“When you begin to love yourself, you begin to set other people free.”
- Lama Rod Owens, It Gets Better: The Radical Path of Befriending Ourselves
Reading time: About 5 minutes
During a service for the Trans Day of Remembrance, a Jewish person born in Israel and relocated to Canada as a child spoke about their complicated relationship to home. I can’t remember her exact words, but she said something along the lines of, “We do not find home by taking it away from someone else.”
Buddhism talks a lot about home leaving. It’s right there in the origin story of the Buddha taking off right after his son is born, leaving his wife, Yaśodharā, so he can go figure out this human being thing. Hero’s journey, and all that. Folks justify how he abandoned his family, how “it was normal then” and without this journey he couldn’t have discovered the Fourth Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path.1
Of course, he comes back eventually, after six years away. He brings the teachings and does all the transmitting and Yaśodharā is one of the people to wake up. But she didn’t have to leave home like he did. She just heard the teachings and was like, “Oh, yeah. Right. Life IS suffering and being attached to outcomes definitely doesn’t help. Gotta work with my mind and stabilise that because life is unpredictable and chaotic! Makes sense!”
Yaśodharā got it. Her husband abandoned her with their infant child, after all.
The Buddha was a person. He was a human being. He wasn’t a god or some otherworldly deity. He didn’t have perfect politics. He didn’t even have an insight that no one else had had before. He just happened to be really good at sharing it well. He built a framework for wisdom that made it accessible to a lot of people without any of them having to go on some epic journey to get it.
That wisdom?
While it can be human nature to cause and experience the most extreme, unimaginable harm and suffering, it is also human nature to embody the deepest, unlimited compassion.
I know it feels like you are just one person and that what you are doing can’t possibly matter, but I promise you, it does. Remember, the Buddha was also just one person.
What we do and don’t do always matter because we are interconnected. Nothing happens in isolation. And so yes, it matters that you wrote an email or called a representative, or faxed them about a ceasefire, about preventing a book ban, about ensuring bodily autonomy and access to affirming care. It matters that you re-shared a post calling for a free Palestine and trans liberation and disability justice. It matters that you continue to say genocide is wrong and bodily autonomy is sacred and Black Lives Matter. It matters that you make yourself heard even when some people will tell you you shouldn’t get to have an opinion because the “situation is complicated” or “it doesn’t apply to you” or “you aren’t directly impacted.”2
It matters that you notice how much it hurts to witness the worst humanity is capable of. It hurts because you know we are equally capable of the most beautiful, astounding things too, and yet this violence and hatred is what our fellow beings are choosing. It matters that you feel the hurt regardless of how personal any of it is. We don’t have to have a lineage cut off by genocide or be rendered second-class citizens because of a disability or to have refugee status or be trans or be disconnected from our own culture3 to know that these things are hard and painful.
To be human is as much about being able to separate ourselves from others as it is being able to relate to others. We get to make the choice, each of us, on if we will give in to fear, paranoia and ignorance, or if we will work for hope, love and liberation.
Another aspect of Buddhist teaching is that everyone, every single being, has Buddha nature. Which is to say, we are all capable of waking up, of seeing the fullness of our shared reality and living from a place of liberation. This is not to say that we can’t or won’t cause harm. It is to say that to be human is to be as capable of ignorance as we are of the profound realisation that all beings deserve to be free.4
We make home by being comfortable in our body and mind and we do that by leaning into our capacity to love deeply. When we choose love, when we side ourselves with being at home in the complexity of our shared humanity, it is not passive. It is a radical act to choose to love and it is a radical act every single one of us is capable of.
We get free by loving the fullness of our humanity, starting with ourselves.
We get free by listening when our gut says, “No. This is not okay.”
We get free by naming an atrocity an atrocity and refusing to be bystanders.
We get free by taking care of each other.
We get free by protecting each other.
We get free by loving.
May all beings be free.
K.
The thangka depicted at the top of this post is a crowdfunded commission actively in progress. As of this post being published, in addition to the patron who commissioned it, six individuals have contributed a total of $441 towards this work. Contributions help cover the costs of supplies, time, imaging, having prints made, and will help fund publication of a collaborative community ‘zine celebrating trans joy. To support this project you can e-transfer funds to faunawolf ‘at’ gmail ‘dot’ com or through this paypal link.
Below is the post where you can read all about this commission and what contributors will received when the piece is done:
Not like now, when husbands and fathers never abandon their wife and kids.
You are impacted and so are they even if they are ignorant of it, because again, that interconnected thing.
Shoutout to my Métis kin!
And remember that All Beings includes you too.