Why Meditation Is Not Enough: Rev. angel Kyodo williams
Reverend angel Kyodo williams, born and raised in New York, is an ordained zen priest and sensei. She is acclaimed author of Radical Dharma and Being Black: Zen and the art of living with fearlessness and grace, and that is a perfect title to describe her. She is a force of nature. In this episode, Rev angel talks about how we need to hold the intersectional complexity of who we are in America and how we came to be here. She challenges us to go beyond what is politically correct or socially acceptable and do the simple and radical thing of practicing justice and being in relationship with one another.
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Kerri Kelly: Do you want a drink or something?
angel Kyodo williams: Yes. I'm going to get some water.
KK: No, like a tequila drink?
AKW: That's actually good. Yeah. That's perfect for me, like wet my whistle.
KK: Should we do that?
AKW: I think so.
KK: All right, hold. You ready?
AKW: Put the chocolate there so that I can get it without the noise.
KK: You can keep eating the chocolate. I’m not going to deny you chocolate in this interview.
…..
KK: Hi, my name is Kerri Kelly, and welcome to another episode of CTZN Podcast, where we are exploring a citizenship of solidarity in how we show up for each other. We're joined today by Reverend angel Kyodo williams, acclaimed author and Zen master, as we talk about holding the complexity of who we are in America and why meditation is not enough.
I wish I could share the full, unedited version of this interview, because like all of my conversations with angel, it was deep, and inevitably with her, I have some major realization or breakthrough. Now, that may sound dramatic, but once you start listening, you'll know what I mean. Reverend angel Kyodo williams, born and raised in New York, is an ordained Zen priest and sensei. She is the acclaimed author of Radical Dharma, and Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, and that is the perfect title to describe her. She is a force of nature.
When I first met angel, what resonated most for me was that she was very much an off-the-cushion meditator, actively engaging in the world in whatever way was most needed, and that was my jam with yoga and being off the mat and into the world. Angel was one of the first people in contemplative practice to integrate racial justice as an essential component to understanding and engaging in our liberation, and that perspective has really shaped my work since before CTZNWELL even existed.
She's made a huge impact on my own journey of waking up to whiteness by holding my dignity and humanity as most sacred. Not because I did everything right, I didn't in fact, but no matter where I was in my learning or what messed up thing I said or did, which was often, she never ceased to love me or believe in me. It taught me about the role of authentic relationship in anti-racism work. I'm often challenged by saying the politically correct thing or knowing the latest ally terminology. It's almost become like ally theater, more performance than purpose, but in this episode you'll hear angel debunk what she calls so-called allyship and really call us up to the deeper and often harder, more nebulous and certainly risky practice of just being in relationship with one another, not because it's the right thing to do but because we must do it.
In her book, Radical Dharma, angel writes, “In truth, we have to integrate our wounds into our understanding of who we are and what we are really capable of so that we can be whole human beings. Only from there can we begin the process of healing the brokenness, the broken-heartedness within ourselves that is the foundation for beginning to heal that in our larger society.” Whoa. Once again, angel totally turns my world upside down and challenges me to go beyond what is politically correct or socially acceptable and do the simple and radical thing of practicing justice and being in relationship with one another.
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KK: All right, hi.
AKW: Hi.
KK: We're here with Reverend angel Kyodo williams, who has a very substantial Wikipedia page. She's been called the most vocal and most intriguing African-American Buddhist in America. We like to call her our favorite troublemaker and disruptor. She's a dear friend and teacher, and we are so grateful to have you here with us. Welcome.
AKW: Thank you.
KK: I want to dive right in, because you are one of those people that I go to to make sense of this moment in America. One of the things that I love about you, and really, I've learned about you, is your capacity to hold this moment with both complexity and compassion simultaneously. I think it's often easy for us to default to the either/or, the right or wrong, the binary, the blaming, but you really always bring a much more nuanced and multidimensional perspective to whatever issue we're contemplating, whether it's white supremacy, whether it's the Me Too movement.
I want to ask you about this quote that you sent me that was recently in The New York Times written by Frank Bruni. He said, “There's a pattern of turning righteous causes into indiscriminate attacks, painting with a destructively broad brush and branding certain actors irredeemable, which doesn't leave them any room or much motivation for redemption.” What role does redemption and restorative justice play in a moment like this?
