Ruth King – The Medicine of Dharma

Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m sitting here with Ruth King. Welcome Ruth to the podcast. Welcome back.

Ruth King: Thank you.

Thomas: Yes, I remember vividly, although I think it’s already three, four years ago that we talked at the Collective Trauma Summit, which I found really lovely and I remember this is a very deep and also touching conversation, so thank you for joining me again here, the podcast. And so of course there are so many things we can talk about and I think there are so many things we are both passionate about. What I’m most interested in is we all have our leading edge. We are doing a piece of work for a long time in our life and we are refining it and refining it and expanding it. And I’m curious, where is your leading edge? What excites you the most at the moment or where do you feel most of your pull and also most of your agency being alive or your creativity being alive. So maybe you can share with us a little bit, what’s that for you right now?

Ruth: Oh, thank you so much and indeed, a joy to be with you again. It’s a really big question for me. I feel like I’m really feeling into my eldership. I’m feeling into being in a seat where the view is broad in terms of past and present and future. It seems like my trajectory in terms of span of view is large. And so I’m not feeling heightened particularly at any one thing as much as I’m feeling more kind of galactic in my view and seeing a lot of things at once. So I’m not experiencing a lot of peaks or passions as much as I feel there’s more flavor and fragrance in my life and a sense of balance, a sense of full bodiedness, a bit more joy, a lot less grasping. And so with all of that, I think what comes with seeing life as it is, as crazy as it is right now politically, as all of the different ways it feels like we’re regressing in some ways socially, politically, there’s just tremendous beauty in the mix as well.

And things feel simpler. The beauty is simple and it’s subtle in the mix of what feels very chaotic, especially politically, especially around race, especially around global suffering with different wars and just real, just kind of what feels like psychological chaos. Young kids playing with big toys that harm lots of people. So it is an interesting time for me. I feel like I’m able to see a lot of these things and sit with a lot of these things and respond. I don’t know, I feel like my energy needs to be well used at this point. I guess I could say a little is a lot. I don’t want to waste my energy on things that don’t matter that are frivolous. So I feel like there’s a part of my life right now that’s being more and more distilled, more and more present. So this is a long answer to the question, but my wife and I just transitioned. We downsized, we got rid of a lot of things and every little thing needed to be examined in terms of whether it goes, whether we get rid of it and all these kind of decisions. Life just feels like that now. It feels like being more discerning, more attuning to what’s present and a sense of flavor and tenderness that’s in the mix right now.

Thomas: That’s beautiful. That’s a beautiful answer. That’s lovely. Oh

Ruth: Yeah.

Thomas: You said a lot about yourself. I like the fullness and the richness of fragrances. This is beautiful. It’s a beautiful description. And you said something that caught immediately my attention. You spoke about elderhood, so if you’re up for it, I would like to explore that a bit. What does it need for somebody to become an elder in society? And actually in your understanding, what’s the role of elders and maybe also do we really respect the place of elders in our kind of modern society? All of this sounds to me like a very interesting conversation, or at least part of our conversation. How do you see we become an elder? What are qualities that elders,

Ruth: I don’t know if I can speak for everyone because I think there’s such conditioning around what the answer around that would be, but for me, I think there’s a level of responsibility that’s involved that’s not as active or activated. The responsibility of being present, for example, the responsibility of knowing you’re that I want to say people are watching, not in the sense that you have to perform in any way, but that we need somebody to look at who is practiced and who’s honest and who’s worthy of attention of respect. I think the world’s in need of examples like that, and it doesn’t always have to come from a body that’s age elder, but maybe wise elder is a piece of it.

I don’t know. Generally in society if elders are well tapped, I think the bookends of elders and young people are often out of the mix in terms of people being curious and leveraging some of the knowledge that’s there. But I feel like I get a good amount of respect and the seat that I sit in, and I think it’s humbling because it keeps me attending to something other than my own self-interest and comfort. I feel my arms belong to the world. I feel like my heart belongs to the world whether they want it or not. I feel like my words are medicine, so I need to be responsible. I feel a little is a lot. I think it goes back into what I was saying before, you don’t need to say a lot, but presence. I feel quite pregnant as an elder with presence and the desire to, and I know that I know the power of presence. I know the power of sitting with someone that’s having a hard time or holding my great grandbaby in my arms and just rocking instead of talking. I know the power of that. I know the power of that from not getting it early in my life or screwing it up when I was a parent as a teenager. I mean, I’ve come through this kind of preparation, if you will, for this elder seat.

