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Transformation Literacy To Transformative Unity: A Noble Experiment From Me To We, Lisa Napora, Rosa D'Abate, Layla Providente, Angeline Cooper Mar 2023

Transformation Literacy To Transformative Unity: A Noble Experiment From Me To We, Lisa Napora, Rosa D'Abate, Layla Providente, Angeline Cooper

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This case study shares our learning journey while co-creating The Mindfulness Alliance, a non-profit committed to catalyzing collective capacity to foster awareness-based social change. The paper explores our contemplative governance development through the lens of the me-to-We journey, the shift from an ego-centric to an eco-centric worldview. We present our 4C framework as a means to better understand this inner journey and the essential awarenessbased transformation literacies that we need to cultivate in order to meet urgent intra- and interdependent societal challenges. We explain the me-to-We journey as a journey toward transformative unity, a new term which explicates the type …

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Teaching Mindfulness Across Generations: A Case Study, Mary Ann Erickson Mar 2023

Teaching Mindfulness Across Generations: A Case Study, Mary Ann Erickson

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

While people interested in mindfulness can access teachings in many ways, learning situations that include interaction with instructors and other students can enhance learning. In particular, intergenerational groups can provide an important context for increasing generational awareness and decreasing ageism. This case study describes a semester-long class about mindfulness that included reading, discussion, and practice. Participants included 10 young adults (ages 21-23) and 5 elders (ages 67-96). Thematic analysis of student writing showed that students understood mindfulness both as a potential means of coping with age-related challenges and as a way to enhance the wisdom that can come with greater …

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Lessons From The Blurring Of The Frontstage And Backstage: Community College Personnel’S Experiences And Use Of Contemplative Practices During The Pandemic, Amy Pucino Mar 2023

Lessons From The Blurring Of The Frontstage And Backstage: Community College Personnel’S Experiences And Use Of Contemplative Practices During The Pandemic, Amy Pucino

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This article explores the pandemic and contemplative practice experiences of faculty and staff at a Mid-Atlantic, multi-campus community college. Twenty-three respondents, representing diverse disciplines and programs, were interviewed. Findings include the following: most respondents experienced major and “stressful” work and wellbeing changes during the pandemic; changes included shifting work to remote home environments, wearing masks, social distancing, and social isolation; coping strategies included deepening community, doing contemplative practices, and creating spaces for practices; and advantages of the pandemic included the increased accessibility of online practices and more time available for practices. Erving Goffman’s (1959) theory of dramaturgy, emphasizing the frontstage …

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Slow Looking: Powerful Tool Of Mindfulness To Facilitate Transfer, Young Kyung Min Mar 2023

Slow Looking: Powerful Tool Of Mindfulness To Facilitate Transfer, Young Kyung Min

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This paper illustrates how teaching through a “slow looking” pedagogy helps students of Generation Z—who have grown up in a culture of distraction and multitasking—cultivate the habits of mind and dispositions that can enhance their academic performance as well as physical and mental health during pandemic remote learning. Drawing on students’ practice of slow looking in freshman writing courses, the paper demonstrates the power of slow looking as a tool of mindfulness to develop students’ insights and knowledge that are useful in educational settings as well as in their personal lives. It elucidates how their practices of slow looking in …

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Transformative Nonattachment: Unraveling The Prison Of Perfection In The Neoliberal Academy, Charles T. Lee Mar 2023

Transformative Nonattachment: Unraveling The Prison Of Perfection In The Neoliberal Academy, Charles T. Lee

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This essay reflects on how the prevailing neoliberal logic in academia induces faculty to live in a self-imposed prison of perfection that is detrimental to their holistic wellbeing. Drawing on the Buddhist concept of nonattachment, I use the term transformative nonattachment to advocate for a contemplative political intervention to unravel this prison of perfection in the neoliberal academy. This intervention adopts a two-pronged approach, working both from the inside out (i.e., working on our bodyminds to effect change in the external world) and from the outside in (i.e., working on the external world to generate effects on everyone’s bodyminds).

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Dialogic Reciprocity And Contemplative Mentorship, Beth Connors-Manke Mar 2023

Dialogic Reciprocity And Contemplative Mentorship, Beth Connors-Manke

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

While widely recognized as an important part of education, mentorship is rarely taught as a pedagogical practice. In my article, I theorize mentorship philosophically and contemplatively by considering Martin Buber’s (1937) understanding of the I-Thou meeting. I also offer a taxonomy of mentorship, arguing that mentorship can recognize students’ personhood and prefigure the I-Thou encounter. My final sections offer praxis-oriented discussions on listening and grading as a way to prepare students for intersubjective encounters.

