DIVISION
WITHIN
nity dharma leader.” One day, she
hopes to leave her job to be a fulltime meditation teacher.
“Hopefully, to people like me,”
she says.
‘THE EXPRESSION OF OURSELVES’
SIMS’ largest meetings are on
Tuesday nights, when about 100
experienced meditators come to
St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in
Capitol Hill for a weekly “sit” and
dharma talk. A sit is exactly what it
sounds like. In a semi-circle, members sit on cushions and in chairs
in silence for 40 minutes. While
most people would get lost in their
own heads and daydreams in such
a situation, the idea in meditation
is to avoid any complex thoughts,
often called “hindrances.” Instead,
the meditators are supposed to become aware of their own bodies and
breathing, and pay attention to how
one interprets the sounds and feelings around his or herself.
On a recent Thursday, Sala was
one of seven non-whites in the
crowd. Facing the group was Rodney Smith, a nationally known
Buddhist teacher and former hospice caretaker who founded SIMS
19 years ago. After the meditation,
Smith, who was trained in Thailand and Myanmar as a monk, gave
HUFFINGTON
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a dharma talk, a Buddhist teaching, on one of his favorite topics:
the Buddhist view of the body versus the spirit. Meditators, he said,
too often get caught up in comparing themselves and their own spiritual progress to other people, a
negative vortex of practice. For an
hour, Smith told the crowd to let
go of attachment to individuality,
be it self-assessment based on outward appearances, career, money,
power or something else entirely.
“What we are doing in our spiritual journey is we’re transforming
what we thought we were, which
was the expression of ourselves in
form, to spirit, the expression of
ourselves formless.”
But where would that
leave race?
“You can see differences, I can
see differences, but does it have
to create an anxiety or stress? I
would say no,” Rodney, a silverhaired, slim 66-year-old, said later. But in the people of color sanghas, that’s precisely the reason
many give for joining: They feel
anxiety, stress and a sense of being
rejected by white Buddhists or are
unable to find a connection to the
established sanghas.
“So the people of color, they
feel they are at the stage of their
development where they feel they
need special groups of people
leading them who are the same