Class Series, Thursday evenings
Sept 14, 21, 28 – 5:30-7 PM
Online over Zoom
Kwan Yin Dharmas: Compassion Practice for Queer and Trans People
Welcome to a transformative class series designed exclusively for queer and trans individuals, where the guiding light of Kwan Yin’s compassion will illuminate your path.
🕊️ About the Class Series:
Kwan Yin is the bodhisattva who “hears the cries of suffering of the world with ease.” She/They is always extending their compassion and protection to us, we need only to call on them to strengthen our relationship to what she’s offering: safety, guidance and belonging for all queer and trans people.
In this class we will work with the dharmas of compassion (karuna), equanimity (upekkha) and loving kindness (metta), calling the bodhisattva to us through chanting their invocation, to hold and protect queer and trans people everywhere. No experience, or even interest, in working with a deity is necessary. Each class will include embodied practice in compassion and the felt sense of safety, and discussion in small groups.
TEACHER BIOS:
emiko (she/they) was raised with the Dharma through the Western Insight tradition and began practicing Vipassana meditation as a child. Ancestrally, she comes from a long lineage of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priests. Seeded with Insight meditation, steeped in the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, guided by Kuan Yin, touched deeply by Dzogchan, and growing into Higashi Honganji, emiko welcomes the many Dharma streams that flow through their life. They are a graduate of the East Bay Meditation Center’s first Spiritual Teacher & Leadership training and is currently a participant in the Sacred Mountain Sangha’s Dharmapala Training. She facilitates various sanghas locally and internationally, and works to create Dharma spaces by and for marginalized groups such as sex workers, and those disabled, neurodiverse, and/or chronically ill. As a mixed-raced, mixed-Buddhist queer, they practice holding contradictions with equanimity as they strive to co-create a more just and compassionate world.
Ream, pronouns: She/They. Ream is a queer organizer and somatics practitioner of European ancestry currently in Oakland, CA, organizing for economic and racial justice and immigrants’ rights, working for over 25 years in the labor movement and currently as the Strategic Campaigns Director for the United Domestic Workers’ Union. Ream is a graduate of EBMC’s PITA and WAS programs and is a co-founder of the Social Justice Sangha. Ream is a practitioner with Generative Somatics, teaching “Somatics for White Racial Justice Organizers” and holds trauma healing groups with activists and movement leaders.
