Episode 9: Host Julia Sagebien Interviews Kaira Jewel Lingo

In this ninth live interview in the New Horizons in Engaged Buddhism series, host Julia Sagbien interviews Kaira Jewel Lingo. Kaira Jewel is a senior Dharma teacher in the Plum Village Zen lineage and teaches Vipassana in the Insight tradition. She is a member of the Plum Village North American Dharma Teachers’ Council of Elders. She has been practicing mindfulness since 1997 and teaching since 2007, and completed the four-year Spirit Rock teacher training in 2020. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, drawing inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her father’s work with Martin Luther King Jr.

After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen and Vipassana traditions. Based in New York, she is faculty in a Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy training and a guiding teacher of One Earth Sangha. With her partner, Adam Bucko, she is founding a center for engaged contemplation, The Beloved Community for Engaged Spirituality, in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. She is the author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello again, everybody, and welcome to another episode of New Horizons in Engaged Buddhism. And today we have with us Kyra Jewel Lingo. And I'm going to tell you her biography, but one of the things that I became impressed as I got to know more and more and more about her is to see how someone can take a deep meditation practice, in this case Vapassana practice, mindfulness practice, and apply it to a really overwhelming current problem, which is environmental issues. And I think that you will see how seamlessly and how carefully so many of the techniques that many of us practice have been woven into the understanding, the response, and the sense of possibility of things that are quite terrifying, frankly. So Kyra is a senior uh Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition, and she now lives in New York, and she also works in the insight meditation uh tradition. And she's done a lot of work in engaged Buddhism following from Tiknat Han, which was one of our main teachers, seeing as she was actually a nun in the Tiknat Han uh communities for 15 years. And she and her partner, Adam Baco, are founding a center that is going to be called the Beloved Community for Engaged Spirituality in the Hudson Valley, dedicated to engaged contemplation, which frankly seems to be uh the one thing that brings all of us here today and into our very many podcasts that come out of this show. Um Kandia was doing some statistics, and apparently there's over 2,000 people who have actually tuned into the show. So thank you to that, to you and to all the 2,000 people. Kyla has often written a number of books, but but two in particular, and well, one in particular is called We Were Made for These Times: 10 Lessons in Moving Through Change and Loss and Disruption. Um, and she has also co-authored a book in Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation. Uh, welcome, Kyra, bienvenida. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Thank you. Yes, muchas gracias. It's very nice to be here with you all and and um with the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Thank you. And I can't help but start by asking you, where do your names come from? What is Chaira? Where the jewel, what would the lingo? It's such an unusual name.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Yes. Um, well, my my mother actually picked my first name, my my uh legal first name, which is Chaira, and she picked that from the New Testament, from the Greek word Kairos, uh, which is describing the time where Jesus is around, which is sort of outside of time, as opposed to chronos, chronological time. Kairos is this fullness of the present moment. And I I appreciated it so much when I then ended up studying with Tiknathan, who only teaches about dwelling in the present moment. I thought, wow, my mom picked a really good name for me. Um, and then jewel is the name that Tiknat Han gave me when I became a nun. So it was my full Dharma name as a nun is was true adornment with Jewel. Um, and so um when I left the monastic life, I I wanted to keep ties, kind of blessing with that name, and so I I decided to be Cairo Jewel. And Lingo is my family name from my uh dad's side, which is I think uh originally Italian, but his people really came from Ireland and um England, um for the most part, his ancestors, but um but somehow there was some group of people that came from Italy and that I think that influenced it.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

