"Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence. In this sense, goodness is understood to be an expression of virtue if it does not challenge the power imbalance and does not make the people who benefit the most from that power imbalance uncomfortable. When you are good, you are not causing trouble. Here I define trouble as creating discomfort for others."
“goodness is the choice I am making each moment to do what is conducive to freedom for me and others. Goodness is a verb that I am actively engaging with: I like to say, ‘I am gooding’ as opposed to ‘I am being good.’
"Voting, educating ourselves, highlighting the voices of the most underrepresented folks, being at least liberal, recycling, carrying people's groceries, reading the current justice books, never saying 'Candyman' into a mirror, putting up Black Lives Matter signs, saying please and thank you, paying taxes, not wearing white shoes after Labor Day, supporting charities, avoiding cracks and walking under ladders, and offering thoughts and prayers are all wonderful things to do, but they are more about feeling good about ourselves and making sure others view us favorably. Which of these beloved labors will actually get us free?"
"Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice."
"... the real superpower of the Buddhist saint is giving a shit - giving a shit is an expression of their bodhicitta, or their deep desire to help free people from suffering."
"The first practice is the expression of what I call awakened care: an expression of love and compassion for themselves and others, an expression of joy all grounded in clarity. The most profound care we and others can experience is to be free from suffering and all the causes and conditions of suffering. The second practice is the development of the capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity to everything that arises for us by choosing to experience what arises for us, which helps us transition into a place of responsiveness. Experiencing and then choosing how to respond with care is an expression of liberation. The New Saint can choose the most beneficial way to respond to anything."
"We will not get everyone free because not all of us are ready to be free. When someone isn't ready to be free, forcing them to do the labor of awakening becomes an act of violence. We can neither drag people to freedom nor scare them, manipulate them, intimidate them, or use one of our favorite collective techniques - yell at them on social media - to get them to freedom... Training in awakened care is training in love, compassion, and joy, which helps us to get clear about what it takes to get people free. We can't do the work for others. Each of us must choose liberation on our own terms, and in doing so, commit to our individual labor."
"What we need is vital. If we don't get our needs met, not only will it be difficult to meet the needs of others, but we may also start manipulating those we have committed to help to get our unmet needs fulfilled in ways that are harmful and unethical. On the New Saint's path, we must figure out what we need and acknowledge that our unmet needs create distractions for us and impact the work of liberation for others. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the New Saint's work. We must love ourselves enough to care for ourselves and, in doing so, reduce the labor we force others to do for us."
"... it can become easy to mistake collecting practices as the practice and work itself."
"Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us."
"Regardless of whether we are conscious of this or not, our deepest longing is to remember our liberation, but if we are not actively working to get free, then in a way we are consenting to the delusion of the state."
"When I began practicing community service and activism, I was trying to get free from the violence of systemic oppressions ranging from racism to queerphobia. IT seemed that the best way to honor my life was to dedicate my life's labor to studying freedom, trying to get free, and helping others around me get free."
"With the remembrance came an ethical responsibility called compassion"
"We abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to."
"Most of us are afraid to get free because in freedom we have to do the labor of figuring out who we are... The ego functions best when its boundaries are defined for it... We can't handle space and openness; we don't understand what they say about who are are. Most of us will not get free anytime soon because we don't want to be free. It costs too much. We are too dependent on being defined by the closet... We have become acclimated to the suffering of everything, and we tell ourselves this is how it is and must be."
"Liberation is my primary goal in life, and I am training to align everything I do, say, and think with the goal of liberation. Therefore, I do what is conducive to getting free, while letting go of activity that is not conducive to freedom. This framework helps me to understand that what others have to do to get free is not necessarily what I have to do to get free and vice versa. This keeps me from judging other people's work."
"My ethics are also how I maintain my integrity. My integrity is my clarity as it pertains to the work I am doing in this life. My work is to get free and help as many others get free as possible. The intensity of this clarity is often read as arrogance from people who are not that clear about their work. Most people I meet have jobs and professions that they feel obligated to do to make money. A lot of people don't get joy from their work. It is hard for people to understand that my work is my life; it is what I have chosen as the best possible thing for me to do to benefit people. I am cared for in this work. I am joyful in this work. My needs are met in this work. I am fortunate to have the support I do in this work. This may sound like bragging, but this is what it feels like to find and do your work."
"Love means we touch the ground of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. It is the labor of telling the truth and allowing the truth to tell us. And none of this is supposed to be easy. Allowing ourselves to expand the pain into the space and then to start identifying with the space is how love frees us."
"Conditional love is an expression of love from a place of separation and contraction. People weaponize it against others. I consider conditional loving an act of both personal and interpersonal psychic terrorism that hurts both the person expression conditional love as well as the recipient."
"Compassion is the meeting point between deep empathy for our pain and the pain of others and the wish for us all to be liberated from this pain. The work that arises out of compassion is the strategic and informed intervention into the experience of pain... As I've gotten older, I've begun to feel compassion as an opening to freedom, fluidity, agency, and power to determine how we want to experience freedom. Compassion is not just about caring. It is not the obligatory 'thoughts and prayers' after a tragedy. IT is the work we engage in that begins to undo the root causes of the tragedy."
"Our suffering turns into violence when we can't hold space for the discomfort it causes. We react to it in ways that erase or bypass the experience of who we believe is causing us to suffer. This reactivity replaces the labor of holding and experiencing, distracting us from tending to the primary suffering."
"Felt in the body, joy is the experience of release, a letting go that feels like putting down a heavy package. At other times joy is the experience of the body as a blooming flower. Joy makes us expand outward to connect to all phenomena. We are no longer afraid of everything around us."
