STL Queer Sangha: Homecoming To Belonging, May 2024

Welcome again.

The theme that I chose for this month,

Which is May,

Which is Mental Health Awareness Month,

Very important to me.

This is definitely survivor-led healing that I do here,

And the theme that I wanted to bring to this was Homecoming to Belonging,

Which has a theme of safety and refuge along with it.

And I actually wanted to first start off by talking about quote-unquote safety,

That it is like,

Especially with meditation groups,

That it's just somewhere out there if we practice hard enough,

If we do our mantras enough,

That it's just out there for the taking.

But I have noticed that that's not actually the case.

Safety is actually very hard to come by.

It can be very challenging,

And certainly very challenging to feel like the felt sense of safety in the body.

So the practice that we're going to do today,

And that the talk that I'll give today,

Is a compassion-based practice to cultivate that.

And always good to remember that it's a practice,

Like we don't have to do this perfectly.

But I wanted to figure out a way to offer space to cultivate safety in ourselves and do that in community together.

And one thing that I notice that is different with queer meditation groups and queer Dharma groups,

I have gone to many other different kinds of Dharma groups,

And what I love about practicing with other people that are similar to my own identities,

Is that we all kind of share that knowing of how difficult and challenging it can be to find belonging and safety in the body.

So automatically there's a bit of a refuge there that even though things are challenging,

We can get together and practice these things together because we can normalize it.

We're all kind of in that same boat.

I have a quote here from one of my favorite Dharma teachers,

Larry Yang,

Speaking about intersecting identities and the way that we walk in a world in a dominant culture that is very challenging at times.

He says,

We walk in a world that more frequently than not,

Tries to define who we are,

Who we should be,

What we should be doing,

How we should be looking and what we should be thinking,

Even what we should be feeling.

Whereas returning to the depth of our own experience can be called a kind of spiritual homecoming.

As we move into exploring our identities,

We create an acceptance of who we are completely,

And a sense of being able to be at ease no matter how difficult the conditions of our lives might be.

And he continues,

Maya Angelou writes,

The ache for home lives in all of us,

The safe place where we can go as we are and to not be questioned.

So that's what I think of when I think of homecoming to that belonging.

And things that are challenging are not also impossible.

And that's also what I bring to this course and so much of the reason why I facilitate these kinds of groups and so much of the reason why I wanted to become a certified meditation teacher and mentor to begin with,

Because I deeply know what it feels like to not belong and to have safety be very challenging in my own body.

And one thing that I,

Or another thing that I can find with people that come to meditation,

Is I often find that people don't come to meditation because they felt well.

Does that resonate with anybody?

Yeah,

Probably most of us at some point.

So I can relate even my own story.

Many years ago,

I kind of learned about Buddhism in my early 20s and then kind of lost my path.

And a lot of,

You know,

Not great shit happened and I was looking for something that was totally different because everything that I was trying was not working.

And I tried regular Buddhist meditation groups,

Zen groups,

Other different kinds of groups,

And of course,

None of them really had anybody facilitating that had identities similar to mine.

And it didn't really give me that sense of belonging or safety that I was looking after.

And so one of the first things that I did when I practiced meditation was to just try,

I didn't know really what I was doing,

And certainly was probably fucking it up.

But I would hang out at my home,

And just close all of the doors and like turn on the candles and the incense and just like picture myself like,

In space,

Like,

Just out there with nobody around me.

And I imagined this door behind me that everything else and everybody else in the whole world,

It was all there.

So I wasn't denying that stuff was there.

But I was able to just close the door and be by myself for a moment.

And like tune out all of the other stuff,

All of the causes and the conditions,

All of the people,

The stories,

The world,

All of that.

And that gave me enough space to be like,

All right,

There's something to this meditation thing.

And then from there,

I went on to to looking for more things and more people that were queer and had different,

Different conditions similar to mine.

