Full Description
The contributors to this volume - educators, student affairs practitioners, and higher education staff - heartfully share a broad range of contemplative practices and acts of resistance used within the confines of shattered systems and institutions for themselves, their colleagues, and their students. The narratives in this volume broadly imagine, inspire, recount, and guide readers toward the fullness of their humanity and wholeness within institutions of higher education. At the same time, these accounts navigate the operational realities of daunting demands on the mind, body, and spirit, the growing turbulence of working on higher education campuses across the country, and a sense of urgency toward collective life affirmation within modern higher education institutions. Each chapter features critical framing of a concept, personal stories of this concept in action, and descriptions of contemplative practices for readers to use in their own contexts. Together, chapter authors demonstrate what it means to be a contemplative practitioner attentive to issues of power, racism, and marginalization in higher education today. With a deep breath and mindful awareness, this book invites faculty and staff at colleges and universities on a transformational journey with the contributors toward fullness in pursuit of becoming whole and inspiring change.
Contents
1. Introduction: Contemplative Practice is an Act of Resistance Part 1: Ever Present and Interconnected: Symphonic Journeys, Rooted Practices 2. Teaching Best What You Most Want to Learn: The Way of the Crows 3. Unsettling the Colonial Shadows of Contemplative Practice 4. Cajitas as My Contemplative Practice 5. Contemplative Practices through a Black Feminist Lens: Badassery, For Real Love and Fellowship 6. Deepening Belonging: A Contemplative Practice of Relational Flourishing 7. Reflections Beyond Fragmentation: A Fractal Reconfiguration Part 2: Conjuring Transformation: We Who—Know—Know 8. Revealing Healing, Wholeness, and Power: Sitting Zazen 9. From Body Oppression to Body Sovereignty Through Contact Improvisation 10. From Practice to Purpose: Contemplative Dance as a Method for Moving through Resistance 11. Creative Envisioning: A Contemplative Practice that Promotes Healing, Personal Growth, and Professional Development 12. On being (a) contemplative in higher education: 'moving' through familiar and unfamiliar spaces 13. Conjuring Transformation: The Magic is in the Process Part 3: Pause 14. Cool Like Jazz: A Loving Dialogue on the Multiplicity of Black Manhood Part 4: Rhizomatic Awakenings, New Plateaus: Rhizomes, Connection, Ruptures, and Lines of Flight David W. Robinson-Morris 15. Showing up Audacious and Bad Ass from the Edges & On the Margins Like My Ancestors Phyllis M. Jeffers-Coly 16. Our Skins are Membranes, Not Walls: A Multiracial Feminist Conversation 17. Dancing Barefoot in the University: From Burnout to Radical Presence 18. Alongside Aaron 19. My Rhizomatic Awakening Part 5: Liberatory Relationality: Cultivating Collective Compassion 20. Cultivating Belonging: Compassionate Practice and Pedagogy 21. Beloved Community as Practice: Grounding Exercises, Care Teams, and Redefining Success 22. Why am I talking? Disrupting Dominant Narratives in Higher Education 23. Contemplative Emergence: How My Contemplative Practices Have Supported Transformative Change in a Higher Education Space 24. Enacting an Indigenous Decolonial Contemplative Mentorship in Higher Education: Meditations on the Legacy of Plenty Fox 25. Contemplative Resistance Amidst the Fires of Global Suffering 26. Afterword: A Ritual for Resisting
