I came to the dharma the way many of us do — through suffering. I'm Black, of Afro-Caribbean descent — born in Brooklyn to Jamaican parents, one of African lineage, one of Indian. For years I carried the particular anxiety of moving through spaces that weren't built with me in mind: predominantly white institutions, predominantly white practice centers, rooms where my presence was welcomed in theory and lonely in fact.

Work stress eventually found its way into my body as an autoimmune disease.

Yoga was the first door. It gave me a way back into my body — something to inhabit rather than escape. Then the dharma opened the next door: a way to investigate what was happening in the mind that kept driving my body toward harm.

The Insight tradition gave me genuine tools. And it also showed me its limits — the way Western convert Buddhism has, in many spaces, reproduced the same dynamics of exclusion it claims to dissolve. The retreats expensive. The rooms overwhelmingly white. The unspoken assumption that this practice belongs to certain kinds of people.

It doesn't. It never did. This practice belongs to anyone who suffers and wants to be free. My work is to bring it out — past the gatekeeping, past the price tags, past the loneliness of being the only one in the room — and into the lives of people from the global majority who have every right to these teachings.