Keeping Faith in Kindness with Suryagupta Dharmacharini (London Buddhist Centre)

How can we respond to suffering without being overwhelmed by it? Can kindness be a catalyst for change? And how do we keep faith in kindness in today’s world, which all too often feels far from kind?

In this episode, we hear from Suryagupta Dharmacharini – chair of the London Buddhist Centre – who shares her journey to Buddhism and to leadership, and how she has kept faith in herself and her community along the way. 

We reflect on the role of kindness in a world grappling with armed conflict, far right rhetoric and divided communities. Suryagupta argues that kind does not mean weak, but offers us a way to see the world differently as well as a vital reminder of our interdependence. 

Find out more about the work of the London Buddhist Centre here. 

Read more about WIN’s book ‘Keeping Faith: 20 Years of Women’s Interfaith Network’ here. 

Keeping Faith: A How-To Guide was created as part of Women’s Interfaith Network's 2024-2025 Keeping Faith Programme. Read more about the programme here and be the first to hear about upcoming events and ways to get involved by signing up to our newsletter. Views expressed on this podcast are the speaker’s own and may not reflect the views of Women’s Interfaith Network. 

Hosted by Maeve Carlin

Produced by Maeve Carlin and Adam Brichto

Edited by Adam Brichto

Executive Produced by Lady Gilda Levy

Theme music composed by Jamie Payne

Logo and Artwork designed by Jasey Finesilver

Support from Tara Corry

Transcript

Maeve Carlin: I’m your host Maeve Carlin and today we’re speaking to Suryagupta Dharmacharini, the Chair of the London Buddhist Centre – a hub for Buddhist practice in East London since 1979. If you’ve got a copy of our book, Keeping Faith: 20 Years of Women’s Interfaith Network, you might also remember Suryagupta from her chapter on Keeping Faith in Each Other. 

In this episode, Suryagupta shares her journey to Buddhism and to leadership, as the first woman and first black chair of the London Buddhist Centre, as well as what it looks like to keep faith in kindness in a divided, conflicted world that all too often feels far from kind. 

Suryagupta argues that kind does not mean passive, but can be a place of real power, and we explore the challenge of staying in touch with our interconnectedness without being paralysed by the depth of global suffering. 

So, let’s jump in to our conversation with Suryagupta Dharmacharini. 

Welcome to the podcast Suryagupta. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Oh, it's great to be here with you, Maeve. Thank you for having me. Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: Oh, we're so excited to have you. Um, I'd love to start by hearing a little about your journey to Buddhist practice and to the London Buddhist Centre. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Okay. Um, well, I think the first thing to say is that I didn't plan to become a Buddhist.

It wasn't even in my awareness. Buddhism wasn't something I really knew about. Although if I look further back, I can see little signs that sort of took me here. But it was a really a series of events really that were quite sort of life changing for me, that eventually led me to firstly think I need some answers.

I don't understand how to live well in this world and how to make the most of my experience. So, and the key one that I often t talk about is the one of me on the plane. So I was on a plane where it was running into difficulty. And everybody on the plane was really scared and nervous and praying.

There was lots of praying on board 'cause it was coming back from the Philippines and it’s quite a strongly Catholic country. So lots of rosaries I remember. And crying and the, the staff on board were also looking very scared. So the combination and then telling us to kind of be in order, like stopped to stop, to stop crying, stop shouting, you know, which didn't have that, their desired effect of course.

And I was just terrified. I just was like, “I'm too young. I'm too young to die and I haven't made the most of my life. I feel like I barely lived.” At that point, at the height of my terror and fear, I remember looking out the window and seeing this very incredible sky. They had all the colours of the rainbows, oranges and purples and, you know, gold. And then there was this, this expanse of black in which there was this single star. And the whole scene just captivated me until I sort of at some point forgot that I was in this plane. I was just with the experience.

And eventually I came back to the plane and, you know, we were still dropping lots of feet. There was still shouting and crying going on, but I noticed that I was in a very different state. I noticed I was quite calm. And I still wanted the plane to land. I still had that, like “I want to survive this.”

At the same time, I really felt I could feel my breathing. I could feel my heartbeat. I felt really connected to my body. I noticed that my hands were no longer gripping the armrest. And then out of that space came these two questions which have really since then shaped my life, I would say.

And the two questions were how do I live so that when I die, I can die without regret? And how do I love? And somehow the, the two questions were linked, even though I didn't understand that at the time. And I sort of promised myself then that if the plane landed, I would go in search of those answers.

‘Cause I knew as well that I'm not the first person to think those questions. Somebody must have worked this out. And rather than me trying to spend my whole life, you know, going in all kinds of different directions, I just wanna follow someone who I have confidence has some answers here. 

And so that was the real catalyst really. The plane landed, came back to London. I then had other events, 'cause I realised then actually that I could have also forgotten that experience. I could have pushed it aside and gone, you know what, I'll come back to that when, you know, I've sorted out my career, sorted out, you know, where I'm gonna live. All the kind of big questions that one has in one's life.

 I know that there was a part of me that was like, oh yeah, well how are you gonna, how are you gonna get the answers there? You know, you've got other things going on. But then other events happened, you know, like a bit of a spate of an illness and, and various things that in the end I was like, okay, I need to go and search.

