Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Contemplative Practice for Community Building and Healing in Writing Studies: A Conversation

Veronica House and Stephanie Briggs

Veronica: Stephanie, you and I met in 2017 at the Conference on Community Writing in Boulder, CO, where you led a workshop with Paula Mathieu on contemplative practice. At the time, you were facilitating the Contemplative Community Circle for faculty and staff at the Community College of Baltimore County, where you were an English professor for 18 years, and you had received a Center for Contemplative Mind in Society Building Communities Grant entitled “Practical Empowerment: Building Contemplative Communities With Students of Color.” You are the owner of Be.Still.Move., a facilitated training program of mindful/contemplative practices for educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and corporations. What are some of the initiatives you’re working on that will help readers get a sense of the work you do with faculty?

Stephanie: My clients include the Association for American Colleges & University Undergraduate STEM Education division for several of their initiatives: The Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership’s Keystroke writing program intensive for HBCU STEM faculty. The focus is on contemplative work in practices that not only support the act of writing but also, through storytelling, art, music, and guided practices, unpacking the role of place as academics of color and research in academic publishing. The Teaching to Increase Diversity and Equity in STEM (TIDES) initiative requires a different approach as practices are designed to take a deeper look into systemic oppression while providing a series of practices that guide the mind/head work down into the heart work. I also work with organizations like the STEM Women of Color Conclave and Collegiate Directions. The Conclave focuses on contemplative practices as healing, as there is a strict no academic conversation policy during this 3-day retreat. The focus is women’s health, so the practices reflected that mission. Collegiate Direction is an afternoon educational college preparation course for juniors and seniors of color where practices are not only about the value of mindfulness in their lives now and while in college, but also the importance of creative practices (storytelling and art) that not only center the mind but create spaciousness that opens the mind to possibilities or, as I explain to them, the foundation to research.

Veronica: Increasingly, writing and rhetoric faculty are interested in bringing contemplative practice into writing classrooms, evidenced, for example, in the Contemplative Writing Studies SIG at CCCC, but the intersection of contemplative practice and community building is not frequently explored in community-engaged writing scholarship. Of particular interest for rhetoric and writing faculty and students who use community-engaged pedagogies is in how contemplative practice can enhance the learnings that occur inside and outside of the classroom. That’s where your work is so instructive.

First, because contemplative practice is such a broad topic, can you define your contemplative practice and what it means to you?

Stephanie: Well that’s an interesting question. What does my contemplative practice look like, and what does it mean to me? The contemplative practice I attempt, and I use that word “attempt” to focus on traditional sitting practice. I take my seat, whether it’s on a cushion or a sofa or a chair. I place my feet on the ground. I find my place and the silence in the quiet. Since the pandemic it’s become even more difficult. The pandemic led me to stay inside for a month, and what got me through was a sitting practice. I did it every single day, maybe twice a day just sitting on my cushion and getting grounded, becoming more grounded, and during that practice I had a moment where something became quite clear. What came to me was a four part mantra:

1. All there is is the present moment.
2. We have little control over what is occurring, and that’s OK.
3. It has always been like that.
4. So now, what are you gonna do?

The fourth was based on something that I heard from the former President Barack Obama. He said it during one of his sessions with young people who were graduating from college or high school during this time of the pandemic. Everything was virtual. And he knew this was something important to tell them. He said, everything is going to change, everything you’d planned for is going to shift. You know all the summer jobs you thought you were gonna have probably won’t be there. And his question was, so now what are you gonna do? And that became my 4th mantra. If all you have is the present moment, everything beyond that, you have no control over. Everything before and beyond, you have no control over. It’s always been like that, so now what are you gonna do?

At that point, I was talking with friends who are in education and who were saying, I just hope we get back to normal, and I was so clear that we were not going to see normal ever again. So somewhere in there, my practice changed. I found it harder and harder to sit. I was involved with some virtual sitting practices, and that was good, but my mind wouldn’t settle. So I spent my time doing my second most favorite practice, a practice that I’ve been doing for over 25 years, and this was a writing practice.

