Practice and Council Groups

The White-Practitioners Unraveling Racial Karma (WURK) group is committed to helping create a sangha at Clouds in Water where all who wish to practice the teachings and precepts of Zen Buddhism feel safe, welcome, and nurtured.  The creation of WURK responds to a call from LAB and BIPOC sangha members for white-bodied sangha members to more fully engage in the work of sangha transformation.  

The group helps plan and promote programs and activities for white-bodied practitioners to examine racism in our society, and how the white mind is conditioned to support and maintain it. WURK also supports the white Racial Awareness Groups that are centered at Clouds (see below). WURK operates as an advisory group to the Guiding Teacher, and its members are chosen at the discretion of the Guiding Teacher in consultation with current WURK members. For more information, contact our Guiding Teacher, Sosan, at: sosan@cloudsinwater.org.

Helping White Practitioners Reckon With Racial Harm

We are excited to announce a new partnership with Reckon With, an organization that works to help white people learn to acknowledge, disrupt, and repair racial harm; and transform themselves, their white families and friends, and the institutions they're a part of. In this program, groups of three people meet every 1 - 2 weeks, guided by an interactive platform to acknowledge and interrupt false narratives of anti-Blackness and racial hierarchy, develop reckoning skills to effectively disrupt harm in real time, and strategize and rehearse specific reparative interventions they'll enact that week. With this partnership, Clouds in Water participants can sign up to be matched with other sangha members (or they can specify specific sangha members they'd like to work with). Participants meet with coaches quarterly to receive personalized feedback, and are invited to re-evaluate their participation every three months. The program is free (donations welcome). For more information about the organization and our partnership, contact reckon@cloudsinwater.org. To sign up to be part of a group, follow this link: Reckon With Sign Up Form.

These small groups of white-bodied people work together to awaken to their role in perpetuating systemic racism and find ways to dismantle it. The groups focus on developing the awareness necessary to see through our individual and collective delusions and conditioning around race and move toward personal and social transformation. 

Contact RAGinfo@cloudsinwater.org for more information, or to find out how to join one of the groups.