The urge to create a narrative seems fundamental to human nature,” writes Susan Griffin in Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something: A Writer’s Guide. Griffin has much to say about how the process of storytelling shapes how we see the world and how we understand who we are. As well as offering guidance in the craft of writing, the book tells of the author’s own journey as a writer. A poet, playwright, essayist, and feminist philosopher, Griffin has published twenty-two books in a life dedicated to literature. Her 1978 book, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, was a pivotal publication in ecological thought, linking, as it did, the exploitation of our natural environment with colonialism and the subjugation of women.

Griffin, who turned 80 this year, is a master at interpreting universal ideas through the prism of her personal experience. In her 1992 book A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, she draws on her own troubled family history to analyze the connections among war, gender, sexuality, and denial. In 1999, she published What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows, which interweaves historical and literary analysis with an account of her own struggle with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) to reflect on the interrelationship of body, mind, illness, and society.

Throughout her writing, Griffin explicates connection where separation is otherwise the norm. In reading Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something, I was struck by how Griffin describes writing in terms of a spiritual practice. “To craft a sentence,” she writes, “will change not only what you write, but most often, even on a subtle scale, your own thoughts.”

Griffin has studied with such Buddhist teachers as Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Joan Halifax. Buddhist teachings and Vipassana meditation have, she says, taught her a great deal about herself and the nature of consciousness. But while Griffin considers Buddhism a great tool in her life, she doesn’t call herself a “Buddhist.” She says she prefers “not pinning myself down to a simple definition,” which is, she notes as an afterthought, “a kind of Buddhist approach.”

As a writer and meditator myself, there was much I wanted to explore with Griffin. Does she, like me, see writing as a form of meditation? How do writing and storytelling shape our view of the world? How is it that, as she says, so many things remain hidden until we find the right words to describe them? In the following interview (edited for clarity and brevity), we talked about these and quite a few other matters, with one thing connecting to another.

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Can you explain what is at the root of your impulse to write? Well, several different motivations, but mainly that I love writing. I love the actual process of it. I also love working with my students, I love working with their prose or poetry and getting inside it and showing them ways they can fine-tune it and make it better. I even love playing with the grammar of sentences. I love the raw mechanics of writing. And part of what I love about it is the state of mind I get into when I’m doing it. It’s humble work. It’s sort of like being a carpenter. People get in trouble when they put writers on a pedestal and believe the romanticized notion of writers as Hemingway-style geniuses. Writing is the same kind of work that a carpenter does.

Writing can be more than just a profession. Isn’t it also a way of being in the world? Yes, definitely! When I’m writing and things are going well, and I’m capturing what I wanted to capture, I feel as if there’s a host around me, in the sense of the old religious idea of a host: a host of spiritual beings. It feels as if there’s a sort of yes there that is coming from existence itself—not just from humans, but also animals and plants; a host that is nodding in agreement, saying: “yes, you’ve hit the mark here.” Such moments are brought on when you get close to something that hasn’t been expressed before, or something you haven’t been able to express before.

Do you experience writing as a form of meditation? There’s a lot of similarity to meditation in the sense that you have such a keen focus on what you’re doing. You can get into a kind of altered state of consciousness in which new solutions and new thoughts and new ways of saying things suddenly arrive in your head. It’s a very receptive state of mind, highly perceptive, and highly focused.

If you’re really on to something in your writing, then your whole consciousness is brought up for you. If you’re on point, it will clear your mind of other thoughts. You’re not focusing in the conventional way or according to the conventions that already exist, but you’re focusing as much as you can on the thing itself. In writing, you’re often stripping something of all the opinions about it, to try to get a fresh look, and that’s very meditative.

But writing doesn’t replace meditation. They do different things in the long run.

Buddhist meditation is often seen as a movement from sound to stillness, getting away from words and concepts to just be. But writing may be the reverse: a movement from silence to sound, as you indicate in your title. But you’re not trying to put the silence into sound; you’re listening into the silence for the sound. We hear these little phrases, either what somebody says, or something that’s repeating in our own minds, and we don’t pay attention. But a poet pays attention and writes things down. Many poems begin with a phrase that’s been rattling around in your head; you don’t even know what it means, but you write it down. It has some meaning, but the meaning sort of cuts off after a few words. So it’s a matter of paying attention to these phrases that are in there. Sometimes, I’ll hear somebody use a phrase, and I’ll think, “My God, what you just said is extraordinary!,” although to the person, it probably seems sort of pedestrian and normal. But it’s not. Writing begins with listening.

That makes me think of something you wrote, in What Her Body Thought: “we need words, not only to describe what is observed, but to observe at all.” What does that mean to you? If you don’t have a word for something, you may not even see it. Or you may see it, and you may doubt yourself. Or you’re at a loss for words, because, literally: there are no words for it. It is hard to see something unless you delineate it. In my book, I use the example of Virginia Woolf, who described how she did not really understand her relationship with her father until she learned the word “ambivalence.” Only then did she understand why her feelings for her father alternated between rage and love.

“The best writing often occurs at this boundary between vocabulary and emptiness.”

In that process, when you find a word for an experience or emotion, your understanding becomes deeper and more sophisticated. In the natural world, you often don’t notice things unless you have the words for them. For example, let’s say there are different kinds of grasses, but they all look the same to you until you learn the words for them. Once you have a word for something and you start looking for it, you suddenly can see it. There’s a reciprocal process between meaning and naming.

And that’s part of the experience of writing? Yes, I think that the best writing often occurs at this boundary between vocabulary and emptiness, when you have no words to express something. I think, often, when there’s something that can’t be expressed, you write around it: you describe everything that’s evoked by it, or precedes it, or comes after it, or everything that it is not. And then slowly, the inexpressible comes into view and you have found a way to express it. That’s a lot of what the best writing is.

Would you say that our perception is shaped by language? Yes, very much so. Language can open up or shape our perception. It can deepen our perception or make it more flexible. But language can also have a negative effect. Prejudicial language narrows how we perceive the world.

Language has the capacity to take us beyond what is already understood in the culture. You may be experiencing something that many other people besides you experienced, but they just haven’t put it into words. And maybe you aren’t even original by putting it into words, but you put it into different words, different kinds of words that other people understand. But it’s not a matter of being the first; it’s a matter of seeing what is not normally seen, and understanding it. Experiencing it, really.

You also wrote about language as metaphor. Almost all words are metaphors. I like the example of “truth,” which is such an abstract word. But it comes from the word for “tree,” a straight tree that could be used as a way to measure quantities. Words come from palpable material sources. Most of the words we use are rooted in physical experience. We tend to think of language and thought as above, as superior to, physical existence. But they are not; they are rooted in it. And there’s this tendency in our culture to denigrate material experience: the assumption that sensual and material experience is inferior to what we call “spiritual experience.” But I would say that all experience is spiritual. What is material, especially, is spiritual at base. So it all has spiritual significance. And we feel the connection to a larger existence through sensual experience. If I taste, let’s say, an apple, that taste of the apple ties me to apple trees, which ties me to the soil, which ties me to rain, to sunshine, to what is growing around the tree which decomposes to become part of the humus and then becomes part of the apple eventually. So the taste of an apple is not some sort of vulgar, unfortunate experience we have to have as human beings, something opposed to spiritual experience. Taste is a spiritual experience. Much of my work has to do with retrieving the spirituality and significance of the material world.

Do you feel constrained by words? I don’t blame the words! But I can definitely feel at a loss for words. Often! People think that writers always have the right words. But that’s not true. I think writers feel more often at a loss for words because we’re very sensitive to what they actually mean. People might substitute some sort of stock phrase for what they’re trying to get at, and if it’s not exactly accurate, they don’t care. They don’t think about it. But, as writers, we are aware that the stock phrases that come up are inadequate to describe what we’re feeling or trying to say.

In the 1999 edition of Woman and Nature, you wrote that the times when you published the book were more hopeful. What made the 1970s so hopeful?  It was a time of intense feminism. And also the environmental movement was beginning. Both of those movements were hopeful and exciting because new insights and new organizations were forming, and we weren’t so far along in the path of climate chaos yet.

And are you still hopeful now? I have to be. It’s in my nature, and I have grandchildren. I have witnessed enormous changes during my lifetime. Those of us born during the war were permanently shaped by it in many ways. The Holocaust and the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki—we were born into a world in which these horrors existed. We took those things in as part of the nature of our society and reality. And the other thing is, of course, that as women we had far less equality. But I’ve seen enormous changes in my lifetime: I’ve seen the overthrowing of authoritarian governments, and the downing of the Berlin Wall. And these things were very hopeful.

Now, of course, a lot of authoritarian governments are rising again. We had Trump, who was definitely an authoritarian ruler. But he hasn’t destroyed democracy . . . yet. We’re still fighting for democracy; we’re fighting to save the Earth; we’re fighting for women’s rights. It’s the same struggle. But there’s a far greater number of people now, I would say, who are for women’s rights, who are for saving the Earth, and who are for democracy. And that wasn’t true thirty or forty years ago.

