I’ve come to realize these past several months that I don’t really understand what internalization is–I’ve always thought of it as a means of assimilating our realities into our being, but I had never understood what that process looks like until this class. Contemplation and our contemplative practices have given me merely a glimpse into how this process can be. Learning for me has always been a surface level of information absorption in which I would take in information and memorized via rote practicing until I had “understood” it. However, I never bothered to figure out the “why” or “how” something was the way it was. Through contemplation, I was able to engage with the material on a deeper level, mobilizing my emotions and even my physical body to also learn.

One of the most impactful contemplative practices that we had done was one in which Karen walked us through taking different perspectives:

1. One that believes that the world is progressively getting worse, and that our future is bleak–a sort of pessimistic worldview.
2. One that believes that the world is great and is healing–a more optimistic outlook.
3. Finally, one that is indifferent to the world, and takes everything as it is–acceptance.

In each of these practices, it was notably hard to focus as these perspectives are particularly disparate. Each one was accompanied with its own set of emotions and physical reactions. When we were instructed to take on the first perspective, I had felt a lot more tense than before, and my mind started to become inundated with worrisome thoughts. In contrast, the second perspective galvanized me, and made me feel a rush of gratitude and a desire to feel active.

I began to apply this thinking to Active Hope and I found that the disagreements that I had with the seemingly pointless steps to achieve progress had converted to curiosity through these practices. Our discussions have become less abstract for me, and contemplation has allowed me to feel what people were saying and what I was seeing on a very deep, personal level.

While these practices have been insightful, I do have my reservations about them. For a good amount of them, I found myself lost in my own mind and unable to really grapple with what Karen was saying. Nevertheless, these practices have been enriching, and I hope to continue exploring these practices.

Often when participating in our class’s contemplative practices, I find myself in a state of dissonance. For me participating in guided contemplative practices feels alienating. Through reflection and research concerning contemplative practices, I sought to understand why contemplative exercises feel so foreign and distasteful to me. In organizing my research and personal opinions concerning contemplative practices in academia, I will first break down how contemplative practices are a form of cultural appropriation and exploitation and then parse through the nuances in my perspective on contemplative practices in education. 

Contemplative practices in western education systems are forms of cultural appropriation of Asian religion, culture, and spirituality from Buddhist and Hindu philosophies (Morgan, 2015). However, these contemplative practices in the west have very little in common with these longstanding religious, spiritual, and cultural practices. Rather, they are an imitation that redesigns and capitalizes upon these concepts for “use in Western settings with individuals who may have little interest in Buddhist belief systems or traditions.” (Baer & Huss, 2008, p.123). Contemplative practices, as they are used in western educational systems, simply “reflect the cultural appropriation in the form of exploitation since the benefits to the appropriators are put above the harms caused to the community from whom the knowledge is taken [from]”  (Lalonde, 2018).  And while it may be the case that certain practices “may appear to be self-evidently good and their underlying assumptions obviously true (Brown, 2019)”, I argue that these assumptions are not necessarily inherently good or true, as they are the result of cultural conditioning and conflicts with worldviews that are not normed for white communities, and therefore fail to be true or good from specifically for people of color (Black, 2017). Moreover, when analyzing what contemplative practices are adopted by western societies, it is worth noting that western society has systematically chosen only to practice contemplation in a method that aligns with their worldview. Contemplative practices have existed in BIPOC communities for centuries, “but the ideology of white supremacy has rendered them inferior to European knowledge systems” (Mehta & Talwar, 2022). Thus, in perpetuating contemplative practices that appropriate Asian culture in a way that caters to the western worldview, contemplative practices fail to be truly contemplative and ultimately are simply perpetuating a thinly veiled western worldview.  

Despite my distaste for contemplative practices in academia and dissonance when attempting to participate in these practices, I believe that the idea of incorporating mindfulness into academia is not inherently wrong or bad. I believe that if mindfulness or contemplation is introduced into a classroom setting, individuals should be allowed to choose their own form of mindfulness or reflection and should not be guided through the experience. Cultural imperialism in education, specifically when education attempts to parse through the harm that colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation have had on the degradation of the planet, has no place being part of the discussion or given any weight.

References: 

Mehta, Naisargi (Ness) and Talwar, Gitika (2022) “Recognizing Roots and Not Just Leaves: The Use of Integrative Mindfulness in Education, Research, and Practice,” Psychology from the Margins: Vol. 4, Article 6. 

Morgan, Patricia. (2015). A Brief History of the Current Reemergence of Contemplative Education. Journal of Transformative Education. 13. 197-218. 10.1177/1541344614564875.

Brown, Candy  Gunther. “Why I Do Not Use Contemplative Pedagogy in the Public University Classroom.” Why I Do Not Use Contemplative Pedagogy in the Public University Classroom | Religious Studies News, 18 June 2019, https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/contemplative-pedagogy/why-i-do-not-use-contemplative-pedagogy-public-university-classroom.

