We lost a modern-day bodhisattva this past week. Thich Nhat Hanh taught about the simplicity of mindfulness in everyday life, but also was an activist and global messenger for peace. In this episode, Diana speaks with Dr. Larry Ward, who was ordained as a lay minister and Dharma teacher by Thich Nhat Hanh and is the author of the book America's Racial Karma. Dr. Ward shares his experience of racial trauma, how the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh healed his nervous system, and Dr. Ward’s understanding of racial trauma at the biological, psychological, and systemic levels. 

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Thank you to the team Craig, Ashley Hiatt, and Yoko Nguyen. Thank you to Benjamin Gould of Bell & Branch for your beautiful music.

We can put our energy where it matters most and savor the good along the way.

What is America's Racial Karma and how can we take the teachings

That's what I'm going to explore today with Dr.

Larry Ward on Your Life in Process.

We lost a modern day bodhisattva this past week.

Thich Nhat Hanh passed in Vietnam, a place that he had been wanting to

And for many of us, when we think about his teachings, we

Things like when you're washing the dishes, just imagine it's like the baby

Or pausing in your day to breathe in I am here and breathe out I am home.

But Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings were also about Engaged Buddhism.

It wasn't just about mindfulness to help out the individual.

He was a true activist and messenger for peace.

Thay was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in the 1960s by Martin Luther king Jr.

after the two of them spent some time together, clearly listening

And today on the podcast, we have the opportunity to speak with Dr.

Larry Ward, who was ordained as a lay minister and Dharma teacher by

throughout the world, accompanying him in peacemaking missions in China,

Dr.

Ward is the author of the book America's Racial Karma and brings

As a Director of the Lotus Institute.

Larry is also a family friend.

He used to hold Sangha in my parents living room.

And in this conversation, he talks about his experience of racial

Understand how this trauma is a patterning of karma.

And dedicate his life to changing our ecosystem of hate and using

Listening to Larry Ward reminded me a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh's Dharma talks.

This conversation is not going to give you six tips to heal your anxiety or

Ward's teachings are much deeper and more nuanced than that.

So I encourage you to take this on as if you're listening to a Dharma talk.

Lie down, put your legs up the wall, close your eyes, go for a

The day that Thich Nhat Hanh died, I asked my mom to bring over her journal where

Thay's talks while she was on retreat with him in Plum Village and you can see one

I've seen this journal before and I appreciated her artistry, but I

This is one of Thay's Dharma talks on the Upper Hamlet on June

And when I zoomed into read my mom's transcription, this is what it said.

"Today we focus on right diligence or right effort, right?

Diligence is the practice of choosing the right seeds,

If you want those around you to be happy, choose the correct seeds and nourish them.

Make this a habit.

We are not only our bodies.

We are also our environment."

He goes on to say, "There are neural pathways that lead to suffering

To practice means to "bring your wholesome seeds into existence.

You have to choose the right seeds, plant the right seeds and water them every day.

It is good to bring mindfulness to areas where there is wrong view.

No one should be excluded."

Thich Nhat Hanh was an early neuroscientist, a behaviorist

But that every time we change ourselves, every time we water those seeds, it

So taking this conversation with Dr.

Larry Ward as an opportunity to water some different seeds in your own mind.

And bring some mindfulness to areas in your own mind where maybe there is wrong

We have a little bit of connection through my parents who have I think my

So a long history there So it's wonderful to have you here today

Well thank you for the invitation and thank you for

And I I actually was wondering if we could start by uh

So you write that "healing and transforming the patterns of continuation

To realize this understanding is beyond information gathering."

So what do you mean by going beyond just the information gathering to actually be

When you write a book and I was in Oaxaca finishing it

It's like oh I wrote that.

Yeah to to use a phrase attributed to Einstein that you can't solve a problem at

And this is also beautifully referred to and my grandmother's hands but what

is without context And without context traumatic experiences embedded in the

If we don't understand our own biology and as it impacts psychology as that

we've we've divided the world up in all these species that are not pieces

Now I wrote a phrase to myself of meditation yesterday That actually

us the greatest problem It is in fact our similarities and by similarities

Which is our daily experience of life.

And if we don't elevate our skills in learning how to

our

our nervous system patterns of reactivity, we can't

Because it's rooted in trauma.

