homes is in our bones and begs to be acknowledged, not merely transcended.
P33 Because of chaos in our lives, we need sanctuary. […] Ruijin, an ancient Zen master, once said, “Carving a cave of emptiness from a mountain of form leads to serenity from the ocean of misery.”
P36 Artists, healers, activists, priests and priestesses, storytellers, drummers, musicians, and wisdom-keepers can help us fill the void of not belonging. We are manifesting a village in which everyone feels loved. Identity is used to empower and forge a sense of self, as a gateway to wellness in the larger world and ultimately to an experience of boundlessness and freedom.
As with everything, there is a shadow side to sanctuary. Those with intent to harm also form sanctuaries. […] Sanctuaries formed for defense or harming others arise from the same urge as sanctuaries established for healing.
P41 This is familiar throughout history, groups of people excluded because of fear, having to reconcile loss kinship, language, and belonging and the pain of all that was left behind, seeking a scapegoat in others who are even more excluded.
Morrison depicts how exclusion leads us to establish sanctuary to fill the void of being uprooted, to close the gap between home and homelessness. […]
Although Morrison uses finding paradise as a metaphor for finding home, she points to the violent acts against unwanted people and that creating sanctuary is not always a calm, sweet journey to wholeheartedness.
P42 Those who live on the margins of society will always need to find refuge that is inclusive of protest and wellness, resisting and embracing.
P43 The church was the holy ground for grieving, speaking openly, talking loud, loving hard, and disagreeing in the name of God. We could be fully ourselves.
P45 When suffering arises, there is a profound opportunity for transformation if there is willingness to stay a while. We see our differences most when there is suffering in a community, and therefore acknowledging the sanctuary’s shadow is a way to alleviate disappointment and clip the wings of flight during difficult times. Quaking within a sanctuary is a chance to observe, understand, heal, and be guided home to be fully who we are. Do not accept abuse, disregard, violence, or harm. But if conditions are favorable, resolving conflict is a good way to actuate connection and know yourself.
P46 While freedom from the distress of homelessness is your intention when entering sanctuary, this freedom is found in understanding that you are not meant to shoulder all of your pain alone. Suffering in community can help you see what needs mending. In the safe container of sanctuary, we can become more aware of ourselves.
P52 Homes today, whether our physical homes or our inner, personal lives, are fragile and susceptible to destruction. The demolition begins the moment we turn away from who we are and thereby from our primal connectedness, the ancestral knowing of ourselves as communal.
P63 The earth gives you time to breathe; the aloneness gives you the privacy to expose yourself to yourself and discover a true home within yourself and in nature. You can feel the earth holding you like a mother holding her child.
[…] When fear arises, it indicates a disconnection from home and the need for sanctuary.
P64 Facing and being intimate with the mystery is a path of engagement that includes all the world’s creatures. A quest deep in nature was necessary to see the distortions that had formed in me by systemic oppression and to recognize that acceptance of what I found in my own depths had to be the first step for re-engagement with others.
P65 We can be aware of the general human condition of suffering but not necessarily intimate with the suffering in and around our personal lives, our personal homelessness. When we come to know our lives with such intimacy, we embark upon awakening. Intimacy in the context of the earth as home means acknowledging all the suffering and living as close as possible to that which hurts.
[…] Our charity is empty if it is not intimate with the suffering of disconnection.
Zen Master Dogen uses the term shinzo, “ever intimate.” When we are ever intimate with the tensions between personal and collective suffering, we experience liberation, enlightened to who we are as human beings.
P66 Without intimate engagement with the earth, we cannot be present to the people around us.
P68 I was scared being in the world not knowing if I would feel at home before I died. Dehumanizing experiences in the context of life’s impermanence made finding home urgent.
P73 If you are living in a body that society deems unacceptable, it can be difficult to […] trust that sanctuary can appear within the fire of the hatred directed at us. Lost in the wilderness, we find it difficult to trust any spiritual practice that teaches finding home within. Ancestral displacement compounds the sense you’ll never arrive home. […]
First we must attend to the trauma and stress of having had to live dispirited, and ask for support.
P74 Only a home that comes into being, arises, and ceases to be is a true home.
P75 What we feel, think, observe, and respond to while living between the cracks of freedom, within the brutal honesty of impending death, creates the sanctuaries we need.
P78 Since we don’t grow in isolation, looking at the world and how we are conditioned by it is a prudent step in finding sanctuary.
