Black Women’s Engagement with Buddhism for Healing from Anti-Blackness: A Narrative Inquiry

Black women’s engagement with Buddhism represents a distinct and under-examined pathway for healing from anti-Blackness. Drawing on publicly available memoirs and essays, this qualitative narrative inquiry explores how Black women describe their experiences with Buddhist practice in relation to racialized suffering and meaning-making. Using an interpretive thematic analysis, I identified three interrelated narrative patterns: inherited vigilance, spiritual rupture, and eventual reclamation. The findings illustrate how Buddhist practices such as meditation and compassion support awareness of intergenerational “soul wounds,” a gentler relationship to self and lineage, and the reconfiguration of suffering narratives without pathologizing Black women’s responses to systemic violence. This research contributes to qualitative and humanistic psychology by demonstrating the value of narrative inquiry with secondary data and by expanding understandings of spirituality as a culturally situated and relational resource for healing within racialized contexts. Implications for clinicians and researchers working at the intersection of race, trauma, and spiritual practice are discussed.