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Many of you turned out on Saturday to make wisdom and compassion visible in the streets and squares of our wounded nation. Whether you protested, or tended your life, family, community, or land in any of so many good ways, thank you. Our lives in the Dhamma—formally as Buddhist or informally as those who care for well-being in the world—compel us to bring our passions, care, attention, and tenderness to bear on the world we find ourselves in. We need to keep doing this, in all sorts of ways, over and over, because saṃsāra is never fixed. Partly (non-dually) it’s never fixed because it isn’t broken, but more poignantly, it’s never fixed because it was never unbroken.

It’s so tempting to cling to one or both of the great Christian myths that animate our culture: the first that there was once perfection and goodness, with humans in harmony with non-human nature, but we “fell” from that perfection into the violence and scarcity that is the world we know; and the second that there is a perfect good future awaiting those of us who do—and believe—right in the present. If you idealize an imagined “natural” pre-industrial or pre-agricultural past, you may suffer from the first view, and if you consciously or unconsciously believe that activism can bring us to a stable, permanent, peaceful future you may be influenced by the second. Wisdom in social justice understands that neither view is healthy or sustainable.

The Buddha understood the paradigmatic expressions of the constricted heart—greed, hatred, and delusion—to be fixtures of the world, without perceivable beginning. There is neither a perfect past to restore nor a perfect future to attain. This leaves us with only two expressions of the medicine known as the Dhamma: harm reduction for others, and letting go for oneself. The heart of freedom for the Buddha is letting go of grasping, and nobody can do that for anybody else, so we know a fundamental solitude and individual responsibility for our own path. At the same time, we are relational animals—compelled to connect, protect each other, and help those whose suffering we can ease.
Buddhist practice, since it proposes neither past nor future utopias, is a beautiful religious system for those animated by social justice who want to decolonize activism from Christian doctrine. Meditation then functions as a bridge between the self-care and resilience needs of social action and the liberative inquiry of contemplative and renunciate practice.

Continuing with our 2025 theme, “Dharma Life Reset,” we’ll start thinking in these next few weeks about daily meditation and its role in sustainable spiritual practice, well-being, and our lives in the worlds of relationship, work, and community. I talked last week about meditation as self care, and this week I’ll explore meditation as tending and restoring the nervous system through stillness and the alchemizing balance of inner and outer listening that is Kuan Yin Dharma.

SEAN OAKES
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English, living on Pomo ancestral land in Northern California), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received Insight Meditation teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. Sean holds certifications in Somatic Experiencing (SEP, assistant), and Yoga (E-RYT 500, YACEP), and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.

LINKS
Website: seanfeitoakes.com
Community Page: In It To End It
YouTube channel: In It To End It
Spirit Rock: spiritrock.org/teachers/sean-oakes
Insight Timer: insighttimer.com/seanoakes

GIVING
All of Dr. Oakes’ independent teaching is offered on the model of Gift Economy, in the Buddhist tradition of dāna, inspired giving. Support of our teaching and community is gratefully received. Thank you for your generosity.

Donate:
seanfeitoakes.com/gift-economy

Blessings on your path.