showing up is a project which offers ways to engage mindfully and in community with some of the most difficult issues of our history and our present time.

Many of us carry a deep longing to make a positive and personal contribution to what has been termed the 'meta-crisis', however small that contribution may seem.

We tend to underestimate our capacity and the daily, positive impact we have on the world around us. It's easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of multiple injustices and crises and it can be hard to know where and how to start.

Through group practices such as mindfulness and council circle, reflective responding to texts and direct community-engagement, this project aims to offer the individual a variety of ways to facilitate their responding to 'this burning world', according to their unique gifts and callings.

In contemplative practice, whether alone or with others, we are practicing showing up for our whole, interconnected life and allowing ourselves to be touched by both the joy and the suffering we encounter.



showing up has been inspired by the teaching and example of the late Roshi Bernie Glassman and by the Bearing Witness and Street Retreats of Zen Peacemakers, an interfaith organisation which was co-founded by Roshi Bernie. He developed forms of socially-engaged contemplative practice that have resonated deeply and are still practiced around the world, including the annual Bearing Witness retreat in Auschwitz (first held there in 1996), and in the Black Hills of Dakota, Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere.

The foundation for this practice is the Three Tenets, a set of principles conceived by Roshi Bernie Glassman:

Not Knowing – thereby giving up fixed ideas about myself and the universe

Bearing Witness – to the joy and suffering of life

Taking Action – that arises from Not Knowing and Bearing Witness

Roshi Bernie Glassman on the Three Tenets:
“It’s about questions. More specifically, it’s about how to live a life from the spirit of questioning, a life of not knowing. If we are willing to live such a life, a life without fixed ideas and answers, we can bear witness to any situation we are confronted with, however difficult, disturbing or painful it may be. And from this witnessing comes right action: the work of peace, the work of healing.”