True compassion can only arise in a relationship between equals. If we are looking down on ourselves or somebody else who is experiencing suffering, that’s not compassion. It’s pity. True compassion never loses sight of our own or others’ inherent capacity to meet the circumstances of our lives when we have the appropriate support. If we’re lucky, our friendships can provide the space and time we need to recognize the wounds we carry, to be supported into our own resilience, and to reflect on our experience in a way that leads to emotional integration and spiritual growth.

  A few years ago, I called my mom on the anniversary of Tamir Rice’s tragic death. As you probably remember, Tamir was a twelve-year-old Black child who had been playing with a toy gun outside a recreation center in Ohio. A white police officer, Timothy Loehmann, fatally shot him within two seconds of arriving on the scene. Loehmann was fired from his job, not for having killed an innocent child, but for having lied on his job application. He was never charged with a crime of any kind though, and was later hired to work as a police officer again for another Ohio town.

  Because my mom had recently moved to Ohio, a few hours drive from where Rice was killed, I asked if she had plans to attend a memorial that day to celebrate his life and to protest how African American communities were being terrorized by the police. She wasn’t attending any marches, she said, but she did remember Tamir. She thanked me for reminding her of the anniversary. His death had made her very, very sad, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

  “Hey, Katie,” she began, shifting the subject a little. “I was reading this interview with the Obamas, and they were discussing what it was like to have ‘The Talk’ with their daughters. Did you know about ‘The Talk?’ It’s um…this talk that Black parents have with their children to prepare them for encountering racism.”

  I laughed. “Yes, Mom. I know about ‘The Talk.’ ”

  “Well,” she said. “I don’t think I ever gave you all that talk. I guess…” She hesitated for a moment and then continued, “I guess you guys learned about racism on your own?”

  I thought of myself and my siblings. I nodded and pressed the phone to my cheek. “Yeah,” I said. “We did.” My mind scrolled through the countless racist incidents I had experienced in my life and never mentioned to her.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’m sorry I didn’t have ‘The Talk’ with you. I didn’t know I needed to.”

  I always knew my mom loved us and thought we were beautiful, smart, and incredible human beings. Our family photo was the first thing you saw when you walked into her office, hanging on the wall behind her desk. Four shining brown faces surrounding hers. Strangers sometimes told her how amazing she was to have adopted all four of us together. She would laugh. “Oh, no. I’d never adopt four kids. These are my babies!” she’d proclaim as she looked at us adoringly.

  It wasn’t until my mom apologized for not preparing me for the inevitable experience of racism that I realized how much the absence of that discussion had hurt. It wasn’t just the experiences of racism that I was still healing from. It was also the loneliness of feeling unwelcome to share those experiences with my mom, the person that my young self loved and trusted more than anyone in this world.

  I definitely did figure a lot of things out on my own, and this “I’ll figure it out myself” mentality created a great deal of self-sufficiency, for which I’m grateful. It also ingrained the stubborn belief that people who don’t share my identity not only aren’t interested in the details of my experience in the world, but they also aren’t capable of understanding them. Even the people who love me the most.

  My mother’s apology was a catalyst for me. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t even know how much I needed it until she offered it to me. The fact that it came unprompted shook up the assumptions I’d made about her capacity from my earliest experiences trying to talk to her about race. Namely, she would never get it. That apology didn’t immediately erase the fog of silence around race and racism that had hung between us for decades, but it did make way for the many conversations we’ve had since, which have been enlightening and profoundly healing for both of us. It made me realize I’d given up on her, which is itself a form of looking down. And, it restored my respect for how, in the context of committed relationships, people can and do continue to grow and change over time.

  We won’t always be so fortunate as to have the people who harm us, whether directly or indirectly, come back to us and spontaneously apologize for what they did or didn’t do. Because many of the harms we experience in relationships with loved ones are unintentional, the people who have caused us harm might not even know they’ve done so. What seems totally obvious to us may have missed the other person completely.

  If it feels safe, and if our friendship is strong, going directly to the person who hurt us and sharing what we experienced can open the path forward. It’s simple, but not necessarily easy, to start with something like, “When I saw/heard/felt you _____ (do this), I felt _____ (this way about it).” It’s simple, but not necessarily easy, to listen to their response and then to make a request: “In the future, I’d like _____ (this instead).” What a huge act of friendship: to respect someone who has harmed us enough to trust that they can actually bear to hear about it, and to respond with friendship in return.

  I know that expressing how I’ve felt harmed can open a whole floodgate of emotion in me. Sharing something that didn’t work for me, requesting a change in future behavior—these things fall under the category of setting healthy boundaries. Because setting boundaries feels vulnerable, we can get angry that we even have to do it, frustrated that our friends don’t already know how we want to be treated. Of course, anger is a totally appropriate response to feeling hurt and then feeling like we have to be the ones to bring it up. Making friends with ourselves in these moments—noticing when there’s agitation or discomfort in our bodies or harshness in our minds, and then doing our best to be nonjudgmental and compassionate with ourselves—this is how our practice can help us tolerate the vulnerability of vocalizing that we’ve been hurt, asking for what we need, and seeing if our friend can meet those needs.

