Listening in with … Spring Washam

Spring Washam was born in Los Angeles to a white mother and a Black father who abandoned the family early on. Growing up in the 1970s, she struggled with her Black identity, especially after her family moved to Northern California. At 24, she discovered Buddhism during a 10-day meditation retreat led by Jack Kornfield. The practice felt like coming home.

Today she is a prominent teacher of Buddhist meditation and a pioneer in bringing mindfulness practices to diverse communities. She’s also an expert in shamanic healing and plant medicine who has studied in South America. Her most recent book is The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground (Hay House, 2023). Here, she talks with Unity Magazine editor Katy Koontz about the battle of consciousness happening today, as well as why Tubman is the perfect bodhisattva to lead us through it.

Katy Koontz: In your latest book, you write about communing with the spirit of Harriet Tubman, but you say you don’t necessarily consider this channeling. What do you think happened?

Spring Washam: This is a real challenging point for me. When I think of channeling, I have always thought about going to see a medium who contacts your grandfather, and then they start talking. I never imagined going on the world stage and saying, “Harriet has a message for us right now.” I describe this as a conversation with an ancestor.

KK: You state quite plainly that you’re not a historian, an academic, or an expert on literature. Were you surprised she chose you?    

SW: Absolutely. There are so many prominent African-American historians and writers. Any one of them would have taken on this project. I thought, Harriet, I’m a Buddhist-based teacher. I don’t get it. Call Angela Davis. I’m not your girl. I don’t know how to write about you like this. But one of Harriet Tubman’s superpowers is that she can convince you to do what is beyond you. So I said, “Okay. I’m going to try.” When we were deep in the writing process, Harriet’s energy was very strong. I felt very held. It took me a long time to realize that I was on the Underground Railroad. I was spiritually on it with Harriet. I started writing as just an observer. But then pretty soon I realized, Wait, I’m actually on some kind of journey here with Harriet. We’re going somewhere together.

KK: Although you were surprised, she wasn’t the first spirit you had communicated with. You write that you’ve been communicating with the spirit world your whole life, yes?

SW: Yes, and in a way I wasn’t conscious of because I thought everybody had that open door. I do think everybody has that ability. It’s not unique to me. Even so, at first I did feel crazy. I thought, This can’t be happening. Then I started to talk to some of [the late Hindu guru] Neem Karoli Baba’s devotees who feel like the guru is with them all the time. Some people can pass out of the human body but their work, their legacy, their energy is still very strong. So I had to understand it through that, as being beyond the body.

KK: How do you think your unique background informed your work on this book? 

SW: So many of our battles right now are so divisive, and one is this battle between Black and white. This epic wound. And here I have these two parts of myself on opposite sides of the tracks. I’m trying to reconcile it. I’m trying to be a bridge. I feel like I’m a bridge all the time in a way, bridging teaching, bridging cultures—South American culture, North American culture, Black culture, white culture. It’s definitely an interesting lens having a white mother and southern Black relatives. Those are definitely different worlds. I was trained in Marin County [California] at a very wealthy center in a wealthy community. But then I would go back to downtown Oakland [California] all the time. I was even driving literally over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, from one neighborhood to the other.

KK: The way you portray Harriet, she speaks of freedom not only in terms of liberating society from racism but also from sexism, from homophobia, and from any other prejudices against those who are outside society’s norms.

SW: That’s absolutely it. I kept thinking, Wait, this is so much bigger. It’s about being a bridge between love and hate. What we’re dealing with now is the battle of consciousness. Who are we going to be? Are we going to be hateful? Are we going to be excluding people? Are we going to be othering them? Or are we going to start awakening to the fact that we’re all together in this and that there’s only interconnectedness?

I feel like the book could be a bridge to people who maybe are not open to communities of color and their messages but who might be open to Harriet Tubman because of her legacy. She might help them bridge something with her own life. It’s hard to dispute Harriet Tubman’s legacy. I mean, you can try to erase it. They’re trying in Florida to take lots of names, including Harriet’s, out of history books. But at the end of the day, I think this is the war of consciousness.

