A Refuge That Does Not Abandon the World: Trust, Surrender, and the Courage to Walk Toward Suffering
With Lubna Masarwa and Thanissara
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Key Information:
Special Sunday session from 9 - 11 a.m. PST (UTC-7), Sunday June 7th.
This is a drop in offering. Registration for this event will remain open.
This offering is shared on a suggested donation scale of $10 - $30. You can also pay $0 - no one will be turned away due to financial need.
This offering is recorded and posted to the SMS YouTube Channel.
General Description
Together, Lubna Masarwa and Thanissara will explore the shared spiritual terrain of trust, surrender, refuge, and compassionate presence through the lens of Islamic and Buddhist practice. Lubna offers this reflection as a doorway into our gathering:
“My name is Lubna Masarwa. I am a journalist and offer Dharma and meditation teaching. In the past three years, it has become almost impossible to survive in Palestine.
Under massive genocide, apartheid, and systematic discrimination, to keep going and continue offering my work, I learned and practiced the skill of Tawakkul.
Tawakkul in Islam means trust in Allah. In the teaching of the Buddha, we might speak of refuge, relinquishment, or ‘hand it to the Dharma.’ We may also know this through devotional expressions such as returning ourselves to Quan Yin, offering all back to Dharma, to nature, to the unfolding of life itself.
In the midst of the chaos we are living through these days, I want to offer this teaching, sharing something of our daily practice with suffering here in Palestine.”
Drawing from Lubna’s lived experience in Palestine, together, we will explore how the Islamic teaching of Tawakkul and the Buddhist teachings of refuge and paṭinissagga, meaning relinquishment, releasing, offering back, can support us in meeting collective suffering without collapsing into despair, numbness, or overwhelm.
Within both traditions we find invitations toward trust: not as passivity or turning away, but as a deepening into courage, clarity, and compassionate presence. Yet at this time of immense violence, displacement, grief, and collective trauma, we also ask more difficult questions:
How does trust and surrender become sources of courage that allow us to stand, accompany, protect, and act? What does that look like?
How do we preserve conscience and open-heartedness without hatred and overwhelm, and what does it mean to refuse dehumanization?
And how do we remain resourced enough for the long work of collective healing and liberation?
Inspired by Tawakkul and Dharma teachings on relinquishment, this gathering opens a contemplative space to explore what it means to remain inwardly steady within a world marked by deep division and profound uncertainty.
This gathering is not an invitation to step away from suffering, but to meet it differently. Together, we will explore how trust, refuge, relinquishment, and compassionate presence may become pathways of resilience and courage, helping us stay close to life, close to truth, close to one another, and close to the deeper work these times call to us.
Facilitators
Lubna Masarwa (she/her) Lubna Masarwa is a journalist and Palestinian spiritual activist. She offers Dharma and meditation in Palestine. In Lubna's own words, "It’s a daily struggle to survive in Palestine, under massive genocide, apartheid, and systematic discrimination. To keep going and continue offering my work, I learned and practised the skill of Tawakkul” Lubna is also a spiritual activist, and is based in Jerusalem.
Lubna's activism involves working to support breaking the siege in Gaza for over a decade, while ministering and offering spiritual support for those living through the horror and deprivation of genocide. Lubna has also managed big teams of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank for the last 10 years. She is inspired to co-create a revolutionary dharma for this historic time, particularly for those living through war and genocide.
Thanissara is Anglo-Irish, from London. She is a Dharma teacher, writer, poet, eco-spiritual activist, and former Buddhist monastic trained in the Thai Forest tradition. Teaching Dharma for nearly four decades, her work brings together contemplative practice, feminist inquiry, sacred activism, ecological awareness, and systems change.
Shaped by decades of engagement in rural post-Apartheid South Africa and an ongoing exploration of collective liberation amid our intersecting social and ecological crises, Thanissara works at the interface of inner awakening and cultural transformation. Her path also includes more than a decade of learning and ceremonial work within Indigenous lineages in South America, including sustained traditional dieta practice and exploration of the relationship among plant teachers, shifts in consciousness, healing, and bridging the human the more-than-human worlds.