 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava. You have to be peace with yourself, you know, not just make peace, right? You have to be peace with yourself in order to tolerate the suffering of the world. Today I'm talking with the Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams. Reverend Angel is a visionary author, Zen priest and activist. As an anti-racist priest who advocates for social justice, Reverend Angel has been shaking up the Buddhist community in the US for decades. Recently, her work has been impacting an even bigger community. Against the backdrop of COVID-19 and global anti-racist uprisings, Reverend Angel has been leading online group meditations. She uses the practice of mindful meditation to help her followers heal from the pain of racism. It's a practice, she says, that makes for stronger, better activists. And finding inner strength is important to Reverend Angel because she believes the key to transforming society is transforming our inner selves. I first met Angel about 20 years ago when I was starting out as a journalist in New York. I got in touch with her again all these years later to learn how addressing the pain of racism can make us stronger actors in the world. And how it can help us survive COVID-19 and resist the ongoing onslaught of systemic racism. Angel generously shared all that and so much more. Hi, Angel. Hi. I'm so happy to have this opportunity to speak with you again. Me too. Yeah, this is great. I think we last spoke a couple of years ago, but we've last seen each other even longer than that. So much longer. We first met 25 years ago when you were the owner of the first black-owned internet cafe in Brooklyn and downtown Brooklyn for Green. And actually, I first met you because I went for a job interview. Oh, I don't even remember that. That's so good. Yes. Did I hire you? Yeah. Oh, okay. Good. That's good. I was smart then too. And I actually went to your graduation. Do you remember that? Yes. That I remember. I literally watched you go from entrepreneur to Zen Buddhist priest. Yes. And today you are a writer, an activist, and you run an organization called Transformative Change, which uses meditation to forward the anti-racist movement. And these days, that movement is strong. We've been witnessing and experiencing this seismic global anti-racist movements. And Angel, I have to tell you that ever since those first anti-racist marches, in this iteration of them, for George Floyd, for Breonna Taylor, for so many others, I've been thinking about you. It just feels like we're witnessing this collective awakening, but also this collective anger and this collective pain. And I've been feeling it myself. And I've been hearing it from so many people that we are tired. We are in pain. And I know you are doing a lot of work to address that pain. And I want us to talk about that. I want us to get there. But I want to start with the pain itself. Some of our listeners will have felt it and others not. And I'm wondering if you can describe your own personal experiences with that pain. Maybe we can talk about what that means. What is the pain of racism? I have really been doing a lot of listening and feeling into what this moment is and have lots of points of contact, depending on one's social location. It is a very different experience. I mean, we can look and say, oh, you know, we're having this collective experience. We can all see these uprisings. We can all see this outpouring of, you know, historic rage and pain. And so I think much of the conversation about the pain and how we are relating to the pain or not relating to the pain has very much to do with our sense of the past. And the more we have a sense of the past and the history and the history of this country and our understanding and relationship to the truth, to the facts, to the facts of what has transpired for this country to become, you know, what it is and to be shaped as it is today, the closer that we are to an awareness of that in our own, I want to say, intellectual understanding, felt experience, ancestral knowing, and so specifically, you know, the felt experience of being on stolen land and being stolen bodies, you know. You've often said racism is in our bodies. And I'm just wondering what you mean by that. Yeah. Race lives in the body. And so by that, I mean that it actually affects our physiological responses to our environment, to other people. It affects our neural pathways. It is made up. We know that it's made up, right? But as inorganic and unnatural as this construct is, it is devastating to our essential human nature. Yeah. We're responding to what's going on inside of us rather than the other way around, you know. So the example I often give is white woman in elevator, black man comes in and she actually registers fear and contraction, right? She registers that and the contraction follows the registering of threat, right? So there's actually like in the brain registering of threat, body follows with contraction, thought follows that person is X, Y, and Z. We think it's the other way around, but we are animals far, far, far before we are humans. We are feeling creatures far before we are thinking creatures. So we've identified this as a feeling that's in the body and that we are reacting through that and it impacts everything we do. What is the work that you are doing to address this pain and this feeling? I grew up with this sense of, oh, there are secrets to be kept. And also pain. The secrets of pain. I mean, the secrets of pain. Yum. And you know, I'm pretty sure my dad's never going to hear this. So I'm just going to say this, you know, my dad had a girlfriend with my now, you know, stepmother