This book is a testament to the messages of freedom in Baldwin, Lorde, and the Buddha. It is also a statement of the ways in which my meditation practice moved from my own inward healing to outward action.
– Rima Vesley-Flad, PhD, The Fire Inside

What does it mean to practice when the world is on fire? In The Fire Inside, Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad brings James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and the Dharma into conversation as a living inquiry into how we heal, and what we do with that healing to inform how we respond to suffering in the world.

Rima Vesely-Flad writes from her own life, as a Black American woman growing up in a mixed-race family, as a Buddhist practitioner, and as someone who has experienced systemic oppression not as a concept but in her own body and family relationships. Rather than a literary and theological analysis, this book is testimony, and also an invitation: each chapter ends with a liberating practice from different Buddhist traditions for readers to engage with and integrate the teachings from Lorde, Baldwin, and Vesley-Flad’s own practice-rooted wisdom.

We’re reading this together as a Sangha because The Fire Inside offers something rare: Dharma practice that centers your body, your culture, your lineage, your suffering as the path to skillful, liberating responding in the world. Vesely-Flad guides us through Baldwin and Lorde as people who transformed their suffering into art, into witness, into action. We read it not just to understand, but to be strengthened, and to show up more fully for one another in community and for collective liberation.

Pick up a copy!

The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde is available for purchase for $20 at Brooklyn Zen Center. Payment options: Cash, Venmo @BrooklynZenCenter, or our donation page. It is also available to order online at Bookshop.org, Reparations Club, and wherever you get your books.

Pick up your copy, engage with the text at your own pace, and then gather with us for a special online discussion with the author on Wednesday, August 26, 7–8:30 PM ET.

Registration is free – please register to receive the Zoom link.

Registration deadline — August  25, 11:59 PM ET

Questions? Contact us at info@brooklynzen.org.

Rima Vesely-Flad, PhD, is the Founding Director of the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies. She is the author of three books: The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (North Atlantic Books, 2026); Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation (NYU Press, 2022); and Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Fortress Press, 2017). Dr. Vesely-Flad has twice been awarded a Department of State Fulbright Fellowship, as a post-graduate student in South Africa and as a faculty member in Ghana. She is also the recipient of grants from the Fetzer Institute, the Henry J. Luce Foundation, the Frederick Lenz Foundation, and the Crossroads Program. For several years, she taught college-level courses at Sing Sing Prison, Sarah Lawrence College, and Warren Wilson College, as well as graduate classes at Union Theological Seminary. You can follow her work at www.blackbuddhiststudies.org and on Instagram @blackbuddhiststudies.

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