Raw Basement Tapes Blog: 04/01/2019

Monday, April 22, 2019

Improvisation and Mindfulness

One of the founders of the improvisation and mindfulness movement talks about improvisation as a life practice, the connection between spiritual practice and improvisation. and what it means to live an improvised life.

Back in 2013, Ted DesMaisons assembled a group of improvisors at a San Francisco Zen monastery to explore the many connections between spirituality and improvisation. That event helped spawn the creation of a worldwide coalition of mindfulness improvisors and an array of improv-based practices for enhancing mindfulness.

In this podcast, DesMaison explains why some people have difficulty improvising, the importance of play for both spiritual practice and improvisation, and why the appreciation of mystery is central to both. He also shares the improvised path that led him from teaching English to becoming a professional improvisor, shares his own definition of spirituality, and plays a live improv “word-at-a-time” activity.

“We’re improvising all the time,” DesMaisons says. “Why not learn to do it well?”

DesMaisons is the author of the new book, Playful Mindfulness and the founder of Anima Learning. He holds an MTS from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford University. He’s taught mindfulness with renown meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn, taught and performed improvisation internationally, and studied acting and voice with Patsy Rodenburg.

Links:

Anima Learning business site
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Religion in an Increasingly Secular World

What does society lose when religion no longer is a safe topic for discussion in public spaces? How has the role of religion changed in parts of the world that are increasingly secular? What are the unexpected consequences of laws designed to prevent discrimination based on religious preferences?

These questions are explored by Coreene Archer and Mark Argent, two UK-based organizational development consultants with deep roots in faith traditions. Although they both understand why governments feel compelled to pass religious nondiscriminatory laws, they believe such laws have unexpected consequences.

“Faith for me and lots of people is a core value,” says Archer, Principal Leadership Coach and Organisational Development Consultant at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations. “To have to have a work face and a private face is a bit of a shame. It damages all of us if we’re hidden and can’t speak to who and what we are.”

“Carl Jung came up with the very useful idea that progress in the West has come about at the expense of our ability to feel,” says Argent, a spiritual director, organization development consultant, and Elder in the UK's United Reformed Church. “If you compare the West with bits of the world that are often described as underdeveloped, you see something very rich going on (in these less developed countries) that we’ve sort of lost sight of. There’s a price we’re paying for our technological progress.”

In this podcast, Archer and Argent talk about their faith traditions, challenges of working both in secular and faith organizations, and their sense as how religion plays out in the public sphere.

Links:

Mark Argent’s site
Coreene Archer at the Tavistock Institute
“Religion: Hard to Talk About” event
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Teaching diversity as Miss North Dakota (and beyond)

Rosie Nestingin is an African-American woman who grew up in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the U.S. Because she grew up in a multiracial household, and went to daycare with international children, she was shocked to discover that hers was one of the only black faces in her elementary school. As a result of this, she began at an early age to start to observe, respond and dispel false assumptions others made about her based on her appearance. From a very early age, she became, in effect, an exemplar of inclusion, teaching her classmates and teachers what she had already learned about diversity growing up.

After graduating college, she won the title of Miss North Dakota. Her platform was “Celebrate Diversity: One Nation, All People,” and she she spent a year traveling throughout the state, carrying the message of inclusion. In this podcast, she shares some of the insights she gleaned during this process.

Nestingin credits her deeply religious parents with instilling her with a commitment to welcoming everyone with love. These days, she continues to embrace and extend this commitment, while at the same time forging a spiritual path.

Links:

Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Jules Munns on Improvisation Jules Munns, the Artistic...

Jules Munns on Improvisation

Jules Munns, the Artistic Director of the UK’s Nursery talks about improvisation in a presentation for the Diversity and Spirituality Network’s monthly online community exploration. Munns is one of three facilitators of Waking Up! The Improvisation and Spirituality Weekend, to be held in the UK in spring 2019. http://bit.ly/wakeupimprov
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"What Color is Your Soul?"

Cultural Agility Strategist Niambi Jaha-Echols talks about the roots of racism, why it’s historically been difficult to dismantle, and the role of ancestral healing in curing its wounds.

Racism, Jaha-Echols says, is a sickness that can’t be cured by that operating on the same vibrational level of its cause. Eradicating it requires understanding its causes, engaging in ancestral healing, and a willingness to embrace that part of us that is vested in spiritual healing and reconciliation.

Author of the new book, What Color is Your Soul, Jaha-Echols here describes her childhood, what led her to found the African-American girl-power Butterfly Movement, and the influence of Native American spirituality on her understanding of ancestral healing.

Jaha-Echols is the principal of Cross-Cultural Agility, LLC, the author of Project Butterfly, Inspiring The Souls of Our Girls, and her new book, What Color is Your Soul.

