During my first attempt at meditation, I fell asleep. “Pay attention to the air in your nostrils,” said my tenth-grade yoga teacher, “Free the mind as you breathe.” With my eyes closed and back to the linoleum floor, I began to think that I might benefit more from a 20-minute nap.

Each time I tried, my mind slipped back into that familiar darkness, dragging with it my intention to meditate. Though my love of napping always overpowered any desire to “free the mind,” I felt unsatisfied. What does freeing the mind look like, anyway? And what about meditation specifically allows that to happen? For me, meditating felt like trying to stand against an ocean’s undertow, impossible by intention alone.

At the time, the popularity of meditation as an act of ‘self-care’ satisfied my desire to belong in mainstream America. I wanted to take part in the life of my peers—yoga classes, self-improvement apps, and overpriced vegan meals. During my previous four years in Korea, self-care was mostly avoiding microwaved foods and using lotion. At boarding school, however, meditation connected me to a progressive culture that promoted ideals such as equity, inclusion, and diversity. These aligned with my values of love and accessibility, and ironically, I appropriated an Eastern practice to rebrand myself as the American I thought I should be.

Yet the more I meditated, the less ‘American’ I felt. Observing sensations of the body, breath, and mind actually sharpened my awareness of my queer, Korean identity. With each inhale came cravings for red bean porridge or a subway ride in Seoul. Through the exhale, I released weariness from assumptions about my sexuality. I meditated to forget who I was, but only grew more aware of how my identities clashed with mainstream America.

These observations, along with childhood memories of Korean temples, led me to take a course called “Global Buddhisms” in eleventh-grade. I learned that the majority of followers did not even meditate. Surprised, I slowly began to understand meditation as one of many ways to practice Buddhism, a diverse, interconnected system of people, ideas, and traditions. My teacher introduced me to literature by queer people of color practicing various Buddhisms across the United States. These writings highlighted spaces where you could use your uniqueness as a doorway into shared Buddhist scriptures, practices, and community.

For the first time I felt affirmed by the presence of other queer PoC and excited by the possibility of understanding varied Buddhisms through my own experience and worldview. Coming out helped me internalize Buddhist concepts of samvrti (conventional) versus paramartha (ultimate) truths about reality. On one level I had to acknowledge the importance of my sexual orientation in self-expression, but on another my queerness is not essential to any notion of an independent self, which is ultimately questioned in Buddhism. As I was wrestling with these ideas, support from close friends enforced the idea that sangha (community) can be a facilitator of spiritual liberation.

During the rest of the year I explored various Buddhist communities. I chanted with Tibetan practitioners in Redwood. I joined a “cyber-sangha,” where we used Buddhist scriptures on body, social constructs, and the caste system to study race and racism. During the summer I swept the courtyards of Baekyangsa Temple with monastics who emphasized traditional rituals and a teacher-student hierarchy, while the cyber-sangha focused on modern-day life and a more democratic process of learning. Nevertheless, each community required me to interpret Buddhist teachings and practices through my own identity and experiences. As Larry Yang writes in Awakening Together, “the single unity of the Sangha has always been diverse in nature.” Now when I meditate, I try to access a shared, ancient wisdom by understanding my uniqueness within the sameness of the sangha. While I still fall asleep sometimes during meditation, I expect to be continually shaped by my communities, Buddhist or other.