Every morning I would get up, and I would feel so down. I was not happy with where things were going in the country, and I would moan and moan about this in my journal. But by the end of every journal entry, I would write five things I was grateful for. I always started with the fact that I was grateful for my job, which shifted all the moaning and groaning into gratitude. Over the years I’ve done that – I write for half an hour or an hour about the things I have to let go of, the things I didn’t even know were buried or needed to be looked at. You know the journaling was an opportunity for me to meet myself and then to find gratitude, or an opportunity for me to place some of those thoughts in perspective.

Veronica: You’ve said before that if a teacher wants to work with their students around community-based conversations and social justice work, that we can’t expect our students to dive into that work without our having a practice ourselves. What connection do you see between your contemplative work and writing and rhetoric pedagogy, particularly in how we can bring that practice into a writing classroom that is themed around contentious community and social or environmental issues?

Stephanie: It’s complex. I use practices that are healing practices for myself, and I think that’s important for faculty. Just to have a practice. Practice can be a prayer, practice can be taking walks, and not just taking walks so you can tick off all the things you need to do, but to count your footsteps, to walk until all you know you’re doing is walking. You hear the sound of your footsteps and realize that’s all I’m doing. The practice is not to go out for a run; the practice is to run until all you’re doing is running so that there’s nothing else in your mind. Well, you know things are always in your mind, but there’s a clarity. There’s a recognition of what’s around you, of what surrounds you. Being present with the whole goal being mindfulness. It could be sitting down to draw if that allows you to have moments where you’re not distracted.

Veronica: What you are saying about clearing the distractions in order to recognize what is reminds me of Carmen Kynard’s keynote address at the 2019 Conference on Community Writing in which she explains the imperative to distinguish “the work,” the work of racial justice and the mentoring of Black and Brown students, from “the job” and the noise that can pull you from that real work. She explains, “My advisor from graduate school, Suzanne Carothers, always stressed knowing the difference between the work and the job and also knowing and feeling when the job is interfering with the work” (18). Kynard adds a third category, “the hustle”:

By the hustle, I mean the arbitrary rules and processes you chase down to get your paper/ to make that money/ to get tenure and promotion, rules like: journal article rankings, university press rankings, CV lines, job market trends, hiring committees, salary negotiations, job applications, interviews, and other submissions of all kinds. The list goes on. Winning at these games is part of the hustle, but it ain’t the work, but some of us can get so caught up in the visibility and fleeting status of what all that means that we lose sight of the work. (19)

For her, the work is to disrupt in order to imagine other possibilities. In her work, she traces a lineage of thought through Black feminism, from Audre Lorde to Jaqueline Jones Royster to Alexis Paulene Gumbs and others. Through this lineage, she explains her “attempt to offer imaginations, questions, mantras, and meditations where the ongoing work of teaching for Black freedom is an infinite yet life-affirming loop” (7).

It sounds like contemplative practice could be used as a way to clarify the work in the face of tremendous injustice, which includes institutional injustices within our community colleges, colleges, and universities. Do you see having a practice as a way to clarify the urgent justice-focused and community-based work ahead through the haze or fog of exhaustion and burnout or the mundane requirements of the job? Can contemplative practice be a means toward disruption?

Stephanie: I think it can be helpful. I also think the goal of the practice a lot of times is to get beyond that point of exhaustion if you’re writing about exhaustion, to get out the writing about anger, to get beyond to a place of peace. And it’s not an easy journey. As I said I used to be really angry about some things in the education system, and I could write about that and write about that because I have to get it off my chest. But the bottom line was to recognize the gratefulness. Even with the anger, I was grateful. Even though the job made me crazy, I was grateful for the job and what it offered. The purpose is to become aware of our need for peace and clarity through the practice. The need is for understanding that even in chaos, there can be a kind of peace and clarity.

