ONLINE: Access to Zen’s 12-week Class Series

The Dharma of Being Antiracist (DBA):

Accessing Skillful Engagement for Healing

Mondays: Feb. 17 - May 12*, 2025, 6-7:30pm PST

(*12-week course but duration is 13 weeks! We’ll take a 1-week break on 3/31/25 to celebrate Cesar Chavez Day.)

with Rev. Liên Shutt, Willie Mukei Smith, & Dawn Haney

Apply by February 10th!

Would you like skillful ways to be in the midst of these critical time?

If so, the teachings of the Engaged Eightfold Path directly shows us how we can use our wisdom & heart-mind training to support our behaviors with these qualities:

Wisdom in:

  • Skillful Understanding / View

  • Skillful Thought / Motivation

Enacted through Heart-Mind trainings/meditations & practices in:

  • Skillful Effort

  • Skillful Mindfulness

  • Skillful Concentration

To foster behaviors of:

  • Skillful Speech

  • Skillful Action / Enactment

  • Skillful Livelihood / Living

These 8 aspects are taught as ways to live an intentional life of non-harming. Each week you’ll be presented with traditional & social justice-oriented contemporary frames to understand & apply these aspects in real & every day ways. You’ll be able to learn & practice how they make sense for you in your life now & not just as theories & concepts.

Inquiring into, understanding, and responding to the causes & conditions that have brought about our collective suffering of racism, this course will offer a variety of instructional/guided meditations, reflective writings, and mindfulness practices along with interactive exercises to support grounding, settledness, & wise action. Connecting to how you have agency/power (in yourself & with your communities) in the midst of racial conditioning is the best “medicine” for these times. We’ll practice skills for staying in discomfort & resilience through cultivating an open-hearted intimacy with suffering, invoking anti-racism to have impact in the world.

Class format will generally alternate between a session of teachings (with a home practice assignment) and a session to discuss what came up for you in that week’s practice. — Teaching weeks are attended by all while discussion weeks will be both shared meditation time and then in small groups to foster brave-space intimacy; in BIPOC-affinity & white-bodied-affinity.

REQUIRED TEXTS(s): 

Open to those who acknowledge systemic racism & are committed to open engagement in examining the impact of being part of such a structure. Open to all levels of practice. A variety of meditations & other Buddhist-based practices will be available.

Please note this is a practice course and so there will be approximately 2 hours of reading or home-work/practice each week. Also, as engagement increases the likelihood of intimacy and shifts, please commit to being able to attend the full 12-weeks of the course.

Noble-Giving Scale for the 12-week Course:

The teachings are given unconditionally to be accessible to all. To support this Dharma event & A2Z, we offer this sangha-determined giving model:

Sliding-scale: (with income - match guide) FOR THE SERIES:

  • Pay-it-Forward: $360 (more than $75K)

  • Standard: $300 (between $50 -$75K)

  • Limited Income: $240 (less than $50K)

  • Benefactor: Self-determined amount more than the 3 stated above — Especially to support another’s participation in this Program or other A2Z events.

  • No one turned away for lack of funds based on economic access needs.

Venmo giving to: @SuddenLeap-A2Z (Tel. 4 digits: 2585) or PayPal giving to:  SuddenLeap.A2Z@gmail.com or use the “Donate” button on the main page of this website

Liberation is co-created!

Please fill out the registration below to receive your application to the course

DBA Teachers

Rev. Liên Shutt (she/they) is a priest lineage holder in the Shunryu Suzuki tradition. Born to a Buddhist family in Vietnam, she received her meditation training in the Insight and Soto Zen traditions in the U.S., Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. They were a founding member of the Buddhists of Color in 1998 and currently is the guiding teacher of Access to Zen, an inclusive, anti-oppression sangha and non-profit in the SF Bay Area. She’s the author of Home is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path, published in 2023. 

They are Vietnamese American, 1.5 generation via adoption by white parents at the age of 8; lesbian, GNC/gender expansive. She lives on Coast Miwok land, north of SF, with her partner, exploring waterways and forests as often as they can. More info at AccessToZen.org

Willie Mukei Smith is a Zen student at The Village Zendo, where he co-leads the People of Color Sitting Group. He is also a psychoanalyst with a private practice and a member of both the Buddhist Council of New York and New York Disaster Interfaith Service and Episcopal Priest.

Dawn Haney (they/she) braids together wisdom from Buddhism and social justice traditions, understanding identity, power, and change through their own experiences as a white, fat, queer, nonbinary femme. A former co-director with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, she teaches with the East Bay Meditation Center and the global Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program. You can find Dawn online at dawnhaney.net