More on the Blogisattva Awards

Further to the previous article on the 2010 Blogisattva Awards I posted a link to one of the items from "Sweep the dust, Push the dirt", winner of "Post of the Year" onto the Women and the Forest Sangha facebook page. The piece is from another Buddhist blogger "Angry Asian Buddhist" and is entitled "On white women and Buddhism".

Following this I received the following from Thanissara Mary Weinberg,

Hi Stephen,

"tnx for posting this.. Along with 3 other facilitators, I am co facilitator of the Community Dharma Leader Program at Spirit Rock - a 2 year leadership training. One of the central focuses of the training is diversity and inclusion of marginalized communities. It's taken a lot of hard work by some POC (People of Colour) Dharma leaders and community - to make conscious some of the issues raised in this article. It takes a particular kind of focus to explore bringing accessibility to Dharma, and visibility, to those communities who are marginalized because of race, sexual orientation, class, economic income - at present in the West, Dharma teachers, resources, power, narrative, tends to be very much in the white middle-upper class domain. As we can see from the dialogue around gender equity in Buddhist monasticism, it takes a lot to educate about the impact of assumed entitlement - how that tends to exclude, dis-empower and undermine the growth of leadership in those who are not offered the same levels of support, encouragement, resources and respect. Entitlement makes huge amounts of the lived reality, of those who struggle as a consequence of disparity, entirely invisible. I see Awakening not only a transcendence of our conditioned views about those who appear different - but Awakening is a process that directly uncovers and makes conscious our learned individual, cultural and collective prejudice's. This is painful work and requires much inner honesty and reflection."