If I mention the word radical, what comes to mind? What do you see or feel?

Maybe you think Rosa Parks not vacating her seat. Perhaps it is an image of a "tank man" standing in front of a column of tanks near Trenaman Square in China in 1989. Or maybe it is Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who, in a powerful act of protest against the Vietnam War, immolated himself to death. Maybe you see the images of the water protectors at Standing Rock or tree protectors in the old-growth forests. Or maybe you think of Greta Thunberg railing against the techno-industrial complex at the UN and COP.

Or, like me, maybe you think of that one person who, in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic, stopped everyone and let you in with a smile. That was this morning, and I carried that single act of kindness all day, uplifted. I wonder about such simple yet profound unintended consequences.

In 1950, China invaded Tibet, a clear invasion of a people and a nation's sovereign rights. This is not unlike Russia invading Ukraine, except that Tibet had been practicing peace institutionally for hundreds of years. By 1959, many feared the Dalai Lama was to be kidnapped and murdered and urged him to flee to India. He did not want to leave but listened to his advisors and did so. Tibet in Exile was born, and in 1963, India gave these refugees land in the Indian State of Himachal Pradesh. Thousands of people have died, and thousands of Buddhist temples and monasteries have been destroyed. The situation is ongoing.

One unintended consequence of these terrible happenings was that the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism spread across the world. For me, this is particularly relevant as it led to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche carrying these teachings to the West, initiating the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO in the 1970s, which later became Naropa University, which in turn became a clearinghouse for contemplative education and a radical praxis for integrating peace into scholarship, which in turn drew in creatives and advocates of all sorts, which resulted in an ecopsychology masters degree program emerging, which is where I met my soul mate Colleen in June 2015 <3. But I digress…

I spent a month in the year 2000 with the Tibetans in exile. When I returned in 2012 for three weeks, I happened to be there for a Tibetan Film Festival, a very modest affair but deeply informative. In one of the short films, a collegiate Tibetan girl falls in love with a collegiate Chinese boy. In central moment of the film, the two protagonists are sitting in her dorm room and outside a Free Tibet protest transpires out int he street; the protestors are heard calling out China. The boy doesn't understand: "Why are they protesting my homeland?" To this, the Tibetan girl begins to explain, and the young Chinese student is devastated. "I know nothing of this; nobody I know does."

Afterward, the young Tibetan filmmaker shared his insight and took questions from the audience. He explained that the central premise of his film that he really wanted to convey was that the Chinese people know nearly nothing about the true situation of Tibet because of state censorship. In this, the filmmaker wanted to help de-escalate the anger and resentment of Tibetans toward the Chinese.

I was so touched by his compassion–-to craft a film that takes us right to the heart of the matter and clearly articulates the delineation of power and oppression.

One of the quintessential teachings of the Buddhadharma is about taking personal responsibility for the changes we want to see in the world. If we want to heal anger, hate, or violence, then the invitation is to begin by healing this within ourselves first. In some very tangible ways, Buddhist meditation is about beginning to make space for these aspects of ourselves, our shadows and neuroses. In my practiced understanding, working with the West shield–-as outlined by the initiators of the modern wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony Foster and Little (1998) and as practiced by the School of Lost Border guides–-holds a similar but less structured intention. Both help to create what Trungpa (1995) called a "little gap" between our neurotic stories and our own suffering (p.146). Ironically, to really be with what is, is a radical way of knowing the self and our world, making the unseen seen.

 But, in all of this, I have foregrounded only the human experience—a human-centric bias that is so pervasive as to be nearly invisible.

When I consider radical, I also think about the Australian rainforest activist John Seed. When he was first taking part in the defense of old-growth forests three decades ago, he had this life-altering realization that he wasn't just John Seed protecting the rainforest; he was a part of the rainforest grown conscious that was protecting itself (Seed, 1988).

Such a profound awareness is at the heart of the radical praxis in ecopsychology, but it is often misunderstood.

Ecopsychology asks, from a root level, that we quit the human-centric biasing and (re)remember the interconnected lifeworld to which we belong and of which we are only one of perhaps 100 million species. Such an idea, which directly calls into question the very social and cultural structures of our human institutions, is radical—"a corrective to anthropocentrism in psychology" (Fisher, 2012, p. 82).

We know, for instance, that we are in the midst of the sixth extinction event on this planet (Kolbert, 2014). Yet how do we really come to ground with such a destabilizing reality?

Gomes (2009) helped to create a project called Altars of Extinction, a ritualized memorial art project in which a formalized space is created that invites deep reflection on four shrines to four extinct species set in four directions. In the center, a black curtain encloses a small space, and participants are invited to carry a small stone inside the darkened space and drop it into the central dark well as a prayer for the countless unknown species now extinct because of human impacts.

By helping sanction a sacred place for all the feelings that emerge as we consider our human impacts on this planet and the countless species who are no more because of that impact, Gomes and her colleagues are facilitating the expansion of our hearts into the larger reality of our times. Emotions need to move, to be felt and processed, and a culture that invites emotional repression unconsciously makes rigid our empathy, compassion, and deeper reflective abilities.

Returning to the start, I see that each of those examples was radical not just for the bravery of embodying and speaking truth to power but also because they called our wandering attention into something utterly unbearable.

As I understand it then, and in conclusion, radical is about seeing reality past our preconceptions and busynesses. Radical is about awakening to reality completely and "goes against the stream of forgetfulness, ideological mystifications, and flights from the challenges of existence" (Fisher, 2012, p. 81).

To see nature as beautiful and as a place in need of protection is certainly a good start. But to really awaken to a radical view of this lifeworld is to recognize the right to exist of all those more-than-humans and their ecosystems intrinsically and independently from human use or value. In so doing, the story turns from one of human-only protagonists to one of an immersive and myriads-deep conversation, an immeshed reciprocity, a collaborative endeavor of existence that includes all of us earthlings, equally.

References

Fisher, A. (2012). What is ecopsychology? A radical view. In P. H. Khan, Jr., & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species (pp. 89–114). MIT Press.

Foster, S., & Little, M. (1998). The four shields: The initiatory seasons of human nature. Lost Borders Press.

Gomes, M. (2009). Altars of extinction. In L. Buzzell, & C. Chalquist, (Eds.), Ecotherapy: Healing with nature in mind (pp. 246–250). Sierra Club Books.

Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: an unnatural history. Henry Holt & Co.

Seed, J. (1988). Introduction: "To hear within ourselves the wound of the Earth crying." In J. Seed, J. Macy, P. Fleming, & A. Naess, (Eds.), Thinking like a mountain: Towards a council of all beings (pp. 5–17). New Catalyst Books.

Trungpa, C. (1995). The path is the goal: A basic handbook of Buddhist meditation. Shambhala Publications.

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