"A want is something that feels good to have and experience. Wants fulfill basic desires for pleasure and fun. Though pleasure and fun are wonderful and can also be needs, when we lack an awareness of how to use pleasure as an experience of liberation, it can become self-indulgent, leading to overconsumption. Overconsumption means I bypass what is needed in favor of accumulation. Often I use consumption to cover up or numb discomfort."
"We must know what we need and what we want in order to support the collective in a way that is not reproducing harm and violence. When I know what I need and want, I'll also understand the things that I can't do for myself. And so when I Lean on the collective, knowing what I am asking those around me to help me with, I also understand what I can offer back to the collective. The path of liberatory self-care isn't about bypassing what I need in order to perform a kind of selflessness that makes me look good. Liberatory self-care is about understanding what I need and then understanding how to get what I need while offering others what they need. Ultimately, what we all need is to get free."
"When I think of home, I think of being in a place where I am wanted. I think of being in a place where people notice me and see me. It is a place where I can say my name without fear of being judged or being afraid of hurting someone's feelings. Home means belonging not just to a physical location or a group of people, but to myself. When I say 'home,' I mean that I am resting in my own experience. I am resting within the recognition of who I am, not within the projections of those around me telling me who I am. This king of belonging is restorative care we can offer to ourselves."
"As I find myself sailing through my middle-aged years, it seems that I am becoming like the old church elders, always praying and fasting, watching and fighting. I used to rebel against becoming an old, praying Black man, but this expression is native to my flesh and bones, buried deep in my DNA. My ancestors have called me into the world; I consent to being a reflection of them."
"I also use this space to acknowledge that my body is an extension of the earth, and like the earth, it is a primary support - there can be no work without my body."
"I have known for years that as a descendant of enslaved people I would have to return, somehow, to the experience of the Middle Passage because, as Mother Alice Walker has taught, healing begins where the wound was made."
"She was both a youth and an elder. Her strength never faltered. She was both a mountain and running water, hurricane and gentle breath."
"Touching the earth reminds me that I am an extension of it. The ground feels like my own body. The water is my blood. The wind is my breath. The rain is my tears. The thunder is my anger... To touch the earth is to remember that the earth is alive, free, awakened, and feeling - that it remembers and mourns, that it loves and has no animosity toward us, that it can support us in getting free."
"My body is a loving extension of the earth. Stillness, stability, and a capacity for nurturing and growth are qualities that the earth and body share. When I die, I will be returned to the earth through burial or fire. My ashes will be scattered back to the earth, my Mother. When I walk on the earth, I am walking on my body. When I lie on the earth, I am lying on my body. When the earth is in trauma, I am in trauma. When the earth is colonized, I am colonized."
"I have the hands of people who had to mold survival out of earth; who touched the earth and prayed for food, built shelter from wood and brick, washed clothes by the creek, hauled and sewed, kneaded and braided, held babies, and dug graves for their dead. My ancestors and I link hands together across realms."
"When I am touched by others, they are transferring the essence of their lineage into my body. Just through one touch, I know what they have survived and what their songs are. I can feel their joy, how they have cried in their life, how they have wanted to be free. How we touch is an expression of how other people have touched us."
"My lips remember so many other lips I have kissed in pleasure, in friendship, or as blessing. My kisses have adorned so many bodies. The only reason to have lips is for this adornment."
"I have decided to get braces to further care for my teeth. It was an act of care for myself, and I have noticed how much more I smile and let the world see my teeth. Sometimes we need to do things like this because of how it can help us support our work of helping others. I wish that I could use my practice to transcend anxiety about my teeth, but sometimes we can take a quicker, more worldly path to reduce suffering."
"I feel the erotic when I close my eyes and shift my attention to my heartbeat and the way it reverberates within the essence of all phenomenal reality. The whole world is alive with my pounding heart. The masculine erotic is a life force; it is the point at which I start believing that things are workable and changeable."
"Darkness can be an expression of a different kind of clarity - one that invites us to consider how darkness isn't necessarily asking us to figure it out but instead is asking us to take care of it."
"Loving God is the only way to God in the same way love is the only path to liberation."
"In the New Saint's tradition, I define forgiveness as the experience of wanting the person that hurt me to experience the care they need to be well."
"Of course, disprivileged communities have had to develop a sensitivity to the needs of dominant groups to survive. Maybe we didn't really forgive dominant offender groups, but we had to pretend to in order to make the dominant groups reduce violence against us."
"I love you, but I don't trust you. I don't know how to say that when I look into your eyes. All I see are all my own unmet needs for belonging looking back at me. I know it was never more than just a moment, or a cuddle and orgasm, and yet I still want to run away from this. I get it now. I need more than what I taught myself to settle for."
"I am haunted by how we are born into this world beautiful ones and how that beauty gets broken up into little pieces. And then, broken up, we go about trying to collect the little pieces of our beauty while calling that gathering a life. It is the labor of re-membering not being that occupies our living."
"It's not just about me and this life or this moment; it's about everything. We have a responsibility to remember we are in debt to the beautiful ones who have made our living possible and full of potential. This recognition is how I choose to continue. My heart is full of sorrow and at the same time my heart is a vast ocean of care that can tend to the sorrow. If you don't get this, you will never understand why I do the things that I do."
"And although sometimes I am confused about what freedom feels like or if I am as free as I think I am, I know this for sure: I consent to this sacred work. I consent to the brokenheartedness, the rage, and the hopelessness, as well as to the joy, the gratitude, and the care. I consent to the weight of being healed and the responsibility I choose to get others well and free. This has been the only choice for me in this life. With the help of the saints, both old and new, I keep moving on."
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