It's amazing how it's sort of like your name is like unconditional jewel of travel. So tell me a little bit more about your upbringing, just a little bit, because you you reference it here and there.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Yeah. Uh so I grew up in a family religious order, a Christian uh community that was really setting out to renew the church and uh taking a new monastic uh form of families, lay people, but many of them clergy, but uh taking vows of poverty, taking vows of obedience, living in a we I lived in an eight-story insurance building on the north side of Chicago with about 300 other people. And so as children we were cared for communally, kind of like in a kibbutz, where a few adults were responsible for us, you know, getting off to school, and different people would put us to bed at night. We had a prayer on the wall so they would read the goodnight ritual, and it wouldn't always be my parents. And one night a week we had dinner with our parents, with a family dinner, but every other meal was with 50 or 100 other kids, you know. Um, but we went to public school and came home and we had our own, you know, after school curriculum. Anyway, um I spent four years in Nairobi, Kenya as part of this community. There were community and human development projects all over the world in every time zone. So in Kenya there were 500 village development projects that our community ran. My dad did fundraising all over Africa for these projects. So people would go into a community, into a village from our organization and hold a town meeting where everyone was invited to be and share what did they feel would really be the most important thing to support their community, whether it was a road or bridge or a women's cooperative or a preschool or you know, an irrigation project, and then they would make it happen. And so there were 500 of these development projects. We would spend our um our vacations from school in the villages where we would, you know, um take care of rabbits and learn to make sisal baskets and swim in the rivers where we got leeches on us, or you know, like learning how to live in a rural Kenyan village, um, having competitions for how little water we could use uh for bathing because it was you know a shortage of water. Um so so between Chicago and Nairobi, I lived in this community from birth till I was 14. And then the community really didn't have the financial uh capacity to continue. So it it ended the residential aspect of it, it continues as a nonprofit even to this day, uh doing consulting and strategic planning. And but so yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so we moved to Atlanta, you know, it was my first time being in mainstream US culture without this community around me. Went to high school, went to college, but that very much set me up for monastic life because I had grown up in this, you know, scheduled uh communal situation where people had a big, you know, desire to fulfill this bigger vision rather than an individual.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

So you went to uh it's like you were trained in bodhisattva camp somewhere along the line. What inspired you to join a Buddhist order rather than, for example, you could have joined a Christian order?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Yeah. Um, you know, I just knew at the end of college, I was just really clear. I got a wonderful education, but I was really clear that I hadn't learned how to be happy, how to how to take care of my suffering. I knew that there was a spiritual peace that was missing. And so I decided I'm just gonna find a spiritual teacher and a community. That was the clearest thing I knew after I finished college. And so I didn't know which kind of community. I just thought I just need to find a community. So I started out in India. I visited some ashrams, and and a friend had told me about Plum Village, so I did three months in India, then I went to the summer retreat in Plum Village. And as soon as I saw Tiknad Han come into the hall and start teaching, I just knew this is my teacher. I was it was an immediate recognition, and and I was very impressed by the community as well, practicing his teachings, realizing what he was sharing. I mean, you can't take Thai, or what we call Tiknad Han Thai means teacher in Vietnamese. You can't take him from out of the community. His you know, his teachings only make sense within that community. So I lived, I I, you know, canceled the rest of my tour that I was gonna do around Europe, and I said no, I gotta stay here for four months. And then at the end of that time, I thought, well, this is really working for me. I I had never been that happy and that um sort of able to be authentic in that way of who I really was, and um and so I thought, why don't I do this all the time instead of you know working just to be able to afford to come for one week every year for a retreat. So I I decided to go home, work, and and be with my family for a year, and then I came back and I lived with the community for a year and then I ordained when I was twenty five.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

And what made you leave?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah. Um Well, I was a very um very inspired by the community throughout my whole time. Like just having TikNatan as a teacher was really um well the biggest gift of my life. And so I wasn't trying to really get away from something. I felt called toward something else. So it wasn't like, oh, I I you know, like I really didn't want to end my life as a nun, but I felt I in order to keep growing I have to be in different conditions. Um and so I I felt like life was you know, I felt like I got called into the monastery. It was like a calling, and it also felt like a calling to find my way out of the monastery and to return to lay life and to start all over and find out what you know, and and in a sense too, I think part of what needed to happen was I basically lived in community my whole life until I was in my early forties. Because even in college I chose the most communal living situations, and I think part of what I needed to to do was individuate what a lot of people do in their 20s, I had to do in my 40s because I had like never paid taxes, I had never um, you know, just run a household, or you know, I remember after I left the monastery and I would eat alone, and I was like, this is so hard. Like eating, I was like living alone was sort of okay, but like eating alone, I never I was just like, but this is what so many people do. So many people live alone and eat alone, and so I was like, you need to also understand this experience so you can relate to to that, and but yeah, it was just kind of needing to understand how I could exist not as part of a community too. Not not about being an individual, but just kind of getting confidence in my own ability to care for myself.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Yeah, and deal with the aloneness of the majority of the world these days. As I read your work, um, which I'm enjoying quite a bit, there seem to be two streams to your interest, um, which is the BIPOC community and also working as an eco-warrior. But in in this interview, I'd like to really dive into the ecological issues that you have been uh working with. And I um encourage people that are listening or um that if they Google you they can find some really interesting uh uh videos, um, well, actually they're audios, but with a uh um on on the your eco eco work, the we were made for these times work. So I would like to uh take the opportunity to really dive into uh some of these things. The first question being, what attracted you to working on climate issues? What what motivates you to keep your going? What what is the what is the question and what is the inquisitiveness?