So there’s responsibility in there and there’s generosity. I feel that’s there. And I think the giving of that is less and less conditioned, I would say, and more seeing it as something that’s needed in the world period. Not because I like you and not you, but it’s like love medicine, something like that’s how I associate and the responsibility to something bigger than just your own life and immediacy.

Thomas: Beautiful. You just said something else that caught my attention then was my words are medicine and I need to use them wisely. What’s your sense, when are words, words and when do words become medicine? What’s the difference in your understanding? When do words become medicine? What’s the quality of that? Yeah,

Ruth: Yeah. I think when it’s fed from a conscious intent where intention is present as opposed to just conversation or chatter, sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes it’s okay to have words like that or to be in just a more casual conversation with someone. I just find that I do less and less of it. It becomes medicine. Yeah. I think intent when intent is feeding it. When I’m talking to my grandson who struggles a lot and I know what his capacity is in terms of hearing me, mainly because it’s me, because I’m the grandmother, he might be able to hear it differently from someone else. So picking those moments when there’s a sliver of receptivity and there needs to be some homeopathic drop of offering that can be received maybe or tasted. And I know that because him and I know that place and I know his heart and I love him, so I really want it to matter.

I think it’s medicine when I’m not forcing the fit of it. I mean, I get that I can’t control whether one takes the medicine or not. I can’t control whether they like it. Sometimes I feel like my job is to just to put it out there and sometimes I have to put it out there in a very direct way. I think I have to let go of needing to be liked in any kind of way in order to offer the medicine or needing something in return. So there’s those kind of cleaning myself up part that’s in the mix for me. But this is the practice that I do with myself. I mean, there’s this background operating system, if you will, or my practice around working with my heart and working with my emotions and working with the capacity to sit in distress without my own activation kicking up. This is operating in the background, so medicines being researched, if you will, or well or lived, so that I’m just not throwing it out there before the medicine’s gotten. Its kind of approval from

Thomas: A approval, FDA approval.

Ruth: It has to be ripened somehow and how it’s ripened, this me keeping myself in check of

Thomas: It. That is very sweet. The FDA approval for the medicine of words. Yeah. Yeah. It’s good. I like it. I like it. Yeah, because I deeply believe in the healing power of words, and that’s why it resonated with me also, because I think there’s a lot words being medicine and how we are attuned to and what comes through when we are really present with each other. And so that’s why I loved your phrasing, and I’m curious about what the FDA is for that

Ruth: Kind of thing. What are they going to say? I mean, what do they know, first of all, but

Thomas: Exactly, exactly. And who’s going to approve for it?

Ruth: Who’s going to approve? Who’s the ultimate authority here?

Thomas: Exactly.

Ruth: I remember the last time that we talked, it was so joyous because I think we started talking about creativity and music and

And the role that played. Well that’s been ripening a lot in my life around just the role that music plays. And I’m especially speaking to some of the black music. And when I look at some of the compositions, some of the lyrics, some of the permission that’s just deeply embedded in the offering of the music as medicine, because part of what I’m playing with is artistry as cultural medicine. And when we are ripening our artistry, we are actually offering medicine to the world because there’s a distinction that’s pristine in it that if heart is involved, of course, because that’s one of the ingredients of the medicine. But that kind of composting or refining that happens when you have to, so-called perfect your art, and you get to a place where it’s good enough and you offer it out, whether it’s a publication or a composition or a poem or a dance.

There’s some place that you get where the offering is made and where it’s good enough. And that kind of self authorizing this kind of distinction that’s gifted in that way, I think is a real beautiful flower that we all are, that represents this kind of mosaic or bouquet in the world that we all need to smell, we all need to taste, we all need we to enjoy it. So I really do feel like that kind of crafting, I mean, you look at Quincy Jones music, for example, in terms of how one has a kind of ear and heart and capacity to bring all those different sounds and sounds of distinction together for something that’s offered up and out, something that’s healing, something that touches us deeply. I see those kind of compositions as sangha, as community building, as respect as a certain beauty that you just don’t get to enjoy singularly because there’s so much interdependence on other components. These, to me, are Buddhist principles at play. These are the pares in my tradition, dancing with each other with the third jewel of Sangha. So yeah, I just remember that we enjoy that conversation back then.