People are busy. Whether through work, hobbies, or time at home, people feel a duty to be doing. Behind this lies a capitalist dogma, prescribing ultimate value to productivity. This same system emphasizes innovation on the basis of increasing this productivity, forming a feedback loop in which tasks are made more efficient, opening up time for new preoccupations. It is in this state of perpetual doing that we forget that we do not have to do. We find ourselves in our free time scrolling perpetually, or gazing at our TVs. We have grown so far from inactivity that it has become a space of unfamiliarity to a point of discomfort. It is through the deliberate overcoming of this discomfort provided by contemplative practices that allows for a moment of reconciliation with a piece of yourself long left ignored.

The Washington Post, Even by ourselves, we avoid ourselves

Just as going on a run burns your lungs and legs, so too can a contemplative practice bring forth anxieties and pains lingering in the mind. Through the choice to accept such hardships, resilience and strength are built in these areas. It is not the sense of accomplishment or clarity felt after these exercises that underline their purpose. There is no single run that will make you marathon-ready, nor is there a single contemplative practice that will resolve an anxiety, but through genuine, consistent effort, the potential for such is unlocked. While certainly far from being in contemplative “shape”, the practices in class have catalyzed conversations with myself I had long known needed to be had, but avoided through constant preoccupation. There are times where I emerge from these conversations deeply relaxed, and others when my discomfort is heightened, yet in both cases there comes a sense of gratification as a result of acknowledgement. This acknowledgment can be in regards to both positive feelings and the distressing, both equally as insightful into my own mind.

The interaction between discomfort and self-assigned preoccupation mirrors my experience with death anxiety. To force myself to think about my own death such as this class has done, I have come to notice a subconscious force to change my topic of thought. Just as with the self-reflection of contemplative practices, by demanding myself to overcome the discomfort, I open a space for genuine acknowledgement. These experiences have come to teach me the power of diversion, but the even more valuable power of overcoming diversions to the uncomfortable.

Some of my most robust contemplative practices occur outside the fold of the ordinary, particularly through mediums of art.

After watching Journey of the Universe, I felt an idea crop up linking to a line in Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” (We saw to the edge of all there is—/so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back) that sat at the borders of my mind like a thread I couldn’t grab hold of. So I started painting. The painting I created features a disembodied person with stark outlines, with color fading beyond the shape of a person. The same is true for Earth, and both Earth and the person bleed into deep black, flecked with stars: the Universe. This painting is a reflection of my own feeling of expanse, which I was the emotion/feeling I named after watching Journey of the Universe.

To me, it blurs the lines of distinction between “us” and “the universe,” but I didn’t set out to portray that meaning when I picked up my paint brush. I had to excavate my own feelings about both the film and the poem through a different medium before I could interpret what this feeling of “expanse” meant.

While not facilitated during our class time, this contemplative practice helped identify some of the thematic content I was struggling to contend with. I believe the distinction between humans, non-humans, the Earth, and the universe, is overstated; if we are all made of stardust, the distinctions between “us” and an “other” (regardless of what form that might take) become irrelevant. The contention between the boundaries our societies impose and my understanding of internal exapnsiveness has caused a great deal of internal conflict for me, which I experience through anxiety or forms of grief.

However, accessing the expanse within myself has offered me inroads to coping with my own fears around worsening global conditions and finding generative perspectives; knowing that the opportunities for know knowledge are so vast that it is impossible to capture them all has redirected where I pour my energy. If our existing lines of inquiry have gotten us this far with various disastrous results, I believe it’s time to open up a new avenue of knowledge—to sacrifice some things we hold as fact—to explore ways of being and existing that were either lost, destroyed, or entirely undiscovered.

Contemplative practices gave me an opportunity to practice gratefulness and look at things from a new perspective. There were days when I struggled to sit quietly to participate in the practice. Those days often occurred when my back hurt and I was in physical pain. However, this struggle to concentrate made me aware that when we are in pain it becomes difficult to look past that pain to practice gratefulness or see new perspectives. Specifically, as people are suffering from flooding and heat waves to civil unrest, how can we focus on anything past that pain? I’m still struggling to answer that question myself.

Many contemplative practices allowed me the opportunity to practice gratefulness. During the practices, we often talk about putting our mind and body in the present. On October 21^st, when it rained for the first time after a dry and smoky summer, I was so happy I felt like crying. The rain on my skin never felt so refreshing, and I felt silly smiling to myself as I walked through the rain to my class. Any other quarter I would have walked to class as fast as I could to avoid the rain. But because I had a chance to practice being in the present, in that moment, I had a chance to appreciate the rain.

Not only have the practices helped me habituate gratefulness, but they have helped me see things from new perspectives. During the practice where we took on three different perspectives where the world was good, where the world was bad, and where the world is as it is, I found myself not quite fitting into any of those three perspectives. However, when we watched the movie Journey of the Universe, I reflected on that practice again and concluded that “The universe is definitely half full.” This perspective derives from the thought experiment of “Is the cup half empty or half full?” Probably, the cup and the universe are both half empty and half full, but I will choose to look at its fullness rather than its emptiness. Rain after a smoky summer, the death of stars to create all the heavy elements, and this life, are all definitely a gift. To help answer my previous question of how to look beyond the pain in our lives, I think part of that answer is seeing the good despite the bad.

Louise Glück