DIVISION
WITHIN
of development and that can’t
be pushed or forced upon them.
And at some point they do, like
Tuere, she just naturally started to
come [to the broader meditation
groups]. But it may take long.”
After almost a decade of meditating on her own, Sala began attending the main sangha at SIMS
in 2001 at the invitation of a friend.
She was immediately put off.
“We walked into this room and
there were 60 white people. No
black people. No people of color,”
she said. “I did not want to stay
… We had been there only five or
10 minutes, and a woman in the
group began asking a question
and talking about how she had
transcended her body, and was
looking at herself from the outside. It was way too ‘out-there,’
for me and it just seemed to reflect a whole different outlook
on meditation than what I was
used to. It was what I stereotyped
white sanghas as, you know, a little hippie, a little self-involved.”
SPECIALIZED RETREATS
The goal of “more diverse dharma,”
as Smith calls it, has proliferated
across the nation in recent years.
Race is just one factor, though the
most easily seen in many cases. In
HUFFINGTON
03.17.13
places such as New York and the
San Francisco Bay Area, though,
diversity has become an ever wider
effort. At the East Bay Meditation
Center in Oakland, Calif., there are
Buddhist groups for gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgender meditators, people with disabilities and
those with allergies to perfumes.
“P EOPLE SAY WE’RE GOING
AGAINST BUDDHISM. THEY ARE
KIND OF RIGHT. ONLY KIND OF.”
In New Mexico and Arizona, Buddhists and Native Americans have
joined to launch meditation centers that combine teachings from
both traditions and include traditional Native healing rituals. In
western Massachusetts, meditation communities have formed
“diversity councils” to recruit
minority practitioners. In Atlanta,
meditators thought separate meditation groups were too divisive, so
they launched a broad campaign
against all “the ‘isms.”
“My hope and imagination
would be that we would have a few
years of retreats for people for color and then there would be a much
more obvious period when we were