What we’re trying to abolish is the mind of hatred because that’s the beginning of racism and suffering and oppression. Harriet’s optimism and focus on love was so powerful. That was the energy that affected me—the vibration of her love.

KK: You describe her as being a bodhisattva, a type of deity, an ancestral archetype that we can call on. Why has this book been written now and not, say, during the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s? 

SW: One of the things I learned about is the connection Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King have. It’s like there was a baton being passed. Harriet worked to abolish slavery. Dr. King’s work was about fighting segregation. We had a powerful figure in him, and his legacy will only grow. But right now, we’re in a period where we’re a bit leaderless. People don’t believe that they’re going to be saved by an individual. It’s like a kind of pessimism. There’s not a lot of cohesion in social justice movements right now.

That’s because there are so many competing states of mind and outside influences, and so much manipulation. The movement’s fractured. There is no core leader, and Harriet’s saying, I’m back because I’m needed to help win this battle. It’s the battle of greed over love, hatred over compassion. It’s the oldest battle there is. Ego over the heart. That’s needed because the movement isn’t going to come from a single person. [The late Buddhist monk] Thích Nhất Hạnh said later in his life that the next Buddha may not take the form of an individual. It may take the form of a community practicing mindful living. It’ll be a wave, like all the cells in the system rising up together.

KK: Even the current Dalai Lama has said he’s not sure he’s going to incarnate again after he lays his body down.

SW: Yes, he questioned it because he said he would reincarnate only if the world needs it. It may be that that role is no longer applicable because he represents a deity.

KK: And we are now evolving into understanding that the Divine resides within each of us.

SW: Yes, and it’s necessary because it’s like the French Revolution now with leaders. Everyone’s being beheaded, and for legitimate causes. No spiritual tradition has been left unscarred. Most people right now have little faith in leaders and they’re questioning what comes next.

There’s been a kind of a void that happened after George Floyd’s death.

KK: In the book, Harriet talks about the inner Underground Railroad, which liberates the mind from the consciousness of slavery. The destination of that railroad is not a geographic location but a state of consciousness. That’s a fascinating idea.

SW: I think when Harriet was on the Underground Railroad, to motivate people to risk their lives for an unknown, she had to say that Philadelphia is the promised land. But even when they got to Philadelphia, on the deepest level of their being, many were still traumatized. They were living in an internal system that wasn’t liberated yet. So that’s what she meant when she said she couldn’t bring them to the full promised land. She could take them only so far. Harriet attained that awakening, that inner freedom, very early in her life.

What we’re trying to abolish is the mind of hatred because that’s the beginning of racism and suffering and oppression. Harriet’s optimism and focus on love was so powerful. That was the energy that affected me—the vibration of her love.

KK: Your book paints her as someone who truly understood the power of what we now call New Thought. Why do you think she was able to achieve that state? Do you think it was connected to her near-death experience, after her skull was fractured when she was hit in the head with a heavy weight?

SW: Deeper into the book, Harriet reveals she has been Moses for lifetimes, saying, “I chose to be born in the system at its deepest root and then liberate myself out of that on every level.” She died a free woman on her own land after rescuing almost all of her family.

I think the head injury was a catalytic moment of remembrance. It broke the spell. It was an outer condition that allowed her to have space and time to be in her own world a little bit because the resulting narcolepsy, seizures, and going unconscious was intense for many years. So people just left her alone at some point, and this gave her a kind of opportunity.

I think her spirit was already awake when she came into her body and saw this as a way to experience Truth principles as an enslaved person. That’s what a bodhisattva does. Bodhi means “awakened.” And sattva means “hero.” In the Buddhist cosmology, bodhisattvas are born again and again.

KK: You described Harriet as a shamanic surgeon. What did you mean by that?