The classroom has its own energy. There is a practice that is helpful in these moments. It is called the Threshold Practice. Before entering a new space, all one does is take a moment to be present to the fact that you are leaving one space behind and entering another. It takes a second, a moment to be present with the fact that something is changing and that you must enter into a new space with a sense of calm and awareness. If we can ground in that simple bit of awareness, we can see clearly who is in front of us, who those students might be, so that’s the purpose of the practice in teaching.

Veronica: Yes, really seeing each student as a whole person. Several colleagues in writing and rhetoric have written about how white supremacy culture is infused throughout our discipline—be it the white, male scholars most cited (e.g. Royster), the erasure of whole rhetorical lineages and cultural histories from the field (e.g. Ruiz; García and Baca; Powell; Driskill), linguistic violence in promoting “white mainstream English” (e.g. Baker-Bell), curricular violence in what readings, subject matters, and methodologies are included and ignored (Riley-Mukavetz; Ruiz; Smith), physical violence and policing on campuses (Kannan et al.). I see your deliberate work to see clearly the student in front of you and who they might be as an act of justice and as an act of love, in the vein of what bell hooks called a “love ethic.”

Part of my ongoing contemplative work has been to sit with the ideologies I was raised with as a white, east coast, middle class, cis-gender person. External success, perfection (including with grades), competition, scarcity, individualism—all of these were parts of my indoctrination. If I can sit with, really deeply sit with, for example, a question of how all of these cultural and familial ideals show up on my syllabus, in the classroom, in my individual relationships with and commitments to students, and in the community partnerships I’m part of, my syllabus and classroom practices and partnerships can change in ways that reject these ideals, to the extent I’m able given my positionality, and that instead foreground ideals of justice, collaborative learning, co-created educational experiences, and reciprocity. And it’s hard and iterative. I have to keep coming back to the question after each class, each assignment, each course.

Kynard writes that “the imaginative refuses as it generates” (6). I love this idea, and it is woven throughout Black feminist work on radical imagination (e.g. Davis; Royster; brown), that those striving for justice must not only know what we’re working against, but imagine what we are working toward. Imagining more just futures in the face of oppression and violence. I wonder if you believe that having a practice can help clarify in us and our students what we are refusing as we simultaneously generate? And as Kynard also says, “Educational counterstories can thus reveal, in real talk, the everyday ways that whiteness and racism are remade and reaffirmed in schools and via schooling and the radical counter-narratives that make other worlds” (7). Doing contemplative work is not to get to an endpoint. For me, it is to continuously loop back to the question of what’s the real work, or whatever question guides the practice. Or it can be the movement into clarity that you’ve mentioned.

I remember reading an interview with adrienne maree brown in which she discusses abolition and big systemic problems in society. She asks a question that reminds me of this connection between contemplative practice and social justice that we’re discussing. It was, “ How do we actually break those patterns in ourselves in order to break them in the larger world?” (qtd. in Voynovskaya). And that’s the question, isn’t it? How are we, in ourselves, reinforcing or rejecting systemic injustices every day? I appreciate brown asking this of herself because it shows how everyone –regardless of race, cultural background, political and ideological beliefs–everyone can ask that question. “How do we actually break those patterns in ourselves in order to break them in the larger world?” I can use what surfaces from this question or perhaps from sitting with Carmen’s call to distinguish the work from the job or whatever question we feel called to ask at the time. I can use the thoughts that surface to ask myself how they affect my teaching, my community work, and my scholarship. And very much in line with your fourth mantra, I ask myself, “now what am I going to do about it?” And then I make changes, and inevitably I’ll make mistakes, so I loop back and ask the questions again and again.

Can we return to your four-part mantra that you shared at the beginning of our conversation?

