RaKw: Yes. So intense emotions are bound to come up and so what we’re doing is actually being embodied. And so we’re coming, actually, back to the sensation that surrounds the emotion. Emotion arises as a reaction to the sensation. So what we’re doing is we’re coming back to the sensation, not to have a dialogue or discussion about it or how do I feel about it, but rather the sensation itself.
If it feels too intense, just back off a little bit, right? Just have a little bit of space around it, where it’s like, OK, I can kind of get next to it, I can sit right down next to that sensation. But I always say to people, “If your path to liberation is creating contraction,” and I think contraction and suffering are synonymous, “then you’re not generating liberation, right?” And so back off and allow yourself the space to say like, “This is as close as I can get right now,” and that’s what we’re returning to.
We’re not trying to overcome. Maybe therapy is for that, maybe there are other practices, in this point practice, all we’re doing is presencing ourselves with what is, coming back to point. And anything else that is not presencing ourselves with what is, we’re simply letting that be. If we are finding that we are creating contraction in returning, then just ease off, right? Move a little bit further away from what that point of intense emotion feels like, just set a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right.
And that’s why I call it attention awareness, which is awareness has spaciousness and allows us to move. Attention is precise, but awareness has some spaciousness and it’s like, “Oh yes, I can get kind of close to it and I can look at it from here and feel comfortable and at ease here.” That doesn’t mean that we’re not able to sit with discomfort. We can sit with discomfort, but if the discomfort is creating new suffering, then that’s not a path to deliberation.
TS: Now this is a very powerful statement that for you suffering and contraction are synonymous, how did you come to that and what do you mean by that?
RaKw: About a year, two years ago… Time is all funny now. About two years ago, I was at Upaya Zen Center and they gave me the opportunity to do some classic Buddhist teaching. And so in the Buddhist teaching, there’s this fundamental idea that life is characterized by what is called a dukkha. And dukkha is often translated as suffering. A lot of people are like, “Wow, these Buddhists are weird. They’re always talking about life as suffering.”
And so it’s really characterized, right? Life is characterized by suffering, but I realized people get confused by that idea. And so it sounds like a bummer. And so in order to bring it to an embodied understanding, I was like, “Well, what is that? How do we know suffering? How do we know big suffering, little suffering, in-between suffering?” And I realized in an embodied way, the way we can recognize it empirically in our body is contraction. That when we contract, when we move away from life, when our body is pulling in away from life, that that is suffering, that that’s suffering. So that contraction is suffering.
When we are thriving, we move towards life. We allow ourselves or we are present in it. And our bodies, our nervous system can be relaxed and at ease. Once our nervous system begins to contract, we can describe that as suffering. And so it is my embodied way of speaking about what can begin to become a theoretical space of suffering.
TS: It also seems like there are some really good moment to moment practice instructions or life instructions in what you’re describing.
RaKw: Yes, definitely. So even in a moment, if I notice that the top of my belly slightly to the left gets that little feeling of pulling in, it’s like, “Oh yes, there’s some contraction there.” And if I check in with that feeling, it’s a sensation of contraction. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t like the way that person said this thing to me.” And every emotion that we have is traceable to a sensation in our bodies, by the way, in case that’s not apparent.
So every emotion we have, actually, it is an emanation of a sensation. And so everything that shows up for us, if we can trace the sensation in our body, then we can find some relationship with it. The other way I think of suffering is to be out of relationship, right? When we’re out of relationship with ourselves then suffering arises, contraction arises and we use a phrase, “I found myself.”
Well, when we find ourselves, it means we’re away from ourselves and so this idea of coming back to ourselves so that we… Not that we don’t leave ourselves, but when we do leave, as soon as we recognize it, we come back. So that’s an embodied way. And as you described in our pointing to, it’s a way that we can have a moment-to-moment practice of being aware of our experience, of suffering not as this big thought space, but rather here it is right here in our body. I’m contracting, I feel my buttocks tightening. I feel my legs tighten. I feel my toes curling up, right? I feel my shoulders drawing up. I feel the back of my head getting tight. I feel this in my body. We’re embodied beings. And so our suffering happens in the body and our liberation happens in the body.