Links:

Niambi’s main site
Her business site
The Butterfly Movement
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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How Millennials Find Meaning

When Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston began their research on their fellow Millennials in 2014, they discovered there were a lot of people who were just like them. Like many of the people they interviewed, neither were affiliated with traditional houses of worship. ter Kuile was a former activist who’d grown up in a secular household, while Thurston was deeply influenced by the Urantia Book, a spiritual and philosophical book popular in New Age circles.

They and the people they studied were members of what demographers have labeled “the nones,” or people who said they had no religious affiliation. According to some studies, the number of Americans ages 18 to 29 who had no religious affiliation has nearly quadrupled in the last 30 years.

But, as ter Kuile and Thurston discovered, Millennial disdain for traditional religion didn’t mean they’d abandoned the search for belonging and meaning. Instead, many were getting their spiritual needs met within secular organizations, many of which served roughly the same function as traditional churches.

But in a larger sense, ter Kuile said, “nothing has changed” in terms of people’s need to fulfill their religious or spiritual needs. “The way it’s expressed and the cultural context is changing.”

ter Kuile here shares his own story, what he and his colleagues discovered in their research, and his thoughts on what traditional religious institutions can do to support this emerging landscape.

Links:

How We Gather - home of a series of reports created by ter Kuile and his colleagues
Casper ter Kuile’s website
The OnBeing Project
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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The Diversity and Spirituality Network has been around (more or...

The Diversity and Spirituality Network has been around (more or less) since 1996. Because the group’s leaders wanted to move in a more “spiritual” direciton, they considered changing it’s name. This video explains our decision.

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The Dark Night of Soul

Just before the Dark Night came calling, Fiona Robertson felt she was on top of the world. She was the co-founder of an award winning health project, had a charismatic new boyfriend, and felt more physically fit than any time in her life.

Yet in quiet moments she felt that something wasn’t quite right. The material success she’d achieved wasn’t really giving her peace. Within a relatively short time, a series of circumstances occurred that undermined her carefully constructed sense of self-esteem.

“Becoming the person I had believed I should be did not bring about the happiness or contentment I had imagined it would, simply because it wasn’t who I really was,” she writes in her new book, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Journey from Absence to Presence.

Robertson here shares how she navigated the spiritual crisis first described in a poem by St. John of the Cross. She explains how the process involves the disintegration of a false self that masks fear and unworthiness, and the emergence of a mature, stable and integrated true self. She describes what she’s learned by comparing her experiences with those of a group she calls her amam cara, a group of friends and associates who’ve also experienced the Dark Night of the Soul.

Links:

Book site
Robertson’s main site
Wikipedia’s description of the Dark Night of the Soul
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Facing Death Without Religion

How do non-religious people – which now comprise nearly 30% of the American population – face the coming of death? That’s the subject of Dr. Christel Manning’s John Templeton Foundation-funded research project.

Although a fair amount is known about how religious people face the certainty of their demise, relatively little is known how non-religious people do. This category, which religious studies scholars refer to as “the nones,” now comprises 27% of the population, up from about 7% in the 1980s.

Unlike their religious contemporaries, this group lacks the powerful set of stories, symbols and rituals that have for generations characterized the predominate American approach to dealing with dying. This group instead relies on different types of what Manning refers to as “maps of meaning.” These might include the sense-making that comes from personal growth narratives gained from such processes such as engaging in a 12-step program or therapy after surviving a divorce.

In this podcast, Manning describes her own belief-system journey; what is currently known about how aging people in general approach the coming of death; and the new types of secular rituals that are emerging to help non-religions people become more comfortable with death and dying.

Manning’s faculty page
Her research project’s description
Death Cafe website
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Improvisation and Spiritual Practice

For Jules Munns, the art of improvisation he’s devoted his life to is much more than simply a type of theatrical performance. Improv, he says, is as an activity that helps people uncover previously hidden aspects of their selves and thus become more fully human.

Munns here explores the notion of improvisation as spiritual practice. Just as is the aim of passive meditation, improvisation helps practitioners achieve mindfulness, awakening and a connection to a larger Mystery and deeper meaning. In addition, it helps practitioners do something that most forms of mediation do not: connect and interact with others in surprising and unscripted ways.

Munns is the co-Artistic Director of the Nursery Theater and the founder of Slapdash International, London’s longest running festival of improvisation. He’s also a performing member of the Maydays, an award-winning improvised comedy company with bases in Brighton and London. One of the UK’s most prolific improv teachers and actors, he's performed and taught at festivals across the UK and in countries including the US, Pakistan, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Finland.

Links:

The Maydays
The Nursery Theater
Jules Munns Site
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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True dat!

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I stand with my indigenous brothers and sisters, whose legacy...

I stand with my indigenous brothers and sisters, whose legacy endures despite Trails of Tears and attempts to disappear them from their country’s memory… (at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo6S6urAy84/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=tsyms4h3cd1p

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My new thrift store kicks! Even though they were a bit too big,...