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Um one of the main uh gifts of TikN's teachings is the articulation of interbeing, of really seeing that you know, if you look deeply into anything, you'll see that it is interconnected with every other thing, right? Like a piece of paper. If you look at it really deeply, you'll see there's the sun in that piece of paper. The piece of paper wouldn't exist without the sun or rain is in the paper. So just that like that was woven throughout all of his teachings and and how he saw the world and how he, you know, uh he he really wanted us to live lightly on the planet, knowing how much strain the planet was under as that became more and more clear. And actually he was he was part of one of the first Buddhist uh I I think it was a Buddha maybe it was an interfaith gathering, um, but it was I think called I can't remember, I d uh something like Great Togetherness, but there was a gathering in the 60s, I think, of many, many people looking at the issues of of climate, of of the earth, of ecological destruction. And he was he participated in it, you know, even before he set up Plum Village. So, you know, and he when he wrote his he has a series of books where he um gives commentaries on key uh Buddhist texts or sutras, he wrote a commentary on the Diamond Sutra where he said this is the oldest ecological text because it talks about letting go of four notions the notion of a human being, the notion of a living being, the notion of a lifespan, the notion of uh of a self. Uh and when you let go of the notion of a human being and a living being, that's humongous to realize we we we take this uh we think we're so unique. We take this, I mean, you know how we personally see ourselves as a separate self, as a species, we have done that, and we have taken ourselves out of the living world as this separate species that's dominating and on top of and can do whatever it wants with the rest of the world, which is what's brought us to this place of this next mass extinction event, right? And so he he he saw it so clearly, right? You know, it's been such a big part of his teaching, and so that's was a big part of his transmission to all of his students is you know, we if we're gonna be real Buddhist practitioners, we have to see that we are the earth, the earth is us. There is no way we can um live if we don't take good care of our planet and all the other species and all the waters and all the air and all the you know soils, and that that is absolutely being an eco-warrior is being someone on the path of awakening. How else can you live an ethical life if you're you know constantly contributing to harm for other beings, right? And for yourself. So it was ever present in our in our training and in our practice. I remember, you know, um we tigh wanted us to do no carve days where we wouldn't drive cars. Just that was even before we were so aware of the extent of of how dangerous what what we were doing as a species was. But we started a kind of you know campaign to get not only so we would have every week no going out, no driving a car as in the monastery, and we encourage people to have that as well. Just like use less resources, plan your life so that you have one day of rest where you don't need a car if you can. Drive, you know, ride your bike, take the bus, whatever. But the sisters I remember, and then the brothers too, we were so moved by that that we also decided to have once a week a no electricity day. We already lived so simply. We we we each, you know, we were we were living on a budget of three dollars a day per person for everything, including toilet paper, including cleaning supplies, like we'd buy in bulk. You you know, we were very frugal. And in addition to that, we were trying to do one day a week with not using any electricity. So that was how much we were trying to like not take from the planet, you know? And so so when I left the monastery, I had just turned 40 uh when I I I took a year sabbatical, I hadn't disrobed yet. But I did a s a solo retreat during that time around my birthday, and I just really looked, I was on a beautiful beautiful retreat center, just looking out at the greenery, the land, and I just I reflected on how much I had contributed to the earth's pain in my 40 years of life. Like I just really kind of reflected on like all the water I had used and all I mean, not like we can't live and be supported by the earth, but I was just aware of like processes I had been a part of, whether I wanted to or didn't, whether I knew I was a part of them or wasn't, that had been harmful to the earth for 40 years. And what arose out of that kind of deep contemplation was I'm dedicating the rest of my life to supporting the earth, to caring for the earth. So that was really this strong motivation. And that's when I reached out to One Earth Sangha. I was still a nun, and I just said, Do you need help? Can I volunteer? And I don't know, a year or two later they asked me to be a guiding teacher for their communion, you know, with other people as on this guiding teachers committee. But, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Tell us what One Earth is. Tell us, tell us.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

