Liberation Spirituality for Our Times: Sacred Strategy in an Age of Unraveling
Just as the ocean's salty water, taken up in to the clouds turns sweet, the stable mind works to benefit others, turning poison into healing nectar.
— Saraha Mahasiddha
Key Details
This offering is designed for:
Dharma practitioners who seek deeper clarity, courage, allyship and engaged action.
Spiritual leaders, change-makers, activists, educators, and artists on the frontlines.
Those healing from systemic oppression through inner and outer liberation.
Anyone drawn to a sacred, strategic, collective response to this moment.
This series will meet for four weeks on Saturdays and Sundays for two hours from 9:00-11:00 a.m. PST (UTC-7) beginning June 7th
All meeting dates include: June 7th, 8th, 14th, 15th, 21st, 22nd, 28th and 29th.
This offering is shared on a tiered based contribution scale. No one will be turned away due to financial need.
This course will be recorded and recordings will be shared with all registered participants.
About This Training
Join us for this vital, multi-lineage journey of Dharma-informed practices in response to increased political, social and environmental upheaval. This spiritually aligned container will navigate the undoing of democracy and rise of systems rooted in domination while co-visioning liberatory ways of being and engaging. Inspired by Liberation Theology and rooted in Dharma, enduring spirit, ancestral wisdom, and somatic awareness, we will gather entering conversation and practice together, to build clarity and courage while shaping a collaborative vision for wise and compassionate transformative engagement and renewal.
This four-part series is shaped by the movement of the Buddha’s four noble truths, from suffering to liberation. The four primary themes of our journey together are:
Seeing clearly in the time of collapse: From historical amnesia, fear and numbness to remembrance, grounded somatic refuge.
How did we get here? From transactional relating, stagnation, silence to life-force recovery, authenticity, courage, finding our voice.
Collective liberation: From separation, domination, despair to the cosmology of interbeing, empowerment, mutual care.
Co-creating a new story: From competition, hoarding, individualism, old oppressive paradigms to sharing, reparative justice, sacred service, systemic transformation.
During this collective conversation we will also explore:
Facing the inner and outer impacts of the collapse of the world we’ve known.
Embodied healing and liberatory practices for resilience, refuge, and transformation.
Visionary and sustainable strategies for collective strategic organizing and thriving.
Solidarity with those most vulnerable and those on frontlines in the struggle for individual and collective liberation.
Each session will include meditation, chanting, Dharma input, collective sharing, dialogue, somatic practices, and homework to support the development of a collaborative vision and pathways of strategic engagement.
Outline of Weekly Sessions
Session 1 (June 7th & 8th): Seeing Clearly in the Time of Collapse
Focus: The journey and impacts of colonial-capitalism, systemic oppression and violence. Honoring frontline resistance while exploring spiritual courage in the face of dehumanization.
Practice Themes: Grounding in truth, grief as medicine, finding our power by naming and facing challenging truths, healing through remembrance and solidarity.
Session 2 (June 14th & 15th): How did we get here?
Focus: Primary separation, loss of connection to nature, apartheid/wetiko split, endless, soulless consumption. Confusion of transhumanism–trying to find the eternal in the mortal realm while missing the immanence of the deathless citta–heart/mind.
Practice Themes: Inner healing, reclaiming agency, voice, and vision for justice and solidarity.
Session 3 (June 21st & 22nd): Collective Liberation
Focus: Collective awakening and movement building as an antidote to despair and grief. Co-creating templates for a spiritually-informed vision for a new story and steps to its embodiment. Dedicating ourselves to collective awakening and co-collaboration.
Practice Themes: Dharma-powered systems change and strategic collaboration.
Session 4 (June 28th & 29th): Co-Creating a New Story
Focus: Bodhisattva vows–intention setting–collective ritual, long-haul strategies. Connecting inner liberation to outer systemic change through Dharma-aligned pathways for engagement (inter-being/world as self/unshakeable liberation of heart and bodies).
Practice Themes: Sacred interdependence, reparative justice, long-haul strategies.
Facilitators & Guest Speakers
This series will be held by Thanissara, Sumedha, and Andrés González with Lubna Masarwa, Deborah Eden Tull, Nadia Abdel Karim, Jilna Shah, Kareem Ghandour, and Gareth Fysh-Foskett joining as guest speakers (bios below).
Thanissara (she/her) started Buddhist practice in the Burmese school in 1975. She was inspired to ordain after meeting Ajahn Chah and spent 12 years as a Buddhist nun, where she was a founding member of Chithurst Monastery and Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in the UK.
She has facilitated meditation retreats internationally for the last 30 years and has an MA in Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy Practice from Middlesex University & the Karuna Institute in the UK.
With Kittisaro, she co-founded Dharmagiri Sacred Mountain Retreat and helped initiate and support a number of HIV/Aids response projects in South Africa.
She has written several books, including two poetry books. Her latest book is Time To Stand Up, An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth.
Sumedha (she/her) became interested in spiritual practice in her teens. After studying Comparative Religion at university, she practiced as a nun for 10 years in the Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah (based in the UK and for a short time in the US). After disrobing in 2010, she co-managed Dharmagiri Hermitage for a year and then co-founded Ekuthuleni retreat place in France, bringing together ecology, simple living and meditation. In 2020 she moved on from Ekuthuleni, but remains resident in France. Sumedha is passionate about how we can reconnect with our deeper being through learning from nature itself – and how we bring that depth back into the world, in how we live and care about each other and the planet. She teaches in person retreats in Europe and the UK, and online programs with Sacred Mountain Sangha.
