Healing Our Way Home:  Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation – A Book Talk

In Healing Our Way Home:  Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation , three Black women, all teachers in the Plum Village tradition founded by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, share intimate conversation, touching on the pain and beauty of their families of origin, relationships and loneliness, intimacy and sexuality, politics, popular culture, race, self-care, and healing. No subject is out of bounds in this free-flowing, wide-ranging offering of mindful wisdom to nourish our sense of belonging and connection with ancestors.

In this book talk, two of the authors will share readings and practices from this new offering, in conversation with the audience.

Leaders

Valerie Brown is an author, Buddhist-Quaker Dharma teacher, facilitator, and executive coach specializing in leadership development and mindfulness practices with a focus on diversity, social equity, and inclusion. An award-winning author, her latest books include Healing Our Way Home:  Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy, and Liberation (Parallax Press, 2024) and  Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022). She has written several Pendle Hill pamphlets and is long-time and beloved teacher at Pendle Hill.

Valerie is an ordained Buddhist Dharma teacher in the lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition. She leads an annual pilgrimage to El Camino de Santiago, Spain to celebrate the power of sacred places. She is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher (500 hours), engaging leaders to embody somatic wisdom and creativity.

Learn more at www.valeriebrown.us.

Marisela Gomez is a mindfulness practitioner in the tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Order of Interbeing, a public health scholar-activist, and a preventive/alternative medicine physician. Of Afro-Latina ancestry, she lives in Baltimore and is involved in land liberation activism and community re-building/research.

She is the author of Race, Class, Power and Organizing in East Baltimore and co-author of Healing our Way Home and of numerous book chapters in popular and scholarly publications.