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Transition In The Era Of A Pandemic: An Exercise In Mindfulness, Ana Fonseca Conboy Mar 2023

Transition In The Era Of A Pandemic: An Exercise In Mindfulness, Ana Fonseca Conboy

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

COVID-19 took over the world in March 2020 and overturned our practices, customs, and perspectives. It reminded us that how we relate to one another defines how we choose to build our community and our society. In our forced isolation and confinement, it became evident that we must remember to let go, slow down, and rely on each other to positively influence our future. In times of drastic change, exercising kindness to yourself and to those around you can help wade through challenges and make the best of them, one day at a time, one step at a time. This …

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Poetry As A Contemplative Pedagogical Practice, Neill Korobov Mar 2023

Poetry As A Contemplative Pedagogical Practice, Neill Korobov

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This reflection argues for the integration of poetry into our teaching as part of a contemplative orientation to pedagogy. I discuss poetry both as a way of awakening a relationship with truth that lies at the periphery of our awareness and as a form of language that disarms us and opens the way to a robust form of vulnerability and courage. The poem “Living Together” by David Whyte is explored to illustrate the ways poetry invites us to think about teaching as a unique type of apprenticeship, as a call to maturity and love, and as a unique form of …

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Preface, David Sable, Trudy Sable Mar 2023

Preface, David Sable, Trudy Sable

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

No abstract provided.

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A Vision Of What Might Be: The Pandemic, Protests, And Possibilities, Jan Willis Mar 2023

A Vision Of What Might Be: The Pandemic, Protests, And Possibilities, Jan Willis

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Times of crisis offer us opportunities for radical transformation. The past two years of the Covid pandemic have laid bare, in glaring fashion, the social, economic, and judicial inequities in American life. Even so, some moral and religious leaders have provided us with teachings and guidelines for a new vision of what we might become. Here, based on my experience as a Professor of Religion and an African American Tibetan Buddhist scholar and practitioner, I draw on the teachings of two of these visionaries—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Buddha—to help us to imagine the moral and …

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Buddhism Through The Looking Glass: How The Practice Helped Me Discover My True Self And Raise Self-Reflective Kids In Pursuit Of Their Dreams, Tricia Elam Walker Mar 2023

Buddhism Through The Looking Glass: How The Practice Helped Me Discover My True Self And Raise Self-Reflective Kids In Pursuit Of Their Dreams, Tricia Elam Walker

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

As a Soka Gakkai International-USA (SGI-USA) Buddhist, I have practiced Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism for over 30 years. This essay focuses on my journey of raising three children—two sons (39, 33) and a daughter (29)—two of whom were “fortune babies” or born to parents who practiced this type of Buddhism. I will cover several Buddhist core beliefs and discuss how instrumental they were in my raising children to become capable, successful young Black people on the path to achieving their dreams. My essay will also discuss the “mentor-disciple relationship” which is at the core of how to live one’s life with …

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Dialogue As Black Contemplative Practice, M'Balia Thomas Mar 2023

Dialogue As Black Contemplative Practice, M'Balia Thomas

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Across space, time, and texts, I have engaged in contemplative dialogue with the writings of four writers—Black feminist poet Audre Lorde; Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa; artist, activist, and community healer Tricia Hersey; and novelist Andrea Lee. In doing so, I have participated in a contemplative practice that is culturally attuned to me as an African American woman as their writings—in different ways—are in dialogue with Black feminist thought, womanism, and Afrofuturism. Through these authors and their works, I have found the wisdom, comfort, othermothering, and language I have needed to make sense of my journey as an early career scholar …

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Teaching Note: Bridging Contemplative Social Work Education And Emerging Technologies, Juan Rios Mar 2023

Teaching Note: Bridging Contemplative Social Work Education And Emerging Technologies, Juan Rios

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This paper will describe Dr. Anthony Nicotera’s theory of the Circle of Insight and apply it to emerging technology, such as virtual reality and explore why special attention must be paid in this context to integrating immersive contemplative practices with the experience of racialized Black and Brown people in the virtual space. Evidence shows that virtual reality as a tool can increase empathy through virtual body transference and could be an effective teaching tool (Cogburn, 2018). It is theorized herein that if the Circle of Insight is applied accordingly with and through virtual reality, participants may gain a better understanding …

