The Dharma of Being Anti-Racist: Accessing Skillful Engagement

Teaching Team:

Core Teachers: Rev. Liên Shutt and Dawn Haney
Facilitation Teachers: Dalila Bothwell, Linda Gonzalez, Korin Charlie Pokorny, Dojin Sarah Emerson

Description:

Would you like to skillfully practice anti-racism? The 8-Fold Path provides ways to enact:

• Wisdom of understanding & thoughts
• Meaningful meditations & practices with effort, mindfulness, & concentration
• Fostering engaged behaviors in speech, action, & livelihood

Inquiring into the causes and conditions that have brought about our collective suffering from racism, this course will offer meditations, reflective writings, mindfulness practices, and interactive exercises to support grounding, settledness, and skillful action. We’ll connect to individual and collective agency as we practice skills for staying in discomfort and resilience.

Open to all who acknowledge systemic racism and are committed to examining the impact of being part of such a structure.

We are committed to a class ratio of 50% BIPOC to 50% white-identified participants.

for more information and to apply click here

Stone Creek Zen Center stands in solidarity with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and condemns both the long history of oppression, and the recent waves of violence against AAPI persons. We acknowledge the deep roots of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Sonoma County,; and the deep roots of Asian American buddhist practice in our community and in the United States.

In alignment with the Bodhisattva Vows, we call on our sangha members and all Zen practitioners who are not Asian American/ Pacific Islander to be on the lookout for, and to interrupt any violence- physical, verbal and otherwise- aimed at anyone in the AAPI community in this time of escalating attacks.

Please read Why Did Six Asian Women Have to Die in Order to be Seen? by Butterfly Tony Pham

Take a free online Bystander Intervention Training with Hollaback! (recommended in article above by Butterfly Tony Pham)

Or enroll in The Dharma of being Anti-racist (Dojin Sarah and Korin Charlie of Stone Creek are on the teaching team, so please reach out with questions)

There are also  many efforts in our community to stand in solidarity and here are some ways to support those efforts and get involved:

Asian American Alliance of Marin- resources page 

Anti Asian Violence Resources- national 

The Wechat project

The posts below include dharma talks offered at Stone Creek Zen Center. To listen to a talk, you can use the player embedded in each post by clicking on the play button which looks like this:

Note: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You can also download the mp3 file using the link highlighted in green using right click, “Save Link As…” on Windows, or on Macs, a two-finger click.

In addition to browsing these pages, you can navigate the collection of dharma talks (over 500 talks) using the functions in the right sidebar:

1. The “Dharma Talk Tag Cloud” can be used to select talks by topic or theme.

2. The “Dharma Talks Archive” can be used to find talks by date.

3. “Dharma Talk Speakers” can be used to select talks by a given speaker.