Deer Park Monastery's Tea Room is a relaxing space with couches, a small library and tea. When retreat participants are asked to keep Noble Silence, this also includes when in the Tea Room. This practice served as a catalyst for lively dialogue between several women. It began with the question of how to keep silent when there is a need to talk and share experiences together. Many thanks to the women in this dialogue for allowing us to videotape their dialogue. Note: The interview is excerpted since we didn't have the names/permission of two women that were also present.
Brenda Gipson: It didn’t seem like there were enough forums for people to express themselves, to really interact with this experience. So we just created our own space.
Dorothy Randall Gray: And that’s what we’re talking about -- the differences. When you have people of color, but that doesn’t mean that because we’re all people of color that we all have the same ways of interacting and connecting. Like I shared with my group today, I said, “Golden silence does not work for Black folk.After a certain hour and after certain experiences, it just does not. And after profound experiences like Touching the Earth, there have to be some kind of dialogue somewhere, somehow, an exchange. And the fact that we kind of gravitated to this room, I think it speaks to the need for some kind of conversation, some kind of closure of our own. I’m thankful that this room is here to provide that space for it. But it is needed. So the golden silence is not colored golden, it’s a little different color tonight and last night.
Brenda Gipson: I was walking after our dharma talk today. Al, he was new to the group. Al and I were walking and we was talkin' 'cause we was walkin' and talkin' about the dharma talk. We were talking about what this whole experience is. And from my perspective, that’s what it’s all about. We want to absorb what this whole experience is. We want to find meaning in it and then we want to go off and create sanghas and save the world, right? So, we need to have those spaces. And one of the sisters approached me, approached us and said, “Well, you know, you’re to do mindful walking, which means silence while you’re walking. And if you want to talk then you need to stop.” So it got me to thinking about here’s this eastern tradition, Buddhism, beautiful, sacred, ceremonies and you know, traditions to get in touch with the divine, and the interaction between that and say, and I’m thinking western civilization, I’m thinking African American you know, as you were talking about. Well you know, emotion -- we just don’t -- at least I don’t sit very well with silence when I’m emotional. When I got something, I got to talk about it. That there seemed to be a need for even an exchange around this expression of the divine, so that it’s respectful. Because I could see from her perspective, it could be disrespectful. Here I am at a retreat and you know they’re offering me the gift of Buddhism and I’m kind of like tramping’ on it by not following all the rules and, you know. But on the other hand, where’s the space for me to authentically express myself from my essence? How do you balance the two?
Janvie Cason: My sense is the importance of being able to connect because -- and I will say this and I’m just gonna put it in our context for Black folks but people of color and I’m finding others who are willing to open their heart or willing to do this but we’re with Black folks right now, and that is that number one, we love ritual, ergo, that’s why I think the healing circle was created the way it was. And it was so akin to us to offer that. The other thing is that we love connecting by looking at each other and smiling and touching one another and that’s important. I’ve been coming to Thay’s groups for quite a few years. I missed four years because I inherited both parents and I’m just now coming back. But I remember the joy for me was connecting with people of color and doing our own little hi-fives or touching or hugging or whatever that was. Because there is a healingness, a heart offering that I think that is akin to who we are already. You know the Native Americans say that the Black people are the emotional people, they carry the emotions of the world. So, the loving and what not, the feeling and what not, it comes forth stronger from us. Other’s learn. each color has it’s own offering. Now, I’m not saying that they don’t all have loving, but I’m just saying that it’s a natural way of being for us. And I think that with the evaluations that we have, that would be something very pertinent to put down about having some time to get together as a group afterwards to discuss, you know, some integration time, some home time. I wasn’t in on the putting together of this, but I know the group that did put this together, they worked very hard to pull it together and sometimes you can’t think of everything. And that’s where we come in. So, I just say, write it and put it out there.
Janvie Cason: But you must know that every retreat that people of color have been to, they’ve gotten together. I’m saying, even of their own. What you did last night is not new to Thay’s retreats or any spiritual retreat. There’s always an element where people want to get together. You can go to Revelations at Agape and you’ll have people who will get together there. And then there’ll be people who’ll get together in the rooms, and there'll be people who get together in their homes. People will call me on the phone and tell me
what’s going on. So, there’s always a hookup as to what’s been happening with something that is -
Sarah Brown: I went to the last retreat. There was a creative retreat. There were people of color but there weren’t nearly as many as at this one. They stuck to the rules of silence much more and I felt after we had things like sharing and we had dharma discussions and then we had to be silent, I felt like I was holding something in. I wanted to talk about it but no one would talk to me 'cause they were all, “Shhh,” and I’m like burning up inside because I want to talk to someone and no one would talk to me. So, I’m tossing and turning at night because I’m thinking about all this stuff. Man, if someone would just be awake and talk and get it out.
