Some years back I interviewed Lama Rod Owens about his experience as a queer Black Buddhist. He spoke to me about rest as resistance because rest leads to resilience and is a radical act. Lama Rod eventually put this conversation into his book Love and Rage: The Path to Liberation through Anger (North Atlantic Books 2020). Multiple Black practitioners and writers speak to this notion of rest as resistance because rest focuses on inner knowing and being true to oneself. Being true to oneself is a radical act of acceptance and inclusion, and is necessary for the next concentric circle: of acceptance and inclusion of others. This includes our enemies and those we do not understand.

I speak to this in my work with adults and children in a Buddhist context, where we reflect on the ease we have with accepting those who agree with us. But there exists also the incredible necessity of reaching out to those with whom we have innate conflicts. This is the kernel at the center of our struggle to be human. We see it reflected in our own self-hatred or inner misunderstanding or disconnect, which manifests regularly as disconnect between body and mind. Therefore, rest and taking care of our emotional states is the foundation of engaged meditation. We then step out toward helping others or speaking out about injustice. If we do these things from a place of lack or self-harm, we can only project that harm onto others instead of modeling a reduction in harm that the world so desperately needs.

Women, people of color, gender non-conforming, and other marginalized folks are well-acquainted with the need for rest, resilience, and replenishment of inner resources for the outer struggles we face. Much of this entails reconnection with our own bodies, hearts, and the body of the Earth, our original cradle, to be separate from the Earth is to be separate from our natural selves. As Tom Robbins, recently deceased, put it:

To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling. . . .

The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary. (From Jitterbug Perfume [Bantam 1990])

Desire, in this case, has to do with reconnecting with our inherent completeness—the fact that we don’t truly need anything more than what we have, however much our basic needs may remain unmet. This is a bit of a paradox, to be sure, yet much of Buddhism is paradoxical or at least koan-like.

For me, our interconnection is imperative and unavoidable. Most of us are not Hinayana, monastic, solitary renunciants. We live in community, survive, and thrive—or do not—in a communal context. We rely on one another for growth, development, resilience, and meaning. Enlightenment is collective, though at the same time individual. Each drop of shared wisdom and experience fills our collective bowl of light. Indigenous Hawaiian culture holds a special meaning for this internal bowl of light we each possess.*

In addition to rest, resilience, and replenishment, receiving is a fourth dimension of wise strategies for resistance and engaged Buddhism. I love the way my cranio-sacral practitioner describes receiving, in a poignant portrait of a lesson from her dog:

Receiving is a skill my dog Zoe has cultivated through her experience of trauma and the intensity of her sense of smell. When humans are traumatized, we bound from task to task, problem to problem, or person to person because we have the capacity to override uncomfortable sensations with cognition. Zoe does not. She cannot do anything but open herself to every molecule of information entering her nose. It’s really deep for her, and I wish I could know what she perceives when she slows down. What I do know is that it satisfies her and calms her down.

I have been challenging myself to pause and do more receiving. At a time when many of us are pushed toward too much emotion or too much rationalization, receiving is a way to re-orient. Much like meditation, receiving focuses our attention on the senses. I find information received through the skin particularly calming. Receiving can be done anywhere but is especially available outdoors in the sun.**

* The Bowl of Light (YouTube)

** From personal communication with Jennifer Sokolov, Tenth House Health

See more

Beth Marcil Art (Instagram)
Tom Robbins Quotes (Goodreads)

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