![]() What are we trusting? We are trusting that what happens between us is the path by which we must come to awaken as human beings. If we could consider our common ground as trust we would be more able to remain open to the struggles. Being human is not enough common ground to navigate our challenges. This perspective can negate unique differences and end up causing more tension. Many of us consider being human to be our common ground. To access this sacred time we must have common ground, we must stand at the water with all of our problems. We may even gather to commune in our rage, and perhaps to love one another fiercely and tenderly through it. When the subject is tabled for discussion in spiritual communities, the tension is palpable, and our inability to approach it honestly gives rise to frustration, grief, humiliation, grief, numbness, blindness, fear, and rage. “The silence regarding race, sexuality, and gender in spiritual literature may create the illusion that all is well in our spiritual communities, or that speaking of our unique embodiment in terms of race, sexuality, and gender is not necessary. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people.” Would I survive the namelessness-without my body, without my heart-while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination-from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. And then-I dare to say it-I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment-my face, my flesh, my skin, my name-I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed-wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. “When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. If we carry awareness of the body as our inheritance of nature, as tender as a maple leaf or a small hummingbird, then the experience of complete tenderness can rise and swell within our ever-evolving relative reality.” We must constantly be attuned to the unfolding of life as it presents the multitude of variations in which harmony manifests in nature as oneness. We must listen to the earth right under our feet no matter what. We must study the self in order to discover harmony in our own lives. The notion that acknowledging lived experience is misaligned with spirituality is something we've made up in our minds, and not the natural reality of things. Given this, we need not insist that discussions of race, sexuality, and gender adversely affect the appearance of harmony or cause it to disappear. We have nothing to do with the fragrance of harmony. Thus, harmony may be seen as an expression of the body, of nature. It resides in the body and it is only through the body that we experience harmony. Harmony is seen, heard, and felt with the body. We need a body in which it can be revealed. “I still experience this chill today when a song or chant touches some place inside my body that my mind cannot name. The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender They are refuges in which one can participate in the collective, rather than being perceived as a distinct individual in the midst of sameness.” Cultural sanctuaries provide a space where appearance doesn't act as a platform to launch diversity campaigns, or provide a basis for special attention, which many people of color do not want. To embark on that path of healing or liberation requires exposure-where we can be comfortably seen without encountering another's guilt, explanation, or justification. But we will not recognize our true nature until we honestly look at ourselves. The Buddha's teachings that are passed on in Dharma centers can certainly benefit everyone. This does not have to be only in terms of race, sexuality, or gender, but also in terms of the true nature of students' lives. It is important to the viability of any path that students see themselves reflected in it. “Our potent contemporary cultural sanctuaries shape the Dharma to fit our cultural traditions so that the mirroring needed for spiritual paths to work can occur.
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