Eisha Mason: Okay, I’ll speak from my experience. I really want to be clear I’m not saying, “Either/or,” I’m saying, “And.” I feel like, as people of color we know how to do emotions and we know how to communicate already so that’s down. And, for me what his teachings have offered - and, I am a very passionate person, I can go from zero to 360 like that - now I have the capacity to use another tool to work with my emotions. There are times I really am more effective if I could learn to keep my mouth shut ten seconds longer than it opens. Or the capacity to be alone and be comfortable. And in our community there is so much stuff coming in all the time in urban, particularly in an urban setting and a people of color setting So to learn how to be able to be silent and be comfortable with no distractions but me, I think is a tool that we could really benefit from. To learn to be able to hear my own thoughts and not be afraid of them and to enjoy them - to be able to get both sides of it - is a skill many of our young people don’t have. I want to add that to my tool chest so that when I speak there’s even more power. And actually now I’m thinking of elders, you know often elders, they do sit for a long time before they say anything and then when they do it has so much power, it's just like a laser beam. And many of us haven’t learned that skill yet.
Lissa Sprinkles: We’ve put our foot in our mouths so long, no kidding, with not that self-mastery or that self-discipine. This is my first visit here with Buddhism. I’m a novice. But the thing I’m appreciating about it, it gives us the opportunity to master that part of ourselves that needs mastering. I’m not talking about eliminating feeling but what I am talking about is mastering our emotions. Learning when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away and when to run. That’s that old cowboy thing. But in our community, we need to learn that kind of mastery. Our children need to learn it. Our young people need to learn it. So, if we here, well now we can have - well, it’s hard for me to eat and not talk, Jesus, what am I going to do about this, you know? But it’s a discipline, it's a discipline. And from what I’m finding out, that’s what this is all about. But it’s a self-discipline that as Eisha says, empowers us. I’m much wiser now than I was when I was just going with my feelings and so forth. But you have to learn that. It’s something you learn and I believe that we can - I know - we have the capacity, to go back to the Bible, to be “as wise as a serpent
and harmless as a dove,” which means you know, learning to control ourselves. But in holding it, we’re not holding back. We’re learning so that when we do present, it’s powerfully expressed. From what I’m getting with this Buddhism stuff, it’s a discipline. [Brenda laughs] I call it all “stuff”, I call all those religions, “stuff”. They’re just stuff, you know?
Brenda Gipson: That's right, I know what you're talking about. It's all stuff. It's all the same stuff.
Lissa Sprinkles: That's right, it’s just the same stuff just with different names. But I really like the discipline that it offers. And Lord knows, our kids need it. They have to know who they are as African Americans. You know, we can’t let that go. If the gang members knew that they were original people and kings and queens and all that stuff they wouldn’t be blowing each other away, but nobody told them. So there has to be a discipline and I think that this offers it. We can talk about that when we get together and then still find a way to maybe incorporate it in a way that it’s palatable and in a way that it’s understood, okay?. But, I do see it as being a very healthy thing for us, a very healthy thing.
Adesina Ogunelese: Everybody’s in bed but we like to stay up and talk. We used to sit around the campfire and talk. We used to sit on the step on the stoops on the street and talk in the summer times. That’s a natural process for us. So, maybe it’s like, “Everybody go to bed but the Black folks go to the room and talk.” You can build that into the situation and then that’s how we process our stuff and then we get to those midnight things where okay, it’s clear. Now we’re ready to take it to the next step. And I think that we still need to be able to come into Buddhism with respect of how it is but still keep something of our own self because we’re going to be bringing it out there as people of color. We’re not Asian. So we have to be able to go through it in an Afrocentric kind of way.
