Embodying social and environmental justice learning through somatic and mindfulness practices
Sapana Doshi and Tracey Osborne
The central pedagogical theme we are exploring in this chapter is how awareness-based mind–body practices can support transformative education that is aligned with environmental and social justice. The chapter reflects on our experience with two related modalities of mind–body practice in the classroom – somatics and mindfulness – aimed at bringing together healing and transformation at the level of the individual with justice-oriented shifts in consciousness and action in the collective. Somatic and mindfulness practices share a commitment to embodiment as defined as the awareness of sensations, emotions, habits, and other experiences of the body and the beliefs that inform them. Somatics and mindfulness practitioners and teachers posit that awareness of embodied experience is a necessary prerequisite for making choices, rather than operating out of unconscious reaction in relation to self and others. As Prentis Hemphill has noted, “When we become disembodied or disconnected from our own feelings and sensations, it’s easy to become habituated to practices we don’t believe in or value.”
Embodied practices can create less alienating learning environments and allow for deeper connections between classroom members. We argue that uniting mind and body through these practices helps to create an inclusive relational field in the classroom for new kinds of co-learning. When students are open to learning not just from their heads but from their bodies, they are better able to listen and engage with each other as well as the instructor across social location and difference. Their nervous systems become more regulated and they are able to sense their connection to community and the environments they inhabit. By engaging their whole beings, classroom members are better able to understand the complexity and intersectional nature of social and environmental justice issues, thereby empowering them to act.
This chapter reflects on our experiences with mind–body practices to unleash the potential of learning in the classroom in order to foster the conditions for making change in the world. Our work is inspired by the tradition of radical, critical pedagogy that is grounded in and relevant to the lived experience of students and the creation of communities of belonging, practice, and just change (hooks, 1994; Freire and Macedo, 2018).
OUR JOURNEY TOWARD EMBODYING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE PEDAGOGY
We know from our own experiences and those of our students that higher education is often profoundly alienating. Issues of social and environmental injustice are often conveyed in narrow, disciplinary and siloed ways. Particularly in the natural but also social sciences, academics are expected to follow positivist frameworks marked by objectivity, ignoring personal experiences and social power relations. Furthermore, conventional pedagogy has class members – students and instructors alike – engage with material in a solely intellectual manner that is disconnected from corporeal experience. Rooted in a classic Western Cartesian dualism in which the life of the mind is seen as disconnected and “above” that of the lived experience of the body, disembodied higher education is especially damaging and exclusionary for those inhabiting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), feminine, gender-non-conforming, disabled, and other marginalized bodies. When the topic of instruction focuses on the collective and individual traumas of social and environmental injustice, the alienation of disembodied education becomes all the more debilitating.
As queer and women-identified people of color, both of us have long struggled with alienating and disembodied education, especially as PhD students at the University of California, Berkeley. We found a lifeline in the practice of Vipassana meditation during grad school as a means of addressing our own anxiety and stress during that time. Vipassana is an embodied meditation practice that requires feeling sensations throughout the body in a systematic way. The logic is that events in our external world are experienced by the senses as good or bad, and these feelings create a sensation in the body-positive or negative. We tend to react to that sensation with craving or aversion which over a lifetime can create deep and unhealthy complexes. The practice interrupts this process by gently training minds to not unconsciously judge or react to these body sensations and instead observe them with equanimity. The practice supports the meditator in navigating the vicissitudes of life with resilience. This in turn allows us to make choices about our actions for the change we want to see, rather than succumbing to unhealthy forms of reactivity, addiction or numbness that may be harmful to self and others. Ultimately, this modality of cultivating embodied equanimity supports a happier and connected life.
While both of us were trained as critical human geographers attuned to political economy, Sapana’s focus has been on feminist political geography and urban social movements, while Tracey has worked in political ecology and climate change mitigation in forests. Sapana teaches about racial capitalism in a global context within a critical race and ethnic studies department. Tracey teaches about domestic and international environmental justice in an interdisciplinary management school and has sought to create new non-capitalist ways of relating to the natural world that are deeply informed by Indigenous knowledge to cultivate communities of stewardship.