Does the groundedness you seek, the clarity, help you to move into action? What I mean is, do you see a purpose for contemplative work in activism, and if so, what is it? Or does the practice not necessarily have to be about anything other than just seeing what is. How do you move beyond your idea that there really is nothing we can do, to seeing what’s important and moving into action—Obama’s “now what are you gonna do?” In her Composition Forum interview with Christopher Minnix, Paula Mathieu says,

To really see any problem as an opportunity to make ourselves more aware of the way that we perpetuate pain and suffering in the world—that’s been really interesting to me. Contemplative pedagogy is not about turning away from the public, but turning toward the public with more resources, with a little more wisdom so that we do not personalize things that otherwise might be personalized and so that we own what we say and do. (qtd. in Minnix)

Do you see a dissonance between your second mantra that we have no control over anything and Mathieu’s idea or your fourth mantra saying “now what are you going to do,” which implies there’s purpose to our actions. Or am I misunderstanding?

Stephanie: Having no control is based on the fact that we can’t stop what is about to occur, because life is in constant motion. We can make a plan, we can move into action, we can own what we say and do, but having control of all of that is also recognizing that actions and plans are always in a state of “be ready” for whatever is to come. Own what you say and do, for sure, because when the unexpected comes, then you can go into action and make the adjustments.

Veronica: And this takes contemplative practice?

Stephanie: When you think about civil rights activists of the 60s, there was always a point of contemplation. It was generally on Sunday. That’s when things came to a halt, or we got quiet. Generally community activists would find their way to a church that was open and safe, and they would have prayer. They would be cared for, they would be fed, and for that period of time, were able to see that we needed the time to reflect with gratitude for still being alive and safe. To reflect on those who didn’t make it, reflect on those who are giving their all to fight for justice. You know that’s why we have mindfulness practices. It’s all about rest.

The importance of rest and restoration is key particularly in the work of activism. Do you know about R.E.S.T.? It was started by mindfulness yoga teacher and restorative justice facilitator, Rashid Hughes. A Howard University graduate in the Department of Music and School of Divinity, he combines contemplative work with collective care. R.E.S.T is a restorative, mindfulness practice that allows space for healing and the freedom that comes once the perceived powers are placed in a space of stasis, or simply not given space, so these systems of oppression become powerless. Hence there is the space for just radical imagination. The idea is you’ve got to take care of yourself (Hughes). Practice lets us see our way towards another path and that allows us to look at our students with the clarity to understand what’s in front of us.

Veronica: I love this idea of seeing what’s in front of you at that moment. With our students, it’s recognizing their full being, nurturing the whole person and continually looping back to “what does this student need most right now.”

Stephanie: Yeah, filled with all the stuff that we’re filled with. I think that’s the beauty of mindfulness: that we’re all interconnected. Yes, we’re all interconnected in a very deep way, and you know I’m thinking here— I just took a breath because I’m remembering when I would have a student that would come to me who was filled with anger and pain or suffering, and sometimes if I was awake, see that’s the whole thing, if I was awake, I could look at that student and just pause and I could take a breath, and that student could watch me take a breath—a big inhalation and a big exhalation—and then I would say, what can I do for you now?

Veronica: Yes, that pause, taking a breath in the classroom, a literal breath, like an opening up of the self, and seeing your student as a whole being in need of empathy, love, and self expression.

I’m also thinking about how that idea of allowing for breath and for the awake kind of seeing that you mentioned shifts the way we consider what we teach, what curriculum should be, what we bring into a classroom. What if we think about a syllabus as a breath, as breathing with the students? It becomes this very beautiful thing that’s not so filled with need for achievement and those ideals I mentioned before, but rather deep care.

Stephanie: Ooh I like that! The syllabus as a breath. You know I used to create two syllabi for each class. The first one was a one page syllabus that was filled with pictures and drawings and stick figures that I had created, and the idea when you were talking about the syllabus as a breath, it was a syllabus of a breath. It was an opportunity for students first to say, this doesn’t look like any syllabus I had ever seen. I would say don’t worry, you’ll get that soon. Right now everything you need to know about this class about what we’re going to be spending time on is here. It was at this point, once they recovered from the peculiarity of this one page document, that you could feel a collective exhalation from the class. It’s about the beauty of not knowing. You don’t have to know anything as you enter this space. I used to teach “not knowing.” There was a section on empathy because my focus was empathy as a high impact practice.

