Since the second reign of Trump began, I have wondered whether to live by Buddhist vows in this moment requires us to question the way that training in those vows has been presented. In my own training and mentoring of chaplains, I have felt, again and again, the limits of spiritual care when it is imagined only as something that happens beside an individual bed, in a zendo or interview room, or at the threshold of a personal crisis. I have observed the need for care in the community meetings, anti-ICE trainings, interfaith gatherings, and movement spaces where people are simultaneously holding collective grief while building collective possibility. The crises that draw me toward this work are political, economic, ecological, and deeply intimate. I care for and love the many beings with whom I am in relationship. When they hurt, I hurt, and I am not alone. This hurt lives in our bodies. It lives in the ways we have been taught to separate ourselves from one another, from the Earth, from history, and from the consequences of the institutions we participate in. Movement chaplaincy matters to me because it begins to address the underlying roots of the conditions that cause that separation, and because it asks how vows can keep us connected to our spiritual orientation without asking us to disappear into our own personal political conditioning.
Movement dharma is an invitation to bridge our practices and movements, to unify practice and action, contemplation and politics, self-care and collective care. I think of movement dharma as teachings and practices that support a weaving of these forms together. I come alongside communities in many contexts. I steward conversations around death and dying, facilitate discussions on gender justice in the classroom, hold spaces for those suffering from climate anxiety, and guide spiritual formation for student chaplains. I am also a steward to those who steward: movement builders and organizers, caregivers of loved ones who are chronically ill or dying, and organizations that are impacting justice work. At the heart of this work lies a question I hear often in movement and spiritual communities: How do we continue to serve, organize, and care for one another when the world feels like it is falling apart and we are already exhausted?
In those moments, I often invoke Glassman Roshi‘s question: “Who are we cooking for? Even though it may seem as if we are cooking for ourselves, we are always cooking for everybody at the same time. This is because we are all interconnected.” As a Buddhist movement chaplain, this teaching reminds me that how I nourish my own formation is also connected to the nourishment of those I come alongside. There are people inside our movements and spiritual communities who are carrying responsibility, tending to others, navigating threats, nervous system and trauma activation, and trying to remain human while doing demanding work. What I am referring to is beyond assessing for burnout; I am curious about what nourishes people to stay in relationship to what they are tending, from a space of resource as well as discernment, that includes compassion and attention to what will best serve. When we do not see spiritual life and the material conditions of people’s lives as one, “we are locked into a worldview that separates us from reality”.
The shape of the question as I understand it now is, as a movement chaplain, how can I be formed into a person capable of staying in relationship to both the spiritual and material conditions of people’s lives? For me, movement chaplaincy/dharma is a formation, training in a of culture of relationality, discipline, wholeness, and clear discernment that supports acts of compassion and interdependence. It is a chaplaincy that asks what kinds of practices, communities, rituals, and ethical commitments make it possible to stay porous without being flooded, devoted without becoming obedient, and accountable without losing our uprightness.
During my own formation, there were two salient experiences that helped me understand what movement chaplaincy might mean in practice. The first took place in the relative quiet of a Zen monastery. The second unfolded across the streets of New York City. They could not have looked more different, yet both taught me about the possibilities for emergent interdependent collective action and practice.
At the Upaya Zen Center, I spent mornings in Samu, scrubbing toilets, oiling wooden panels, tending altars, and doing what was needed alongside others. I came from an achievement-driven academic world where I had learned to measure myself through recognition, productivity, and individualism. At Upaya, much of the work was intentionally quiet for the benefit of the collective. My body softened into the simple dignity of cleaning, bowing, and sweeping. I now understand those mornings as part of my formation in movement chaplaincy: preparation not to leave the temple for the world, but to recognize the whole world as a moving temple. Samu taught me to notice the conditions that sustain collective life and the labor often hidden within it. Not only the physical labor but the intentional stewardship of formation that asks us to shift our relationship to one another, to our lives, and to our actions.
Over time, I came to see that these conditions extend far beyond monastery walls. Movement chaplaincy asks us to attend to these conditions without separating political and spiritual life. That understanding became especially vivid during the Day of Remembering Our Interdependence (mahasanghanyc.com) when Buddhist practitioners, teachers, community leaders, interfaith clergy, medics, artists, and neighbors walked across New York City. I was one of the organizers, but I was moved by our collective practice that emerged throughout the day. In places marked by struggle and memory, like the South Bronx, Staten Island, the African Burial Ground, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, I witnessed community leaders who spoke about housing, health care, childcare, labor, and dignity. At the African Burial Ground, standing with Indigenous elders, I felt the ground itself move from the cries of the buried dead, the original peoples of the land, enslaved Africans, and immigrants. Those of us gathered there were not separate from one another; we were standing inside, alongside one another, together, one living fabric.
