Justice, Compassion and Ethical Mindfulness with Pamela Ayo Yetunde

Speaker 1 · 0:06Welcome everyone. We have uh Pamela Ayo Yatunde joining us today. So it's Pamela Ayo Yatunde, J D and T H D, and I had to ask her what that meant. It's a jurist doctor and doctor of theology. So Ayo is the author of uh Casting Indra's Nut, Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community. She's co-editor of Black and Buddhist, which is very highly voted and critically acclaimed. She was trawn for the Community Dharma Lord Program at Spark Rock Meditation Center. And she's the co-founder and chief of Buddhist Justice Reporter. You can find them at Buddhistjustice.com. And she's also an associate editor of one of my favorite magazines, Lions Roar, and also a great website. Io is going to be talking about uh the mindfulness of ethics, cultivating a posture towards justice.

Speaker 2 · 1:25And hello, everyone. I go by Io. I am delighted to be here. Sean and I were talking as we were getting to know each other a little bit. We were talking about how we are uh integrating all, trying to integrate all the parts of our lives, our uh histories, and that that's the work, right? So, in my view, um, whatever you have done in the past, whoever you were in the past, uh, all serves to do what you're doing now and what you will do in the future. So that's from my perspective as a pastoral counselor. Also, I told Sean, but maybe I didn't speak properly when I said I was I would try not to be too Buddhist-y, but that's subjective, right? For some people it may be too much Buddhism, for some people it may not be enough. But I do want to draw on some of the teachings that mindfulness comes from as it relates to the, let's say, the ethical groundwork that my mindfulness practices have come out of, whether it's um applied in a secular way or not. Okay. So justice, why justice for me? Why justice for me? And I want to hear about justice for you too. I'll just say that I began learning about advocacy, advocating for others, standing up for others when I was in an organization called the Brethren Volunteer Service. So I grew up in the United Methodist Church, but I had my falling out. And uh then later I had a particular kind of falling into another uh church tradition called Church of the Brethren. I wasn't a member of the Church of the Brethren, but I did join this volunteer service that they have, similar to the Peace Corps, but they call it Brethren Volunteer Service. And because I had graduated with a degree in journalism, they had one project overseas. I had to get out of the country. Uh, they had one project overseas that's that I thought, well, maybe I can do something because I have a law, uh a journalism degree. Uh, it was a position to work on a um news service in the Netherlands. And so I'm like, sign me up. I don't know a thing about the Netherlands. I know nothing about the subject of this news service, which was called disarmament campaigns about nuclear disarmament. This was 1985 to 87. So that the Berlin Wall was up. I mean, it was a cold war for real. Um, and I learned so much being a uh very sheltered person from Indianapolis, Indiana, uh, in the black neighborhood mostly. Um I learned about advocacy um from BBS. Then um I came back to the states and went back into BBS, uh, but in Washington, D.C. And the projects I worked on when I was in DC uh were with the Washington Office on Africa, and this was an anti-apartheid organization, lobby organization on the Capitol Hill, and then also um the American Civil Liberties Union, uh, ACLU. And while there, it occurred to me, the people I'm surrounded by seem so capable of articulating these issues that I care about. Um, but I'm not able to do that. But I want to do it. I want to be able to stand up for people. What do they have that I don't have? And it occurred to me, these folks are lawyers. That's why they can do it. So then I went to law school and learned how to be uh a more effective advocate. Then years later, actually, the very year I was graduating from law school, this was 1992, I had a cousin who had AIDS and he was dying, and he asked family members to come visit him. And they said no. And it was so shocking to me, it was so wounding to me because as you know, I grew up in the church. And my understanding of Christianity was that you serve people in need, and blood is thicker than water, and all this kind of stuff, right? And so um I visited him, spent four days with him. He uh eventually died in hospice, and I said to myself that I wanted to be the kind of person who could be with dying people, right? And so you can see why I have such a maybe mixed-up background. In law school, I learned that I want to be the kind of person who could be a chaplain to dying people. So that's sort of what goes into my justice orientation. Uh fast forward, then um to 2015. Trump enters the scene. Okay, and uh on a national political level, he was all already in the New York scene. Um, he became uh Barack Obama's main nemesis, really, starting up all kinds of conspiracy theories about uh his birth, his religion, so on and so forth. Um and then uh as a, I don't know, kind of bizarre twist, we go from having a man like Barack Obama as president to having Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. And shortly thereafter, after taking office, his administration goes right after the transgender community, reversing all the gains that they had made under the Obama administration. So I began writing about justice. Um I wrote about transgender spiritual care. Um and Sean uh mentioned uh black and Buddhist, and now I have this book, Casting Interest Net. Okay, so that's a little bit about me and why I am justice oriented, even as a mindfulness practitioner. I don't see that the two have to be mutually exclusive. But um to say that when someone says um mindfulness practitioners are not interested in social justice, you can remember this conversation, right? That's that's obviously not true. Um, and also when people say that uh that it is incon whether there are up that whether there are people who are mindfulness practitioners and teachers who are interested in social justice, um, it doesn't matter because mindfulness comes out of a tradition that is not about social justice. And that's also not true, right? And so what I want to do today is just kind of do a little myth busting around that. Now, this may matter to you, may not matter to you. Um, but uh from my perspective, not a perspective that everyone needs to share, but from my perspective, having been introduced to mindfulness, the concept of mindfulness and its practices in Buddhist traditions, in particular, uh the tradition of Tiknat Han, also known as the Plum Village Tradition, um, Soto Zen, through the Zen Hospice Project, where I was a volunteer, and also Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I engaged in uh in retreats and so on. The combination of those three things were like my introduction to mindfulness. So when I think about ethics, and I think it was Eugenia who talked about the importance of ethics. Um, what is the point of being aware if you're just going to be aware of the intention around hurting other people? What's the intention uh or what's the value of being aware if um you're just aware of the ways you hurt yourself and you have nothing else following that? Um, or the um away the ways that we are aware of, let's say, um, our narcissism, and we just, you know, we'll um continue to be narcissists. Ethics is part and parcel of the mindfulness um teachings and came out of, one might say might even come out of uh a necessity for um well-being. So I'm gonna be I'm gonna be Buddhisty. By by that I mean I'm not trying to tell people you need to be Buddhist. I'm just letting you know the context that these teachings came out of when they were introduced to me. So it is said that um mindfulness comes out of the tradition of um of this person um that was called and is still called the Buddha, who was a historical figure named Siddhartha Gautama, who um was near death from a variety of ascetic practices. And it was only after a little girl gave him some rice milk, so to speak, that um he began to come back to his health. And in doing so, then came to one of his first realizations, which is uh it's better to be in the middle of things, the middle way. It's better to have equanimity, which is something that we've talked about. It's better to be equanimous at peace, abiding in the middle, than to be stuck in a uh polarizing way of thinking, a diametrically opposed way of thinking, stuck in a polemic, um, which then uh clouts one's ability to take in the whole.