AKW: I think not just in a moment like this. I think for the sake of humanity that the very fundamental underlying glue of our humanity is redemption, and that people are aware that redemption is possible is, I think, the difference between being able to be human and potentially becoming a monster. We have structured society in a way in which we are too often too quick to try to make people irredeemable monsters. I understand and believe in and lean into justice, so I'm not opposing justice. Simultaneously, I think that that is intentional, that this idea that we have that we can decide a clearcut right and wrong, good and bad, belonging, not belonging, is exactly the mental construct that allows patriarchy to continue, I want to say, under-challenged.
It allows the colonialist mindset that founded this country to continue to wind its way through all of the systems and structures that we have. That is to say that what we can do is we can produce things in a human being, the society, the culture, the norms; what is expressed in the culture through an individual can be blamed and burdened upon solely the individual, but the culture remains unscathed. It releases the culture from any kind of responsibility or accountability for what it is we produce in our society, what it is that our culture produces, what it is our norms, what it is the unspoken things, not just the things that are said, which we have a set of behavior codes.
For instance, in Me Too we have a set of behavior codes where we “know” that this is wrong, and yet clearly we watch television, we watch movies. None of this is new, but it has been the unspoken cultural norms, the things that have been accepted that are part of patriarchy, that are part of classism, that are part of sexism and misogyny and how it is we understand that boys will be boys, men will be men, and women have to just bear it. When we point someone out and we use this broad brush that Bruni talks about and we just wipe it over an individual and we single them out, we absolve the culture that allowed that behavior to manifest in society. No one in society is manifesting anything that the culture is not permitting them to manifest and, in fact, feeding.
KK: Right. It's mutual. How do we do that? How do we be the disruptors that we need to be in this particular moment, speaking truth to power while simultaneously holding this commitment to understanding the humanity of who we are at the same time? What does that look like in practice?
AKW: Yeah. I think that what you said, the humanity of who we are, and that's actually where we begin. Because often, what we're focused on and the question is usually phrased of how do we focus or keep the humanity of the other, and where we begin is actually how do we focus on our humanity and whether we are-
KK: Our collective?
AKW: Our individual humanity. It is actually our relationship, and the more nuanced and complex a relationship we have with our individual humanity, the more we are able to manifest a complex and nuanced relationship with humanity of the so-called other. We understand our failings. We understand the ways that we can misstep. We understand our ignorances. We understand the ways that we can do things that we absolutely know that we have no business doing. When we're in a good relationship with that with the full complexity of what it means to be human, learning about where it comes from, understanding that there is a power behind our thoughts, and certainly there is impact behind our behaviors, that we can hold then the humanity of the so-called offender in equal measure with the offense so that what we're doing is, as the saying goes, calling people in.
I like to think of the story about an African tribe in which the way they dealt with someone that did something wrong was to actually bring the person into the circle that the whole tribe would gather. The person would be called into the circle and reminded of all of the good things about them. They are told by the community, by the tribe, “This is who you have been. This is who you truly are.” We're reminded of our highest calling, the full expression of our humanity, rather than cast aside and left into a place in which all we are left with is the behavior that came through that is a manifestation of our confusion about our culture, about our society, about ourselves.
What I've heard you talk about and what I've learned from you is when we talk about self-care, when we're talking about the individual, it's really with a capital S.
KK: That's right.
AKW: And this idea, I think, reinforced by our culture that the self is separate from other and all is really false.
KK: Yeah. Not only is it false, it's convenient to allow those systems of domination to continue. Those systems get to go scot-free. They can actually serve to protect the very same individuals that are later understood as offenders. You can trace something like that back to Hitler, where that person was being protected.
KK: Was benefiting.
AKW: The society thought it was benefiting. Then when it no longer suits the society, we cast the responsibility and accountability for the behavior and put the burden entirely on the individual. This is a very, very powerful function of white supremacy. It's very powerful in that it allows people to both be kept and held and protected, but when that person and their behavior is going to sink the white supremacy ship, then they are cast out alone, and the white supremacy ship continues to go on its way unaddressed. The patriarchy ship continues to go on its way. It's allowed to continue unscathed because we have shifted the burden solely to the individual.
KK: That's what you're really talking about with the Me Too movement, this idea of finger pointing and ostracizing the individual without taking responsibility for the whole structure that's really upholding that culture.
