Becoming a Meditation Teacher During the Pandemic

Teacher/student collaboration (2022)

March 11, 2020

“What do we do?” a male student asked me.

What was I supposed to say on the verge of a pandemic about to explode? I stood speechless before them at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, a dozen set of eyes probing mine for answers, for something beyond my grasp. There was so much I wanted to tell my students; how I didn’t have answers for what was about to unravel, how the only way I’d ever weathered a crisis was by nimble vigilance. How I’d turned to writing to make sense of life, how a decade-long meditation practice taught me to ward off distractions and focus on the present.

I’d been sent as one of three teaching artists for DREAMing Out Loud, a writing program for undocumented CUNY students organized by PEN America. We urged them to write about their lives, to draw wisdom from the adversity they encountered daily in the Age of Trump. The students learned memoir writing basics and were encouraged to envision the futures of their dreams while chronicling the challenges shadowing them every moment of their lives.

I’ll never forget the luminous apprehension in their gazes as each seemed to wonder what would happen next, the hand sanitizer I’d set onto my desk inspiring even more anxiety it seemed, which for them had become a way of life. The pandemic had already developed into something new to lose sleep over, to dread as much as getting on the subway or applying for a job. They sat chilled before me, most Latin American and Caribbean, a few expressing concerns over talks of a citywide shutdown. What would that mean for undocumented students whose relatives worked in housekeeping and in restaurants? And what about school?

“Let me tell you a story,” I said at last.

Silencing my insecurities, I told them how I never thought I’d experience life beyond the violent crime and hopelessness of The Bronx neighborhoods where I grew up in the 70s and 80s. How my father’s lifelong battles with depression and heroin addiction resulted in violence too often, his presence petrifying me. How even my mother succumbed to the allures of easy pleasures in the aftermath of their marriage, to feel alive despite the pitfalls; how friends I went to school with were gunned down in the streets after risking their lives to sell drugs.

I excavated as much as I could access, the snapshots of what seemed like another lifetime—someone else’s life at times—flashing before me: The tenement buildings set on fire by landlords for insurance payouts. How I realized I was queer at the peak of the AIDS crisis, as neighbors wasted from the disease. Rivulets of tragedy that trickled in before roaring into floods of devastation: the fires, heroin, crack, and AIDS. Ronald Reagan. The Christian Right. Guns. The plight of too many to list, most people of color, all poor and working-class.

“You were around for that?” a female student asked me.

“I was.”

“Have you written about it?”

“I haven’t,” I told her, stricken by epiphany. “But now I will.”

Two weeks later, ambulances and emergency vehicles sped past our house in the South Bronx night and day, the frequency of sirens rising with the number of infections and mortalities reported on the following morning’s news. I lost nights of sleep for fear of a loved one getting sick and requiring hospitalization, while trying to convince my mother and youngest brother to stay home when there were so many reasons why they needed to go out. Work as a freelancer dried up, my bank account balance shrinking by the minute.

Randall’s Island became our nearest escape from the South Bronx, where I spent most of the lockdown with my partner, Urayoán. We’d walk the loop while catching glimpses of Manhattan office towers soaring skyward in silence. Then the white trucks arrived. Suddenly, there were 50 or more at the stadium, a sea of buzzing white rectangles cooling corpses from across the city. Each held up to 100 bodies. It was hard not to feel rage over the outbursts of Covid-19 deniers when the innocent perished daily in our frontline communities.

In summer of 2020, I organized COVID Stories, a series of online writing workshops for anyone interested in chronicling the challenges endured during the springtime pandemic peak. Most attendees had participated in storytelling initiatives I’d organized such as Bronx Memoir Project with Bronx Council on the Arts, #OurStoriesNYC with the NYC Department of Health and DREAMing Out Loud, which had wrapped up in March after moving online. We’d been torn away from one another, and the long stretches of solitude proved difficult for many.

