An excerpt of Healing Our Way Home
by Valerie Brown, Marisela B. Gomez, MD, and Kaira Jewel Lingo:
As Black Buddhists and as members of BIPOC sanghas—communities of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color—we hold multidimensional lineages and cultures grounded in the lives of our ancestors that continue today to point the way to individual and collective love, compassion, resilience, liberation, and understanding. We have inherited gifts of song, land, wisdom, food, dance, poetry, stories, and other practices that support our daily lives. We honor this ancestral legacy that keeps us moving forward in our lives. We also know that we live in urgent times of overlapping crises: a recent global pandemic, climate chaos, economic inequality, heteropatriarchy, racial and political polarization, and continued “coloniality” (the set of attitudes, values, ways of knowing, and power structures upheld as normative by Western colonizing societies, which serve to rationalize and perpetuate Western dominance). These are similar and yet different crises from those our ancestors experienced. Our ancestors passed down ways of rising up and healing from the disturbances and destruction of their times, ways that can serve us in these times. We believe this book, made especially by and for BIPOC, is an offering to support us in reclaiming and remembering our spiritual roots.
Many of us, especially BIPOC, too often live and work in toxic environments with untenable roles and impossible-to-execute standards or in communities that are grossly under-resourced and under-served. Some have become apathetic, resigned, rageful, or drop out altogether when faced with these often “broken” environments.
As BIPOC belonging to multiple lineages and identities, we are called to live into our best, brilliant, and wise selves in even more courageous and powerful ways, especially now. This requires spaces and places where we connect with ourselves and each other to reflect, renew, and remember, spaces where we are surrounded by a community of support and practice. This book aspires to be part of creating that community, those places of support and nourishment.
We invite you to join us in exploring this book, to practice, to listen, rest, restore, experiment, play, and create new and nurture old pathways and practices, to be in community and to rediscover ease and well-being within yourself. This book is a resource to support you in acknowledging the fullness of your life as it is and in cultivating practices to support your spiritual growth.
For more, see Healing Our Way Home, published in 2024 by Parallax Press