Thomas: That’s reminds me. Right. Yeah. I also deeply enjoyed also the creativity and also it generated the longer we talked, we went deeper and deeper and into a very lovely resonance flow. It was really lovely.

Ruth: Yeah. I think you were saying your wife was involved in music and

Thomas: An artist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Ruth: Yeah. Beautiful.

Thomas: And you said something now like Sangha and community. Let’s talk a little bit about the principle of Sangha in a world that is very hyper individualized in many ways, at least in the West, we look a lot at the individual, the individual, the individual. And I think, I mean better. The Buddhist teachings opened it up in some ways. And the Sangha and the community and the collective spaces are very important part. It’s not just about the Hyperindividualism, and maybe you can speak a little bit to the medicine of Sangha. You spoke about music as cultural medicine and also the real art of community building, weaving a sangha, weaving the fabric of asanga weaving the container or the vessel of asanga. Maybe you can speak a little bit to that. I think that’s very important medicine for our time too.

Ruth: Yeah, I really like how you wove all that together, Thomas into a question that’s really beautiful, and it’s a bit of a dance of life. Sangha. I do think we learn these Buddhist principles when we go to the Dharma centers and we get, it’s kind of like getting an infusion. We get infused with these teachings, but then the real practice is how we are in the relational field with what we’re downloading or what we are learning how to be with. And it’s so easy to get, there’s three jewels in the teachings of Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, but the Sangha can be kind of subordinated in the scope of things, in terms of how to be in community. And we see this a lot in our DMA centers. The moment we get off the cushion from our silence and start engaging each other, all hell breaks loose,

Put in mouth, oops, uch, all these things happen. My work centers around race and racial dynamics and healing, and it’s just so easy to bruise each other. I mean, we’re just so conditioned in that individualist and racial kind of racialized ways. So sangha is not the easiest thing to be in, but also probably the richest ground, if you will, of learning and digesting and integrating and embodying and attuning to what it is to be human and what it is to really connect with these teachings in a very deep way. So yeah, I think Sangha is different than just community at large because in Sangha, the intention is around waking up to how we are together, waking up to our own sense of, I don’t know, rotten tenderizing our hearts, we’re opening our minds. We’re learning how to be with our thoughts, our conditioning in ways that are more onward leading, though more freeing. So we come into Sangha, into Dharma community with the intention of that kind of deep dive. It is not to be confused with the rest of the world that hasn’t come into community with those same intentions. So I think it’s of course, a more challenging environment to engage in those minefields, if you will, where you can be activated, be harmed, be disrespected, all these things that can happen and they can also happen in sga.

But I think that one of the things I realize is I, what brings me back into center when I’m out in the world with folks that have not made that same kind of deal, what keeps me in my right heartfulness or in my right intention when I’m out in the world. And I don’t think there’s some place we get to where we’ve totally nailed it and we’ve got it all together and we’re not activated. But I think what shifts and what has shifted for me is that I recognize myself and a lot of what I see out there, I can recognize myself in that person. I’m not liking in the moment, and I can snap out of the delusion.

I can snap out of. Yeah, I think I’m not as stunned or shocked or crippled by any experiences of disdain. I actually allow that to move through and almost kind of live with it for a while if that’s what’s there. And then I’m able to see something. I can see not just something, but I can see how impermanent that experience is if I’m not continuing to fan the fires and struggle with it. And I don’t always catch myself immediately, but I do catch myself more often than I used to. And so much of my practice has been that I get it in retrospect. I may not get it always in that moment, but I have a way of sitting with it and reflecting on it and forgiving myself and forgiving the other person and seeing how the intensity gets thick and then it softens and it dissolves. And these waves of experiences not to be confused with a permanent state. It’s a comma, not a period. These are things that help me snap out of my delusion, I guess you could say, or out of my wish that things were other than how they are in this very moment, because this is kind of what it is right now.

