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

Rituals of (Dis)Regard and Mindfulness

Rasha Diab

Abstract: This article explores the transformative potential of mindfulness and rituals of regard, drawing inspiration from bell hooks’s insights on communities of care. Focusing on the intersection of epistemology, ontology, and pedagogy, I investigate how mindfulness can serve as a liberatory pedagogy, challenging Cartesian legacies and fostering relational selves. Through storytelling and cross-cultural meditations, I illuminate the limitations of traditional pedagogies and the expansive possibilities of mindfulness. By examining concepts like the reconciled self and without-thinking, rooted in Arabic-Islamic and Buddhist traditions, I highlight the power of mindful attention and regard. This piece navigates the tension between critique and affirmation, emphasizing the importance of non-self and regard in mindfulness practices. Ultimately, it underscores the role of mindfulness in shaping both individual and collective narratives, offering pathways to freedom and connection.

I’m doing the work of self-healing, of earth healing, of reveling in this piecing together of my world in such a way that I can be whole and holy.

— bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (68)

To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms.

— bell hooks, “An Agent of Change”

I start with reflection, storytelling, and haunting questions. What does mindfulness in-practice look like? Who enacts mindfulness and models the work and clarifies the challenge of mindfulness? My answers to these questions are messy, straddle different traditions, and don’t settle with a coherent story because mindfulness would resist this desire for closure. My answers lead me to many more questions. So, I revisit and weave together several moments that illuminate mindfulness and why a commitment to mindfulness matters. I revisit and weave these moments because they respond to what seems like a shared yearning for transformation, a yearning to connect with the self differently and to (re)write the word and world when violence is pervasive and quotidian. I return first to a moment when I read the essays in bell hooks’s Belonging one after the other and attended to hooks’s work on communities of care, “the enactment of a ritual of regard,” and her assertion that “[n]ew rituals of regard are needed” (Belonging 229).

Belonging

In Belonging, hooks writes about Kentucky, home, and homecoming but evokes much more. The essays are filled with jarring contrasts: loving, wholesome, and reverent connections with spirit, family, community, and land, on the one hand, are set against jarring discrimination and loss of connection, on the other. hooks explains, “We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent” (25). It’s with(in) such jarring contrasts that mindfulness is practiced.

Belonging abounds with themes and mindful practices. In Belonging placemaking, knowledge-making, relation-making, memory-making, self-making, impermanence, and loss; human and cultural geography; the dialectic of belonging and othering; and the journey away from and back to home are central to the unfolding of hooks’s story. Home/homecoming is an orienting theme in many spiritual traditions and practices, and Belonging is as much about physical homecoming and placemaking as it is about awakening to the self and its journey, or spiritual homecoming. The undercurrent is (at)tending to experience; suffering; and perceptions of oneself, others, and environment. [1] Slowing down to attend, hooks dwells on individual/collective experience and scans for what/why of thoughts, feelings, reactions, and relations, and the end result is a reflective, spiritual journey. Along this journey, the question of regard repeatedly pops up. Gently, we are invited to ask: What do we dis/regard? Do we regard positively, negatively, or conditionally ourselves and loved ones? And at what cost?

Belonging can be considered an iterative (guide to the) practice of mindfulness. But like a code in plain view, it can be missed. What provides an entry point to this iterative practice is the concept of dis/regard. Dis/regard can be simply defined as a form of enacted and consequential judgment, whose proximity/distance from reverence to life helps us see regard’s relation to mindfulness. [2]

The first time I read Belonging, I only paid attention to dis/regard at the very end. Suddenly, dis/regards’ significance became clearer. Dis/regard can be defined as a consequential (even when inconspicuous), complex bundle of perceiving, emoting, being, acting, and relating force with momentum and velocity. [3] At the very end of Belonging, hooks writes about the “enactment of a ritual of regard,” and the words enactment and ritual underscored the socio-political performative dimension of dis/regard. It’s the connection between regard and reverence to life that helped me unlock this code and understand how and why Belonging is an iterative (guide to the) practice of mindfulness.

