Review: A Fierce Heart
A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment by Spring Washam
Review by En KW
CW: This review contains mentions of relational abuse, anti-blackness, and state violence that are all part of the contents of Washam’s memoir.
Through critical reflection and storytelling, Spring Washam presents a powerful & contemporary vision for actualising the nonduality of personal and political transformation.
A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Any Moment (Parallax Press 2017) book begins with Washam’s dedication, “to the beautiful community at the East Bay Meditation Center [EBMC]. Your strength, courage, and wisdom have inspired me beyond measure.” Many of us in Buddhist Peace Fellowship know that the EBMC in Oakland, co-founded by Washam, has a vision of centering the needs of people who have been historically marginalised from other Dharma practice communities: providing community-specific practice sessions of yoga, discussion and meditation for young people, people of colour, LGBTQI people, people with disabilities, and people living with chronic illness. It is not insignificant that Washam’s dedication is to a beloved community of practice founded less on individual heroism, than on the wisdom of collective liberation. In a marketplace of USAmerican English-language Buddhist literature seemingly dominated by whiteness and disciplinary individualism, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Any Moment (Parallax Press 2017) is a standout.
Part memoir and part manifesto, the book only builds upon Washam’s opening dedication. She begins introducing herself, how she was born to a black father and white mother, who had met when they were both “young, homeless, and completely down on their luck.” Her father, who had had “a longing to study meditation and Eastern philosophy,” unfortunately abandoned the family due to his own struggles with addiction to “drugs, money, and life on the street,” which Washam recounts with compassionate heartache and tender resignation. Washam reveals some of the pain of being raised by her mother, who could not even acknowledge her African American heritage until Washam was in her 20s.
Far from reducing liberation to a matter of strictly personal or interior transformation, Washam reminds us that “inner and outer worlds transform together,” relating as much to social transformation as to our individual agency.
After significant struggles with love, living with cultural and anti-black erasure at home and community, Washam almost succumbs to a state of existential despair in her young adulthood, when she intuits the emergence of her Great Calling in life, a theme that Washam describes as running through the great myths of the world. The Great Calling arises when we find ourselves statically caught at a crossroads, and a new chapter beckons to be born. She describes this as “an invitation to adventure… on to a higher path. When we respond to the calling, it becomes a powerful force for change…. [we] go inside ourselves and reflect on who we are and why we are here.”
Washam links this to the story of Shakyamuni Buddha. When he had first been the Prince Siddhartha Gautama, he had responded to his own Great Calling after realising the unsatisfactoriness of living in the meaningless privilege and excesses of palace life. Confronted by the inevitability of ageing, illness & death, the prince abandoned the material wealth of his palace, setting forth into the wilderness of passionate personal inquiry.
Washam describes her own experience of existential despair as a young adult, before encountering her first Buddhist meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, whom she regards with deep, devotional gratitude & respect, and with whom she embarked on her first ever 10-day fully immersive Vipassana (Insight) meditation retreat. This would turn out to be a catalyst for Washam’s spiritual awakening, eventuating in a life thoroughly committed to critical spiritual inquiry.
In her early spiritual studies, Washam found that "nobody talked about racism or diversity ever. It was a facet of the diamond left unpolished."
A Fierce Heart recounts Washam’s journey of devotion, spiritual growth and learnings, vacillating between student and teacher, in her evolving commitments to practising and democratising access to methods of meditative awakening & liberation. Among many anecdotes, her lucid interior reflections while practising 1008 prostrations in Bihar, India, and her shamanic initiation in Peru which included excruciating physical and spiritual pain with her guides during their trek up to the peak of a mountain, are particularly affecting in revealing Washam’s vulnerability as a wounded healer.
Disenchanted by the under-representation of diverse perspectives and voices in spiritual liberation through her experiences with meditation centers, Washam passionately reflects a plethora of vivifying personal anecdotes, case studies and wisdom-reflections from many people and traditions. These include her encounter with Garchen Triptrul Rinpoche, who had fled from Tibet to India after 20 years of brutal torture in a Chinese prison. When Rinpoche was then asked by His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he had ever been scared while he was in prison, he famously responded that his biggest fear was of losing compassion for his Chinese torturers and captors.
Through her many experiences, Washam soon finds that in the USA, “issues of race, class, gender, and discrimination were not addressed at any of the meditation centers” that she had encountered. “No one ever talked about racism or diversity ever. It was a facet of the diamond left unpolished.”
Recounting this story even now, I find myself weeping, these resonant whispers of transformative possibility that echo throughout Washam’s lucid reflections on the struggles of so many, under ongoing atrocious injustices of empire — from movements of healing and conciliation in South Africa under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, to the plight of imprisoned African American man Jay Jarvis, on death row at San Quentin Prison. Prosecuted for allegedly sharpening the weapon that had been used to stab a prison guard to death (a charge which he has denied to this day), Jarvis developed a passion for Buddhist teachings, after his attorney had sent him books on meditation. Soon, Jarvis would be meditating religiously in his cell for hours at a time each day. Washam recounts that within a few years, Jarvis had been transformed. The prison, “[a] place that had felt unbearable, [soon] became his sanctuary.”
Far from reducing liberation to a matter of strictly personal or interior transformation, Washam reminds us that “inner and outer worlds transform together,” relating as much to social transformation as to our individual agency. This requires that we “address the oppression and self-hatred” arising from fundamental ignorance. Washam is adamant on one thing:
“Until we start to pay attention, we’re all just doing time.”
As a healer, community organiser and teacher, Washam is unashamed of telling us of her struggles to heal her own wounds of all unfinished ancestral business. Far from derailing from her core message of maintaining fierceness of heart in the face of adversity, Washam’s story instead affirms that we can never disentangle our capacities for necessary ferocity from our the tenderness of our inherent vulnerability.
As per Leonard Cohen’s song, it is through the "cracks in everything" that’s how the light gets in… Being thus illuminated, Washam’s ecstatic, punchy and wizening debut A Fierce Heart reveals:
However much we are still-breaking and broken-hearted, this is the very basis from which our light will shine right back out.
BIO
En KW (they/them pronouns) is a public health professional, queer 3rd culture kid, artist, scholar-practitioner and student of Buddhadharma, based in Birrarunga (Melbourne, Australia), on the unceded sovereign Aboriginal lands of the Bunwurrung & Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. En has a B.A. in Gender Studies (Dartmouth College), a GradDip in Buddhist Studies (University of Sydney), and recently completed a Masters of Education at Monash University focusing on the intersections of queerness, body politics and the Prajnaparamita teachings of the Heart Sutra, and their implications for secular adult education beyond Mindfulness. En practices with the Melbourne Zen Group, and in the Düdjom Tersar lineage of Tibetan Vajrayana. En has two evolving Buddhist arts, poetry and dharma study projects on Instagram: @BootlegDharma, & on the Heart Sutra: @HeartSuturings.