AKW: That's right. That's not to take anything away from the person that has been victimized or perpetrated against in the particular act and behavior. We're talking about a meta conversation about how it is that we as members of a functioning society then in our desire to have some kind of justice in a time in which there feels so much that is injust, we have turned to this behavior of finger pointing and blaming. Actually, what we're doing is we're advancing the very same things that we think that we have an intention to disrupt. We're advancing the tenets of patriarchy. We're advancing the tenets, the machinations of white supremacy. We're advancing the mentality of individualism over collective responsibility.
We do it under some notion of a progressive ideal and the notion of justice, but we are actually advancing, and that's what's so amazing actually about white supremacy, about patriarchy, about dominance, about all of these forms of oppression, is that they have been skillfully designed to cast individuals off when they need to so that they can continue and not be held accountable as an overarching structure and overarching construct.
KK: Let's talk about how we embody that disruption in a way that includes both a resistance and a resilience, a commitment to humanity. I've heard you call this the “back of the bus moment of this time”. What do you mean by that?
I think that we have come to a place in our nation's national memory where most people in the light of day understand that the point at which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus was a point that changed the country for the better. Of course, there's a lot of other history that's around that that created the context for that moment, but that it changed the country for the better. There were some people that didn't understand what was happening and didn't know the right place to be, and so they resisted.
They resisted the Negros riding the bus. They resisted the black folks that wanted to be able to ride the bus. They resisted the people that were then boycotting the bus. They resisted the people that crossed the bridge. They resisted the people that participated in all of the marches, all of the forms of resistance, all of the sit-ins. Those people at this point, most of them would probably regret that decision at this point and hopefully absolve themselves at this moment of, well, I didn't know. I only knew what I was brought up with, what I was raised with.
KK: I was doing the best that I could.
AKW: I was doing the best that I could with what I had, but we are now at such a moment in which we are looking at a pivotal point in our nation's history where we can take a turn towards a very different America. The question is, what side of that conversation are we going to be on? Are we going to sit on the sidelines? I'm not saying that the people that were saying, “Oh, I'm going to do something horrible,” or “Oh, I'm going to do something terrible to black people, I'm going to bash them,” I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about the people that sat and did nothing. Where are they going to be in this moment?
KK: I even think about the culture of allyship, and one of the things that I've learned in being in relationship with you is that it's not about what you do but how you are in authentic relationship with one another that is really the breakthrough to actually moving our culture forward, igniting a new story, changing-
AKW: I wouldn't call it so-called allyship because I even think that the notion that someone is an ally and that they're not implicated and somehow that they're not implicated as well, that they're not implicated in the harm; that they're not implicated in the destruction; that they're not implicated in the loss of relationship to one's perspective on humanity is a destructive way of thinking, that there is some poor somebody or something that needs our help and we should ally with them. I understand the term, so I'll just call it so-called allyship. The so-called allyship has ended up in a place in which there's a kind of very much part of the capitalist mentality, a set of checklists of things I can check off.
KK: That's right.
AKW: It will tell me whether or not I have met the mark or met the measure of being whatever it is I'm trying to attain. That framework, that way of thinking about our lives and about how it is that we relate to things leaves us empty. It leaves us out of relation because it leaves us out of relationship. Allyship is not possible without relationship. It's not a set of behaviors, as you said. It's not how much you wrote out of your checkbook, though I'm not opposed to people writing things out of your checkbook.
But if people want to be in true relationship and really show up on the line with people that are overt victims of oppression, then what they have to risk more than anything is their vulnerability, is have a willingness to see someone that is different from them in all of these kinds of ways, economically, in terms of access to resources, skin color, religious, the level of persecution that they undergo, gender, how people show up in their bodies and the way in which they're responded to on the basis of that. We have to allow ourselves to truly see those people for who they are, and the only way we can do that is to allow ourselves to be seen.
KK: Yeah. I hear you also saying something around, I mean, it goes back to really looking inward and knowing the ways in which we are responsible and we are participating in upholding that system and benefiting from that system so that we can truly own that as a part of being in relationship.
AKW: Yeah. It's not just also how we're participating. It's how we are actually, when I say implicated, I mean how we are wounded, and so how the person in the position-
KK: So not just implicated as ...
AKW: Yeah. There's a lot of focus on, oh, I'm a part of this; my family has been a part of this, and particularly in the forms of white supremacy and whiteness itself is there's a focus on the fact that white people or men or whoever it is in a particular dominant position in the social strata has perpetrated something or is implicated in perpetrating something. I'm saying that there's something in terms of the relationship in being willing to look deeply at how it is that you are being wounded by it.
KK: Yeah, and oppressed.
