A Buddhist Perspective on the Current Situation in Minnesota 

Randy Wedin is a Sinai and Synapses Fellow. This blog post is adapted from a talk he gave at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center on January 27, 2026.

It’s a very challenging time to live in Minnesota. Over the past month, our city and state have become the center of an unfolding crisis, and I’m seeing things and experiencing feelings I never expected to see or feel. My emotions are on a roller-coaster.

I’m full of questions: How can I make sense of what’s happening around me? How can I understand and deal appropriately with my own feelings? What actions can I take in response to this crisis?  I’m sure many of you are riding a similar roller-coaster of emotions and questions.

As I was preparing this talk, I was online and reading local and national media. On the negative and scary side, I saw photos of young children who were being detained. I saw videos of protesters being sprayed up close with pepper spray or being dragged from their cars or houses. I learned that a second citizen—Alex Pretti—had been shot and killed that very morning. I felt angry and outraged.

At the same time, I watched coverage of the many “ICE Out” events that had taken place the day before. I watched videos of thousands of protesters marching peacefully in the street. And I saw a video of a gathering at a downtown church, where more than 600 clergy from around the nation had come together in support. I felt proud of my fellow citizens and hopeful that we can make a difference.

And these were not just events I was reading about from afar. I felt personally involved through two spiritual communities I belong to.

I belong to a suburban Lutheran Church where I sing every Sunday morning in the choir. Our small church has been sponsoring a mother and child who are refugees from Venezuela. Over the past year and a half, since they came to this country legally, we’ve been helping them find housing, employment, childcare, and schooling. I learned last week that the mother had just been detained and sent to Texas, even though they were here legally. The six-year-old child is still here, being sheltered by community members in a safe place. When I think about how they’re being treated, I feel anger and outrage.

My other spiritual community is this sangha, here at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center (MZMC). Normally the building is closed on Friday, but this last Friday we opened it up and meditation sessions were happening most of the morning. I came here and meditated with others, some of whom were then joining the protest march in the afternoon. I watched as they put on layer after layer of warm clothing and headed out into the below-zero weather. Our guiding teacher at the Zen Center, Ben Connelly, has been part of the organizing group that brought together all those clergy from many different faith traditions and from across the nation. When I think about the roles played by fellow members of our sangha, I feel pride and hope.

I’m not sure if I have any special wisdom to offer at this difficult time, but we all need to do what we can. So I’m going to share my thoughts, and I’d like to hear yours.

First, I’ll tell you about a Zen teacher who can provide an example for us. Then, I’ll read a poem that provides an important perspective as well as a challenge for each of us. And finally, I’ll describe a Buddhist practice that each of us can use as we respond to today’s crisis.

Two important Buddhist concepts that will run through this talk are compassion and “interbeing.”

The teacher I want to highlight this evening is Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen monk. During the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s, he refused to take sides. Instead, he founded a Buddhist organization, the School of Youth for Social Service, that sent thousands of volunteers into the countryside to establish schools, build healthcare clinics, and rebuild villages destroyed by bombing. The school operated on the principle of non-violence and neutrality. He coined the term “engaged Buddhism” to describe this application of mindfulness to social and political suffering.

In 1966, he traveled to the US to speak about the need for peace in Vietnam. He met with Martin Luther King, Jr. and convinced King to publicly oppose the war. Because of Thich Nhat Hanh’s activity and his refusal to take sides, he angered both the South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese governments. As a result, he was banned in 1966 from returning to Vietnam. He continued to work for peace for the rest of his life, until 2022 when he passed away at the age of 95. In 1982 he founded the Plum Village monastery in France. I know some members of this sangha have spent time at Plum Village and met Thich Nhat Hanh, who is known to his students as “Thay,” which means teacher.

In 1983, Thay came to the US on a six-week tour of Zen Centers. He visited MZMC and met Katagiri Roshi, who was our founder and guiding teacher. And he gave a two-day workshop right here in this building.

Besides first using the term “Engaged Buddhism,” he’s also known for coining the term “interbeing.” The concept of “interbeing” is that nothing can exist by itself; everything has to “inter-be” with everything else. Interbeing is a word that captures the essence of the Buddhist teachings of emptiness, interdependence, and dependent co-arising.

