“When you learn, you teach. When you teach, you learn.” — West African Proverb
For 32 years, I have been teaching. I just didn’t always call it that.
In 1994, I wrote the choreopoem, “A State of Rage,” in a Toni Cade Bambara scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, whose closing refrain became “Rage. Meditation. Action. Healing.” That is the closing refrain of my film, NO! The Rape Documentary. That was Dharma.
Toni Cade Bambara was my teacher, elder sister-friend of five years, and guiding ancestral spirit of thirty years. She was the catalyst for my film, NO!, for learning to be well, the power of wise speech, and my gateway to the Dharma. Through her published and spoken words, she taught me, before I had words for it, what Wise Mindfulness requires: self-seeing, our conditioning, our habits, our truths, extending into our communities and our collective work.
“Revolution begins with the self, in the self. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships.”[1]
And what Wise Speech requires:
“Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.”[2]
I learned dharma before learning Dharma.
Before Dharma became my refuge in 2002, Black feminism was my refuge. It had been since the 1980s. As a Black feminist lesbian survivor, I read the works, saw the films, and listened to the music of many Black feminists as if my life depended on it. Because it did.
The horrors of political violence, sexual violence, and femicide are tragically not new. My ancestors lived through enslavement, emancipation, post-Reconstruction terror, and Jim Crow apartheid in the American South. I am the great-great-great-great granddaughter of a woman assaulted by the white man who owned her in enslavement in the U.S. Her daughter, the descendant of that assault, lived through emancipation and was battered by her Black husband. All of the female descendants in my direct ancestral line, including me, experienced various forms of sexual violence as children and/or adults. While I cannot speak with certainty about the male descendants, I would not be surprised if some did as well. Sexual violence has no boundaries. We’re all vulnerable.
The gift of the 24/7/365 digital age is that denial and silence can no longer be enforced, but the relentlessness of our exposure offers no natural pause.
“Rage. Meditation. Action. Healing.” written in December 1994, ultimately led me to the meditation cushion in December 2002. And from the cushion over a decade later, love WITH accountability® was born. The phrase emerged in 2015, the project took root in 2016, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology was published in 2019. The words emerged from within during one of my extended Vipassanā meditation sessions at home. My meditation cushion became both a literal and metaphorical refuge as I faced the reality of my parents’ initial unwillingness to acknowledge their bystanding roles in my childhood sexual abuse. I could not force them to reckon, yet I continued to try, demanding accountability.
I offer my own life as witness, not as prescription, but as possibility, that these practices can support us in facing what cannot be looked away from.
On April 22, I turned 57.
I am a Sufi Muslim-raised Dharma practitioner first and foremost, from which I learn to teach. I have been practicing since 2002.
For six years I have been teaching Dharma and mindfulness in an official capacity. I am currently in the inaugural cohort of the reconvened Spirit Rock/Insight Meditation Society Residential Retreat Teacher Training Program (2025–2028), a rigorous multi-year formation in Buddhist residential silent meditation retreat teaching.
NO! The Rape Documentary and love WITH accountability® continue their sacred work at their own homes. That work has not ended. It has deepened.
All of this lives at:
where my Dharma teachings, Black survivor-centered cultural work, and the path that holds them both can be found in one place designed by Innovative Web Productions.
Not a turning away. A continuation.
NOtheRapeDocumentary.org | loveWITHaccountability.com
[1] Bambara, Toni Cade. “On the Issue of Roles.” In The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, 101-10. New York: New American Library, 1970.
[2] Bambara, Toni Cade. “What Is It I Think I’m Doing Anyhow.” In The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Reflect on their Art and Situation, edited by Janet Sternberg, 153-178. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980