Shadow Work, Healing, and Spiritual Activism: A Contemplative Mixed-Medium Arts-Based Study

• In Event: 32.077 - Contemplative Approaches to Transforming Education: Engagement in Awake-Dreaming, Spiritual Activism, De/colonial Perspectives, and Mindfulness

Abstract

Purpose
Using contemplative arts-based practices, I highlight the toll it takes on the human spirit to conduct social justice work in education from bearing witness to experiencing injustice across multiple axes of differences. Specifically, I work with contemplative, mixed-medium painting to engage in deep self-excavation to emphasize spaces of silence, battle-fatigue, spirit-drainage, joy, and hope. I map onto large discourses of opportunities, improvements in social conditions in education. Using a post-oppositional framing to imagine equitable educational opportunities, I make space for conceptualizing a research agenda that is informed by spiritual activism (Anzaldúa, 2015) and the need for healing the condition of the human spirit.

Perspectives
Situated within the discourses of transformation, healing, post-oppositional theorizing, and contemplative practices (Anzaldúa, 2015; Barbezat & Bush, 2014; Keating, 2013), this paper focuses on healing while conducting what Anzaldúa terms spiritual activism. Anzaldúa (2015) calls for an awareness of the iterative relationship between engaging the human spirit to raise our consciousness and becoming conscious of the human spirit simultaneously. She states that such engagement is a form of activism, which could be transformative, resulting in shifts and healing. Healing then becomes an act of empowerment where we take back the scattered and fragmented parts of ourselves trapped in our wounds when we engage with oppressor/oppressed binary relationships. This work is similar to engagement with one’s shadow (Anzaldúa, 2015) where one has to conceptualize one’s wounds as direct invitations to healing. Such acceptance would require direct meeting with the shadow and tracing the shadow’s tentacles. Such journey requires transparent discussion about how one experiences meeting the shadow in the mind, body, and spirit.

Methods
The methods used for this project integrates contemplative practices with mixed-medium painting. Using specific prompts from my research journal and interview data, I create contemplative mixed-medium art and poetry from the data collected.

Data Sources
Data sources will include a merging of autoethnographic data and interviews of 14 scholars in training who reflect on their wounds that have emerged from being trapped in binary relationships.

Results
The findings highlight the spirit-draining challenges of being trapped in an oppressor/oppressed binary, the possibilities of imagining a post-oppositional transformative future, the ways in which wounds become invitations to spiritual healing, and how engagement in spiritual activism must contain elements of deep contemplation to illuminate interrelatedness of being, empathy, and compassion, even when such concepts seem strange to the traditional forms of knowledge making.

Significance
Socially just work is an interconnected relationship between the researcher and the researched that engages the spirit deeply. To fully understand this relationship, there needs to be opportunities for self-excavation to engage with one’s wounds and healing possibilities, so that one can deeply connect to one’s spirit, and imagine and participate in transformative actions that are free from the oppressor/oppressed binary while understanding how one relates to herself and the other, especially if the other is the oppressor. Without contemplating and engaging in spirit healing and transformative possibilities, we would make little progress towards creating equitable educational opportunities.

Author

• Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University