As I’ve been trying to make sense of my feelings about the current situation in Minnesota, I thought about Thich Nhat Hanh and some of his books that I’ve read. When I learned about the killing of Renee Good on January 7 just two miles away from where we are tonight, one of his most famous poems came to mind. The poem is titled “Call Me by My True Names.”  Thich Nhat Hanh wrote it during a period of intense suffering following the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Between 1975 and 1995, refugees, who became known as Vietnamese Boat People, fled Vietnam by boat. It’s estimated that almost 800,000 boat people left Vietnam and arrived safely in another country. However, many others were killed by pirates, overcrowding in the boats, and storms. It’s estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 boat people died at sea.

In 1976, near the beginning of this period, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was living in France, received a letter about a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl on an escaping boat who was raped by a pirate in the Gulf of Siam. After she was raped, she jumped in the sea and drowned. When Thich Nhat Hanh learned about this incident, he was initially very angry, and he spent hours in meditation.

Here’s what he wrote about this experience: “When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily … After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it there are three people: the 12-year-old girl, the pirate, and me.”

Here’s the poem:

——-

Please Call Me by My True Names

FEB 21, 2022

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing

on the surface of the river.

And I am the bird

that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond.

And I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man who has to pay

his “debt of blood” to my people

dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm

it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart

can be left open,

the door of compassion.

This poem is about interbeing, collective responsibility, and compassion. To be “called by one’s true names” is to recognize that we are everything and everyone.

As I thought about this poem, I wondered how it might be expanded to apply to Minnesota today. I came up with several new stanzas:

“I am Renee Good, the protester killed in Minneapolis on January 7. And I am Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fired the bullets that killed Renee Good.”

“I am the refugee from Venezuela or Somalia, welcomed in the past by the federal government, who is now afraid to leave my home to go to work or school or the grocery store. I am the masked ICE agent whose heart has been hardened in order to do a job carrying out orders from that same federal government.”

I find this poem to be very challenging. It’s one thing to think about interbeing and interdependence while on a peaceful walk in the forest in the middle of summer. When I’m in nature, I can sometimes sense that everything is connected to everything else and how I’m part of that all-encompassing web of life. On the other hand, this poem calls us to experience interbeing while seeing ourselves in the pirate, in the ICE agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

From a Buddhist perspective, the “actor” who commits harm is also suffering, as they are creating negative karma for themselves. We can help them cease the behavior causing their own spiritual suffering, by extending compassion to both the victim and the perpetrator.

Listen again to the final lines of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem:

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart

can be left open,

the door of compassion.

This poem does not ask us to condone the behavior, but rather it asks us to separate the “deed from the doer.” It’s not about being passive or “nice.” It’s a strategic and spiritual refusal to mirror the hatred of one’s opponent. We are asked to find a middle way between passive acquiescence on the one hand and violent retribution on the other hand. We’re asked to keep open the door of our heart, the door of compassion.

This is not easy to do. Fortunately, there is a Buddhist practice that can help us. It’s a practice called “Tonglen,” and it’s one of several different meditation practices that specifically help us train to become more compassionate.

“Tonglen” comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, so it’s not strictly speaking a Zen Buddhist practice. But here at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, we’re happy to adopt practices from other Buddhist traditions, as well as from modern psychology.

I first learned about Tonglen from Norm Fischer, a Zen Buddhist teacher from the Bay area who’s a good friend of MZMC. A number of years ago, he was here and gave a workshop based on his book, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong. In the book’s introduction, he lists several reasons for writing the book. He writes:

“The third reason for this commentary has do with what I consider a serious weakness in Zen: its deficiency on explicit teachings on compassion. … Since Zen is so fixated on cutting through complications and focusing on a few simple, profound points, it assumes rather than encourages compassion and has very little to say about it.”

This book is based on the Lojong tradition from the 11th century, which is a Tibetan Buddhist program for training the mind. It involves 59 slogans, and one of those slogans introduces the Tonglen practice.

Tonglen refers to a breathing practice known as “giving and receiving” or “sending and taking.” The Lojong slogan says, “Practice sending and taking alternately. These two should ride the breath.”

The way it’s typically practiced is to first start by centering yourself with a few cleansing breaths. Then you use your imagination to visualize and experience a situation where someone or a group of people are suffering. As you inhale, you visualize taking in the suffering of others. It’s often described as breathing in a dark, sticky, hot substance or black smoke or the feeling of claustrophobia. That’s the suffering of others that you are taking into your body.

Then your body and your heart acts like a transformation machine. When you breathe out, you breathe out white light or a sweet, cool mist, and you are breathing out kindness, spaciousness, lightness, and ease.

You synchronize these two images with your breath. You breathe in darkness and suffering and you breathe out lightness and ease.

It’s important to visualize a specific person who is suffering or a specific situation where suffering is happening. After a while you can expand your breath to include all beings in that same situation of suffering. If you want a guided meditation with Tonglen instructions, I recommend a YouTube video from Pema Chodron, a nun in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition who is the person who has really brought this practice to the West.

I’ve learned recently that Tonglen and other compassion practices have been incorporated into a number of programs developed with the specific purpose of training people in compassion. For example, Stanford University has a program called “Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT).” Emory University has a program called “Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT),” and Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe has a program with the acronym G.R.A.C.E.

These compassion-training programs were initially developed for healthcare professionals and others in caregiver roles. Healthcare professionals and caregivers who are often in the presence of suffering and pain are in danger of “empathy burnout” or “empathic distress.”

It’s important to realize that compassion and empathy are not the same thing. Compassion can be defined as “empathy plus action.” With compassion, there is an action-orientation of doing something to relieve another’s suffering. This action-orientation can lead to positive benefits for both those receiving the compassion and those giving the compassion.

I like to think of Tonglen as training your compassion muscle. It’s kind of like doing simple physical exercises to strengthen your physical muscles so that you can use those muscles when you really need to. I’m reminded of the simple physical therapy exercises I did when I was recovering from a knee replacement. Those simple exercises activated the neurons and rewired the nervous system so that I could regain my ability to move my knee and walk normally. That rewiring process is called neuroplasticity.

Scientific research is showing that compassion training, like Tonglen, can do the same sort of thing. Neuroscientists and psychologists have for the last decade or two been studying the science of compassion. They’ve learned which parts of the brain are involved in compassion and what neurotransmitters are affected.

And they’ve shown that there are positive benefits of compassion training. In one psychological study, for example, individuals who have received some training in compassion (through practices such as Tonglen) are three times as likely to help others who are in pain.

The neuroscientists who study what’s going on in the brain have shown that compassion training reduces neural activity in those centers of the brain associated with fear and stress, such as the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex. This training also increases activity in other regions of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex that is involved in emotional regulation or the brain’s reward centers.

As a chemist, I’m always interested in what’s happening with brain chemistry. Research has shown that Tonglen and other compassion-based practices can lead to an increase in neurotransmitters associated with positive feelings, such as oxytocin and dopamine. We also see a decrease in neurotransmitters associated with stress, such as cortisol and adrenaline. As a scientist who likes to look at measurable evidence, I find it fascinating that these scientific results are confirming the value of a practice that’s nearly a thousand years old.

I should note that these same physiological effects of compassion training are likely to be observed for certain practices from other major religions. Compassion and training in compassion is not strictly a Buddhist phenomenon but can be found in many other spiritual traditions.

I encourage you to try this Tonglen practice in the coming days. We could all use some strengthening of our compassion muscles. And then you can take those strengthened muscles and use them in whatever way you choose to be involved in today’s challenging situation in Minnesota. I know there’s a long list of ways that people are involved in relieving the suffering we see around us right now, and an attitude of compassion is helpful for all of those activities.

Being compassionate and realizing your interbeing with others is not a call to be passive. It is a call to recognize our common humanity. It is a way of refusing to add more hatred to a world that seems to be overflowing with it right now.

Instead of creating divisions and putting people into camps of “us” vs “them,” we can realize that we are all caught in a web of suffering—or as Buddhists sometimes describe it—a web of causes and conditions.

So that’s my take on the Buddhist perspective on the current situation in Minnesota. My hope for all of us is that we can do as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches. We can practice “engaged Buddhism” and non-violence. And we can keep open the door of our hearts, the door of compassion.

Photo by Lorie Shaull