Category Archives: Contemplative Practices

A Reflection of My Reflection

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A Reflection of My Reflection

These past ten weeks have been quite fruitful and interesting as we touch on the different contents of the class.  I found the class to be interesting even before I registered for it. I was curious to learn and understand how our perception of death affects our society and our surrounding. In my culture death is scared and a taboo and its not a common topic that is touched on especially among young people. The class gave me the courage to participate and listen to the different discussions and perspectives about death and how it connects to our societies and cultures.

My group and action project were the highlight of the class. I was able to partner with the most amazing and hardworking people all quarter. The group action project we choose to participate in was with WASHPIRG, and we partnered with them on their “Beyond Plastic” campaign. Our project was focus on collaborating with greater community to reduce plastic waste, educate our peers on the devastating effects of plastic on the environment, and analyzing and evaluating the course content of the class to the real time human activities and experiences. WASHPIRG is one of the first independent activist organizations created by UW student back in 1976 to address and advocate for issues affecting students in higher education such as college affordability, environmental safety etc. One of the highlights of our project with WASHPIRG was our neighborhood clean-ups. We helped clean the U-district area to help reduce to plastic waste in the area. We were inspired by the Albatross documentary to execute our clean-up project with a cause to protect vulnerable species from plastic waste created by human activity, and to help do our part in protecting the ecosystem. Through our observation of plastic waste on campus, we were reminded of the negative impact of humans on the environment and beautiful living beings such as The Albatross movie.

Additionally, the contemplative practices were super helpful for me in the class. The quarter was very intense and the practices really helped in easing the tension a little bit. As a group we thought the contemplative practices will further help us to bond even more if we incorporated them in our group project routine. One of our group members was very helpful in leading the contemplative practices by reading out load poems and reflecting on how we were feeling. The poem that resonated to us the most was the one we shared with the class on our group presentation: “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” by Matthew Olzmann. All in all I had a great learning experience in the class and will definitely relate the contents of the class as I continue to grow and live my life.

Course Synthesis: Leaning Into Fear

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I almost dropped this course a few times. Especially towards the beginning, it was deeply uncomfortable for me to spend such long periods of time thinking about death, dying, and environmental destruction. I was often overwhelmed by feelings of impending doom and sorrow.

And this was how I initially felt about my action project as well. Although I had worked somewhat with the Animal Rights Initiative before, the extensive research we were tasked with opened my eyes to the sheer scale of animal suffering on this planet. It was already painful for me to think about the plights of suffering humans. And, by intentionally expanding my circle of empathy to the roughly 60 billion land animals raised in factory farms each year, that pain greatly increased. It was depressing and infuriating to spend so much time doing research on such mass amounts of suffering. I became angry and disillusioned with the way in which society tolerated these mass amounts of violence. As author Timothy Pachirat writes in “Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse,” an interview with Avi Solomon, the globally affluent live in a system that requires the “active complicity in forms of exploitation and violence.”

However, I soon found calm in the contemplative practices. In these, I was purposefully leaning into the fear I felt instead of shying away from it. I learned to accept and embrace my anxiety, which in turn, calmed me. I experienced similar feelings of catharsis in the advocacy involved in my action project. Even though the problem of industrialized animal agriculture is unfathomably large, it felt good to have a part in helping address it, especially because I was working in a team of others who cared. Throughout the course, those two coping strategies became my lifeline while wading through difficult course content and dealing with death in my own life.

This image is a draft of the Animal Rights Initiative logo, which depicts a group of volunteers passing out literature on the animal rights and welfare movements. The underlaid image of the volunteers brings me so much joy because I think it encapsulates the feeling I had working with my group in the action project. It is a beautiful feeling to work on a team of passionate people, even against a seemingly insurmountable problem.

Final Reflection of This Journey!

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What I learned during the quarter is more of the details of the Anthropocene and the aspects of death as a big concept to politics, society, and the future. I have learned more about the idea of death and realized how society utilizes death and immorality as a personal gain and a political gain. For example, the food and the laws on death and immortality projects. The one that I learned the most is how the concept of ecology and the earth is dying due to the innovations of humans. How everything we do has a feedback loop of systems. And the hardest lesson from this class that I learned is to accept our death and the earth is dying. Beforehand, I always thought death and the end of everything shrugged off negative things as “oh, we are changing for the better.” But that whole concept was not the truth, and I faced it. Besides cultural differences or religious differences, we are dying, and the earth is dying. As for the project itself, I learned that having your trauma can overshadow the more considerable collective trauma but adversely affects individuals. Therefore, many conflicts within our personal lives can intertwine with more significant aspects with people like climate change or covid.