And I went looking at bookshops and couldn't relate to anything that I saw. I thought everything looked a bit weird. And my biggest thing was I don't want be weird. Whatever I do, I want to be able to just live like everybody else. I don't want people stopping me in the street. I don't wanna be one of those people with a megaphone in a shopping centre, you know, like, "follow me." I, I just had these visions of, you know, what looked outside of mainstream that I didn't want to be. 

So it was totally by chance. I was at my, uh, university and I was talking to a friend about all the experiences I was having internally and how it was shifting my perception, 'cause really I thought I need to find some meaning here. You know, like I want to make a difference in the world. That was very important for me. At the same time, I also wanted to be well and happy within myself and the two things seemed like they didn't quite go together. So I was telling her one day about this and I saw this guy. We were at the top of a long staircase and I was talking very intensely and she was just like, "oh, poor you", you know? She didn't sort of know how to really respond to the challenges I was having, so I was feeling a bit frustrated in our communication.

Anyway, I was on the top of the stairs and I noticed there was this guy walking up the staircase and he just was walking really slowly as if he was going nowhere. And the staircase was a busy big, you know, everyone's running up and down and everything, and he's just walking like a ballerina almost, sort of like, just slowly.

And I thought, what's he doing? He just caught my eye and every time I turned to look, talk to my friend, I looked back there, he was as, as if he was going nowhere. Eventually he came to where we were standing and put some leaflets down at the table and I watched him walk back the same way, you know, completely free of agenda, it seemed to me.

Anyway, I then looked down at the leaflets and it said creative communication workshop at this Buddhist Centre. And I thought, I dunno about the Buddhist Centre but I need to communicate, I need to find ways of communicating my experience. And really that's how I ended up at the Buddhist Centre. And it was completely, as I said, by chance. I went there for this workshop on creative communication. I never did the workshop, dunno what happened to the workshop. I just walked in and it was a meditation class. And at the meditation class, we were learning to just follow our breath, which I couldn't do. I just thought it was really difficult thing to do. But I was captivated by the whole thing, the whole scene. 

And then at the end, I picked up a couple of books and the book, two books I picked up. One was about healing. It was called Healing into Life and Death. It was a famous healer in America. And then one was by the founder of Triratana called Vision and Transformation. 

And it, the first chapter just described that it is quite human, it's quite an ordinary thing in a sense, for us to have these peak experiences, whether it's a life changing moment like I had in the plane, whether it's a death, whether it's a baby born, whether it's an experience of great ecstasy, doing something creative or nature. We have these peak experiences of our life, or challenging experiences whereby we start asking ourselves some really deep questions and we can no longer quite engage the way we did. We sort of step back as it were. 

And then the key thing, and I thought, “well, that's me. I, I've been through that.” But the key thing is what do we do with those experiences? Because they can fade, we can push them aside, we can forget about them. But what he was saying was that these key experiences, if we are inspired by them, they kind of can have a real effect on us. We then need to sort of live the rest of our lives and all aspects of our lives in accordance with that experience.

So for me, well, I thought, “Well, I've learned something about love and I've learned something about the preciousness of life and that it is not guaranteed. So what does that mean for me in my relationships, the way I work, the way I just live every day, how I see things? So that was me setting on the path really. 

Maeve Carlin: Wow. That's such a beautiful story and I love what you were saying about all these unexpected strands that kind of come and pull together in the end. That's really beautiful.

And you've now been the chair at the London Buddhist Centre since 2018. The first woman, and I think the first person of colour to hold that post.

I've heard you speak elsewhere about a reluctance to put yourself forward for that leadership role despite encouragement from those around you, which is a feeling I know a lot of women and other minoritized people can relate to. Can you share with us how you found your faith in yourself as a leader and how you keep faith in yourself now, eight years on?

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Wow, such a great question. I was the first woman chair, there had been another person of colour. The previous chair was from a British Asian background. But I was the first black person to be chair and to have to any kind of role really, in terms of institutionally, organizationally at the centre.

So yeah, I was very reluctant. I was a kind of "No way". And I think that was because I didn't see myself, I didn't see examples. There were very few, there still are quite few, uh, black people involved in Triratana, the movement I'm in, but also in the Buddhist world generally. You know, Buddhism hasn't really had deep roots in Africa or the Caribbean. So there isn't that cultural reference point that I could sort of lean to. 

Plus, you know, in our particular movement I'm in, there just weren't many women leaders of mixed settings. So I just didn't see what it would look like. I could see what it looked like if you were a man. You could be on a journey with each other, go on retreats together. You'd practice together, you'd live together. You know, all the previous chairs, I believe, all lived together at the Buddhist Centre.

And I just thought, well, I'm a parent. My son was a teenager at the time, you know, I don't live near the centre necessarily. I haven't seen any women in senior positions at the centre in terms of organisationally, apart from if they're supporting the women. I've seen that. But as chair, you really are the kind of CEO, you are the spiritual director. You have a number of different hats on. So I just didn't see it. And I just also sense that because I didn't see it, but also it hadn't been a live conversation, you know, around minorities or…it hadn't been a live positive conversation, let's put it that way.