Veronica: Teaching “not knowing” takes humility in owning what we as teachers don’t know. It is such an important model for students who have been so deeply ingrained with the idea of definitive answers and perfectionism. I have several assignments, including in the community-engaged portion of my courses, where students and I are often co-learners delving into questions none of us knows the answers to. We’re asking and creating and writing and asking again. For complex, systemic problems, there aren’t easy solutions, so “not knowing” becomes a recursive cycle of inquiry and creation and action without an end destination. We’re all involved in networks of people writing for social change, so our writing is not the endpoint, it’s part of the writing happening all around us all the time. Maybe this is like your idea of walking, not to get to an endpoint, but to recognize ourselves as walking. My students’ writing may not “solve” systemic issues, and there’s a lot we don’t know, but they can recognize themselves as writers working toward something.

Would you consider that teaching “not knowing?” How do you teach “not knowing?”

Stephanie: Yes, what you describe is, in essence, “not knowing.” It is a way of engaging with an idea or something that is right in front of you with an open mind. In the Buddhist traditions, it addresses the idea of the clinging mind. You know, the things that are familiar and comfortable that we don’t wish to release. This could be the political beliefs of someone’s family and the decision to go in a different direction or discovering that something that was once truth is now a stereotype. What practice offers the teacher is the ability to sit with the unfolding of the innocent mind of the student and create a space of community that supports this new and fragile journey that leads towards one’s freedom. It is known as a heart opening.

So, the question is, can this be “taught”? And based on recalling the true definition, it can only be accomplished by an instructor’s willingness to allow for the process, much like you did in your class. The hardest part is when the “knowing” is in opposition with your personal belief systems or other students.

Veronica: Ooh, I want to come back to this, but can you first say more about what you mean that empathy is a high impact practice?

Stephanie: Yes. At CCBC, we all had to develop a High Impact Practice Plan, and we presented it to the Dean. When the Dean asked me what’s your high impact practice, I said, “empathy.” He stepped back from me by about three or four steps. He was literally taken aback. But then he responded, “yes our students need more empathy.” And my response was that faculty and staff and administrators need more empathy, too. We have empathy inside of us, the students do, too, but they’re so busy trying to be successful, they’re so busy trying to get to their goals that they’ve forgotten that they are human beings. So when I think of empathy as a high impact practice, everything we did, every assignment had a component to it that forced us to look at the human being.

Veronica: What’s an example that you think was particularly poignant?

Stephanie: The very first assignment was about contemplative photography. And the very first class we had, students had to go into their neighborhood where they lived currently. Some students, I remember, walked to the Community College. Many students were still at home. Some students were living on campus. They were to go on a walk through their neighborhood. And this was where I taught the very beginning of the use of storytelling and research. So they might take a picture of a factory and create a story of that image. In the next class, we would begin by me asking, “why should I care?” I would ask them to dive really deep into their neighborhoods and about the topics they photographed and wrote about. That was the first assignment.

HIPs are these learning practices designed to promote deep learning and ultimately increase student retention, engagement, and persistence necessary to graduate. There are many approaches to executing a HIP, but to design a semester long program with a wide brush stroke focus on empathy, or the ability to understand another’s perspectives or feelings while, at the same time, not being intimately connected with that experience, I challenged students to suspend their beliefs in order to open their hearts to the unfamiliar. My hypothesis was, if you can do that, then almost any HIP experience was manageable simply based on a student’s willingness to be uncomfortable and open at the same time.

