Sovereignties and Colonialisms: Resisting Racism, Extraction and Dispossession
2015 Critical Ethnic Studies Conference

May 1, 10:45-12:15, Founders Junior Common Room 024E

This experiential workshop will offer participants a way to respect and connect with their pain (emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, inter-generational, inter-relational) with embodied awareness and kindness/compassion. Compassion is defined as the capacity to turn towards pain with kindness. Often, we push away our pain with judgment, fear, and distraction. Reacting to pain in this way can at times be brilliant action to take, but in the long run, these critical life-saving skills can impact our holistic health at great costs. Introducing skills in mindful awareness can offer an embodied way for us to become aware of how we relate to our pain and how to relate to the pain with attitudes of deep self-respect and compassion/kindness. Dominant Western discourses privilege disembodied learning, marginalizes embodied knowledges such as mindfulness; re-centering our many traditional ways of healing decolonizes. It becomes a revolutionary act to embody our awareness/knowing and to turn towards ourselves with compassion in a culture which denies us our dignities in most aspects of our lives.

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