Are you talking about the US? The US and around the world too. If you look at what’s going on, at the level of governance, it’s very daunting and disturbing. But if you look at the level of what’s going on among people, it looks more hopeful. Look at the Iranian women and what they’ve been doing! Women who defy the laws are subject to ten years in prison, and yet they’re out in the streets protesting anyway. That’s quite extraordinary.

You wrote that in the process of telling a story, one comes to understand events on a deeper level. Could you talk more about the urge that humans seem to have to tell stories? It’s fundamental to human nature. We tell stories about who we are and what we’ve been through. And not only what we have been through, but also what our ancestors have been through, and what the people we know have been through. Communities create themselves by telling stories. Some people may put that down as “gossip,” but it’s much more than that. It’s a community weaving its own history, its own stories, and trying to understand itself: connecting one thing with another, and one person with another. It is fundamental to human psychology. We shape our perception of the world and ourselves through words and stories.

How has illness shaped your relationship with writing? I can’t write rapidly anymore. Physically, I just can’t do it. I get fatigued rather easily because of my ME. Recently, I’ve also gotten the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But I have all these ideas in my mind, and when I lie down to rest, the writing goes on, but not the actual words. The thinking has become a very essential and welcome part of my writing process. It’s because I have to rest so often. I’m now looking at the process of thought in a different way. It was always part of my work, but the way I’m treating it now is more concentrated.

“We shape our perception of the world and ourselves through words and stories.”

Does the mental world take on more importance when your body is struggling? I wouldn’t put it that way. I mean, the physical world has become very important. It has made me get horizontal. I’m obeying the physical world. But then I have this peaceful, open time to think. And instead of saying, “well, I can’t work anymore today,” I began to see that as part of my work. I’m working in a different way now. In my book, I mention how Hannah Arendt would spend hours just staring out the window. She said that was a part of her process. She would just sit, and stare, and be thinking. And she regarded that as part of her work. So I’m in a great tradition!

And that goes back to what we talked about earlier: writing as a form of meditation—a process of discovery and letting your mind find connections. Yes, that’s right. It’s not that something creative has come into your head and then you write it all down. It’s more often that you write something and then that suggests the next step. You write a sentence, and then that suggests the next sentence and then the next sentence, and then you finish the paragraph. And then you don’t know where to go after that. So you wait for a while, and you walk around. And maybe you even wait for a week. And then, suddenly, it comes to you. And you write that paragraph. You want to allow your mind to find connections. You can’t force it. It’s a matter of creating the space in which your mind can discover those connections, which your mind wants to do already.

I think our minds are happiest when we’re weaving things together. We have this desire for meaning, and meaning often is a way of making connections. Because in the world, everything is connected to everything else, and our minds reflect nature that way.

The post Listening into the Silence appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In this series, Pamela Weiss, author of A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism, shares stories of Buddhist women past and present that illuminate how feminine energy can support people of all genders in their practice. These often-overlooked figures not only exemplify qualities cultivated on the Buddhist path but provide an important counterbalance to the historically patriarchal tradition. Weiss tells the stories of Mahapajapati, the Buddha’s aunt and foster mother, and her dual capacity for nurturing compassion and fierce advocacy for women’s inclusion in the sangha. Prajnaparamita, the archetypical figure of “Perfection of Wisdom,” invites us to embrace the unknown and the wisdom it contains. And Yasodhara, the wife the Buddha left behind, offers an example of integrating our practice and mundane daily responsibilities.

Pamela Weiss led a live meditation, dharma talk, and Q&A session on Thursday, November 19th. See the recording here.

Pamela Weiss has been practicing Buddhism since 1987, including several years of Zen monastic training. She serves on the Spirit Rock Teachers Council and was the founder of Appropriate Response, an organization dedicated to bringing mindful awareness to the workplace. She is the author of A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism (2020).

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Editor’s Note (2/16/21): In this series Pamela Weiss shares excerpts from a book of Matty Weingast’s original poetry inspired by the Therigatha, a collection of verses on awakening by some of Buddhism’s earliest nuns. Due to criticism that Weingast’s book was falsely presented as a direct translation, Shambhala Publications republished it as The First Free Women: Original Poems Inspired by the Early Buddhist Nuns in 2021.

The post Awakening the Fierce Feminine appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We badly need feminist Buddhist scholars and meditation teachers who empower women and many marginalized people,” says Ouyporn Khuankaew.

As the founder and lead trainer for the International Women’s Partnership for Peace and Justice (IWP), based in Chiang Dao, Thailand, Khuankaew has thought a lot about feminism and its relationship to Buddhism and Thai culture. As a domestic violence survivor herself, she focuses her teaching on trauma, gender, and sexuality, topics that are often taboo in Thai society. Formerly a director of Women and Gender programs for the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, Khuankaew now leads anti-oppression workshops and retreats for activists suffering from burnout. For her, the work of transforming Thai society and empowering women means braiding spiritual practice with activist work.

Caitlin Dwyer: How do you see feminism in relationship to Buddhism, especially in Thailand?
Ouyporn Khuankaew: Feminist views and practices are most needed in transforming Thai Buddhism because, as a result of male domination in Thai Theravadha Buddhism, the Buddha’s teachings have been altered or replaced by the teachings of patriarchy. When I first conducted a workshop with the Buddhist women from this region many years ago, what we found was that most teachings we have socialized from the Buddhist monks were anti-women. For example, we have all learned that, as women, we cannot gain enlightenment. Thus, patriarchal Buddhist institutions and teachings have become one of the root causes of oppression, particularly against women, transgender people, the disabled, and other marginalized groups. We badly need feminist Buddhist scholars and meditation teachers who empower women and marginalized people.

Related: Putting an End to Buddhist Patriarchy

Violence is the background for a lot of the people you might work with, whether domestic violence survivors or refugees. What is important to know about working with trauma survivors? Trauma knowledge is most lacking in our society. I did not have this awareness until I started doing healing for myself and my mother many years ago. When I began to teach trauma healing to Thai nurses and psychologists seven years ago, I realized that they had learned very little about trauma, and the trauma knowledge they had learned was mainly of the trauma caused by natural disasters or accidents. So when trauma is caused by sexual violence or domestic abuse, the health officers have no knowledge or skills to support these patients. In addition, since most hospitals are led by male doctors who never learn about this kind of trauma, they either are against or are not supportive of feminist counseling knowledge for nurses and psychologists. The emphasis is to give these patients pills. Our organization is the only one in Thailand that has been giving seven-day mindfulness based feminist counseling for survivors of gender-based and other forms of oppression.

Related: Healing Trauma with Meditation

You wrote in a paper that sometimes people “simply only need a witness to their own existence.” Can you explain this a bit more? Deep listening is an amazing practice to offer to people who have experienced violence of any form. There are many social stigmas and labels placed on women, children, transgendered people, and people living with HIV who have experienced domestic or sexual abuse. Often these groups of trauma survivors are told that it is their fault (or karma from their previous lives), so guilt, shame, suppression, and isolation make their suffering worse. When they have a chance to tell their truth with a witness who is present and compassionate, they are breaking their silence, which is the beginning of healing.

Tell me a little bit about founding IWP—how did the organization come about, and how did you get started? I left the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) in 1998 but continued to do grassroots work with women in Asia. Working with INEB and living at the Wongsanit Ashram [a Buddhist activist community in central Thailand] for six months made me realize that I needed spiritual practice to deal with my anger and burnout from activism. I also realized that it was impossible for me to work or live in a male-dominated organization/community. It also made me see that an organization can influence change only if it embodies power-sharing, spirituality, and a recognition that all forms of oppression are intersectional. In those days I had not heard of any Thai feminist organizations that included spirituality in their work and practice. So I came home, and in 2001 I met Ginger Norwood, who seeks similar values and vision, and we founded IWP in 2002. For the first two years we mainly served different ethnic women from Myanmar, because of their severe suffering at that time. We later expanded to cover women from India (including Tibetan women in exile), Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Thailand. For the first two years before building our own center, we rented a retreat center from Catholic nuns in the mountains of Chiang Mai. After the Catholic nuns found out that we worked with undocumented women from Myanmar we were told that we could no longer use their space, so we began training in a small house inside my family compound. Then a year later, one of my sisters donated land nearby so we could build a kitchen and simple accommodation.

IWP focuses on deconstructing structural oppression. What are some of the ways in which working on social issues out in the world intersects with cultivating peace in oneself? As peace activists, we cannot work for peace with anger, fear, and hopelessness within ourselves. Well-being, self-care, and self-love bring me joy, inner peace, hope, and happiness daily. This, I think, is the core of sustainability for activists and activism and is a foundation for transforming difficulties in work and in personal life and especially our own ego.