And I finally did open up to a community of people of all diversities and the richness of the Dharma expressed through all different kinds of cultures came through and really gave me that vehicle to to not only find my own belonging,

But find belonging with others who were feeling as deeply as I was who were conflicted as deeply as I was,

Who knew that there was a way to go about and live life that was much more blissful and shared in solidarity.

And so I had to find a safe enough container first.

I had to first find that that container within myself and then I found a community to explore with and really understand the Dharma and get to learn it and see how it expressed through me and someone like me.

And I can kind of think about my my relation of moving through the Dharma that way,

That it was a gradual softening and it's very similar to my own queerness and exploring my queerness.

It was a gradual what is this and a gradual opening and a gradual softness.

I cannot think of one day where I was like today I'm queer.

Does that relate to anybody else out there?

It's kind of a process,

Yeah.

So I think that's very similar with meditation and I certainly encourage you all to understand that about today.

Like this is one session and I hope that it is chock-full of resources that you can take with you,

But I encourage you to try these things out for yourself and see how they see how they fit,

See how they they interact with your life.

And so when I found safety in my body,

When I finally experienced that like death grip of anxiety and panic attacks and depression just unclench,

When I finally found that it wasn't due to what I was searching and what I was finding through other people,

The other people that I knew,

The other people I was meditating with.

It actually came from my own body.

It came through my own experience of the practice.

So it was me partnering with my body.

There was a psychological or physiological part of it,

Like what it actually feels like to let your nervous system actually relax.

That's like a very physiological thing and has an impact on our physical body.

And there was also the spiritual part of it.

I spiritually let go of so much shit,

So much nonsense,

So much clinging,

So much avoiding,

So much judging myself.

And so what the practices did is they helped me shift my perspective to see that there was another truth here.

Not that the other all the bad stuff didn't exist.

It certainly does,

But it's not the end of the story.

There's other things here too.

And the practice of meditation and certainly meditation community is about cultivating that.

It's about practicing those pathways so that our body remembers these pathways back to homecoming,

Back to safety.

And just to give kind of a temperature check to everybody out there,

Raise your hand if you have ever experienced ongoing anxiety,

Hypervigilance,

Fury or rage,

Judgment about anything and everything around you.

Yeah.

And let's just normalize looking around and seeing that everybody in the room had their hands raised right now.

So we can normalize that,

That it's very normal to experience those things.

Raise your hand again if you're also aware of how toxic and fucked up the systems that we're living in are.

Every day it's beat down on us.

Is that right?

It's like living in these systems and certainly with different marginalized identities means we also have wisdom about the systems,

About the causes and the conditions that we did not create.

We have to be a part of these systems.

We're here on this planet.

And so in a way,

When we acknowledge all of those systems,

We can actually take a step back from being enmeshed in those systems.

You say,

Wait a minute,

That's all that shit that I didn't create and I'm right here.

Just that little bit of acknowledgement can add a little bit of space in there.

A little bit of space.

And how often do we blame ourselves for those causes and conditions?

Unknowingly,

Unconsciously.

So that's very normal too.

So that's why we practice this pathway back to homecoming.

So if we get swept up in a day or a time or a lifetime like that,

We can practice these things and be like,

Okay,

What's a thing that I can do to just help myself in this exact moment?

That's why I love meditation.

That's why I love this style of meditation,

Which is insight meditation.

You can do it anywhere,

Anytime.

You don't have to be in a formal setting.

You can do it in your car,

Outside of work.

You can do it while you're doing your dishes.

You can do it while you're hiding in a closet at work.

I've definitely done that.

And so in thinking about the physiological response that the body has,

Like we're living in this toxic place and it is extraordinarily challenging.

And our body response can be a place of like constant defensiveness,

Constant searching for danger for the other shoe to drop.

And looking for all of the wrongs and looking for all of that can actually keep our body in that activated space where we're like perceiving threats and perceiving trauma all over the place.

And for very good reason.