and I kept the secret of his having a girlfriend, girlfriends, a series of girlfriends, right? So he was a womanizer and I had, but I was his daughter. So he kept me with him when he went places. So there I was, you know, keeping the secret of his girlfriends, even though we lived in the house with his, you know, his baby mama, which was kind of supposed to be our family. I've got the lesson of, you know, first of all, people are not to be trusted. And that to belong was to descend into this fantasy of what was actually happening. And I, I refused, you know, and I think that what Socrates called a philosopher, I would today call an activist, right? I would say that activists, you know, at the heart of them are after a more complete truth. I don't mean activist for the sake of like a particular cause. I mean, activist at the heart of, you know, and Vinita, I think so much of you as that kind of person, right? That is not just like this cause thing, right? It's like the activist that's like after the truth in a wholeness, right? We're active on behalf of a wholeness in the world. And for me, and maybe this goes to the question too, my intentionality and focus on race is about trying to get to that liberation on behalf of us all. And being so clear that racialization is in the way of our completeness, no matter where we are, you know, socially located on the spectrum of feeling the material impact and not those of us that don't feel the most material impact. I believe do experience unbeknownst to them the most profound impact on their humanity. I mean, I think there's there's so much that you're saying here. These are very big ideas. This idea of, you know, liberation, you know, as a collective liberation, collective anti-racist movement. But then the idea of, you know, personal liberation, the personal search of truth as well. Yeah. And it sounds like you have found ways. I mean, you're talking about this history with your dad's side and your mom's side and the history of the secrets of pain and how you started to approach to be able to sit with that pain, like literally sit with that pain. I remember early days sitting with you when you used to run meditation, you know, in person, those small meditations. I know that you now do this online with the groups of people. But this idea of, you know, sitting compassionately with yourself and with others. Yeah. You have to be peace with yourself, you know, not just make peace, right? You have to be peace with yourself in order to tolerate the suffering of the world. And I think if you can't tolerate your own suffering, you know, you can't tolerate and have a deep and abiding relationship of self-compassion with your own suffering, then you become as a result of that under-equipped to be able to really face the suffering of the world. Have you seen this help other folks too? I mean, I can hear that you've been able to accept and sit with your pain. Have you seen this work for other folks? I mean. Oh yeah. I mean, in extraordinary ways, extraordinary ways, you know, in sort of really basic ways. So we have this kind of almost daily sit that we do and we call it no big deal. And it's called the no big deal sit because that's how I wanted people to come to it. It was like, you know, this is not like, you know, you're Buddhist or fancy Schmancy, whatever, you know, this is like just come as you are is actually the motto, come as you are and then leave as you must because it was a pandemic reality. And you know, and sometimes your kid was going to like be in the background and we didn't want people to feel like the white cultured expression of a lot of sitting spaces came with all this like hyper-properness that everybody had to kind of be a certain way in order to get in the gate, you know. And so there's this performance before you got there to try to find yourself. And it was like, wow, you have to perform to come in and find out who you really are. That doesn't make any sense. And come as you are also meant come as you are in your racialized body. So, you know, come wealthy, come poor, come white, come black, come mixed race, come confused, come with mental health challenges, so on and so forth. It really started in the pandemic. It was just a one-time thing that I thought, you know, that really has become a thing. And people have said like literally, I believe this saved, you know, my life, if not at least my mental health. It's not just that we're sitting. It's that we're sitting with a practice that I've developed to help people sit with their pain, right, to meet it, to sit with the truth of their pain and where they are, but also be able to simultaneously hold the pervasive now-ness, right? Like the pervasive now-ness that says, wow, even with this pain, even with this legacy, even with this history, even with this seemingly insurmountable and overwhelming reality of so many systems and things either coming apart or really holding on tightly, not trying to come apart and this great clash of the titans of our history that's playing out in this enormous drama on the backdrop of climate change and our impact, you know, on the earth and our ability to inhabit it, that I can be okay. And not only that, that I must be okay if I actually want to be able to affect what is happening around me. I must find that okay-ness if I actually want to be a useful instrument of change, of profound and lasting change. On the face, what you're talking about, it sounds like it's a form of healing, but I'm wondering if you also see it as a form of resistance. It is, yeah. It's healing. You're so good to see that, right? It's healing. It's through safety and belonging and acceptance and redemption. And