Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

by Angel Kyodo Williams

The practice pulls us together, but we are not all headed in the same direction at the same time. We long for community but do not know how to sit with difference. We try to take connection and eviscerate what makes us distinct.

When I suffered severe depression, the easiest thing to do was hide it. You become quite skilled in distracting others from focusing on you and your suffering. This is possible because most people are not interested really in how others are suffering and certainly not interested in their own suffering. There’s no judgement here. Suffering is difficult and tough.

The most profound practice I have ever been taught by my teachers is simply letting my shit fall apart, developing the courage to sit with all of my rough edges, the ugliness, the destructive and suffocating story lines I have perpetuated about myself, and letting go of the same suffocating storylines others maintain about me.

Self-care, I think, is a way of going against business as usual. It’s a radical route. Learning to love ourselves is hard to do. It’s a fierce kind of self-love that we need to work through—that I need to work through.

The happiness that I’m talking about is that deep sense of well-being, comfort—not materialistic comfort but that deep sense of being at home with who and what you are. Occupying that space in a way that’s not dependent on the external environment, that’s not dependent on your Honda or your 65-million-dollar jet or where you live. It’s dependent on being fundamentally OK with who you are—no matter if you are experiencing tragedy, illness, death—you’re always at home with that. And when I’m at home, there’s a sense of spaciousness. So I can be happy at the same time I can be going through rage and anger and despair.

The misunderstanding is that refuge means somehow being protected from our discomfort. Refuge is actually about being protected from all of the things that are hindering our ability to see our discomfort and to be able to actually come in contact with it. The refuge is: Here is a space. Here is an opportunity for you to meet your discomfort instead of continuing to bypass it, to drug it, to distract from it, to Hulu it or to Facebook it or—you know all of the ways. We’re always talking about other forms of anesthetizing ourselves. We create this separation between people who are drug users and alcoholics, so they’re the bad ones that aren’t taking care of themselves and are really distracted. In fact, we are all heavily anesthetized by the various ways we’re distracted from our own suffering. Mine is maybe online shopping, but we all have some version of it and just because we’re not actually using hard drugs or hard alcohol doesn’t mean that we’re not distracting ourselves from this pain.