Learning Lab Consulting

Q and A with Equality Ohio

This last week I facilitated a retreat experience for the folks at Equality Ohio.  I loved this opportunity to help build sustainable activism for a cause that is meaningful to me.  At the end of our time, the group submitted questions.  Here are my responses.

How can we balance acceptance through mindfulness with the activist’s desire to change the world?  

This is a deep and ever present question for many.  I will do my best.  First of all, there is a rich history of intermingling, to mutual benefit, contemplative practices that boost awareness and acceptance with social justice work.  The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the work of Ghandi in India are both good examples of this rich history.

I think what acceptance did in those moments, and what it can do now, is to separate the act of doing from the result.

A mindful person is still an active and engaged, perhaps even more so because he or she is fully present in the moment.

There is also an awareness of the larger context outside of the self.  This is important.  It allows a person to see that they are not alone in the doing.  In addition, objectively, one person can’t take ownership of changing the world, but they can affect change in individual moments.  Acceptance provides a healthy mode of keeping us “right-sized.”  What I do matters, and its not the only thing that matters would be one way to think about this dichotomy.

What can we do as a team to support ritual and practice in our work as activists?  What other resources are available for this?  

Going back to a historical perspective, there are many good models for how ritual and practice can be paired with community work, the Civil Rights Movement being one.  In modern day, the Movement Strategy Center (here is a link to their blog, too) has some really interesting resources that might be worth checking out.  I recommend reading Love With Power: Practicing Transformation for Social Justice and Out of the Spiritual Closet: Organizers Transforming the Practice of Social Justice.

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