When your body experiences those things,

It is actually doing you a solid,

It is letting you know where you care,

Where you care about yourself,

Where you know shit is fucked up,

Where you know stuff is not you.

And so those responses that come up,

They're very normal,

And they're very human.

We can learn wisdom from those things,

To learn how to like respond to life in a way that we can try to create better conditions for ourselves inside of the fucked up system.

And so today,

This practice is to actually take a pause from all of that state of hypervigilance and all of the amygdala reactivity,

That stuff that we don't really have a conscious grip on most of the time,

To nourish the parts of ourselves that are living here and trying to protect ourselves.

We're going to practice today,

Finding a sense of ease,

And relaxing our guard,

And clenching our jaw,

And the nerves that fight our IBS.

So I can say that I came to meditation,

Because I needed more of me in every day.

I needed more of me to keep going about in this world,

Because I didn't want to lose me.

And I certainly didn't want to lose all the people that I care about.

And what I realized through the practice,

The physiological parts of meditation,

Of practicing this way,

That it had nothing to do with how I did or didn't fit in with anybody or anywhere.

So belonging was not a thing that I needed to go outside of myself and do.

It was something that I cultivated inside myself as a way of being,

As a way of existing with my body,

Empowered with my body,

With my spirit,

With me in all of my history,

Beautiful and mundane.

And I also knew that if I needed to make the changes in the way that I was relating to life in the outside world,

To find a less harmful path,

I found all the hard,

Harmful ones,

Like,

That was all of my 20s and 30s.

So I had to find a less harmful path.

And I knew that if I needed to go about that,

I needed to also learn how to walk myself through the feeling of the difference between discomfort and harm.

So like discomfort can feel very vulnerable.

So when we try new things that can be like,

Oh,

God,

I'm feeling,

Feeling the same feelings of anxiety and all of those things.

And what I can certainly offer as a lifelong dancer and performance artists,

The feelings of anxiety and terror feel exactly physiologically,

The same as excitement and effervescence.

So kind of bringing this,

This practice here can help us like learn the difference between what is scary,

Because it's new,

And what is like scary,

Because we shouldn't be doing it.

So that's the only way that we'd be able to do that is when we partner with our body.

So there's like the perceived sensation of something that is vulnerable.

And we learn to identify that and learn the sensations,

Learn the track record,

Our body knows it before our mind knows it.

So when we learn about all of that,

That can keep us well,

It can cycle break us from those loops.

We kind of tend to like cycle through stuff on autopilot.

So when we bring awareness to things that we're having reactions to and get curious about that,

That's how we end up cycle breaking and exiting those those patterns.

So this was something I had to feel my way through.

And what I want to offer to kind of wrap this so we can move into the meditation,

The Sangha,

And the lineage that I practice,

Which is based in 2600 year old Buddhist philosophy,

Theravada Buddhism.

It has three refuges that we can take,

Take refuge in.

And that is Buddha,

Dharma and Sangha.

And so for for Buddha,

That is our Buddha nature,

Or refuge in our innate divinity,

And our capacity for liberation.

Refuge in our own innate divinity,

And capacity for liberation.

Our own Buddha nature,

Buddha was a human being too.

And then there is the Dharma or refuge in,

As I say,

Praxis.

So it's like theory that we put into praxis,

Or practice.

So that is our own direct experience,

Making the practices alive,

Through our own active engagement with it.

The Dharma is going to look different for each one of us,

The way that it lands with you.

So it is up to you to find your way,

And what feels right and resonates with you.

And then the last is refuge in community,

And refuge in community solidarity.

So taking interdependence,

How we are all related here on this planet,

From transactional,

Which is so much of the world,

To reciprocal,

Like the sharing part of it.

And to me that seems like the essence of solidarity,

Very much an underlying factor of very much the rest of my days here on this planet.

I have one more quote here from Ruth King,

Who is a wonderful teacher,

And author of a book called Mindful of Race.