Across the essays, hooks teaches us that as individuals/groups, we dis/regard the self (internalized dis/regard) and others (externalized) dis/regard. Consider here dis/regard as manifest in gendered or racialized power dynamic: it manifests as re-iterative communicative scripts, a thing that is repeatedly addressed by scholarship on microaggressions (e.g., Diab, Godbee, with Burrows and Ferrel). Disregard does harm and stealthily moves around until we choose to look and (be)long differently. These judgments are often trapped in dualities. “Dualities serve their own interests;” recognizing the dualities doesn’t necessarily lead us to “critique the dualities and dissolve them through the process of deconstruction” (hooks, An Agent for Change). When dis/regard is shared, enactments of dis/regard accrue collective force, remain undetected, and, therefore, are rarely questioned. Repeated enactments of disregard sediment as everyday, routine, and unmarked -isms with rippling and damaging effects. Under the radar, collective dis/regard has a quotidian grip that manifests and is shared across generations, time, and space.

Not surprisingly, hooks meditates on the enactment of internalized racism, sexism, and classism (e.g., 54). Belonging abounds with critique of social and national patterns of regard as manifest in racial politics and harm, ageism, ableism, and “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (47). Each critique acts like a force of interruption, loosens the grip of the supremacist judgment that justifies and sustains the resulting -ism, and seeks liberation.

Each critique is woven with accessible storying. Storying dramatizes the complex and gripping web of perceiving-emoting-being-acting-relating to self, loved ones, other(s), land, things, and relations of power/empowerment. If patterns of dis/regard shapeshift, hide, and move, how can we counter them? Another story—this one from Indigenous wisdoms—will help clarify.

Stories and the “Wolf You Feed”

The Nanticoke People share a story of “The Tale of the Two Wolves,” published via the Nanticoke Indian Tribe’s website. The tale teaches about conflicting forces of/within the self, which are metaphorically represented as two wolves: “one is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace love, hope serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The tale presents a way to resolve this conflict. In the parable, an elder and his grandson are contemplating how we face internal conflict and its conflicting parties. When asked about which wolf will win, the elder Cherokee Brave explains to his grandson that the winning wolf is the one supported and fed. Across time and space, we, too, can attend and learn.

Similarly, the multi-layered and evocative storytelling in Belonging can help us see that seemingly simple acts become practices, and routine practices become rituals (wolves can be interpreted as the rituals that regular practice feed). “We are always practicing something” as Mia Mingus puts it, and practices both hide and reveal: like iceberg tips, practices point to a mix of perceiving-emoting-being-acting-relating patterns or connections with self, others (even loved ones), land, and things, which are not always immediately visible. Some practices enact and are informed by liberatory, empowering, and life-giving acts of regard; some are dehumanizing, constraining, draining, and life-denying acts of disregard. Do we know what rituals we perform and practice? Do we know what force is supported and fed by rituals we practice and perform?

Decoding the dynamic practice of dis/regard slowly and gradually, hooks shares numerous moments of insight and cultural critique. She gifts us with a mindful art of re-writing word and world, a method to know and be known differently, or to counter-story (e.g., Martinez). [4] hooks’s is among “these personal counter-stories [that] are autobiographical reflections of the author, juxtaposed with their critical race analysis of [not just] legal cases and within the context of a larger sociopolitical critique” (Solórzano and Yosso 32). The consequences of dis/regard become clear in Belonging.

