The heart of higher education: Rediscovering meditation from the margins of learning to a liberatory pedagogy in the post-pandemic university

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Toward a quantum model of activism: Creating educational change through retreat, meditation, healing, and consciousness evolution

Proposal

On May 14th, 2022, a racially motivated mass shooting occurred in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Ten Black lives were lost, and many more lives were shattered by fear, grief, and despair. The trauma brought fresh anguish to a fraught social landscape deeply shaken by the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and resurgent racism. This paper explores the formation of a campus meditation group that emerged in light of the shooting tragedy and prolonged pandemic suffering, and its members’ journeys of healing, self-discovery, and transformation. Two weeks after the shooting, we held our first event “Healing through Meditation” in a public park; about 12 participants attended and meditated in nature. Since then, the group has continued to meet weekly, and when weather no longer permitted outdoor gatherings, we met virtually on zoom. This group reflects our humble efforts to reach, to care for, and to care about one another during an exceedingly difficult and uncertain time. It reflects our priority of mental health and well-being when suffering is widespread with overlapping and intersecting crises – prolonged COVID pandemic, anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism, climate disaster, environmental destruction, poverty, segregation, among others.

While scholars have critiqued the neoliberal higher education for producing self-enterprising individuals solely motivated by economic rationality, the magnitude of issues facing today’s world urges for the evolution of higher education to address the whole of human being. Echoing Palmer and Zajonc’s (2010) call to cultivate a secular ethics of the heart to awaken the deepest potential in educational spaces, this paper offers our humble attempt to re-center meditation from the margins of learning to a liberatory pedagogy in fostering a caring academy. The heart is the seat of compassion and community, where we learn to love, forgive, heal, and blossom. While higher education curricula have largely neglected the centrality of the heart, through practicing a form of heart-based meditation, we rediscover the promise that higher education holds, beyond its technocratic aim of enhancing human capital.

This paper is born out of a sharing circle of four regular members of the meditation group: a faculty member and three doctoral students at a public university in Western New York. Sharing circles were originally used by indigenous peoples to gather stories and preserve wisdom. By building up non-judgmental, non-hierarchical, communal, and relational experiences in the circle, each participant can access the healing source through collaboration (Lavallée, 2009). In a decolonized context, the circle methodology was embraced by researchers to resist Western domination and establish a new strategy that does not prioritize the researcher’s gaze (Yu et al., 2021). As regular members of the meditation group, we performed the dual role of researchers and participants. Our sharing circle took place through regular online meetings, each lasting one to two hours and featuring an open discussion on our meditative practices and reflections. In co-facilitating the circle discussions and co-analyzing data, we strove to stay rooted in our theoretical commitment to decolonial and feminist approaches. The supportive environment created a comfortable space to connect our meditation journeys with our life stories and educational trajectories. The circle discussions were voice-recorded and transcribed into a body of qualitative data, which were then coded and analyzed into three interconnected themes: (1) Cultivating an informal learning space for social justice; (2) Heart-based education as an integrative art of inner and outer world; (3) Healing through purifying consciousness in the present moment. The qualitative data analysis was overlayed by our own inner cultivation experience, which makes our methods uniquely first-person yet also empirically rigorous.

Inspired by the theme of next year’s CIES, The Power of Protest, and the CIHE SIG’s approach to social activism in holistic ways, this paper uses a decolonial and feminist lens to unpack our meditative experience and what promise it contains for the transformation and humanization of the university. We draw from bell hook’s (1994) engaged pedagogy, one that invites educators and students to become embodied and committed to self-actualization, to shed light on meditation as an anti-oppressive, feminist, liberatory healing practice. In contemporary neoliberal higher education, the ground needed for social justice is often destabilized by conditions of precarity, stress, and anxiety (Musial, 2011, p.213). Students and professors alike are asked to produce more with less and do not always feel safe in self-exploration and inquiry. Furthermore, modern academia is deeply anchored in a Euro-Western epistemic structure that upholds a mind-body split and privileges rationality over introspection, intellect over spirituality. In times of intense emotional trauma, such as racially motivated mass shooting, a decolonial, feminist pedagogy embraces vulnerability and reciprocal healing for teacher and learner alike. In this paper, we highlight the role of healing and inner cultivation as a powerful tool of social activism without which outer circumstances will largely remain unchanged. The learning we gleaned may seem accidental, indeed at the margins of the formal university education. Yet such “margins of learning” (Takayama, 2020) allowed us to explore a more engaged and liberatory form of pedagogy that is more about assisting growth than imparting knowledge, and that has the real potential of fostering inner change and the common good.

Authors

• Jinting Wu, State University of New York, University at Buffalo

• Yuejia Wang, University at Buffalo