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Echoing: A Practice Of Liberation Through Transformative Education, Monika L. Son, Virginia Diaz-Mendoza, Schevaletta Alford, Erica King-Toler, Gabrielle Cuesta, Lenwood Hayman Mar 2023

Echoing: A Practice Of Liberation Through Transformative Education, Monika L. Son, Virginia Diaz-Mendoza, Schevaletta Alford, Erica King-Toler, Gabrielle Cuesta, Lenwood Hayman

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Black people living in the U.S. have had to resource themselves with practices to help them remain resilient against the oppression they experience. Pandemic-inspired challenges have made the collective contemplation on how to engage in liberating, transformative practices imperative. Faculty across the country have been tasked with creating nuanced ways to cultivate contemplative, restorative, and liberatory pedagogy. The focus of the current study was to develop a clearer understanding as to how contemplative practices help inspire people constrained by structural inequities to actively shift their mode of being and teaching in higher education. Through a contemplative practice known as echoing …

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Zen, Contemplative Practice, And The Emergence Of Black Queer Joy, Steven Thurston Oliver Mar 2023

Zen, Contemplative Practice, And The Emergence Of Black Queer Joy, Steven Thurston Oliver

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This narrative essay offers an exploration of the ways in which contemplative practice can be part of a strategy for nurturing health, well-being, meaning and joy in our everyday lives as Black contemplatives. Drawing on my experience as a Black queer scholar and college professor, attention is given to the notion of contemplative practice as a way of cultivating our internal emotional, intellectual and spiritual resources from which those of us who teach must draw upon to make our disciplines come alive for ourselves and the students we work with.

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Journeying Home Through The Body: An Introduction To Resource, Resilience, And Resistance In Relationship (R4), Dominique A. Malebranche Mar 2023

Journeying Home Through The Body: An Introduction To Resource, Resilience, And Resistance In Relationship (R4), Dominique A. Malebranche

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This paper will explore the connections to Black cultural reclamation, liberatory healing, and future building through a framework of cultivating a sense of home in contemplative body-based Resource, Resilience, and Resistance in Relationship (R4). Home is a concept that has been historically disrupted for Black and Brown bodies across generations. As people of African descent, we carry stories of homegoing, stolen histories, and politicized futures. Displaced from our motherlands and separated from our resources, home is lost. In a society where we are racialized and subjectively treated and mistreated by the rigidity of white cisheteropatriarchal supremacy, home is needed. Through …

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Swim Lessons: Black Motherhood, Embodied Meditation, And Healing, Kimberly Nao Mar 2023

Swim Lessons: Black Motherhood, Embodied Meditation, And Healing, Kimberly Nao

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Contemplative practices offer a site for resilience, healing, and alleviation of the pressures of parenting within the context of oppressive systems, particularly for Black single mothers. This autoethnography offers an understanding of how meditation through embodied movement facilitates physical and emotional healing individually and within the parent-child relationship. Through personal storytelling, the author describes how swim lessons, taught by son to mother, heal the pain, anger, and separation they experienced during the difficult teen and young adult years. Swimming, with its patterned movement, intrinsic breathwork, and meditative quality, helps mother and son negotiate his shift into adulthood, his challenges with …

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Touching The Earth: A Black Buddhist Perspective On Connecting With And Healing Ourselves And Our Ancestors, Kaira Jewel Lingo Mar 2023

Touching The Earth: A Black Buddhist Perspective On Connecting With And Healing Ourselves And Our Ancestors, Kaira Jewel Lingo

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Ancestors inform so many aspects of our experience. We are our ancestors. In the Plum Village Vietnamese Zen Buddhist tradition, we speak of three kinds of ancestors: familial, spiritual, and land ancestors. I reflect on my own connection to my familial ancestors as a Black bi-racial descendant, and explore the Plum Village practice of Touching the Earth, which supports us in healing the intergenerational trauma passed on to us by all of our many kinds of ancestors as well as strengthening and celebrating the intergenerational resilience and excellence that our various ancestors have gifted us with. I share and explain …

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Reclaiming De-Natured Blackness Through Kigandan Epistemological Nature Journaling, Feisal Kirumira Mar 2023

Reclaiming De-Natured Blackness Through Kigandan Epistemological Nature Journaling, Feisal Kirumira