Hand and Foot

In Belonging, regard is deceptively simple. [5] To reiterate, dis/regard can be defined as a form of enacted judgment. In most cases, hooks shows how regard reflects a judgment (1) to align with/against, (2) to include/exclude a person/group, and shows (3) the longevity of this judgment and (4) its far reaching consequences. The following representation of regard is not an exhaustive representation of the work hooks does to uncover normalized disregard. Rather, it offers just an entry point. Take a listen. hooks writes, teaches, and testifies:

For the more than thirty years I lived away from Kentucky, coming home to see my parents was always the ritual of regard, renewing my sense of connection with the world of my growing up. My parents are old now. I can no longer count on them to be the force calling me home. Now the force within me demands that I stake my own claim to this Kentucky ground…. Seeking solitude, my spirit finds solace in nature. There it can embrace the reality of things living and dying, of the passing away of the old, of resurrection. (hooks, Belonging 221)

New rituals of regard are needed. Before her memory loss, Mama was always on her feet working, cooking, cleaning, meeting someone else’s needs. In their patriarchal marriage, she waited on our father hand and foot. Now she needs us to serve her, to dedicate ourselves to her comfort and care. This service is the enactment of a ritual of regard. (hooks, Belonging 229)

Attending to her parents, hooks illustrates how past regard is just that, past. And it might not be regard at all, for the wife-mom-do-it-all recedes in the background and indeed is often just that hand and foot. This evocative description dramatizes a critique, an interruptive moment.

Before enacting “[n]ew rituals of regard,” there has to be an interruption. Together, what these moments from hooks’s Belonging interrupt is automatic behavior in terms of re/acting. It is the force behind and the automatic reenactment of relations to her mother that hooks registers as an exigence. She attends and chooses to respond to her mother being reduced to (a) hand and foot and (b) no longer hand and foot. Both terms form a duality that no longer works [6]: terms of the duality neither feel right, do right to the Mom, nor align with what is just. Therefore, there is a need to re-write their relation. Indeed, both an interruption and “[n]ew rituals of regard are needed” (e.g., “seeking solitude,” “[finding] solace in nature,” and “dedicate[ing] ourselves to her comfort and care”). But, how can this brief moment be illustrative of mindfulness in-practice?

To explain, I, first, have to address how misrepresentations of mindfulness block us from seeing mindfulness in-practice. Then, I zoom in on three terms that help explain what hooks enacts and models: these terms are automaticity, mindfulness, and relational mindfulness.

Automaticity and Relational Mindfulness

Facile, stereotypical representations of mindfulness haunt our collective imaginary. A person practicing mindfulness is often imagined/represented as one who brackets herself off from this world, sits in a composed way, and sustains an unwavering gaze at something unknown to the onlooker. What bell hooks does differs from this flattened misrepresentation; she exemplifies the mindful person engaged, in-practice, and in the world: interrupting, unlearning and relearning, re-writing her life and relations, and modeling these practices. Unpacking the terms automaticity, mindfulness, and relational mindfulness makes her mindfulness clearer.

Automaticity refers to automatic, mindless behavior which has benefits, but not always. “Automaticity is adaptive in that it conserves limited attentional resources and lessens the self-regulatory burden by freeing up one’s limited conscious attention from tasks in which they are no longer needed…” (Bargh and Chartland ctd. in Kang, Gruber, and Gray 194). Automaticity also has a sinister side: automatic behavior is typically mimetic, elusive, resistant to reflection and transformation, and has a slumbering, seductive hold. Interrupting automatic behavior, or de-automization, is one dimension of mindfulness. De-automization is crucial to loosening the grip of a feeling/thought/(re)acting/relating pattern and holding space for reflection and mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a cluster of volitional processes wherein a person divests from automaticity, invests in “voluntary sustained attention” (James, qtd. in Stanley 74), and “continually make[s and pursues] novel distinctions about objects of their attention” (Djikic, Langer, and Stapelton 106) with the hope of wakefulness from the grip of automaticity. Consistent practice can result in a disposition that shifts the nature of our relations with self, other, and environment.