TS: Now, one of the things, Rev. angel, I wanted to understand more has to do with the subtitle of the series, From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community. And it’s this notion of what is true community that I’d like to understand. I hear from so many people, “I’m looking for community, I don’t have community. There’s an epidemic of loneliness. There’s no such thing as community. It’s a myth. Online community, come on, that’s not community.” What do you mean by true community?
RaKw: For me, true community is you have a feeling in the presence of others which begins with yourself and it has to begin with yourself in order for you to know what is true for you, right? So you have to know what it is in yourself to feel at ease in your body and to not feel as if you have to cut a part of yourself off or leave a part of yourself behind in order to feel that sense of belonging. So true community is when you can be present with others and you do not have the sense of having had to check part of yourself at the door in order to gain access to membership to that community. I would say that that is a club, it’s not community.
And we all know some ways in which we just take it as a given that if I want to be a part of this group, community, family, I have to leave this part of myself, I have to leave the queer part of myself behind. I have to leave the racialized part of myself behind, the part of myself that speaks colloquially in this way, the way that I speak with other black folks. I can’t say folks, I have to say people, right? Like my voice has to get a little bit tighter. I have to hold myself in a certain way.
And so that leaving part of ourselves behind– before we know it, we don’t know who we are anymore. And so true community are spaces in which we feel that we are accepted in the wholeness of who we are. And that doesn’t mean that every part of who we are is expressed in every given moment, that’s not possible. But that the body, the collective of people that we are in relationship with, there is no request to leave a part of ourselves behind in order to be accepted in this group of people.
TS: And this is a difficult question to ask, but I’m going to ask it on behalf of someone who might be having this experience. What if someone says, “I don’t have true community anywhere in my life. I don’t have it with my family. I can’t bring my full self there. I don’t have it at work and I don’t have a kind of intimate partner that I feel I can bring all of me to. I don’t have a true community, Rev. angel.”
RaKw: Yes. And that’s why you have to begin with developing that sense of your own belonging because when you are… The closer you are– and it’s ongoing–the closer you are in relationship to yourself, the more that you will generate connection with people that allow for you to be who you are. We get into dynamic with your family and there is underlying agreement, a tacit agreement that this is how we be together. And you leave that part and as long as you leave that part and leave that part behind, then we can get along here. As you become more aligned with yourself, it no longer becomes tolerable for you to leave parts of yourself behind. And as a result of that, you will generate relationships and you’ll seek out and you will find relationships with people that will be comfortable with allowing you to be who you are.
That is tolerable for you is the first thing that needs to shift. And it will shift as you become more comfortable within your own being. And there are plenty of people that are out there. We all find our ways to those kinds of communities, but first we have to have the commitment and impulse to go and search for it and that commitment comes because we’re committed to ourselves. We’re committed to becoming whole, we’re committed to the healing of those parts of us that have been left behind.
TS: Well, one of the things you teach on, you brought up this phrase in the series that we can come upon these crossroads of belonging in our life and that these are these crossroads where we have to make some tough decisions, as you’re describing here, telling ourselves the truth. And I thought, for myself, the biggest crossroads I ever came upon had to do with academia. That I had to admit I don’t fit in the academic world. I think differently. I feel differently. I write differently.
I’m not an academic, but at 20, that was a big, terrible crossroads for me because everything in my upbringing had prepared me to be a successful professor and that’s not was happening, actually, if I told myself the truth. And I was wondering, for you, Rev. angel, what would you say have been the big crossroads of belonging? When I ask this question, do you think of one or two crossroads that you had to go through, and what was that like? How’d you make it through?
RaKw: Yes. I’ll say one very early one is as a person that was mixed in sort of my locations and how people related to me, the question that you asked right at the beginning about this choosing places of belonging and having to find your own belonging. The crossroad that I had to make for myself is that part of what it meant to be a part of black communities, at least the ones that I was a part of at the time, was that I had to, kind of like, make fun. It was like there was a thing about making fun of other people, right? And I grew up with a lot of Asian people. And at the time there were lots of jokes about Asian people. We’re always making jokes and it was sort of part of the culture at the time.