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

The goal of this paper is to autobiographically explore de-naturing of Blackness through Eurocentric schooling, and re-naturing of Blackness through Kigandan epistemological nature journaling. I define racial de-naturing as the anthropocentric abuse of nature by European colonizers who viewed themselves as being above other-nature in order to dehumanize Black Bodies as sub-human forms of other-nature. I suggest that anti-Black racism was borne out of anthropocentrism as a means of sustaining and legitimizing colonial domination of Black bodies and their lands. Black Ugandans, whose indigenous religions are inseparable from nature-worship, had to be subjugated and transformed to legitimize Whiteness. Scientific racism, …

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The “Science Of Social Justice”: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Framework Grounded In Neuroscience, Education, And Anthropology Towards Healing Intergenerational Trauma, Sará King Mar 2023

The “Science Of Social Justice”: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Framework Grounded In Neuroscience, Education, And Anthropology Towards Healing Intergenerational Trauma, Sará King

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

The Science of Social Justice (SSJ) is a theoretical framework for healing intergenerational trauma which stems from the impact of the historical and lived embodied experience of systemic oppression. It explores the theoretical assertion that social justice and well-being are one and the same thing. This paper explores neuroeducational and anthropological research on the relationship between empathy, emotions, and awareness to analyze how embodied and contemplative practices such as yoga and meditation are examples of awareness-based interventions that can serve as the means of promoting embodied social justice. In this paper the Systems-Based Awareness Map (SBAM) is introduced as a …

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Gullah Geechee Visuality As Protest Art, Contemplative Practice, And Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Kathy J. Brown Mar 2023

Gullah Geechee Visuality As Protest Art, Contemplative Practice, And Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Kathy J. Brown

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

This article centers two fabric assemblage pieces I created in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer 2020: the first piece made specifically in response to the murder of Breonna Taylor. In 2021, I completed the second piece—her male counterpart—created with similar methodology and materiality, in recognition of the long history of Black men who lost their lives and or were/are impacted by police brutality, specifically Sgt. Issac Woodard. I believe that as a proverbial Black collective we continue to be linked, in equal parts, by both collective memory and concurrent triumphs. Here, as critical arts-based research, …

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When Grandma Comes To Visit: Exploring How Communion With Our Ancestors & Nature Deepens Our Capacity For Healing, Restoration, Resilience, And Resistance, Phyllis Jeffers-Coly Mar 2023

When Grandma Comes To Visit: Exploring How Communion With Our Ancestors & Nature Deepens Our Capacity For Healing, Restoration, Resilience, And Resistance, Phyllis Jeffers-Coly

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

I am not quite sure what they are officially called—these itty bitty brown seeds that show up in white whispy whirls in my home. I see them as special and sacred because they give me a way to feel tangibly connected with my ancestors, specifically my maternal grandmother. The magic, the delight, the awe, the sense of wonder that I associate with these seeds that show up in white whispy whirls is what I hope to share when I integrate invocation, which is typically familiar for our visitors, and yoga, which might be less familiar, into the Heritage and Healing …

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I’M The Only One Who Can Do It: Healing My Very Own Black Body Through Contemplative Practice, Brandon Hutchinson Mar 2023

I’M The Only One Who Can Do It: Healing My Very Own Black Body Through Contemplative Practice, Brandon Hutchinson

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Written in a combination of prose and poetry, this paper captures my journey to healing and healthy well-being. As a Black woman tenured professor who is also a mother of three Black girls, a wife to a Black man, I am full. And so, I have to make space to see my own self clearly. Each day as a Black woman, I have to set the intention to save my own life. In this selection, I bring to the page my experiences with contemplative body work and energy practices and capture my practice for survival, greater self-knowing and the desire …

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R.E.S.T.: A Practice For The Tired & Weary, Rashid Hughes Mar 2023

R.E.S.T.: A Practice For The Tired & Weary, Rashid Hughes

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

In this article I explore how systems of capitalism and colonialism—the larger anti-Black world—have conditioned modern mindfulness meditation to be unattractive for Black contemplatives (Sharpe, 2016). I describe the Four Pillars of R.E.S.T. as a contemplative offering that is free of colonial influence. R.E.S.T. is a contemplative practice, intended to be practical and accessible for Black folks who are fatigued from America’s centuries-old repeated attempts to break our bodies and spirits. The intention of R.E.S.T. is to offer Black people a contemplative path to liberation that not only empowers us to remain resilient in the face of overt forms of …

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Teaching About Race, Racism, And Social Justice With Mindfulness: A Pedagogical Tool That Keeps Us All Engaged, Marisela B. Gomez Mar 2023

Teaching About Race, Racism, And Social Justice With Mindfulness: A Pedagogical Tool That Keeps Us All Engaged, Marisela B. Gomez