Participants shared accounts of losing loved ones and neighbors, the terrors of navigating the subway. The initial pool of 15 attendees consisted of undocumented students, LGBTQI writers of color, and frontline community residents, mostly women of color. By the final session in August 2020, the group had grown to 35, most participants expressing gratitude for the opportunity to connect with others. I refrained from offering craft feedback and listened with an open heart as participants unleashed months’ worth of loss and hopelessness.

From now on, I thought, I’ll do even more to help others. What though?

I’d learned transcendental meditation years prior and turned to it for centering, for stillness in the post-apocalyptic confusion that had become life in The Bronx yet again. It was hard not to think about the darkest years of my childhood and adolescence, during the borough’s bleakest years in the 70s and 80s, which also doubled as its most visionary artistically. Many Bronxites turned to creativity to cope with life and the hip-hop movement was born.

The parallels between Reagan’s AIDS denial and Trump’s Covid-19 failures were haunting to those of us who experienced them in frontline communities of color. Covid-19’s initial death toll hardly inspired an effective response by the Trump administration, quite similar to Reagan’s ignoring of the AIDS crisis forty years prior. HIV/AIDS ravaged the gay community as has been well documented, but it also did a demolition job on communities of color such as where I grew up. The first AIDS victims I knew were Black men. Had the primary victims of either disease been white, affluent, and heterosexual, history would look different.

An opportunity presented itself as I was scrolling through my social media feed one evening: Train to Become a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher. The online course was being offered by Tibet House, taught by senior Buddhist teacher David Nichtern. Nichtern had studied with Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose books I’d started reading while out West in my 20s. If anything, I would finish them since I still had them.

This is either the worst time to be doing this or the best time, I remember thinking, knowing I would need to isolate myself in my Pelham Parkway apartment to pull it off. The 100-hour program required the thorough reading of coursework and books we ordered in advance. I thought about my CUNY students every time an ambulance rushed past with its siren ablaze, the coursework becoming more daunting as infection rates exploded over the holidays.

I thought of the day when a Mexican student asked me: What do we do? When I stood speechless before them. How they morphed into children, their gazes rippling with terror and uncertainty. Hope twinkled in some of their eyes. I didn’t want to tell them that I was just as freaked out about my elderly mother in The Bronx, for the rest of my family. For my partner who suffers from epilepsy and my mentor in Mexico, who was ill and wouldn’t survive.

“Many of you are the only English speakers in your families,” I said. “Yes?”

Most nodded in accordance.

“Okay,” I told them. “Your job is to access the most reliable medical data you can daily. And share this with your families and everyone in your communities.”

A few sat up straighter, as if ready for the battles to come.

There was no way of knowing how many would lose loved ones in the tidal wave of illness and death revving to ravage our neighborhoods, where most residents couldn’t work from home even if they wanted to. I thought about this as bodies piled up on Randall’s Island in the weeks following, as the wails of sirens followed me into dreams after waking me in the morning when I managed to sleep. A few students wrote to me about their struggles, their stories.

Much will be written about Covid-19 and the horrors it unleashed in our most vulnerable neighborhoods. Yet I also witnessed something I hadn’t noticed since mobile devices forced us into silos: Strangers connecting in deep and meaningful ways as evidenced in the workshops I hosted once I could teach meditation. I combined mindfulness basics with memoir writing in early 2021 and marveled as participants of different generations, who’d often never met in person, listened deeply to one another as they shared tales of anguish and discovery.

These intergenerational exchanges were even more apparent on the streets of my Pelham Parkway neighborhood in The Bronx, while passing people on the way to the bank or the bodega once vaccines became available. The finessing of eye-to-eye communication while wearing masks, the compassion offered in flashes, even if executed in silence, served as a reminder that we’d all been through hell together. That we’re capable of being our best during the worst of times. As if we’d learned what it meant to be human again, to give of ourselves.

Let’s keep it that way.