Thomas: It’s beautiful. You said something I think really important also for any kind of spiritual practice. What I heard you say is I’m not suppressing the emotion or the disdain as an example or anything that comes up, but I am becoming more a vessel for it, and I let it be there until it can dissolve and move on. That’s very different from trying to fit yourself into a spiritual behavior or a way of being that needs to suppress that in order to belong to a community. I think just that sentence for me is an important part of living, not creating a lot of shadow in the spiritual community because we are trying to be somehow, and actually reality is a bit different, and then we create a tension between what actually arises really and how we should be when we are, I dunno, in a certain spiritual tradition, that’s a very powerful sentence. I think that for me, that seems to be also a very important part of the building of a sangha, like a healthy sangha that doesn’t create a lot of spiritual shadow or bypassing. It’s like there’s something about that, what you just shared. That sounds to me very real, very grounded in what is but filled with presence.

Ruth: Yeah, I hear you. And I think one of the ways that shows up is I often talk about my process out loud, not out of wanting something, but just out, just sharing the tracking of the experience. Sometimes that feels like the right thing to do, and I’ll say something like, whoa, I’m feeling really tight in my chest right now and I’m just going to take a breath. Or I really just was, I’m feeling really quaked by what was just said, and I’m wondering, and I’m curious about more. And so just speaking to the experience that one’s having also releases the shadow because it’s bringing voice to what’s happening and it humanizes the experience. What I find with people is usually when I say something or I invite something to be spoken in a group, I facilitate a lot of groups, or I say something like, wow, I’m feeling a lot of tension right now. I’m wondering if anybody else is. It just gives people permission to take a breath and to really come out of hiding, which I think is a big part of the shadow work that you’re speaking of. People don’t even realize sometimes that they’re holding or suppressing, but when somebody can show up that way and or invite that exploration, it can be very freeing and harmonizing for a group of people.

Thomas: To me, this sounds very beautiful and very important. I think that’s a great leadership quality in a group or facilitation quality in a group that you just described. I think for me, this sounds like very important principles of building how we build the sangha and how teachings come in a very connected way and not in an elevated way. It keeps it very grounded,

Ruth: And I love that you’re bringing in this diminishing of the elevated dynamic that could be happening. That can also be a way that people sit on what’s present in a community setting. Then as you know, I offer these racial affinity group deep dive experiences where people are in community for a dedicated period of time for a year where they’re invited to really vary tenderly and structurally. They’re given a lot of guidance on how to be together in the inquiry of their racial conditioning. So that kind of holding and shadow can be aerated and examined tenderly with folks who share similar experiences only to learn that we’re all different, but we start in a place of racial affinity in order to deacon deconstruct some of the ways we’ve been habituated and we can safely, so to speak, do that so that we’re not sitting on our thoughts and holding things in or expecting others to. We need structures to support that kind of investigation and aeration and composting and planting of new seeds. So I’m not only is Sangha important, but having structures in Sangha that supports a sense of being with your internal experience out loud, with loving community is really important.

Thomas: When you have this affinity groups, how do you feel? When is the right time to, for example, let people or different racial backgrounds come together then? So there’s the safe space of the affinity group for some time. There’s some work happening as a safe container or relatively safe container, and then let’s say as it develops or grounds itself more so how, when is the right time for us to come together and do work with each other in a more mixed or diverse group? And how long, when do you feel, oh, no, these groups should stay more in those affinity spaces for some time?

Ruth: Yeah. Yeah, good question. And I think that my work has focused more on the affinity group consciousness raising, aerating, harmonizing among, especially around racial conditioning. So my work centers that, and I think that most of us are in environments that are diverse, or when folks come out of the Brave Space program that I offer the racial affinity group work, they’re in a better place to navigate being in different environments that are challenging around race, and they recognize themselves as a racial being in relationship to not only their own race, but in diverse races. I’m not necessarily facilitating us all coming together because we live in a world where that’s already happening. What I really ripen is one’s capacity to know themselves as a racial being and their impact so that wherever they are in the world, they can recognize how that plays and can make some wholesome choices around what brings us together. So I think the work that I’m doing is really focused on that piece of it, not so much on, once we’re done with that, how we all come together. I think we live in a world where that opportunity exists pretty readily.

