EcoDharma exploration
Beyond the Binary, Beyond Separation:
with Andrés González
This special monthly series of EcoDharma Explorations is offered in partnership with One Earth Sangha and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. A recording of the conversation will be provided for those who cannot attend the gathering.
Session Description:
At a time of escalating attacks on trans and gender-expansive communities, alongside ecological and political upheaval, we might ask: What is so threatening about lives that refuse to conform to the boundaries of the dominant order? And what wisdom might these lives carry for a world in transition?
Across the living Earth, ecotones—the fertile thresholds where ecological communities meet—are places of encounter, adaptation, and emergence. In the Nahuatl concept of nepantla, and through the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, we encounter another understanding of the in-between: a space of disorientation, transformation, and possibility.
Drawing from his lived experience as a trans and Two-Spirit person and his path as a Dharma practitioner, Andrés González brings these ways of knowing into conversation with Buddhist teachings on emptiness, nonduality, and interdependence, including the playful disruption of gender duality in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra.
Together, through contemplative practice and shared inquiry, we will explore how trans and gender-expansive experiences can illuminate the constructed boundaries between self and other, human and nature, and how we might move beyond separative consciousness toward a more intimate, compassionate, and liberatory relationship with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.
About the Teacher:
Andrés González (he/they) relates to himself firstly as a spiritual being embodying, Earth-side, the multiplicity of gender, sexuality, race, and culture as a Two-Spirit mestizo with primarily Yoeme (Yaqui), Mexican, Spanish, and Scottish ancestries. He is also a transracial adoptee, connected to a lineage of Indigenous adoptees separated from family, land, and culture through the U.S. child welfare system. Andrés’ lived experience integrating these many worlds has informed his path as a practitioner of curanderismo, Dharma teacher, mental health clinician, writer, and song-carrier. Trained in harm reduction, healing justice, and liberation psychology, he holds a master’s degree in social work. He is also a graduate of East Bay Meditation Center’s two-year Spiritual Teacher & Leadership Training and the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics’ 2023–2024 certification program in psychedelic facilitation. Andrés is the author of Blood, Bone, & Breath, a Substack publication exploring transmissions from the ecotone: the fertile threshold where the in-between whispers of home, portal, and worlds yet to come.