Andrés González (he/they) relates to himself firstly as a spiritual being embodying, Earth-side, the multiplicity of gender, sexuality, race, & culture as a two-spirit Mestizo with primarily Yaqui, Mexican, Spanish, & Scottish ancestries. He’s also a transracial adoptee, connected to a lineage of Indigenous adoptees separated from family, land, & culture by way of the U.S. child welfare system. Andrés’ lived experience integrating these many worlds has informed his path as a practitioner of curanderismo, community dharma leader, and mental health clinician. Trained in harm reduction, healing-justice, & Indigenous psychology as a psychotherapist, he holds a masters degree in social work. He is also a graduate of East Bay Meditation Center’s two-year Spiritual Teacher & Leadership Training and the 2023-2024 Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics’ certification program in psychedelic facilitation. Andrés presently resides on the land of the Yokuts people (aka Bakersfield, CA) and lovingly traverses the ceremony of life with his adored service dog, Jr.
Lubna Masarwa (she/her) is a Palestinian journalist and Middle East Eye’s Palestine and Israel bureau chief, based in Jerusalem. She is also a meditation teacher, and spiritual activist based in Jerusalem. She has been involved in actions for breaking the siege in Gaza for over a decade. She has managed big teams of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank for the last 10 years. She is inspired to co-create a revolutionary dharma for this historic time, for people living through war and genocide.
Deborah Eden Tull (she/her) is the founder of Mindful Living Revolution, a Zen meditation teacher, author, and spiritual activist. She spent seven years as a monastic at a silent Zen Monastery, and has been immersed in sustainable communities for 25 years. Eden’s teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, non-duality, mindful inquiry, somatic awareness & movement, conscious dance, and an unwavering commitment to personal & collective transformation. She teaches dharma intertwined with post-patriarchal thought and practices, resting upon a lived knowledge of our unity with the more than human world. Eden also facilitates The Work That Reconnects, as created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy.
Jilna Shah (she/her) is a Craniosacral therapist and community movement and meditation facilitator, working mainly with racialised an LGBTQI+ folks and groups. She is also a mentor on youth mindfulness retreats with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education UK. A lot of her political consciousness has been shaped by learning from the struggles and resistance of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India, as well as from Black feminist traditions and disability justice movements. She facilitates movement and meditation in community settings to create spaces for solidarity and collective care- for example, with refugee youth, migrant women and for elders. Jilna is concerned with how we can relate to the body-heart-mind in a way that cultivates more care, freedom, ease and joy and explores this through practices rooted both in stillness and in movement.
Nadia Abdel-Karim (she/her) is a British Palestinian facilitator, healer and sangha builder. She’s a long term practitioner of the BuddhaDharma, trained as a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher and a Focusing practitioner, and has held trainings’ and support groups for mental health non-profit organisations. She holds grief rituals, leads meditation retreats, is a co-founder and organiser of the SWANA+ Sangha (a sangha for people from South West Asia and North Africa, and people of Muslim heritage), BPOC Dharma Collective (a sangha for Black and People of Colour) and Sacred Justice Coalition (an emergent decolonial Buddha Dharma in times of genocide). Currently she’s exploring how to weave ancestral wisdom teachings from the BuddhaDharma, grief tending, Palestinian and Islamic lineages, for collective liberation in these times.
Kareem Ghandour (he/him) is a Lebanese/Palestinian teacher, facilitator, and artist based in the UK. His teaching is inspired by contemplative creativity, ritual, and devotional practice. He has worked with youth and in mindfulness based education projects for the last decade, including serving as managing director for iBme UK. He is a member of the collaborative staff team at Sacred Mountain Sangha and a graduate of the 2 year Dharmapala training. He is a co-founder of the Sacred Justice Coalition and the SWANA+ Sangha, co-creating new dharma cultures to meet times of genocide and collapse.
Gareth Fysh-Foskett (he/him/fo) is a long-time activist, meditation teacher, organiser, facilitator and father, living in the sacred lands of Machynlleth, Cymru, Mid-West Wales. He was proudly raised in a lineage of trade union organisers, leftist agitators and social justice community leaders, and spent most of his twenties training as a monastic in the Thai Forest Tradition. He has lived and worked as a social forester in the Dyfi Valley for the past 13 years.
Kritee (she,her), dharma name Kanko ,is a Climate Scientist, Zen Buddhist priest, Educator & Founding Spiritual Director of Boundless in Motion. She is an ordained teacher in the Rinzai Zen lineage of Cold Mountain and a co-founder of Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center. She has served as faculty for workshops or retreats at the intersection of climate crisis, racial justice, trauma healing and spirituality for many organizations. Kritee served as a leading scientist in the Climate Smart Agriculture program at Environmental Defense Fund for 12 years. Her experience is that identifying and releasing our personal and ecological grief in presence of a loving community is necessary to re-indigenize our ecosystems in this era of global polycrisis. Her articles and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, Harvard Health, Yale Climate Connections, California Public Radio.