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: But I thought, is there awareness around what it would be for me? So, so I really was like, “don't think I wanna do that, but I'm willing to support whoever does that.” So that's in the end why I, I sort of put, threw my hat in the ring, right at the last minute.

So I thought, you know what? It's an interesting - you have to just kind of go for a consultation process - I thought it's an interesting discussion. Let me just at least have the discussion and um, you know, it will inform me so I can support whoever is the chair. So I could see myself in a supportive role. So when it actually did happen, um, I was kind of in shock actually.

But at the same time I sort of describe it that I had two minds. I had this sort of ordinary mind, which was my sense of the limits, the sense of all the difficulties I would have in a context that just hadn't been used to that. I could see that quite clearly and I could see the problems I might have and I could see the challenges and I, who wants that? You know, who wants to go…? So that's my ordinary mind that wants things just to be kind of comfortable and, you know, within my known as it were. But then I did have what I call my sort of big mind, which is just that I wanted to serve, actually. I wanted to make a difference.

And that's been a theme throughout my life. Uh, I wanted to support others. I also wanted to kind of grow within myself. And this is not a, it wasn't a conscious thing, but in a way it was more like, I do know my known, I don’t know my unknown. So there was a part of me that was like, “just keep going.” I, I had this little voice going, “just do the next thing, just do the next thing,” you know. And so there I was, okay, I'll just throw my hat in the ring and just see what happens. Okay. What, what can happen, you know? Um, so that's what happened. 

And it was, to be honest with you, I mean, I don't talk about it a lot, but it has been very challenging because, you know, you are working with two things there, gender and race. I'm also, you know, working class background. One of our first homes was just around, down the road from the London Buddhist Centre in East London. So I'm sort of, uh, you know, had to face multiple different challenges in my life just through people not expecting a leader in this shape, in this particular, you know, body. And therefore not always knowing, you know, how to respond. And then also conditions not always being there to support as well. 

So yeah, I've definitely had some challenges and actually in, in some ways it's been very good for me because, you know, with those particular challenges, I realized that halfway through a certain point through I thought, “oh yeah, I've never really wanted to work in an mostly all white or mostly male organisation, have I?” I've made sure that my previous works I've done, I've been in mixed environments and suddenly here I am.

And so I think what kept me going was the same thing that's got me there in the first place. This kind of desire to grow. When I face a challenge, what am I learning about myself? What am I learning about others? What am I learning about the context and conditions? What am I learning about self?

Where are the limits that I'm facing right now? Because if I'm conscious of facing these limits, then it's like,“oh, there's some growth possible here then.” And then I really have, um, leaned very heavily on my meditation practice, the teachings. 'cause the teachings really say, you know, we've got this infinite potential. So if I'm going, “oh, I'm upset about this and I'm upset about that”, I was like, okay, well where is the growth? Where is the potential? Where is the actions as well that I need to develop that will support other people coming after me too? 

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: So I sort of see it two ways. It can be helpful for me in terms of my own growth. But if I see that there are limits that I face that other people will face, then how can I create conditions in this role that will make it easier for others? 

Maeve Carlin: Thank you for such an honest reflection there, Suryagupta, that was like really helpful. I think also what you said about, uh, only picturing the next step ahead. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: Sometimes I think that's so critical to taking that step into a space that is challenging and does encourage growth. If we imagine the full journey… 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Oh! 

Maeve Carlin: We're never gonna take that first step. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: And I think with that first step and the next step and the next step, what you are doing, you are deepening your sense of yourself. You're deepening in your commitment, your own courage, your own self-knowledge. You are also allowing as well the space for help and support. 

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Because sometimes as well, I had a tendency of thinking, “well, I should be able to do this by myself.” And it's like, well, no, you can't actually, you actually do have to rely on others. You do have to call in the supports wherever it's coming from. And it really supported me to do so, so I'm very, very grateful. It's an incredible thing to do to, to serve a community in the way, uh, that we do at the London Buddhist Centre. It's such a vast community of difference, of people at different stages of their lives and temperaments and personalities, and then we're sharing the teachings that have come from 2,500 years ago that are making it relevant to people now. And you see the transformation that people go through. 

So for me, it is always been like, well, you know, there's something around the cultivating faith and you know, you are called Women Interfaith Network. So what is faith? And for me it was like, well there's learning to be confident, learning to trust, we're trusting oneself, we are developing confidence through growing. And we are also then looking for support and supportive conditions. So really, we are not having to do this on our own. 

Maeve Carlin: I think the magic comes from when we lean on each other and when we listen to each other and learn from each other. And I think also that's something special about women's leadership often, I think, is that perhaps being more comfortable in looking to each other and leaning on each other and supporting each other. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. I think women, we more like to gather in groups. So I think for me that was a natural thing to lean into, you know, friendship groups and other people that were supporting me. Because it was a male dominated situation when I first joined, it was also like, well, I have to be open to support wherever it comes from actually. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Um and I have received a lot of support from, you know, members of the community, male members of the community, and senior members, you know, so as well. Yeah.