We had another assignment where they were researching a topic, but it was designed to address empathy while teaching use of integrated quotations, in text citations, and writing a bibliography. This is community college, so you know I have to make sure that they know how to cite, and integrate a quote, and use parenthetical documentation, and how to use MLA. But I said, “I want you to find a picture of the topic you’re focused on.” It was to be a social justice issue, and I wanted them to find a social justice issue image. But I don’t want it to have any words. I just want it to be an image that reflects your topic. So one was of a faucet with brown water coming from it. The students would do a PowerPoint presentation with four slides. The first one was the image. We would sit with that image in silence for about one minute. A minute seems like forever, but we would sit. Then the next slide would be three or four quotes or facts that they had come up with from at least two sources. And while I’m using this assignment to teach parenthetical notation and how to bring in facts from different sources, the students are really drawn to it because they’ve just seen this image of colored water coming out of a faucet and now they’re learning the facts. They’re really taking in the facts. The third slide is the original picture again. And now we sit with it again, but it has deeper meaning. We sit for another minute. The fourth slide is the bibliography.

After a few of these presentations I heard sniffling, and I thought maybe someone had a cold, but I looked around and there were people crying. I realized that they needed to be with their thoughts. So, I had them do another exercise. We did this on campus. There was a small labyrinth outside. I told everyone to put on their coats, we’re going outside. We stood in a small huddle at the entrance of the labyrinth and I had them set a simple intention, based on what, during the course of these presentations, was cause for them to feel so deeply. Then, with that intention in mind, each person entered the labyrinth. We started slow, but it was cold, so we walked a little faster than we normally would. We set an intention and began to walk. When we came in, they were just so quiet.

This is why having a practice is so important to recognize when it’s time to shift the game plan and allow for healing to take place. If you’re doing social justice work, it’s like going to the church in the civil rights movement, you need to do something to create the balm. We need that practice so that people can really realize why it was hard to look at those images. We want our students to sit with what they learned. We want our students to do the right thing, but we have to be able to sit with the fact that there are going to be students in your classroom, and you’re not going to be on the same journey, but then we all sit with what is presented to us.

There’s a rapper, poet, and peace activist by the name of Genesis Be, and Genesis is the reason why the Mississippi flag came down. She started something called People Not Things, and to see her sit with white Mississippians, you know folks who are Red to the bone, and you know love their flag, and you watch her using compassionate concepts (Henao and Leshner). Utilizing practices of deep listening and compassion, she simply sits and takes in each person’s story. In one example, she listens to a man’s story of how the flag is a symbol of Mississippi pride. They sit facing each other as he explains why the flag is an important symbol to him and generations of his family. With each pause, Genesis Be looks at him, with love as the foundation, and slowly retells her family’s story. And this white Mississippian man repeats his story of the flag’s symbolism. And she doesn’t waiver. Calm and listening deeply, she explains once again why this flag is such a difficult image for her family. She adds just a bit each time, reminding him that her grandfather, a minister, was murdered because of this flag. After five minutes or so, he responds, “Oh, I never thought of it that way.” The process of being seen and heard requires, even if just for a moment, the willingness for this man to see her as a whole person.

Veronica: I could imagine that some of the people she encounters in Mississippi would not care, or you know, are the ones out there causing violence in the name of the flag. How do you work with people who hate you or who hate what you stand for?

Stephanie: That’s a hard one. I think that’s what’s so powerful about Genesis. She’s young and fearless, and she’s patient. It doesn’t mean they’re going to love her, and it doesn’t mean this guy is going to go out and tell his family they need to change. And yet something might have shifted.

Veronica: Do you see a connection to how this practice is usable in a classroom on a smaller scale with a single student? If you have a student who disagrees with you or with another student, do you find that this practice helps open conversation?

Stephanie: Well, I’ve had students in the classroom who have never had a Black teacher before, and they question everything that I say. I think the practice allows for humor. A lot of people think that you have to be still and stoic to have a practice, but when you really listen to teachers of mindfulness, there’s a lightness, there’s a humor, there’s a giggle that comes with this because you know that change is only possible when someone’s ready to change. Being in practice allows for that space. It’s hard to care about someone who’s not like you and doesn’t think like you.

This leads me to the election of 2016. I was teaching English 101 on one of our smaller campuses, in a very red community, in Baltimore, MD. I mean, this was a community that Donald Trump visited for lunch at the local diner and it was packed. That semester I had one of the most diverse classes I’d ever had in this small community. The day after the election, I was in conversation with faculty members on our other two campuses which had a much larger blue presence. They were planning student conversations and plans to head to DC to demonstrate. Someone asked me what I planned to do in my classroom.

That Thursday, I entered my classroom, a class where we practiced empathy as a high impact practice. We’d spent the semester engaged in deep writing and creative art practices. The night before, I had decided on an opening practice. As always, I provided limited information on what we were about to do or why. I’d learned through the course of many semesters that it was best not to name or explain what we were about to do or the intended outcome.

Our practice since the start of the semester was simple. Every morning, at the top of every class, students would be given a large index card. They were asked to write their name at the top of the card and then write for about three minutes, and then I’d have them turn the card over and using crayons and markers, they would draw for about three minutes an interpretation of their response to the quote. They would then hand the card to me. This was called their “attendance practice.” I always marveled at how, after a few weeks, the writing was a little more profound, and the drawing more deeply reflective and creative.

This was also a class where, as part of our empathy work, we investigated and wrote essays on a stereotype we’d heard of or one that we might be guilty of. Part of the empathy work involved drawing. Students were given a piece of construction paper that was folded in half. On one side, they were to draw a stereotype that the still hold today. Then, on the other half of the paper, they had to draw their experience with someone of a different race or ethnicity who they are friendly with in their job, in a class, or another environment. Maybe they’ve spent time having lunch, or going to a baseball game, or grabbing a cup of coffee. Draw that relationship on the other half of this paper.

On the table I had popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners. I asked the students to use these items to create the intersection between these two images they’d drawn. Once they were done, I asked them to share what they experienced with their partner. The conversations were rich, and I believe by the time they finished their conversation something shifted.

So, on the day after the election, I entered the classroom and gave the students two cards. As I’m passing them out, I said, “You know I don’t have a clue how you voted. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What’s important to me is this class. I don’t know how you are feeling right now, but what I want you to do is take some time to look ahead. Let’s see each other.”

We did our “I See You” practice which always made them giggle. The practice involved making eye contact with another student and once a connection was made to say to each other, “I see you.” Then they would move on to another student and do the same. This is based on the Zulu greeting, “Sawubona” which translated means “I see you,” but there is another translation as well which is “Because you saw me, you brought me into existence.” This is a lovely practice to do in the classroom because so many of our spaces are set up to see the back of students’ heads and not for students to see each other.

After we finished this process, I asked them to consider this classroom, the students in it, and what this class represents. I let them draw for about fifteen minutes, or until the last person finished their card. I then told them to put a number one on the card, as I was going to collect it.

On the second card, which I prefaced by saying I would not collect it, I asked them to draw how they felt now that the election was over. They drew again for about fifteen minutes. When they were done they were extremely quiet. I then collected the first card. I still have those cards. They are a reflection of a world I’m sure most of us would love to live in.

These kinds of practices offer the kind of spaciousness that is not easily defined and understood at the time. My job wasn’t to try to change students’ minds. My job was to hear them. My job was the ability to sit there and provide the space for something to occur. That’s the breath we spoke of earlier. That’s the pause that allows us to hear things that go against the fiber of our being. Clearly, contemplative work offers the foundation for doing the work of justice, but for me it provides the grounding I need in order to have more clarity and patience.