Rhetorically listening to stories and counterstorying hold the space for mindfulness; both are productive and receptive rhetorical arts that can support making “novel distinctions.” As such, rhetorical listening and counterstorying can facilitate “analyz[ing] claims and cultural logics within which these claims function” (Ratcliffe 26; emphasis in original) and countering master narratives replete with stock stereotypes, which activate mindless prejudice. Indeed, storytelling holds the space for mindfulness when “we perform our commitment to living with careful intent, critical interrogation, and thoughtful awareness” (Chambers et al. xxvii; see also Delgado; Holmes). Then, rhetorical listening and counterstorying deepen awareness. When the healing impact of mindfulness extends from interrogating and reflecting to relating differently, then it’s termed relational mindfulness, which results in “deepening awareness of the present relational experience, with acceptance, where connection is described as the core of psychological well-being and is the essential quality of growth fostering and healing relationships” (Bishop, qtd. in Burrows 25).

hooks’ relational mindfulness “deepen[s] awareness of the present relational experience,” shows how a judgment pattern holds someone hostage to a role, a past role: hooks’s storied critique is a micro-enactment of judgment of the wife/mother as a self who “lives’’ absented, sacrifices to propel other people’s lives, so she becomes an object for other people’s lives. hooks’s practice of relational mindfulness in Belonging allows for the daughter-mom relation to grow (and heal) together—not apart—and differently.

This moment and others in Belonging are generative and can be extended to innumerable situations, spheres of action, and -isms. As hooks alerts us to ways we are held hostage to assumed judgments or past ruminations (or future planning and perfected images), her critique against the objectification of someone as hand and foot suggests other patterns of objectification like being eye candy, for example.

It’s hard to read hooks’s critique outside of her project as a critical race feminist whose work addresses the intercentricity of race and racism and other forms of objectification, subordination, and oppression including sexism and classism. It is hard to read hooks’s generative work outside feminists’ critique of the iterative logics of domination and its fractal, rippling effects especially in relation to persistent iterations of the Cartesian legacy (e.g., Bordo, Orr). The Cartesian enduring mind/body split separates us from wholeness and instead keeps us stuck with consequential metonymic iterations and “valorization of the first term—being/becoming, male/female, reason/emotion, culture/nature, polis/demos, transcendent/immanent, good/evil” (Orr 486-487). And when we add neoliberal ideology, we have the terms productive/liability, self-reliant advancement/care-taking-the collective.

Among the enduring metonymic mind/body split’s far-reaching consequences is the reduction of teaching/learning to a simplified “mentative process” (e.g., Orr) that relishes on either-or thought, that speaks but neither attends to the self, its internal rhetoric (e.g., Craig; Nienkamp) and yearning nor listens (e.g., Ratcliffe). Now, more than ever, the “atomized individual” (Asen) seemingly stuck with and pitted against these assumed binaries is conspicuous. “[N]eoliberalism … [feeds] that selfish [fragmented and more objectified] version of the Cartesian subject ….” (Hattam 52). [7]

As I revisit hooks’s work now, all these threads come together. What hooks practices and models enriches and extends critical pedagogy because hooks chose to (1) make the critical (pedagogical) praxis not just mentative—a mental exercise about power, objectification, and silencing, (2) use narrative voices to take the critical praxis beyond the class into one’s home spaces and beyond, and (3) connect the critical praxis to her heart-wrenching lived experiences, lived losses, and tangible possibilities. [8] The generative nature of hooks’s interruption became clearer to me experientially when I named interruption as key to mindfulness in a class on peacemaking rhetoric.

From Home to Class: Engaged Pedagogy and Bearing Witness

As a scholar and educator, my workday is punctuated by trips from home to class. Every time I teach peacemaking rhetoric, I am gifted a unique experience, as unique as each member of the class’s learning community. I am often surprised by what and how much students gift each other as they embrace their learning journey separately and together.