Thomas: Right? That’s right.

Ruth: It’s not to say that that’s not a piece of work that’s needed. That’s just not what I’m necessarily trying to facilitate.

Thomas: Right, right. Yeah, I got that. And so when we look a little bit into the dharma teachings now, do you want to share with us when we are on a path of the one hand, it’s like a healing path on the other, what you described also, when we become more in touch with ourselves, when we see more of our wounds, so there’s something healing and integrating, then there is maybe the agency and how we want to impact the world and how we want to kind of deepen our understanding of the dharma. And so how do you hold all this in your sangha in your community? Do people fluctuate back and forth? Do all grow together? Do we need certain times where we focus more on the one or the other? How does this all work together and how important this make the social impact or the work, the service aspect in the world, in your community or in your sangha?

Ruth: I don’t have a sangha. I kind of am what you would call an itinerant teachers. So I’m in a lot of different sagas and have a number of sanghas coming through. My mindful of race institute. I’m not sure I’m clear on the question. Are you asking how one takes the dharma into social settings? Ask me the question.

Thomas: Yes, let’s start with that. How do you take the dharma and the deepening the dharma into the world, into social settings, into how we impact the world, how important this it, some spiritual traditions try to leave the social context and be more, and that’s the practice. And I think you’re also having an impact role in the society. So let’s talk a little bit about how these come together, because some of the Buddhist teachings can be very much in a monastic setting, which has its own beauty and maybe has a different kind of social work also. And so let’s see how this comes together in you and in your teaching.

Ruth: Yes, yes. Yeah. One of the things, and I just wrote a blog on this and it’s important, here’s how rose with me. We bring our life to the cushion. When we come to practice in the dorm centers and we meditate and we sit on our cushion, we close our eyes and what we see and feel is our life. And because we’re still, the volume of that experience is usually kind of cranked up a bit. So there’s a certain heightened awareness that we have of what we’re living with and walking with and working with in our lives. So that’s the material that we sit with, I feel as a teacher is important that I acknowledge to some extent the world we live in to relax the nervous system, to have the nervous system be affirmed around a lot of what people are just kind of grappling with.

It’s kind of naming some of the global issues that are out there, what’s happening in Gaza, what’s happening in Sudan, what’s happening in other parts of the world. It’s not naming what’s happening. It’s acknowledging the suffering that is happening specifically in these parts of the world when all of the killings of black people were going on, there was seldom a dormant talk I would give where I didn’t acknowledge just the raw fact of that happening in the world. And what I found was it allowed people in the room who are also sitting with that to feel like that wasn’t an invisible suffering, that we were kind of whitewashing suffering the conversation around suffering as opposed to putting the texture and color of life in the Dharma Hall. So I think it’s important to name those issues and to drop the distress that anyone may be having right into the heart of what the dharma is offering, which is that we can be free from suffering and its cause that’s the dharma’s medicine. So I think it’s important that we affirm for people that they’re not crazy with what they’re feeling, that the texture and colors and context of life that we’re walking with, living with many of us, certainly me as a teacher, am experiencing this. That becomes what I compost into my dharma talks and offer out with the intention again, of healing, of reducing suffering, of understanding how to work with that, of being present to that and knowing that that’s something that we can work with.

And what I find is when feel like, yeah, my life can fit into this meditation practice that I’m doing and how I learn to work with this can be what I’m learning how to do here. It just relieves a lot of, it relaxes what I find with people. It allows many people that I work with to be able to stay in the room, to be able to listen and hear the messages, to be able to try some things on, because they’ve been kind of affirmed, they’ve been mirrored in some ways, they’ve been seen, their suffering has been seen and that there’s something they can do with that. And I think then they get nourished and resourced, if you will, in ways where the practice becomes immediate and relevant to their lives and how they can be with it and sit with it when they leave the halls, and how to keep their heart open and to know that hate is a non-negotiable.

Right. So these are the things that I think is really important. And because of that, this is why I feel like the practice isn’t different from being out in our social lives. It’s not a lot of separation in my mind with how we move in the world and how we practice with our hearts and minds. Because what we need to remember is that we’re always planting seeds, and what’s unfinished gets reborn. So the practice offers so much beauty and heartfulness and wisdom around how to be with suffering. So of course, what’s happening in the world belongs in the halls.