AKW: And oppressed by it, and that that is actually the more significant probing that needs to happen. Because we can all go and check off the ways in which we have perpetrated something in some form, but can we look at the ways in which we are wounded and not reify our dominance by suggesting that we are not somehow hurt by it as well. It actually reifies our position of dominance, our position of control, our position of being better than.
KK: When we're immune to it.
AKW: When we are immune to it and we have language that suggests that we're immune to it, when we perform in such a way that suggests that we are immune to it and what we can do is we can heal it; we can try to fix it; we can try to bandage it but that we ourselves are not bleeding.
KK: It goes back to the complexity that you were talking about before that we are both the oppressed and the oppressor.
AKW: That's right.
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KK: You talk about a lot of this in the book Radical Dharma, and I want to name a couple things that people have said about this book. They've said, “The best thing I've heard on our current situation in a Buddhist context.” They've said, “Urgent reading!” They've said, “It's like coming home for the first time.” They've said, “It's life changing.” Those are big statements about a book that I know changed my life. I want to know, how did writing this book, how did sharing this book change your life, change you?
AKW: One of the quotes was actually the title of an article that was said about Radical Dharma was “a book made for these times.” That's how it affected me is that it affirmed what I feel like I have honed in my life, in my practice, in my ability to hear, my ability to discern what's real, what's not real in what I'm hearing, to actually have been very, very clear that this book had to happen and that it had to happen when it did. Not only was Radical Dharma made for these times, I was made for these times, and it affirmed that for me.
The book affirms and reflects back to me and people's response to the book reflects back to me the ways in which the time that I've put into my life, to my self-examination, to my care, to working through my wounds, to being in my own relationship to healing and illness and the challenge of having an illness and all of the things, my own confrontation with white supremacy, my confrontation with patriarchy, my confrontation with being a part of a tradition that is borrowed from Zen from Japan and its patriarchy and all of that and all of the complexity, that I've ingested those things and integrated them so that I'm not just puppeting some set of words that say, this is who we should be as Buddhists, or this is who we should be as black people, or this is who we should be as activists, or this is who we should be as liberation theorists, but that I'm living it and that I'm speaking it.
I'm speaking it not from a set of texts but from a knowing. That kind of affirmation, I think too few of us get it in our lives and have the great opportunity of having that out in the world and to have people say something to you about it and reflect it back to you all the time. I'll tell you, when my first book came out, Being Black, I always say Being Black is like my bastard child. I did a book that I thought it was time for. That was in the year 2000. I thought people of color were going to be interested in Buddhism, and they were, and that they needed an invitation; they needed an explicit invitation.
The degree of rejection that I was confronted with in terms of the Buddhist community, in terms of the white bookstore owning community, in terms of even media and media opportunities was crushing. First of all, I was much younger. I was 30, and so we get more easily crushed, but it was also I was confronted with the distinction between what people said about what it meant to be Buddhist or yogis or practitioners or spiritual and who they really were and how they could really show up. I just wanted to get away from Being Black for the longest time. Not only has Radical Dharma been something that I can fully own, it's actually let me fully reclaim Being Black as well.
KK: You've said, “Meditation is not enough.” Is that true?
AKW: Yeah, absolutely. It's necessary and insufficient is what I would say. I'm not one of the people that has a traditional role in the spiritual tradition as Zen, as Buddhist, that is against the mindfulness movement. I think it has its problems and has its challenges that anything else, anything that has been popularized and commodified in this society is going to have and going to run into, but simultaneously, I think that the benefits will far outweigh the potential damage, and in many ways we're making much ado about nothing. What really needs to happen is that we need to be in Mindfulness 3.0 is what I say, that meditation simply can't keep up with the level of destruction that we're at as a society, as a culture, as a people.
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KK: Well, and the meditation, the spiritual, the yoga community has also all been indoctrinated in many ways within these systems of power and oppression.
AKW: That's right. The meditation, the way in which when I say the meditation, I don't mean the particular techniques. I'm talking about the theory of being a meditator, the way in which we are holding the idea of what it means to be spiritual, what it means to be Buddhist, what it means to be yogis. All of these things is actually being held, and it's held captive inside of all of these structures of power and oppression so that it's keeping people from actually doing the deeper work of looking at themselves in the context of a larger society. There's a lot of navel gazing going on, or I don't know how yogis would call the form of navel gazing. We're in tree too long or something like that.
