Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Via [GBF] // "Working with Our Shame" with René Rivera
Another dharma talks is now available on our website and podcast:
Working with Our Shame – René Rivera
-- How large of a force is shame in shaping the behaviors we see in society and ourselves?
In this talk, René Rivera gently but powerfully guides us through the terrain of shame, drawing from personal experience, restorative justice work, and Buddhist teachings. He names shame as one of the five primary human emotions and explores how it subtly drives fear, anger, and avoidance.
René relates how shame shows up intensely in work with people who’ve experienced or caused sexual harm and how facing it consciously can lead to healing and growth. He also ties shame to cultural patterns of oppression, suggesting that unexamined shame fuels collective harm, such as the political targeting of marginalized communities.
To help us recognize and transform our own shame, René shares several tools and frameworks:
Shame vs. Guilt: Shame is “I am bad,” while guilt is “I did something bad”—guilt can motivate action, while shame tends to immobilize.
Compass of Shame (Nathanson):
Attack Self: Internal harshness or over-apologizing.
Attack Other: Blaming or lashing out.
Withdrawal: Avoiding situations that might evoke shame.
Avoidance: Distraction or pretending nothing happened.
Body Awareness: Shame often shows up in physical sensations like sinking or heat; returning to the body anchors awareness.
Reflective Questions (inspired by Byron Katie):
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know it’s true?
How do you react when you believe it?
Who would you be without it?
Is this mine?
“Shame Report” Practice: Sharing shame stories with trusted others to dissolve secrecy and regain perspective.
René encourages us to remember that our shame responses often began as survival strategies. Bringing compassion, curiosity, and community to our experiences allows us to shift from painful self-concepts toward healing and freedom.
Enjoy 850+ free recorded dharma talks at https://gaybuddhist.org/
Via FB // Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
The Rev. Dr. William Barber II isn’t some fringe loudmouth with a sandwich board and a megaphone. He’s one of the last honest moral leaders America has left — a civil rights titan who moves mountains despite a spinal disease that turns standing into agony.
He founded Repairers of the Breach. He co-chairs the Poor People’s Campaign. He teaches public theology at Yale Divinity School, because apparently someone at Yale decided a real Christian voice was more important than another plastic technocrat. Barber has spent his life standing in pulpits, courthouses, and streets, thundering the kind of truth that leaves hypocrites and half-steppers shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. He doesn't just preach about justice — he embodies it.
And for that, on April 28, 2025, they handcuffed him.
What was Barber’s crime? Setting fires? Smashing windows? Storming the Capitol like a frothing MAGA cosplay army?
No.
He prayed.
He stood quietly with a few fellow clergy and workers under the Capitol Rotunda and dared to pray for the poor, the sick, the broken — against a Republican-led budget that guts Medicaid and slashes lifelines like it was pruning dead branches instead of cutting real people loose.
For fifteen minutes they prayed: no chants, no bullhorns, no slogans. Just a call for mercy echoing off the marble.
That was enough.
Within minutes, dozens of Capitol Police poured into the Rotunda like it was the Alamo, armed not with guns but with plastic cuffs and a breathtaking level of institutional stupidity.
Instead of letting a handful of pastors finish their prayer, they cleared the Rotunda with military precision, expelling credentialed members of the press and slamming the doors shut so the world couldn’t see what happened next.
They surrounded Barber — a man with a debilitating chronic illness who walks with a cane — and treated him like a flight risk at Guantanamo.
They cuffed him, dragged him out, and charged him with "crowding, obstructing, and incommoding," a charge so ridiculous it sounds like something invented by a drunk hall monitor.
Seriously. Incommoding.That’s what they wrote down.Apparently, praying too hard for poor people now legally constitutes a disturbance.
Maybe next time Rev. Barber can stage a prayer circle sponsored by Lockheed Martin — then he might actually get a permit.
This would be farcical if it weren’t so gut-wrenching.
Because while Barber was dragged off in handcuffs, the ghosts of recent history rattled around the Rotunda.
It wasn’t that long ago that Sean Feucht — Christian nationalist influencer and professional hair model — threw an impromptu worship concert in that very same space, complete with Lauren Boebert waving her arms like a Pentecostal air traffic controller.
No police crackdown. No mass expulsions. No charges. Just a wink and a nod and a few thousand Instagram likes.
Prayer is welcome at the Capitol, apparently — but only if it worships the right idols.The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. It’s screaming through a megaphone.
Donald Trump, who spent half his second term bellowing about "anti-Christian bias," now presides over a government where a disabled Black minister can be arrested for praying the wrong kind of prayer — the kind that demands justice instead of loyalty, mercy instead of cruelty, truth instead of power.
You could almost laugh if it weren’t so bleak: the same people howling about “religious freedom” are the ones throwing a clergyman in cuffs for having the audacity to ask God to protect Medicaid.
And let’s not lose sight of the sheer cowardice on display.
They didn’t just arrest Barber. They tried to erase the moment itself.They kicked out the press. They closed the doors. They made sure no photos or videos would leak out showing a disabled preacher praying while a wall of uniforms advanced like a scene out of a banana republic.
They knew exactly what they were doing.
They knew what it would look like.And they knew they couldn’t afford for the country to see it.
This isn’t just about Rev. Barber.This is about what kind of country we’re living in now.
If praying for the poor can get you arrested in the "people’s house," what happens next?
What happens when you show up at a school board meeting?
When you kneel in protest on a courthouse lawn?
When you hold a candle for someone society decided doesn’t deserve saving?
The answer is already here.
They’ll slam the doors.
They’ll expel the press.
They’ll hand you a plastic cuff and a criminal charge and tell you it’s for your own safety.
Because they’re not afraid of violence.
They’re not afraid of chaos.
They’re afraid of mercy.
They're afraid of truth.
They're afraid of the power that surges through a single man with a bad spine and a good heart, standing up when everything says he shouldn't be able to.
Rev. Barber prayed.
They arrested him.
And if that doesn't make you furious — and make you laugh bitterly at the absolute cartoon clowns running this circus — then you’re not paying attention.
We should be flooding the Rotunda every damn Monday until they run out of plastic cuffs.
Because the truth that got Barber arrested is the truth that will set the rest of us free.
Monday, April 28, 2025
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
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Via Daily Dharma: Quit Deceiving Yourself
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Sunday, April 27, 2025
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and the Second Jhāna
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Via Daily Dharma: Happiness Without Conditions
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