P85 I had allowed silence to be a spiritual medicine rather than the coping skill I learned as a child who wanted to be invisible in her dark skin.
P101 This doesn’t mean we forget what happened or even stop speaking of it, but we remove the longing for what was lost because of slavery and embrace what is in front of us. Without the longing, slavery, although embodied and remembered, ceases to be an obstruction to finding home. It remains an element of my origin but not the center of my life.
What might happen if those in a sanctuary based on a shared history of atrocity begin to water a seed motivated by freedom and not pain and suffering? <>
P104 We’ve been waiting for this time to create a home that mirrors the compassion and freedom in our hearts.
------------
P3 […] finding refuge, or sanctuary, from acts of hatred must be offered along the path of finding our true home.
P6 Patience is more than waiting and hoping. Patience is taking the time to love what is difficult to love.
P7 […] the act of creating sanctuary as a response to the hunger for home.
P10 […] to shape religions to my own sense of home is to create sanctuary.
P11 We were each asked by the group leader, “What was your deepest loss?” The leader was concerned we might seek what we feel we are missing from our future students. [NOTE: Use for therapist training too]
When projection or transference becomes part of a teacher-student relationship, it needs to become conscious.
P19 In one sense, at the core of sanctuary is the failed quest to find home in the places we live.
P20 If the spiritual quest to find home within were enough, what do you do when your soul cannot live in peace on the land that is your birthright?
P23 Surviving meant assimilation. Not fitting in meant never feeling welcome, body and spirit never being at home.
These experiences of displacement followed me into adulthood and produced a perpetual fear of homelessness because of how I was embodied.
P28 When the journey of finding home takes ancestral homelessness into account, we begin to understand the need for sanctuary in a new way. The hunger for home is deeply layered. When seeking a vision of being healed, multigenerational displacement motivates within some of us a desire for our indigenous lands of origin or to create sanctuary or shared community with those of similar ancestral origin, places where we can enter life fully without fear. We need places to breathe and heal our disconnection from the earth. Our spiritual journey requires us, first of all, to understand the pain of the loss of our ancestral identity and to experience the extent to which we have wandered. This loss of homes is in our bones and begs to be acknowledged, not merely transcended.
P33 Because of chaos in our lives, we need sanctuary. […] Ruijin, an ancient Zen master, once said, “Carving a cave of emptiness from a mountain of form leads to serenity from the ocean of misery.”
P36 Artists, healers, activists, priests and priestesses, storytellers, drummers, musicians, and wisdom-keepers can help us fill the void of not belonging. We are manifesting a village in which everyone feels loved. Identity is used to empower and forge a sense of self, as a gateway to wellness in the larger world and ultimately to an experience of boundlessness and freedom.
As with everything, there is a shadow side to sanctuary. Those with intent to harm also form sanctuaries. […] Sanctuaries formed for defense or harming others arise from the same urge as sanctuaries established for healing.
P41 This is familiar throughout history, groups of people excluded because of fear, having to reconcile loss kinship, language, and belonging and the pain of all that was left behind, seeking a scapegoat in others who are even more excluded.
Morrison depicts how exclusion leads us to establish sanctuary to fill the void of being uprooted, to close the gap between home and homelessness. […]
Although Morrison uses finding paradise as a metaphor for finding home, she points to the violent acts against unwanted people and that creating sanctuary is not always a calm, sweet journey to wholeheartedness.
P42 Those who live on the margins of society will always need to find refuge that is inclusive of protest and wellness, resisting and embracing.
P43 The church was the holy ground for grieving, speaking openly, talking loud, loving hard, and disagreeing in the name of God. We could be fully ourselves.
P45 When suffering arises, there is a profound opportunity for transformation if there is willingness to stay a while. We see our differences most when there is suffering in a community, and therefore acknowledging the sanctuary’s shadow is a way to alleviate disappointment and clip the wings of flight during difficult times. Quaking within a sanctuary is a chance to observe, understand, heal, and be guided home to be fully who we are. Do not accept abuse, disregard, violence, or harm. But if conditions are favorable, resolving conflict is a good way to actuate connection and know yourself.
P46 While freedom from the distress of homelessness is your intention when entering sanctuary, this freedom is found in understanding that you are not meant to shoulder all of your pain alone. Suffering in community can help you see what needs mending. In the safe container of sanctuary, we can become more aware of ourselves.
P52 Homes today, whether our physical homes or our inner, personal lives, are fragile and susceptible to destruction. The demolition begins the moment we turn away from who we are and thereby from our primal connectedness, the ancestral knowing of ourselves as communal.