Some of your work focuses on sexuality and gender, especially within the LGBTQ communities. Why is embracing sexuality an important thing for the women you serve? Do you find that there is support within the Thai community and the Buddhist community for this kind of work? When we look at sexuality, we look at heteronormative sexism that oppresses heterosexual women and LGBTQ people, although in different ways and levels. I think heterosexism helps particularly heterosexual women activists see patriarchal systems as bigger, that it not only affects them. This helps with building allies among women’s and LGBTQ groups. I used to work with women living with HIV, and heterosexual sex is the main cause for women to have HIV. Gender culture does not allow Thai women (or those of many other nationalities) to learn about safer sex, nor does it give them the power to say no to unsafe sex. Meanwhile, it promotes men having sex with anyone freely but without responsibility. I have been working with the community of female monks led by Ven. Dhammananda [Thailand’s first fully ordained Buddhist nun], who shares common values with IWP. In November this year, IWP will began teaching a five-day Buddhist feminist anti-oppression workshop for Thai Buddhist female monks, white robed nuns [celibate renunciants known as maechi], and laywomen. I hope this project will help us create and expand Buddhist allies for social justice in Thailand.

Related: Working Through the Strong Emotions of Sexual Identity

What are your hopes for the next generation of Thai women? I see that some young Thai women who are exposed to the progressive Western feminist movement on LGBTQ and women’s issues are being active. But this is a very small group of young middle-class women, mostly based in Bangkok. I have to admit that I don’t have much hope in general as long as the curriculum in high schools and universities does not integrate gender studies and feminism. The feminist groups in Thailand including IWP—which are very small in number—do not work enough at organizing grassroots women. In comparison with the feminist movement in Myanmar, we still have much to learn. We do not have a feminist movement in Thailand; we only have feminist groups, whereas in Myanmar there has been a strong feminist movement.

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Published with permission of Buddhistdoor Global, where this article first appeared.

The post Toward a Thai Feminist Movement appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few years ago, the gallerist of a premier art space in Milan told Italian multidisciplinary artist Michela Martello that representing women was a real challenge.

“Women don’t sell,” Martello recalled him saying in a frank conversation.

Flash forward to May 2018, and Martello and a contingent of Italian artists are presenting “Super S.H.E,” the first all-female group show at Giovanni Bonelli Gallery.

What changed? Martello—a fine artist turned “street-art guru” whose work is influenced by classical Italian painting, Buddhist motifs, and graffiti—told Tricycle that she and other women have been making significant gains in the art world. And now galleries and museums are trying to catch up to the culture, she said.

Dismantling stereotypes of women throughout history will be a common theme in several solo and group shows that Martello is participating in this summer, including Consequential Stranger in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Martello is displaying her Buddhist spin on Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece, The Birth of Venus.  

Her version of Venus is a female wisdom deity known as a dakini, meaning “sky dancer” or literally “she who moves through space.” Martello’s dakini-Venus is gestating a Tibetan snow lion, a symbol of fearlessness and a reference to Shakyamuni Buddha, while crushing a medieval Gothic demon.

“She’s taking steps toward the sky and is not afraid to occupy the entire canvas. Nowadays, women can stretch themselves and are empowered to do so,” Martello said, reflecting on the current climate. “A few years ago, especially in Italy, this was still unthinkable.”

Visualizing images of empowered female figures is an important part of Martello’s personal practice and art-making process. “But you certainly don’t have to be a woman, a Buddhist, or an iconography expert to relate to dakini energy,” she said.

Related: Dancing with the Divine Feminine

Also featured in the Raleigh exhibit (which opened this April and will run through June 1) are what appear to be pottery relics from Ancient Rome. On closer look, the clay shards are, in fact, broken fragments of a female body: a brain, eyes, ears, teeth, heart, lungs, intestines, uterus, and breasts, along with a strand of DNA. The collection nods to the Buddhist idea that we are a sum of our parts rather than an essentialized, fixed self.

In many ways, Future is Goddess and the ceramic relics merge Martello’s Italian and Buddhist visual vocabulary, but this coupling hasn’t always come so easily.

Trained as an illustrator at the Europe Institute of Design, Martello felt that the traditional techniques and methods taught in school could be incredibly rigid, especially when it came to depictions of women.

“My style has always been somewhat oppositional and spontaneous,” she said. Often, her teachers commented that her subjects were either too spiritual or ethereal. But Martello believes that arts education in Italy is beginning to break from its “highly conceptual and often chauvinistic art forms.”

In the nineties, soon after meeting her Buddhist teacher, the late Tibetan master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Martello moved to New York City, where she found the art scene more open to transgressive thinking.

“In Italy, I would have struggled to assert myself. But thanks to institutions like Pen and Brush, a 125-year-old nonprofit in Manhattan, women in the arts are supported in an ongoing way.

“When we lift each other up,” she added, “stereotypes become old ghosts.”

Related: Nasty Women Meditation

Martello’s large-scale murals, sculptures, and collages have since headlined at several feminist exhibits and public arts installations. Many of her creations are made by repurposing quilts, US Army tents, vintage fabrics, pages from Shakespeare plays, animal skulls, and human hair. The resulting pieces are as inventive as they are provocative.

Women breaking down constructs and taking flight is the theme of Wings to Fly, a Frida Kahlo-inspired exhibit that pays tribute to the Mexican painter and pop-feminist icon. The modest showcase, on view at the PBX Gallery in downtown Brooklyn through June 9, features artwork by Martello and Indian-American Jewish painter Siona Benjamin, along with select pieces from others, who use art to think critically about their national, religious, and gender identities.

With Outsider, a self-portrait akin to Kahlo’s contour drawings, Martello explores and challenges the way we craft our own images and identities around the often constrictive roles that we are expected to perform.

In another of Martello’s works at Wings to Fly, pages from Shakespeare’s King John and kimono fabric are stitched together to form the body and brocade of Yabyum, a nontraditional thangka, or Buddhist scroll painting. At its center, a male and female deity are locked in sexual embrace—a Vajrayana visual device that’s often misunderstood as an obscene display of eroticism. The symbolic union of the tantric pair signifies two aspects of enlightenment—wisdom and compassion—coming together, and the image is meant to uproot the sources of ignorance and suffering.

Martello explained that sitting with this and other Buddhist imagery is part of her practice, which she turns to when she gets bogged down by discursive thoughts in order to gain some perspective and reestablish her balance.

Together, Buddhism and feminism have led Martello to discover hidden parts of herself that manifest during the creative process. “When I’m making art, I can look honestly at myself, confront the shadows and insecurities, and eventually integrate their opposites into my life and work,” she said.

In both her art and Buddhist practice, doubt plays a key role in her ability to work through anger, depression, and creative blocks. On one of her first retreats with Namkhai Norbu at Merigar West, the Dzogchen center he founded in Tuscany, Martello was drowning in uncertainty. At the time, she was in her early 30s, unmarried, and without children.

“It can be difficult to talk openly with other women about pregnancy, child-rearing, and motherhood. Doubting is seen as a sign of weakness, when really it’s the opposite,” she said.

Raising questions around femininity and womanhood is what spurred Martello to produce a series of ceramic dolls, a handful of which are in the Raleigh exhibit. Not on display is Eva, a doll with a dark hole where her womb would be and the words I am not sure I want to have children in this life printed on her Victorian-style dress.

“Investigating the mind is always risky, yet Eva is celebrating doubts,” Martello explained.

Likewise, questioning the norms we inherit as individuals and societies can be uncomfortable, painful, and destructive, but it can also create something beautiful.

“I take refuge in doubt,” Martello went on. “Without it, I couldn’t grow.”

Michela Martello’s street art, textiles, and ceramics will be showcased with Parlor Gallery this June through September as part of their Wooden Walls Project in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

The post An Artist’s Buddhist-Feminist Renaissance appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Title: Bhikkhuni – Buddhism, Sri Lanka, Revolution

The Buddha established an order of fully ordained nuns during his lifetime, but it died out across southern Asia a millennia ago, relegating Buddhist nuns in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand to second-class status. Three determined women take on the patriarchy by reviving this abandoned Buddhist tradition and becoming the first fully-ordained Theravada Buddhist nuns in their nations’ modern histories in this documentary. Follow Bhikkhuni Kusuma from Sri Lanka, Bhikkhuni Dhammananda from Thailand, and Bhikkhuni Gautami from Bangladesh as they challenge opposition from monks and governments in this contemporary documentary. To learn more about the film visit https://bhikkhuni-film.com.

This film will be available to stream until midnight on Saturday, March 30.