Yeah, so One Earth Sangha is um one of the, you know, one of the responses from the Buddhist community to the climate catastrophe. Um and it's uh it's been around since I think 2014, 2015, um working to articulate what the gift is of the Dharma to us as people who care about the earth. What are the tools, what are the wisdoms that the Dharma can offer us as we go about trying to protect the earth? So it was really in the beginning just trying to say there's so much here that can that can keep us going, keep us uh motivated, that can sharpen our focus as to how we can um shift what's happening uh with climate change. Um but it also then created uh an uh eight-week uh eco-sattva, maybe a ten-week ekosattva training. So this new term of a instead of a bodhisattva, an ekosattva, someone that um awakens themselves by caring for you know the web of life. And that has been a very popular, very profound training. Now they're working on a teacher's training, so they're creating a training that anybody who teaches mindfulness or Buddhism can take so that they bring in ecological awareness into their teaching. So that's their next. But at the same time that I was joining one earth sangha, the plum village tradition formed a similar organization within the plum village lineage called the earth holder sangha. So there's a uh bodhisattva in the Lotus Sutra called Dada Nimdara, which is the earth holder bodhisattva, the one who brings earth beings and human beings into better connection. So it's it's the bodhisattva that really helps humans be more aware of, understand better animals, plants, and the earth. And so they took that name as earth holders and they started to create beautiful dharma practices that support us to heal our you know disconnect from the earth. So a special touching the earth practice, a prostration practice where we kind of apologize to humans, to animals, to plants, and to the earth herself, four different prostrations where we acknowledge the way in which we have made mistakes in our life. Anyway, many, many practices like that where we have a practice in Buddhism, even like the five mindfulness trainings, the five precepts, but they apply it to climate change. What are ways we can, you know, really refine this language so that it helps us see and and make commitments around our relationship to the planet? And they have a every two weeks a meeting online since many years. They offer retreats, they um really encourage a kind of earth-based lifestyle. So those are some of the ways that I continued to practice this and and get more explicit about it as I was leaving the monastery because those two organizations sort of arose at the same time that I was leaving.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Can you mention again the name of the two organizations so that people can follow?

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Sure. Oh, and I'll put it in the chat, but it's one earth sangha is the um the one that has the, and that's sort of from the vipassana tradition. The people that started that were more from the vipassana tradition that has the eco-sattva training, and then the other one is the earth holder sangha. And if you look up both of these, you'll see their websites.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Great, thank you, thank you, thank you. So one of the things that is apparent in your work is your concern for the earth on the one hand and all living beings and so on, but also concerned about the psychological impact that frankly the traumatizing, if if anybody actually is willing to get with the program about what is happening, it's downright terrifying. Um, and you talk about how to address, and I imagine is very real for younger people in particular, um, where they were born already in a decade time, and as they're looking in the future, it's only worse. So I I I w one of my things is whatever we do, let's make sure that they don't become nihilists. Can you talk a little bit about how um you approach the notion of this kind of climate trauma?