Thomas: You said just a beautiful sentence. I mean, you said many beautiful things, but one sentence I want to highlight, what’s unfinished gets reborn. That’s a very deep, I think just to listen to that sentence and let it sink in. There’s so much to it. How it gets reborn in short term cycles and in longer term cycles and in very long cycles. I think that there is so much to that sentence that I find very strong and powerful, and how we are often in meditation, witnessing how things are being reborn over and over again just in this cycle that we go through. Yeah,

Ruth: That’s right. And what we give birth to with our thoughts, with our emotions, with our fixations. That’s also part of it.

Thomas: I mean, I see our time. Maybe the last question. Do you want to speak a little bit to impermanence and just what you said just now, the fixation that we experience and impermanence in the Buddhist teaching in the Dharma, because somehow it might seem to many first as a contradiction, how we have fixations and we see that we are actually circling around similar things all the time again and again and again, and then to liquefy or create become more part of the fluidity of impermanence. And so maybe you can speak a little bit between impermanence of listeners.

Ruth: Yeah. One of the things that a Dharma teacher told me when I was on a long retreat once, and I was fixated around what was happening racially in the world, because there’s always something to get pretty locked up around. And I remember just being in such a ball of suffering. And what this exquisite teacher, I think is Christina Feldman said to me, she says, look for the holes in it. There’s holes in it. That wasn’t immediately helpful, but she pierced a bubble in that moment. That gave me a lot to practice with for a long time afterwards, looking for the holes in it. It’s like pixels, there’s more space than anything at any given time in this room. There’s more space in this room than this body, the pictures on the wall and so on.

And so a lot has to do around fixation is what we’re zoomed in on. I often talk about zoomed in, zoomed out. If we’re too zoomed in, that’s where the fixation ends and everything is concretized tightly pixeled on that zoom in, and it can feel so absolute, so shrink wrapped, bubble wrapped, sealed. It could feel so absolute and forever in those moments. And I think what we get to see when we zoom out is that the mind has the capacity to look at a lot of things in the scope of a broader view. Usually when we’re zoomed in and fixated, something’s left out of you, and what do we see when we zoom out? We see the movement of things. The awareness of what’s happening is shifting. The minute we close our eyes and meditation, we see things popping, popping, popping, coming, going, popping going.

I remember Joseph Goldstein saying to me, we think we can hold on. But the truth of the matter is that it’s not about letting go. It is understanding that you can’t hold on to anything that you’re not in control necessarily, of the mind, what arises and what passes away. So there’s an element of not being in control of what arises and passes away. Then there’s the element of being fixated and tightly pixeled on something, even though you can’t hold onto it. There’s just so much to say about impermanence. I have this saying around nothing in life is personal, permanent, or perfect. And it has to do with the three characteristics that’s core to the Buddhist teaching, this core to mindfulness meditation. And that’s what we get to investigate when we’re in the practice of mindfulness or ana meditation, that it’s always changing. It’s not personal. And suffering is a part of what comes with just being in this form.

So impermanence is a true characteristic of our existence, and we get to have an intimate relationship with that through mindfulness meditation. And if you’re not getting it there, then it can become very conceptual, and it’s just not helpful to just speaking of it conceptually. But to have a real experience of closing your eyes and seeing the constant movement that’s not in our control, then that’s something we can count on. We can count on the suffering I’m feeling in this very moment. It’s not going to be here forever. We take that out into our lives, and we see that with the rise of the sun and the moon, and we see it with the changing seasons. We see it with each breath. Yeah.

Thomas: That’s beautiful. And again, I want to highlight something that I heard you say now, and I heard you say it at the beginning when you spoke about an elder, or in your version of Elderhood, you said about the broad view. And now you spoke about the zooming out and not being so zoomed into life. So zooming out seems to be part of the wisdom that practice generates more and more.

Ruth: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What a beautiful full circle, Thomas.

Thomas: Yes. It’s a beautiful full circle, isn’t it? Thank you so much, Ruth. It is lovely. Always lovely to talk to you. Thank you so much that you’re joining us here. And I’m sure everybody that listens will be inspired and by the circle. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much.

Ruth: Thank you as well.