Radical friendship, p.1
Radical Friendship, page 1
PRAISE FOR
Radical Friendship
“A skilled, natural storyteller and teacher, Kate generously shares her humanity and journey of fears, tears, and awakening as a mixed-race Dharma student, activist, and teacher. This is a rare opportunity to receive the gift of deeper understanding of a multilayered, heartbreaking, and heartwarming journey accompanied by integrated wisdom.”
—GINA SHARPE
“Radical Friendship connects the Buddhist teachings to universal human experience by unraveling the narrow bandwidth of white supremacy within Western interpreted and colonized dharma. A radical teacher that lifts veils of privilege, oppression, and fragility (greed, hatred, delusion), this book invites and allows the dharma to permeate into all of our diverse lives that matter.”
—LARRY YANG, author of Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community
“Radical Friendship is a wise, ennobling, sanctuary of a book. It invites our heart to go deep into friendship, justice, love, and conscience. It reminds us of the beauty we can create with one another.”
—JACK KORNFIELD, author of A Path with Heart
“With love and rigor, Kate Johnson offers a timely roadmap for healing and transformation. Through fierce honesty, compelling storytelling, and trauma-informed practices, she reminds us how to build relationship across difference and find freedom in every moment. I’m so glad she wrote this book.”
—DAVID TRELEAVEN, PHD, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness
“This is a thoughtful and compassionate exploration of the meaning of friendship and its practice in today’s confused and contentious world. Basing her exposition on an ancient Buddhist text, Kate Johnson offers us many precious nuggets of practical wisdom that can enrich our spiritual life, deepen personal relationships, and sustain us in ways that are both profoundly meaningful and fulfilling.”
—VEN. BHIKKHU BODHI
“Radical Friendship has arrived on time! This book is relevant, on point, and apropos for the world we are living in today. Kate Johnson has provided a thought-provoking synthesis of Buddhist understanding and the politics of social justice, race, class, gender, ableism, and sexual orientation. She points to the many ways we might honor the spaces we occupy through identity without interpreting our differences as further proof that we are separate. She invites us to understand what freedom could be possible by applying this to relationship. Her perfectly chosen words and bigness of heart point us toward clear comprehension of what is possible if only we surrender and let go into the perfection of love—love for ourselves and love for others, buoyed by compassion, equanimity, and courage.”
—DARA WILLIAMS
“In Radical Friendship, Kate Johnson examines the Buddha’s teaching on the seven qualities a true spiritual friend should embody. The book describes her journey as she sets out to become a true friend to herself and others. Johnson offers a fresh and timely interpretation of spiritual friendship informed by her study, her practice, and life experiences.”
—SHARON SALZBERG, author of Real Happiness
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
2129 13th Street
Boulder, Colorado 80302
www.shambhala.com
© 2021 Kate Johnson
Cover art: Signet/Shutterstock and LivDeco/Shutterstock
Cover design: Daniel Urban-Brown
Interior design: Kate Huber-Parker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For more information please visit www.shambhala.com.
Shambhala Publications is distributed worldwide by
Penguin Random House, Inc., and its subsidiaries.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnson, Kate, 1981–
Title: Radical friendship: seven ways to love yourself and find your people in an unjust world / Kate Johnson.
Description: Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001496 | ISBN 9781611808117 (trade paperback)
eISBN 9780834843240
Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations. |
Self-acceptance. | Relationship quality.
Classification: LCC HM1106 .J648 2021 | DDC 302—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001496
a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
To my mother, Ann
&
my daughter Maple
CONTENTS
Practices
Introduction
(1) Friendship as Freedom
(2) Give What Is Hard to Give
(3) Do What Is Hard to Do
(4) Endure What Is Hard to Endure
(5) Tell Secrets
(6) Keep Secrets
(7) Don’t Abandon
(8) Don’t Look Down
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
E-mail Sign-Up
PRACTICES
Making Friends with Yourself
Metta Meditation
Wise Reflection
Four Noble Truths Reflection
Endurance through Praise and Blame
Mudita (Sympathetic Joy)
Wise Inner and Outer Speech
Listening Meditation
Tonglen
Writing the Community Ideal
Equanimity
Introduction
This is a book about finding your freedom, finding your people, and the possibility that these are actually two parts of one and the same spiritual path.
It’s a book about friendship as both a fundamental human relationship and a fundamental attitude of heart and mind with which we can navigate the world around us. Friendship as an inner fulcrum upon which all our actions can reliably hinge, a compass to offer us direction when we’re lost, and a shield to protect us.