We are not called to turn that lens of attention, of insight and all of the potential wisdom onto the collective, and that's because it's not convenient to do so. That's because the way in which we've been sold and had meditation packaged to us does not invite us into the greatest potential for liberation, which is to be in relationship with our bodies, which is to be in relationship, therefore, with our truth. But if you limit the truth to something that's somehow outside of your body and outside of your full technicolor reality, then you're going to end up actually perpetuating the same harm that you have already perpetuated and just doing it in a smoother voiced way.
KK: It sounds good, it looks good-
AKW: That's right.
KK: ... but it ain't the real thing.
AKW: That's exactly right.
KK: I've heard you define intersectionality as something that you've embodied, that you have a specific lens on intersectionality. I would love for you to share that.
AKW: Well, with all due respect to Kimberle Crenshaw, I would never say that I defined “intersectionality”.
KK: Yeah. It's not an Al Gore thing of you founded the internet.
AKW: Yeah. I think that I exist in an intersectional reality. As a result, the complexities that you spoke about my holding are true and natural to my willingness to hold the complexities of what it means to live at the intersection of race--mixed heritage is in my own background--to live at the intersection of class. I grew up not with money. One of my parents didn't finish high school, and yet I lived in Tribeca, New York, which is one of the wealthiest places in New York that you can live. I lived amongst people that had an enormous amount of access, and so I had insight into that possibility. I lived on both coasts.
There's many ways. I'm queer, and I've done all of the things of exploring gender spectrum for myself. I live in those ways. I'm a black woman that's trained inside of a ridiculously patriarchal Japanese tradition that is known for its machismo, that is known for its rigor, that is known in many ways for its patriarchy and for the ways in which it has actually caused harm, has caused conflict and confusion in terms of sexual molestation, misogyny and those kinds of things. I'm living inside and yet I have found enormous peace in that tradition, and I also don't operate primarily inside the tradition. I break free of it and do me.
KK: Well, and you understand intersectionality in a way that I can't. When I think about who needs to be leading in these times, it's people who have an embodied understanding of that kind of multidimensional complexity that you're talking about who can really help us navigate that in our culture, in politics, in social situations.
AKW: When I think about intersectionality and the place that I occupy, and, I think, really, truly a lot of black women occupy, and I want to go even further and say black queer women occupy, is exactly this space of the wayfarer that's the person that creates or admits passage from one land to another in terms of the different locations in our society. Because black women, by nature, have relationship with white women. They have relationships with white men. They have relationships with black men. In many ways, they are a portal to the spectrum of society.
That relationship, for instance, to white men had to do with white folks having black women bring up their children, and so you have black women that could love white men as if they were their own children and then be separated from them. We still hold that sense of love and compassion and complexity, and we can see the wounding of patriarchy in white men in the same way that we can see the wounding of patriarchy in black men. We're kind of this wayfaring station, and if you're queer on top of it, then also the finite lines of gender start to get blurred, and gender expression and how one shows up in the world gets blurred.
I think that I'm embodying something that is true and that in many ways we're seeing, and it's similar for many indigenous people, I think, as well.
KK: I've heard you talk about the fundamental human value of basic goodness and the idea that deep down our nature is good, our true nature is good, despite all of the ways in which we might be acting out other things. I also know you to believe that we can do better. How do we reconcile that? How do we reconcile this knowing that we're doing the best that we can and deep down, and there are a lot of difficult people that we are dealing with these days in our culture and in our leadership, how do we reconcile the idea that they too at the core are good and uphold a vision that we can all do better by ourselves and for one another?
AKW: I think the idea and the term basic goodness was really popularized by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher that headed up the Shambhala tradition in Buddhism and really gave us a very straightforward language, so basically good. I think that basic goodness does not suggest that people cannot be painfully flawed and corrupted by the scourge of domination and the mentality that comes with and that advances a position of seeking after domination over others. I don't have to take away the fact that someone has basic goodness, which is different than saying that someone is basically good. It is to say that they have basic goodness, that it sits at the seat of their very expression as a human being, that that is actually the undergirding of what it means to be human, but it doesn't suggest that everything that they do is in alignment with what it is that they have access to. They possess it.
