One way our ancestors, transistors and older community members today celebrate self-compassion was and is through envisioning and living their lives authentically. From Michael Dillon to Gladys Bently to Marsh P. Johnson, Sylvestor, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the Wachowski sisters, Joan Benoit, Zander Keig, StormMiguel Ruiz and so many others. Each of these individuals chose not to compromise the integrity of their lives and all did so with the self compassion needed to be visible in a world that continues to fight against their existence. 

This session brings us together to briefly look back and honor those who came before us; those who provided us with this opportunity to be and/or live toward our genuine selves. We’ll then learn about and practice self-compassion to support our personal and community visions for a future that includes all of us, with everyone experiencing love and thriving! 

Lev Michael Moses, aka Fresh!, is a Love and Compassion Activist. He offers mindfulness, spiritual mentorship, mediation, and diversity training as tools for shifting toward more authentic, conscious, and passionate living. Lev teaches and writes about how unconditional love and self-compassion are the ultimate gateways to honoring and understanding ourselves and others, thus healing our communities and our planet. 

A graduate of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practitioner and Community Dharma Leadership programs, Lev’s been leading meditation groups and retreats since 2013 at several centers across the country including the East Bay Meditation Center, Southern Dharma, Big Bear Retreat Center and Spirit Rock as well as in corporate and educational settings. Lev Michael is also a Lay Spiritual Leader at Kehilla Synagogue. He’s offered over 300 professional trainings on Self Compassion in the Workplace; Trans and LGBTQ+ Allyship and more. You can also find Lev’s writings in several anthologies including Real World Mindfulness for Beginners and So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. 

Lev credits his ability to reach and connect with diverse communities and audiences to his years growing up in and around various communities in New York, D.C. and San Francisco.

In Brazil the State formally protects both religious freedom and, since 2019, LGBTI+ people against homo/transphobia; yet many queer people are still denied a religious life they can live, not by the State but by religious institutions, families and society. Reading Rainbow Sangha Brasil and its inter-religious action through Socially Engaged Buddhism, this talk shows a community working in that gap. Grounded in the reduction of suffering, the bodhisattva ideal and interdependence, RSBr turns a right guaranteed on paper into a lived, public and joyful practice, linking the conference’s themes of Law, Human Rights and Thriving.

Ícaro Azevedo Matias graduated in graphic design (2005) and holds postgraduate degrees in Socio-Psychology (FESP-SP, 2015) and Science of Religion (PUC-SP, 2021), plus a master’s in Science of Religion (PUC-SP, 2022). He is now a doctoral candidate in Science of Religion at PUC-SP and is also specialising in Medieval History at PUC-PR. A Buddhist for fifteen years, he began in the Japanese Nichiren-shū tradition; after a journey to Japan and time in Pure Land temples studying Amida Buddha, he moved to the Higashi Honganji (Ōtani-ha) branch of Jōdo Shinshū, where he still practises Pure Land Buddhism. In 2019 heco-founded Rainbow Sangha Brasil alongside Reverend Jean Tetsuji, working to welcome the LGBTI+ community and to show Buddhism as an opportunity for religious identity.

Donations: wise.com/pay/me/icaroa72

The talk “Trans”cending identities, limiting rights: India’s Queerealities” deals with Hijra and Kinnar in India from the perspective of the gender-fluid, NeuroQueer writer and LGBTIQAP+ community counsellor.

I’m a NeuroQueer mental health support provider and Gender-fluid writer with invisibilized disabilities, in India. 

Buddhism is often imagined as an inward, mentally focused tradition. This emphasis on “mind over matter” reflects colonial biases that sought to obscure the dynamic, embodied rituals through which enlightenment has unfolded across Asia. The disruptive power of drag activism has similarly threatened patriarchal systems of domination. Contemporary prejudice against gender-diverse people reproduces colonial power structures that serve to police dissenting bodies. Integrating drag into my ritual practice has reshaped the way I experience emptiness and blissful embodiment. In this workshop, we will explore the Drag Persona as a practice for accessing the transformative capacity so integral to our being.

Alimma Dechen Khacho (she/they) is an artist and scholar-practitioner in Vajrayāna Buddhism. They hold a Fine Art BA from UAL and a Buddhist Studies MA from SOAS University of London. Their work across these fields explores embodied forms of tantric realisation. The celebration of queer life is always central to their work, as it is essential for the spiritual wellbeing of the world. They are currently training in the practices of the Dakini’s Whisper community.

See Alimma’s work here:

ig: @dechen.khacho
web: sites.google.com/view/alimma-art 

PayPal Donations

www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=FBMWGQ7A3DL72 

Present day circumstances surrounding human interactions around the world tend to validate the need for an exploration of important Buddhist concepts to support development of a more humanistic world.

Many people today continue to experience exclusion based on their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or other aspects of identity. Indeed, many have never explored their own exclusionary attitudes and the systems set up to perpetuate them. The Lotus Sutra offers a profound vision of radical spiritual equality—a central teaching that all beings possess the capacity to attain Buddhahood, not due to a specific similarity to a particular standard, but because each embodies the Wonderful Dharma in their own unique life.

This  presentation explores the Lotus Sutra’s understanding of equality through the teachings of Nichiren Shonin [a 13th century monk], based on the One Vehicle [Ekayana], the Ten Suchnesses, and ichinen sanzen [three thousand realms in a single thought-moment]. These teachings affirm that our differences are neither obstacles to enlightenment nor grounds for spiritual hierarchy. Instead, they reveal the rich diversity through which the Dharma is expressed. Equality is NOT the erasure of difference but the recognition that every person possesses immeasurable dignity and the inherent potential for awakening.

Nichiren Shonin’s unwavering faith in the universal possibility of Buddhahood challenges us to be aware of labels, prejudices, and fear and to meet each other with respect and compassion. We are thus able to consider how the teachings of the Lotus Sutra can inform our Buddhist conversations about belonging, authenticity, and the full embrace of all beings within the sangha, and ultimately, our societies. We are invited to recognize that unlike earlier teachings, the Buddha has never excluded anyone from the path of enlightenment. This presentation offers a framework for cultivating communities in which diversity is honored, dignity is protected, and every person is encouraged to awaken to the Buddha already present within their own life

Myokei Caine-Barrett currently holds the position of Bishop of the Nichiren Shu Buddhist Order of North America. She is the first woman and the first American to hold this position. She is also the first American woman and first person of African American-Japanese descent to be fully ordained, having completed this process in 2007 with Archbishop Nissho Uchino at Mt. Minobu in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. She is the guiding teacher and resident priest at Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, Texas.

Myokei Shonin continues to volunteer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as clergy to two prison Sanghas for the past 18 years in keeping with the Lotus Sutra teaching of full equality of all beings. Her writings have been published in a variety of Buddhist magazines [Tricycle, Lion’s Roar] and newspapers [Nichiren Shu News] and is featured in “The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women.”

She also supports weekend trainings for Healing Warrior Hearts, a Texas for Heroes project designed to truly welcome veterans home. Myokei Shonin is a facilitator in dialogues on racism and managing conflict mindfully. She is also a licensed Religious Science practitioner.

She currently sits on the board of Lion’s Roar and is advisory board member of the African-American Musuem of History and Culture and Rice University’s Boniuk Institute of Religion and Public Life.

Venmo: @Myokei-Caine-Barrett
PayPal or Zelle: myokeishonin@gmail.com
CashApp: $myokeicb

This confidential space invites participants to share and listen empathically to personal experiences of harm within Buddhist communities. Whether you have experienced harm, witnessed it, or are reflecting on ways you may have caused harm, you are welcome. The only requirement is a willingness to show up and engage with empathy. We will begin by creating shared agreements, followed by an introduction to the specific skills of empathy. Most of the session will focus on sharing, listening, and practicing compassionate engagement in community. We will close with an optional circle of gratitude, offering a chance to reflect and acknowledge the experience of this workshop space.

This facilitated workshop serves as a companion program to the presentation titled “The Missing Practice: Why Do Buddhist Communities Built on Compassion Fail to Care?“ 

Max(ine) Christopher, she/her, is a professional interfaith chaplain and founder of Mitigating dHARMa LLC. Her work and presentations are informed by her intersecting identities as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, single mother and by her lived experience as the youngest child in a family impacted by incest and as a survivor of verbal spousal abuse.

A student of Buddhism for more than 25 years, Max left Zen training after “practicing” for five months with misogynistic and ethical misconduct by her teacher, and as compounded by the devastation of community complicity. Today, she draws on both her privileges and the humility cultivated through suffering and survival to support and center survivor voices, explore and implement what “care” is in community, and develop frameworks for thinking about “care” in Buddhist spaces. Max views the implementation of caring in Buddhism as a formal, engaged, tangible transformation of the training with relational practices.

Venmo: @Maxine-Christopher

This will be an opportunity for conference attendees to experience a traditional Buddhist service during the conference. Many queer people may feel uncomfortable going to temples and thus do not always get the opportunity to participate in a Buddhist service. This service will be held in the Little Heron Zen tradition of Thich nu Tinh Quang, involving the chanting of sutras and paramitas using inclusive language. There will be a short meditation as well as a Dharma talk and discussion period. It is possible that an online Rainbow Zen Temple may be launched soon; this is an opportunity to experience a trial of such a service and provide feedback before it is launched. 

Kody Muncaster, PhD (Quảng Trai tim) began a 3-year training to become a Zen priest under Ven. Bhikkhuni Thich nu Tinh Quang in 2024. They are trauma therapist in Toronto, Canada and have taught gender and sexuality studies at Western University and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. 

You were probably taught the Five Precepts as a list of things not to do: 

Don´t kill, don´t still, don´t lie. Simple enough.

But what, if the real question was never whether you could folllow them, but whether you were willing to ask what harm actually means.

Many queer Buddhists have already wrestled with this question long before they encountered “Engaged Buddhism”.

At some point, you were told that a precepts had a problem with who you are, who you love, or how you live. So you did something remarkable: you sat with the teaching and asked whether it was truly about reducing suffering, or simply about preserving someone else´s idea of morality.

That uncomfortable, often lonely questioning is not a departure from Buddhist practice. It may be its fullest expression.

As Thich Nhat Hanh reminded us, “You are not an observer, you are a participant.” The precepts were never merely personal rules for keeping your own hands clean. They are invitations to examine how suffering moves through relationships, communities, institutions, and systems.

This presentation asks a deceptively simple question: once you relieve suffering in one place, where does it go next? And what happens when the same courage that helped you question exclusion begins to illuminate the suffering hidden in your workplace, family, society, and even the Buddhist communities we call home?

Perhaps the Five Precepts were never the end of the conversation.

Perhaps they were where the real conversation begins.

Kyle Neo is a freelance designer, writer and a Dharma practitioner. He holds a Diploma in Buddhist studies and Buddhist psychology. He aims to find deeper meaning in life through his adversary. His
daily source of Vitamin “C” is Compassion. Last year, he had a good karmic connection to conduct a Buddhist Toolkit workshop for the LGBTQIA+ with a few Dharma friends under Rainbodhi. He is also
the Editor in chief for an online Buddhist publication, Kusala. He is also now involved with a Buddhist
Mentoring program which he hopes to share his insight with the Buddhist youth. 

Contact:

https://substack.com@kyleneo

PayPal eight_nov@yahoo.uk