P63 The earth gives you time to breathe; the aloneness gives you the privacy to expose yourself to yourself and discover a true home within yourself and in nature. You can feel the earth holding you like a mother holding her child.
[…] When fear arises, it indicates a disconnection from home and the need for sanctuary.
P64 Facing and being intimate with the mystery is a path of engagement that includes all the world’s creatures. A quest deep in nature was necessary to see the distortions that had formed in me by systemic oppression and to recognize that acceptance of what I found in my own depths had to be the first step for re-engagement with others.
P65 We can be aware of the general human condition of suffering but not necessarily intimate with the suffering in and around our personal lives, our personal homelessness. When we come to know our lives with such intimacy, we embark upon awakening. Intimacy in the context of the earth as home means acknowledging all the suffering and living as close as possible to that which hurts.
[…] Our charity is empty if it is not intimate with the suffering of disconnection.
Zen Master Dogen uses the term shinzo, “ever intimate.” When we are ever intimate with the tensions between personal and collective suffering, we experience liberation, enlightened to who we are as human beings.
P66 Without intimate engagement with the earth, we cannot be present to the people around us.
P68 I was scared being in the world not knowing if I would feel at home before I died. Dehumanizing experiences in the context of life’s impermanence made finding home urgent.
P73 If you are living in a body that society deems unacceptable, it can be difficult to […] trust that sanctuary can appear within the fire of the hatred directed at us. Lost in the wilderness, we find it difficult to trust any spiritual practice that teaches finding home within. Ancestral displacement compounds the sense you’ll never arrive home. […]
First we must attend to the trauma and stress of having had to live dispirited, and ask for support.
P74 Only a home that comes into being, arises, and ceases to be is a true home.
P75 What we feel, think, observe, and respond to while living between the cracks of freedom, within the brutal honesty of impending death, creates the sanctuaries we need.
P78 Since we don’t grow in isolation, looking at the world and how we are conditioned by it is a prudent step in finding sanctuary.
P85 I had allowed silence to be a spiritual medicine rather than the coping skill I learned as a child who wanted to be invisible in her dark skin.
P101 This doesn’t mean we forget what happened or even stop speaking of it, but we remove the longing for what was lost because of slavery and embrace what is in front of us. Without the longing, slavery, although embodied and remembered, ceases to be an obstruction to finding home. It remains an element of my origin but not the center of my life.
What might happen if those in a sanctuary based on a shared history of atrocity begin to water a seed motivated by freedom and not pain and suffering? <>
P104 We’ve been waiting for this time to create a home that mirrors the compassion and freedom in our hearts.
September 28, 2021
Another delightful journey from Earthlyn. The power of this work consists largely in that it arises out of the author's encounter with an ancestral legacy of dehumanization and loss of home. How does one honor the suffering of the past - of one's ancestors and one's self - free of longing for what was lost, and live with one's deep pain and, yet, free of it? Earthlyn shows us how.
This book was published after the presidential election of 2016, hence it provides a timely look at the resultant arising of racial unrest in the United States. Earthlyn recognizes the supermacists' fear of losing the home they had known - as one woman cried out to Trump from her virtual video, after the 2020 election, of how "they" were "taking away our country": the racist elitism she had come to know as home, leaving her with fear of homelessness. Yet, those that have had a home have denied home to others, relegating them to unclean caste status: dis-membering them. However, this ultra-conservative reaction witnesses to how we all need home. Hence, the cry for home arises from the same primal, embodied longing, be it racist or inclusive, for a safe refuge to live and share. Yet, can home really be home unless all are invited in?
Earthlyn's Zen arises before us in her assertion that home cannot be found only outside us. Our first home is within. Still, we need sanctuary outside us, and having a roof over our head and a physical address does not make a home. How will we discover or create community as refuge in societies that have lost traditional signposts and means of sanctuary within and without, along with substituting facial interactions of virtual reality for heart-communion? Sanctuary provides guidance in exploring this question.
This book was published after the presidential election of 2016, hence it provides a timely look at the resultant arising of racial unrest in the United States. Earthlyn recognizes the supermacists' fear of losing the home they had known - as one woman cried out to Trump from her virtual video, after the 2020 election, of how "they" were "taking away our country": the racist elitism she had come to know as home, leaving her with fear of homelessness. Yet, those that have had a home have denied home to others, relegating them to unclean caste status: dis-membering them. However, this ultra-conservative reaction witnesses to how we all need home. Hence, the cry for home arises from the same primal, embodied longing, be it racist or inclusive, for a safe refuge to live and share. Yet, can home really be home unless all are invited in?