SW: Throughout the process of writing the book, when these doubts and fears would come up for me, she would just start slicing them away. I would have to let them go to keep going. So let’s use the metaphor of somebody who’s on the Underground Railroad, and they’re cold and tired and scared and injured and they think they can’t go on. She had to cut their attachment to their pain, cut out the thought that they couldn’t do it. With me, she was cutting away a lot of my own self-doubt. She gave me a kind of strength to cut away the fears and showed me that they’re illusions. That’s her biggest message: People think they’re powerless but they’re not. They have so much power.         

Harriet was so optimistic, and she is telling us not to give up because this mess we are experiencing is just what it looks like when a system is collapsing. Right before the system shuts down it just goes into total chaos. But in spite of so much harm, there’s also so much good. George Floyd’s death fueled this new civil rights movement, and what we saw in 2020 during the pandemic was this wave of compassion. Both are happening simultaneously.

KK: You name three actions we can all take to bring about this change in consciousness: holding, tracking, and disrupting. Can you explain each briefly?

SW: Holding is about holding our wounds and pain from the past with compassion versus holding on to the trauma with anger. We all know what it’s like to hold on to rage and trauma. That’s our world right now and we’re seeing the effects of that everywhere. Holding also includes allies opening their hearts to willingly hold a sliver of the pain from this collective wound so we can begin to metabolize and dissolve it.

KK: How about tracking?

SW: Tracking involves a deep mindfulness of the programming we all have. Maybe your ancestor fought in the Civil War for the South, so you’re driving around with Confederate flags on your truck without questioning that. We don’t always see there’s a reason we’re thinking the way we think. For some people, the awareness is an initial waking up to the program of white supremacy. Initially they think, Me? I’m not a white supremist. But then they start to see 50 things that undercut what they believed about themselves because there was a kind of blindness there. As an underground operative, we stay vigilant to see how this system is playing out, because once you start to see it, you recognize it everywhere.

KK: And disrupting?

SW: Disrupting is making a change, going the opposite direction, disrupting the unconscious programming with things like whistleblowing, speaking out, and noncompliance. That’s what Dr. King did. People get punished for that, of course, but even so, without the Quakers disrupting the slave system to help with the Underground Railroad, where would we be now? Those Quakers thought, This is not right; it’s unjust. We’re going to help. We’re no longer participating in the system, and we’re going to go against it. We need more of that disruption now.

KK: You also identify three levels of abolitionism: the inner, the outer, and the ultimate. Can you describe each of these?

SW: The inner abolitionist is where we start abolishing all of our internal oppression, all the ways that we suppress ourselves. It’s basically taking a stand against our own internal greed, hatred, and delusion. It’s a dedication to our liberation. We dedicate ourselves to uncovering all the ways these programs are operating. This goes beyond just white supremacy. This is about homophobia and being afraid of gay and trans people; it’s about sexism, the environment.

The outer abolitionist is where we harmonize all of our behavior. We’re staying committed to this outer level in our actions, no matter what society offers, even if people are violent toward us. This is really key in any revolution. You’ve got to fight fair. What happens in these social movements sometimes is that the wounded people become like those they’re trying to overthrow. It’s like Animal Farm.

That leads into the ultimate abolitionist. This is understanding that it’s a journey. We’re all just light. There is no ego. There is no I. We are all God. We operate on behalf of the system of liberation itself.

That’s a high level. This is what all the great sages have awoken to. When you work from that place—like Harriet, like Dr. King, like Nelson Mandela—you can change the world.

Spring Washam is a teacher of Buddhist meditation practices, a shamanic practitioner, and the author of A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment (Hay House, 2019) and The Spirit of Harriet Tubman (Hay House, 2023). She is a founder of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, and is on the teachers council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. She is also the founder of Lotus Vine Journeys, which offers retreats that combine indigenous healing practices with Buddhist wisdom and meditation. Washam now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit springwasham.com.

This article appeared in Unity Magazine® and was a finalist and received a 2023 Folio: Eddie honorable mention.