The class as a learning community begins to form as we, together, address the question of violence. We grapple with what violence (beyond somatic harm) means. We grapple with

• how violence manifests and accrues force and momentum in the direct, cultural, and structural realms;

• how violence is justified, shapeshifts, and when/if normalized is hidden in plain sight; and

• how we can become complicit in seemingly random, automatic acts of violence. [9]

As a learning community, we grapple with violence and its quotidian grip before and to think about peace. We also think about relational assumptions and premises that we discern in acts of violence and acts of peacemaking (Kuttner “From Adversity”).

As varied as they are, in each iteration of my peacemaking rhetoric class, the interrelated concepts of objectification and dehumanization—iterations of disregard—pop up with regularity. And their connection to social justice work becomes clear to some, for “opposition to objectification [is] at the heart of feminism” (Nassbaum 251). We try to tease out (1) what objectification means, (2) how patterns of seeing/feeling/interacting/relating inform and are communicated by objectification (when/if we choose to listen), and (3) how harm and positive/negative regard are connected.

Depending on the projects undertaken in a given semester, we struggle together to understand (a) how objectification manifests as random, individual acts yet have a collective backing, (b) why objectification is clear sometimes, at least to some, yet repeatedly invisible; and (c) to what end objectification is normalized and routine.

One semester, students and I were reading about assumptions that inform relations resulting in communicating (dis)regard and cultivating dialogue to counter aggression (Kuttner, “Cultivating”). More specifically, we had been thinking about violence beyond somatic harm, objectification, and how Buber’s philosophical work on dialogue and I-Thou/I-It relational distinction clarifies the alternative and underscores the violation. [10]

Facing objectification cognitively and affectively isn’t easy. It’s hard to reckon that any one of us can be an objectifier; it’s hard to reckon that any one of us can be objectified. As one student said, “this objectification theme is an unwelcome visitor,” hoping to bring some levity to an intense class discussion. Indeed, like visitors, objectification and dehumanization as manifestations of disregard step in; change the scene; facilitate reflections on social interactions, implicit judgments, and expectations; and demand attention, if not put on us a claim to (re)g(u)ard.

We meditate on this together. We create lists to clarify what might lurk unseen, and we confront—even if momentarily—how/why we hold each other hostage as objects of desire and control (e.g., sexism, trafficking), objects of wrath and hatred (e.g., bullying, religious discrimination, xenophobia), objects of adoration and public consumption (e.g., eye candy), objects of derision (e.g., stock caricatures embodying racial or religious derision), and objects of labor (e.g., indentured labor, reproductive labor, hand and foot). [11] When engaged in “light(hearted)ly” and/or justified, objectification practices can become automatic, normalized, iterative dimensions of social interaction. This means that such acts of disregard have crept under the individual and collective radar.

The lists generated confront us with objectification as a “slippery” and “multiple, concept” (Nussbaum 251). On the board, we list many of objectification’s “seven distinct ways of behaving”—patterns classified by feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum (251). Holding space to discern pattens of regarding and behaving implied by objectification is emotionally tasking. As a learning community, we talk about the emotional toll of epistemic work, especially that of unlearning: epistemic work is more than just sifting through units of ideation, for each unit relates to shades of desire/aversion and socio-political contexts (e.g., schools we went to, people who (didn’t) challenge(d) what we learned). I identify interruption as necessary to mindful action. We meditate on how interruption of automatic, taken-for-granted actions can hold space for “novel distinctions about objects of… attention,” for dialogue with self/others, and for mindfulness, which in turn can chart pathways to peace(making). Together, we meditate on the nature, features, and potential of peace(making) especially when transformative action seems elusive or futile. Together, we think and write about our possible actionable steps and action spaces.

One student chose to write and share in her literacy narrative reflections on rereading violence, being objectified, and objectifying self/other. She recognized that she is objectified repeatedly as eye-candy and that she objectifies herself. She repeated a short phrase from Buber that condenses objectification: “A thing among things” (137), she pensively acknowledged. A statement like thunder! The class gasped, bearing witness.

