Friendship as Freedom

Friendship as Freedom Synopsis

Current zeitgeist urges us to be mindful, to take a path often described as "awakening." When we wake up in the 21st century, though, we are waking up to a world in which many people are suffering. We have all contributed to inequitable social systems, and we know there are institutions in which many are oppressed. Acknowledging the suffering of separation and recognizing our own contributions to it can be enough to make us want to go to back to sleep.

Friendship as Freedom offers perspectives and practices from the Buddha's teachings and places them in conversation with Black, feminist, disability, and queer studies frameworks to help reframe, contextualize, and integrate experiences of waking up in a way that moves us toward individual and collective liberation. Our personal awakening can lead to an interpersonal enlightenment experience. Johnson shows how we can extend our awakening to oppression out to community, and even to friendship: true friendship, a relationship with ourselves and others that allows us to enact and embody freedom, in our social structures, in our politics, in our spirits.

The spiritual idea of expanding friendship out to all is one that exists in every major religious and secular humanist tradition. Such friendship is an affirmation of our belief that all of us are interconnected, regardless of race, class, body size, immigration status, or any other characteristic of social identity or experience.