Maeve Carlin: Absolutely. And I think this feeds into my next question where you were talking about it's sort of hard to be something that you haven't seen in other people. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: And I know you've spearheaded programs at the London Buddhist Centre, including retreats and meditation circles that are led by and for people of colour. Why are spaces like these so important? 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Well, actually London Buddhist Centre has been running those events for way before me. You know, I went on my first person of colour retreat that somebody from the London Buddhist Centre led, you know, years ago. I think what I did and another colleague of mine who was a woman of colour chair of another centre, we realised that, um, those spaces had been pivotal for us, in terms of our growth. And we realised that we wanted to make them more available to lots of people, not just at our individual centres, but throughout the whole of our movement. So this is kind of what we spear headed particularly.

 And I think there are multiple reasons why people come along to those spaces and why I went along and still love them. Partly because, you know, you just see yourself reflected back. You know, I remember the very first event I went onto, 'cause I'd been at a centre where I was the only young person and only person of colour, that wasn't at the London Buddhist Centre, it was another centre. And that was fine. People were very friendly and I was kind of getting to know people and everything. But, you know, I remember when I went on my first person of colour retreat, I remember meditating, opening my eyes and just looking up and seeing other faces like myself. 

And I was like, oh, that's what I might look like. You know, because unless you're looking in the mirror, you don't see yourself, you know? And it was lovely. It was very beautiful. And again, and I remember particularly, you know, other black people and people of mixed heritage. I thought, oh, I just don't, you know, in all the literature and the images of Buddhism, I just didn't see people from the front of African Caribbean diaspora.So it was as kind of like, “oh, that's what we look like when we meditate.” And it was just lovely. So that was one very simple thing.

But generally it's like, when you're on retreat, when you're practicing, you're really trying to understand your conditioning. You're really trying to see what informs your being and why you are the way you are. And a lot of our conditioning is cultural, is racial. It's, if you are in a diverse setting, like I was brought up in the UK, in London. There's all kinds of different cultures there and I was trying to discover my own culture, but I was also learning to see what impact being in this context had had on me.

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: And some of that, not all of it, but some of it is to do with my experience of race. And so being in a space where, well, that was quite a common theme for most people, for everyone pretty much. 

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: You could just talk about it with ease, recognize that we all brought our own individual lens to that, and yet there were some common themes that runs through, you know, migration and racism and identity and learning to discover cultural roots when you are not in the place where your parents or grandparents might have been born.

You know, and all of that's mixed in with your own temperament, your own particular life experience. So in a way it just created a context whereby we could either just share that as it came up or just know that's part of somebody's story. So it is not like you always talk about that either. You know, we are practicing, we are doing the meditations, we are learning the teachings.

But if at some point for somebody in the course of their practice that becomes pertinent, that becomes something that they're discovering, then they know they have a space they can share that. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, that sort of shared language of experience and shared understanding sounds really important.

Well, the focus of our discussion today is keeping faith in kindness, which feels like something that we are in desperate need of in the world right now. Most of our listeners won't be familiar with Buddhist teachings, so can you share a little with us about the Buddhist perspective on kindness and the role it plays in Buddhist practice?

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah it's quite interesting. I think I went in search of the truth and how to live well and to love. Kindness has an image problem sometimes, I think. I think a lot of people think, oh, it's a bit weak in some way.Whereas the Buddhist perspective is it's powerful. It’s loving kindness and it's loving awareness. 

Yeah, there's a story of the historical Buddha. A woman came to him whose child had died and she was mad with grief and she kept the child on her hip. And she was going from person to person, saying, give me medicine for my child, give me medicine for my child. And they could see that she was just really lost. And then eventually somebody sends her to the historical Buddha. And he doesn't give her a lecture. He doesn't say, "Hey, all things are impermanent. Things change, let go!", you know? Or "there's something wrong with you". He doesn't do that. 

He says to her, yes, I can help. Go to a house and get a mustard seed. Let them give you a mustard seed. But the mustard seed mustn't come from a house where anyone's died. 

So she's just happy. She just runs to all the different houses of course. And they go, “yeah, here, you have a mustard seed. Yeah, sure. You know, go have a mustard seed”. And then they say, “oh, but has anyone died here?” And of course they start telling their stories, you know, “Oh, we just lost an uncle. Oh I've lost a child.” You know, all the stories come. And so of course what happens is she has her own direct experience of the truth of change and the truth of loss and suffering. Um, and she goes back to the Buddha and says, “oh, the work of the mustard seed has been done”, and she's able to lay her child down.

And it is such a powerful story for me. Uh, and I thought, his response was, in a way, there's two things there. There's awareness and wisdom. He understood the truth of things and there's also the great compassion for the fact of her suffering. Um, and in a way that's where it starts: loving kindness.

It starts with, we are human. We are born into this world and we are trying to make it work based on everything around us, based on what we've been told and conditioned. But actually we will come against things that don't work in our lives.

And we often end up thinking it's something I've done wrong, something wrong about me, or we think "Fix it. Come on world, come on other people fix this thing." And we can go through our lives just trying to do that. So in a way it's kind of saying that there is suffering. Suffering is sort of woven in life.

You're gonna have difficulties. It's like life is, has its ups and downs, and the thing that we need to do is to respond to that with loving awareness rather than like, “there's something wrong with us”, or something wrong with the world even. It's like bringing that sort of empathy, that compassion to ourselves.

