The Way of Tenderness Quotes

“But if we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we may well be walking past one of the widest gateways to enlightenment. It is a misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace. Profundity in fact resides in what we see in the world. Spiritual awakening arrives from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other. It may even erupt from the fear and rage that we tiptoe around. The challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things that the spiritual path to awakening requires us to tend to as aspirants to peace.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Unworthiness, invisibility, loss of intimacy, isolation, neglected intuition, lack of love, intense fear, overwhelming distrust, and a loss of voice—all life-threatening symptoms of the disease of systemic oppression.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Creating and entering sanctuaries allows us as people of color to address the circumstances that are specific to who we have been born as, on our own terms, without interference. The desire of those who are not people of color to enter the spaces where people of color face these issues betrays a disregard for the uniqueness of the work that must be done within these cultural sanctuaries. It indicates an unjust sense of entitlement on their part.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“I find intimacy within and between all of us that is not sentimental or romantic. From one point of view this intimacy can be expressed as 'We are all one.' But there is also an interconnected intimacy that is messy, uncomfortable, and difficult, but worthy and liberating to attend to. By the nature of things, we are closer than we would like to be.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Sometimes we have to leave the comfort of home, as the Buddha did, in order to discover truth. Truth often emerges through discomfort.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“When we say 'living without anything our hearts,' we do not mean emptiness in the sense of zero, but rather that the heart remains clear of notions and ideas about others or about anything in life... Emptiness refers to an open and uncluttered heart with regard to nature or form.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Only when I dropped the notion that I was the creator of my own peace or oneness, or that I was powerful enough to change the world by acting to change others did I experience the way of tenderness.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“The sudden death of oak trees in where I live in Oakland is like a clear cry naturally emerging from nature, just as cries emerge from groups of people when they are ignored and mistreated.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Some misperceive “difference” to refer only to people of color, “race” to refer only to black men, “sexuality” to queer people, “gender” to white women, “class” to those with have inherited wealth or those who live in poverty, and so on. And notice black women are hardly considered on the continuum at all. Whether or not we see ourselves in terms of these groups, we all participate in these consciously and unconsciously created constructs (or delusions, if you see them in that way).”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Death widens the river’s mouth, loosens our relentless grasp on life, and delivers us closer to the ultimate silence on this earth.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? 9”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“When we fully know in our hearts who we are as living beings, not only emotionally, psychologically, politically, or socially, we can share a deep felt, visceral acknowledgment of each other. We can submit our interrelationship to the blue flames, unafraid of being burned away... To be 'good' people we tend to bypass the messiness of our lives in order to enter the gate of tranquility. Can the gate of tranquility really be as we imagine it? No matter which way we approach peace, it seems we must cross the burning threshold of human conditioning to enter it. So, before we leap to the universal, the true essence, or spirit, why not start where we are as human beings? We must carve a path through the flames of our human condition. We must see it for what it is, and bow to it--not a pitiful bow, but a bow of acknowledgment. By acknowledging our human condition, we acknowledge that we might not know how to end hatred and that we are not superheroes; we are human beings. [32&48]”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed--wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. And then--I dare to say it--I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment--my face, my flesh, my skin, my name--I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. Would I survive the namelessness--without my body, without my heart--while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination--from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“I still experience this chill today when a song or chant touches some place inside my body that my mind cannot name... Harmony, like the chill, reveals itself. We need a body in which it can be revealed. Harmony is seen, heard, and felt with the body. It resides in the body and it is only through the body that we experience harmony. Thus, harmony may be seen as an expression of the body, of nature. It expresses itself without our doing. We have nothing to do with the fragrance of harmony... Given this, we need not insist that discussions of race, sexuality, and gender adversely affect the appearance of harmony or cause it to disappear. The notion that acknowledging lived experience is misaligned with spirituality is something we've made up in our minds, and not the natural reality of things. We must study the self in order to discover harmony in our own lives. We must listen to the earth right under our feet no matter what. We must constantly be attuned to the unfolding of life as it presents the multitude of variations in which harmony manifests in nature as oneness... If we carry awareness of the body as our inheritance of nature, as tender as a maple leaf or a small hummingbird, then the experience of complete tenderness can rise and swell within our ever-evolving relative reality.