Dorothy Randall Gray: You know the Indian women were getting together. They started gathering themselves. That place where each group finds it’s own, so they talk about their own stuff is a natural outcome of this so it’s not just the black folks. And, I was thinking about what this sister said, yes, we have the capacity to do Golden Silence, that’s not beyond us, you know. We didn’t want to but it’s not beyond us. What I’m thinking of is maybe there’s another kind of way to do it so that Golden Silence starts at nine and then whatever groups want to get together and talk can do it between nine and eleven, you know, as long as they’re not disturbing other groups. And at eleven, then you go into your silence or whatever it is. As long as you're in a space and you be respectful and it's not loud enough to disturb other people. So, that gives you two hours at the end of the day to talk, to process to meet, to connect, the Indians with the Indians, and the Laotians with the Laotians, and the Chinese, and the Cambodians, whoever wants to get together, there's a space for that if you want it. So, there's a way to have everything in this same package. We can suggest it in that same way, that sure we'll do golden silence at eleven but we need to do the talk, our talk, our connecting. And, coming into this room is priceless, you know. I look for this room, with that light on. The light is on and great! Come in for tea, look around for who there is to talk to. The other thing I wanted to say is... One of the women who’s here was talking about her son, how she almost lost him to the streets. He got into all kinds of trouble and got lost until he almost lost his life. They had to take him up and take him to Africa where the father became a Babablau. He was on that path anyway. In taking the son to Africa, having a ceremony done and calling on ancestral energy, helped to save this boy’s life. After about a month or so he was straight... We need to talk about the ancestral power and energy, how to pull that in and why our kids are the way they are. So we got into this therapy session about this last night and about the violence that we perpetrate on each other, the way we talk to each other, you know, what we do with each other and then we got to the place where we said, “Hey, what if we use some of these tools? What if we just concentrate on like, one? What about that Precept number one, subset A, you know? Like, how do we talk to each other? Just that, alone. If we did that for the next five years that would be something that would help transform us. Because a lot of this stuff, a lot of the arguments, a lot of whatevers come up because somebody said something too soon, too fast, too wrong, too harsh or whatever, you know? And so we have to take the teachings and break them down in a way that is going to work for the communities that we’re working in.
Brenda Gipson: Respectfully, though. Because you don’t want -- I mean we’ve seen examples of, lot's of people, say Native American tradition, people taking aspects of it but...I call it culture vultures, you know? You’re going through the motions, but you're not really totally respecting or embracing the tradition. You want to pay honor and respect, you know? And so you don’t want to do that. On the other hand you do have to embrace any spiritual tradition as your own. So it’s a balance. That means dialogue, that means a give and take, that means we gotta talk about it! We gotta talk about that. And where do we talk about that, at? This is a bigger thing, above and beyond--
Brenda Gipson: ... [Thay] also said you gotta do your own personal healing before you go out there because there’s a lot of people doing social justice work and they haven’t done their own healing. And that’s where our conversation was too, last night at two o’clock in the morning. We were talking about the pain and the hurt that we keep carrying. You can’t heal nobody else until we take the time and create the spaces to heal ourselves.
Dorothy Randall Gray: As we help other people heal, we are healing ourselves.
Janvie Cason: You know the other thing that is so pivotal is the fact that you’ve already said, is that we tend to go and heal everything and everybody else first. I think with Thay’s teaching for me - and this is just another "and" - yourself first. So, the Noble Silence that he asks for in a lot of ways says that we’ve walked through a lot, we’ve discovered a lot, and sometimes that stuff doesn’t hit you until you are quiet by yourself, with yourself. And sometimes that that is trying to grow within you can sometimes not be attuned to because you’re involved with the group energy. The group energy is important, don’t get me wrong. But I do think you’ve got to have that self-time. Every religious walk does that. When I was studying to be a Religious Science practitioner, that happened. I got my license. When I was studying to be a minister, it was the same kind of walk. You have to have your own time. A practitioner takes her time by herself, with herself to get clear...
Lissa Sprinkles: What I listened to also, was that he [Thay] was teaching but when he really got it was when he was exiled. Am I correct? So, he didn’t wait 'til he embodied it totally. Because as I see it, it’s a lifelong process... They’re calling it, “This is our practice,”. They didn’t say, “our conclusion,” this is our practice. And because our intention is so great, we’re going to stay with that idea. And gradually we begin to understand, oh this stuff is working. And then the light goes on and we think oh, yeah, it’s deepened. Because I think it deepens itself if we continue to practice.
Eisha Mason: One thing that struck me that a monk said in our group today, in term of us taking care of our own practice and making it a priority. He just reminded us, the people that we are out to assist or teach, they watch what we do more than what we say. And so, we can only teach as much as we’ve embodied. We can only embody as much as we’ve healed. That was a good reminder that my own self-mastery of it, I just gotta stay on point of it not just for my own well-being but to be the example of the world that I want to create, the example I'm encouraging other people to follow.
