Image Description: A collage of ferns over a lush redwood forest. An oval of hand drawn ferns surrounds the words "BIPOC BLOCK BUILD BE IN PERSON, OCTOBER 25-29" in block letters.

BIPOC Block Build Be

A retreat offered only for the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community of social and eco justice change workers, this is a space for healing through embodied practice and spiritual-political tools. A team of skilled facilitators will share dharma wisdom and a variety of spiritual practices supportive to awakening activists in the process of balancing personal transformation with efforts to create systemic change. Toolkit includes dharma wisdom (Buddhist mind and heart practices); interactive workshops on race, ethnicity, and healing from trauma; community building; ancestor practice; ritual; songs; and more. Applications for BIPOC BBB closed July 25th.

What is BBB?

Block Build Be (BBB) is for activists, organizers, healers, and seekers who desire spiritual tools and community support to keep engaging in change work from a resourced place. This online retreat will help you to level up your transformative change work by braiding together the often-separate strands of blocking systemic harms, building creative alternatives, and being aligned with spiritual wisdom. You’ll get to feel how each of these expressions of activism is crucial in making the more beautiful and just worlds we dream of.

Retreat offerings include:

• Immersion in the Block Build Be approach to social justice
• Teachings and techniques that you can bring into your political spaces to help (re)shape them.
• Chances to reflect on your strengths and challenges in movement work
• Experience in a spiritual-political setting where embodiment, stillness, and heart-tending aren’t seen as separate from the urgencies of struggle
• A variety of contemplative and healing practices
• Interactive workshops on a range of spiritual-political topics
• Lots of small group activities and opportunities to connect with members of your cohort
• A spacious schedule with ample breaks to honor the body, the only place where liberation can happen

BIPOC BBB

We believe we can experience freedom even as we live within oppressive systems. We don’t need to wait for our justice movements to win before we begin the work of healing and transforming ourselves and our communities. We choose to embrace dharma wisdom and other spiritual practices, connect with ancestors, reckon with trauma, relax our nervous systems, and create BIPOC spiritual community infused with political praxis. This retreat is for folks who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Keeping this retreat BIPOC-only will help us to create a container of greater safety and ease when moving through important conversations on race, ancestry, trauma, and the deep healing we know is possible. 

"It is extremely important for me to see BIPOC folks being leaderful within Buddhism / yoga / dharma, and doing so with patience, humor, contemplation and consideration, compassion, studiousness, and ease."

—Kendra Graves, BBB 2020 Participant

The Details

Monday October 25th — Friday October 29th. 

We will gather in person at Land of Medicine Buddha, a retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California (traditional Amah Mutsun lands). 

In order to keep ourselves as safe as possible from Covid-19, we'll be limiting participation to residents of the United States who have been fully vaccinated.

A note on fire season: Our retreat falls within the bounds of wildfire season in Northern California. 2020 was the worst fire season on record, and we unfortunately don't know what 2021 will bring — we could be forced to cancel BIPOC BBB if wildfires or smoke conditions make the area too dangerous. Please abide with us in this uncertainty and do your best to make informed decisions and create backup plans as you are able.

• Vegetarian meals and shared-room or tent lodging included with registration
• Sliding scale registration $75 - $3,000 with no one turned away for lack of funds (scholarship options in Application)
• Natural setting of redwood and eucalyptus forest with hiking trails
• Singing, swimming, sharing in the beloved BIPOC community
• Ample breaks to honor the body

Note: While BBB gatherings draw from multiple lineages of Buddhism, please note it is open to people of all faiths, and it is not a silent meditation retreat or intensive Buddhist study. 

Applications closed July 25, 2021.

Our Fantastic Facilitators

Our facilitation team is made up of committed wisdom practitioners, some of whom have studied or apprenticed to teach Buddhist wisdom. Although this is not a dharma teaching retreat, Buddhism is the central spiritual tradition that guides this gathering. Our leadership team is made up of these extraordinary, visionary facilitators and teachers.