In that space, we begin to see things more clearly because we are not pushing away the reality of our experience anymore and wishing it wasn't like that, or getting overwhelmed by it either. We are kind of able to go, "ah, this is what it is to be human." We are gonna lose things. Things aren't gonna work out for us sometimes. We are gonna get various challenges. We are gonna see things we can't change.

And often our response is anger or upset or despondency, depression. But if you look at that with, oh this is part of the human experience - it’s not the whole, but it's part of it - then we actually are gonna be so much kinder to ourselves and others because it has that awareness woven in.

So in a way, what the Buddha said is like, we are deeply interconnected, interwoven in life. We all have a finite time here. We will have these challenges, even if our external life is fabulous. The fact is one day we are gonna have to let it go, you know, and let other people go and we'll get sick.

So he was like, “Oh, there'll be old age. There'll be sickness, there'll be death. There'll the unforeseen unwelcome events. And we need to learn a response that actually works.” And kindness is key to that. 

Maeve Carlin: I'm gonna remember that story of the mustard seed. My goodness, that's so powerful. And I was thinking as you were speaking about that interconnectedness, that we are kind of living in a time with social media and, you know, we never feel disconnected from each other, do we? And that feeling of my suffering being connected to the suffering of a person experiencing war and conflict on the other side of the world, or my grief being connected to their grief, it feels really visceral at the moment, doesn't it? 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the words of Martin Luther King, you know, who said “all men are caught in this inescapable network of mutuality, you know, and tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

But he also said that “I can never be what I ought to be unless you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be unless I am what I ought to be.” And I just love that quote because it's both ways. It's like, okay, we experience because of the global context right now, it is actually painful, isn't it, to look up the news?

And for me, I've always had that as a, as a child. As a child growing up, I, I didn't like the news. My mum would cry. think I wrote about that in the book actually. 

Maeve Carlin: You did, yeah. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Mum would cry at the news and I'd hate it. Just like, stop crying. But really what that that it just put me in touch with my own, “oh, I don't know how to deal with this, is it's too vast.”

And in a sense, it's like the media's just made that even more, you know, apparent now. Having said that, when I grew up as well, we, we had the global responses to some of those things. I was thinking about the famine that's happening in Sudan at the moment. And, you know, there was an Ethiopian famine when I grew up, and then.

Whether or not it was a, it was an effective response or not growing up, you, there was Live Aid. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes, of course. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: And then there was like, the government slowly got behind it. And then you had the anti-apartheid movement and the global campaign to free Nelson Mandela as a symbol of the oppression there.

So, you know, I did see responses to that, and I think now it's so complex and so vast that you think, oh, you know, what is the response? But I think what it, what we, what this quote suggests is that, you know, if we are interconnected, interdependent, and interwoven in that way, to me it also shows like - if we are caught in this fabric - it's like any part of the fabric where you can express kindness and love and peace and work for that, actually will affect the whole.

And it's hard to kind of have faith in that 'cause you don't see that. But over time I felt more and more confident in Buddhist practice, you know, because it really centres itself in non-violence. It centres itself in, in fact, the, the quotes of the Buddha is, “Hate can never be ceased by hate. Hate can only be ceased by love. That's an eternal law.” That's not a Buddhist law. It is like that just runs through the cosmos, that actually aggression is never quelled by aggression. It just fuels it. More of it. Love needs to come into the picture. 

So if we can practice that in our own lives and around us, we actually begin to deepen the confidence of that. And it begins to have the effect of those of us we are in contact with and gives them a sense of “that's possible.” 'Cause I think we need more and more of us to stand for what's possible. 

And I think, as humans, we have a choice of how to be. We can be in a very reactive, contracted, defended, hostile state: the hate mind if you like. Or we can be in a creative, open, empathic, loving state: the love mind if you like. There's a power… My teacher says there's a power mode of way of being and a love mode. And we have this basic choice and we, we face that choice every day in our own lives and then the world faces that. 

But the world's politics and economic systems and all that are created by individuals, coming together in groups. So in a sense, I think, well we see the macro on the micro, you know? So I think if we can do that in our own way: come together in groups, you know, whether that's a family, a community, a a self-organised group, you sort of think, well, what are our values here? What are we gonna choose? Power or love? 

And then knowing that suffering will result in that hate, that's just inevitable. And growth, growth and creativity comes from loving awareness because you are helping others fulfil their potential as humans. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah. And I was struck by, as you were speaking, how nothing is new under the sun and, and none of these dynamics or truths are new. But perhaps what's unique about the moment that we're in right now is this loss of faith that an individual has an impact beyond… 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: That's it. 

Maeve Carlin: themselves. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: And, you know, we feel the, the grief of the interconnectedness, we feel the overwhelm, the burnout, maybe of the interconnectedness, but we don't feel the potential we have within that to affect change. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. Yeah. But that's why it's so important that you have, that we cultivate the conditions of that in our own lives. 

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Because if we, we can't see that clearly on the global scale, at least what the, the particular aspects that we see. We don't see the whole world. We just see those things. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: You know, so it's already filtered. But if we don't cultivate that within our, within our own context, then that's just breeds despondency. It's like we have to see transformation. 