We have used a range of practices in the classroom that aim to (1) guide class members into regulating their nervous systems, especially during times of stress or when discussing activating or difficult topics, and (2) bring learning in the realm of mental reasoning and ideas into connection with embodied experiences and knowledge that are unique to each student. We found that these practices of nervous system regulation and mind–body connection are helpful not only for the students, but also for ourselves as instructors. As trauma-informed somatics practitioners have demonstrated, nervous system regulation or deregulation does not merely take place within individual bodies but also through a collective and relational field. So, for instance, if an instructor or student comes into the classroom harried and stressed, as so many of us do, it affects the entire classroom. Similarly, there is a ripple effect throughout the classroom when students are in a calmer and more focused and engaged state. There is often more capacity to communicate in an honest and non-violent manner, and to listen and understand each other across differentiated social locations and experience.
Both of us have incorporated the following three elements into our classroom which we discuss in greater detail in the following sections:
- Embodied mindfulness meditation – a moment in the beginning of class to bring attention to the breath and bodily sensations.
- Trauma-informed somatics – grounding, centering and other nervous system regulation exercises.
- Reflective writing and journaling and verbal sharing related to one’s thoughts and experiences with social and environmental justice issues.
Both of us began to integrate mindfulness in the classroom as a shorter adaptation of the Vipassana practice that we describe above during our time at the University of Arizona, starting in 2016. We then built on these practices for our specific social and environmental justice learning objectives. Sapana has incorporated somatic techniques developed within the field of trauma therapy. Much like Vipassana, somatics relies on awareness of the body with added attention to practices that enable the nervous system to remain in a sense of safety. Somatics pioneer Bessel Van Der Kolk writes:
Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past. (Van Der Kolk, 2015: 100–101)
Recently, specialists in the field of “politicized somatics” have shown that trauma is not simply an individualized phenomenon. The structures of racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, they argue, have also inflicted trauma in different ways across communities and the globe (Haines, 2019; Menakem, 2017).
Below we discuss our experience using two practice-based approaches that guide classroom members into befriending the body and cultivating awareness of and reflection on embodied experiences as part of the learning process: somatic abolitionism and eco-mindfulness. Developed by trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem, somatic abolitionism draws on trauma-informed techniques to help people from different racial backgrounds to identify and release the imprint of long histories of white supremacy and anti-blackness operating unconsciously in our nervous systems in order to facilitate deep and lasting social justice. Eco-mindfulness is the term we are giving to the broad range of mind–body awareness and contemplative practices oriented toward mending the modern human condition of disconnection from the natural environment and relieving numbness and extreme anxiety over ecological collapse in order to foster action for sustainable and just living systems on Earth.
FREE YOUR BODY: SOMATIC ABOLITIONISM IN THE ANTI-RACIST CLASSROOM
I (Sapana) have designed and teach a course called Power, Liberation, and the Body within the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) undergraduate major at University of California Merced. The course seeks to support the decolonization of higher education by dismantling the hierarchical separation of the mind and the body. The majority of students in the CRES program and in my class are people of color, with a large proportion of them first-generation college students from working-class backgrounds. The students thus come from a lived experiential knowledge of social injustice and inequity and are passionate about social change in their communities.
The course centers on the living, breathing body as a central site for both the enactment of social power and possibilities for radical transformation. It builds on the work of thinkers who have discussed the ways that our social, political, economic, and cultural systems target and designate certain bodies as inferior or superior, as “deviant” or “normal,” as objects of control and discipline, and as sites of extraction and exploitation. Drawing on the insights of feminists and theorists of race and capitalism (including Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Michael Mendez, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel), the course unpacks how modern, (settler) colonial societies overvalue mental work and devalue pleasure, corporeal experience, and physical and care labor, despite the essentialness of the latter for all life.
This scholarship is coupled with the work of a growing number of thinkers, activists, and healing practitioners who see the body not only as a site of oppression but also as the locus for radical change and liberation at the personal and collective levels (including Resmaa Menakem, adrienne maree brown, Staci Haines, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha). It takes an experimental embodied approach to learning and unlearning systems of domination – based on supremacist racism, heteropatriarchy, coloniality, capitalism, and ableism – by integrating embodied practices that connect “book knowledge” to the wisdoms of the body’s lived experience and relations. These practices include radical embodied meditation, politicized somatics, daily journaling, reflection and sharing of lived experiences, music and movement, vocalization, and trauma-informed grounding. I often describe the class as “a mind/body laboratory for liberation.” The class size is relatively small (25 to 30 students) and meets once a week for two hours and 45 minutes. This longer time frame allows for a deep and settled engagement with the practices and material, and time for sharing in the class and in small groups.
While it is outside the scope of this chapter to discuss the entire course, I will draw on the experience of working with embodied mindfulness and journaling together with the insights and practices of Resmaa Menakem, an author and healer who has developed a body of work called somatic abolitionism. Menakem describes somatic abolitionism as “an embodied anti-racist practice of cultural building. It is a way of being in the world. It is a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies” (Menakem, n.d.). We read selections from Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Menakem, 2017), which provides the intellectual background for understanding the trauma-informed field of somatics and its relevance for anti-racism at the level of individual bodies and collective culture.
Menakem’s argument in the book is that all Americans, regardless of race and other social locations and backgrounds, carry different forms and degrees of trauma related to “white body supremacy,” which posits the superiority of European descendent people. Beyond ideas and expectations related to race operating in the cognitive sphere, racialized trauma, Menakem argues, operates in the nervous system as a visceral experience or a set of “wordless stories about what is safe and what is a threat.” Such trauma can look like an intense protective emotional and physical response in the form of freeze, flee or fight, and is often stored in the body and reproduced in culture in toxic ways if not addressed. Inherited and accumulated trauma combine with ongoing racialized violence, microaggressions, and injustice to produced severe physical and mental maladies, especially for Black and Indigenous people and other people of color. Such a scenario correlates with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of racism as a socially produced, group differentiated, “vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007). But the impact of white supremacy also lives in the bodies of white people and law enforcement officers in the form of fragility and self-over-protectiveness, especially in relation to the black body and other racial groups deemed to be a threat.
It is important to note that because we are in a classroom and not in a therapeutic setting, I implement safety and care agreements and resources at the start of the course to ensure that students do not find themselves in a mental health crisis without adequate support. This includes practicing becoming attuned to when they are too far out of their comfort zones in terms of sharing mental and bodily experience. There is also an agreement that students sign to maintain confidentiality of other classroom members’ shares. Finally, I provide resources for counseling, safety, and mental health services available to students at the university.
I then invite the students to engage in a few somatic and reflection practices adapted from Vipassana meditation, Menakem’s book and other trauma-informed somatics resources. Some of these are exercises that I guide in class while others are practiced at home. I start every class with a 15-minute practice that includes the following elements: somatic grounding, attention to the breath, a body scan, attention to the space as experienced through the senses, and acknowledgment of membership in the classroom community. I start with grounding, which consists simply of guiding students into attention to the lower parts of their bodies – the feet, legs, seat, lower back – where they can feel their weight and contact with the physical surfaces (chair and floor) that are supporting their bodies. I invite them to sink their weight more deeply into these surfaces, releasing any layers of muscular-skeletal holding or tension of the body into these lower body parts and surfaces with each exhale. When I sense the classroom energy is especially agitated, I invite the students to gently push the balls of their feet into the ground to more easily facilitate attention toward their physicality. Grounding is a key resource in trauma-informed therapy, which aims to reorient people from stressful or trauma-induced states by bringing them back to a safe and settled sense of their bodies.
Next, I direct the students to either stay with this grounding if they need it or to take a moment to sense where they can feel their natural breath in their bodies (belly, chest, nostrils, etc.). I suggest they take a few deep breaths to facilitate their awareness of the sensation of the breath in the body if they cannot feel it otherwise and then to return to natural breathing. I then orient students toward a more specific observation of the state of their breath in the moment – shallow or deep, fast or slow – noticing how the breath might be changing. I bring in a note that free and easy breath is the birthright of us all, attuning to the rallying call of the Black Lives Matter movement. The next practice guides students into an attentive scan of whatever sensations are present in the body, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes, without any judgment and with a sense of care for the present experience of their body. This sensation awareness practice then progresses to an orientation of the body in relation to the environment through each of the five senses, bringing gentle attention to background noises, the space and objects in the room or, if their eyes are closed, the quality of the light, any smells or lingering tastes, etc. I end the meditation with an invitation to acknowledge their own and others’ membership in the class community with a consideration of each person’s belonging and contribution.
Aligned with trauma-informed somatics, this baseline meditation provides embodied anchors (grounding, breath, spatial awareness, and sensorial perception) for students to return to when class content (or life in general) becomes overwhelming. It lays the foundation for one of Menakem’s practices for engaging with the intergenerational and collective trauma of white body supremacy: the contemplation of and connection to one’s ancestors. I add that ancestors may be those who are related to us by blood or by other forms of connectedness of experience such as race, (trans)gender and sexuality. The ancestral practice consisted of reflection on the following questions: when and how did your ancestors settle in America? What were the conditions of their arrival and life in this country? If you are yourself an immigrant, reflect on your own experience. What traumatic events directly affected your parents and grandparents? After exploring these questions, I ask the students to consider and journal about how the cultural–social struggles and experiences of those who have come before them live on in their own minds and bodies. Finally, I ask them to reflect on the practices of resilience that they have also inherited from their ancestors. This last point is especially important for students not to feel limited by trauma, through creating a pathway for them to draw on the wealth of embodied resources seeded by their ancestors.
The ancestor exercise was one of the most powerful ones for the students, the majority of whom are BIPOC, immigrant, working class and/or the first generation in their families to attend college. While I did not have any fully white identified students, there are ample ways in which Menakem’s approach helps people with European ancestry to identify the inherited impacts of white supremacy, such as numbness or fragility of witnessing or being accomplice to dehumanizing racist violations in the past and present. Daily journaling reflections revealed a plethora of insights. For instance, several students noted how their experience as immigrants in a capitalist country instilled in them a sense of workaholism and guilt when they rested. Others noted how they struggled with retaining aspects of their cultural inheritance while releasing others such as restrictive gender roles. The exercise also allowed the students to gain consciousness of their cultural traditions and their own practices, such as singing or dancing, as a form of embodied self-care and radical resilience. Finally, one of the biggest pieces of feedback that the students relayed was the power that they felt in sharing in the safety of the community space of the classroom. They expressed feeling less alone in their experience, and more seen and empowered to make change in their own lives and in their broader relations, communities, and the world.
ECO-MINDFULNESS: FROM CLIMATE ANXIETY TO CLIMATE ACTION
I (Tracey) teach undergraduate and graduate courses on climate change from a critical political ecology perspective. Students are increasingly experiencing eco-anxiety associated with environmental collapse, particularly with regard to the impacts of climate change, over which they feel little control. According to the American Psychological Association, eco-anxiety is “the chronic fear of environmental cataclysm that comes from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change and the associated concern for one’s future and that of next generations.” When teaching grad and undergrad courses on climate change, there is a visceral tension in the room, and students often express fear for their future on a warming planet and frustration in the presence of denial and inaction from those in power. This was particularly heightened during the Trump administration, which saw a government dismissal of climate science; permits for dangerous pipelines that traversed Indigenous territory, impacting land and water; and threats to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. The grossly insufficient action at multiple scales given the urgency of the climate crisis has caused many students to suffer from various degrees of eco-anxiety.
When I began teaching at the University of Arizona (UA), I met with a friend and colleague who served as Director of the Center for Compassion Studies, who helped me identify strategies I could use in the classroom to support my students to better manage their emotions and fear of climate change. I used three main practices and exercises: (1) mindful moments, (2) journaling in nature and (3) the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, an online short course developed by a rainforest action nongovernmental organization (NGO).
At UA, I regularly taught a large undergraduate course of 150–250 students called Environment and Society. When I first introduced mindful moments, I had already been teaching the course for a few years, so those early experiences served as a type of control experiment. I introduced mindful moments by discussing the benefits of meditation and mindfulness for improved concentration and retention of the material, as well as reducing anxiety. Being situated in a university and not a meditation retreat center, I was at first cautious and unsure how my students would respond. However, as a general education course with many students new to college, most participated because, I assumed, they figured, “this must be what we do in college.” Participation in this activity was always optional. I invited students to participate, to close their eyes or lower them to the floor. I invited them to turn their attention inward and explore their internal landscape with the same curiosity they might explore the outer world with their senses. I invited them to take a few deep breaths, and as they breathe to feel the rise and fall of their bellies and chests. After a few breaths, I would then invite them to feel the more subtle sensations of the breath going in and out through the nostrils above the upper lip. I would then ask them to feel the sensation around their head and, if there was any tension in that area, to release it; then their neck and arms – again, release; their chest and torso – release; their back and seat in the chair, release; their upper legs, lower legs and feet on the floor, release, release, release. Then they would take three more deep breaths and when they were ready, they could open their eyes. We were now ready to dive into the material. I used mindful moments for about five minutes at the start of each class.