Shock gifts us interruption; it interrupts presumed normalcy. An interruption becomes a mindful praxis. Interruptions are risky because we also interrupt a version of our self. And, interruption has the potential but not guaranteed promise of pedagogy of liberatory attention or regard and abounds with possibilities.

Mindful praxis needs to be dynamic and deep rooted, and we need to approach mindful praxis from varied vantage points until it resonates (beyond ideation) both affectively and bodily. In the coming section, I share two cultural models that helped mindfulness resonate more for me. Like hooks, me/we, too, need new literacies and rituals to enact mindful regard. So, I contrast the “atomized individual,” Cartesian legacy as manifest in this neoliberal moment with relational possibilities (e.g. Licona and Chávez), which hinge on a relational self. The relational self comprises a variety of components, including conceptions of and relations with self and (in)significant others (Chen, Boucher, and Kraus; Diab; Kuttner). A relational self is inconsistent with Cartesian subjectivity premised on dualities but consistent with mindfulness (e.g., Hattam; Kuttner).

Cross-Cultural Resonances and Relational Possibilities

Mindfulness is a cross-cultural phenomenon. As an Egyptian, Arab, Muslim woman, who lives and works in the United States, I cross (transnational) borders repeatedly. I straddle different cultural practices, I can at times see illuminating resonances across cultural manifestations of mindfulness. I want to share two that helped clarify how and why mindfulness matters. When I re-read Belonging, I was struck by the resonances between hooks’s teaching and without-thinking from the Buddhist tradition (Dōgen, 1200-1253, a thirteenth-century Zen teacher and Buddhist philosopher) and the concept of the reconciled self (nafs muṭma’innah) from the Arabic-Islamic tradition. Without-thinking and the reconciled self model reflective, mindful attention, or regard. Situating both concepts in their cultural traditions, both concepts model mindset mindfulness, illuminate rituals of (dis)regard, and have deepened my appreciation of mindfulness as a pedagogy of freedom. Both iterations address a dimension of mindfulness that I struggle with. I first explain each concept separately, then I bring them together.

As noted earlier, de-automization hinges on “voluntary sustained attention” and “novel distinctions about objects of… attention.” Dōgen, while exploring the nature of consciousness and suffering, provides an illuminating distinction. He distinguishes between three types of thought (Kasulis 71-7), which can be considered portals to the self, other, and the world: “thinking,” “not-thinking,” and “without-thinking.” Let me clarify the distinction using the example of automaticity as manifest in stereotypes: a stereotype exemplifies thinking because it (1) slices and dices, conceptualizes, and reifies assumed “essential” characteristics of people and things (i.e., they become objects of thought), and (2) doesn’t see the whole person and their immanent value. However, not-thinking (the negation of thinking) takes thinking as its starting point and object and rejects thinking. Better? Not really. Dōgen teaches: With not-thinking the stereotyped person is just that, not the stereotype, but who are they? We don’t know because the person is still hostage to the “not-the-stereotype;” not-thinking hovers still in the thinking orbit (74). Not-thinking seems better, but it retains meaning only in relation to thinking and to analysis: only “[w]hen we engage in thinking or not-thinking and objectify the experience of a past moment [/thought/judgment/emotion/relation] does that experience seem limited and capable of being fully analyzed” (76; emphasis added). Is analysis the way we relate and become present to and accepting of someone/something? In rejecting thinking, not-thinking neither transcends analysis nor offers new possibilities, which are crucial to counter dehumanizing autopilot.

Dōgen offers a third term, namely without-thinking. It breaks the grip of the essentialized reification (thinking) and its rejection (not-thinking). Without-thinking is open, reflective, nonpositional choice and process that “takes neither an affirming nor a negating attitude for its intentionality. Since it does not objectify ideas[/people/events], there is no object for it to either affirm or deny” (Orr 490). Instead, without-thinking empties the head and heart of the clamor of thinking and not-thinking and “merely accept[s] the presence of ideation” (Kasulis 72). This state of “emptiness” is akin to Mary Rose O’Reilley’s state of radical presence, openness, and acceptance. O’Reilley and Dōgen’s terms are akin to my understanding of the (disposition hospitable to the) reconciled self.

The reconciled self (i.e., content or calm self; nafs muṭma’innah) is referenced several times in al-Qur’ān (e.g., Al-Fajr 27). The features of this self and its juxtaposition with other selves help explain its role, nature, and potential moves toward it. The reconciled self is best understood in relation with God as well as its inherent features. Because of the focus of this essay only the second is addressed. The reconciled self is part of a discourse on understanding the nature and features of the self. This discourse distinguishes between three selves, or three of its dimensions. For simplification, these dimensions are referenced as three selves, namely the rational self or fiṭrah, desire-ego (amārah), and reproachful-ego (lūāmah). Fiṭrah, which Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240; considered one of if not the greatest Muslim philosophers) calls the rational soul, is the “site of the divine knowledge” and ‘‘the pristine nature within humans that leads to acknowledge the truth of Allah’s existence and to follow His Guidance’’ (Briki and Amara 841). The desire-ego, named by Ibn-Arabi as “animal soul,” is less regulated and more impulsive and “corresponds to the most superficial compartment of the self because of its highly suggestibility, so that it is potentially sensitive to good and evil” (841). Unlike the desire-ego, the reproachful-ego “represents the locus of self-regulatory operations (e.g., self-control);” it “detects the presence of evil thoughts, emotions, or behavior” and seeks “corrective adjustments” by “seek[ing…] repentance to God,” for example (841). [12]

The interaction of the three selves can align with health or sickness of the self. “Exhibiting a healthy functioning of the self, the serene/tranquility-ego indicates that the fitrah enlightens SH [Spiritual Heart] because of a complete domination of the reproachful ego over the desire-ego. In that case, people would be attracted to good and repulsed by evil” (842). The resultant reconciled self describes a recursive, volitional process (and not a state or destination) wherein one abstains from slumber and heedlessness (ghaflah), pursues wakefulness (yaqaẓah), invests in continual watchfulness as a practice: slumber and heedlessness and wakefulness are forces. Like wolves, they can be nourished, trained, and worked with. The reconciled self’s wakefulness makes it aware of the merits and excesses of the desire-ego and reproachful ego, so it is supported but neither taken over by the impulses of the desire-ego nor crushed by the excesses of the reproachful-ego. As the reconciled self balances the needs and functions of all dimensions of the self, it assumes a non-positional state of openness to the impulses and regulatory potential of the self. This balance is akin to Dōgen’s without-thinking which transcends thinking (e.g., demeaning one’s impulses and desire-ego or idolizing the reproachful-ego and denying one’s humanity) and not-thinking to attain balance and well-being.

The volitional work of the reconciled self is the Islamic iteration of mindfulness. Openness and humility characterize the watchful work of the reconciled self, which is rightly called jihād, or strife; it’s hard for the reconciled self to objectify or harm, and even if/when this happens the reconciled self seeks to re-align with the loving, compassionate, life-affirming, reverent, watchful work of openness and humility. This work starts within the self, but aligns well with the relational mindfulness demonstrated earlier by hooks and the relational literacies illustrated by Chavez and Licona, for as hooks writes, “we cannot truly be peacemakers if we have not found peace within” (Belonging 66).

Pulling together these threads, homecoming is a physical process and a spiritual one to find home. Indeed, as hooks writes in All About Love, this work is too crucial and cannot be done when we disown parts of the self, for how can we thrive in ceaseless fight with the self? Belonging demonstrates engaged mindfulness praxis, without-thinking operationalizes to us a way to work with and transcend dualities, and the reconciled self offers us a way to bring the work of mindfulness home. “Knowing how to be[long; emphasis added] solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone [without thinking], we can be with others without using them as a means of escape” (140). Knowing how to distinguish between thinking, not-thinking, and without-thinking is a long process that helps us resist fragmenting the self. “Shame breaks and weakens us, keeping us away from the wholeness healing offers. When we practice forgiveness, we let go of shame. Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy. It separates. Compassion and forgiveness reconnect us” (All About Love 217). With a reconciled self, we are mindfully present for ourselves and each other.