My new thrift store kicks! Even though they were a bit too big, had to have them. Put a new insole on these babies and a little shoe-stretch stuff on them, and let them walk my body around. Italian leather, square front. Jello’s in the house! (at Lambertville, New Jersey)
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The One Thing that all women, POC, LGBT and all...

The One Thing that all women, POC, LGBT and all “marginalized” people share… ( listen to the entire podcast here: https://radiopublic.com/the-podcast-of-the-diversity-and-GqzL4P/ep/s1!db096 )

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The Radically Inclusive Ministry of Yvette Flunder

It was a gradual process that led the young Yvette Flunder to question the tenets of the United Church of Christ in which she was born and raised. She couldn’t reconcile her emerging beliefs with her church’s patriarchal orientation and its emphasis on preparing adherents for the next world rather than addressing the injustices and inadequacies of this one. She also realized she never again could call herself a member of a church that completely rejected same-gender-loving people such as herself.

Bishop Flunder here traces the path that led her to become a visionary religious leader with a mission of tending to the spiritual needs of marginalized people around the world, particularly those of African-American descent. She speaks of her vision of radical inclusion,which she believes requires an equally radical social ministry reaching to the furthest margins of society to serve all in need without prejudice or discrimination.

“The greatest mistake at the Christian church has ever made was to put a back cover on the book, to somehow suggest that we could make a manual out of the living word of God,” she said.

Reverend Flunder is the founder and senior pastor of the City of Refugee United Church of Christ in Oakland, California. In 2003, she was appointed Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a multi-denominational coalition of over 56 churches and faith-based organizations from all over the world. She’s also the author of Where the Edge Gathers: A Theology of Homiletic Radical Inclusion.

Links:

City of Refuge United Church of Christ
Fellowship of Affirming Ministries
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Creating Communities of Choice

Organization Development Robert Leventhal explains why there’s a decline in synagogue and church attendance, how congregations can reverse this trend, and his thoughts on next generation engagement strategies.

According to Leventhal, external force fields make it necessary for churches and synagogues to change to remain relevant to a new generation. Synagogues in particular can no longer be content to be ethnic enclaves but instead must evolve to be more outward facing and responsive to the needs of potential new members.

A former sales and management consultant, Leventhal for the past two decades has had a synagogue consulting practice that has worked with organizations that include Yeshiva University, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and the UJA Federation of New York. Previously a consultant with the Alban Institiute, he’s now the Kehilla Leadership Specialist for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the largest network of Conservative Jewish congregations in the world.

Leventhal is the author of Byachad: Synagogue Board Development and Stepping Forward: Synagogue Visioning and Planning.

Links:

About Robert Leventhal
UNCJ
Diversity and Spirituality Network's site
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Flame Wars in Spiritual Spaces

During the summer of 2018, what happened behind the scenes of two online events exposed the painful fact that the wound of race is as present in the spiritual space as anywhere else. The run-up to both of these events sparked heated flame wars, contested on one side by white women with a history of promoting progressive causes and on the other side primarily by woman of color who perceived these events as reeking what some described as cultural appropriation and others described as racism masked by privilege.

One woman who described herself as triggered by these events is Wendy C. Williams, an African-American spiritual life coach and energy healer. In this podcast, Williams reflects on what went down during the run-up to ill-fated Urban Priestess Summit and Danielle LaPorte's Lighter program, lessons that each group might learn from their participation in the flame wars, the psychology of triggering and appropriate ways to react.

Williams also talks about growing up in a Jehovah’s Witness household, the emerging agency of African-American women, and how to harness spiritual power. In addition to having practiced spiritual counseling for the past decade, Williams has a degree in counseling psychology and has lived internationally.

Links:

Wendy’s site
Facebook background on the Urban Priestess Summit
Facebook background on Lighter
Diversity and Spirituality Network’s site
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The Poet, the Buddhist, the Transsexual

Esteemed poet Diana Goetsche talks about anti-gay and anti-trans attitudes within the American Buddhist community, how people fiercely protect the gender divide, and how her Vajrayāna practice sustained her during her transition.

In between discussing these and other topics, she reads poetry from her eight collections, including the poem, Black People Can’t Swim, which merited her the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Because of this and others work, Diana’s been cited as one of the few white poets willing to write on the subject of race. She also reads from The Diana Updates, a series of letters to friends about her transition that was republished in The American Scholar.

In reaction to her American Scholar letters, she received supportive letters from people in all walks of life. “We are all, I was learning, in transition, people between people, longing to be fully ourselves. The only essential difference with my deal is that it’s glaringly obvious and can’t be hidden from anyone.”

A former varsity athlete and concert jazz dancer, poet with award-winning collections, a dedicated meditation practitioner and instructor, Goetsche is a multifaced advocate for America’s newest visible minority.

Links: