Last year during a retreat I attended as a participant, I broke down in tears in the meditation hall. It was quiet enough not to disturb anyone, but the sorrow that had been rising in me for days finally spilled over. Later, I walked out into the woods and let the trees hold my grief — the ancient grief of this land and its people.

Over the last several years, I’ve spent time in places where the memory of genocide still breathes: Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo Nation, the red desert that remembers the Long Walk and the broken treaties. The land’s beauty is immense, but the silence around what happened speaks volumes. That silence lives in our collective body — and, I’ve realized, in much of our Dharma world too.

At the retreat, I spoke about my heartbreak in a small group. Some said they were moved, yet I could sense how distant this history feels for many practitioners. Native genocide, like so many forms of collective trauma, has been largely erased from public consciousness. Forgetting and silence are not compassion. But it is often what happens when pain feels too vast to face.

I want to acknowledge my own silence, too: for my entire adult life I have empathized deeply with the plight of the Palestinians. I’ve spoken of the genocide in some group and retreat settings, but not publicly. I haven’t spoken of the internal horror I’ve felt, witnessing the unbearable suffering and death unfolding in real time. I’ve held it inside, partly out of weariness from my own grief that arose from spending so much time in Native American territory these last several years.  Yet I know that silence can also become its own form of complicity. So I’m naming it now. 

The Dharma calls us to look directly at suffering — personal and collective — and to let our hearts break open rather than turn away. When we can name what has been erased, we begin to open our hearts and minds to what is true.

As I stood in the woods that morning, letting the grief come in waves, I realized I wasn’t being undone; I was being shown what my heart could actually hold. Grief didn’t collapse me — it connected me back to what is real.

If anything, that is the invitation now: not to be unbroken, but to let what breaks us deepen our commitment to truth and compassionate action in a world that needs every bit of it.