I think that's why I love what I do, and I love the context I'm in. It has its challenges like everything else, but I see transformation every day. You know, I see people come and feeling a bit disconnected and a bit sort of lost sometimes and a bit fed up with things, and then next thing you see them growing because they're cultivating that within themselves and they're showing that it's possible. Because if you feel it in your fibre of your being, because you are living it as much as you can, then when you hear somebody else going, “what's the point?” You know that's not true either. 

We might not see change in our lifetimes in some of these spaces that we are referring to probably. We might not see that. I might not see that. But do I think change isn't possible? I absolutely think change is possible and I work for that every single day within myself and, you know, around.

Maeve Carlin: Well speaking of cultivating that in our own lives, and you touch on this in your essay for our book, Keeping Faith: 20 Years of Women's Interfaith Network, this idea of kindness is something that we can practice, almost like a muscle we exercise and can make stronger. So if we are looking to strengthen our kindness muscle, where do we start?

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I would start with meditation, although there's so much meditation as well out there. 

Maeve Carlin: People are gonna get overwhelmed by meditation now. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: I did go online the other day and I thought, oh my God, I'm over…I'm overwhelmed by the amount. What kind of meditation do you do, how long do you do it for? That's really changed from when I started, actually it was real fringe activity. And I didn't know anyone else that meditated apart from my cousin who's a Rastafarian in the Caribbean. And, you know, he'd go up on the hills and he would do his meditation. That's the only sort of context I had.

But I think I would start there still, at least in the sense of, in a way, you're starting with knowing that you are on a journey of discovery because we don't see ourselves and we don't see the world the way it really is. This is another key teaching really of, of the Buddhism. We see it as we are and we see it as we are conditioned to see it.

So because of that, you know, everyone, we’re going around a bit, you know, that sort of metaphor of the elephant. The blindfolded people with the elephant, they're all touching a bit of the elephant. They can't see the whole elephant. One's touching the tail, one's touching the ear, and they're describing it with real conviction. “It's like this, it's like this.” Um, and of course they're only part touching a part of the experience because that's all that they've been conditioned to. 

So when I say meditation, I'm not necessarily talking about a technique. Because I think sometimes it's reduced to a technique and something that's just gonna help you cope. Which is fine, you know…

Maeve Carlin: Coping is also good.

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: We need to cope. We need to cope, but then we have to grow. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: And we have to sort of expand our awareness because we've all got a different bit of the elephant thinking it's the thing, which is what's going on in those big conflicts. And then we are trying to oppress other people who don't see it the way we see it and don't subscribe.

So when I say meditation, I'm really talking about a kind of exploration of, you know, mind, an exploration of heart, an exploration of what is it that makes this being up, that I call me. And how am I perceiving the world and how is my perceptions of the world then having an effect on the way I interact with the world and interact with myself and interact with others?

So in a way, this is a kind of wisdom aspect, really, the truth aspect of practice, of kindness, which is really integral with Buddhism. That's why it's never just "be kind to somebody else." I think because I grew up as Christian. My mum was a very faithful Christian. I benefited a lot from the teachings, but I looked at it through her lens. And she was a very forgiving woman and she would literally like turn the other cheek. 

And she had a really difficult life in some ways and she'd turn the other cheek. She'd tell us all about her experience.

She was a cleaner and she would come back as a cleaner – a black woman who’s cleaning - and come back with stories about, you know, how some people had treated her in the hospitals. And I used to be like enraged. 

Maeve Carlin: I can imagine. Yeah.

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: And she'd be upset too. But somehow or other, she just lent into her values and forgave. She literally turned the other cheek. And I really admired that and I also could see that it sometimes it wore her down. So for me, there was always a thing of, okay, how do you act kindly and lovingly in the world, but with strength, with confidence?

That was always a question I had, and this is where the truth and the wisdom side comes in. It's like you kind of gotta see things more clearly. You gotta see the systems and the kind of the way things are constructed and the conditions, within oneself and out externally. Once you see things more clearly, actually, you think, “oh, that's why things are the way they were. Okay.”

You know, and you are fighting less. I, for me, I'm talking for myself now. I sort of feel like I'm, I'm less angry than I used to be 'cause I think I just have more understanding. And I have understanding that the hatred and the, the greed and everything that we see out there is also within me.

And in meditation, because you are really trying to understand who you are and what makes yourself up and what makes life up, you know, what makes other people up. You know, you should begin to see, ah, okay, it's not all out there, the problems. They're here too.

Um, you know, there's another, like Martin Luther King quote that I like. He says, “there's some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” And that's been such a key teaching for me. 'Cause I was wanting to change the world and I also though suffered from low confidence sometimes.

So I thought, well how am I gonna, you know, change the world and I've also got this thing going on in my own personal life? So really, the practice of meditation, you start with calm, you start with learning to just be with your experience. And the metta bhavana practice, the practice of loving kindness is one of our key practices.

And it starts with yourself: bringing love to yourself and being able to sit, be with all the ups and downs of your experience with a more open, friendly, sensitive attitude. But then you are bringing in your friend who you like, great. You are wishing them well, and you are cultivating positive regard to them. Then you bring in someone you don't know. And it's like, “oh! I, can I really, can I really like someone I don't know? I don't know them, so how am I gonna like them?|” And it's not about liking. That's one of my learnings. I thought, it's not about liking them, it's more about can you see the preciousness of their human experience? That they feel like you feel? That they want the best for their lives, the way you want, the best for your life? Can you, can you engage with them? It's like, when you're in London, you're on the tube. They're not, they're not just 2D, 3D figures. They're whole beings with whole histories and whole futures.