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Um, it's very important that we um that we do uh touch our agency. I think what you said is so important, Julia, that we don't um collapse into nihilism. Um and just to also say that both in my perspective, both jumping into urgency and collapsing into despair are both kind of an escape. Not to be judgmental, but just to say that's they are opposing ends of the s spectrum of uh I can't deal with this, I'm gonna, you know, um overfunction or uh under fun, you know, like hyper arousal or hypo arousal. And so um it's possible to be in this very difficult space of, you know, we're facing something no other generation of humans, no other group of humans have had to face what we're facing now. Are like potential destruction caused by us. You know. I was just listening on the news that El Nino is gonna be potentially like a once in a hundred and fifty year problem this year. Like it could be really, really, you know, severe. And and last time it was this bad, it was caused a w you know famine all over the world and millions of people died. I mean, we're at a different place 150 years later where we have, you know, maybe hopefully better ways to handle this, but but we've also you know gutted FEMA and all the you know, all the things that would help in a time like this, we have we have not helped them. Our government has not. So we're very fragile and vulnerable. And so, you know, big, big things are are coming and and and you know bad things are getting worse, and structures that provided support are now are crumbling. And so this is all true, and at the same time we do not know how all this is going to end up. And so the despair route says it's hopeless, nothing I can do will help. That's uh that's making a big assumption, and it's not actually we don't know. The truth is we don't know. We know that that we do have the science and the you know, I mean, from many, many decades ago, people saw and it's it's happening, and it's happening faster, and it's more and more feedback loops. So, you know, but but still we don't know exactly how it will all happen, and and there are still many things we can do to, you know, even if it's just deepening community with each other, deepening our own connection to the earth, all those things matter. Like if we can stay sane, if we can stay grounded, if we can keep our nervous systems regulated, you know, our nervous systems are not you know individual. We have a collective nervous system. When you're around someone who's regulated, it helps regulate you. When you're around someone who's dysregulated, it dysregulates you, unless you're really, really grounded. So the more we can develop those capacities in us, the more prepared we'll be to support other people as systems crumble. So none of none of the things that we can do today are insignificant for what's coming. So preparing ourselves mentally, preparing ourselves physically, you know, learning skills now that are going to be really important when maybe all we can do is have a local existence where we need to know how to grow our own food, where we need to know how to be in harmony with the people that we are around, and grow skills for like making tough decisions together and making sure everyone is heard and resolving conflict, and you know, um, we live so individually now where you just click on your app and you can have food delivered to you by a drone or in a day from Amazon, and we can just do everything from morning till night completely on our own. We're not gonna have that kind of um convenience, you know. So so and the urgency piece is also making an assumption that it's all about you know, you know, and and uh there's so many versions of this, like you have to do this now, or only this approach is gonna work, or that's wrong. You've got to get on this train, right? That voice of urgency, that's also a kind of gotta be careful with that. It's a it's an ideological trap, too, because again, we don't know, but we do need to do something, we do need to be together, we do need to grow our capacities and our ability to respond, but we need to also respect and stay humble and keep questioning ourselves. What are the assumptions? What are the ways in which we've already finished the end of the story and we're operating from that place when we could be very off, right? And when we act out of urgency, we can very easily make the situation worse. You know, we can divide community, we can, you know, I mean, all the sort of green technological solutions, you know, may or may not, you know, like the the so-called solutions, like carbon tax, which we've seen doesn't work, or you know, different things where people are reaching for some way to use the systems that we have or the logic we have now of capitalism or whatever to solve the climate crisis. But it but it comes from a deeper place. So unless we address that deeper place, we're not gonna come up with the solutions that are really helpful. So one of one of the things I got to be a part of a few years ago was uh kin-centric leadership training, which I was centric? What centric? Kin-centric, like Kin K I N.

SPEAKER_03 34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

And there's a beautiful handbook that's out from the two people who really um uh led that training. I was like a you know, early thought partner, but um it's all about you know learning to see with these eyes of interbeing that we actually can, you know, when we make a decision, we can ask the trees for input, we can ask the animals that live in that area, we can make decisions with them, we can have, you know, a member of the non-human world be on our board and figure out what that means with our board. How do we invite that that wisdom in when we make decisions? There's, you know, so many ways in which we can open up to the more than human world and include it in how we see things, how we do things, how we, you know, decide uh what to do in the world. And so I think all of these, and so so just to say, like, urgency doesn't get us there, despair doesn't get us there, but staying really present with these strong emotions of pain, of grief, of loss, of anger, of shame, of whatever it is, practicing with them, with with all these, you know, the many beautiful practices of of the Buddhist path that help us work with those emotions, but really staying connected to each other and creating new forms, right? New ecological spiritual forms, I think, is so crucial to help us move through this time and to see we there's a lot we can do. We don't know even what that's gonna lead to, but like the Brazilian theologian uh Rubem Alves says, we must live by the love of what we will never see. Like a f a fruit tree, you know, it doesn't know what's gonna happen to its fruit, but it still produces fruit. Right? We have to keep giving out the best of what we can and we don't know what's how it's all gonna turn out.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

