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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The Delaware River, On the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania

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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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Bodhisattva Maitreya @Rubin

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This Saturday, explore the "space between" or liminal space, where your multiple identities intersect and how they show up within us and between us. http://bit.ly/DSNEVENTS

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How Millennnials find meaning (podcast) http://bit.ly/2MANHrN

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(Diversity and Spirituality Network)

(Diversity and Spirituality Network)

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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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Join Us Saturday to Explore the Improvisation/Spirituality Connection

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Join Us Saturday for a Different Take on Mindfulness

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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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Free "Dark Night of the Soul" online event Saturday. Details: http://bit.ly/decemberexploration

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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
• Provoked by this episode? Record a response!
• Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!

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Saturday we'll talk about Navigating the Dark Night of the Soul. Join us. It's free!

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Author Fiona Robertson on her new book and the spiritual state called The Dark Night of the Soul - YouTube http://bit.ly/2UygtNm. Free online event Saturday: http://bit.ly/decemberexploration

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Hafiz!

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(Diversity and Spirituality Network)

(Diversity and Spirituality Network)

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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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Travel Stories: Encountering the Other (online event)

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