So you do that, you begin to cultivate that. And then the next stage is you are cultivating some friendliness, awareness of someone you don't like. So then you are directly encountering the parts of you that, that go, “No. They don't... Why, why would I like them? Why would I want the best for them?” And it's confronting in a sense because, you know, we like to see ourselves as like, oh, we like everybody, until somebody does something or says something that we push against. 

And then you do the whole world, then you bring in the whole world and this is an ancient practice. This is a practice that the historical Buddha created and he created this to help us with fear actually. Because underneath our fear is a is a real sense of, you know, separation. It's a real sense of “I'm on my own here. I've gotta survive. I've gotta get through this thing called life and, and I don’t know how to do it.”

But when you cultivate this kind of connection with yourself, a deep loving connection with yourself, and then all these other classes of people in these different categories, it's like fear does actually begin to dissipate because you can see their humanness. You embrace your own humanness and you see their humanness.

So even if they're unpleasant to you, you are like, “okay, they they've got, they've got hatred going on right now, or they've got anger going on right now. I can see that because I see my own.” Like you recognise it. But you also go, “but I'm not my anger, am I? I'm more than that. I'm more than my depression. I'm more than my fear. I've also got this potential.” Because you're also cultivating this connection, this loving connection. So you see yourself in a positive way as well. So even if someone's unpleasant to you, you're like, “okay, they're not in contact right now with their positive qualities and their love.” They're disconnected, but you also see they're not just that. And that's my practice when I see people on the global stage. 

Maeve Carlin: How do we bring them into the circle of loving kindness? It's got to be difficult. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: The last stage of the practice, you are cultivating, loving and kindness to all beings everywhere without exception. And you are saying that no matter what it looks like on the surface, that person really wants happiness. They really want to be free of discomfort. They want confidence and they're going about it in the best way they think and remember, we've all got a different bit of the elephant. So they're like, "this is the way!"

So in a way, I have a certain compassion in a sense because I think, gosh, when we cause harm, if only we could see the harm we are causing to others and ourselves in the process, we would drop that like a hot coal.

Maeve Carlin: Mm. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Actually that's one of the, um, images that the Buddha has. It's like hostility or anytime we're pushing something away is like picking up a burning coal and throwing it. You might catch that person with a burning coal, but absolutely, is your connection to humanity being seared at that point? Absolutely. It is. 

Maeve Carlin: I think so much of what you said there is really pertinent to people doing dialogue work, community cohesion work, interfaith work. And the thing that we say a lot is about learning to disagree well. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: And I think the way that that's always made sense to me is it's about trying to put yourself in another person's shoes really. Very simple. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: But if, you know, someone has a perspective that you find difficult to understand or maybe painful, offensive. It grieves you in some way. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah, yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: You think, you know, what would it be like to feel that way? Or what would it be like to see the world that way?

And most of the time when you do that, you think, oh, the world is very frightening from that, from where that person is standing. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: The world is very small and it's very scary. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Yeah. And they feel threatened. Um, I, I had a very strong experience of this when I was about 14, 15, because I lived, uh, it was East London.

A lot of the far right was very, um… 

Maeve Carlin: yeah. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: They were around. So I'd go to school and on my morning school walks um, there was a group of boys. I didn't think at the time, why are they not at school? But they, they were teenagers and slightly older than me, probably 16, 17. Um, and they would sort of hang out around the, the news agents. I'd have to walk past them. And there was always a fear that they would start calling names or even assaulting somebody, including myself. They would just pick on people. 

And, you know, I used to go through all kinds of things around that. I used to get into real rage with it and really upset. And I used to then feel like just despondent and a bit like, “oh, don't pick on me today. I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to get to school.” I went from fear and, you know, to anger and it was just oscillating. And one day I had Bob Marley's song came into my mind, which was like, "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds." And I thought “Oh, so that means I can do something here!” Because I just felt like I was caught in it. “I can respond differently, can I?” It hadn't occurred to me.

And then I began to think, what does that look like for me to, to not be caught in this fear, anger sort of thing and feeling threatened by them really? And what I started doing, which I don't know where it came from, but it was probably my first meditation experience if I think about it now. Because what I started doing was just, well, I walk past them and I'd be like, okay. I'd noticed that my breath, my, my heartbeat was really fast and I was breathing fast. And I'd noticed my belly was contorted just with the experience of the walking past them. 

And then I thought, “oh, that's what it’s doing to me. So what can I do right now?” So the next day I thought, well, what if I just began to relax my belly a little bit? What would that look like? Then it was my breath, then it was my heart rate, you know? like I just basically began to just go, well, "I don't want to be conditioned or controlled by them." Now, I can't stop them from throwing something at me, calling me a name or anything like that, but I can choose how I'm gonna respond to whatever's going on. 

So I took myself through what we call now a mindfulness exercise, really looking at how I was in my being and so that their response, their actions didn't become the predominant thing at that time. It wasn't the thing that was governing my mind. 