Most of us want our distress to go away without caring for it.

Compassion practice serves as the anticoagulant to such burdens.

With practice,

We experience more inner circulation,

More flow,

More lightness and openness.

There is more space to soften,

To forgive,

And to receive all that life offers.

We begin to realize that there is more love in our heart than anything else.

We're just not in the habit of relying on it.

So I want to pause here and talk a little bit about meditation.

I think I have some new folks in here,

And I'd love to just get like a show of hands if you have any meditation practice of any kind.

Yoga,

Zen,

Qigong.

All right,

We got some in there and everybody.

Cool.

And anybody with insight meditation,

Known in layman's terms as mindfulness meditation.

I don't like to use that word because I think the medical-industrial complex kind of stole that and sanitized it.

That's not really what I teach.

I teach the cultural version of insight meditation.

So we'll be doing insight meditation,

But also a compassion-based practice today.

And what I'll offer for you all,

Your meditation pose,

How you are in this space is totally up to you.

If you want to lay down and meditate,

Go for that.

If you want to sit up like I am,

I like to be on a little bit of a cushion so that my feet don't fall asleep,

So that my hips are a little bit above my legs.

There's also a space for walking meditation.

So if you're like here and you're doing the thing and you're like,

This is not working,

I need to just pace,

You are more than welcome to do that.

I'm also a fan of like swaying meditation.

For any of my,

Also my fellow neurodivergent folks out there,

Like sometimes just the sway is enough.

You're reminding me of when I was a kid on my grandparents' porch,

An old rickety thing.

So sometimes just that swing is enough there.

And I think the meditation that we will do today might be somewhere upwards of 25 to 30 minutes.

We'll be calling in the earth elements,

So it'll be a very nature-based meditation,

Very grounding.

And also you don't have to close your eyes in meditation,

So that is not safe,

That is a-okay.

It's also why I keep these candles out here,

So visually we also have something that we can rest our awareness with.

I will work a little bit with the breath.

There's many different ways to feel the breath.

You can feel the breath on the inside of course,

But as a former panic attack anxiety sufferer,

The breath was not always the right place for me to practice.

And I could also feel the air on my skin as a way to different,

Like a different sensation of air and breath.

Or feeling the clothes against my body,

Something of that sort.

Let's see,

What other guidance do I want to give before we get into the meditation?

I think the last thing I'll say is the keys to this are in your pocket.

You know your body,

I do not know your body.

So that is something that I want you to always remember with any practice of meditation or awareness,

That the keys are in your pocket.

You know when you're needing to get up,

You know when you're needing to scratch your nose or shift a position.

You know your levels of safety.

And I think before we all get settled,

I think people are very cozy on the floor,

I want to,

If you are where you are,

Before we get settled into the pose,

Let's take a moment to like somatically shake out.

So I want to just like start with our hand and do some like shaky shake.

Let's like shake them to the right.

Let's shake them to the left.

Let's shake them around.

Let's get your whole arms into it.

Let's get the whole torso into it.

You can just be a little bit silly with it.

Let all of that tension out of our bodies.

Let your neck roll around.

Maybe let your feet get into it.

Maybe they want to shake.

And as you are,

Just let it settle in.

Maybe let yourself have a nice big exhale.

And just feel that warmth coursing through your body for just a moment.

Just that little bit of a somatic shake and let that help guide you into your meditation pose.

If you want to lay back,

You're welcome to do that.

If you want to lower your gaze,

You're welcome to do that.

I want to start this meditation with the seat.

What is exactly underneath you?

Inviting you to sense the way that you can feel the earth underneath you in this moment.

The way of letting yourself arrive to your own seat,

The space that you take up in the world.

And starting with the seat,

You might also notice your breath,

Allowing yourself any time that you want a nice long exhale to release any tension.

And so the seat and the breath and the body are always with you,

No matter the story behind or the thoughts that mind.