This is also a guide to reopening spaces for collective friendship, even friendship at the societal level. Of course, whenever we are relating to another human being or community, we are bridging a difference of some kind. Our survival in an unjust world will depend on our capacity to be, feel, and move in right relationship with all various backgrounds, identities, and lived experiences that exist within us and between us.
The idea for writing this book began, as all growing things do, with a seed—in this case, a talk at a Buddhist conference in spring 2013. The event had come under fire in the previous year for promising audiences “the emerging face of Buddhism in the West,” and delivering a roster of speakers that was almost entirely white and male. In the following year, the organizers were doing their best to make things right by increasing the number of presenters who were women and people of color. I was one of them.
Just a few months earlier, while I was on a two-month silent Buddhist meditation retreat, a Black teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. Because I’d given up reading, writing, and talking while away on retreat in deep solitary practice, I’d had no conscious knowledge of what had happened. But in my meditations over those two months, I experienced terror like I had never known before. I was so fearful, I could hardly put one foot in front of the other to leave my room. I figured it was some sort of purification, a release of all the unmetabolized fear I’ve felt in my life, and the fears of all the generations before me that feed into this one. It wasn’t a bad way to make sense of things, and maybe not even a wrong way, but I know now that it wasn’t the whole story. I believe I was sensing in to something much bigger than myself.
On the ride to the bus station on my way home from the retreat, my taxi driver informed me. I heard Michael Brown’s name for the first time, and learned that he had been unarmed, murdered, his body left bleeding in the street for hours. For the people of Ferguson, Missouri, who had been terrorized by white supremacist police officers for decades, who had seen countless family members, friends, and loved ones beaten or killed by those officers, Brown’s death was a breaking point. When the Black residents of Ferguson went out into the streets to express their grief, they were assaulted with tear gas and rubber bullets by police officers in riot gear. Activists, artists, healers, and others from around the country had gathered to support the mourning community in Ferguson and to defend Black lives. The events that unfolded after that murder exposed to the world what some Americans had already known or suspected: the illusion of a post-racial society was exactly that.
As all this was unfolding, I had been sitting in silence for months somewhere in Massachusetts, trying to gather my mind. On that taxi ride to the bus station, the irony hit me. I had originally started meditating to deal with multiple sources of stress, not the least of which was the pervasive stress of being a mixed-race Black person in a violently racist society. I kept meditating because the practice had begun to heal the suffering of separation I felt inside—the separation from myself, from the people I had loved, and from the world around me.
And yet, there was something fundamentally isolating about the approach to practice that I had been taught at the meditation centers where I’d trained. Center
I was deeply grateful for the transformative meditation practices I had learned at those centers, and I also knew that what they offered was not everything I needed to get to the deep freedom I dreamed of. As the uprising that affirmed Black Lives Matter swelled and blossomed, it became so very clear to me that if our meditation practices weren’t actively liberating us from white dominance and other forms of oppression, they would very soon cease to be relevant. Collective liberation wasn’t going to happen in silos where solitude and silence are the norms. To achieve freedom from structural violence in society, we would need to begin using our personal practices as the foundation for wise relationships within our communities. And frankly, the Buddhist communities I was a part of were failing at that. I had been harmed, had witnessed harm, and had probably harmed others countless times in these well-meaning spaces. For all our talk of mindfulness, compassion, and liberation for all beings, the supremacy that pervaded these communities remained somewhat unspeakable and largely unaddressed.
I knew I wanted to deliver this message at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, but I was terrified to say these things to the still mostly white, mostly male audience there. I knew the mere mention of racism made some white folks uncomfortable, and that discomfort could lead to unsavory reactions. My credentials could be called into question. My statistics could be challenged and torn apart. I could be dismissed—not because I was wrong, but because they didn’t like what I had to say. I spent most of my preparatory hours trying to find the right words, the right voice, the right stance, so that my listeners would actually hear me. It was a tremendous labor to try to put myself into their perspective, to try to see myself through their eyes, to anticipate how my message would land.
