On Revolutionary Mindfulness and Restorative Justice
We’re a nation born of blood, slavery, and genocide. This original trauma re-enacts itself in many ways… We must become skilled healers. We must be brave ones to take on juggernauts of harm. —Fania Davis, co-founder, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth
So how do we become these skilled healers and brave ones? A late October conference pointed the way via keynotes from two lawyers and an array of other sessions that offered instruction, research, and compelling personal narrative.
Practice: Mirroring
Simply put, there is nothing, nothing in the world, that can take the place of one person intentionally listening or speaking to another. —Jacob Needleman
If we don't listen, how will we understand?
Practice: Breathing Compassion for Self
Maintaining our well-being requires finding our center, our sense of balance, our breath, again and again.
Practice democracy with this inspiration from The Sufi Book of Life by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Many people observe their breath during meditation. This is a different way of doing breath meditation, using it to reinforce your sense of freedom, compassion, positivity, and hope. These feelings in turn enhance your resilience.
Practice: Engage in One Another's Differences
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. —bell hooks
Our fears, fueled by stories that—advertently or inadvertently—demonize people based on religion, culture, national origin, or other differences, can easily dominate our attention. At the same time, there are redemptive stories that inspire hope and possibility for reaching across differences and working together for a higher good.
Practice: Not Knowing
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. —Pema Chödrön
Practice: Finding Rumi's Field
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make sense.
—Rumi
Practice: Destroy the Lens of Pessimism
Hurry: A poem from the Afghan Women's Writing Project
Practice: A Mind Without Fear
Where the Mind Is Without Fear
Practice: Open to Possibility
"It is precisely in a period of great spiritual and societal hunger like our own that we most need to open minds, hearts, and memories to those times when women and men actually dreamed of new possibilities for our nation, for our world, and for their own lives. It is now that we may be able to convey the stunning idea that dreams, imagination, vision, and hope are actually powerful mechanisms in the creation of new realities—especially when the dreams go beyond speeches and songs to become embodied; to take on flesh, in real, hard places."
Practice: Potentiality
I listen to the silence I have in the past called inertia. What I hear is almost a voice in the hollowness…it is the calling of talents and potentialities that wait to bud in the dark recesses of ourselves, beneath the static and cacophony of everyday life. —Dawna Markova, “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life”
Potentiality: the ability to develop or come into existence