Dr. Kamilah Majied’s Joyfully Simply: Black Knowledge and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Dwelling (Sounds True) invitations us to train playful curiosity. The e book’s expansive embrace of contemplative practices helps wellness and justice for folks from all religious traditions and cultural backgrounds. “Effectively minds nurture justice and simply minds nurture wellness,” Majied writes. Drawing deeply on Buddhist teachings and Black artistic expression, Majied guides us on a path for how one can reclaim and interact with a holistic pleasure, one which acknowledges and integrates the realities of struggling, however then flowers in distinctive expressions as we absolutely embrace our tradition. This e book is Majied’s invitation for us to embark on a transformative quest, one that may elevate our consciousness, deepen our resilience, and put together us to take part within the emergence of a world that’s freer, extra joyful, and extra simply.
Therapeutic Our Means House: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Pleasure, and Liberation (Parallax Press) is a singular “trialogue” between Black Plum Village dharma academics Valerie Brown, Marisela B. Gomez, MD, and Kaira Jewel Lingo. Although Brown, Gomez, and Lingo share lineage, trainer standing, gender, and tradition (in various levels), their particular person lived experiences and sophisticated views add to the numerous twists and turns discovered on this e book. Integrating Black mental thought into the dharma, they cite bell hooks, Cornel West, Malidoma Patrice Somé, angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, Jasmine Syedullah, and extra as influences. Some of the outstanding options of this e book is the trialogue’s creating friendship and appreciation for one another. The audio system mannequin respectful communication, displaying curiosity regardless of their familiarity, whereas avoiding feigning familiarity about experiences that aren’t shared. This e book illustrates that making any sangha a deep effectively of refuge requires devoted religious buddies.
In Lifting as They Climb: Black Ladies Buddhists & Collective Liberation (Shambhala Publications), Toni Pressley-Sanon celebrates six phenomenal Black girls who’ve elevated and expanded the Buddhist custom. Writing, “I’m a witness to their scars,” Pressley-Sanon explores the autobiographical writings of Jan Willis, bell hooks, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, angel Kyoto williams, Spring Washam, and Religion Adiele. Invoking the intimate follow of self-revelation, every lady’s story unapologetically “speaks to the significance of centering one’s private expertise as a part of a dedication to collective liberation.” These girls transmute their private ache and increase their private energy by drawing on a broad spectrum of religious traditions and practices together with Christianity, shamanism, activism and organizing, divination, African and Indigenous beliefs, animism, and embodied follow. This e book is a cornucopia that lifts up the tales and embodied teachings of Black girls who’re illuminating liberatory methods of being that dharma follow makes doable for all.
Trauma-informed Buddhist trainer Valerie Mason-John’s First Assist Equipment for the Thoughts: Breaking the Cycle of Recurring Behaviors (Windhorse Publications) is a e book centered on mind-body follow, which asks, “What ought to we do once we are hurting?” Mason-John demonstrates how one can come house to our our bodies each once we’re distressed and once we are relaxed, in order that we will have our personal emergency medical technician of the thoughts to assist us establish and work by the disgrace we really feel when what we’ve tried in life hasn’t labored. Drawing on Buddhism, mindfulness, the performing arts, psychology, and physiology, they use mnemonics to assist readers bear in mind the follow. This quick e book affords greater than a Band-Assist method to overlaying over a scar; it’s a software for self-diagnosis and a salve for the weary-hearted.
Rock star Tina Turner, one of many world’s most well-known practitioners of Nichiren Buddhism, described chanting the daimoku (Nam-myoho-renge-kyo) as life-changing. Her dramatic story of private transformation is informed by Ralph H. Craig III in Dancing in My Goals: A Non secular Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans). This formidable account attracts on media profiles, interviews, articles, documentaries, and earlier biographies of Turner’s life, whereas additionally situating Turner’s religious journey inside broader understandings of American metaphysical faith and African American non secular historical past. Documenting what Craig calls “Turner’s combinatory non secular repertoire,” this e book travels from the Black Southern Christianity of Turner’s household house and the religious naturalism of her maternal grandmother, by the parlors of European psychics and astrologers, and into the hidden visitor rooms, dressings rooms, and stadium live performance levels the place Turner finally practiced her Buddhist religion. Dancing in My Goals is a tribute to the alternatives for rebirth, that are born of impermanence.
“Welcoming is our true nature,” writes Gaylon Ferguson in Welcoming Newbie’s Thoughts: Zen and Tibetan Buddhist Knowledge on Experiencing Our True Nature (Shambhala Publications). Persevering with within the custom of masters Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and Chögyam Trungpa, Ferguson affords an experiential information for religious growth. He invitations us into deep reflections on Zen’s historic ox-herding photos, which present the levels of a practitioner’s progress towards enlightenment. Utilizing clear and accessible prose, he discusses every picture from “In search of the Ox” to “Being within the World.” In an effort to domesticate the bottom of our understanding of the trail, Ferguson additionally gives an iterative train of welcoming follow on the finish of every chapter. A beneficiant providing of wealthy reflection and easeful follow, this e book invitations us to enter into intimate alternate and to inhabit the spacious meadow that’s the direct expertise of our true nature.
In bell hooks’ Non secular Imaginative and prescient: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist (Fortress Press), award-winning journalist Nadra Nittle affords each the novice reader and the longtime fanatic distinctive perception into the folks and private struggles that influenced the religious growth of well-known feminist scholar bell hooks. Nittle quilts collectively formative tales from hooks’ life, guiding readers on a journey by her explorations and critiques of Christianity, Buddhism, and different approaches to spirituality. Broadly surveying hooks’ writings and celebrating the recognition of All About Love following hooks’ demise in 2021, Nittle traces the evolution of the deeply integrative religious method that finally rooted hooks within the “transformative energy of affection,” and by which hooks asserted love’s important position in countering interlocking programs of oppression. We come to grasp bell hooks as a strong lady of religion who reimagined extra liberatory approaches to therapeutic, self-realization, spirituality, and relationships, and we be taught why hooks finally got here to view all her choices, private {and professional}, as religious work.
Within the superbly curated assortment bell hooks: The Final Interview and Different Conversations (Melville Home), we witness bell hooks’ artistic and mental brilliance by her conversations with seven writers and editors. We uncover hooks’ reflections on race and feminism, Buddhism, in style tradition, love and relationships, political and patriarchal domination, and on the primacy of place and the Appalachian values that made her. In these interviews, which span thirty years, we find out how hooks challenged materials definitions of success, pushing past educational, feminist, and religious theories to raise the immediacy and relevance of lived expertise. She known as for sensible instruments that “give folks methods in on a regular basis life for justice” and that increase our particular person and collective capacities for self-determination. By these dialogues, we see hooks integrating private narrative, partaking in self-critique, and sacrificing notions of privateness for the upper functions of collective progress and collaborative alternate. “Revolution should start with the self, she wrote, “however it needs to be united with some type of social imaginative and prescient.”