Dorothy Randall Gray: Sarah, can I ask you, where are you in this process? You’re eighteen, right?
Sarah Brown: Yes. Um, you kinda caught me off guard.
Dorothy Randall Gray: I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sorry.
Sarah Brown: That’s okay. [she reflects momentarily] I have a lot of emotions. Very extreme emotions. My father’s Irish Catholic and my mom’s African American so I’ve got all these riled up emotions. For a long time I had no idea how to channel them, how to control them. I’d spout out things I really shouldn’t say to a lot of people I really shouldn’t say it to. Coming here’s really helped me to learn how to deal with those emotions, learn how to choose what I say before I say it, learn how to respect other people more, be much more understanding of people. I always got really frustrated with people, especially peers who couldn’t catch on as quickly as I did. It wasn’t that I thought they were stupid. It’s just very frustrating for me that, “I’m trying to get this done, buddy. Try to get with the program!” So I’ve become much more understanding of them. Uh, I don't know. Yeah, generally I wanted to come down.
Dorothy Randall Gray: Great. Thank you! Talking about cultural specificity and that whole idea of recognition, that spark of recognition. I was just thinking, you know I’m not redesigning this whole thing but if I were I would have some subsets happening at some point. There would be a whole subset/dharma group/sangha somehow about “What box do I check?”. I saw so many heads of recognition going around because you have a lot of those mixtures, you know, of all kinds. What box do I check? And the other would be culturally specific things. We mentioned, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. I’m sure that if people were not African American they would not know that we had our own anthem. When that sister mentioned the word, “conk” [group laughter] I know the people didn’t know what's so funny but when they're like, the Black people are laughing they thought, let’s laugh, too! You know, that cultural language that we share, that subcultural language that we share, I would incorporate those kinds of things into the whole structure of this...to have a place where we can like laugh at our own stuff and our own cultures... There are all kinds of things that we like to smile at because these are familiar to us in the context of this whole structure here.
Brenda Gipson: Also, what did we say? This was the first day we were having another conversation and that in fact, our lives are very isolated. When we go back to life, we live in isolation. We're not, sometimes, in cultural context. So, this is an opportunity to really connect with other like-minded spiritually -- and so you make an assumption that you can just have a safe conversation, you do a lot more risk-taking. You say, we don’t have to start here, we can start here. And you know what I’m talking about. I can say, “conk” and you know. We can sing the song and we have a common shared understanding. And that’s good! That make ya feel good!
Adesina Ogunelese: So, if we come to these things and we’re at Golden Silence and we see all these like-minded, same kind of people but we can’t talk to them, we’re frustrated because we’re here at the whole retreat the whole time and then we leave and we haven’t connected. You see what I’m saying? So there’s gotta be space and time where we can connect with each other because we don’t see each other. We’re all over the place and then when we come together and we say, “Wow, here’s another sister that’s Buddhist and she’s over here, and she's over here!” And we can talk and see where we’re working the same ideas or where we’re working different ideas or where we can join together. But if we don’t have that opportunity then we just see a name and we might remember the face and then they’re gone until the next time.
Janvie Cason: Sister Lissa has something she wants to say.
Lissa Sprinkles: No, it's all been said. No, but, it feels like if it’s not expressed, it’s repressed. And that’s a discomfort, you see? So, repression, evidently brought about this meeting. I mean we can’t handle this, we’ve got to express this some kind of way.
Brenda Gipson: And it’s probably coming up because we haven’t had places to express safely. So, part of the healing process as Thay was talking about was that you gotta bring it up to consciousness. And that happens at a personal level but you make an assumption that if people are here at this retreat they’re doing their personal healing to a certain level if you got here. You know if you found that piece of paper and you found your way here, you have been doing something.
Janvie Cason: I'm here because I love my people. Okay, so they tell me Black folks are gettin' together and I know about it then I'm gonna be there only out of pure selfishness number 1 yeah I'm curious, what they talkin' 'bout now so I can be in on it, too and then secondly, I love my people! And the other thing I appreciate coming to Thay and other walks is I love to smile at the differences even though we're all in the same place and delight in that, that is so like who I am.
End of Interview
interview extra
Noble Silence in the Tea Room
