Abstract
African-American Buddhist same-sex loving women (or lesbians) in the Insight Meditation tradition, who grew up in Christian churches, engaged in a mixed methods research study utilizing the Fetzer Spiritual Experience Index (with some modifications) for the quantitative portion of the study. Five women, Norene, Deborah, Marcella, Alicia, and Mary (not their real names) participated in interviews. The quantitative analysis was put in “dialogue” with the qualitative analysis from the narratives, through a Sequential Nested Transformative Strategy (SNTS) to find that Buddhism, in the Insight Meditation tradition, has a positive relational impact on these women.
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Notes
- 1.
Pamela Ayo Yetunde, “A New Spelling of Our Names: An Exploration of the Psycho-Spiritual Experiences of African-American Buddhist Lesbians,” PhD diss., Columbia Theological Seminary, (2016).
- 2.
I call these nonlinear movements self-preservation, rejection, migration, longing, exploration, positive encounter-relocation, integration, re-evaluation, transformation, longing again, letting go, and deity exchange.
- 3.
Shared Meditation Center is a pseudonym of an Insight community in northern California. I used a pseudonym to protect the identity of research participants who practice there.
- 4.
Ja’Nina Walker and Buffie Longmire-Avital, in their article “The Impact of Religious Faith and Internalized Homonegativity on Resiliency for Black Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Emerging Adults,” Developmental Psychology 49, no. 9 (2013), 1723–1731, found that black lesbians utilized their families and racial communities as sources of strength when faced with sexism, racism, and homophobia.
- 5.
Walker and Longmire-Avital found that some black lesbians struggling with their sexuality may seek out religious support to work through their oppression and cultivate resilience because of the black community’s belief that religion may give meaning to systematic oppression.
- 6.
W.R.D. Fairbairn, “The Treatment and Rehabilitation of Sexual Offenders,” in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Routledge, 1999), 289–296.
- 7.
Ibid., 291.
- 8.
Ibid., 292.
- 9.
John D. Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 66.
- 10.
Marie T. Hoffman and Lowell W. Hoffman, “Religion in the Life and Work of W. R. D. Fairbairn,” in Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition, eds. Graham S. Clarke and David E. Scharff (London: Karnac Books, 2014), 78.
- 11.
Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior, 73.
- 12.
Hoffman and Hoffman, “Religion in the Life and Work of W. R. D. Fairbairn,” 71.
- 13.
Sutherland, Fairbairn’s Journey into the Interior, 72.
- 14.
SNTS is a combination of Sequential Explanatory Strategy, Sequential Transformative Strategy, and Concurrent Nested Strategy. These research strategies can be found in John W. Cresswell’s Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: Sage Publications, 2003).
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Yetunde, P.A. (2018). The Spiritual Practices and Experiences of African-American Buddhist Lesbians in the IMC. In: Object Relations, Buddhism, and Relationality in Womanist Practical Theology. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94454-8_3
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