And as you settle in,

I invite you to search around and find a small point of ease.

Maybe it's your pinky finger.

Maybe it's the softness of the hum of the air conditioning or the cars outside.

Maybe the point of ease is the flicker of the candle,

The softness of your clothes against your skin.

Inviting yourself to find one little small point of ease where you know you can rest your awareness.

And as you do so,

I invite you to deepen your connection to the earth,

Knowing that the earth is actually holding you.

You've got the support of the wood floor underneath you,

The solidness of gravity,

Like the earth is giving you a warm hug and offering your trust to the earth,

Offering your trust to your own seat.

Just like the earth has hold or held all of its people and all of its history,

The earth can hold all of you too.

The earth has held all of its history of generative and destruction.

It can hold all of that for you too.

So I invite you to relax a bit more into being just as you are today.

There's like one bit of tension that you can offer over to the earth to hold for a while.

Allowing yourself to be here in both your beauty and your mess.

Allowing yourself to be here in both your sacredness and your profanity.

I invite you to exhale a deep exhale and expand into this sense of both and.

You can be beautiful and messy.

Inviting you to relax into being fully human,

Not an either-or that needs to be good or bad or right or wrong.

Inviting yourself and arriving at your homecoming to your seat.

Taking a moment to connect with the element of earth there in your seat.

Knowing that you share the same minerals in your bones that the earth shares.

Noticing your sit bones at this moment.

Noticing how your legs are crossed if they are or how your feet can touch the floor.

Connecting yourself with the element of water through the refreshing and cleansing cycles of your own body.

Knowing that just like earth,

You too are also 70% water.

You too have the birthright and sensation of flow.

Inviting yourself to find a little momentary flow.

Maybe that's just with the coolness and the water that's in your breath that you can feel when you exhale.

Even feeling the breath like an ebb and flow of an ocean.

Also connecting with the element of air,

That spacious and life-sustaining breath that you can invite deep into every cell of your body.

We know that oxygen moves to all parts of our body,

But do we practice feeling it?

Invite yourself to feel that exhale travel.

Take a deeper exhale,

Slow through the mouth and feel that wave as you exhale.

Inviting the air for a moment to breathe you.

Allowing yourself to give over your sense of breathing to just this flow of the air that's around you.

Awareness of breath is not something that you need to cling to.

Notice if you can invite a deepening of the breath to release a little more of tension anywhere that you sense it.

Inviting yourself to release tension through the power of your exhale.

Then also invite yourself to connect with the element of fire,

The entire essence of life-giving transformation.

Knowing that you share the same primal elements of the universe with the iron and fire and warmth in your own blood.

Inviting your passion to be held here with you in your seat.

Maybe even inviting your fury and your rage to be present with you here in your seat.

Not having to push away,

Not having to avoid,

Not having to cling to any frustration.

Allowing space for your anger as well.

Acknowledging that this element of heat is a part of you too.

You may give yourself a moment to cycle through those elements at your own pace.

Connecting with earth and grounding,

How you can sense it under your body.

Connecting with water and flow.

You can sense it in your muscles and your movement.

Connecting with air,

The spaciousness that you can feel between your vertebrae when you exhale.

Allowing space to enter your jaw.

Allowing space to relax your shoulders.

Connecting with the element of fire to feel the vigor of your own heart in this space.

Inviting yourself to deepen into this homecoming to your seat and to yourself in this time.

Inviting your homecoming to this body,

Into this place.

Held by the earth at the seat and connected to all time and history in this dance of elements throughout the ages.

Connecting with the way that all things that have come to pass have also been held and connected on this earth,

Our home.

And I also invite in an opening of your presence and homecoming to include your various lineages.

To include your family,

Your chosen family,

Your movement elders,

Your wisdom guides,

Be they human,

Animal,

Plant or spirit.

Inviting them to your homecoming as well.

Inviting your ancestors and your trancestors into your homecoming.