The post The Nuns’ Revolution: Restoration of Bhikkhuni Ordination appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anne Waldman is a giant in contemporary American poetry. Cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and collaborative texts. Her new book, Trickster Feminism, unites feminist history, Buddhist lore, contemporary politics, quantum physics, and more in a text of protest and upheaval. Her poems are layered, enchanting, and challenging, but if you’re willing to go along for the ride, their movements will unsettle your thinking on gender, feminism, and the political powers at large in the United States today.

Tricycle spoke with Waldman about her book, mythological feminine figures, and political action.

Who is the “trickster” that appears in this book?
There are a number of pieces to the book, and the first one introduces the whole notion of the trickster. In various mythologies, the trickster is a kind of playful energy who can’t be trusted. He is a con artist. There is a wonderful book by Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, a compendium of lore about the trickster. In it, Hyde says that there are rarely female tricksters. I had trouble with that. It felt like something beyond gender for one thing. I wanted to claim the idea of the trickster for feminism.

In 2011, you published the Iovis Trilogy, a feminist epic. Does Trickster Feminism come out of that work, or does it stand on its own?
This book stands on its own, though there are two sections that do come out of the ongoing Iovis project, which I’m always engaged in. After Iovis was published, I thought it was over, but of course when it ended, other things kept coming up related to it. It’s taking on patriarchy, so there are some resonances between it and Trickster Feminism. But this recent work coalesced in the last two years—really, under two years—around the current political situation. This book came out of the women’s march and other protests, and it seemed to me it had to happen now. I’m not sure if it would have coalesced in the same way a few years back, or even ten or twenty years ago, when I began the Iovis project.

Related: Radical Presence

How exactly did this book come out of today’s political moment?
I had an invitation to address a gallery opening that the American artist Kiki Smith was organizing around the future of feminism. There are a lot of discussions and disagreements about where feminism stands today, where it’s headed, and so on. I don’t have answers or any kind of ideology because my perspective is very personal and visceral, but at the same time I’ve been involved with the movement from early on. In any case, it seemed that this book was the way to address what I was feeling—the best way to address the root cause and problems with our current political dynamic, the chaos leading up to today’s dystopia, the 2016 presidential elections, and now, the post-election period where we’re seeing a lot of the social order being unraveled, from the Paris climate agreements to the situation in Iran.

In the 1970s, I was involved in political protests against the Rocky Flats nuclear plant in Colorado, near Naropa University, with the poet Allen Ginsberg and activist Daniel Ellsberg. We protested the plutonium pits that sites like Rocky Flats and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina create. We helped shut down Rocky Flats, but as I watch this issue circling back today, it makes me think of the old Zen adage about how you have to keep sweeping the temple over and over again. You clean it, and it looks fine for a day, but then you have to go back in the morning and do it all again. There’s a Sisyphean effort in any kind of activism, and it seemed an urgent time for calling to address these things in a new and immediate way.

In writing this book, I also thought of Frank O’Hara’s great book titled Meditations in an Emergency. Being someone connected to a Buddhist practice, and involved with Naropa, I meditated on samsara, on the endless cycles of the realms, including the warring god realm where we have to constantly create enemies. But this book seemed to be a more direct way to revisit all the karma—the hideous karma—of our nation, from its origins in slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples and so on. In a way, it’s a very exciting time—people are talking about all of this.

The poems in this book work as a kind of an incantation to invoke the spirits of feminist foremothers and religious figures. You draw on the strength of female figures across cultures, and weave in aspects of documentary writing, as in the poem “Denouement,” where you’re circling Trump Tower, chanting, Om Man Be Gone Om Con Be Gone. . .
Yes, I was summoning all these deities across time and space and invoking the Poundian idea that “in the mind of the poet, all times are contemporaneous.” It’s very important to my poetics to draw on the past. You’re not alone. You’re part of a continuum. In terms of spiritual practices, you can visualize, practice mantra, recite poems, and sing praise songs to all kinds of female figures, both historical and mythological.

Related: Nasty Woman Meditation

Speaking of myth, tell me about the rabbit-headed yogini who appears on the cover of the book, and at the end of each poem.
The image came from a friend’s book about the 64 dakini [female embodiment of wisdom] temples. I did a pilgrimage to certain sites in Nepal last winter. I’ve been to some of the dakini temples near Puri, and there’s often a rabbit-headed yogini.

I thought of this rabbit when I went to Borobudur temple in Indonesia. There are images carved into it showing the story of the Jataka Tales [about Shakyamuni Buddha’s past lives], the various stories of animalia. There’s a rabbit carved in stone, and another in the sutras depicted on the walls. Of course, the paint is gone, but they’re beautifully carved, and represent the idea of enlightenment coming in all forms and sizes. When you climb to the top of the temple there is a series of various buddhas and bodhisattvas. But at the very pinnacle there’s an empty cage, representing the idea that emptiness is your teacher. Even the rabbit can be your teacher.

This question comes directly from one of your poems: “What methods of political thought can poetry uniquely perform?”
I think an important part of that is question is “what can we uniquely perform?” We enter public space, which has always been important to me. When I was in Bali, working with the Naropa program, I spent a lot of time going to temple ceremonies that would go on all night. They are elaborate theater, dance, and music productions that are very much a part of the spiritual practice of the people. There are many different forms. In any case, there’s one where a figure emerges from the inner temple, where various deities and their shrines are kept. The figure then passes through a gate, a Candi bentar, which is open at the top. On the other side of the gate is the public space, the marketplace, where the audience is—but the figure stands there in the gateway, paused and trembling.  

In Balinese dance, there is a movement of intense shaking in the fingers, and a waving of the eyes in an almost fearful state. It can be held for 20 minutes or 30 minutes at a time. You’re sitting there, wondering, when is this figure going to come through the gateway? Why are we still waiting here? Finally, a half hour goes by and the theater breaks through to our side. I remember being so knocked out by this at the time—the tension and the waiting and the paranoia and fear coming into the space. In my work, I try to invoke that, though I try to get through the gateway a little faster at times.

How can we be effective? The “coming through the gateway” is where artistry or invocation, music, sound, gestures, and dance, are important. How do you enter public space with something that’s not simply another political speech or something where you’re preaching to the converted? How do you create something elevating, a real intervention?

The post Anne Waldman Takes on the Patriarchy One Poem at a Time appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Before the female buddha Tara came into being, she was a princess named Wisdom Moon, who was very devoted to the Buddha’s teachings and had a deep meditation practice. She was close to reaching enlightenment, and had developed the intention to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

Her teacher, a monk, approached her, saying, “What a pity it is that you are in the body of a woman, because of course there is no possibility you can attain enlightenment in a woman’s body, so you will have to come back as a man before you can become enlightened.”

The princess answered back brilliantly, demonstrating her understanding of absolute truth, saying, “Here there is no man; there is no woman, no self, no person, and no consciousness. Labeling ‘male’ or ‘female’ is hollow. Oh, how worldly fools delude themselves.”

Related: “The Matter of Truth”

She went on to make the following vow: “Those who wish to attain supreme enlightenment in a man’s body are many, but those who wish to serve the aims of beings in a woman’s body are few indeed; therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, work for the benefit of sentient beings in a woman’s body.”

From that time onward, the princess dedicated herself to realizing complete enlightenment; once she accomplished that goal, she came to be known as Tara, the Liberator. I like to say that Tara is the first feminist, and I joke that in her form as Green Tara, she is the spiritual leader of the Green Party: guardian of the forest, fast-acting and compassionate. Tara is depicted with one foot in the world and one foot in meditation—a place where many of us find ourselves.

Like Tara, I firmly believe that at the absolute level we are beyond gender, and any notions of gender are limited and not our true nature. At a relative level, men and women are different, and that difference is precious. But when I use the terms “masculine” and “feminine,” it doesn’t matter whether you identify as male, female, or nonbinary, or what your sexual orientation may be: the masculine and feminine energies are alive within each of us and in our world. That said, there are rules and laws and cultural messages worldwide that specifically affect and disempower women. My wish is that we not lose touch with that unique magic of the primal feminine, the unique power we can bring to bear on the challenges of these times.

Feminine models of strength have been largely lost, repressed, or hidden from view, particularly images that are not acceptable or are not safe in a patriarchal society. Those images of the sibyl, the wise woman, the wild woman—women who are embodiments of specific powers of transformation, magical, spiritual, and psychic—become “wicked witches.” Estimates of the number of women executed as witches from the 15th to the 18th century—primarily by being burned alive, as it was considered a more painful death—range from 60,000 to 100,000. Those were times of puritanism and sexual repression, and the women burned as witches were often independent or rebellious women who lived alone and practiced herbalism, or women who disobeyed their husbands or refused to have sex with them.

Images of the devoted, peaceful mother have always been safe. Such images have always been acceptable in all cultures, even patriarchal ones; but there’s another level of reflection of the primal feminine experience that has not been present and that both men and women long for. And this is an experience that comes from the intuitive sacred feminine, a place where language may be paradoxical and prophetic, where the emphasis is on the symbolic meaning, not the words; a place where women sit in circles naked wearing mud, bones, and feathers, women who turn into divine goddesses and old hags—who turn into the fierce dakinis.