Speaker 3 · 11:38Right.

Speaker 2 · 11:39So one might say health, because it's been mentioned a few times, that mindfulness comes out of a tradition of taking care of oneself, right? Taking care of oneself. And to take care of oneself is a particular posture towards the ethic, or I'll put it this way, ethics, sometimes people say the study of ethics really is the study of how you take two really good, um, two really good positions, two really good alternatives, thoughts, what have you. And you have to make a decision between two really good things. That's what ethics is about. Trying to figure out what would what actions would produce the least harmful or the best outcome. That's that's what ethics is about. And so um we are living in, and it has been mentioned, we are living in a system. I think I'll use this as an example. Someone said, this administration, political administration, I took it, this political administration is pro-environmental justice. Now, whether you agree with that or not, if you compare it to the previous administration, you must know that it's truer than less true. It's truer than less true, which now reminds me of uh Tignat Han. And one of the first meditations that um that I learned from Tignat Han was you know the breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, and then the visualization that I the way I'm interpreting it now, I am at one with the mountains, I am at one with flowers, I am uh at one with streams, with every aspect in nature, and I am as solid, I am as free, I am as fragrant, all these things, right? Um, and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever experienced. That visualization. So to care for sentient beings and to regard non-human beings, sentient beings, as worthy of our love and respect and care is an ethical decision. It's an ethical posture towards justice. Why justice? Because there are forces that are disregarding the value of these sentient beings, disregarding the value uh that they have a place in our society, that they have value to our lives, um, and that uh from some theological perspectives, because it has been supported uh in some um Christian theologies, that human beings are at the top of all beings, and we have quote unquote dominion over all things, and because we have dominion over all things, we can do whatever the hell we want to those things. That mindset is the beginning of injustice, and it could be that one day someone's gonna think they have dominion over you, and the question is how will you use your mindfulness teachings if you choose to use them to uh adjust that attitude that um you know no, you don't have dominion over me, and I don't have dominion over you. We share all of this, and we need to negotiate how we're going to do it.

16:00Right.

