Lava at the Core

April 10, 2026 | Articles

by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad

I was in a planning meeting last week with my friend Jasmine Syedullah when she offered this way forward: “I’m practicing with what it means to be part of a planet that has lava at its core.” And I thought: that’s it.

Beneath the surface, Mother Earth contains molten rock. And we mirror her.

Evoking the lava at the center of Mother Earth is such a significant metaphor, one that Audre Lorde too brought forth in her essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.”

Lorde wrote: “My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage … How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life.”

What Audre Lorde — and Jasmine — are saying is that this lava at the core of the earth is part of us. Rather than repress it, we can practice with it. We can train it.

Such commitment starts with attuning to depth and breadth of the lava, giving it attention, allowing it to breathe. In my own life, Buddhism has offered a path, a way of attuning to and training just fire that erupts in response to great injustices.

Training anger with accuracy is especially poignant in this period of expansive, unchecked violence. Our fierce anger compels us to resist Trump and his threat to annihilate Iran, Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, occupation of Palestine, and ongoing genocide in the West Bank, and the treatment of immigrants and their families by ICE agents on our own shores. Our rage tells us that perpetrators of these injustices must be stopped and held accountable. And we are the ones who will do it, through collective, vigilant action.

We must be deliberate, thoughtful.

Too often our fire can spiral out against ourselves and those in closest proximity to us. Yet if we can train our anger with accuracy, we can be like Mother Earth, protective as rock, capable of enacting volcanoes.

More from Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad

James Baldwin argued that racism is not a “Black problem” but a white fear-driven delusion that scapegoats Black people and evades interior work. Drawing on Baldwin’s essays and testimony, we discuss his critique of white moral pretentiousness, evasion, and the projection of shame and fear—especially the fear of death—onto Black bodies. We also see how Baldwin’s analysis relates to Buddhist teaching on dependent origination from the Rice Seedling Sutra.

 

In this dharma talk, we investigate the role of Sati—which is translated as knowing, awareness, presence, or mindfulness—in the writings of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, in conversation with early Buddhist writings.
In this dharma talk, we understand the weight of suffering through the eyes of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. We learn how Baldwin gleaned the difference between suffering due to the violence of racism, and suffering that is central to the human experience. We learn about Lorde’s embrace of the idea that pain can teach us something important, but that we need not suffer uselessly.

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