One of the things that you do in your uh book Um We Were Made for These Times is you apply specific techniques of mindfulness awareness to almost like you've come up with a a very simple process by which you identify how you're feeling and what you can do about it. And in specific, applying mindfulness, applying meditation, applying uh body-mind coordination. Um it uh I particularly like the fact that you were so specific. You know, you really could help people almost a different the the stages of freak out. And somehow or other you found a way to bring them back by saying, whatever it is, just get back on the horse. But you brought them through by meditation, not necessarily deep therapy or or marching.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um there's a wonderful piece of wisdom that says the only way out is in. The only way to really move through these difficult emotions is to feel them in the body, get to know them, give them space, give them time, be curious about them, and then they reveal themselves to us. They help them see what's really happening much deeper than that emotion. So often we're responding to something that we're not even aware of. That's three, four, five layers down in our psyche, and we think it's that surface love, you know, it's the current moment, or it's that person, or it's that, but it's way, way deeper than that. And so the more we sit with the emotion and and just allow it, the more those things start to arise. And we sometimes years, years later, we're like, oh, that's what it was. It wasn't this right.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Um specifically in terms of what mindfulness can do, this entire mindfulness of despair and awareness that it isn't really that you can stay with it almost.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Yeah. And you know, I think it's important with mindfulness to really, you know, mindfulness has that investigative quality of like, what is this really, right? Because um, like I see doubt and despair kind of connected. Like like doubt in in Buddhism, it's one of the five hindrances, one of the five, you know, um things that come up in our mind that cloud us and that you know make our kind of an obstruction in our practice. And what makes doubt so powerful is that we we believe it. We don't even know where that it's doubt. We just think, you know, if we have the thought, oh, this practice isn't working, I'm so scattered, and I, you know, that I just can't do this. We just we don't recognize that as doubt. We just believe it. Right? It's easier to see anger as anger, right, or desire, attachment, craving as that. But it's hard to recognize doubt, and I see despair as similar. This emotion arises that right away is so uh compelling and so we identify with it so wholly that um it's hard to see that we ex we can exist that our you know our mind can you know have despair in it and not become despair. You know, and I think um mindfulness helps us to see, oh, this is despair. Not to judge it, not to, you know, um make it a problem, but to to be very mindful of it. If despair can be there, it's not a problem as long as we have awareness of it, as long as we are present with it, then it can't take over.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

I am uh I'm an opera fanatic, and I always say, isn't opera great? They take despair and hatred and death and you know, and make such beautiful music out of it. And it's like I love it. Um, and one time somebody asked me, What to do with doubt? And I said, Well, just doubt the doubt. Love that. Doubt the doubt will get you out of trouble every time. Just don't believe it, doubt it. Um, before we move to questions, I still would like to say, Kyra, is there anything else you want us to take uh with us today? Um before we actually just open it to questions.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Anything that I haven't provide you a platform to to address us or I guess I would just say um, you know, I I I have done a lot of nature practice in the last few years of doing a nature dharma training where we learned about leading retreats and events out, you know, outside. And I'm about to lead a nature retreat at Spirit Rock in next week. But um when I did a self-retreat a few years ago, I decided to go, I was staying at home, but every day I was going to an arboretum and just practicing outside. And I guess I say all this to say, I think really spending time outside or with the natural world, if if we can't get outside, like really figuring out how to commune with our plants or the animals or the moon or this clouds from inside. Or outside, whatever, like taking refuge in in the world around us, in like really really seeing the earth and other species as our as our kin, as our siblings, as our teachers, as our place of refuge. I I really feel like that's a big part of what will help us to heal and what what will actually guide us in terms of what needs to happen next. And I I'll just share a little story of a of being on a two-week silent retreat camping with others. We were just silent all day. We slept in our tents, sitting, walking, you know, once once a day in the evening we would share any things that arose from the day. But and then the kind of culmination of that two-week nature retreat was we each had to find a spot for our three-day solo retreat. And I just found myself drawn to this particular walk. I don't know why. And I stopped in front of this beautiful oak tree. And I felt this tingle or like an electric current go up my left leg right at that spot, which I had never felt before. I was like, is there like electricity in the ground? I really didn't know what was going on. And then I turned to the right and I saw a path, and I took that path, and it led me to the spot that I ended up having for my three days, which was overlooking this beautiful, it was on a ridge looking a valley, overlooking a valley and a beautiful mountain on the other side. So I was able to set up my tent and everything there. And I um I chose this pine tree as my center point of the little campsite that was my altar. I put a little turkey feather or something at the base, and then I I went about, you know, we had taken three days worth of food and two big gallons of water. That's what everyone was given for the three days, and um it was was wonderful to see how I could be so content on so little. And I never spent that many days by myself. Um, it was it was a little scary at night, um, but I began to feel more and more at home. But what happened on the very last day was I I found myself sort of deciding to say goodbye by leaning my back up against that pine tree, just wanting to sort of say thank you to the place. And I leaned my I leaned against it and I looked up and I just I noticed sort of for the first time that it was the only pine tree in that whole area. There was it was surrounded by little baby oak trees, and then it was a forest of oak trees beyond. And so just in my quiet of this three days in solo retreat, I just asked the tree very naturally. I was like, Are you lonely here? Being the only pine tree. And the pine tree answered and it said, Look out at the ridge, uh the mountain across the ridge. It's all pine forest. And said, Look behind you, there's another for another mountain, it's all pine trees. It said, I'm very happy, surrounded by these these little oak trees. When they grow up, I'll happily yield my place in the sun to them. And I was really moved, and then I just found myself saying, Well, what's it like to be a tree? And the tree said, Well, I'm you know, strong and hard on the outside, but inside I have quite a bit of juiciness, which I'm happy to share in the form of sap. And uh, you know, I dig my roots down deep, and then I can really express myself fully from that depth up up above. But then it asked me, what's it like to be a human? And I said, Well, I wasn't expecting that. So I first just talked about how how how it is to be in all these different places where there's all these different kinds of trees that grow. So I was sort of trying to show it the world, oh, there's this kind of tree, there's that kind of tree. But that wasn't what it was asking. So it had to ask me again. It was like, no, I want to know what's it like to be a human, what's it like to be you? And that was a much deeper question, and I had to dig deeper for that. And I just said, Well, it's hard. There are a lot of a lot of we're in trouble, basically. I said, There are a few a few people forcing a lot of other people to live in a way that really doesn't respect you and your kind and doesn't take care of you. And I said, But there is a small group of humans that's doing their best to really live uh deeply and to live uh in harmony with the more than human world. And I said, Sometimes I'm able to be part of that group and sometimes I'm not. So it felt like a bit of a confession and uh And then the the tree said, Well please continue to to live in a way that is healing of this rift between humans and the natural world and help other people do the same. And I said, I I will.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