At the Metropolitan Detention Center, we placed our palms and foreheads against the prison wall and took turns “holding” the burden of those detained inside. I remember the heat, the thirst, the ache in my heart, and the feeling of my own limitations. I could not open the doors and let people free. I could not undo the violence of the building. But I could stay. I could pray. I could feel my body in relationship with the bodies inside and with the practitioners beside me. We were led in metta, prayer, chant, and prostration. We were invited to see not only the violence of the prison, but also the seeds of violence within ourselves. That day taught me that a public movement dharma is a way of going up and down the mountain at the same time.
Bernie Glassman Roshi’s teaching that “we go up and down the mountain at the same time” has become one way I understand that we practice in the very midst of crisis. We bear witness not from a distance, but as participants in one body. We act not as a departure from spiritual life, but as one of the ways spiritual life becomes real. To go up and down the mountain at the same time is to embrace a non-dual view of the spiritual and political; to keep asking how formation can accompany action, and how action can keep deepening our commitment to one another and what matters.
My orientation to movement chaplaincy is not just as a field of care, but as an essential field of ethical formation. It shapes people who can listen, respond, organize, mourn, imagine, and act without reproducing the very patterns of domination they seek to interrupt.
I am concerned for our current movements. I have seen how movements ask people to keep moving even when they are exhausted, grieving, afraid, or in conflict. Activists and organizers are often expected to be endlessly resilient, strategically clear, morally certain, and emotionally available while navigating internal tensions, burnout, disappointment, and loss. I know of that pressure in myself. I know the temptation to confuse urgency with aliveness, or sacrifice with commitment. Movement chaplaincy is a way to create spaces where grief is honored, conflict is held with dignity, and spiritual imagination is treated as part of the work rather than an afterthought. It cannot replace organizing, leadership, or analysis. It can, however, deepen these lineages by examining what kind of people and communities we are becoming as we struggle for collective liberation.
There is a koan and an image that stays with me in this conversation.
Case 89 from the Blue Cliff Record:
Yun Yen asked Tao Wu, “What does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes for?”
Wu said, “It’s like someone reaching back groping for a pillow in the middle of the night.”
Yen said, “I understand.”
Wu said, “How do you understand it?”
Yen said, “All over the body are hands and eyes.”
Wu said: “You have quite a bit there, but you’ve only said 80 percent of it.”
Yen said: “What do you say, Elder brother?”
Wu said, “Throughout the body are hands and eyes.”
The Bodhisattva of Great Compassion is described and displayed as having many hands and eyes throughout the body. I return to this image because it helps me imagine compassion not as something I possess or dispense, but as something distributed through a body larger than my own. One hand reaches, another steadies, another cooks, another writes, another chants, another organizes, another rests. One eye sees what I cannot see. Another eye observes what I would have missed. Movement chaplaincy, as I understand it, asks how our movements might cultivate not more hands and eyes: but deeper ways of seeing, deeper ways of reaching, limitless ways of holding, and luminous ways of responding together in the dark, with one foot grounded in practice and the other, ready to act with compassion..
For this reason, I see this special issue of The Arrow as an invitation to gather language around what many communities and dharmic lineages have already been doing for generations. Movement chaplaincy is not a new invention so much as an emerging language and orientation for ancient and ongoing forms of accompaniment, ritual, protection, prayer, public witness, liberatory care, and compassionate action. Together and collectively, I believe more continues to emerge. I need this language too. I need ways to understand the forms of care I have received, the practices that have held me, and the communities that have taught me to keep turning toward the world. I believe our movements need spiritual leadership that can bear witness to suffering while helping us remember our collective capacity for transformation. We need practices that do not ask us to choose between the cushion and the street, between inner liberation and structural change, between tending the self and tending the world. We need ways of giving ourselves to what is larger than ourselves without abandoning the ground of conscience, embodiment, and care that allows us to remain whole. We need to go up and down the mountain at the same time.
Our commitments may at times be unrecognized, challenged, or even misunderstood by Buddhist teachers, Buddhist institutions, or the communities we serve. Movement chaplaincy is not formation in order to choose one loyalty over another: what is right for me, what is right in the Dharma, or what is right for my communities. It is formation on the edges of political life, in living those tensions with openness, compassion, ethical clarity, and moral uprightness.
I also want to speak honestly about the tensions inside this work. Giving myself to a movement does not mean surrendering my conscience, my limits, or my ethical and moral discernment. The risk is not only burnout, though burnout is real. There is also the risk of confusing belonging with compliance, strategy with wisdom, or collective commitment to nonviolence with the silencing of questions that still matter. For Buddhist chaplains, this can be especially tender. How we practice and define movement dharma has real consequences. If our movements are to help create a more liberated world, then the ways we practice within tensions must include the ways we meet real political constrictions, disagree with one another, rest while others work, lead while others follow, and find our own dharmic paths that may not be traditional ones.These practices are not secondary to the work, they are part of the world we are already making.
