This beautiful glimpse into the mind of a modern Zen priest shows us how we can cultivate and experience peace through silence, stillness, and practice. “A balm for our troubled hearts and minds . . . soulful, warm, and welcoming, and—at times—heartbreaking.” —Lion's Roar While there is suffering in the world and in each of us, there is also the possibility and the experience of peace. As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel—a Zen priest and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh who has written at length on race, gender, sexual orientation, and homelessness—writes in the introduction: “I have testified many times of my suffering. Before I die, I must speak of peace.” The Deepest Peace is a poetic, lyrical ode to the ways contemplative practice illuminates daily life. It is at once a window into Zenju’s personal practice and an invitation to begin our own.
“What does liberation mean when I have incarnated in a particular body, with a particular shape, color, and sex?” In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege. Manuel brings her own experiences as a lesbian black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us. This is a book that will teach us all.
Opening to Darkness is a profound exploration of darkness, drawing on the
ancient wisdom found in Zen Buddhism and African and Native American
indigenous traditions. It is through this spiritual journey that we disrupt
how we relate to darkness and blackness and our constant longing for light.
A singular work of poetic prose exploring otherness and belonging—and what it means to be truly at home. Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness, and Belonging examines the interface between inner and outer sanctuary, and the ways they affect one another. “Sanctuary” is the home we can return to when our lives are under threat, where we can face what's difficult to love, and have a place where we can truly say, “I am home”—and spiritual teachers often emphasize sanctuary’s inner dimensions, that “our true home” is within. “Homelessness,” in turn, can be viewed as a forced experience or one in which there is a spiritual void in being or feeling home. Drawing from her life as a Zen Buddhist priest whose ancestors labored as slaves in Louisiana, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel explores the tension between oppression—based on race, religion, ability, class, orientation, gender, and other “ghosts of slavery”—and finding home within our own hearts. Through intimate personal stories and deep reflection, Manuel helps us see the moment when the unacknowledged surfaces as “the time we have been practicing for,” the epiphany when we can investigate the true source what has been troubling us. This insightful book about home and homelessness, sanctuary and refuge offers inspiration, encouragement, and a clear-eyed view of cultivating a spiritual path in challenging times.
""I often felt my ancestors at ease with my practice of Zen. I felt they had led me through other traditions to this practice of ritual and ceremony. I had participated in rituals and ceremonies of African and Native American traditions but was not trained completely in those traditions. I had not been fused into priesthood with my Orisha (spirit) over my head in the African tradition. While I was a drum and song leader in the Native American Sundance tradition, I had not been a sundancer or pipe carrier. In my long history with the black church, I saw that subtle shades of African culture existed there. Yet my church, black as it was, did not have musical instruments, nor any swaying, clapping, or dancing. The Church of Christ, often mistaken for the Church of God in Christ, grew out the Restoration Movement of the early nineteenth century. Led by Thomas Campbell in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, it had a focus on communion, repentance, baptism, and a cappella singing of hymns-a kind of "Christian primitivism or apostolic," meant to be as close as possible to the word of the Bible in the times it was written. Almost anything with an African flavor was suppressed in such an environment. The influence of this "bare" kind of Christianity was instilled in me at a young age. I am sure it contributed to my ease with Buddhism, in particular Japanese Buddhism, where simplicity is at the heart of the practice. I left the church, my first tribe, for many reasons, including the denial of women to preach. I was clear in my soul that teaching was in my horizon, and I would not be trained to do such at my conservative black church. The place in which my ancestors reached me was in the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and Zen, where I was led to just be. The ancestors needed me to be still and breathe as they approached with what they had to offer my life. It would be these ancestors who guided my Buddhist walk. Buddhism was a path in which I found myself communing with ancestors and being guided by them every day, and not only in occasional ceremony.""-- Provided by publisher
