Unbroken Wholeness: Six Pathways to the Beloved Community

“A holistic vision breathtaking in scope.”—Frances Moore Lappé

Distilling a lifetime’s insights on the triangle of healing emotional pain, social justice work, and spiritual growth, veteran activist and educator John Bell shares personal stories and reflective practices to help us on our path of personal and collective transformation

Unbroken Wholeness brings an integrated lens of social justice, trauma healing, and spiritual practice to the work we do in the world and the pressing concerns of our times.

Collectively, these writings help us access a view of the world as unbroken, even in the face of obvious suffering and disharmony. With searching questions and easy-to-follow practices, Unbroken Wholeness offers a way for activists to apply mindfulness and insight to bring about healing for seemingly intractable social divisions. “Skillfully handling our emotional pain about the world while cultivating a joyful and kind heart helps us navigate the troubled waters of our life,” says John Bell. Continuing the peace work of his teacher, the Vietnamese social activist and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, John Bell brings forward the importance of cultivating a practical yet visionary, ennobling view of humankind when engaging in the “mud” of daily difficulties that gives rise to the lotus of an enlightened, compassionate heart.“This book will change many lives. It is the result of a life deeply and courageously lived. It offers powerful stories and practices that will help readers move more and more toward healing and unlocking their inherent wholeness and power. These teachings will take us closer to realizing the Beloved Community we all yearn for.”
—Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption

“Wow. With a holistic vision breathtaking in scope, John Bell shares his own heart and path. He enables each of us to see ourselves experiencing personal power and healing, all while contributing to transformation of life on Earth. Beautiful and powerful! Soothing yet strong!”
—Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and (coauthored with Adam Eichen) Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want

“We live in urgent times, facing multiple and overlapping crisis of climate change, racial and political polarization, economic inequities, gun violence, and much more. We can lose sight of the beauty and fragility of this human life and the world around us.  We can forget the powerful legacies and inspirational voices like Thich Nhat Hanh and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  In Unbroken Wholeness, Dharma teacher John Bell illuminates the wisdom of Nhat Hanh’s and King’s vision of Beloved Community and his own transformational life, weaving together a rich tapestry and a call to action grounded in the vulnerability of his lived experience and teachings on nonviolent social action, and more. This is a must-read for anyone seeking to do good, protect the planet, and transform racial and social injustice.”
—Valerie Brown, author of Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace

“True vision is building a bridge across the abyss in order to provide a pathway for others to find safe passage. John Bell is the embodiment of a visionary and a bridge-builder, offering us the courage and the practical ways to come home to ourselves and to life. Paradoxically, by delving deep into his own pain and suffering as well as the pain and suffering of the world, John has discovered profound joy and compassion. From this place, he offers us hope that the Beloved Community has the potential to be a dream come true.”
—Jo Confino, cohost of the podcast The Way Out Is In

“How can we nurture and realize the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of?  We need good guides such as John Bell, and good guidebooks such as this one.”
—David Loy, author of Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis

“John Bell’s roadmap to the Beloved Community is articulate, eloquent, comprehensive, heartfelt, and grounded in deep experience. It’s the best invitation to the Buddhism of the future I’ve ever read, weaving together profound insight, trauma-informed practice, and social action. A well-thumbed copy should be in every dharma center library and act as the guide to many Sangha discussion groups.”
—John Negru, author of Bodhisattva 4.0: A Primer for Engaged BuddhistsJohn Bell, a direct student of Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh since 1982, is a teacher in the Plum Village tradition. He has served on the boards of the Earth Holders Community climate justice initiative, the racial justice initiative ARISE, and the North American Dharma Teachers Sangha.  
In his wider life, he has 40 years of experience in the youth field as an educator, counselor, community organizer, leadership trainer, and program director. He is a founding member of three youth leadership organizations: East Harlem’s Youth Action Program (in 1978); Children of War (in 1984); and YouthBuild USA (in 1988).  Until his retirement, John was the vice president for leadership development at YouthBuild USA (www.youthbuild.org), an international nonprofit with 350 programs in 15 countries providing young people with further education, vocational training, and leadership skills. A nationally recognized trainer and consultant in youth leadership development, Bell lives near Boston.Beloved Community: The Reality and the Noble Aspiration

Reality, Aspiration, and Framework

Now in my late seventies, I am keenly aware there are many fewer days ahead than behind me to be in this body on Earth. I love life so deeply and long for the end of unnecessary suffering. The sense of my limited time, my mortality, makes me feel the need to try to express the fullness of what lies deep in my heart about healing our beloved world. I have nothing to lose, and a hurting Mother Earth is calling. I am immensely grateful and deeply content with the life I am blessed to live. I actively feel the gift of having a body and a mind. I look around and see enormous human kindness and caring, courage and resilience, individual and collective determination to fight the good fight for truth, justice, freedom, and joy. At the same time, I am heartbroken about the vast suffering in the world that begs to be healed. I have wept buckets of tears and raged to the heavens about human cruelty. I have felt powerless to change things. I regularly have bouts of despair about our struggling ecosystem, continued racial injustice, extreme economic inequality, and deepening divisions among people. I see hurt in all directions.

I imagine that you too have your moments of gratitude and heartbreak that weave through your life. For me, living in that gap between the wounded world and my heart’s desire is both excruciatingly painful and ultimately motivating.

The Aspiration for a Beloved Community

The world is laced through and through with jaw-dropping beauty and heart-numbing horrors. We humans are born into this life to navigate these joys and woes as best we can. I hold in my heart a deep aspiration—for a world unified, just, peaceful, and harmonious, that supports the full flowering of individuals and all species. I long to live happily in the Beloved Community. I am not alone in this longing—I’ve met hundreds of people who have expressed a similar aspiration. Many of us carry an intuitive idea of what a safe, healing, loving world in balance might be. Words like sacred, divine, the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Pure Land, Gaia, living happily in the present moment, sustainable ecosystem, fair economy, and a happy planet point to this heartfelt notion. Some might say this is a very human aspiration, a wish for a better world. Others might say it goes deeper than a wish; it taps into an inherent “knowing” that we bring into human form from the mysterious depths of creation. Whatever the truth,a line from the iconic US labor and Black Civil Rights Movement’s song, “We Shall Overcome,” expresses it well: “Deep in our hearts, we do believe, that we shall all be free someday.”

We are not just wanting to transform racism. We are not just wanting to change our economy to one of sharing. We are not just wanting to end war and violence. We are not just wanting to heal our emotional wounds. We are not just wanting to save the planet. We want all these and more, on the way to living in a Beloved Community. 

The term “Beloved Community” is often associated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He put a strong public spotlight on an idea that has been held deep in the hearts of humans for millennia. People across centuries and cultures have yearned to live in a peaceful, harmonious, and sustainable world. Many indigenous peoples, as best they could, have lived according to this idea. Utopian thinkers through the ages have created versions of this very human aspiration. Enlightened spiritual teachers have pointed the way. Dr. King’s uplifting of this aspiration was a great gift to humanity.

However, many people mistakenly think that Beloved Community is made up of folks like us, our kind, our people, our kindred spirits, our special group. This is much too narrow a definition. Dr. King, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and many others who have contributed to the idea of the Beloved Community, grounded in their respective spiritual traditions, envisioned it as a manifestation of the way love or God or the divine shows up in the material world. For Christian leaders, the Beloved Community might be the Kingdom of God on Earth. In Buddhism, it might be considered the
Pure Land—a realm considered suitable for a noble rebirth. Spiritual leaders seem to imply that the Beloved Community already exists as the bedrock of reality. Thich Nhat Hanh might say it is alive and whole in the ultimate dimension—the deeper truth of our interconnectedness. And, of course, the Beloved Community doesn’t just apply to human beings but includes all species and the Earth itself.

In this historical dimension where we live and breathe, the Beloved Community is an aspiration, and our task is to realize its fullness. It is imagined as the community that is based in love and compassion, that lives in harmony, that excludes no one, where everyone belongs, where conflicts are minimal and are resolved peacefully, where oppression is a relic of history, where hurt and
mistreatment are quickly healed, where there is a shared commitment to the common good and the well-being of all, where the sacred and vast unknown are honored. As an aspiration, it is “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” to use the lovely title of a book by Charles Eisenstein.

The painful gap we often feel between that vision and where we are is a measure of our deep conditioning to feel separate. We’re so conditioned that it’s not uncommon to feel separation within ourselves—our minds and bodies—evidenced by our myriad of conflicted feelings and the stubborn divide between our actions and our deepest values and aspirations. But we humans are not
and cannot be separate from the rest of the natural world or ourselves. We are part of unbroken wholeness. Unfortunately, this primal ground of our being is often obscured by hurtful experiences, wrong perceptions, miseducation, oppression, and more. We mostly forget our essential connectedness and wind up divided and disunited, cut off from ourselves, each other, and nature, and we hurt others and the Earth as a result.

The challenge is clear. How do we do the inner and outer work necessary to come back to ourselves in order to include everyone and all species in a peaceful, harmonious, creative, caring, relational, global community? This might be a more fruitful question than whether Republicans or Democrats will win the next election, or who’s to blame for the spread of misinformation, or how we safeguard democracy, or how we save the gray wolf. All these are important, but they fall short of a unifying purpose.

What if we ask questions like: What makes us happy? How much do we need? What helps all of us be safe? What kind of a community do we want to live in? How do we want to be treated by others?
How do we want to contribute to the collective good? What is fair? How do we share Earth’s limited resources? How do we cultivate reverence for all life? What is the balance between individual freedom and collective well-being? How do we restore, renew, reconnect, reweave our relationships with ourselves, one another, other species, the natural world, and the cosmos? What does a world look like that reflects our sacred nature? And then, how do we get there?

Six Pathways

This book explores interrelated components that are necessary to move us toward a seismic shift in human imagination from “me” or “us” to “all”—the Beloved Community. These components integrate social justice, emotional healing, and spiritual practice. They are not complete or sufficient, but together they begin to form aholistic, mindfulness-based approach toward making the Beloved Community real. These six interrelated pathways are:

1. Cultivating wise view: Grounding our actions in spiritual depth.

2. Healing hurt and trauma: Releasing grief, despair, fear, and powerlessness so that we may think, act, and love more deeply.

3. Transforming racial and social oppression: Linking climate justice with racial justice and economic justice to break habits of exploitation and foster human unity.

4. Building deep local community: Creating dependable space to recover, refresh, and renew ourselves in the face of environmental and social suffering, and to deepen solidarity.

5. Living ethically: Practicing reverence for life, deep listening, kind speech, and mindful consuming so that we nurture our compassion to counteract hatred, blame, and “othering.”

6. Engaging in mindful social action: Individually and collectively taking action that is nonviolent in methods, transformational in vision, and aimed toward realizing the Beloved Community.

Each section of this book is devoted to one of these components. Each includes frameworks of understanding or practice that have proven invaluable to me, and stories from my life related to that component. Sprinkled throughout the book are short practical applications called “Practice suggestions” or “Reflection questions.” Certain concepts are revisited in different sections because
those practices or views apply to more than one of the six pathways.

I imagine these components as intersecting circles, each impacting the others.

Foundational Views

It is important for me at the outset to share a set of viewpoints that guide my thinking. I cannot claim these as my own, since I culled them from many thinkers, spiritual ancestors, and social justice movements, to whom I offer a deep bow of gratitude. This list has been refined in my conversations with climate justice activists over the past several years. You, dear reader, have your own set of guiding principles, whether explicit or not. As you review this list, you might reflect on what you resonate with or diverge from, and why.

Grounding Action in Love

-I bow in humility and awe before the miracle of creation. I acknowledge that I am a manifestation of this great mysterious energy called Life, and that humans are among the youngest species and have much to learn about living harmoniously embedded in nature.

-I offer deep gratitude to all our ancestors. I extend my thanks to all species in all dimensions through all of cosmic evolution. I am because they were. Gratitude keeps me pointed toward love, generosity, compassion, and nonviolence as guides to action.

-I am guided by love. I am motivated first and foremost by a revolutionary love that seeks transformation at the base of our consciousness and our society, and seeks a mending of our broken relations with other humans and species; a love that sees no permanent enemies and believes justice is a manifestation of love; a love that is infinitely grateful.

-I carry a deep aspiration for liberation. Deep in my heart, I hold a hope for collective healing and liberation from suffering of people, animals, plants, and minerals.

-I believe there is sacred nature in all. Every person has an inherent Buddha nature, or Christ nature, or God nature, or Source Energy, which is whole and unbroken. I am inextricably bound up and embedded in the natural world, out of which I cannot fall. Our existence absolutely depends on an infinite web of causes and conditions.

Recognizing Suffering and the Roots of Suffering

-Suffering obscures our nature. Awareness of our true nature can become buried by bad experiences that make us shrink into a smaller self. This suffering is both individual and collective, personal and institutionalized, pervasive and deep.

-Separation is a deep wound. I believe most humans carry the wound of separation: separation from our true nature; separation from our own bodies; separation from each other and from people who seem different from us; separation from our country and other countries, from the natural world and other species, and from the cosmos itself. This fairly universal conditioning gives rise to division, dualism, “us versus them”thinking, domination and oppression in all its ugly forms. This, not other people, is the enemy that needs healing and transformation.

-Greed, hatred, and delusion are institutionalized. Long ago, the Buddha identified what he called the three poisons at the root of all suffering: greed, ill will, and ignorance of our interconnected existence. These have become institutionalized and mutually reinforcing. Our brutal economic system
has institutionalized greed, which promotes consumerism, profit-making, competition, individualism, and a growth mentality, since enough is never enough. Ill will is institutionalized by militarism (the United States has over eight hundred military bases in eighty-five countries), mainly to protect corporate interests and resources; by the mass incarceration, racism, and killing of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) folks; and by white supremacy and nationalism. The delusion of a separate existence is institutionalized by policies that discriminate against certain groups, value individual achievement over collective cooperation, undermine community cohesion, and promote nationalism (for example, “America is number 1!”).

-Humans have caused widespread destruction and ecosystem collapse. In the past two hundred years, since the beginning of the industrial revolution—a mere blink in the 4.5 billion years the Earth has been around—we humans have had an outsized impact on our planet’s ecosystems. Through a combination of ignorance, unintended consequences, and unbridled greed, we have extracted, mined, drilled, clear-cut, polluted, poisoned, overfished, overgrazed, overfertilized, overdeveloped, and overpopulated our beloved planet to the point of a grim eco-crisis. Despite our good efforts and intentions, climate scientists say we might be past tipping points; we could be headed over a cliff of environmental catastrophe leading to failed societies, the rapid extinction of hundreds of thousands of species, and the possible elimination of humans.

-Capitalism needs transformation. Our current economic system exploits, disrespects, and oppresses the majority ofthe population, and concentrates wealth and power in the hands of relatively few individuals. This is an overarching structural cause of much suffering. Until we create a caring, fair, cooperative, and democratic economy, the Beloved Community will not be attainable.Integrating Social Justice, Emotional Healing, and Spiritual Practice