Status Updates From A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Me...

The scientific findings about practice are important and verify what the Buddha knew millennia ago — that meditation transforms the brain to be kinder, to respond more skillfully over time... Meditation is the laboratory for this to happen...

True happiness is not dependent on life always being pleasurable or fun. True happiness comes from living in harmony with the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows of life. This means we can be happy in the midst of our pain. When our hearts learn to meet pain with compassion and meet pleasure with unattached appreciation, happiness can coexist with any sensation, emotion, or experience.

Joy is essential to sustaining work for social change. If we only attend to the injustice, oppression, sorrow, and struggle, then we miss a lot of beauty and we are likely to burn out. When we spend time on joy, it gives us the fortitude to continue to build stronger, more just communities. Joy balances compassion. If we get too focused on sorrows, we die in their depths.

I could remain enraged at all of these people, historic and contemporary, who cause harm. Remaining enraged would not enhance my freedom or well-being, but rather create greater suffering for me, as well as toward those who encounter my bitterness and resentment.

Forgiveness involves vulnerability and nobility, courage and presence, and it moves on its own timeline; you can't force it.

Life is full of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, and our task as practioners is to be present to it all, without attachment or aversion.

Lama Rod Owens says, "The work to turn our attention back to the woundedness is this intense, profound path of transformation, which doesn't feel as good as responding to the anger because the energy of anger makes us feel powerful. Some of us, particularly if we're coming from communities where we feel marginalized, use that anger to feel powerful, to feel valid." There is this vulnerability to being with the pain.

Audre Lorde said, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." The women of the Combahee River Collective foresaw just that when they said, "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression."