Mindfulness for Organizers: Recent Episodes
Ben
Mindfulness for Organizers is a project by Ben to integrate insights from mindfulness practices with political organizing for inclusive social change.
This guided mindfulness exercise reflects on Emily Nagoski's quote "emotions are tunnels". The exercise reminds you that your feelings fundamentally motivate you to do something that is adaptive. The practice reminds you that even difficult and challenging feelings embody your connection to others.
This guided mindfulness exercise imagines a hug, connection, and presence. Something that we all need during COVID-19 especially. It practices your access to compassion and kindness hoping that you can bring this feeling into your everyday life.
This guided mindfulness exercise focuses on shifting the time frame you think in terms of to help you see your present from a more positive and constructive lens. It shares a story of a time I went on a walk and remember to this day.
This guided mindfulness exercise imagines you going on a short walk through friendly woods. You have moments to reflect and gather yourself. You head back into the world feeling recharged.
This mindfulness exercise visualizes you facing discomfort head-on. It helps you practice differentiating how unpleasant an experience is from the stress of having to face the experience itself. It hopes to develop a mental skill you can bring into the moments of your life that you dread facing, but that you will be better for facing.
This meditation is inspired by internal family systems. It intends to connect you to how your body is connected to the hurt parts of you that influence you in this present moment. It intends to build your muscle of self-awareness and self-compassion for emotional healing and growth.
This simple meditation is based around one of my most poignant memories in community organizing. Conflict can pick us up in a mighty river of emotion — remembering that we want to go to the same place, that we want a shared community, the other party can help reduce the unproductive parts of conflict.
This meditation is intended for you to save for moments when you need to pause from thinking about food or eating. As someone who has recovered from an eating disorder, I know how the pressure to make a food decision in the moment can be utterly overwhelming — this meditation intends to give you the time you need to make a decision 'that you would make for a friend in your situation'.
This meditation focuses on accepting being imperfect and resisting social norms pushing you to be different. It uses reflection and limited visualization to help you feel grounded and whole in your own power.
Inspired by Buddhist death meditations, this guided meditation poses questions to help you reflect on the impermanent nature of our inter-connected lives? I have found that reflecting on death helps me live more fully and be more present during my days.
Trigger warning: contains discussions of death and dying; I would ask that someone who is at any remote risk of self-harm to not listen.
Mindful and compassionate body scan to ground you at this moment. I use some visualization (your body lighting up or you breathing into your body). Body scans have helped me grow and heal as a survivor of eating disorders. I made this meditation to incorporate more compassion and recognition of how we sense connection into this. I want to thank Dr. Heidi Walk, Thich Nhaht Hahn, and True Peace Toronto for their influence on my mindfulness practice.
This meditation uses guided visualization to imagine how our relationships and connections give us strength. You imagine being a tree in a forest of connection, providing mutual love and support. It intends to remind you that you are never alone, and those you love are never truly gone. Philosophically, this meditation connects to the idea of Inter-being as described by Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn.
This meditation introduces my Mindfulness for Organizers project. It reflects on the complicated relationship between Buddhism, Mindfulness, and appropriation. It invites the listenership to reach out if I say anything that you want to hold me accountable for. It introduces the question of how we can blend progressive organizing with mindfulness.