It's very interesting because as you know, in the Japanese tradition you have kami, and in the Tibetan tradition you have drala. And being the notion also that when when elements are disrespected, the kami or the drala leaves. And one of the things I'm particularly interested in finding are the people the people who have some sense of how to do drala restoration work. Um, you know, the the kami are just sort of the the magical everything is alive in Japan, like the word kamikaze, right? Uh kami, and and uh I I hesitate to call them nature spirits or whatever, because some of it is for example, Omaterasu, who is the goddess that that it was out of which Japan arose.

SPEAKER_03 51:11

Right?

SPEAKER_00 51:11

So it's it and it's complex. For the Buddhists, it has to do with almost like a personification of magic. And non-existent, there's no ego, but but almost like the the transmigration of of of magic of the world and how important it is to keep that magic respected and cared for. And I think also we need to know how to repair it.

SPEAKER_03 51:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

So maybe we have small spaces, but we know how to repair them.

SPEAKER_01 51:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

So we have five minutes, which I just couldn't help myself. I just wanted to hear more and more. I have five minutes, and I'd like to open it to our uh friends in the audience, some of which has been patiently waiting for me to let you have. Kat, please.

SPEAKER_02 52:14

Hi, thank you, Julia. Kandia, nice to see you. Oh my gosh, Kyra Jewel Lingo. I I don't know if you noticed while you were speaking, but I was over here throwing emojis and fingerling, and I'm so embarrassed, but it is an honor to get to meet you and speak to you. I have your books. Um I just completed cohort one of the EcoDharma teacher training through one or Sangha that you spoke about. Wow, what what an experience. Um, cohort two starts in June. Um, so thank you for mentioning that. Um, I I'm not gonna take a lot of time because I'm sure there's other questions. My question is I live in the Hudson Valley, um, and I would be beyond interested in um your your new Sangha that you're forming. Would you please speak more to that?