Trauma of the victim, victims.

Trauma of the witnesses.

The observers and trauma of the perpetrators And this is all

And once you start to understand that life is interconnected to life not as a

your body, you realize how deep the work is we need to do with one another and

When I interviewed Dr Helen Neville from Psychology of

And I was thinking about that and reading and learning more about you and

And I'm wondering if you could share a bit about your experience

Oh sure.

I don't say that so easily but uh I say it sincerely Am I sure well one

a meditation for me Um is uh our house was firebombed um by a team of people

And we had the good fortune to be able to go to Plum Village and spend time

So we had time to to tend to our shock, I emotional pain.

For a time every smell of any smoke reactivated our body sense of fear

And so spending time in the monastery was the most helpful thing, in

To recognize my trauma to honor it to use a phrase from Thich Nhat

No escape but to understand that that phenomenon that experience does not define

I don't mean abstract intellectual thought, I mean body centered healing

And you know remembering that we're being rewired all the

Not just by our biology not just by our psychology but the interaction

No human being has ever found out so many things things that

It's just this tsunami of and that's why information is not enough.

We have to move from information into knowledge and from knowledge into wisdom.

But that wisdom has to be body centered wisdom not simply

Yeah When I had heard that you had gone to Plum Village after

Hanh and he too had to leave his home and experienced so much trauma in his

know practices that you were doing The and I think our listeners both that are

We spent a lot of time in silence and parts of the Buddhist

heals the silence that gives you time to come back to yourself to reconstitute

was every day and every night times in the day but also from like 10 at night

thing is mindful walking mindfulness of steps through the forest and um and

I remember when I was in Plum Village seeing that the

Yes The sacred in terms of movement of the body and mindfulness

So once you learn how to move slowly and become conscious, just like

doing things slow, so that you can start to build the patterns in your

And or in jazz and playing the piano you have to learn the scale, you know

And so it's a journey of mastery And then for me it was great great fortune to be

was our dog and how sorry he was that this occurred after a couple of days

know that was just horrible but don't put your energy there You have bigger

part of the impact of an attack like that is to, at some at a

To wrap you in trauma so that you live the rest of your life in reactivity to hatred.

Which you then embody and advertently.

Um just like you can embody the good.

So the whole slowing down part of the practice overall helped us heal

The question always is how to practice with these experiences so they while

One of my memories of Plum Village was also lazy days.

And uh Americans hate the word lazy.

We had this reaction to lazy what you know but uh the lazy day was was

And we enjoyed just being being with each other.

And um and I I've been thinking about that in terms of all of us everyone

And I'm wondering how um how you practice that in your own life in terms of you

First I have to say I am I I discovered throughout my whole

But as I've grown older, I resist the definition of what I'm doing as work.

Because I see it in it only identifies within a commercial productivity, all

That's our human creativity in motion.

So I practice laziness every morning before I get out of bed.

So what I've discovered in in a non monastic paradigm of daily living,

So I start the morning lazy I do not rush out of bed.

I do not use an alarm clock.

I haven't for years because I don't want to be alarmed.

I have enough alarm right.

And another alarm to shock me into.

And so I begin with a body centered meditation on the Five

And only after I complete that process and remember my father's waking up words

So that I have some sense of reality in some sense of joy

And then in mindfulness practice everything can be coming object of

So uh I shower and the water I remember being part of my life in

water was so precious, hard to come by, walking to a river a dirty river

Pick it out the worms.

And so when I shower I just don't cut on the faucet and forget that.

I am lucky in that sense to have that access to.

I am grateful for my experience of water.

So I'm thanking the water.

So I practice gratitude for being alive.

being able to experience life in this way.

So and then I go outside to our little patios where we have lots of flowers and

And I talk to them every morning and they talk back sometimes and um I

just a walk through uh or like our dog Charlie who's stopped to smell all

And that's part of what the slowing down and the lazy day allow.

So I build laziness into my whole day every time and whenever I can cause

But I always begin the day lazy.

And end the day lazy I have an evening process I go through, sometimes with

Uh and up and down my body and a meditation I use from my

Bathing in moonlight before bed.

That sounds like a lovely practice.