Inviting space for them here with you at your seat to be held with you and in care with you.

Connecting through that lifeline of passion and warmth we feel through the heart with those who fought,

Those who hurt,

Those who danced,

Who cried,

Those who created art.

Choose to settle a little bit more into themselves even though things might have been hard.

Opening to the awareness that these lineage guides were also beautiful and messy.

These lineage guides also made the vulnerable choice to not only connect deeper with themselves but deeper with others.

To be a part of the flow of history and the flow of humanity just like you are today.

Maybe taking a moment to check in with those lineage guides and elders and see if there's like one little message of care or compassion or kindness.

Something that you really want to hear from them today.

Something that you know that they would share with you if they were here.

Maybe it's not a word or a phrase,

Maybe it's actually just a sensation.

A little takeaway of care that you can sense in your body.

Holding that message of care and compassion close in your own heart.

I invite you to bring curiosity and wonder to your practice today.

Inviting and actually consenting with yourself to get curious as to why this body,

Why this feeling everything heart.

Inviting yourself to get curious about what wisdom that can be gleaned for the purpose of your own awakening,

Of your own presence,

Of your own homecoming.

When we invite ourselves into deeper relation with our own body,

Experience,

Heart,

Spirit,

And mind,

What invitation towards more wholeness can we relax into?

Invite yourself or to give yourself a nice deep exhale in this moment to slow and audible through the mouth.

What invitation towards more wholeness can you relax into?

Normalizing knowing that all beings here experience question and doubt.

All beings here experience happiness and sorrow.

All beings here experience gain and loss.

All beings here experience praise and blame.

All beings here experience both fame and shame.

I invite you to take another deeper exhale to release any clinging to performance or perfectionism.

Any clinging to how the practice should be or how you should be.

Allowing that breath to carry an ease of relaxation through your muscles.

Inviting yourself to normalize all these reactions and normalize this practice as a pathway to recalibrate to grounding,

To homecoming,

And to recalibrate away from worry,

Fear,

Judgment.

There's things that were conditioned into you but are not you.

Say that one again.

Inviting you to normalize and recalibrate away from worry,

Fear,

And judgment that was conditioned into you but is not you.

Writing with an exhale that thought or sensation with your lineage elders.

Connecting with that sense of warmth again in this space.

Connecting with the way that you know that they know of your divinity.

The things that we forget about ourselves that we can connect in this space and and hear from the earth and hear from our from our lineage elders,

From our ancestors.

I invite you to take a moment to notice the shift and the ebb and flow of this experience.

So again,

Noticing that you can sense the ground underneath you.

Noticing that you can sense yourself breathing and you can sense sound.

I invite you right in this space to take a moment to fall deeper in love with your own humanity without needing any piece of you to be perfect or different.

Truly inviting yourself to love you exactly how you are,

Exactly in this moment in time.

This is the preciousness of homecoming to this life.

Opening to ourselves and a sense of vastness beyond boundaries of time,

Beyond boundaries of definitions of human,

Beyond even the conditions of permanence.

So taking this moment to also notice the shifting of your practice today and the impermanence in the flow of everything that was practiced today.

And then connecting in one more moment with that word or phrase or sensation from your ancestors or lineage guides or your plant friends or animal friends.

One more connection to that sensation as a way of inviting them to this community space here today.

In a way,

Sharing with their power.

Knowing that they too can also hold you when holding yourself is challenging or hard.

And I want to finish with a quote from my meditation teacher Jack Kornfield.

You need a community.

They remind you when you forget and you remind them when they forget.

And invite you where you are to take a few cycles of deep cleansing breaths.

Slow through the nose and loud and audible through the mouth.

Yeah,

Maybe even give a hum through your exhale.

Make a nice big noise.

Make it weird.

Yeah,

Yes.

And invite you at your own pace to slow your breath.

Invite movement back into your body.

Allow yourselves to wiggle out of your meditation at your own pace.