In total, this piece engages the dialectic of critique against (understanding what undercuts mindfulness and keeps us in a state of disregard) and critique for (what moves us closer to hooks’s invitation to enact “rituals of regard,” which is aligned with Dōgen’s without-thinking, and a reconciled self from the Islamic tradition). In doing so, I bring attention to a more expansive understanding of the self as continuously evolving in relation with its different forces and in relation with others. Regard is a crucial dimension of mindfulness, reflective interruptions, and transformative re-writing the word and world.

Notes

[1] Attending is the practice of non-judgmental, non-attached observation of components of experience, including thoughts, images, feelings, and attitudes, which lead to reaction. Undifferentiated, or unattended to, these components create a mental environment that is invisible, yet influential. Conversely, when differentiated, or recognized, alternative deliberate decisions become possible. This is why attending is considered mindfulness’s gateway.

[2] Dis/regard and homecoming to live/die are conspicuous throughlines in Belonging and in Buddhist teachings and philosophy and have an indelible impact that I cannot fully address here because of space limitations.

[3] The term “rhetorical velocity” centers the western canon of delivery and circulation and attends to how texts and by extension enthymemes move in the world. Though the term was used to describe patterns of circulation in digital environments, I extend it to other environments as it clarifies automaticity and mindfulness. Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss define the term as “conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed, and time, pertaining specifically to theorizing instances of strategic appropriation by a third party.”

[4] Aja Martinez, in her award-winning Counterstory, explains the critical race theory grounds and epistemic and methodological significance of counterstorying: “Counterstory is methodology that functions through methods that empower the minoritized through the formation of stories that disrupt the erasures embedded in standardized majoritarian methodologies” (3).

[5] The complexity is partly due to the use of regard to invoke both regard and disregard while loosening our attachment to judgment and closure.

[6] Duality and its relation to mindfulness is addressed later in this section and in the last section.

[7] For more on four iterations of neoliberalism and how neoliberal discourse brackets issues of social justice and the common good, see, for example, Asen.

[8] For more on hooks and critical pedagogy, see Davidson and Yancey.

[9] Galtung’s work scaffolds these explorations.

[10] Throughout the semester, students and I read about cultivating dialogue to counter aggression. In “Cultivating Dialogue,” Ron Kuttner introduces Buber’s I-It/I-Thou relational distinction, which is both informative and surprising to students even those introduced to the objectification of bodies as eye-candy, as one of my students reported.

[11] Organically generated class lists are consistent with the seven behavior patterns that Nussbaum identifies in “Objectification.” Despite reservations about the article, Nussbaum’s explanation of objectification is useful and accessible. Nussbaum explains that objectification is a “slippery,” “multiple, concept” with “at least seven distinct ways of behaving” (251): “The objectifier treats the “object” as:

1. “A tool of his or her purposes” (“instrumentality”); that is

2. “Owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.” (“ownership”);

3. “As interchangeable (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types” (“fungibility”); and

4. “As something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account” (“denial of subjectivity”).

Such an “object” is deemed lacking in:

5. “Autonomy and self-determination” (“denial of autonomy”);

6. “Agency, and perhaps also in activity” (“inertness”); and

7. “Boundary integrity, as something that it is permissible to [touch,] break up, smash, break into” (“violability”) (257).

Nussbaum’s explanation clarifies how/why objectification relates to violence even when violation isn’t immediately visible: across all relating pattens “[o]ne is treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being” (257).

[12] For more on the reconciled self, see chapter 5 of Shades of Ṣulḥ.

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