So I'd love to talk about um America's Racial Karma and uh how we're all

And then it also it's extends.

You've written about how it extends beyond America It's not just about America.

But um what w w maybe just start by defining karma and

So what I mean by karma in this instance is a repeating pattern.

So if you're if you're a scientist or a sociologist or a psychologist you

habits at the collective level of our consciousness It's nice at the level

status based on skin tone uh is a human invention not a divine code And and so

others both at the individual level but also at the level of consciousness itself

how our thinking has been conditioned by our trauma by our motivations by our

There's plenty of examples of humanity throughout all of history that learn

But in our state here in the U.S.

today makes everybody wonder if we are actually, we don't have the

And so this the wheel and the patterning is continuing

That's karma and in the only way to break the cycle is to create a new

book just a little bit is in order to create a new pattern you must come deeply

If you cannot recognize your own humanity and you cannot

Hi folks.

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And then finally in March, if you're a clinician, I'm offering a workshop

So you can join me there.

You can check these all out on my event page at Drdianahill.com.

You've written about avoidance.

The type of um therapy that I that I practice, Acceptance and Commitment

and the suffering that comes from avoidance and that also links to Buddhism

But specifically you write about how we have these three types of avoidance

So how do you work with people that are engaging in avoidance whether it's

We'll do anything we can to get around those feelings that show up.

Well my experience is Um spiritual practice in particular,

We have the modern world has convinced us that cognition is the whole meaning

Meaning when I am thinking and you can just try this out Anytime when I am

And therefore the pancakes might be burning.

Therefore therefore I realized I left my keys in the car and therefore

And so our cognition gift is wonderful It's the newest part of our

And until we both train our bodies at another level of evolutionary resilience.

It's not enough resilience just to get by now because we're inundated

And so learning how to journey through our grief with respect and honor and

I do meditations every day to help me recognize my sense of safety and

So that I can recognize and cultivate safety with you

But we have such a long way to go because our traumas stands

even in this moment you being a black man and me being

And then bridge And for me that bridge is there to be crossed

bringing around the world historically and geographically But one of the

black people and Jews were the first people to experience laws actually

And so to be to get away with George Floyd's murder don't

We see this attack mentality and if I live long enough I read a book about the

The conditioning of our our male language and archetypes and even

Because if you're on the battlefield you don't have time to embrace your

And that survival sense that we are at war all the time since is not sustainable

So I have a I have a question about that and I really want to

Because I interviewed Kristin Neff and she's written a new book come

And so it and a lot of it is about anger and and the balance of and

of like these these mother goddesses that are both like hold the the energy

And so then I picked up Thich Nhat Hahn's book to read about anger.

Because I'm like what does what does he have to say about anger.

Because in some ways anger is what burns stuff down anger is is stuff

right and also anger can be the thing that can protect can be that

How do you work with anger?

Well th the first way I work with it is

First anger is a biological response irregardless of what you're thinking.

It's your body's information, talking to you screaming to

And then what you do with that anger then moves into ethics.

But anger itself is a legitimate and genuine and precious source of

it's it's it's an otherwise we wouldn't be gifted with this through our

Now learning how to process our anger just the energy biological energy.

To to learn how that recognize when the anger is rising.

Thanks to many years of practice I can actually feel my anger with Donald

Yeah That's often what's under the anger right It's deep grief.

Yeah In the process of learning how to hold it.

Respected recognize.

It honor.

It is the same.

So that I arrive at a kind of equanimity with my anger where I

Nice.

Anger is the information And then what you do with it the

Yes

So if you look at anger as both um as energy, then you can transmute

Um and yes that's that's kinda how I work with it in myself.

I don't suppress I know shut down.

While I was working on America's Racial Karma Every day, I said to my wife

And that was that's a literal that's a real statement.

To me a nation created in trauma that doesn't deal with this

This is what we're seeing now.

In the pandemic oh what a teacher, if we understood it as a teacher not simply

And we're here together.

Yeah And and that exists in your own household.

You you mentioned at the beginning how your house was firebombed because

And I was telling you that whenever my parents talk about you they talk

Peggy and Larry, Peggy and Larry.

You and your wife have founded the Lotus foundation.

