Transformation, Regeneration, Flourishing
What world would you like to live in? As you visualize, perhaps consider what your own interests, skills, and talents are, who the people who have supported you through the challenges are, and which sorts of activities you have found the most meaningful.
The path of sustainability is mostly understood and discussed in terms of “outer” transformation through public policy and law, education, use of technology, innovative agriculture and fuel production, finance, etc. These are fundamental and necessary steps to take, yet their potential impact on behavior is limited unless we work to heal, renew, and transform ourselves. We also change the world by changing ourselves.
Many of the world’s Indigenous and contemplative traditions have long understood that answers to the challenges we face in life can frequently be found by starting with understanding ourselves and our interdependence with nature and other people. In a 2014 Dharma Talk delivered at Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh shared,
“There is strong support for engineered solutions to our ecological problems like reflecting sunrays, sucking up carbon emissions, or lab-grown meat. Is this the right approach for us to be taking? That may help, but it is not enough. What we need is a transformation of our consciousness, our idea of happiness, our lifestyle. … Your happiness and the happiness of other species inter-are. If you are healthy, if you are happy, then other forms of life can profit from you. If you are sick, if you suffer, then other species will have to suffer with you.”
On the previous page, we shared a delightful 4-minute talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on the topic of mindful walking. If you have yet to see it, you might enjoy.
Over the past few decades, a growing movement within both the natural sciences and liberal arts communities has turned increasingly to the topic of well-being and begun to listen more carefully to the call of the world’s Indigenous and contemplative traditions in exploring our transformative capacity in addressing our mental health, inequity, and environmental challenges.
This approach to sustainability is the path of “inner transformation.”
Inner transformation involves challenging our worldviews, mindsets, and values, and liberating our minds, bodies, and relationships from unhealthy and inequitable influences. One might think of it as the practice of shifting behavioral and thinking patterns onto a healthy path that is mutually supportive of ourselves and Mother Earth.
You might say that inner transformation is doing the “inner activist work” that can help make the “outer work” of living our lives together wise, responsible, compassionate, and impactful.
One way of seeing inner transformation is as a practice – one that involves deepening understanding of ourselves, expanding our worldviews, developing a sense for the textures and contours of interdependence and collective flourishing, as well as growing interpersonal relations through cooperation, collaboration, and kinship.
Inner transformation is a dedication to shifting thinking and behavioral “patternings” that do not serve us onto a more sustainable path that promotes health, well-being, and flourishing.
This is what we offer at MBEI.
“The question is not really just how to survive, but how to thrive, with passion and compassion, with humor and style.”
-Maya Angelou
The inner/outer relation is a holistic integration of the various dimensions of what it is to be a person or self, rather than intended to mark a radical distinction between inner and outer worlds.
The inner and the outer are in reciprocal relationship. Botantist and member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer writes,
“Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their care-giving responsibility for the ecosystem that sustains them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.”
Recent studies here and here which Christine Wamsler, Director of the Contemplative Sustainable Futures Program at Lund University, discusses how exploring our inner dimensions and embracing inner transformation are essential to understanding and facilitating personal and collective processes of change in terms of our awareness and relationship to ourselves, others, and the environment. Here is a short presentation by Christine Wamsler.
A healthy and supportive dimension of such transformation can be developing skills and methods for flourishing. As Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University, puts it, “well-being is a skill.”
Daniel Wildcat, Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies (HERS) Center and member of the Indigenous & American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University, writes in Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge (2009),
“The most difficult changes required are not those of a physical, material, or technological character, but changes in worldviews and the generally taken-for-granted values and beliefs that are embedded in modern, Western-influenced societies.
In this respect, what humankind actually requires is a climate change – a cultural climate change, a change in our thinking and actions – if we are to have any reasonable expectation that we migth mitigate what increasingly appears to be a period of dramatic plant and animal extinction.”
Nature-based meditation and embodiment practices can promote insight, compassion, community, and well-being. Becoming more aware of and finding ways to attune to the ecological dimensions of ourselves can enhance that.
Recent studies show powerful links between nature-based mindfulness practices and pro-environmental behavior. The physical and mental well-being of the individual is intimately connected to the well-being of all living beings.
As cultural psychologist and author of Nahua and Maya descent Yuria Celidwen writes,
“Indigenous contemplative science offers new insights into the meaning and pathways to sustainable, collective well-being by promoting a sense of relationality and belonging, self-awareness, and social and environmental skills.”
These insights include the fundamentals of kin relationality and ecological belonging. Here is a short talk from Yuria Celidwen.
Dharma teacher and author Sebene Selassie discusses how these practices are particularly helpful with building a sense of belonging.
The work of religion professor Bobbi Patterson shows that experiential practices are very effective in building resilience, which is so essential for living well, particularly in these challenging times.
Author and meditation teacher Ruth King and law professor and meditation teacher Rhonda Magee show how embodied mindfulness practices increase our emotional resilience, help us to recognize our unconscious bias, and give us a space to become less reactive as well as enhance our ability to choose how we respond to injustice.
Healing Ourselves, Healing Nature: Costa Rica, June 2022
Our integrative approach at MBEI is intended to bring us all into deeper connection with ourselves, the land, and all living beings through the “skills of well-being” and deep community building.
Our participants improve their physical well-being by forming a deeper connection with the body-mind continuum, each other, and Mother Earth through nature-centered embodiment and mindfulness practices – a powerful fusion of secular science and ancient wisdom.
Our participants express improvements to their mental health and emotional well-being as they personalize their practice, leaving them better prepared for their daily lives. As personal well-being skills develop, we reawaken a sense for our interdependence while opening space for belonging and clarity about how we may wisely promote equity, sustainability, and collective flourishing.
We expect our guests to leave our progams with a deeper sense of purpose.
In the spirit of author and activist Audre Lorde, we think of self-care and healing as integral forms of eco activism.
The Mind Body Ecology Institute welcomes you in mindfully walking this flourishing path.
