How do we use our energy to confront overwhelming dehumanization and force? I am excited to announce a series of community-based courses that I will offer beginning in September which will address this question and other topics to help sustain healing and social justice work.
Presented by Sacred Mountain Sangha
🗓️ Sundays, June 28th to July 18th @ 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. PT
📍Online
Join us for a contemplative journey exploring how Baldwin’s and Lorde’s lives and works illuminate the territory of suffering, liberation, and the truth of this moment.
Dr Rima will open and close the series alongside sangha leaders Kareem Ghandour, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Lisa D Moore who will be hosting the rest of the weeks.
Presented by Myers Park Baptist Church
🗓️ June 21, 2026 @ 11:15 a.m. – 12:15 pm ET
📍In-person
📍1900 Queens Road, Charlotte NC
To commemorate Juneteenth weekend this year, we are offering a special session of the Faith and Community Forum.
We will host social activist, pastor at Warren Wilson College and author Rima Vesely-Flad, who in 2026 published her third book: The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. She will share with us some of the painful experiences in her childhood, and how these shaped her younger years.
Presented by Noir Collective AVL
🗓️ June 19, 2026 @ 2:00pm ET
📍In-person
📍39 S Market St Suite C, Asheville, NC
Come celebrate Juneteenth with us at the Ujamaa Marketplace, part of the Boosting the Block initiative that seeks to connect Asheville’s historic Black business district to Pack Square.
Join us for the Juneteenth Edition of the Ujamaa Marketplace, where culture meets commerce, creativity, and community—an intentional space where emerging entrepreneurs and artisans showcase their talents, build meaningful connections, and bring their goods to market!
This idea that we learn to suffer skillfully might be heard as a way of accepting it. Like ‘that’s okay, it’s justifiable. It’s something that is part and parcel of what it means to be Black in this country and we’ll just go along with it.’ That’s not what James Baldwin and Audre Lorde were talking about.
🗓️ May 30, 2026 @ 11:00am – 12:00pm PT / 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm ET
📍In-person
📍2020 Addison St, Berkeley, CA
Diving deeply into a dharma of liberation, Rima Vesely-Flad examines the writings of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin through key Buddhist principles, revealing that liberation depends not only on organizing and mass movements, but also the generative power of inner well-being, authenticity, art, and embodiment.
🗓️ June 4, 2026 @ 6:00pm – 8:30pm PT
📍Online and in-person
📍1453 Mission St, San Francisco, CA (Main Building)
Join author Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad for a conversation exploring a Dharma of liberation, offering timely lessons to help us meet this moment, using the writings of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin to provide real world examples of this dharma in practice.
🗓️ June 1, 2026 @ 5:30 – 7:00pm PT
📍Online and In-person
📍2406 Webster St., Oakland CA
EBMC is thrilled to host Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad, author of the newly released book The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde! Dr. Vesely-Flad will be in conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, author of The Trauma of Caste and Executive Director of Equality Labs. There will also be time for audience Q & A. We hope you’ll join us for this deeply intersectional discussion about two iconic Black queer writers, timeless Buddhist teachings, and our current work toward social justice and collective liberation. This event is for lovers of literature, Buddhist teachings, and social justice activism. All are welcome to attend.
Advice for rising scholars, writers, healers and artists: if you can hold a strong sense of purpose in front of you, you can “make a way out of no way.”
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.”