SPEAKER_01 53:21

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

And tell me where it is or where it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

Yeah, thank you so much for for your beautiful words, Kat. I'm so glad you're part of that, where you finished that training. And and yes, thank you for asking about our center. So it's it's uh in La Grangeville, uh, Our Lady of the Resurrection Monastery. We were so my husband's an episcopal priest, and we were both offered this monastery when the priest, when the monk who founded it and lived there for 40 years passed away, we were basically invited to take it, take it on and steward it. And we had already been looking for a place in upstate New York to do a Buddhist Christian and Earth-based center. And so this was felt, it fell in our laps, and we were like, oh my gosh, this must be meant to happen. That exactly what we were looking for. Literally within like a few weeks of us putting out to the universe that we wanted to find a place in upstate New York, we got that email. So um, yeah, that's where it is. So we're we're actually moving up to Poughkeepsie this um summer to be closer, and you know, the build many of the buildings have to come down because they're not structurally sound, but um, so we have a big, you know, renovation, big, you know, construction that needs to happen. But we'll have um the plan right now when the vision keeps evolving, but it's to have six hermitages where people can do um sort of solo retreats and uh or or just practice and and have some communal time as well if they wish. Uh, we would live there as the stewards. We would have a kind of semi-monastic schedule of morning and evening meditation, prayer, uh, walking meditation every day, meals that are, you know, mindful, and people could join that or have their own practice. And then mainly we're thinking of it as sort of a a very small center or more of a day center where people would come for the day and practice with us, and we would have, you know, events and could have non-residential retreats, except for those, you know, few places where guests could stay. We thought it's we may not be able to manage well, you know, trying to do a full-on retreat center just because it would be so much to fundraise for and then run once it's built. So we thought let's just start small. So we renovate the chapel, build a meditation hall, have a kitchen, dining hall complex, good bathrooms. We're wanting to do everything as as ecologically as we can. So we're we're looking to do like the highest certification of a sustainable building is the living building challenge. So we might do that as the kind of how we build the the meditation hall and kitchen, dining room, you know, living area, I mean living room, lounge, sort of library, all of that would be a living building challenge building. And then um, yeah, the other buildings would be you know also very ecological, and but but there would be paths through the forest, it's 23 acres, and so that we would really encourage people to be outside and decks where we could do yoga and have discussions and you know have a lot of um outdoor practice and nature practice.

SPEAKER_02 57:02

Yeah, that sounds amazing, and I would love to be in touch with you about that because I'm a vegan chef and I'm a yoga instructor.

SPEAKER_01 57:11

Wow, amazing. Yeah, we plan to have vegan food, so that we should definitely stay in touch. Yes, yes. Um thank you, thank you so much. Thank you, Kat. Thank you. Does Julia have your information? Or you can email me on my website if you go to kyrajewle.com.

SPEAKER_02 57:29

We'll do. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 57:30

Okay, thank you, Kat.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

And uh Kat um is also a very important person in the Buddhist coalition for democracy. She's all of the social media stuff. And I I think that you have recruited her. And uh I count myself amongst the new recruits. I know how to do anything practical. I've already had my place in Armageddon. I tell stories, okay? And I also deal with the storytellers, yeah, and I also deal with the people on the Border Tribes because I probably know their language because I was there for a while. That's sort of the kinds of things I can do. But I have uh nothing but gratitude to have had you here. And you know, it takes a lot to inspire me. I am inspired, and I'm sure that everybody who is here today and likely will listen to this interview and podcast is probably going to be inspired too. And I I think it's it speaks very well for the notion that it makes a difference to live from the very beginning of your life all the way through. People talk about authentic lives, but you know, your life has been devoted to goodness and kindness. And uh wow, and uh on the silly uh non sequiturs, go see um The Hail Mary Project with Riot Gosling. It's a science fiction movie about you know upcoming catastrophes, but based on goodness, it's really interesting. It was the last time you actually see a movie that has some kind of basic goodness all the way through. So, you know, we're fighting back in in our own way. So on behalf of myself and everyone here, um and everyone who would listen in our podcast. Muchísimas gracias. God bless everything. And if there's any in the future, I can cover your community um in any way I do any any broadcasting, whatever, just let me know. Okay. Thank you so much. That means so much.

SPEAKER_01 59:53

Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

Glad glad I can help. And uh lastly, everyone, on um June June 25th, um, if you'd like to join us for an interview with Joshin Burns from the Breadloaf Mountain Center community, please come along. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

Gracias, buenas noches, thank you, everybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

Bye, everybody, thank you.