What I gave in my action projects was my experience with trauma and relating it to collective trauma and the aspects of factors that can connect to a collective trauma like racial injustice and personal hardships related to trauma. As for the class, I will be honest and say that I wish I gave frank discussions, but the topic of death in this class hits home to me because I lost someone this year, so in a way, it was terrible timing. But I tried my best to participate in the zoom chat discussions on my thoughts and experiences. 

How does this whole experience relate to ecology, death, and the Anthropocene? The class helped me connect with my death and others, the realization of the immortality project discussions. Those discussions made my peace with death instead of fearing the concept and the afterlife due to religious constraints.

I can take away from this class because I accepted Anthropocene and death. It was a challenging course for me with the readings and the discussion, but I realize this was a great class to learn from and change perspectives.

The Interconnectedness of Political Ecology: Utopia, Terror Management Theory, and Being Deeper in the Moment

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In working on the action projects, it was a curious challenge and quite an interesting experience trying to come up with an ideal utopia. We spent so much time brainstorming and discussing various ideas—which often clashed with each other. Eventually, we choose to make our own utopian concepts. That way, we could better establish simpler utopias, that later would become more complex through the synthesis of our utopias. My utopia, in particular, inspired me to delve deeper into the idea that we, as a society, should have a greater emphasis on the arts and culture rather than economic gain. How we could also change our relation to the planet through the Half-Earth Project, making half the Earth protected in the form of national parks and protected regions, including the sea. And through the lens of political ecology, we can see how our interrelation with the Earth’s systems echos with similarity to how we interact in society. Whereby our capitalist desires are destroying the planet, separating what is useful and not, similar to how we treat people who do not partake in the capitalist system, labeling them as poor, crazy, or not worth our care. 

In thinking back about this class, I had skimmed over a key aspect of the class, “Death.” I had learned about terror management theory, never imagining that our conscious and unconscious fear of death could affect every facet of our lives. How it fuels capitalism and nationalism, or creates desires for literal and symbolic immortality. Personally, I don’t think terror management theory changes my personal outlook of the world that much, but I do believe that it changes my political perspective, and how I view the interactions and decisions of the people I hope to one day win over. 

Looking back to my first blog post, I had desired to have a better understanding of why the issues of the Anthropocene were important and worth my attention. And honestly, I didn’t know if this class would be able to answer that desire. But it was—through a process I was initially quite resistant to: the contemplative practice. After a few of these practices, I began to realize that living in the moment is one thing, but striving to live further and deeper into the moment is another. They showed me how to care for all the Earth’s systems being affected by the Anthropocene, beyond just climate change. 

https://media.itsnicethat.com/images/nat_geo_double_cover.width-1440_SKNGANTs5lcnrGZm.jpg

The Crisis of Complacency

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  I find the plethora of plastics in our surrounding environment ironic. We as humans crave significance, we want people to remember who we were and what we did. This is how we cope with fear and death. Yet, many people choose to disregard the current climate crisis and the buildup of waste that surrounds us. Throughout this course, I have been reflecting on the impact I hope to have on the world. This course has taught me that I play a vital role in the earth system, and my action project allowed me to explore what this role means. I believe that recognizing and accepting the important role we possess as humans in The Anthropocene is key to mitigating the potentially horrific impacts of climate change.

The work of my Action Project allowed me to feel a deeper connection to the earth. For our Action Project, my group worked with WASHPIRG and organized various plastic cleanups around campus. To connect more deeply to the earth, my group chose to engage in a contemplative practice and read a poem prior to our cleanups. This practice allowed me to bring myself back to the present moment and reflect on the gratitude I have for the earth and my group mates. I was able to stop and appreciate the feeling of sunshine on my face and grass beneath my feet. As I sat with my group mates and the earth, one specific quote from the poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now” struck a chord. It states, “it must seem like we sought to leave you nothing but benzene, mercury, the stomachs of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.” I want to leave our future generation with the beautiful earth I have gotten to experience, not a mess they must clean up. 

Through the work of my Action Project, I discovered how easy it is to reconnect with nature. This reconnection greatly impacted my perspective on the potential impact we as humans can have on the earth. We can leave future generations with a better earth, but we must first accept the important role we hold as humans living in The Anthropocene. 

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/december/humans-are-causing-life-on-earth-to-vanish.html
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/08/31/commentary/world-commentary/humans-will-remembered-mess/

Power-With: Citizenship in the Anthropocene

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The most impactful theme for me this quarter has been practicing new ways of thinking. Engaging with both the action project and course material, contemplative practices led me to a more relational point of view, which helped me to manage feelings of frustration or stagnation. When I perceive disfunction, my response is more effective when I can let go of the impulse to “overcome” and instead consider how I want to relate to a challenge. Thinking in systems, I can develop a stronger sense of identity as a citizen to find inspiration rather than depletion in the face of the Anthropocene.

My group’s project was focused on the concept of collective climate trauma. In reviewing the literature on the topic, I noticed a consensus among the authors on the importance of reflective witnessing in one form or another. Rather than overcoming or moving beyond the trauma, authors emphasized practices designed to honor and reflect upon it- thereby opening space for new collective stories in relation to the traumatizing phenomena. This reminded me of an argument presented in The Worm at the Core ­­– human beings cannot overcome the terror of death, so should instead remain mindful of how it impacts our lives (221). In both cases, as with my own experience in the class, there is a chance for renewed energy through a relational reframing.

In Active Hope, Macy and Johnstone parallel this with their distinction between “power-over” and “power-with” (106-108). While the exercise of “power-over” is a zero-sum resource game, “power-with” is a model wherein power is a practice, generated by action in relationships. Instinctively, I can see this “power-with” when I imagine an ecosystem, but it has been harder to conceive of in political systems. As an individual, grief and frustration regarding the Anthropocene deplete me, and “overcoming” the emotions, much less the global phenomenon, feels impossible.

With practice, I can lean into a “power-with” identity, working with the emotions and as a citizen – (a node in a human-system response) to guide my orientation to anthropogenic crisis. In this framing, a citizen mindset provides an opportunity to respond to Death and the Anthropocene from a place of diffuse and renewable strength. I look forward to a “power-with” relationship between the human and natural world, and the reciprocal healing that will facilitate. I am grateful for the tools this course has provided to support that vision.

Image source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2020/01/22/life-as-an-emergent-property-and-rocks/

Contemplative Practice ; A Deeper Thinking

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These contemplative practices we have been engaging in this quarter has increased my self-awareness. I have mostly become more aware of my body positions throughout these and, will perform tasks such as unclenching my jaw or fixing my posture. The connection of the poems to what we discussed that day also bring a deeper connection and I feel like it opens my mind to analyze these readings. I see these practices as tethering course materials with my own life in these moments of deeper thinking. This quarter has been a particular rough one with a lot of health complications that have really borne a weight on my performance. My life, like everyone else’s is chaotic and busy so the few moments of thought in these contemplative practices have opened this opportunity for breath and reflection. Which in my experience has led me to refocus on this class content with an open mind not so full of distractions. The material we have read in this class is heavy and I have experienced these practices helps develop capacity and increase mindfulness for these types of discussions.

One reading particularly that stood out to me and I seemed to reflect during contemplative practices was  Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism? – Ernest Becker Foundation. Going back to that TMT that we learned about in The Worm at The Core, this reading examines how capitalism could be at the heart of our fears of death. This idea that being reminded of death increases our part in contributing to our capitalist society helped me see my part. When reflecting on the way my personal fear of death plays a part in contributing to those in power and big corporations the practices this reading helped me connect my personal behaviors with it. I connect my own purchase behaviors, jobs, and activities that I perform to this idea and see that the reasoning behind why I work or why I shop immensely is to cope or pass time with the fear of death in my subconscious.

On the ecology level, my impact on the earth and a lot of the readings in class have intertwined with the contemplative practices around this subject. The article Häagen-Dazs and Tide are turning to reusable packaging to fight plastic waste – Vox, gave me hope as well as a increasing awareness of the plastic products I use. The state our world is in, is extremely alarming to me and hearing about progress and companies that contribute to this becoming more sustainable, pushes me to increase sustainability in my life. I am persistently pondering how to change my actions to make as little impact on the earth with each new information I learn, and these thoughts have emerged extensively throughout these contemplative practices.

See the source image

Source: Deep thinking man – Zodiac Fire

A Different Method to Practice Introspection

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As someone who has always found contemplative practice to be something that doesn’t suit me, I still have yet to really take anything beneficial away from them.  I have always been an introspective person who does my deepest thinking when listening to music, hiking, or cooking so trying to force myself to be meditate generally has the opposite effect and I end up feeling less introspective and self-aware.

Due to this it is challenging to connect course content to what I am getting from the contemplative practice since I really don’t feel there is a huge benefit for me personally.  I think this is just because I’m a generally impatient person who needs a lot of stimuli to think clearly and contemplate the deeper meaning of things.  While all live music experiences give me the room to be more introspective, there is nothing that matches when I am seeing Phish.  The way they create space and improvise for long periods makes getting into a meditative state easy for me.  Even during really intense or funky jams everything slows down and I can feel every second while freely associating and working through challenging topics.