I am always surprised of the impact and power of mindful moments in the classroom. Even in large classes of 200-plus students, after mindful moments, the students are present, attentive, and calm for usually about 20 minutes after the meditation. It is quite striking when I compare this to the control experiences before I have instituted the mindful moments, where students were more distracted and disruptive. After the mindful moments, however, I find the conversation and discussions are also more thoughtful, and the students are better listeners and more respectful to others in the class. The evaluations, however, tell it all. Many students are extremely grateful for the mindful moments in class, which they noted allow them to engage more deeply with the subject material with reduced stress and anxiety. More recently I have been using mindful moments in graduate seminars, and it is clear that grad students also appreciate the opportunity to drop into mindful moments that create more space for deeper connection with each other and with the readings and the subject matter.
In addition to mindful moments at the start of every class, I offered two extra credit assignments that involved mindfulness practices: journaling in nature and completing the Awaking the Dreamer symposium, an online short course developed by the NGO Pachamama Alliance. Key words associated with these exercises were gratitude for time to reflect and a space to explore feelings and emotions associated with environmental issues and lived experiences of the environment. In this way, these exercises helped relieve eco-anxiety by allowing students to better connect information they were learning in class with the feelings in their bodies. It was a more integrated way of absorbing the information, and students responded positively by describing gaining deeper understandings of the root causes of environmental destruction and feeling empowered to act.
For the journaling exercise, I requested that students choose an object of nature (a tree, cactus, turtle pond, garden) which they would sit next to, observe their sensations (as in the mindful moment), and record what emerged. The only criterion was that it be a place they had easy access to – on campus, near where they lived, or somewhere they could return to once a week. The exercise required them to spend 10–15 minutes per week with their object of nature, and reflect on what they noticed around them and how they felt before and after. I asked them to pay attention to the sensations in their bodies and to whatever feelings or emotions arose. They would then write one or two paragraphs on any aspect of their experience they wanted to share. They did this for ten weeks, and at the end of the semester, they compiled their entries. The students who took the assignment seriously often loved having time to return to a calm place in nature and reflect on their day or week, challenges at home or at school, or observations about how the nature around them was changing due to the time of day, change in season, etc. Many found it a refuge from the stress of their daily lives and a safe outlet for their feelings.
The final assignment had students partake in the NGO Pachamama Alliance’s Awakening the Dreamer Symposium. This mini-course, which has the goal of creating a more environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on the planet, emerged out of Pachamama Alliance’s deep and long-standing relationship with Indigenous people from the Ecuadorian Amazon, especially the Achuar. Drawing on their own dream-based cosmology, the Achuar asked the organization’s founders to help change the dream of the modern world from that of consumption and environmental destruction to living in reciprocity with nature. Awakening the Dreamer was first developed as an in-person facilitated, half-day event and then was later also offered as a two-hour online course. My students had the opportunity to participate in the online course, which leads participants through personal reflections centered on four modules: (1) where we are (the current state of the environment and society); (2) how we got here (a history of the deeper causes of interconnected environmental crises); (3) what is possible now (providing examples of positive changes in the world, such as the movements for civil rights in the US and the end of apartheid in South Africa, as a means to the possibility of environmental justice); and (4) where we go from here (a reflection on the concrete actions we can all take to address environmental crises).
After taking the course, students expressed gratitude for the ability to slow down and absorb the information about environmental conditions in new ways. They were able to tap into their own experience of social and cultural paradigms based on the myth of separation of humans from the natural world and the growth-centered economic systems at the heart of environmental degradation. By the end of the course, students expressed a more profound understanding of the underlying drivers of interconnected environmental crises and felt empowered to act. I find these mindfulness activities are a powerful complement to the readings and lecture materials – the more conventional pedagogical aspects of the course.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have outlined some of the experiences and potential of integrating embodied practices of somatics and mindfulness together with journaling and reflection exercises. The two classroom experiences we discuss demonstrate how this work may be utilized for both social and environmental justice topics, as well as different classroom sizes and time frames. The potentiality of mindfulness and trauma-informed embodiment is vast. We have found that with such practices, students are not only more focused and receptive to learning; they are also able to make connections between course content and their own lived experience, feel a greater sense of belonging and community, and gain more resilience, capacity, and motivation to take action for social and environmental justice.
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