Buddhist Peace Fellowship used the peacefulness of our sitting meditation posture to interrupt the flow of foot traffic at the downtown Oakland Marriott Hotel, which was hosting Urban Shield, a weapons expo and militarized training site for police. The Marriott was not happy with our peaceful protest, and immediately called the cops to remove us. Still, we continued sitting.

As terrible as the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions have been, they are serving the purpose of waking up a lot of people who have been oblivious to or in denial of racial injustice. Maia Duerr weighs in on how you can stand on the side of love instead of staying silent or turning away.

Want to know how you can be more mindful around race and racism? Here's a helpful list of resources from dharma teacher Ruth King.

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By the time we arrive at the Fourth Noble Truth, the Buddha offers us the medicine that helps to bring an end suffering. He teaches it as the Eightfold Path, a set of interdependent practices that help us to untangle the knots of greed, ignorance, and hatred.

The night of the Ferguson grand jury verdict, I faced an unsavory, familiar choice.Buddhism, or the movement?

Every last one of us has failed to end police killing of Black boys and men.

I'm sitting in my home in Oakland, California, meditating as police helicopters fly overhead. I am not at the protests demanding justice for Mike Brown, even though I live only a few minutes from where they are taking place.

As a gender non-conforming person, I am prone to leaving my body, abandoning it, running away. Buddhist meditation helped me come back to a "buddha-nature drenched in flesh."

In the face of violence and brutality, we should develop "samma kodha" — Right Anger — for the sake of all beings.

"Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian writer

When it comes to the education of low-income students of color, mindfulness can easily mystify the structure of social oppression, shifting the analysis of school reform from the systemic level to the individual. I hope for a future in which mindfulness is grounded in notions of interconnectedness and social benefit, rather than focusing on individual growth.

Don't miss Episode #3 of Danny Fisher's new Buddhist podcast series, "Off the Cushion!" Danny asks BPF's Co-Directors Dawn Haney and Katie Loncke about issues of structural racism in Buddhist communities, and the militarization of police forces in the United States

We are constantly yearning for peace and harmony. Yet, the transformation requires us to destroy a life system that we depend upon — a system that is artificially bound together by the dominance of one living being upon another.

For many years, the two preoccupations of my life, “meditation practice” and “environmental science”, were two streams that ran parallel to each other.

Buddhist Peace Fellowship and allies decided to stage a group meditation blockading the doors of a Marriott Hotel in Oakland, California. The reason? Police violence and institutionalized hatred.