The Mindful Journey: Can Mindfulness be activism?
In this publication, my collaborator and I tend to focus on reviews and flash non-fiction. We share stories and lessons from our lives. That is why I started this series on what I like to call my Mindful Journey. Meditation and mindfulness are very much about self-care which is a practice I file away in my ‘cool’ category. Writing has pushed me to think deeper about this practice. To think about Mindfulness beyond it being a good thing to do.
I attended this year’s Democracy Xchange conference, a two-day conference committed to furthering the discussion of democracy. On the second day of the conference, I attended a panel on the Spiritual Commons. The panel was facilitated by an ethics expert and consisted of a Muslim legal scholar, Anglican minister, the director of a mindfulness organization, and a professor from a Luthern University.
There was a lively discussion on religion in the public sphere, one I wished could’ve been a little longer. Much stood out, I left thinking about how religions and activism work together. It’s not a subject I’m unfamiliar with. Many, many years ago, I studied religion and social justice. This was mostly in the context of large scale political movements.
Mindfulness and the work being done in that space is on the small scale. It is no less powerful than larger-scale movements…