  When it comes to addressing harm without looking down on each other, the Buddha’s principles of spiritual friendship encourage a radical turn toward tending the relational wound. It’s a practice that is wholly unlike the crime and punishment approach that sanctions harm as restitution for harm, and the belief that doing so can bring us peace. The dharma way is much more akin to restorative justice, a process rooted in Indigenous wisdom that is less concerned with punishing an offender and more concerned with understanding the effects of harm and conflict for all involved as well as uncovering the patterns that led to that harm in the first place.31 Restorative justice asks questions like, What was the precise nature of the harm that occurred? What are the needs that arose as a result of the harm? And perhaps most importantly, Whose obligation is it to meet those needs? To answer those questions, we must engage in a process of self-reflection that strengthens the love and wisdom we cultivate within a meditative life.

  Forgiveness is not something we do alone, looking down on the person who has harmed us as if from a mountaintop of spiritual attainment. As with compassion, forgiveness is an intimate exchange between equals. In the best of times, it is the fruition of a process of engagement in which the person who has been harmed is safe enough to fully express their experience, and the person who caused that harm acknowledges their behavior and takes action toward change.32 Sometimes, for some harms, it’s possible to forgive only after we see that the change has been carried out. Sometimes, for some harms, we may be able to come to peace around a hurtful experience even if forgiveness still doesn’t feel possible.

  What do we do if the person who harmed us isn’t available to hear what we have to say? Or, if they don’t acknowledge their behavior or won’t change? What I love about meditation is that, through practice, we have the opportunity to meet some of the needs for ourselves that weren’t met by others. Deep listening, patience, acceptance, affirmation, a gentle, warm, committed presence. Treating ourselves really, really well in our meditation practice is one way of tapping into the sense that we deserve to be treated really, really well off the cushion too. When we attend to what hurts with care, moment after moment, a new connective tissue forms within us, covering the places that feel broken with a strong balm of wholeness and love.

  There’s something about having confidence in our capacity for self-healing after harm that makes us more available for the healing that can come through relationship. When the process of repair begins with inner friendship, then our peace of mind doesn’t hinge on the words or actions of others. If we’re not demanding it or depending on it, we may be better able to receive a heartfelt apology when and if it comes, and to recognize whatever transformation comes after it.

  Of course, restoration comes in many forms. It comes in moments when we turn to comfort an old hurt and realize it doesn’t hurt so much anymore. It comes in creative expression, in moments of dance, song, or visual art when what’s inside us becomes seen, heard, and shared. It comes in healthy relationships, in times when we’re finally able to give and receive all the love we need. It comes through the natural world, attuning with the lessons of trees, animals, bodies of water, and soft spots on the earth. It comes by way of mystery, be it divine intervention or cosmic coincidence. And, it can come through justice, through a transformation in society that corrects the harms of the past and present, and sets us firmly on the path to a harmonious future.

  WHEN WE WITNESS HARM

  Our dominant day-to-day experience of harm may be neither as perpetrator nor as survivor of harm, but instead as a witness to the harm that exists all around us. Hearing a couple shouting at each other in the next apartment. Meeting the eyes of a child who was just harshly disciplined in a grocery store. Seeing a video of another police shooting pop up on your social media feed. Being aware of immigrants and refugees camped out at borders and detained in cages. As we enlarge our practice of radical friendship to include all beings everywhere, how are we to respond to the hurts that don’t affect us directly, that we haven’t caused directly, but that break our hearts?

  How can we, in radical friendship, show up for the liberation of people we don’t even know?

  Our world may not be more unjust than it was at the time of the Buddha. But having access to information from the far corners of the world means we are more aware of injustice than we ever could have been back then. The flood of images from near and far can overload our senses and make us feel relegated to the role of bystanders—watching people we care about suffer and feeling unable to stop it. The frustration of powerlessness can, if it goes on too long, sink into hopeless indifference. If we feel we can’t do anything about what we see, we might decide it’s better just to focus on ourselves, and maybe our close circle of friends or family, and close our eyes to the rest.

  In socially engaged Buddhist traditions, the practice of consciously being in direct contact with the suffering in our world is called bearing witness. It is the same radical shift toward tending the wounds in our hearts, but expanded to the heart of society. When we intentionally bear witness to the harms of discrimination, poverty, addiction, disease, or hunger, we subvert our instinctual response to turn away from what we fear could happen to us if we get too close. If circumstances were different—if we were born to a different family, with a different mental or physical makeup, with a different gender or skin color, in a different country or class—we could absolutely be in the other person’s shoes. Recognizing that can open us into the truth of selflessness, the truth that our experience in this life has very little to do with our specialness or individual merits and very much to do with circumstances that could have easily been otherwise.

  When I first learned about bearing witness as a practice of socially engaged Buddhism, I was not impressed. I was annoyed. The whole thing sounded distant and remote to me, like the stereotype of the detached, navel-gazing meditator who removes themselves from the cares of the world and its people. We don’t need more people to just sit there and watch, I thought. We need more people who are prepped and ready to do something.

  What I now understand is that this process of bearing witness in a sustained and conscious way is the exact activity that makes it possible to take wise action. If we can’t tolerate the discomfort of bearing witness with open hearts, we will ultimately act in haste—not so much to interrupt the harm, but to relieve our own discomfort at witnessing it. The actions we take from that place may serve others in a superficial way, but mostly they serve to relieve our feeling of embarrassment at not being able to help.

  Our willingness to bear witness is an important part of being in equal relationship with those we care about, especially when they are down-and-out in some way. It is equally important that we don’t just stay witnesses. In an interdependent universe such as ours, there is no such thing as a bystander. Bearing witness is a practice of clearly seeing suffering or harm and deeply feeling into the truth of those experiences. That moment of clear sight is the end of denial. We must use it as a springboard for compassionate action: action that interrupts cycles of harm, either by addressing the needs that the harm created, or by preventing the harm from happening in the first place.

  Over the last few years, there’s been revelation after revelation of ongoing sexual abuse within several Buddhist communities I used to practice with. There was a stretch of a few months where I had a hard time even opening my emails. I wouldn’t receive one for a few days, and then several would arrive at once. Kate, I’m overwhelmed, not sure how to process this, where to go, what to do, when can we talk? My body ached, reading them. I laid in bed, waiting for something more useful to say than Me too, honey. Me too.

  I talked to a lot of people in the months that followed. Former students and employees of the accused teachers and leaders got in touch to process their grief. I felt honored that they reached out to do so with me. Friends and colleagues who, like me, had taught alongside some of these teachers, got on calls and shared stories, trying to piece together what we had missed. I was haunted in particular by my interactions with a benefactor of one of the organizations I’d worked for. I saw him at least once a year at our holiday parties, and even more as I moved into leadership there. He was pushy with his views about how our projects should run. He was equally pushy with his body—hugging too long, grabbing my hands, or wrapping his arm around my waist, casually but firmly, without invitation. I thought he was awkward and creepy. But because he came with the approval of teachers and community I trusted, I’d bracketed my gut reactions and laughed at his bad jokes instead.

  This was just one of several cases where I bore witness to harm caused by colleagues and friends, and then rationalized it away. And this, I think, is how communities become complicit in the abuse of power. We excuse behavior we know deep down isn’t right because the offender comes highly recommended, or has done so much good in their lives, or because we have something to gain by being close to them. No one else is raising a fuss, so we don’t either. When the truth finally comes out, as it almost always does, it feels like we’re waking up from deep, disturbing sleep—disoriented, a bit confused, but relieved to be finally awake.

  When the people I’d been in community with started coming forward with stories of harassment, assault, and abuse, I wondered about what my role could have been in interrupting it. I recognized how tragically low my expectations had been concerning the people who had committed these harms. I realized just how much I expected people in power to abuse it in some way. When I witnessed them pushing the line, there was a part of me that just felt glad they weren’t blatantly crossing it, at least not in my view. I looked down on them in that way, by not demanding better from them.

  I needed accountability too. We all did.

  When we fear conflict in our relationships, it’s usually because we don’t have a process in place to meet and manage those conflicts. And, when there are accountability issues, it’s the same—there’s often no structure in place that can support safety, dignity, and connection for all people involved while addressing the impacts of harm and the systems that made that harm inevitable. The fear is that if we take responsibility for our part, we’ll lose everyone.

  In the years since these incidents came to light, I’ve been profoundly inspired by visions of community accountability articulated within the transformative justice movement. Transformative justice is a political framework and approach that seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence.33 It is especially focused on transforming systems in which harm repeatedly happens, and in building new systems that produce different results than the ones we currently have.

  I’ve been especially inspired by the notion of “accountability pods” articulated by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. In the times of global pandemic, we started using the word “pod” to refer to a group of people who were trusting each other to hold the same standards of care, and with whom we could take off our masks. Really, accountability pods aren’t so different. As Mia Mingus describes them, “Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you’ve done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused.”34 They are radical friendships in that when we enter into them, we go beyond surface-level interaction and ask that our friend support us through the hardest of times, with the confidence they can do so and not lose sight of our bodhicitta along the way. It’s a conversation that reminds me of what a Christian leader once described to me as the establishment of “spiritual consent” in his community. Essentially, they agree to witness one another and to speak to their friend directly if they see their shared ethical standards being stretched or disregarded. With love, they promise to hold themselves and each other in integrity, and to welcome reflections and feedback about how they’re doing with that.

 

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