Showing Up
in community for ourselves, each other and our world
How to show up?
There are many ways and frameworks available for mindful social engagement. I have experience of Buddhist socially-engaged practices, which can be adopted into secular offerings such as Showing Up.
They underpin my approach to the programme and some of these practices are threaded throughout. Similarities of approach are to be found in mindfulness programmes such as the MBSR and MBCT eight-week programmes, and in other mindfulness courses and practice groups.
I'm guided by the work of two authors and teachers in particular. Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Roshi Joan Halifax
has developed a framework for engagement based on mindfulness and compassion called 'G.R.A.C.E.'
Gather Attention
Recall Intention
Attune to Self and Other
Consider What Will Serve
Engage and End
I've taken part in socially-engaged retreats in the tradition of Zen Peacemakers International
(U.S.). Its founder, Roshi (Zen master) Bernie Glassman (1939 – 2018), was a Zen teacher and social entrepreneur who wanted to extend meditation practice ‘off the cushion’ and into a direct experience of the messiness of life, into all of its joy and suffering. He founded a Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz twenty-four years ago, which continues to be held there each year. He also founded 'street retreats', in which participants undertake to live on the streets of a city without any money or possessions for three days. Bernie Glassman articulated three tenets of the Zen Peacemakers which offer guidance for socially-engaged practice.
The three tenets are:
Not Knowing
- letting go of fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe;
Bearing Witness – being present to the joy and suffering of the world;
Taking Action - that arises from Not Knowing and Bearing Witness, ‘and which fosters the healing of the world and ourselves as a path of practice’ (Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge).