Wisdom of the Body
Today I offer you some WORDS of Reverend angel Kyodo williams, author, Zen priest, and founder of the Center for Transformative Change. I first learned of her last summer when she participated in a free 10-day “Wisdom of the Body Summit” produced by Sounds True. She was the last of the series’ 32 speakers, and the one that inspired me to plunk down money to purchase the whole darn package so that I could listen to her again and again. Her words help me sort through my feelings and gain a deeper understanding of race and whiteness in the context of our country’s history and its current state of events — as well as what’s needed to move beyond it. Find out more about Rev. angel and the movement of Radical Liberation here.
These are excerpts from that first hour-long talk I heard. (I gratefully clipped from Sounds True’s transcription, and took some liberties with punctuation.)
We are a society that is multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, multi—fill in the blanks. Multi-gender, right? All sorts of things happening. We have a unique circumstance in our society as it exists today.
When you take that and you add it on top of the way in which our country was founded… one of the things that I think occurred in that process is that in order for ordinary people to put themselves in the location of witnessing what it meant to decimate a people, to annihilate a people, to actually commit genocide against the peoples that lived here so that we could have their land… we had to ask the peoples that all of this work was being done on behalf of… to essentially cut themselves off from their own body. And [from] their own feeling state, and their own knowing of what is true, and right and wrong, so that they could make sense of what it meant to watch certain peoples do all the labor, watch certain peoples lose their own access to their land and properties to make way for other people. Watch certain peoples die in wars—for instance, in the Mexican wars—to make way and clear the land so that more people could expand further and further west. Not the least of which is to watch African peoples, African-descended peoples toil and do the very, very hard labor that created a substantial amount of wealth in this country for other people to be able to build what they had, and continue.
Now, the way that I think of it is that those were not bad people. They were people that were encouraged to develop a culture that made sense of having to weigh the differences between their survival, their possibilities… the American dream that was promised to them, and to reconcile that with the loss, the pain, the pushing people onto the margins in order to make way for those dreams to unfold, and those aspirations to come into being.
What do you do with human beings when we have to reconcile that kind of disconnect? Well, you get them to not feel. So as a result of our historical formation, we have deeply embedded into our culture a kind of cut-off-ness from the experience and the wisdom of our own bodies. Because the wisdom of our own bodies, if fully engaged for those hundreds of years in our development, if we were in touch with that wisdom, many of us would have said no. “I can't abide by this. I can't do this. I can't be a part of this. I can't allow this. I can't be witness to this. I can't bear these truths.” And so, as a result, in ways that are now not overt but much more deeply underground, we have developed cultures that have an orientation towards distracting us from our own experience, from our own truth, from our understanding of what is right and wrong, what is unjust and what is just, that comes from our feeling, our connection, with the truth—or I would say, the wisdom—of our bodies…
Remaining cut off from the body does not actually serve our unfolding of the highest order or the most profound potential for wisdom that is available to us and is innately our right to access as human beings. And so, we are here, trying to figure out, what are the practices that we need? What are the ways in which we need to reconnect with the body so that we are able to also reconnect to the love, right? The natural love that is part of the human design to be curious, to want to connect, and to have compassion for other human beings… That when cut off, disconnects us from our sense of being a part of the whole…
If we allow that love, and care, and connection, and compassion to unfold, from the wisdom that arises out of the body, we become more aligned with what is righteous, and clear, and just. And we then allow ourselves—we actually can't stop ourselves from doing the work that is necessary… to have that love of peoples, of humanity, of the Earth express itself in society, which we call justice… So what that means is that justice is not just this—just this set of laws and things that live in a fixed and very rigid way in legal books, or happens somewhere in the courtrooms only. Justice is about how we show up in the world in relationship to each other, how we relate our innate sense of care, and compassion, and love… We choose to insist that our love be honored in the form of how it is that other people, the planet is treated. That's what brings about justice.
And then, culturally speaking, we collectivize that and we make demands for that justice to show up in how we write our laws, what our policies are, what we advocate for, what we allow and don't allow, whether we will jail somebody for the rest of their lives or have capital punishment, or whether we will say, "That is not our domain. We have a right, as human beings, to call for justice. We don't have a right to take lives." Or whatever the issue, or cause... We have a right to say that love should unfold and love should win. And therefore, we don't have a right to decide who other human beings should marry, if that's who they want to marry, regardless of their gender, their race, their religion, and so on and so forth…
Developing a habit of creating the life that you want to live in order to cultivate wisdom requires that we do the work of having a practice [e.g. of meditation, mindfulness, movement]. Because the momentum of habits that we receive from core messages in media, in culture, in our families—confusing messages that we get about roles that we play in our gender roles, roles that we play in relationship to who has more value, who has less value, whose voice is worth hearing, whose voice do we disappear and dismiss, all of those things are impacted by the way in which we, ourselves, reconnect to our own truth…
And so, self-care— and I want to say most specifically, developing a practice of forgiveness—is absolutely essential. Forgive ourselves in a way that's not about letting ourselves off the hook, but forgive ourselves on an ongoing basis. Because as we come into… awareness of our bodies, we're going to remember the ways that we participated, the ways that we've been complicit, the ways that we have been our own jailers, our own incarcerators, our own hindrance to our liberation. And that can be punishing, at the very least… It is a level of discomfort that most of us have not been attuned, and we don't have the container of teaching, and support, and guidance in order to support us through willingly navigating that level of discomfort.
With the disintegration of our belief of who we are, what good people we are, how well-intended we are… this disintegration is very much a part of the path of liberation. I would say, if you haven't fallen apart then you haven't even entered the game. Because disintegrating, coming apart is actually a part of—and a necessary part of—entering a path of liberation.
The following passages are Rev. angel’s words from the book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, co-authored by Rev. angel, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah
Healing is movement and work toward wholeness. Healing is never a definite location but something in process. It is the basic ordinary work of staying engaged with our own hurt and limitations. Healing does not mean forgiveness either, though it is a result of it. Healing is knowing our woundedness; it is developing an intimacy with the ways in which we suffer. Healing is learning to love the wound because love draws us into relationship with it instead of avoiding feeling the discomfort.
Healing means we are holding the space for our woundedness and allowing it to open our hearts to the reality that we are not the only people who are hurt, lonely, angry, or frustrated. We must also release the habitual aggression that characterizes our avoidance of trauma or any discomfort. My goal is to befriend my pain, to relate to it intimately as a means to end the suffering of desperately trying to avoid it. Opening our hearts to woundedness helps us to understand that everyone else around us carries around the same woundedness.
I’m thankful to have friends and family members with whom I can safely and openly and awkwardly process these and other difficult issues. I wish the same for you, and healing for us all.
With love,
Pam