Once in a while, we receive a gift at the right time and when we are ready to be replenished by the offering. This was certainly true when I recently had the privilege of staying at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to shape my inner world through communion and community. Many of you know that I have been on a journey of wellness for the last many years - not just as a scholarly pursuit, but as a daily practitioner. Seeking out Indigenous practices from places where I have lived and live, and digging for deeper roots of modern contemplative healing practices. How often do we engage in practices that help us to find a ‘pause’ in our lives? When do we step beyond our rational churning selves to dip into the world of metaphors, storytelling, emotions, and the relational world that can quench our spirits? I don’t know about you, but I am weary of linear perspectives that we are fed daily. The predictable thinking that is relentless in demanding high performance, expedient impact, and quantifying metrics to measure change…while at the same time denying opportunities for gathering, reflection, clearing, and opening up to new ways of curating shifts in our systems. Do we sincerely believe that we can list and checkmark our way to liberation?
The time in Treaty 7 territory, in a nest on the side of Sacred Buffalo Mountain, offered an opportunity to hollow out and fill up the imagination. Within the wisdom of Elder Dila’s stories, songs and drumming, we discovered that same open sense of spacelessness and timelessness while valuing presence in everything we do. Sensing, intuiting, and tending to the dreams we carried into our space. Learning to pause and listen, rather than react or attach to any particular outcome. In circles and in solitude, we explored deep listening with each other and paying attention to the land so that we can start building right relations. Like the cow elk that gathered every morning on the campus grounds, we used ways of knowing that were less tangible, like our intuition and noticing the subtle messages from our bodies. Carrying these lessons forward into daily lives can be hard because it requires that all of us curate a daily practice that runs counter to the values of mainstream systems thinking. That we take up the intentional practice of inviting thoughtful pauses as an act of resistance and resilient action.
Dr. Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux spoke to us about the value of leaning into some of the traditional wisdom to restore connectedness and healing, not just for ourselves but for those who have hurt us. She explained cultural loss through the Indigenous Seven Fires Prophecy that foretells starvation of spirit and a fear of creativity and wildness bequeathed by colonization. When facing the question of how to move forward as a settler, it is has become clear that my inner work is not just personal work but it is collective work. It requires breaking open barriers to healing and reclaiming shared meanings from all our cultures. While our journeys with contemplative traditions like meditation, yoga, ceremony, reading, and writing are critical, we are being called upon to move beyond the ‘maya’ or illusion of our own separateness. In the book, Lighting the Eighth Fire, Smokii Sumac writes that building peace in our societies requires that settlers “must choose to change their ways, to decolonize their relationships with the land and Indigenous Nations” and use the wise practice of relationship building and collaboration to build “mutual recognition, justice, and respect.” Dr. Marie Wilson speaks of reconciliation as a movement rather than a moment in time and challenges us to change “how we do” things across generations. She writes that reconciliation is about “imagining and convening ethical spaces” that renew dialogue as we learn about and from each other.
Living in these dark times where right-wing ideology can destroy women’s liberties over their bodies without apology, there is an urgent need to practice against the grain, to gather, to listen, to pause and see each other…and to rise in collective action.
Please visit the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and Action Canada for Sexual Health to see how you can get involved. Learn about reproductive justice through the work of SisterSong and forced sterilization through the International Justice Resource Centre.
Let us open to wiser ways of knowing.
“These trees tell stories
My ears can only
Dream of hearing”
Tunchai Redvers