Speaker 2 · 16:01I want to say something about uh governmental ethics that the mindfulness trainings come out of. And these are just a few uh governmental ethics that come out of the book or that are written about in the book called An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, written by Peter Harvey in 2002. So now imagine you're going back, you're going back in time. Even though you don't have to go that far back because people are trying to be kings in the United States today, if you know what I mean, right? And these king figures are trying to have subjects, right, who will do whatever the king tells them to do. We see this, we see it playing out right now. Okay, so let's go back in ancient times, ancient India, ancient Nepal. Um, and back in the day, and in many places in the world today, there's something called a king, right? There's something called a king. So mindfulness comes out of a time where we had kings on this planet. And um it was said in Buddhist ethics back in the day when there were kings in ancient times that a political leader should revere the Dharma, which would include mindfulness, right? That a political leader should be practicing mindfulness, right? Probably for some of the reasons why you think people should be exposed to mindfulness, and why you are practicing mindfulness, and why you have chosen to be an exemplar of the mindful way, because it makes for good leadership. It was also said that a good leader, a king, um, would rule with compassion and compassionate justice. In other words, if punishment needed to be meted out, it wasn't meted out in a way that would irreparably harm somebody, but to restore, right, to make good. Right. This is an ethical decision because, as you know, we I have in this you in this country, in the United States, I I don't know about other countries, but in the United States, the prison industrial complex is abhorrent what we do to people and then release them and expect them to be different. We ruin people in prison. Most people are ruined. So, because we don't support them on the outside. So a good leader would be paying attention, a good mindfulness leader would be paying attention to how do people develop when they've been incarcerated, when they are incarcerated and when they are released. It was also said that a good a good leader, a good king would look after all the people in his, and I will underscore him, his, he, because it's patriarchal, passed down from father to son, as the Buddha was in line to receive the the legacy from his father, right? But not after not all not only people, animals and birds too.

Speaker 3 · 19:33Right.

Speaker 2 · 19:34So as a mindfulness leader, right, are we also exhibiting compassion towards other sentient beings? And do people see that? That a good leader, a good king would renounce greed and also act to avoid or prevent poverty. This is the United States, y'all. Thrives on poverty. I don't know about where you all are. I don't know about Mexico. I don't know about New Zealand and Canada and Australia. I'm sorry, not New Zealand, sorry, uh, Australia and Canada, but give that some thought, please. Renounce greed and prevent poverty. Now, um, here's the juicy stuff right here that a lot of people say, no, no, no, but it's irrefutable. A good king would act with generosity and compassion over structural redistribution of wealth. Now, here's the thing: karma. It's one of the reasons why people sometimes uh say, you know, I I I prefer the secular path because there's too much woo-woo in Buddhism sometimes, this whole karma thing, right? Like if I have a lot of wealth, uh if anyone back in the olden days in the Dharmic view had wealth, it was because they were generous in their previous life.

21:15Yeah.

Speaker 2 · 21:16Right. Um, but we know also that there are many, many reasons why people have wealth. And a lot, a lot of times it has to do with exploitation of others. But the redistribution of wealth often um was viewed as something that's done through compassion and through acts of generosity, not through, for example, a coup, right? But through acts of generosity and compassion. Was also said that a government should allow for the practice of one's religion. Does that sound familiar? Sounds like the First Amendment to me in the States. Um, should try, a good king should try to avoid being the aggressor in war.

Speaker 3 · 22:09Wars happen.

Speaker 2 · 22:12Aggression happens, self-defense happens, but even in self-defense, the objective is not to become the aggressor. That's not the point. And then the last one I'll teach, uh I'll uh share for now is to be discerning. A good king, and I'm gonna say a good governmental leader should um be discerning about the connection between law and morality. In other words, what we see now, what we see now, should I say, what we see now, if we are paying close attention to our lawmakers, and in particular, uh uh, I will say, in particular, in the Republican Party, and then they would accuse the Democrats of doing the same thing, is that uh they are trying to legislate morality. And this going back and forth about who is the most moral takes the eye off the ball of the threats, the existential threats to all of us. And that is why social justice is important, and that is why mindfulness is important. Livia, I shouldn't preach, I shouldn't preach, but sometimes I do. But that's why mindfulness is important because we want to be aware. I don't need to tell you this, we need to be aware of how these decisions, how poor leadership, especially poor leadership at the top of the structure of our political uh situation, how it causes harm. How it causes harm. Someone said the media uh is acting in a way that um creates the perception that we are separate. And in addition to that, um leaders are turning us, actively turning us against each other, right? Making us believe that we are um innately or inherently conflicted, um, one against the other, and therefore one has to eliminate the other before they become eliminated. And this is why mindfulness is one of the most powerful practices uh we can utilize to come to the truth of who we truly are and who we can truly be for one another.

Speaker 1 · 24:51Thank you for tuning in to today's powerful conversation with Pamela Io Yatunde. Her journey and insights remind us that mindfulness is not only a personal practice, but also a tool for cultivating justice and fostering ethical leadership. If Io's words resonated with you, I invite you to explore how you can deepen your practice and share mindfulness with others in your communities through our mindfulness meditation teacher certification. Whether you're drawn to teaching mindfulness or leading meditations, or simply wish to refine your skills and being present with others, this program offers a supportive community and comprehensive training that gives you the international accreditation and professional skill sets to teach mindfulness responsibly. Visit mindfulness exercises dot com slash certify to learn more. Thank you for your mindfulness.