The Sanskrit word dakini in Tibetan becomes khandro, which means “sky dancer,” literally “she who moves through space.” The dakini is the most important manifestation of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhist teaching. She can appear as a human being or as a deity, often portrayed as fierce, surrounded by flames, naked, dancing, with fangs and a lolling tongue, and wearing bone ornaments. She holds a staff in the crook of her left elbow, representing her inner consort, her internal male partner. In her raised right hand, she holds a hooked knife, representing her relentless cutting away of dualistic fixation. She is compassionate and, at the same time, relentlessly tears away the ego. She holds a skull cup in her left hand at heart level, representing impermanence and the transformation of desire. She is an intense and fearsome image to behold.

The dakini is a messenger of spaciousness and a force of truth, presiding over the funeral of self-deception. Wherever we cling, she cuts; whatever we think we can hide, even from ourselves, she reveals. The dakini traditionally appears during transitions: moments between worlds, between life and death, in visions between sleep and waking, in cemeteries and charnel grounds.

Observing my two daughters’ four labors, which produced four marvelous grandchildren, two for each daughter, and remembering my own three labors, I think of the dakini in the time called “transition” during childbirth, when the cervix must open the last few centimeters for the baby’s descent into the birth canal. Transition is generally the most painful and most challenging period during labor, and during this time the woman must touch her wildness, take charge, and enter her deepest primal power. She often becomes fierce and must access the powerful dakini within, in order to move through transition, the tunnel of darkness, and bring her baby into the light. No one else can do it for her.

I remember during my first labor, witnessing the potency of the dakini unleashed and in her full power. It was only months after coming back from India with my husband, and less than a year since I’d disrobed from being a Buddhist nun. Living on Vashon Island in Puget Sound off the coast of Seattle, I chose to have a natural birth at home. We were living in a small berry-picker’s cottage, which had housed migrant workers harvesting currants on the island. Our heat and cooking came from a small woodstove.

When the day came, I went into labor in the morning, and right away it was intense. By evening, I had been in hard labor for eight hours when the doctor arrived from Seattle. My labor wasn’t progressing, and he thought the baby’s head was in the wrong position. Suddenly I thought: I have to get this baby out! It’s up to me; no one else can do this. What do I need to do?

I tuned in to my body, got off the bed onto the floor on my hands and knees, and told the doctor to leave me. I began weaving and shaking back and forth, up and down. My husband tried to approach to tell me to be calm and breathe quietly, but I told everyone to get out of the way. I wasn’t nice or calm; I was fierce and clear. I was like a primal animal: sweating, shaking, and moaning, swaying back and forth wildly.

The labor began to move forward. I got wilder as I entered transition, my body shaking while still on all fours. And before long, I held my newborn daughter in my arms. Had I done what I was told, I would not have turned her position; it was all the wild movement on all fours that helped to shift her. Had I not taken it on, becoming fierce and clear and guiding myself from within, I might have had to be airlifted to a hospital in Seattle for a cesarean section.

Fierce compassion is not limited to women; in fact, the Dalai Lama is a good example of it.

I was once at a lunch with the Dalai Lama and five other Western Buddhist teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California. We were sitting in a charming room with white carpets and many windows. The food was a delightful, fragrant, vegetarian Indian meal. There were lovely flower arrangements on the table and gentle, graceful students serving the meal. We were discussing sexual misconduct among Western Buddhist teachers. A woman Buddhist from California brought up someone who was using his students for his own sexual needs.

One woman said, “We are working with him with compassion, trying to get him to understand his motives for exploiting female students and to help him change his actions.”

The Dalai Lama slammed his fist on the table, saying loudly, “Compassion is fine, but it has to stop! And those doing it should be exposed!”

All the serving plates on the table jumped, the water glasses tipped precariously, and I almost choked on the bite of saffron rice in my mouth. Suddenly I saw him as a fierce manifestation of compassion and realized that this clarity did not mean that the Dalai Lama had moved away from compassion. Rather, he was bringing compassion and manifesting it as decisive fierceness. His magnetism was glowing like a fire. I will always remember that day, because it was such a good teaching on compassion and precision. Compassion is not a wishy-washy “anything goes” approach. Compassion can say a fierce no!  Compassion is not being stupid and indulging someone and what they want. The renowned teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called that “idiot compassion,” like giving a drug addict drugs.

The way I am using the word fierce is in the sense of how a mother animal defends her young—a laser beam of fierceness, of pure energy that when harnessed and directed is powerful and unstoppable. It is fierceness without hatred or aggression. Sometimes a wrathful manifestation is more effective than a peaceful approach. It is by understanding the dakini’s fierceness as a productive and creative source of raw energy that we see the dakinis in action—wielding the power to subdue, protect, and transform.

We must find the sources to access this fierce dakini power and bring it to bear on what matters to us in our lives, be it emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Meeting our strong feminine energy, we will develop as women. The powerful, fierce feminine is very much a part of the psyche, but it is repressed; and when it is not acknowledged because it is threatening, it can become subversive and vengeful. But when it is acknowledged and honored, it’s an incredible source of power.

Until recently, being a feminist carried something of a stigma. I encountered this myself and was criticized by my Buddhist teacher for being “too feminist,” when actually I was only trying to bring balance to Buddhism and talk about the empowered feminine, sexual abuse, and patriarchal aspects of Buddhism. Later he changed his view and was very supportive, but it was a challenging time then, when feminist was a dirty word. Some women have been quick to distance themselves from that title, afraid of being labeled “an angry feminist” and being unattractive to men. But if you ask those same women who say they are not feminists if they believe in equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom, and protection from male violence? Most will say, “Yes, of course.” So actually they are feminists but afraid of being seen as anti-male.

Now this is changing. Feminism is coming back as a label to be proud of, for both men and women. Both Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau call themselves feminists. Trudeau said he was “proud” to stand as an advocate for “He for She,” a UN movement of men standing up for women. Feminism’s comeback is especially true as the movement is becoming more inclusive and intersectional, taking into account the unique experiences of women of color, transgender women, and low-income women.

Remember the “such a nasty woman” insult Donald Trump used to denigrate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential elections? It didn’t work. Women took it and turned it into a slogan of empowerment: Never underestimate the power of a nasty woman. We transformed this intended offense into something women wanted to own. We stopped asking for permission to be forceful, outspoken, and decisive. We chose to band together within our power, standing up to obnoxious patriarchy.

Trump’s insult became a movement. Never underestimate the power of a nasty woman went viral; women tapped the fierce part of themselves and bonded in the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration. Women together with many supportive people of other gender identifications marched to protect women’s rights, human rights, and the rights of the earth. They had a sense of humor, wearing pink knitted hats with cat ears and carrying signs with the slogan Pussy Power. The marchers were nonviolent and joyful, but not to be deterred; never before had there been such a huge global protest.

Worldwide participation in the Women’s March of 2017 has been estimated at five million. At least 673 marches were reported across the globe, on all seven continents. In Washington, DC, the protests were the largest demonstrations since the anti–Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and 1970s. It was the busiest day on record in the city’s Metro. There were no arrests; all remained peaceful and nonaggressive, with the marchers carrying an array of provocative placards reading Nasty Women Rule, Save the Planet, If You Take Away My Birth Control I’ll Just Make More Feminists, Fight Back, Bitches Get Stuff Done, Misogyny Kills, We Are the Grnddaughters of the Witches You Didn’t Burn. A 90-year-old woman held a sign saying Ninety, Nasty, and Not Giving Up.

Men of a variety of races and cultural backgrounds who walked in solidarity with women during the march held signs saying I Also Feel Strongly about This, Men of Quality Do Not Fear Equality, Real Men Are Feminists, This Feminist Has Balls, Teach Boys They Are Not Entitled to Women’s Bodies, Real Men Get Consent.

A middle-aged man carried a little boy, the two of them holding signs that read I Am Committed to Raising My Son to Resist Misogyny and Embrace Feminism. A young, grinning couple, both wearing pink “Pussy Power” hats, held a sign together that said Patriarchy Is for Dicks.

There was tremendous energy and cohesion expressed in the Women’s March, but afterward I noticed that the energy seemed to dissipate somewhat, although the conversation is still very much alive. I have also talked to some women who were feeling discouraged, unsure, and frustrated. Perhaps we don’t know what next steps could be effective? What I saw was a need for an inner resource of empowerment and inspiration with which to build from the momentum the march generated.