And Chris Rock would make jokes about Chinese people and so on. And I really wanted to be a part of the black crew and be down with the folks. And I just realized that I couldn’t do this. That that wasn’t going to be how I was going to create my sense of belonging was on the backs of other people. And as a person marginalized and as a person oppressed, that was a critical decision for me to say that I’m not going to let the overarching society and the demand to try to claw your way into belonging mean that I was going to stand on the backs of other people.
The other one is– and I’m going to actually change my mind midstream about the other one– the other one that was really critical for me and it’s actually connected to my sense of forgiveness and how I built my understanding of forgiveness is I was abused when I was a child. And I had, it was a woman that was my father’s girlfriend at the time and she was quite abusive. And then later I went to live with my grandfather and he lived near where she lived and I was moving through my life in this way in which it was like you just didn’t deal with stuff like that, you just kind of like put it aside and you just kept moving. And that’s what I was always told is you just keep moving.
But I had to decide that I was going to confront this person and go back to them so that I could feel at ease in my own body, even though that meant disrupting in my family this secret that was like something that nobody wanted to talk about anymore. So through that, I confronted both forgiveness, which is I forgave that person so that I could move on, and I also allowed myself to disrupt the secrets in my family that many people in the family wanted to keep quiet.
TS: I want to talk a little bit more about going through these crossroads of belonging because I want to hear from your perspective, but just to share, one of the things I found is that a tremendous amount of human capacity is developed when we go through a crossroads and we are true to ourselves. We talk about a way to grow yourself, there is nothing like it. I mean, it’s kind of walking through a fire and I’m wondering how you see that, what happens when you actually choose, in your language, true community, instead, like, “No, I’m not going to be part of this thing, it’s not true for me.”
RaKw: The way that I feel that it happens in my body is that I find greater resonance with myself, right? So I find more ease in my body, I find less contraction. That’s what I mean by more ease. I find that the arguments that I have about like, do I do this or do I do that? Do I let this happen or do I let that happen? In other words, do I let other people and external things determine my path, right? And what happens for me is that every time I go through crossroads, I become more and more clear that I am the only person that can live the life that I have, and that any time that I am not living in a way that is true to myself, even if it upsets people that I love and that I care about, that the fact is that I’m not giving them the whole of who I am to begin with.
And so that the only way that I can have true relationships with people is to be true to myself. And the only way to be clear about what it means to become true to myself is to move through those crossroads and to make the difficult choices of perhaps losing people, losing face, losing position, losing access, losing things that are external in favor of that resonance with a belonging to myself. That I have to be able to tolerate living in my body and in my existence.
And that that is paramount and more important to me than anything else not because I’m selfish and because I just don’t care about anyone else, because that’s the only way that I can actually be true in my relationships in my life. It’s the only way that I can have true community is to be true to myself.
TS: All right. I just have two more questions for you, Rev. angel. The first one is to understand a little bit more about true community for you within your Zen lineage. You’re the second black woman to be named a Sensei, which is a term for a Zen teacher in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. And I thought to myself, “How is it that you’ve been able somehow to work within your lineage in a form of true community?” And I’m saying that because I think a lot of people find a lot of difficulty with various aspects of these Eastern traditions and the culture that came with the traditions, and how are you working this out?
RaKw: I mean, I didn’t, is the truth. My exploration of belonging, the thing that I was almost going to say about the crossroads was actually coming to the crossroads of having to decide that being true to myself was more important than my titles and all of the things that seemed to be required of me in the conventional Zen lineage.
And so I was a breakaway, I broke away and decided that staying true to myself was more important. And so I broke away from the priestly path as I was supposed to do it, I broke away and started my own community. I broke away when my teacher at the time of resisted that, and felt that I should not be supported. As a result of that, I just kept going my own way. And eventually, I think either they’ve realized that they weren’t going to be able to contain me, I ended up being, I want to say, being received by particular people in the community and they just had to live with it.
But I had to break a lot. I broke away a lot and it was not easy. And it went against everything about how we were trained, about how it was supposed to be, but I already had from the incidents that I shared with you earlier, I already had the sense that like, “Well, the only way that I can be true, I don’t need to be a Zen teacher or a Zen anything if I’m not going to be true to myself.” And so I really put all of the work and practice and the movement that I had attained in that lineage on the line in order to be true to myself.
