Practicing Self-Kindness During a Pandemic

The following is a summary of a teaching I gave at Dinh Quang Buddhist Temple in response to the question of how to sustain our daily practice during the pandemic. 

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The first part of the practice is just this: giving a compassionate, honest look at what we’re actually experiencing. A pandemic is something that brings us into contact with suffering, especially kinds of suffering we often avoid as a culture. And we also experience this suffering more frequently and intensely, and that’s something that deserves our kind attention. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s metaphor, we should be taking care of our suffering like we would a little baby.

Against Human Sacrifice: Reclaiming Self & Community Care

I shared this reflection on August 8, 2020 at Community Christian Church as a response to the commodification of self-care, the federal government's continued mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impacts on vulnerable populations, especially essential workers. It is lightly edited. 

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I have a difficult relationship with the term self-care. On the one hand, it’s been wonderful seeing self-care become more widely discussed and appreciated. In many cases, it’s become part of our everyday conversations with each other, and there’s more acceptance than ever that self-care is not only legitimate, it is essential to both personal and social well-being. On the other hand, self-care has become (predictably) commodified, and self-care is increasingly discussed in terms that have a price tag in time, money, and resources that (also predictably) make it mainly available to those with the privilege of financial and social stability. Self-care is also increasingly weaponized against people, such as working class folks, who are told that they need to do a better job of self-care so that they can endure what are essentially unhealthy, unjust working conditions. But the goal of self-care is not to become better at accommodating injustice. 

Guided Meditation: Justice & Joy

I offered this guided loving-kindness meditation as part of a healing justice session for participants in the ACLU Trans Leadership Table (2020). 

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Begin by getting in touch with your body. 

Find a way to sit, lie, or stand where you feel stable and centered. Listen to your body, finding the balance: relaxed without slouching; alert without being rigid. It may help to take some deep breaths, or to stretch and relax. 

“Thievery from the Top Down”

I delivered this talk, with a focus on connecting police brutality with economic injustice, at Community Christian Church on June 27, 2020, as part of an ongoing series of reflections on police brutality, racial injustice, and our responsibility to dismantle White supremacy. It is lightly edited. 

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     Indiana Jones is perhaps an unexpected starting place for a reflection like this, so bear with me. I confess to loving the movies as a child – the music remains incredible, and who can resist a little bit of Harrison Ford’s charisma, not to mention the memes about punching Nazis? I wish that was the whole of it, but we also get a glimpse of a worldview that has shaped and ruled the world for hundreds of years. And while I would love to ruminate on one of Indiana’s more adorable catch-phrases (“Why’d it have to be snakes?”), the one that really applies here is: “It belongs in a museum.”

     In Indiana Jones’ case, it is easy to root for the least terrible White guy. I mean, Indiana really just wants to protect priceless artifacts from the Nazis, private collectors, and evil cultists. All of the movies’ bad guys have motives that are obviously repugnant; they set a pretty low bar. And then we have Indiana Jones, who doesn’t even want to profit off of the looting of cultural and historic relics; he just wants to preserve them. What could be wrong with that? But when I watch these kinds of films now, what stands out to me is 1) how invisible non-European cultures and people are, and 2) how ubiquitous the assumption that White people have a legitimate claim to own and preserve what belongs to others, and to accumulate profit and power at the expense of others, really is. It’s so ingrained that it hides in plain sight.

TLT 20 Interview

The following is the text from an interview I did with the ACLU-MO's Trans Justice Program, in connection with my role as an advisor on the Trans Leadership Table 2020. It is lightly edited. 

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Please introduce yourself. 

Hi! I'm Katya; I'm a genderqueer/nonbinary person living in southwest Missouri. I wear a lot of hats, but most of them relate to my work in community development, with an emphasis on conflict transformation and reflective practices. I’m a co-director of a tiny nonprofit dedicated to making these tools and skills available to communities that don’t usually have access to them. 

The Ongoing Work

I wrote the following article at the request of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, as part of a series of articles on cultivating community committed to the “ongoing work of living lives of mutual care and accountability as a community.” It is lightly edited. 

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The first article in this series brought our attention to human diversity as “a source of tremendous richness.” And that's appropriate and wonderful, because there’s a lot to celebrate! But there’s also this other thing, the “ongoing work of living lives of mutual care and accountability as a community.” Because we can also stumble over the differences.

Imagining Other Possibilities

The following is edited from a talk I gave at Community Christian Church on December 8, 2019. 

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When it comes to social justice, calls for accountability can feel like a threat. The idea that our own actions can harm someone else, and especially that we might be unconsciously acting out the scripts of unjust systems, doesn’t sit well in the human mind. And when people set healthy boundaries, and say, as they should, “You have to stop; you can’t do this,” the human mind can easily experience that as social rejection. What is being said is, “We are committed to creating community that is safe, supportive, and empowering for every person.” But what we, in our defensiveness, may hear, is, “We will cut you off if you don’t change, and don’t kid yourself if you think you are somehow so special or important that you can avoid the consequences of bad decisions.”