Earthlyn's Zen arises before us in her assertion that home cannot be found only outside us. Our first home is within. Still, we need sanctuary outside us, and having a roof over our head and a physical address does not make a home. How will we discover or create community as refuge in societies that have lost traditional signposts and means of sanctuary within and without, along with substituting facial interactions of virtual reality for heart-communion? Sanctuary provides guidance in exploring this question.
June 12, 2020
How wonderful to discover a memoir in the author's direct, lucid writing! Her stories of growing up in LA and finding sanctuary across the world--and home in just being--were insightful and vivid. So were the legends and life lessons. It seems so timely, yet it's recently written, so possibly not surprising.
March 17, 2024
Everything Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes is steeped in story, personal narrative, challenging dominant narratives and beautiful prose - and this book remains faithful to all that.
June 3, 2023
Blown away. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is a profound witness to life.
February 14, 2026
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an ordained Zen priest in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi lineage of Soto Zen, and a poet and author who writes from her perspective as a Black lesbian within a Buddhist tradition. Off and on since November, I’ve had the high honor and privilege of being a resident volunteer and practitioner at the temple where she’s been a teacher-in-residence. I was inspired to read her work after talking briefly with her over dinner, and hearing her give a Dharma talk where she so compassionately shared about living with chronic pain.
In Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging, Zenju writes about ancestral exploration following violent, generational severance from homelands, and some of the formative experiences that led to her ordination. While grounded in the Buddhist views of impermanence and finding Home wherever we are, she radically addresses the need for spiritual communities to acknowledge the loss of home that oppressed people feel from displacement, foreclosure, colonization, genocide, deportation, and other forms of collective and personal disasters. Physical safety and spiritual refuge are inalienable rights, essential to us all.
Each night, after evening Zazen, we chant the Three Refuges, taking spiritual shelter in the characteristics of the Buddha, the wisdom of the Dharma, and the communal brotherhood/sisterhood of a Sangha. In a time where masses of people are being separated from their families, criminalized for being Brown, and being violently stripped from their homes, may we all more deeply examine how we can be a refuge for each other, how we can be more of a physical and spiritual shelter, how we can open our hearts to creating true sanctuaries; the homes, cities, and nations we all deserve.
In Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging, Zenju writes about ancestral exploration following violent, generational severance from homelands, and some of the formative experiences that led to her ordination. While grounded in the Buddhist views of impermanence and finding Home wherever we are, she radically addresses the need for spiritual communities to acknowledge the loss of home that oppressed people feel from displacement, foreclosure, colonization, genocide, deportation, and other forms of collective and personal disasters. Physical safety and spiritual refuge are inalienable rights, essential to us all.
Each night, after evening Zazen, we chant the Three Refuges, taking spiritual shelter in the characteristics of the Buddha, the wisdom of the Dharma, and the communal brotherhood/sisterhood of a Sangha. In a time where masses of people are being separated from their families, criminalized for being Brown, and being violently stripped from their homes, may we all more deeply examine how we can be a refuge for each other, how we can be more of a physical and spiritual shelter, how we can open our hearts to creating true sanctuaries; the homes, cities, and nations we all deserve.
July 12, 2023
So much wisdom and insight into discovering our own sense of homelessness and home. Osho Zenju offers great questions for us to contemplate as we explore our own personal experiences with homelessness and home. As a result, I signed up for her online class/teachings on Finding Sanctuary: a self-paced retreat.
February 1, 2024
This was an interesting book about the connection between homelessness in our society and the Zen path. I liked the way she included both personal stories, and reflections on slavery, homelessness, and starting a Buddhist path. Beautiful reading.
April 7, 2024
The sky is enough for all of us
Perfect for our times. Offers hope for those of us feeling displaced. A reminder that we are all earth beings. We all are home. #Palestinians #racialdiscrimination #justice
Perfect for our times. Offers hope for those of us feeling displaced. A reminder that we are all earth beings. We all are home. #Palestinians #racialdiscrimination #justice
March 30, 2023
Some of the writing felt unclear, but the overall book was good as the author reflected on not feeling belonging.
June 26, 2023
I loved this book. It ended too soon.
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May 6, 2024I don’t know how to rate this. I feel very exposed by this book…
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews