Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Waking Up to the Distortion of Racism | Bonus Talk with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

If we were to walk past the fires of oppression, we would be walking past one of the widest gateways to liberation. About Zenju Earthlyn Manuel Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is an author, poet, Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, artist, and drum medicine woman. She holds a Ph.D. and worked for decades for arts organizations and those serving women and girls, cultural arts, and mental health. Her books include The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. You can find Zenju's Talk in the Ten Percent Happier app at this link: https://10percenthappier.app.link/AttendingToTheFiresOfRacism. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it even mean to live a good life? Is it about happiness, purpose, love, health, or wealth? What really matters in the pursuit of a life well lived? These are the questions award-winning author, founder, and interviewer Jonathan Fields asks his guests on the Top Ranked Good Life Project podcast. Every week, Jonathan sits down with world renowned thinkers and doers, people like Glenn and Doyle, Adam Grant,

Young Pueblo, Jonathan Height, and hundreds more. Start listening right now. Look for the Good Life Project on your favorite podcast app. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, it's Friday, so we're dropping a bonus. We've been, if you've been listening, we've been talking all week about the intersection of meditation and race. And today we have a really personal story about overcoming the impact of racism through meditation, told in the first person by Zenju Earthlin Manuel. She is an author, a poet, a Zen Buddhist priest, a teacher, and an artist.

She's able to PhD, and she's written books, including one called The Way of Tenderness. This is a talk taken from the 10% happier app. There are many more talks on the app if you want to go check them out. And here we go is Zenju Earthlin manual. Greetings. This is Zenju Earthlin manual. When I was ordained as a Zen priest, I was given the Dharma name Echai Zenju, which means wisdom ocean, Echai. complete tenderness, zenju. At first, I embraced the name ecki because I love the ocean, but my teacher told me that the second name

is given as a path, one is to explore. So I began to call myself zenju in a quest to discover a lived experience of the name's essence. What is complete tenderness? It was clear at the beginning of my explorations that I had been hardened by the physical violence leveled against me as a young child, and by the poverty with which my parents had to struggle as Louisiana migrants raising three daughters in the wilds of Los Angeles.

I have been hurt as a child when I discovered that others saw my dark body as ugly. Growing up, I had never been asked who I was. I was told who I was. There was no room for self-discovery. I was told from a young age that my life was going to be a particular way because of my dark skin. And in fact, I did experience the struggles of growing up as a black girl child.

Based on what I experienced, I accepted the story of what was predetermined for black people, feeling completely destined for tragedy. I imagined that I would have to fight all my life to get what I wanted out of it. I imagined dying unfulfilled. I believed that I did not have access to the resources for life, and that access to them was being denied or withdrawn by the powers that be. Indeed, the world had structured itself around appearance, the way in which I was perceived and treated, dependent on a structure of race, sexuality, gender, and class.

The perverse power of those structures made my embodiment unacceptable to others and myself. As a result, I was paralyzed by feelings of isolation in my younger days. Perhaps worst of all, I came to mistrust my own innate wisdom. By internalizing the judgments of those who felt that certain types of folks are lesser, I have betrayed myself. I had yielded to oppression. Oppression is a distortion of our true nature. It disconnects us from the earth and from each other.

In my case, I grew bound to feelings of injustice, rage, and resentment. I held my life tied in my chest and my body ached with pain for many years. Depression, unhealthy relationships, dependency on substances to numb the pain and thoughts of suicide were my responses to the tension. Meanwhile I spent a great amount of time and money on appearance, education, and appropriate political and spiritual engagement. No one informed me that who I was had nothing to do with the way I appeared to others. In fact, I believe that who I was had everything to do with how I appeared to others. Only in the deep silence of meditation did

I begin to disbelieve that I was born only to suffer. Eventually, after many years, I would come to recognize the root of myself hatred, both external and internal, as personal and collective denial, our denigration of the body I inhabited. In the silence of meditation, I could see that in being an object of hatred, I lived my life as an object of everything and everyone. A thing can be dressed up and stripped down, depending on situations and circumstances. Denial and acceptance was based on being a good or bad object in the view of others. This was not life. To cultivate tenderness we cannot go beyond the body. We must look our embodiment in the face. We must acknowledge the body and the integration of certain types of bodies

in the world. Only then can we begin to grow tender toward ourselves and others. Now some believe that true happiness cannot exist together with conflict, strife, or pain. Many feel it almost certainly cannot be found amid social struggles related to race, sexuality, and gender. Some may believe that the indignation and anger that motivate movements of protests only move us backward or away from what is more profound about our lives. But this is not completely correct. If we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we would be walking past one of the widest gateways

to liberation. 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. Awakening from the distortion of oppression begins with tenderness. We recognize our own wounded tenderness, which develops into the tenderness of vulnerability, and culminates in the tenderness that comes with heartfelt and authentic liberation.

That first experience of tenderness is a cry from deep within our own nature. It compels us to seek out reconnection to the earth and each other. As soon as we are born, we began to drift away from our true nature. We align with established structures that immediately began to fix away from our true nature. We align with established structures that immediately began to fix our perceptions of others in ourselves. Our lives are shaped by this alignment. Falling into line is a survival mechanism driven by the suffering that already surrounds us at Earth.

Once on a long retreat during one of the hours of meditation, my deceased mother came to mine. It was as if she had come to silently sit with me. I could not tell her to leave. I immediately began to cry. In that moment, I couldn't tell the reason for the tears. It was an upsurge of old pain, harbored from the time of our difficult relationship.

How could I be tender, given my violent past with her? I kept breathing and crying, sitting with this vision of my mother. Her face was sweet, she was smiling, she did not appear as a rage filled yet beautiful person that had frightened me when I was young. I opened my eyes to wipe the water pulling between my eyelids. I happy-gun to feel real tenderness. Big thanks to Zenju and we're back on Monday with something that's really important right now which is white people talking to other white people about whiteness. Have a great weekend. We'll see

them. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early Have a great weekend, we'll see you then. podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com-slave-survey. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert-expert.

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