it is resistance through recognition and awareness that you have been imposed upon by the design of a system and a structure that actually would rob you of your humanity for the sake of, you know, material gain. As we've been creating this podcast, we've been thinking a lot about this concept of resilience that no matter what comes our way through the decades, that we're supposed to be resilient no matter what. Yeah. We have to be. We carry so much pain that that pain becomes how we live and inhabit a body of pain. And the paradox is that George Floyd's death, Breonna Taylor's death, you know, like George Floyd's murdered, Breonna Taylor's murdered, bringing it into such focused awareness actually gave us access to the experience of the pain that we're always inhabiting and coping with. And so the rage emerges as a result of actually getting up to a place where we're allowing ourselves to feel our pain. So it's this paradox when it seems like we're dealing with it now. Why, you know, why is everybody so mad? And it's like, yeah, because we're now actually feeling that which we have been stealing ourselves against just to get through and just to get by. And so it's a really complex moment. There's a lot of white people that are putting themselves on the line and trying to show up for, you know, what this is and what's happening in this anti-racist uprising, while they're also having to navigate like rack-and-brown people being like fiercely enraged with them, you know, and for good reason. And it's complex because the watershed of like feeling that pain and how long we've been waiting for people to show up together, the pandemic created the conditions that allowed so many people to actually feel the intolerance of this pain. It's, you know, you're talking about white privilege and the pain of white privilege and the pain of, I think, letting go of that privilege. That's another kind of pain, it seems. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a pain of coming into awareness of what the cost of the privilege has been. We hold on to pain. We think we're in pain, but we hold on to pain as a way of telling ourselves that that pain is real, right? So we take pain and extend it out beyond the acuteness, right, of the moment and that's what Buddhists would call suffering, right? So we make pain suffering. You know, we're not just in a constant state of pain, but we tell ourselves the story that we are and then we're down. So, you know, depression, for instance, is a looping on the past. We're not being present. So that's the loop suffering you're talking. You're saying that we, as humans, we allow ourselves to loop through this pain and suffering. Yeah, we keep a low-level loop running, right? It's like the song that runs in the back of your mind and you don't even know it's there. So we're moving through the world in reaction to the looping story, even though around us there's sunshine and light and positivity and beauty and, you know, soft things and loveliness. My existence, my pain is proven by threading it throughout my life all the time and it's not true. It just isn't true. I don't feel less for George Floyd because I don't run the loop in the back of my head, you know, and then furrow and contract my body and feel hopeless. In fact, I feel more hopeful as a result of allowing myself to fully feel the pain of, you know, George Floyd and all of what his murder represents and what it means about my life and what it means about the lack of sense of safety and security in my body and the bodies of people that I love, particularly black men. I'm not abandoning their pain and all of the truth of that because I allow myself to also be in the present of joy and beauty and possibility. You must have, I mean it sounds, I'm just going to ask it, but it sounds like it, looking around you, you know, when you see what's happening in the world now, do you have hope for the future? I do. I think that we are really at an enormous inflection point as to whether the arc that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about is long or whether it turns and begins to thread through itself and find its way to a more just society. I believe that this experience of race and the comeuppance, the confrontation with white supremacy situated in the quiet and the felt experience that has been made possible by the pandemic means that we have a sufficient and growing number of people that will not tolerate it going back to wherever it is that people want to go back to. It doesn't mean it will change overnight, but I do believe that there are a sufficient number of people that are now aware of what I like to call the untenable contract that they have been induced into in bad faith and they want out of that contract and that is not going to change. How do you see things changing for you personally, like your own role moving forward? I think the place that I would like to inhabit is to at some greater scale support people in tempering their bodies so that they are able to feel into the untenability of that contract, to also recognize that regardless of the structures and systems that you have a right to a fundamental okayness that allows you to be here and present and the kind of thriving of your humanity regardless of the conditions, of course it does, of course it does. And the extraordinary and profound truth of spiritual grounding and not talking about somebody's particular faith and I don't care if people are Buddhist and I'm kind of almost not a Buddhist myself in many ways. Just sort of post, but this of a spiritual grounding, a spirited grounding, right? Is that the profound understanding of that is that we can be okay even as we strive