I opened by saying this:
I’m thinking about [this talk] as one statement in a conversation that for some of us is ongoing. For some of us, we’re just kind of jumping into the conversation right now. I’m talking to you not as an expert, but as a friend, as a community member, as someone who cares…1
As a friend, I spoke about mindfulness practice as a tool for waking up to implicit bias—the kind of snap judgment that could lead a police officer to murder an unarmed child. I quoted studies, I offered up my own experiences, and I made the case that waking up to the dynamics of power and oppression, in ourselves and in our communities, is a profound spiritual practice in its own right. I shared my conviction that, as practitioners of Buddhist meditation, our training could uniquely position us to uproot racial bias and other forms of delusion—if we were willing to apply our practice to those particular forms of suffering. I expressed my disappointment that together, we had unintentionally created spiritual gated communities that were more about staying comfortable than becoming free.
To my amazement, the conference-goers were totally into it. As that morning’s session concluded, dozens of people formed a spontaneous breakout group to continue the conversation about undoing racism and other forms of oppression, both in our spiritual communities and in ourselves. I joined the circle in the hopes of listening in. Eventually, the group turned back to me, looking for answers.
“What do we do?” they wanted to know.
“Let your hearts break,” I told them. I wanted them to stop and feel—not to rush into action before truly absorbing the scope of the current reality of which many of them had just scratched the surface.
Their questions, though, remained alive in my mind. What is the practice that can wake us up to the dynamics of privilege and oppression that exist within us and between us? How do we ever connect authentically across the differences that our society has so painfully divided us by?
WHY FRIENDSHIP?
When I was approached by an editor to write a book based on the talk I gave at the conference, I knew the appropriate response was yes. First of all, that’s just what you’re supposed to say when someone asks you to write a book. But I also saw it as an opportunity to continue the conversation that had been unfinished at that Buddhist conference some years before. The short talk I gave had been mostly a call to action, a request for that particular (mostly white, mostly male) audience to apply their mindfulness practices to dismantling racism and other forms of oppression at the level of thought and perception. But, I knew there was so much more to explore in terms of the actual practice of liberating relationships—in our words, behavior, and community culture. In my teaching life, I had been exploring the possibilities of the Buddha’s teachings on spiritual friendship as a framework to support this activity of showing up for each other’s freedom—spiritually, yes, but also socially and politically. Even in an unjust world. Even across difference. Even after generations and generations of harm.
What I didn’t know was how much the writing of this text would put me through the wringer of deeply examining my own friendships with individuals and relationships with communities over the years. In the writing, I began to recognize what a profound impact living in societal structures marked by violence and domination had on my capacity to connect with other people, and also with myself. I also began to recognize just how personal my obsession with friendship is, and why those questions from the white conference attendees would not leave me alone.
The first time I learned that my race could be the site of separation between me and the people I loved, I was four years old, surrounded by plastic toys floating in warm suds. My mother was rinsing my hair by submerging a bowl under the water to fill it, lifting it up, and supporting my neck while she poured it over my tipped-back head.
“Mom, am I Black or white?”
No response. I wiped my eyes to clear away any shampoo bubbles before I opened them. In my memory, my mother was still, her neck held long and stiff, and the rinsing bowl was hovering midair.
“Who asked you that question?”
“A girl at school,” I replied. We had been playing side by side on the swings. She had leaped off at the top of one particularly big swing, flying briefly through the air before landing on all fours, wood chips flying everywhere. A highly respected playground move. She turned, made a funny face, and we laughed and laughed.
When we stopped giggling, she asked if I was Black or white. I didn’t know. She told me she needed to know whether or not she could be friends with me, so I should go home and find out and let her know tomorrow.
My mother laid her forearm over the rim of the tub as she listened and rested her head on it. I twirled her silky hair in my small hand.
“You’re not Black or white,” she murmured. “You’re tan. You’re beautiful. And you can play with whomever you want.”
Now, I might have been only four, but I knew that “tan” wasn’t a thing. It definitely wasn’t a thing I could take back to that Chicago playground in the early 1980s. Not a thing that would give me or anyone else a sense of who I was and where I belonged. I could see that this question of Black or white was one that stressed my mother out, one that she didn’t have answers for, so I didn’t ask any more questions. I was a Black biracial child growing up in a violently segregated city. I had a Black Honduran father and a white American mother who were desperately trying to shield me from the fiction of race and the fact of racism that was all around us. Even on the swing set. I did my best to let them.
In the end, I don’t remember what I told the little girl back at school or whether we ended up playing together. I do remember what I learned from her, though: Some of my lighter-skinned classmates were being told by their families, even at that early age, not to hang out with Black girls. I learned that we live in a world where skin color matters and where our friendships might depend on it. And, I learned that being honest about my experiences navigating a racist world would only upset some people—though I didn’t yet know why.