We need to have a method to build on that energy, an inner practice to sustain and take it beyond protest and into full embodiment. We need to tap into the potent, untamed, yet wise energy of the dakinis. We can do this by journeying through the Vajra Dakini Meditation  as well as other dakini meditations, taking that sacred feminine—which has been relegated to the unconscious, to the negative, to the “shadow,” the “hag,” the “witch,” the “bitch,” and, yes, the “nasty woman”—and bringing her energy forward and applying her positive potential in our lives.

♦

From Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Empowered Feminine by Lama Tsultrim Allione. Copyright © 2018 by Joan E. Allione. Reprinted by permission of Enliven Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Vajra Dakini Meditation for Transforming Anger into Wisdom

After Tamara, a 33-year-old software engineer, was sexually harassed by her boss, she decided to quit her job. For fear of retaliation, she didn’t report him to HR. But when the dam broke in late 2017 with the #MeToo movement and scores of women came forward with stories like hers, Tamara finally was able to feel the anger that had been stewing inside her for so long. Her anger was justified, but it was also challenging because it was so intense and came with a lot of fear. She asked me for help, and I recommended she practice transforming anger into wisdom through the Vajra Dakini meditation. She agreed to try it.

Related: “Mind the Gap“

Tamara was not alone in feeling the force of repressed anger surfacing these days. Anger can be a powerful and necessary force for change. But to use it skillfully, we need methods to transform it. This requires us to be centered and to create the change within ourselves that will lead to wise action in the world.

The word for “dakini” in Tibetan is khandro, literally “she who moves through space.” The most important manifestation of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhism, a dakini can appear as a human being or as a deity. She is depicted as fierce, surrounded by flames, naked, dancing, and wearing bone ornaments. The dakinis are interesting in the current environment as we see the upsurge of women’s anger and resistance, because although the powerful fierce feminine is very much a part of the psyche, it has been repressed and forbidden. The dakini energy allows us to take that anger and transform it into wisdom and fierce compassion. The Vajra Dakini is one of five dakinis that correspond to the five buddha families: vajra (indestructible), buddha (spacious), ratna (enriching), padma (magnetizing), and karma (accomplishing). Each family represents the transformation of a negative emotion into a corresponding type of wisdom energy.

The five buddha families exist within a mandala, a circular template of the awakened mind with four quadrants and a center. The vajra family is located in the eastern quadrant of the mandala. This family’s color is the blue of the autumn sky, and its element is water. Its symbol is the vajra, a handheld scepter with a spherical hub in the center and five prongs emerging from either end from the hub, symbolizing indestructible skillful means and the union of the five male and the five female buddhas. Each family has an obstructing emotion or afflicted pattern. An afflicted pattern is a strategy our ego-clinging develops to try and affirm itself and its safety. These include emotional patterns like anger, grasping, pride, and jealousy. The afflicted pattern of the vajra family is anger, which manifests as sharpness, austerity, coldness, and fear. The wisdom of the vajra family is mirror-like wisdom. The mirror is an important metaphor in Tibetan Buddhist teachings: it is a symbol of the nature of mind. A mirror reflects everything, yet it is not altered by what it reflects and does not judge those reflections. If the mind is like a mirror, it is not conditioned by what appears in front of it. When you are in the mirror-like wisdom of the vajra family, there is clarity without the cold heartlessness of anger; there is clarity with compassion. The state of mirror-like wisdom is, in fact, the very same energy that manifests as anger, but with the struggle of ego-clinging removed. When the struggle is released, the wisdom of the pure vajra energy is right there where it has always been, unencumbered by the struggle of the ego to maintain its ground. In this way it is like gold, which is almost unrecognizable in its raw state, but emerges pure when purified of the dross. 

VAJRA DAKINI MEDITATION

In order to transform anger into mirror-like wisdom, you can practice a meditation in which you embody the Vajra Dakini. Although she is female, all genders may do the dakini practice. Please note, however, that this meditation serves as an introduction to the dakinis and the mandala from the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana tradition; it is not a substitute for traditional transmission through empowerment (wang), reading transmission (lung), and explanation (tri) from an authorized teacher.

• Begin by sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed or sit on a chair. Cultivate the intention to do this practice for the benefit of all beings.

• Begin by thinking of a time when you were angry or irritated. Take a moment to recall the details of that event and perhaps the feelings of fear and humiliation that often lurk beneath anger.

• Now notice where you feel the anger in your body.

• Then sound the seed syllable of the Vajra Dakini, which is HA, slowly so that it reverberates in your body—as though you are directing the sound inside your body instead of projecting it out. Visualize this sound emanating from your heart chakra in the center of your chest. Accompanying the sound, blue light is radiating out from your heart and penetrating into the sensation of anger in your body.

• Repeat the HA three times in a low voice, letting the sound flow out for the entire length of a full exhalation. Your body becomes the body of the dancing blue Vajra Dakini, emanating mirror-like wisdom.

• Notice the moment of transformation, when the sensation of anger dissolves into the blue light and you become the Vajra Dakini, who is pure blue luminosity.

• In your raised right hand, you hold the crescent-shaped hooked knife (trigug), which represents cutting through subject/object fixation.

• In your left hand, you hold a skull cup (kapala) at your heart, a symbol of impermanence, a cauldron of transformation. Your right leg is raised and your left leg extended in the dancing posture.

• You are holding the khatvanga staff in the crook of your left elbow. This staff symbolizes the “hidden consort.” It is the dakini’s inner masculine, and at the top of the staff is a vajra symbolizing the phallus. The staff is an interesting metaphor, because it can serve multiple purposes: as a tent pole, a protective spear, or a walking stick. With it, she has the power to stand alone; she has internalized the masculine.

• Take a moment to feel the support of your khatvanga staff, your inner masculine, and the feeling of holding the hooked knife and the skull cup.

• Feel the mirror-like wisdom—clarity without struggle—emanating out of you so intensely that it creates blazing wisdom flames around your body.

• When you have a felt sense of embodying the Vajra Dakini, imagine your normal self appearing in front of you, caught in anger.

• Observe your normal self from the Vajra Dakini’s point of view.

• Then, as the Vajra Dakini, imagine yourself turning away; when you turn back, you are holding a gift for your ordinary self.

• As the Vajra Dakini, offer this gift to your ordinary self, explaining the meaning of the gift and why you are giving it.

• Then your ordinary self asks the Vajra Dakini for an essence phrase that will help her work with anger, such as “move, play, and know you can create change through clarity.”

• As the Vajra Dakini, you respond, offering an essence phrase—just a few words—a reminder of how to transform anger to mirror-like wisdom.

• Now sound the syllable HA again with a long exhalation, and your luminous blue body dissolves from the top and bottom into your heart, until only the sound and a blue sphere of light remains. Eventually, that too dissolves.

• Rest in the open awareness that appears after the dissolution.

• Enjoy the clarity until discursive thoughts begin to arise again. Then mentally dedicate the merit—the accumulation of positive energy that has accrued from the meditation—imagining that it spreads out from you to benefit all beings.

• Take a moment to jot down the gift and its meaning, as well as the essence phrase.

You can do this anger practice in an abbreviated form“on the run”—for example, when you are at a meeting and someone triggers your anger or when you get an irritating email. Simply close your eyes, feel the anger, and then sound the seed syllable HA, imagining that blue light is spreading through your body and mirror-like wisdom is arising. If you are in a place where you can’t sound the seed syllable out loud, imagine the sound and light spreading through your body.

The post Nasty Woman Meditation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s inevitable that issues of the day will find their way through Tricycle’s Buddhist filter, and the #MeToo movement is no exception. Like the countless marchers in Washington, DC and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Lama Tsultrim Allione cautions us to “never underestimate the power of a nasty woman.” Arguing that “feminine models of strength have been lost,” Lama Tsultrim draws on Tibetan teachings, and more specifically on dakini practice, to tap into the divine feminine as a path to a wisdom beyond gender (see “Nasty Woman Meditation”). And in “Mind the Gap,” longtime contributor Noelle Oxenhandler reflects on sexual aggression she encountered as a young woman in the light of today’s #MeToo movement and her decades-long Zen practice.

As we prepare for press, I find myself thinking about the work of a former Tricycle contributor who did so much to expose Buddhism’s historical bias against women. Discerning, determined, and unafraid, scholar Rita M. Gross (1943–2015) changed the Buddhist conversation, forcing us to come to terms with the tradition’s male-dominated past and present. Her groundbreaking Buddhism After Patriarchy is still foundational in bringing together feminist and Buddhist thought. Rita did not, however, limit herself to issues of gender equality; rather, she used them to broaden our awareness of inequality and privilege more generally. In 2014, she wrote in these pages:

It is well known that, out of self-defense, those on the underside of worldly power and privilege often are double-sighted. We can see things from the dominant perspective, the one that is publicly taught and promulgated, but we can also see things that those who participate only in the privileged perspective cannot see. This tells us that, on any topic in which we mainly operate out of privilege, we should be humble. That is why white people are so often so blind to racism or straight people blind to homophobia. That is also why Buddhists should be much more careful about dismissing issues of social justice as irrelevant to dharma.

