Real talk on living joyfully and coming home to ourselves—with reflective self-care practices to help us on our interconnected journeys of liberation
Join authors Marisela Gomez, MD and Kaira Jewel Lingo as they share how the Dharma’s timeless teachings support their work for social and racial equity and justice in their work and personal lives as they discuss their recently released book, Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation. We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, November 20, 2024 from 11:30 AM – 1 PM ET for this virtual event.
Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation
“This powerful trinity of Black authors invites us into the living room of their hearts, affirming who we are with earthy straight talk, textured diversity, and wise tenderness.”—Ruth King
Join three friends, three Black women, all teachers in the Plum Village tradition founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, in intimate conversation, touching on the pain and beauty of their families of origin, relationships and loneliness, intimacy and sexuality, politics, popular culture, race, self-care and healing. No subject is out of bounds in this free-flowing, wide-ranging offering of mindful wisdom to nourish our sense of belonging and connection with ancestors.
Healing Our Way Home offers insights in embodied mindfulness practice to support us in healing white supremacy, internalized racial oppression, and social and cultural conditioning, leading to a firm sense of belonging and abiding joy.
Words of Praise
“As a White-bodied person, I am enlarged by Healing Our Way Home—reading it has brought smiles and tears, understanding and inspiration. These wise teachings guide us to reconnect with our spiritual roots and bring a courageous presence into our contemporary world. The book itself is an activity of love, like an intimate warm conversation at the kitchen table.”
—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance
“This precious book is a profound gift of generosity, insight, and healing, offered to us by three of the most compelling voices in Buddhism today who invite us to join them in an intimate conversation on the transformative process of bringing our whole selves to the practice of mindfulness.”
—Brother Phap Hai, author of The Eight Realizations of Great Beings: Buddhist Wisdom for Waking Up to Who You Are
“This beautiful offering is a direct and courageous response to the ancestors’ call to heal the generations before and those who will come after. Having created a sacred circle, to teach and allow us to listen in, pays honor to the indigenous ways teachers taught in ancient times. All we need to do is listen clearly with our hearts. What is being shared here goes beyond the stories and follows a winding path towards joy and liberation.”
—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, author of The Shamanic Bones of Zen, The Way of Tenderness, and The Deepest Peace
“In a world that too often leads with the mind, Healing Our Way Home is a true gift from the heart. It transmits the ancient wisdom of the dharma through story and narrative, painting a beautiful picture of what wisdom looks and feels like. I found myself constantly smiling as I moved through these pages. The paths that the three authors took in their lives is a gift to the dharma as much as the dharma has been a gift to
them.”
—Kazu Haga, author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
Authors
Valerie Brown
Valerie Brown, True Sangha Power (pronouns she/her), is a Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition, ordained in 2018, and a member of Religious Society of Friends. She transformed her twenty-year, high-pressure career as a lawyer-lobbyist into human-scale, social-equity-centered work, guiding leaders and organizations to foster greater understanding, authenticity, compassion, and trust.
Marisela B. Gomez MD
Marisela B. Gomez, MD, True Manifestation of Reverence, is a co-founder of Village of Love and Resistance in Baltimore Maryland, organizing for power, healing and the reclamation of land. She is a meditation and Buddhist teacher, physician scientist, and holistic health practitioner. She lives in the lands previously stewarded by the Piscataway, Lumbi and other tribes, colonized as Baltimore Maryland in the USA. She is the author of Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore along with other scholarly, political, and spiritual writings.
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Kaira Jewel Lingo teaches Buddhist meditation, mindfulness, and compassion internationally, with a focus on activists, people of color, artists, educators, families, and youth. She began practicing mindfulness in 1997. An ordained nun of 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, she is now a lay Dharma teacher based in Washington, D.C., leading retreats in the U.S. and internationally, and offering mindfulness programs for educators and youth in schools, as well as individual spiritual mentoring. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s, Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and helped to start and develop Wake Up Schools, cultivating mindfulness in education. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and spiritual practice and is a certified yoga teacher and InterPlay leader. She teaches each year at Schumacher College, an ecological college in the United Kingdom. In addition to her roots in the Zen tradition, she also practices and teaches in the Insight tradition, and is an affiliate teacher for the Insight Meditation Community of Washington DC. She contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book, Real World Mindfulness for Beginners, from Callisto Press.
Event Host
Elli Weisbaum
Elli Weisbaum, BFA, MES, PhD, has worked internationally facilitating mindfulness workshops and retreats within the sectors of education, healthcare and business. She is based at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor (teaching stream) in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health Program (BPMH), with a joint appointment to the Department of Psychiatry, in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. She is cross-appointment to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in their Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME). At the heart of her teaching and research is an interest in cultivating learning and occupational environments where all members of the community can flourish and thrive. Her work draws upon research from the fields of neuroscience, education, healthcare and the workplace to explore how the scientific evidence base for mindfulness is being integrated and operationalized across key sectors of society. Past and ongoing collaborations include working with UofT’s Faculty of Law, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Faculty of Engineering, Rotman School of Management, Physical Therapy Department, the Ontario Hospital Association, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to integrate mindfulness into programming for faculty, staff, clinicians, patients and students. She attended her first retreat with Zen Master and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh at the age of ten and has continued to train with his international Plum Village community. Elli’s novel background in both academic research and traditional mindfulness practice provides a distinct approach to her ongoing work teaching and researching in the field.
Event Details
Book Launch: Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
11:30 a.m.- 1 p.m. ET
Online: Zoom
If you would like to purchase Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation use discount code U0T20 for 20% off the ebook version or printed copy at Parallax Press.
Thank you for your interest – registration is now closed.
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New College Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health wishes to thank Parallax Press for their collaboration on this event.
