Into the Wild

A former Buddhist nun of twelve years, Lama Willa Baker is a meditation teacher and founder of the Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, Massachusetts, and its corresponding retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. In her 2021 book, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom, Baker emphasizes the vital role of body awareness in cultivating a fully integrated spiritual practice. Tricycle contributor Erica Bassani recently talked with Baker about her Buddhist training in the Kagyu lineage, what inspired her to ordain—and later, to disrobe—and channeling our inherent animal nature into greater compassion and spaciousness.

What first led you to become a Buddhist nun? My mother had just passed away when I took my vows. I was in a vulnerable place—grappling with impermanence. I found it difficult to go on with my life without confronting the reality that death comes for all of us. I was drawn to the buddhadharma because death was an acceptable subject to talk about. I initially entered the monastery as a layperson, simply to study. But there was a strong orientation in that monastery toward serious practice and depth. I took the vows, in part, because I was looking for depth. But I can’t say that I didn’t feel pressure from the outside in that community. I felt pressure to take vows. That’s something I always bring up when someone tells me they’re considering ordination:  Are you feeling pressured to take vows? Because that’s not a good reason to become a nun. If you’re in a community where that’s the lifestyle, you can be drawn into it. And I think that’s what happened to me.

What were the greatest takeaways from your time in the monastery? There were positives and negatives to that experience. I learned that ethics are not black and white. We often think of monastic rules in terms of what one should and should not do—but ethics are about an internal process of discernment around what harms and what helps, around compassion and how to enact it. It’s an internal moral compass that has to do with becoming sensitive and empathetic to what is of benefit in the world and what is of harm. 

I am grateful for this exposure to ethics as a way of life and as an intention to embody the teachings. Our whole life was oriented toward the dharma. I learned discipline, and I learned to prioritize the practice. All of that has been invaluable to me. I am indebted to the buddhadharma and to the community for that experience.

I also came to understand the value and power of community. Even now, community is a vital part of my life, and I believe the monastery provided a good foundation for this understanding. Spiritual friendship is a jewel that can be polished throughout our lives. When I think of community, I don’t think of a large umbrella. I think of deeply loving spiritual connections with others who are friends, peers, and teachers with whom we walk the path.

In your experience, do women face many struggles when practicing in a monastic environment? It became apparent to me early on that no matter what people in that tradition might say, women do not have the same opportunities as men do in most Buddhist communities. In many contexts, there’s a glass ceiling for women teachers and leaders, how far they can go with their teachings and who has access to resources. Beneath that problem is a deeper issue: the binary understanding of gender. The binary model constrains the growth of the tradition to fully enact the ideal of spiritual equality expressed in the Buddha’s teachings. Meanwhile, the culture we live in (and the natural sciences) have begun to acknowledge the fluidity of gender. As this new paradigm evolves, it is up to us practitioners and teachers to begin to nuance our teachings in a way that makes room for everyone. 

How did you deal with this awareness of inequality? It bothered me, but I found ways of working with my own resistance and concern. I wanted the teachings. It was the 1980s—a long time ago—and there were fewer opportunities to even study the dharma. I was in a context where I could study it deeply, and I was willing to make some compromises to do that. But when I was in three-year retreat, to help myself get through that experience, I collected all the biographies of Buddhist women I could find in the library, read all of them from beginning to end, drew, from my imagination, pictures of these women and put them on my shrine. The refuge tree that we were prostrating to was a lineage full of male faces, and I was frustrated with that. Putting these women around the shrine helped me include them in my refuge field, and I felt more empowered after that. 

We find our way, but at this point in my life, I won’t tolerate those practices that emphasize a hierarchy between genders. I just don’t do them, and I don’t teach them, and I stay away from those practices. Some teachers have revised the imagery, even revised the language of the texts so that they speak to all of us. 

We need to be courageous.

How do you suggest we find a balance in approaching this topic? I think what’s needed is to come from the essence of the teachings and to recognize that traditions are complex cultural systems. To practice toward awakening itself is the essence of bodhi. And that bodhi, if it had a voice, would be as wide as the world in its acceptance, love, and fairness. If we’re devoted to awakening itself, then it’s a no-brainer that we would be fierce to make it available to everyone and to speak up about disparities when we see them.

I appreciate the gentleness, but there is a fierceness that has to be there too. We need to be courageous.

Why did you choose to go back to lay life after your time as a monastic? I went through a kind of existential crisis around the twelve-year mark. There were many things feeding this, but one of those things was that the ethics in my community were not pristine. There was misconduct happening, and I was a part of that darkness, we might say, without knowing that it was dark. Then, slowly, I became aware that what I was experiencing was harmful to myself and the community. 

But I was also noticing a paradox, a tension between the practice of nondual awareness—a practice of nonseparation and deep recognition of interdependence—next to a very dualistic framework for conduct. When you’re a monastic, as you know, there are many rules. You’re in a box, and the boundaries of that box are very defined, and if you step outside those boundaries, you can’t remain a monastic. At the same time, I was experiencing feelings of openness and freedom coming from the practice of meditation. There was that tension between all these boundaries and feeling boundless through the practice. And I felt like I had to go toward that boundless experience.

I was trying to figure out how to be boundless in robes, and I felt like it wasn’t working for me. I needed to be out of the cage. I needed to go into the wild, like an animal. I needed to be released into the wild. 

How can the animal nature and wild side within us support our spiritual growth? The dharma gives us the possibility to make friends with our wildness. To recognize the animal in us is ultimately a wisdom. Our wildness is perfect as it is, and we don’t have to tame it. What the dharma gives us is a larger space in which to hold that animal body, that animal self, with greater compassion and spaciousness, kindness and wisdom. If we can do that, the energy can be moved toward awakening. Not contained, not suppressed, not tamed but channeled.

As we navigate these times of profound global crisis, how can we keep an open heart and remain grounded in our humanity? We live in unprecedented times, and unprecedented times really require an unprecedented dharma. In the sutras, the Buddha critiques and addresses the caste system, which was the inequity of his time. He was an activist. We’re living in a time where our crisis is ecological. I mean, we have many crises going on, but one of them is this ecological one.

As dharma practitioners and as teachers, it’s an occasion to consider how we can contribute in a positive way to making this world a safer and more balanced home. There are a lot of things that the dharma can contribute, and one of those things is the practice of meditation, which leads us to a place of nondual awareness that helps us see that we are not separate, and never have been separate. To destroy our home is to destroy ourselves. We must bond with the plants and the animals on this planet, or we won’t survive. We can know that nonseparation, not just from a headspace but from a nonconceptual existential embodied place. 

To live in these difficult times, I believe we will need to recenter our devotion. In the past, we practiced devotion to Buddha, dharma, and sangha. That time is not over, but it is time to open our bodhisattva heart and reorient to a deeper dharma. This time of deeper dharma calls for devotion to Gaia (the planetary ecosystem) as our Buddha, Gaia’s teachings as our dharma, and the wild things as our sangha.

Intimacy with the planet and everything on it can teach us—in harmony with the brilliant technologies of liberation offered by the Buddha—how to live with wisdom, balance, and compassion.

♦

Excerpted and adapted from an interview for the Women Awakening Project.