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Our potent contemporary cultural sanctuaries shape the Dharma to fit our cultural traditions so that the mirroring needed for spiritual paths to work can occur. It is important to the viability of any path that students see themselves reflected in it. This does not have to be only in terms of race, sexuality, or gender, but also in terms of the true nature of students' lives... The Buddha's teachings that are passed on in Dharma centers can certainly benefit everyone. But we will not recognize our true nature until we honestly look at ourselves. To embark on that path of healing or liberation requires exposure--where we can be comfortably seen without encountering another's guilt, explanation, or justification... Cultural sanctuaries provide a space where appearance doesn't act as a platform to launch diversity campaigns, or provide a basis for special attention, which many people of color do not want. They are refuges in which one can participate in the collective, rather than being perceived as a distinct individual in the midst of sameness.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“What happens to a hurt people? We forget that we are butterflies bearing up in the wild winds. We forget that we are tender from the suffering.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“...it was difficult for me to trust in the medicinal teaching that we must recognize friction and the not-so-good circumstances in life as being life, and that this life is perfect. It was hard to trust, swallow, and keep down this medicine, especially in conjunction with the hatred I had experienced and internalized for most of my life. I gagged on this teaching of the perfect life, as I have seen many others do. It is perfect because it is imperfect.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“A society that is fearful of self-examination and exploration can't believably say that it trusts in God. Nor can it believably say that it values every living being. We must trust the totality of our nature, in terms of both its multiplicity and its oneness.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“The silence regarding race, sexuality, and gender in spiritual literature may create the illusion that all is well in our spiritual communities, or that speaking of our unique embodiment in terms of race, sexuality, and gender is not necessary. When the subject is tabled for discussion in spiritual communities, the tension is palpable, and our inability to approach it honestly gives rise to frustration, grief, humiliation, grief, numbness, blindness, fear, and rage. We may even gather to commune in our rage, and perhaps to love one another fiercely and tenderly through it. This tensions is our most sacred time. To access this sacred time we must have common ground, we must stand at the water with all of our problems. Many of us consider being human to be our common ground. This perspective can negate unique differences and end up causing more tension. Being human is not enough common ground to navigate our challenges. If we could consider our common ground as trust we would be more able to remain open to the struggles. What are we trusting? We are trusting that what happens between us is the path by which we must come to awaken as human beings. We must stick to this path with great integrity no matter how difficult.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“In her classic book "When Things Fall Apart," Pema Chodron says that everyone and everything is always falling apart. At times we are benefited by personally and collectively 'holding things together.' Can falling apart be a liberating force in our lives?”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“...Identity arises spontaneously out of our bodies and minds, and spontaneously evolves in name, meaning, structure, and appearance. All of these spontaneously arising things are not fixed and isolated... If I am subsumed by blackness, speaking and acting out from some idea of it, I am apt to overlook the completely mysterious unfolding of this dark flowering body... When I see my embodiment as nothing more than nature, nothing more than a flower, nothing to be annihilated, the experience of my life as interrelated allows tenderness to well up, despite the impositions of hatred, whether from without or within. Others may be unable to see me or those that look like me as flowers, but this does not make it any less so.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“There is nothing more powerful than looking out on nature and seeing the varied expressions of life, taking in its myriad forms that touch our hearts or that disturb them.”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

“Everything we experience is because of the body. The body mediates our lives. We work to preserve the body even though we know we will eventually lose it. Our identities slip from one birth to the next. From birth to birth we end up embodying humanity. Yet we are often advised to let go of identifying with our personal embodiments for the sake of enlightenment. In”
― Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender