OPINION | A Reflection on the Meeting of Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhất Hạnh

by Lenna Liu

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s portrait hung in the entryway of Odessa Brown Children's Clinic's (OBCC) Central District location where I spent most of my 30-year pediatric career. Birthed during the Civil Rights era for Seattle's Black community, this beloved clinic was where I had my education in Black history. It was here where we celebrated Juneteenth, singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" decades before Juneteenth became a federal holiday. It was here, where our motto has been "quality care with dignity," that I practiced seeing the dignity inherent in every person, no matter their circumstances. It was here where I grew to understand how much of the "dis-ease" we see in medicine is the impact of social determinants of health, such as poverty, oppression, and trauma. It was here where I learned in real day-to-day tangible ways how the history of Black Americans has continued to play out as lingering inequities in housing, schooling, and even access to healthy foods, decades after our country has been trying to right these wrongs.

Seeing these struggles, I was always asking myself, "How can I possibly help families whose struggles and concerns feel beyond the scope of a clinic room and for which there are no treatments or medication?" As pediatricians, we are trained to be advocates, to work beyond the clinic walls to speak out for policies and legislation that support children and families. But advocacy and policy change take time, often a long time. I struggled with knowing what to do in the moment when I could see the sleepless worry and fatigue in a parent's eyes right in front of me.

Sometimes answers come in the midst of our own deepest suffering. In the middle of my career, my marriage fell apart, and I found myself lost, unmoored, and deeply grieving the loss of my dreams for my children and myself. It was during this time that I had to learn the deep inner work of healing. I had been practicing yoga for exercise and relaxation, but during this time, yoga became something much more than exercise. As I moved through yoga poses, opening and stretching my body, tears would suddenly appear and begin to fall — a physical and emotional release I did not know my body needed. When I sat in the final minutes of meditation after an hour of mindfully moving my body with breath, I felt moments of calm and the sense of coming back to myself again.

I knew these skills of meditation and mindfulness were something I had been missing in my life. To learn how to slow down, to be with complicated emotions, to not abandon myself or ignore what my stressed body was telling me were all essential to my well-being. These practices also invited me to look more deeply at parts of myself that were hard to look at: my tendency to overdo and then hold it against others for not doing their part; feeling judgmental of others for qualities in myself that I was unwilling to see; learning to forgive others and myself. In addition, I grew to see the parallel between understanding myself and how I interacted with those around me. Learning to have more compassion for myself, I became even more compassionate to others. Learning to see and forgive myself for mistakes I made, I was more able to forgive others for theirs. Learning these practices changed my life — they changed my ability to navigate life and deepened all the relationships around me.

I am inspired by another photo of Martin Luther King Jr. In this photo, he sits next to the great Buddhist teacher often called "the father of mindfulness," Thich Nhất Hạnh, at their first meeting in Chicago, 1966. Despite their very different backgrounds — a Black Baptist minister leading the Civil Rights Movement and a Vietnamese Buddhist monk calling for peace during the Vietnam War — they recognized in each other a kindred spirit working toward justice. As a pediatrician working in a clinic birthed during the Civil Rights era, the image of these two visionary leaders working together inspired me in merging the inner work of mindfulness and compassion with the outer work of building community and social justice.

After years of my own healing, I resolved to find a way to bring mindfulness practices to support the well-being of families at my clinic. I knew that reducing the stress of parents would help their children. However, I also knew that most of my families lacked access to these practices. Yoga and mindfulness classes can be expensive, feel exclusive, and are indulgences for many. They should not be. During this time, several local parents of children with disabilities were also searching for something to help them cope with the stress and challenges of their days. They found a course on mindful self-compassion and were struck by how these self-compassion practices were one of the first things they had ever found to help, a balm for the isolation and lack of understanding they felt in other parts of their lives. In 2017, several OBCC and Seattle Children's health care providers partnered with these parents in a grassroots effort to create a mindfulness and compassion program for parents that we brought to OBCC.

These parent facilitators, mostly Women of Color, were also community leaders and organizers, already deeply skilled in building community and holding space for listening and supporting others. In our sessions, we shared mindfulness practices with interested parents and caregivers. We gave space for participants to share how they were doing and for others to listen deeply with an open heart. Instead of facing their challenges alone and in isolation, we found a sense of common humanity in these sessions, a shared sense of facing life's joys and hardships in community.

I learned so much from these parents and these practices, a very different kind of knowledge than I learned in medical school. These skills complemented the science of medicine with the art of living and grew my capacity to be a doctor who could be present — really show up for my families and see and hear them, to listen in a way that was being squeezed out of health care as we were rushed to see more patients in shorter periods of time. It allowed me to continue to prioritize "quality care with dignity" — bearing witness to another person, hearing their stories with an open heart, holding space for the complexities of their lives, showing reverence for what they endured. During these times when many are experiencing an absence of feeling seen or being heard, our presence for each other's inherent dignity, this witnessing, is a profound gift of healing.

Our team accelerated our efforts at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, offering free weekly mindfulness drop-in sessions online. Then, after George Floyd's murder, we recognized the importance of offering classes by Black parent facilitators for the Black community, while also offering classes (adapted by language and culture) led by Spanish-speaking and Somali parent facilitators for their respective communities. Unfortunately, our program was recently ended due to OBCC budgetary constraints; our team is saddened that we are no longer able to share this foundational practice of well-being with more parents and caregivers. But I also know the seeds of mindfulness we planted during these past seven years, and particularly during the pandemic, will root and grow when conditions are right and will continue to support those we reached and perhaps beyond.

On this day of honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and nearly two years after the passing of Thich Nhất Hạnh, I write to share this story and to honor both men at a time when we urgently need their teachings and guidance.

As I think about them, their teachings about Beloved Community rise to the fore. The divisiveness that permeates our world right now masks our common humanity. As a pediatrician surrounded by newborns, children, and their parents, I was reminded daily that we share the same hopes and fears. The vulnerability we feel as we become parents is the shared reality of our lives. There is a deep fragility to our human condition, yet newborns, children, and each of us are also remarkably resilient and strong. To survive and feel safe, we often dichotomize and reduce life, or each other, to good or bad and safe or unsafe, but in reality, life is not that simple. Rather, life, and each of us, is exceptionally complex, many-layered, and we need to build our capacity to hold ever greater complexity and nuance.

How can we build this capacity to see the dignity and complexity in each other? I witnessed and experienced these small acts of collective healing in our mindfulness classes and know these are some of the ingredients needed for what is ahead. The meeting of these two great men can be a reminder to all of us of the necessity of inner healing and collective action, and that the two are not separate, but are essential pieces for ourselves, for our children, and for our world.

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Lenna Liu is an emerging writer and a retired University of Washington emeritus professor and pediatrician who cared for children and families at Odessa Brown Children's Clinic for over 30 years.

📸 Featured Image: Left: Thich Nhất Hạnh in Paris, France, in 2006. Photo is attributed to Duc (pixiduc) (under a Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED license). Right: Portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. by Betsy Graves Reyneau, part of the exhibition "Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin." (Photo courtesy of National Archives, photo no. 559202.)