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Teaching about race, racism, and social justice requires both instructor and student or participant to stay engaged. A public health pedagogy that includes mindfulness can help to ensure this engagement. This reflective piece will highlight the effects of mindfulness in general and specifically in helping to remain calm during education on potentially activating material. A description of the use of nature slides as bells of mindfulness to remind teacher and participants, especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color/Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic, to pause and become aware of the breath, relax, and renew themselves will be discussed. This calm is …

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Rising Up Rooted: Black Wisdom As Emancipatory Contemplative Practice For Resilience, Healing, And Liberation, Shelly P. Harrell Mar 2023

Rising Up Rooted: Black Wisdom As Emancipatory Contemplative Practice For Resilience, Healing, And Liberation, Shelly P. Harrell

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Black wisdom is offered as a transformative, liberatory, and healing resource with particular applications for disrupting the five dynamics of oppression—dehumanization, disconnection, destruction, delusion, and disempowerment. Cultural wisdom is a key element of emancipatory contemplative practice which intentionally centers strategies for decolonizing inner life. The integration of Black wisdom into contemplative practices can provide an ancestral and experiential connection to a sense of belonging and “home,” as well as establish an empowering foundation from which personal and collective liberation can flourish. Black wisdom can be incorporated into contemplative practice through cultural expressions (music, African proverbs and symbols), applications that utilize …

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Infusing Black Music In Breathwork And Meditation, Lacriscia Fowlkes Mar 2023

Infusing Black Music In Breathwork And Meditation, Lacriscia Fowlkes

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

Our breath serves as our lifeline to consciousness and unconsciousness. In many circles, practices such as meditation, yoga, breathwork, and sound healing were seen as a “White” thing. The challenges of 2020 helped increasing numbers of Black people realize that what had been appropriated as a “White” thing was our thing. During the pandemics of Covid-19 and anti-Black violence, I created healing spaces and breathwork sessions designed for BIPOC communities. This paper is a reflection on my experiences, with advice for holistic practitioners seeking to offer connection and resonance with Black and Brown audiences, particularly through sharing music during healing …

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Sacred Basket: Reflections On Facilitating Black Women’S Self-Love Retreats, Veta Goler Mar 2023

Sacred Basket: Reflections On Facilitating Black Women’S Self-Love Retreats, Veta Goler

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

When the U.S. seemed to disintegrate in 2020 from the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing murders of unarmed Black people by the police, my fear levels rose dramatically, and understandably so. Like other Black women, I experienced intersectional oppressions including, but not limited to, racism and sexism. I needed to shore up my inner strength. In this essay I discuss online retreats that I have been facilitating for Black women since September 2020. I describe my approach to the retreats, how participants have responded to them, and the community that has developed through them. The retreats are healing spaces that …

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Ode To Woman On The Train And My Sistahs: Healing And Reimagining Loving Relationships With Black, Indigenous, And Women Of Color (Biwoc), Ericka Echavarria Mar 2023

Ode To Woman On The Train And My Sistahs: Healing And Reimagining Loving Relationships With Black, Indigenous, And Women Of Color (Biwoc), Ericka Echavarria

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

In March 2019, I was assaulted on a busy NYC train during an early morning commute by a Black woman who appeared to be mentally ill. The incident left an indelible impact on my heart, body, and soul, and created a somatic opening to experience oneness and healing with my attacker, a Black woman, as well as with other Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color who have harmed me, and who I have also harmed. This article will discuss how I used contemplative practices to unpack the complexity of emotions I experienced in the processing of the incident and other …

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Heeding The Signs: Using Contemplative Practice For Sustainability As Black Racial Equity Facilitators, Ericka Echavarria, Ovita F. Williams Mar 2023

Heeding The Signs: Using Contemplative Practice For Sustainability As Black Racial Equity Facilitators, Ericka Echavarria, Ovita F. Williams

Journal of Contemplative Inquiry

As women of color working in partnership and individually as Black Racial Equity Facilitators (BREFs) of critical dialogues, we recognize the tremendous difficulty and demand in holding people’s uncertainty, anguish, revelations, and awakenings. We expect that white people will bring their tears, anger, denial of racism and collective whiteness. When the pain emanates from Black indigenous people of color (BIPOC), this can take an additional toll on the livelihood of BREFs. The collective emotions in these conversations are heavy and require preparation, centering and co-leadership that will provide space for healing and sustainability for BREFs. Building awareness of the particular …

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