After you become a Sensei in the Zen lineage, there’s a tacit agreement and I think also an explicit agreement, that then people have to leave you be, to do what you will do. And so I’m pretty unbothered by what other people have to say as a result of that. I want to say to people, “I’ve made a habit of being true to myself, right? I’ve developed a habit, a consistent habit that feels more natural to me than anything, than not being true to myself. And you can do that. Every single one of us can do that and I think we’re all entitled to do that.”
And so I’ve caused disruption, I’ve pushed back. I have caused fissures in that process, many times painful, painful breaks in relationships with people, but I feel clear and I feel true to myself and I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I wish there weren’t so many moments of pain for people, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way.
TS: Breakaway Sensei.
RaKw: Exactly. And people have asked that quite a few times. They’re like, “Wow, how have you done that?” I’ve had to give up a lot. And at this age and at this moment, it can seem like from the outside like, “Oh, you’ve got this and that, and you wrote your own book and done all of these things,” but I have given up access and entitlements over and over again. Income, so on and so forth, you name it, I have given it up in favor of being true to myself.
TS: Well, I just want to take a moment and recognize you from my heart and really a deep bow, deep, deep bow, because I know something in some small amount at least of the courage that it takes to be a breakaway. So, how totally awesome Rev. angel is.
RaKw: Right. Thank you.
TS: All right. The last question I want to ask you is in this series on belonging, you share that you’ve held, really for yourself, this question about developing a deeper understanding of the process of change, how people change, how people commit more to themselves in the context of this conversation in a path of liberation, what are some of the key points you found about understanding the process of change that can help people in that process, wherever they might be as a listener?
RaKw: I found the main reason that people don’t change is because they don’t want to. [laughs]
TS: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty gosh darn good.
RaKw: No matter what they are saying. And what I mean by that is that we have ideas about changing, but if you look deeper and you’re not changing, or you’re not moving along whatever path it is in the way that you want to, it’s because there’s something that you value more and that you are more committed to, that you may not be acknowledging or you may not just be in touch with.
And so that’s one– that the only reason people don’t change is because you’re not committed enough or you have a higher order of priority or commitment, whether explicit or implicit. And so if you go searching for it and figure out what it is… I love to give the example of I think about running in the morning, but I have a higher priority of sleep. I have an autoimmune illness and sleep is the thing that allows for the most healing. So I prioritize that.
Mostly it’s hidden. So what it ends up is I get to five o’clock and I go, “Wow, I didn’t run again.” It’s because I chose something over it. The other thing that I find and it is, again, why I developed the point meditation is because actually most of the practices of rigor that are required for any kind of change practice are predicated to us being able to be aware that we’re off track. And if you don’t have a practice of coming back to yourself, then you will not have a practice of being able to understand that you’re off. So you have to actually be able to return in order to understand that you’re away.
In other words, you have to be able to have point in order to understand other than point, because the whole juice of any meditation practice is not in being on point and it’s obviously not in being other than point, it’s actually being aware and then taking an action and coming back. And so in order to have any change practice and process unfold, you have to be able to be aware that you are somewhere other than where you intend to be. And if you don’t have a practice that enables you to take action at that very moment that you realize that you are other than point, then your practice of change is going to fall apart. And then that deeper commitment, right? That being able to sort and discern, what is it that matters? So I talked about that place in our belly, in our core, and returning to that.
The other reason that it’s the core, that low belly that we return to, is because the core in the yoga tradition, that it’s the third Chakra or the dantien or the hara. In all sorts of systems, it’s our seat of power. It’s where action comes from. And so if we return to our seat of action and we couple that with an awareness of what it is that matters to us, we can couple what matters to us and be clear about what it is that matters to us most so that we can take action on it. And if you’re not clear about what it is that matters to you most, you will not be able to take action.
TS: I have to say, Rev. angel, this conversation has been really healing and empowering for me and I’m sure for our listeners. I just want to thank you so much.
RaKw: Thank you so much. It’s really a pleasure to talk to you. And I wish we could do it more.
TS: Yes. You and I, we’re going to do that. I’ve been speaking with Rev. angel Kyodo williams. With Sounds True, she’s created a new audio learning series, it’s called Belonging: From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community. Check it out.
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