Veronica: This connection between contemplative work, somatic bodywork, and social justice is visible in many movement leaders and organizers. Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, for example, have spoken about the connections many times on their podcast How to Survive the End of the World. The organization generative somatics uses mind/body work with movement leaders, activists, and organizers to build “embodied leadership to align our personal and collective practices with our principles and to heal from trauma and internalized oppression” (Homepage). They explain that they “support social and climate justice movements in achieving their visions of a radically transformed society. We do this by bringing somatic transformation to movement leaders, organizations, and alliances” (About Us). And you first introduced me to Angel Acosta, who “weave[s] leadership development with conversations about inequality and healing to support educational leaders through contemplative and restorative practices” (About).

In organizing work, as in teaching, what’s happening “out there,” whether in our communities or classrooms, is very much connected to what’s happening within us and each student, and we can’t do our best work if we are caught in trauma, exhaustion, violence, and grief with no outlet. If we’re bringing topics of racism, settler colonialism, ableism, ecological destruction, and other emotionally charged topics into the classroom through our syllabi, our students will inevitably feel some of these emotions, or they’re living with them already every day, and we need to offer a way to navigate the emotions in their complexity, including, as I mentioned before, the ancestral and cultural traumas and violences each of us carries. Do you believe that a role of contemplative practice in writing courses can be that balm, as you put it before, that offers clarity to get us and our students to the “Now what are you going to do?”

Stephanie: There is great importance in recognizing that everyone arrives to a space with a story. The real challenge is how to deal with that room, now filled with the all the points you just made—the traumas, ecological destruction, violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. I can visualize all these and more filling the space, words and letters, tumbling over each other. Therefore, I believe it is imperative to recognize, no, remember, that we as faculty, staff, administrators, counselors, human beings, also have our stories to add to this cacophony of letters.

You mention Angel Acosta, whom I had the great privilege of working with in his 400 Years of Inequality through Mindfulness training in early 2020, and I just recently took his Somatic Storytelling course. My takeaway from both of these experiences is that we first must connect with our own pain and suffering through our personal storytelling, whether it be through writing, dance, or music. This provides us with the grounding necessary to incorporate somatic contemplative practices in the writing classroom.

Back in 2016, I received a grant from the Center of Contemplative Mind in Society for “Practical Empowerment: Building Contemplative Communities With Students of Color.” Including the word “with” was a conscious choice, which I will explain shortly. There were six institutions that participated in this work: The Community College of Baltimore County, Coppin State University, University District of Columbia, Howard University, Virginia State University, and Virginia Commonwealth. The original goal was to determine how we create contemplative communities “with” students of color at our institutions. What we determined was that the work was really about how WE create the conditions that support these communities. Our work now involved practices designed to help us interrogate our emotional experience while looking deeply at one image for 30 minutes (also known as beholding practice) and reflecting on how we chose to respond to it. We wrote and created maps of our vision for a safe and open contemplative community for students of color. We engaged in practices that expressed our diverse heritages. We sat up late nights sharing our stories, while laughing and crying. It became clear to each of us that we needed our own deep, diverse practices in order to work “with” our students who were to develop what worked best for their community. To do this work required a kind of fearlessness, letting go of ego, and releasing the idea of the right thing. The practices we shared helped us to remember to pause. The pause allowed for change. By creating a safe container, it is possible to create a contemplative community with students.

At this moment, I am reflecting on a song written by an unknown African American composer in the 19th century, “There is a Balm in Gilead.” It’s funny, at this moment, I recall being a little girl, listening to the church choir. I can hear their voices. Of course, there is the biblical context of this story as well as the historical context of its composer who was probably experiencing the suffering and the indignities of enslavement. But I’m going to reflect on the diversity of these two stories being told, one a written text, the other a musical composition. Both are addressing the ability to find comfort and healing from injustice and suffering - in the world, in our communities, in our families, in ourselves.

Contemplative practices in writing courses are, in my opinion, a win-win. One provides an opening of spaciousness and clarity needed to be in the moment with difficult issues. The other offers a visual, written space for the personal telling, uncovering a truth, revealing the suffering, and then the clarity to actually respond to that question, “Now what am I going to do?” So, yes, as a somatic practice, writing courses have the potential to be that balm.

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