Buddhist teacher and Belmont resident John Bell illuminates the interwoven threads of spirituality, emotional healing, and social justice, offering the world a roadmap for collective healing, navigating the climate crisis, and building beloved communities.
His book “Unbroken Wholeness” combines his decades of experience healing through peer counseling, practicing Buddhism, building international youth leadership organizations, and advocating for a more just, loving, and equitable world.
“I love life so deeply and long for the end of unnecessary suffering,” wrote Bell in “Unbroken Wholeness”. “The sense of my limited time, my mortality, makes me feel the need to try to express the fullness of what lies deep in my heart about healing our beloved world.”
Bell became an activist during the Civil Rights and Peace movements of the 1960s. During this time, Bell encountered many revolutionary leaders, naming Martin Luther King Jr. among his many teachers.
“I can’t claim that the book is mine because I’m just a channel for all the different influences and thinkers and experiences I’ve had in my life,” said Bell.
Embracing Mindfulness
As an ordained Buddhist dharma teacher in the lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, Bell is building a network of “beloved community circles” — small, local groups of three to 12 people who commit to practicing mindfulness, caring for one another, and engaging in social justice work.
“Smallness is important because the love at the center needs to be the glue. As suffering deepens around the world, and I think it is deepening … we’re going to need community more than ever,” said Bell. “I mean, really strong, unbreakable, unshakable community. And that takes work, and it has to come from love and the beloved community.”
In his book, Bell identifies six pathways to building beloved communities: cultivating a wise view, healing hurt and trauma, transforming racial and social oppression, building a deep local community, living ethically, and engaging in mindful social action. These pathways weave a mindfulness approach to actualizing the idea of beloved communities, wrote Bell.
“For me, embracing a mindfulness lens means trying to be awake to what is happening in the present moment as best I can,” he added.
Living For Humanity
Bell’s wife, Dorothy Stoneman, founder of the international nonprofit YouthBuild, said Bell has always committed to living his values.
“When he talks about the six pathways to the Beloved Community and integrating social justice, healing, and spiritual practice — that’s what he’s doing, and that is not new to him,” said Stoneman. “He’s been doing that all his life, and he’s done it with total integrity and perseverance and wonderful impact.”
In 1968, Bell and Stonemen met in church the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
Both were teaching in Harlem and active in the Civil Rights Movement.
Bell invited attendees to his house, and the group talked for hours about King and his crusade for civil rights.
“It was a very wonderful and intimate conversation,” said Stoneman. “I went home, and I called my brother, and I said, ‘I just met the man I want to marry.’”
Bell and Stoneman became partners in work and life.
The pair worked together at the East Harlem Block Schools, a parent-controlled school created in the 1960s. From within this tight-knit community, Stoneman and Bell created the Youth Action Program in 1978.
The program grew from two questions posed to local teenagers: What do you love about your community? And what would you change if you had the adult support and resources to do it?
“And so we began,” said Stoneman. “We completed nine major community improvement projects that were designed and implemented by young people with adult support.”
Stoneman and Bell replicated the model nationwide, growing the program into YouthBuild.
Today, YouthBuild operates in 250 communities across the US, “engaging nearly 10,000 young people each year, and supported by an annual appropriation of over 100 million dollars,” wrote Bell. YouthBuild also has programs in nine other countries.
Healing Together
Starting in 1988, Bell also collaborated on a project called Children of War, which brought young people from 18 war zones together to learn from one another and tour the United States to share their experiences.
“We brought young people from Israel and Palestine and put them deliberately in the same groups … so Yair would have to listen to Rania talk about how the Israeli tanks come into Gaza and tear down her family’s house. And then Rania would listen to Yair talk about how scared he was when the missiles came in from Gaza,” said Bell.
He added, “For me, Children of War remains the most powerful example I’ve ever experienced of what we might call ‘condensed healing.’”
Honoring The Goodness
Universalist Unitarian Pastor Fred Small — Bell’s longtime friend — said Bell has constantly seen the goodness in all people, an incredibly healing experience for everyone who knows him.
“John’s gift is that he never loses sight of that,” said Small. “I think what John is reminding us of, and calling us to, is the recognition that each of us carries the divine within us.”
“When I think of John, the first word that comes to mind is integrity,” he added. “I don’t know anyone who strives more consistently to integrate their inner and outer selves, in other words, to live their values. And that has been a constant in John’s life.”
When asked what he hopes people will receive from reading “Unbroken Wholeness,” Bell said, “I hope people get, number one, that they increasingly know their own wholeness.
Because when we root ourselves in unbroken wholeness, then things are different.”
“The second thing is to see the interconnection of issues that we think sometimes are separate, but they’re all together,” he said.
Bell pointed to climate change as an example of interconnection. He said climate change is more than the amount of greenhouse gases raising the Earth’s temperature and causing hurricanes, droughts, and floods; it impacts food security, immigration, economic justice, housing, animal rights, land rights, and Indigenous rights.
“And the silver lining — if there’s any way to make it a silver lining — is that we have a chance to think holistically about it, to know our wholeness, to see our inner connections with everything and that things are related to each other,” he said.
“The third is to know that we can each make a difference. We can help create a beloved community wherever we are situated in the world.”
More Information
belovedcommunitycircles.org/about,