A nuanced thinker never content to leave things so cut and dried, Rita added one more sentence:

But the knowledge gained from the double-sightedness possessed by those of us on the underside of privilege is so painful and infuriating that freeing its insight is difficult and often lost in self-defeating aggression.

Like Rita, Lama Tsultrim is well aware of the “self-defeating aggression” injustice can engender. And she shows us the beauty to be found when spiritual practice uses even the most destructive emotions to fuel clarity and realization (see “Transforming Anger into Wisdom”).

I wonder how Rita would have understood and interpreted #MeToo, but I have a feeling that somewhere she is smiling. I’m sure she’d have taken to the fire of the movement. More than once she threw a little justifiable nasty our way—and it worked. In the end, we’re much the richer for it.

—James Shaheen, Editor and Publisher

The post Nasty Women Rising appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Long ago, when I was traveling alone in France in my twenties, I was taking a morning walk along the beach in the small fishing town of St.-Jean-de-Luz. At one point, up ahead, I could see a row of elderly men, in black berets, sitting on a low stone wall. As I passed by, they each put out a hand in turn and gave a little thwack to my rump, in a wordless and perfectly coordinated movement. (I’m using the word “rump” quite deliberately here, as the men seemed to thwack me in the very same way that I’ve sometimes felt irresistibly drawn to thwack the rump of a large friendly dog or a pony.) It was clear that, for them, the moment was delightfully amusing.

And for me? It was a very mild experience; it only lasted for seconds, and I didn’t feel the least bit endangered. In fact, I also found the experience amusing—but not, I suspect, in the same way they did. With their stooped shoulders and potbellies, they had looked to me like a row of slightly catatonic puffins who suddenly sprang to life as I walked by, seeming to startle themselves as much as they startled me. But I was aware, even in the immediate aftermath, that the experience was more complex for me than it probably was for them. Because what I actually felt was that I had assented, for one brief moment, to play the role they had assigned to me: that of a young woman, without a care in her head, walking along the beach with a rump just asking to be thwacked. 

Lately, in the light of #MeToo, I’ve been revisiting this experience and asking myself: If I were a young woman walking along that seawall now, how would I react? Would I feel compelled to express my indignation and march briskly away? And if so, would that be an unmitigated good thing, a sign of progress toward the ultimate and unassailable goal of complete equality and mutual respect between men and women? Given how minor the incident was, these might seem like very trivial questions. But I do believe that they have deeper implications.

Much to my own surprise, it was the memory of these old men in their black berets that came to me when someone asked recently, “What light do you think Buddhism might bring to #MeToo?” At first I couldn’t understand why it was this memory that came bubbling up to the surface—it seemed so inconsequential when compared with the intensely disturbing and degrading incidents that so many women have been bravely speaking up about of late. But after giving it some thought I realized: it’s the gap. As I walked along the seawall, I had experienced a gap between how I was being perceived, how I was being treated, and how I actually perceived myself from the inside out. This kind of gap, between what we are experiencing and our awareness of ourselves as witnesses of our experience is something that tends to arise naturally out of meditation, and that is greatly encouraged in Buddhism. And now, looking back along a spectrum of encounters that I had as a young woman, I’ve come to the conclusion that what made some of them feel more violating than others had precisely to do with how freely, with what degree of ease and sense of choice, I could move around in the gap.

Because it was such a mild and fleeting moment, it didn’t take any particular effort for me to achieve a distance between my own witnessing consciousness and the erotic projections of a row of elderly men. Later on that same trip to France, however, I had a different kind of experience. I was on a train, and because I was a young woman in the heat of summer in an era when short skirts were in style, I was wearing a short skirt. A man sat down in the seat next to me. He was a stocky man, thirtyish, with a craggy face and a big head of blondish-brown hair, and not long after I nodded “Bonjour” and opened the book I was reading, he stretched out his hand and—gazing intently at me with a strange smile—began to stroke my thigh. I felt so startled that I didn’t respond. I’d like to think that if I’d been back in the United States on familiar ground—and thus not further confused and distracted by thinking that possibly such behavior was OK in France—I would have quickly come to my senses, briskly removed his hand, and told the conductor that I needed to change my seat. But instead I just sat there, for the duration of a trip that lasted several hours, feeling extremely uncomfortable but so stupefied and disoriented by his strange smile and transgressive behavior that I let him continue. Looking back at it now, I think that I went into a kind of dissociative state, as if repeating to myself, “This isn’t really happening, and if I pretend it isn’t happening then it will stop happening because it’s just too weird to be real.”

Compared with the experiences of so many women, this too was a relatively harmless encounter. No doubt aware that there were many other passengers in the train within earshot, the man never escalated his behavior, and I never felt physically endangered by him. Still, it was much harder for me to maintain the gap that I’d experienced in the fleeting moment of being thwacked by the old men. Whereas in that moment I felt as though I’d consented to fulfill a momentary role for them, this time I felt as though I’d been complicit in a stranger’s use of me for his own erotic needs. I felt ashamed and somehow sullied because through my passivity I had been complicit in his transgression; I had engaged in my own objectification. Now, looking back, I actually feel somewhat grateful to have had this experience, because it’s helped me refrain from asking, or even thinking of asking, the question “Why didn’t you do something? Why did you just submit to the behavior?” I understand, with my whole body and mind, how easy it is—if you haven’t had some sort of prior effective preparation and training—to freeze in such a situation. It’s as though you come under a spell, as though you’re the target of one of those animals that first stun their prey through a fixed, magnetizing gaze or a quick flick of a venomous tongue. And when I imagine what it would it be like to have such an experience at the hands of someone who also had significant power over me in my professional life, I shudder.

It’s as though you come under a spell, as though you’re the target of one of those animals that first stun their prey through a fixed, magnetizing gaze or a quick flick of a venomous tongue.

Years ago, when I was 14 and living for a year in France with my family, I had yet another kind of experience. It was in a park just at the edge of Paris where I had come with a classmate of mine, Ingrid, who was the only other American student at our French lycée. She and I were both California girls, used to being outdoors in wild, natural places. We’d been feeling constrained by the press of city life and the rigid discipline of our French school, and so we were delighted to find that, once beyond the park’s elaborate stone fountain, steps, and statuary, it led upward into densely wooded hills. Relieved to find ourselves released from noisy traffic and crowded streets, we kept climbing farther and farther through the trees. At last we came out into a wide grassy clearing, and—just as we were about to bound forward like two happy deer—we saw two men, dressed in their one-piece blue work uniforms, sitting on the ground beneath a tree and staring at us intently. In the moment we met their eyes, they exchanged some words we couldn’t hear, then leaped to their feet and came toward us. One of them grabbed Ingrid forcefully by the wrist and yanked her toward him, and the other was coming for me. I wanted to open my mouth and release a forceful blast of sound, but I was frozen in terror. I knew no words would come out: not in English, and certainly not in French. It was Ingrid who opened her mouth and shouted, in perfect French: Laissez-moi! Vous savez, je peux crier bien fort!  (“Let me go! You know, I can shout really loud!”) Startled, the man let go of her wrist. “Run!” she told me, and the two of us ran back through the dark woods, leaping over rocks and through brambles, panting so hard it seemed our lungs would burst, on legs that felt like jelly.

I’ve never for a moment doubted that it was my friend’s brave presence of mind that saved us from a truly traumatic and possibly even life-threatening encounter. As we know from the firsthand accounts of people—of any gender— who’ve survived serious physical assault, life is never the same afterward. The experience of feeling helpless, overpowered, at the hands of an aggressive other is shattering to any previous trust one might have had in oneself as a relatively autonomous agent living in a relatively safe world.

Many people have reported that in the midst of such a shattering experience, it was as though their mind flew out of the body and was looking down on the scene, as if from a distance. This reaction is generally understood as a defense mechanism, akin to the physiological state of shock, that helps the conscious mind from being engulfed by horror. And it really is quite remarkable: at the very moment when one feels most objectified by another person, least seen as a subject in one’s own right, the mind experiences the most extreme gap between who I am, as a conscious witnessing self, and what is happening to me. Certainly it’s possible to see a kind of deep, instinctual wisdom at work here. Yet in this context the gap is anything but freely chosen—and the sad truth is that in the aftermath of such trauma, the gap can become pathological. It’s not uncommon for some degree of disassociation or disembodiment to persist: people describe going through the motions of their lives but in a numbed, detached, zombie-like way. At least in part, to recover from trauma is to close this gap, to more fully reinhabit one’s body, one’s life, and to retrieve a degree of continuity between one’s present and one’s past. It is much harder to do this if, for whatever reasons, one has felt the need to keep the shattering experience to oneself.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many women are discovering and celebrating the power of #MeToo? Perhaps for years—whether out of intense shame or fear of reprisal—one has tried to keep an excruciating and degrading experience buried inside, but now there are others who understand firsthand the impact of such experiences and who are willing to share the burden. This is what is so brilliant about the hashtag #MeToo. In the fewest words possible, it conveys magnitude: the magnitude of past grievances that are being wrenched from the shadows and brought to light by an ever-multiplying crowd of voices, uniting in solidarity. And at last, given the sheer number of women coming forward, given the ever more intense reverberation of their collective suffering, powerful people and powerful institutions are beginning to acknowledge the seriousness of the grievances and to make changes, real changes: firing people, forcing them to resign, demanding public apology, changing policies, pursuing justice in courts of law. Clearly there is great strength and healing in people coming together and supporting one another. And often this support does include an explicit recognition: “Though this bad thing happened to us, it does not define us. Despite what others did to us, we are determined to make full and fruitful lives for ourselves.” Still, it seems likely that as a movement gains in numbers and power, the pull to identify with the experience that qualifies one as a member of the movement will also grow ever stronger.

