Joyfully Just
Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights
for Liberated Living
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I am so excited to have you with me on the journey of being joyfully just.
The goal of this book is simple—to reclaim joy by using meditative practices to be just toward ourselves and the world around us. And yet as the great Jazz artist Thelonius Monk said, “Simple ain’t easy.” This book illustrates how we can be joyful in our efforts for personal, familial, social, organizational, communal, and environmental justice.
Joyfully Just supports people from all spiritual traditions and cultural backgrounds in using meditative practices to reclaim joy. Our spirits, bodies, and minds need to be buoyant to navigate the unceasing waves of prejudice, devaluation, and degradation that we encounter internally, interpersonally, and communally. This book is about actualizing that buoyancy, that levity, as we enact justice using diverse meditative practices. In particular, the Joyfully Just journey focuses on practices, teachings, and insights from Buddhism and Black wisdom traditions.
Joyfully Just offers an inspiring and unique approach to facing injustice by embodying joy and allowing playful curiosity to guide us. Readers are enveloped in an intimate experience where they are encouraged to play with ways of being just towards themselves and extend that playful engagement to friends, family, social settings, and the natural environment.
I invite you to gently release the false duality between “what I do in the world” and “what I do in meditation.” The artificial separation of our interior and exterior lives can make us feel stuck. Joyfully Just is designed to help us get unstuck.
Getting Unstuck from the Lotus Position
How? The Methods
In this book, you will come to see how much insight and guidance for wise, courageous living we receive from Black cultural traditions. I explore Buddhism and Black wisdom together in this book because although the spiritual and religious traditions of Black people are diverse, as are Buddhist lineages, many secular Black wisdom traditions and overarching Buddhist principles share common insights. For example, Black musical traditions illustrate the unity of suffering and joy and the possibility for self-transcendence and enlightenment in any circumstance. We will use insights from Buddhism and Black wisdom to help us develop fierce compassion and discomfort resilience as we explore oppression: how it developed in our youth and how it manifests in our lives. We will learn how to navigate suffering with joy!
For Whom? Everyone!
People from every background and organizations including schools, health and human service organizations, and corporations need to navigate the challenges of ending oppression and achieving environmental justice. This book will help you develop an interior life that is a brave, safe space from which you enrich all those around you while embodying justice and joy.
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