Rooted in Plum Village and the Earth Holder Community, the Beloved Community Care-Taking Council offers resources and a network of Circles forming around the world to support mindful action for social justice.
By Coryna Ogunseitan, John Bell, Melanie Gin, Vivien Roman-Hampton on
“We need another dimension,
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Rooted in Plum Village and the Earth Holder Community, the Beloved Community Care-Taking Council offers resources and a network of Circles forming around the world to support mindful action for social justice.
By Coryna Ogunseitan, John Bell, Melanie Gin, Vivien Roman-Hampton on
“We need another dimension, the action dimension ... the realm of the bodhisattva, the kind of energy that helps us bring the ultimate dimension into the historical so we can live our life of action in a relaxing and joyful way, free from fear, free from stress, free from despair.”
—Thích Nhất Hạnh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
Are you heartbroken by the suffering and injustice in our beloved world? Do you long to make an even bigger difference in creating the world you wish to live in? Do you want to engage more in mindful action under the trusted umbrella of our Plum Village practice? Would you like to be part of a small, intimate, close-knit, caring group of folks who come to have a profound sense of belonging and effectiveness?
Hundreds of Plum Village practitioners are already doing this as part of an evolving network of local Beloved Community Circles, which has its roots in Plum Village and the Earth Holder Community. A Beloved Community Circle is composed of roughly five to twelve people who meet regularly in person and commit to three things. We practice mindfulness together so that our liberation from suffering and our continued awakening is at the center. We care deeply about each other’s well-being. And on this foundation of trust and solidarity, we engage in mindful action of the group’s choice, somewhere along the spectrum of social, racial, and climate healing and justice.
Currently there are beautiful Beloved Community Circles in Tampa, Florida, in Greensboro, North Carolina, in Knoxville, Tennessee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Media, Pennsylvania, three in Boston, Massachusetts, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and in San Francisco, California in the US, and in Toronto, Canada. Other Circles are developing in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Brazil, India, Greece, Italy, Germany, Finland, the UK, as well as in Washington DC, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in Tucson, Arizona, and in New York in the US.
Local Circles in the US are engaged in various actions: working with Indigenous groups to protect water rights, supporting Afghani refugees, meeting with state officials around climate legislation, providing organic produce to rural folks, working with a major utility company to adopt renewable energy sources, protecting immigrants from deportation, and creating art to support social justice efforts.
Local Beloved Community Circles are networked together through a website, how-to handbook, newsletter, social media platform, and monthly events. A program director and a Care-Taking Council, which is majority BIPOC, provide guidance, coaching, training, and onboarding.
A local Beloved Community Circle is intentionally small. This small size allows folks to care about each other more personally, make decisions more easily, flatten hierarchy, resolve conflicts sooner, and respond more quickly to changes as they emerge. The relational intimacy created provides a deep sense of belonging and being valued.
Why a Beloved Community Circle?
Suffering and injustice in our beloved world is deep and pervasive, and many of us feel the call to address these conditions. Mindfulness and spiritual wisdom are exquisitely relevant to the polycrisis facing our societies. An untold number of folks are already engaged as individuals; many more would like to engage in mindful action but may not know how or don’t want to do it alone. A Beloved Community Circle aspires to be a home for practitioners who are oriented toward service and action grounded in Buddhist teachings and practice. We view it as one continuation of the School of Youth for Social Service that Thích Nhất Hạnh developed to address suffering in Vietnam in the 1960s.
In the midst of the war in Vietnam, Thầy talked of “a lotus in a sea of fire.” He used this phrase to describe the cauldron of suffering that is war, and the essence of our Buddha nature that sits unharmed and upright amid the flames. In those war years, Thầy told his followers that it was not enough to sit in the temple cultivating peace when the world around them was in flames. Mindful action to relieve suffering was also needed. He said:
When I was in Vietnam, so many of our villages were being bombed. Along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries, or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help the people who were suffering under the bombs? After careful reflection, we decided to do both—to go out and help people and do so in mindfulness. We called it Engaged Buddhism. Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing? [italics added]*
Now, we are in our own sea of fire. Climate change threatens lives, families, and food systems around the world. Poverty is persistent. Racism, too, threatens lives by dividing our communities and fuelling atrocities around the world, including the twentieth month of a genocidal campaign in Palestine. Wars and crimes against humanity are raging in Ukraine, Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere. The global pandemic was deadly, and around the world democracy is imperiled. The social fabric is fractured. The global economy is contributing to severe inequity and lack of opportunity for many people of all races. And we know things can be better than this.
Many people are eager to belong to a caring, intimate group of dependable, reliable, courageous folks committed to nonviolent mindful action to address this collective suffering. A Beloved Community Circle is one entry point into socially engaged practice that offers a clear purpose, an intimate group as a home base, useful trainings, and localized action, all embedded in a national and global network of Beloved Community Circles. In this time of social stress, a Beloved Community Circle can be a safe space for renewal, refuge, resistance, solidarity, healing, effective action, and hope.
Relevance of Plum Village practices
Our Plum Village teachings and practices are exquisitely relevant to addressing the multiple issues that our societies face today. For example, our teachings offer:
- elements of wise view (impermanence, interbeing, and the Four Noble Truths);
- a deep understanding of the key sources of suffering (greed, hatred, and the delusion of separateness);
- practices for developing our love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity (the Four Immeasurable Minds);
- a centering of community building as a necessary refuge (sangha building);
- methods for resolving conflicts and reaching decisions (deep listening, Beginning Anew, Shining Light, Love letters, Care-Taking Councils);
- a specific set of ethics for everyday life emphasizing reverence for life, generosity, kind speech, sexual responsibility, and mindful consumption (The Five Mindfulness Trainings);
- and a history of socially engaged practice as modeled by our Teacher.
The network of Beloved Community Circles deliberately and purposefully organizes folks to offer these practices in the wider world by embodying our teachings in action to help bring forth healing, justice, and liberation for all beings.
The Beloved Community Circles network is in the early stages of development. We welcome your participation. There are many ways to be involved, from joining a local Circle near you, or starting one yourself, to participating in our monthly events (workshops, retreats, open public square gatherings), to connecting with folks in other parts of the world through the social media platform. The vision is of a large, robust, coordinated network of local mindful action teams that add more mindfulness, kind speech, caring nonviolent action, nondual thinking, deep listening and compassion to humanity’s noble effort to protect and preserve Mother Earth and its beings on the way to living in the Beloved Community.
In September and October, there will be a new Beloved Community Circle Cohort Training: nine weekly sessions, focused on creating a lovely and cohesive Circle and on ways of engaging in mindful action. A wonderful way to learn.
For more, please visit our website: belovedcommunitycircles.org, or contact us at belovedcommunitycircles@gmail.com.
Beloved Community Care-Taking Council
Coryna Ogunseitan, Program Director
Melanie Gin
Vivien Roman-Hampton
John Bell
* Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace Is Every Step (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 91.