And uh in your your description of the Lotus Institute, you write that "This

collapse while focusing on building better ways of loving and caring for each other

If we don't there won't be a world for us to do anything in."

What is your hope for the work that you're doing with Peggy and moving forward.

Well my my attention now is around understanding trauma

I've lived in enough places to know.

Rarely have I gone to the grocery store and other parts of the world

That is culture cannot be separated from individual behavior And

Our technology produces it and if it's misused.

We have to really massively reeducate that enough of us fast enough so

Either openly or on purpose.

Suicide rates are up I know you know this across every ethnicity in the United

How is our society creating the emotional psychological biological

Not mentioning the weapons they got to do it but anyway and so this denial

For me as a white woman, my awareness of whiteness kind

Right Yeah And I live in a in a um in a community where you know I I can choose

And so I think that's that for me the work is is the thickness of that denial.

Like um there's some effort.

Yeah And I like your language of effort because it would be

This is not simply a white people's problem.

It is a shared problem.

This is again because we don't see ourselves as a whole cloth.

We see ourselves as pieces and we are pieces but we are pieces of a whole cloth.

And so trauma in San Francisco is also trauma in New York.

We have to really re understand the nature of reality because it all interpenetrates.

Our childhood interpenetrates with our adulthood.

Our genetic dispositions interpenetrate with lived moments of life.

And so we our society is interpenetrating, and again this is a

Interpenetrating nature reality, Where we're a culture oriented around

Which is fine.

But we are not very skillful a very wise and recognizing what led to the event.

This is about introspection skills.

This is about lazy days We used to walk to one of the very old French

Through the sunflowers.

You have to walk through sunflower fields to get there

And you know for me part of our challenge Is fine finding

Yeah It took me years to really understand what Thich Nhat Hanh meant by mindfulness.

But what he meant was, if you're not a monk, you have to create a

You know I um in my office I have two artifacts that I

And one is this little piece of wood and it says on it "We Inter

And I like got it down it's like I got to bring this out and have this.

And then the other the other one which is I mean this is

It is the "Peace Is Every Step."

And I think about when I was chatting with my mom about interviewing you I said he's

Kendi had a baby

We can imagine what that would be.

And it might be Larry Ward.

Because you haven't you've had the the peacefulness and the the inter being

And then you also have the the committed action clarity the

Kendi.

Right And so I just appreciate you and your teachings.

And uh I would recommend folks that want to learn more about you

And I'm also curious if you have some recommendations of folks

Sure Um anyone who's interested can go to

And I'm trying to create, to help create, is a narrative beyond wound.

We need to step into our sacred imagination about the

And we want our children to live in.

That we want uh our plants and animals to live in.

And then clarify for ourselves what that feels like in our body, and

And that to me is the the practice of eco spirituality,

Well thank you Dr Larry Ward it's been an honor and delight

And to have you in my parents' lives.

They've transmitted you to me I guess over time through through that.

And um and I really appreciate the work that you're doing on this in

And what was it creative uh what's the word that you said there at the end.

Sacred imagination

For eco spirituality and sacred imagination.

Those two words those two terms.

Thank you very much

Okay Take care

You too Be safe Be well

I love the sound of Dr.

Larry Ward's voice.

And I love his teachings, there's simplicity, and the ways in which he

of his day, like not waking up with an alarm clock, practicing gratitude

If you look at some of the recommendations in psychology, they really are

So you get a better night's sleep.

And gratitude is one of the things that can help change your happiness levels.

Dr.

Ward also talked about the benefits of noble silence

Movement in nature and recognizing that your trauma does not define

Here's the practice I'd like for you to do this week in honor of Thich

It's very simple.

Let's go for a walk in silence.

When I first met Thich Nhat Hanh, it was on the Bluffs of UCSB where

The monks and the nuns were in their brown robes, walking behind him.

And the slowness of his gentle walk on the earth was a teaching in itself.

It taught us to feel where our feet are stepping and look at what's

So take a break, leave your phone at home.

Go for a silent meditative walk.

Carry on Thay's teachings by walking gently on the earth

Come back home to the nourishment that exists right here and right now, with

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of your life in process.

when you enter your life in process, when you become psychologically

If you like this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody, please leave

for me by phone at (805) 457-2776 or by email at podcast@yourlifeinprocess.Com

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