What was governing my mind was just me being fascinated with what, you know, what's going on internally and, and can I then create a space whereby I could walk calmly? So I, I did this day in, day out, week in, week out. It was a practice. And then one day I noticed that I'd gone, almost all the way to school. And I hadn't noticed them there. Like I'd walked past them and they hadn't figured. And for me that was a such a victory because it was like, ah, okay, now I can actually begin to look at them with more aware eyes, more kindly eyes, ‘cause I'm not caught in it. So I think sometimes, even before we sort of step in other shoes, we've gotta do the work with ourselves.

Maeve Carlin: Absolutely. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Where we're like, okay, where does it, where does this experience that I'm having, where does it actually, you know, make me feel small? Because we can do something about that. Where does it actually make me want to lash out? What is it triggering for me? What's activating, where's it reminding me of stuff in the past?

You know, this is the meditative journey in a sense: the kind of journey of discovering the limits and the conditions that are affecting our perception and experience. Then we make a choice. We can change that. So for me, from that day, it's not saying I like glided past them, you know? 

Maeve Carlin: Of course. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: It was always a, a point of, “ah, okay, they're here”. But I knew what to do. 

I knew that I didn't have to be going there with fear. And I began to see them. I think, gosh, they're there every day. That means they're not going to school. That means, I dunno, what, what do they do? They must be bored.

So I began to just see them rather, rather than just being in my own response, reactions. 

Maeve Carlin: Before I go onto our last question, I do have to say that you are the second person on this podcast to quote that exact Bob Marley lyric. So we should maybe turn it into a tagline of the podcast.

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: It’s a powerful one actually, because… 

Maeve Carlin: Huge! 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery." It's like, well, we can free our minds. Basically. That's what he's saying and that's kind of what the Buddhism says. Buddhism says, you know, we have this infinite capacity, infinite potential for love and to be free of suffering, but we can't be free of old age or sickness. You know, there are some things that are just woven into our experience as human beings, but we can be free of the reactions that we have, the negative limiting reactions we have to our experience. ‘Cause when you are free of that, what actually comes in is that kind of space, that clarity, that calm: the experience I had in the plane. "Oh, I can think now and I can choose what's gonna be a helpful way for me to respond.”

Maeve Carlin: Well, I'm now going to do quite an unfair thing and sort of ask you to summarize or distill this conversation into one question. But I mean, we've been talking about all this hostility and division. We've been talking about the far right presence that you experienced when you were growing up, and we are seeing them mobilising on our streets again in 2026. We're seeing tensions between our religious communities, as we've said, armed conflict around the world. So how are you keeping faith in kindness today, or this week, or this month, in a world that feels increasingly unkind? 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Well, I just remember that I'm here for however long I'm here for. And I have this potential to grow and to discover what it is to be human. And I know that it's absolutely precious, being human. And I want to live well. 

I think one of the biggest things that have had impact on me positively was when I've seen people happy, genuinely happy and, and happy in a really connected way. Not just, "oh yeah, life's going really well for me right now." Not that kind of happiness. Just loving being here, being present, being fully present, and really being able to embrace others in that. And there's a really, um, uh, lovely quote that I like from a, from a, um, a Tibetan master called Tsongkhapa, "This human body is precious. No, this human body at peace with itself is more precious than the rarest gem."

It says, "Cherish your body. It's yours this one time only. And he says “This human form is one with difficulty. It's easy to lose. All worldly things are brief, like lightning in the sky. And this life, you must know as a tiny splash of a raindrop, a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being."

For me, if you have that kind of perspective that every single moment of your day - this present moment that we are in now - can actually open us up to beauty, has opened us up to connection in the way that we are connecting and speaking together. It's opened us up to the child smiling down the road and the fact that somebody's offered you a seat or you've offered somebody a seat on on the tube. You know, those moments are actually what cultivates what it is to be human and cultivates faith.

Faith as in there's a, there's a, there's a reason we are here and it's actually to discover what it is to be human and recognise our interdependence. And we can do that every single moment. The global conflicts can go on, because we are not at those particular seats of the table.

We are at other seats at the table though, we've got our own tables that we're seats at. And the more that we can recognise that we don't have to be bound by suffering, in that way, that we can create those moments with ourselves and then we can have confidence that it's possible to change and share that. 

Bring, I do bring in the, the people suffering around the world into my practice. Absolutely. And it's more like I can't actually help them with food but what I can do is go, “I know that your, your humanity's precious and I'm absolutely gonna connect to my own sense of, you know, the beauty of this life. And share bring you into that. Recognise your preciousness no matter what life is telling you right now, no matter what life is telling me about what people think of me.”

This is my practice to go “there is infinite potential here”. And I'm leaning into that and I'm leaning into the fact that we're on this planet together to support each other and help each other and do that every single day in small and little ways and in big ways.

Maeve Carlin: Thank you Suryagupta. What a note to end on. 

Suryagupta Dharmacharini: Lovely to speak with you Maeve.

Maeve Carlin: We are so grateful to Suryagupta for sharing her time and her practice with us and for reminding us of the power of kindness. You can find out more about Suryagupta’s work with the London Buddhist Centre and get a copy of the book ‘Keeping Faith: 20 Years of Women’s Interfaith Network’ at the links in our shownotes.