And here it seems important to acknowledge that there can be certain dangers in solidarity: the first of which is that, indeed, we may further solidify a traumatic experience. One of the ways that people recover from trauma is to get out from under the crushing weight of the experience, to retrieve a more fluid sense of self, a self that can’t be fixed to any particular time or place, that can’t be nailed to any particular set of circumstances. At the deepest level, the level beyond any personal lifestory, this fluidity is related to the ancient Sanskrit formula neti, neti. As mystics through the ages have told us, those who seek to find the ultimate ground of their own being must proceed by negation: not this, not this. It’s via this path that generations of Zen students have worked with the koan “Mu” or with the inquiry “Who am I?” And if there were a hashtag for this mode of seeking it would be #NotMe!

If we are looking for the light that Buddhism brings to this context, it is here: in the great mystery of form and emptiness, in the reminder that what is deepest and most real about each of us cannot be limited by any transitory state, shape, or event. And though there is always the danger that we can try to hide out in emptiness in order to avoid facing the intensity of suffering—whether others’ or our own—we can never know true freedom if we adhere too tenaciously to any particular form.

But #MeToo and #NotMe! need not be mutually exclusive. Buddhism is the Middle Way, and the wise response is usually in the direction of both/and rather than either/or. It’s never easy to walk the path of continuous reconciliation of apparent opposites, but that, I believe is what we’re being asked to do here: to add our voices in support of #MeToo while simultaneously remembering that the ultimate release from suffering lies in the direction of #NotMe! Here, we encounter the true meaning of sangha, or community, which offers a very rare and precious form of solidarity: one that takes the paradoxical form of supporting us in the quest to discover our own essential fluidity!

And this brings me back to the old men by the sea. For me that was a moment of freely inhabiting the gap: I didn’t mind giving a bit of pleasure to a group of elderly men by stepping, for a few seconds, into the role they assigned me. Another woman, with a different life history, might feel compelled to protest their behavior, and I would fully support her in doing so. But I don’t want to go back and reframe my own experience as something more noxious than what I experienced at the time. I think this is what some of the French women were trying to tell us in their recent letter, protesting our “puritanical” American tendencies to see what is actually a very wide range of possible interactions between men and women through a single, punishing gaze. I understand why many women found the letter so objectionable, but I do resonate with the reminder that sometimes we can afford to be playful, moving in and out of various roles as if trying on costumes, taking our place in the fleeting parade of forms. In my own life, I’ve been a daughter and a mother, and now I’m a grandmother. I’ve had moments when I’ve looked in a Zen master’s eyes and we’ve both felt the absurdity of who is who: the one seated on the brocade cushion or the one in front bowing. I’ve been the young woman getting thwacked by a row of old men who looked like drowsy puffins in the sun. And now? If I could go back and startle them awake again for their moment of mirth, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I can’t. Because now I’m as old as they were then, and I’m quite sure they are dead.

The post Mind the Gap appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There’s a joke I love that makes the men around me uncomfortable. It goes, “A feminist man walked into a bar; it was so low.” We often heap praise on men for showing women basic forms of respect because we set our expectations so low.

Last month, an article on Trike Daily asked what Dogen Zenji would say about #MeToo. It pointed to Dogen’s criticism of his misogynistic contemporaries as evidence that the Zen master was a feminist.

To his credit, Dogen had several female disciples and wrote favorably about them. In particular, he praises the nun Ryonen in the Eihei Koroku (Extended Record). He also argued that women have equal capacity for spiritual development and awakening in the Raihaitokuzui (Bowing at the Attainment of the Marrow) chapter in the Shobogenzo, as well as in Bendowa (Points to Watch on Practicing the Way).

But was Dogen really a pioneer of his time, a proto-feminist, or is this just idealistic projection on our part? Many (male) historians have argued that Dogen’s rhetoric was “merely theoretical equality.” (See William Bodiford, Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. Steven Heine also argues something similar.) In other words, they point out that while he paid lip service to the idea of equality, he may not have taken steps to actualize this equality.

Compared with later disciples, mainly Kangan Giin (1217–1300) and Keizan Zenji (1263–1325), Dogen did not take major steps toward institutionalizing women’s authority or creating resources to help women practice, such as establishing convents or placing women in positions of authority. He undoubtedly “respected” women, yet he did not establish a practice space for them.

Unfortunately, there is no historical record indicating whether or not women were allowed to practice at Dogen’s temple, Eiheiji. Dogen had personal connections with several nuns, including one who took care of him when he was dying, but it is not clear if any of them resided at Eiheiji.

But even if women were allowed to practice at Eiheiji, that wouldn’t necessarily be ideal. Mixed-gender practice spaces were not always preferable to convents. For the majority of Buddhist history, women have practiced in all-women spaces (or at home) for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to freedom from sexual harassment and abuse.

What we do know conclusively is that Dogen did not establish any convents. Instead, Kangan Giin was most likely the founder of the first Soto Zen convent, Ho’onji, which was established on the Japanese island of Kyushu around the year 1260. (A 1990 archeological study found that Ho’onji was probably co-founded by a nun named Hoe, who went by the pseudonym “Jodo Daishi.”)

And Keizan Zenji was the first in Dogen’s lineage to transmit the dharma to a woman, the nun Ekyu. Keizan also established the Entsu-in practice space for women at Yokoji temple in Ishikawa prefecture. Keizan installed the nun Sonin, a major donor of Yokoji, as the first abbess of Entsu-in.

Feminism means more than just saying you believe in equality of the sexes; it means taking actual steps toward restructuring institutional power imbalances. So while I still think Raihaitokuzui is a masterful and elegant treatise on nonduality and gender, it is perplexing to me that Dogen did not establish practice spaces for women, or have any direct female dharma heirs.

Additionally, we need to be careful about using the category of “women” as a monolith. Wealthy women played a substantial role in Keizan’s community, but poorer women would not have had the same prestige. In fact, it is quite likely that an upper-class woman during the Kamakura period would have had more in common with an upper-class man than a female servant. In the Ritsu school’s convent Hokkeji, for example, women were placed in tracts that were segregated by class. Upper-class women had more opportunity for upward mobility toward full bhikkhuni status.

Where does all of this history leave us? It underscores two things for me. The first is the need for institutional support and structuring, rather than words, to be the measure of egalitarianism in Buddhist communities. Dogen was not alone in believing women had equal potential for awakening; many prominent leaders of the time were also rethinking the traditional views that women could not obtain enlightenment. The second is that it is crucial for us to have an intersectional analysis of women’s history. It is easy to say that “Dogen respected women” and that there have been many prominent women teachers in Buddhism. But which women? Did poor women have the same access as wealthy donors? Similarly, in reacting to something like the #MeToo movement, is the accountability about sexual abuse being extended to the most vulnerable women, who are poor, trans, of color, and so on? Are we restructuring institutions in such a way that the most vulnerable are not going to be subject to abuse again?

It is understandable that we want the founder of our religious tradition to be a supporter of women. I get it. And I think he was, in his own way. I’m reminded of my teacher, who loved to quote Raihaitokuzui and claimed to respect women. But, coincidentally enough, it was always women who were serving tea or acting as personal assistants to provide him emotional support.

Dogen was in many ways a genius. But it should be obvious that a 13th-century celibate monk is not the best person to look for advice about #MeToo.

If you are tempted to ask yourself, “What would Dogen have said about #MeToo,” I would politely suggest you ask yourself instead, “What have women been saying about sexual assault, now and since the beginning of time?” History helps us contextualize Dogen’s views on women, and reminds us that the bar for feminist allyship should not be lowered just because we crave belonging and identification with our spiritual tradition.  

This article originally appeared on Gesshin Greenwood’s blog thatssozen.blogspot.com

The post Why “What Would Dogen Zenji Say About #MeToo?” Is the Wrong Question appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.