B. Anderson (they/them), is somatic music therapy practitioner, plant medicine stewart/herbalist, meditation teacher, community mediator, ritual leader and organizer. B. calls up the traditions, legacies and medicine of their southern Black American, Jamaican Maroon and Choctaw ancestry as their healing arts praxis. Their background in sound healing began in their undergraduate studies at The New England Conservatory as a classical musician, exploring with traditional and African American folk songs, improvisation and various music styles from across the world. Their relationship to plant and herbal medicine was initiated informally through the shared practices of her grandmothers and relatives as a teenager. Their traditions live on through B. B. has continued their study as an apprentice of Spiritual Plant Medicine with Karen Rose at the Sacred Vibes Apothecary and through their practice and certification in Ayurvedic Medicine with Dr. Naina Marballi. B. Anderson is the founder and steward of Song of the Spirit, a community based institute in service of keeping alive the wisdom traditions of the African and Indigenous diaspora. B. serves as a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship board, BIPOC Medicine Makers national rapid response collective and youngest member of elders indigenous plant steward council, Sacred Seeds.

Katie Loncke (they/them) is a lifelong paradoxivore — one who feeds on juicy contradictions to fuel evolutionary activism and organizing. Contradictions like: How do we embrace the world just as it is, and fight to change it? A political troublemaker for over two decades, and a Buddhist practitioner for nearly 15 years, Katie loves joining others who want to effectively end systems of oppression, while also cultivating radically loving, open hearts. Over time, Katie's activism has spanned a wide rainbow arc of issues, from feminist housing justice to environmental defense, cop watch, prison abolition, queer and trans solidarity, police demilitarization, alliance with Native sovereignty and rematriation, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Whether flyering with political kid-puzzles outside a WalMart for union organizing; or helping Greenpeace climbers rappel off a bridge to block the path of an Arctic drilling ship — Katie's quests for compassionate confrontation have led them across the world — and back into their own breath and body. Katie is humbled and excited to be with you for Block Build Be!

Chika Okoye (she/her) is BPF's Program Director. She's also an independent scholar whose main interests are theorizing freedom and histories of Black liberation struggle. Her organizing centers on creating revolutionary culture, and she’s curated Black cultural events at BAMPFA and co-organized politicized, art-infused spaces of community learning with a project called Oakland Summer School. Chika has led or co-facilitated courses on Black Liberation and the Erotic, the basics of Marxism for organizers, and studying liberation and resistance through visionary fiction. She thinks best in conversation and most enjoys teaching and learning through collaboration.

Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt (she/her) is Dharma Transmitted in the Shunryu Suzuki lineage. Born into a Buddhist family in Vietnam, she began her meditation practice in the Insight tradition of Spirit Rock. She is a founding member of the Buddhists of Color in 1998. Her Soto Zen training began at San Francisco Zen Center’s monastery at Tassajara where she lived from 2002-2006. After which, she practiced monastically for a year in the Soto Zen traditions at Hosshinji in Obama, Japan and in the Truc Lam/Bamboo Forest Zen tradition in Da Lat, Vietnam. While she has placed her trust and faith in Zen, she continues to enjoy the deep silence of Insight practices so has completed one-month and two-month silent retreats in America and shorter retreats in Thailand.

With a background in activism on anti-violence against women and children, Asian American and LGBTQI rights, and, more recently as a social worker with formerly chronically-homeless seniors, Liên’s philosophy of teaching is promoting self-agency and community mobilization. She has been published in Once Upon A Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience, Social Work Perspectives, The Mindfulness Bell, Turning Wheel, Buddhadharma, and Lion’s Roar online.

Mari Rose Taruc (she/her) is building a healthier future for her two kids & kids like them, which gets her up every morning to fight for climate and environmental justice. 

For 25 years, she has nurtured social justice formations from neighborhood groups to statewide coalitions to binational networks. Her zen flower practice blooms possibilities for clarity and energy for the movement.

Because we want to share the BBB framework in movements, we encourage you to apply with your action partner(s), whether you're working on the same project or in the same organization.

Applications closed July 25, 2021.

If you have further questions, email chika@bpf.org with “BBB 2021” in the subject line. 

“So it is written:
Heal yourself, baby.
With the tree and the touch, with the turmeric.
In this world, nothing brittle prevails…”

— Eve L. Ewing, “Shea Butter Manifesto”

With love, metta, and solidarity,

BUDDHIST PEACE FELLOWSHIP