Equal Footing
"Sometimes, in an effort to attain equal footing, we forget what is most important for us to tend to: our hearts, our spirits, going home to family and friends."
— Being Black
Pain
"I believe, as Jishu wrote, that sometimes it is necessary to know pain, to be intimate with it, to help others to heal. In the course of my practice, my biggest lesson has been how to open my heart and be aware of how I am feeling. I have learned to allow my pain to be what it is, honor it, and be gentle with myself and whatever faults I perceive. From that place, my world — my capacity for compassion, gentleness and clarity — has opened itself up before me. I now embrace my heart that hurts because it is the very same heart that heals. I think our communities can benefit from this lesson."
— Being Black
Contentment
"If being more spiritual, more aware in your own life means completely giving up the life you have, why would anyone bother to trade? We don't want to toss away the life we have. We want both to keep our lives and our personal style and be more content in them. The idea is not to throw away what you have, but to make what you have easier to use."
— Being Black
Enlightenment
"You can't catch enlightenment like a virus and no one can give it away. If there ever comes a time when you feel like you have to go someplace to find a better you and you're going any farther than the mirror, don't take another step. As long as you are looking toward anything but yourself, you'll always be headed in the wrong direction."
— Being Black
Perspective
"The problem is not that we all have these different views of things, it is that we each consider our views the only reality. We forget that life is truly a matter of perspective. We delude ourselves by believing that our experience is absolute, fixed. The truth is that everything, including us, is changing all the time. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. To believe otherwise because you see it as that way is to delude yourself. Delusion is ignorance."
— Being Black
White Supremacy
"Neither Christianity nor any other faith alone can deliver us into a systems analysis that can unravel the massive entanglement that white supremacy is in every aspect of how we think, feel, dream, and act toward ourselves and others based on our perception of their place in the social order."
— Radical Dharma
Suffering
"Buddhist thought has positioned itself for millennia to analyze the complex system of the construct know to us as the self. It has as its goal the unearthing of the bonds that tether us as individuals to seemingly endless cycles on micro and macro levels of unnecessary suffering."
— Radical Dharma
Transformation
"As powerfully painful as that may be — with all due respect to Gandhi — we can no longer afford to just be the change. We actually have to be the transformation, which is to say we have to transcend the form, the construct that we find ourselves in."
— Radical Dharma