to have a roof over our head and care for our children and we need that. I mean I keep thinking about this all the time. We're always thinking you say you're bringing the whole truth but it also means bringing your whole body and all of your actions in service of that idea. And it's not an easy thing to do. It's not an easy thing to sit with, to understand once you start bringing that into your life. It's rigorous, right? It requires rigorous. You're defying the constructed reality around you but when you get the hang of it and you kind of get in the seat of that, the veil comes off and it actually becomes quite simple and that is where the ease arises. And now it's just the logistics, so to speak, of life. I think that's what I'm talking about. It's logistics of life, right? It's like, okay, I have kids. Where am I going to send them to school? What's my... And all of these things that we're talking about, the contract, the comforts, the things that we trade, so that's what I was... It's that logical, practical. And I'm just thinking about the logical, practical for a moment and I'm thinking that so many of us right now are inspired by what we've seen in these global anti-racist movements and we want to have meaningful conversations about race. But some of us don't know what steps to take. Like maybe I'm wondering if you can offer some simple steps for someone who's... I'm really inspired and I want to move forward. One of the exercises I walk people through is to go and find in your own experience and history. I call it the earliest and most potent moment that you recognize that race matters, right? That race is a thing. Not that there's difference that people have different color bodies and all of that kind of thing, but that thing... That race actually matters. Go back and find that and sit with that kind of like walking through that moment that I call the moment you were racialized. And sit with that and I invite people to journal about it. Journal about it as if it were present tense, right? So write the story down as if it were happening right now. So use the present tense and use I statements, right? Like I walked in this room, a young white man turned and looked at me and journal about it and find that story that is looping, probably mostly unbeknownst to you, that is looping. I'm sure you have those looping stories yourself. I don't think I loop stories. You don't loop them anymore. I mean I can tell stories, you know, that's what we are. But I'm not looping the stories part of what meditation practice, you know, when you're really doing your practices, you can catch the loop. And that story that you're talking about, you know, telling your journaling, that story, that's not just for racialized folks. I mean, that's not just for racialized folks of color. We are all racialized. Yeah, no. Oh yeah, of course. I mean, in fact, I would say that it's white-bodied people that have the least access to their story of racialization because their whiteness is a given, and they've been induced into the idea that their whiteness is a given, that they're not a race. They're absolutely a race and have absolutely been racialized. And that's why it's so profound. We have all inherited our ways of knowing and responding and reacting to race and the stories about race and all of these things from the very system that we're trying to get ourselves out of and dismantle. And so if we don't have a way, a perspective that allows us to turn around and look at it and be in it, but not of it, right, to be in it, but not of it, to get ourselves just enough perspective so that we're not of it, that we know we're something greater, we have to be able to think, feel, know outside of the system. And a meditation, and I want to say embodied awareness practices give us access to a way of knowing ourselves that is transcendent, that outside and beyond the system, so that not so we can hover out and go to some kind of magic heaven away from the world, so that we can function inside of it and it's not just devastating to us at every moment. Yeah, yeah. Reverend Angel, it's good to be with you today. It's so funny, I just heard your voice like this, this way you would say my name, you know, without the reverend, you just say angel, and I just totally heard it in that moment, that's great. No, you'd say angel and you'd pause just like that. Oh, so good. Yeah, it is really good. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. If you're like me and you feel inspired and curious after that conversation with Reverend Angel, let us know what you're thinking. Just tag me at writevenita, that's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A. Also tag at the conversation C-A and use the hashtag Don't Call Me Resilient. If you'd like to read more about mindful meditation and its other uses, go to theconversation.com. It's also where you'll find our show notes with links to stories and research connected to our conversation today. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced with a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Venita Srivastava. Our producers are Nahi Pewi, Nihal Elhadi, and Vicky Mochama, with additional editorial help from our intern, Ibrahim Dyer. Residaya is our technical producer and sound guru. Anua Quarku is in charge of marketing and production design. Lisa Verano is our audience development editor and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. Special thanks also to Jennifer Morose for her indispensable help on this project. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. Thanks for listening everyone and hope you join us again. Until next time, I am Venita and please don't call me resilient.