There's a term, they possess, which is what Trungpa Rinpoche was playing on, is that we all possess Buddha nature; not to say that we're all acting out of Buddha nature but that we possess it. It's a little bit different to say that people are doing the best they can than it is to say, but they can do better. In other words, in some ways if we say we're doing the best we can, we make that finite. It's to suggest, well, that's what they've got, and they're not going to be able to do any better. When we say that people have basic goodness, we're right away leaving the door open, and we can expect more from them. I also think that people can be flawed in a way that in this lifetime is beyond repair, not redemption, but it is beyond repair. We have psychosis, we have mental challenges that are brought on by these systems of oppression and domination that so-
KK: And reinforced over and over again.
AKW: And reinforced. It has so fried people's brains and hearts that I think it is very difficult for the deep woundedness and really the atrophying of their own relationship to their humanity, that they're incapable of seeing it and relating to it in others, or they're increasingly incapable of seeing it and relating it to others that do not reflect them back to themselves. It's not that they don't love and they can't love and they can't relate, but they can only relate to things that actually are reflecting back. This is an absurdly narcissistic state of being, and going back to our original conversation, it's not created out of nowhere. It doesn't just come with that person.
KK: It's by design.
AKW: It's by design. It's created in the society. We didn't get what we have right now in our administration by accident. It's by design. It's a plan. Even if it was a surprise, it was a plan. It's what is called for, but it's called for both from our deepest, darkest, most unaddressed places of this nation, of this culture, of this society, but it's also called for from our most powerful and hopeful places in this nation, in the people of the nation and who we are, that we are calling ourselves into a place in which we must confront it; that we're calling ourselves into a place in which we have to confront the things that have gone unanswered, unaddressed, unconscious for us for so long that it's become untenable.
We have to call up the most monstrous, most demonic things that we can imagine and hold inside of what's possible in our society in order for us to get serious. I think that that's what's happened for us. In many ways, I think we could look at the administration or we could look at what's happening and say, ah, there's an example of how off we are and how off we can get-
KK: How low we can go.
AKW: ... away from basic goodness, but in fact, part of what's happening is that we are calling it forth. Because, as we do in our own personal lives, we get tired of ourselves. We're like, enough of this, enough of the thing that we keep ignoring, enough of the thing that keeps going unaddressed. We call forth a kind of explosive situation that forces us to confront it. I think basic goodness is in play.
KK: And it gives us hope.
AKW: And it gives us hope.
KK: Okay. There are so many angel-isms. That's what we call them behind your back, but I want to talk about-
AKW: That's news to me.
KK: More than we have time for, so I'm going to say a few of them, and I just want you to respond with the first thing that comes to you, that comes to mind.
AKW: Okay.
KK: It's not about love after all.
AKW: We have to express that love. We have to show up. It's not about having a checklist. It is showing up for justice.
KK: Radical.
AKW: Complete, whole.
KK: New America.
AKW: An America that doesn't live any longer and chooses not to live in the trauma of the past but to embrace the context that we're in and to imagine ourselves from where we are now going forward rather than what we used to be, what we thought we could be, what we would like to be.
KK: Wellbeing.
AKW: Essential for everyone, being well, choosing that for who we are and how we are in our lives and knowing that it's not possible for us as individuals unless it's possible for everyone.
KK: Life hacks.
AKW: My favorite. Life hacks is really just making it work for you and figuring out what it is, having a mindset that says, I'm going to make my life work for me, and whatever I have to tinker, grab, learn about in order to make that happen, I'm going to do it.
KK: What's one of your life hacks?
AKW: Naps. The best life hack that there is is to take a nap, is to be a grown person and take a nap.
KK: I thought you would've said coffee.
AKW: Yeah, no. That's my big life hack. I love coffee, but it's not a life hack for me. It is a love.
KK: It's a love affair.
AKW: It is a love affair. Yeah.
…..
KK: While this podcast is coming to an end, our work in the world is just beginning. This week's call to action is to get radical, radical in the way that Reverend angel Kyodo williams talks about, far reaching and thorough. It calls us to go beyond, to get radical now in our practice, in our relationships, in our action and in our votes. You can start with her book, Radical Dharma, available on Amazon, and check out her schedule at angelkyodowilliams.com. Thanks for being here today. Special thanks to our producer, Trevor Exter, and DJ Drez for the amazing soundtrack.
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We are reimagining a citizenship where everyone belongs, and that calls us to fight for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. Among them, 800,000 young people are living in fear because of the DACA crisis. An attack on immigrants is an attack on all of us. We need to fight to keep our families together and ensure the wellbeing of everyone. Please make it a practice of your citizenship to demand permanent protection, dignity, and respect for our undocumented communities. You can learn more about how to engage at fairimmigration.org and unitedwedream.org.