What has been occurring to me throughout the quarter is how many of their songs are about death which is why it is so relevant.  The lyrics in their songs that deal with death are all whimsical to the point of being cheesy about something people consider to be a dark subject.  Reading the chapter in Pollan’s “How To Change Your Mind” entitled Trip Treatment explaining how they used psychedelics to assist people who were dying of cancer with managing the anxiety and stress of their impending death really drove it home for me.  The idea of escaping from the ‘prison of self’ and egolessness really makes me think of the lyrics to ‘Ruby Waves.’

While I know a lot of people have a challenging time connecting with their music it has helped me immensely and always helps me ground myself so if you keep an open mind, listen to the lyrics and have an extra 30 minutes you can try and work through different ways of dealing with the probability of civilization irreversibly changing in the near future due to climate collapse and over consumption.

Getting in the Moment of the Anthropocene

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The contemplative practice: the unified act of a small group of students closing their eyes to reflect on the hard subjects of the Anthropocene. These practices are supposed to be meditative, accessing different wavelengths of the brain. For the most part, all my early experiences with them have been lackluster in terms of how they affected me inwardly. I saw them more as a respite from my long commute and my active, sometimes anxious mind. The subject matters of this class never really hit me emotionally, that is, I don’t think I was ever shaken to the core. Even the hard subjects, like from the film Albatross, were simply emotions for me to experience. I would acknowledge them, my emotions, but I would move past them, so to speak. I wouldn’t let them bring me down. I’m an optimistic person, always have been. I think it’s just in my personality. I live by the moment. I can’t think of the what-ifs like a terrorist getting ahold of nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan or a disruption from Saudi Arabia’s oil supply causing “a social earthquake,” as Thomas Homer-Dixon put it. 

My view of life is sort of a flexible one. Often, my days look pretty much the same, but given the chance, I will change with the wind. I, for example, never thought I would see myself maintaining my relative sanity commuting so many hours each day. I managed it by living in the moment, and eventually, about halfway through the quarter, I took that philosophy of living in the moment to the contemplative practice. I finally allowed myself to relax, instead of rest. My posture was usually sluggish, slouching slightly. During one of the practices, I decided to sit up straight, and strangely more important, I kept my feet flat on the ground. I don’t know why, maybe it makes me closer to the Earth, but there is something about keeping my feet flat on the ground that allowed me to be more in a meditative state. Through this contemplative practice and others, I began to realize that living in the moment is one thing, but striving to live further and deeper into the moment is another. I am living in the Anthropocene—and I am learning to die in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a moment in time that I am learning to live in, every second of it.

https://movementmonthly.com/2015/05/01/keep-your-feet-on-the-ground-the-key-to-staying-vertical/

Sapience and contemplation

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The contemplative practices are reflective of the general themes of the class. Whereas the class is interdisciplinary, the contemplative practices integrate meditation, introspection, literary analysis, and group discussion. This introspective behavior is uniquely human, allowing us to disconnect ourselves from the moment and consider any number of possibilities. As discussed in the book The Worm at the Core, human evolution has led to two particular relevant capacities, a high degree of self-awareness and the ability to think in terms of the past, present, and future. The result of such is to integrate both the past and potential futures into our perspective while making decisions and analyzing ourselves and the world around us.

Even when the direction and focus of contemplative practice itself is fairly irrelevant, certain aspects are highly relevant to the overarching themes of the class. As was further discussed in The Worm at the Core, it is the aforementioned capacity to think about in term of the past, present, and future is what leads to the understanding that we will inevitably die. This awareness is uniquely human is the sense that it is present even in the absence of an immediate threat and has a pervasive influence on our attitudes and behavior. The introspective element which enables such is present in the contemplative practices and allows us an opportunity to examine how death influences our own perspectives and behavior.

It has been stated that some others are reaping some benefit from the contemplative practices, but in my experience they have contributed less than nothing, actively devaluing my time spent in a class I paid to attend. This is congruent with my previous experiences with meditation, but contrary to my experiences with introspection. Whereas the latter allows me to form a better understanding of my own perspectives and how my cognition may be being influenced, the former has always struck me as an egregious waste of time without the potential for any sort of benefit to be derived from its practice. The introspection within the contemplative practices tends towards such without tangible benefit, benefiting me neither within or without the class. Were the sessions to be more focused on furthering our understanding of the class topics, I would be relatively contented. As a result of the aforementioned issues, combined with how limited my time has been this quarter, I am left with naught but frustration following the contemplative practices.

References:
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. A. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life.

Saint Jerome Writing by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio