This week I returned to teaching First-Year English (FYE), a course focused on information literacy, academic writing, undergraduate research, and the first-year college experience. This course helps students in making the transition to college, asking research questions, and navigating academic disciplines and the larger university system. The goal is for students to see themselves as critical readers, writers, and researchers—agents with response-abilities to make ... Read more ...
Contemplative Practices
These posts share a range of contemplative practices, including guided meditation, reflective writing, and everyday divination. Practices can be used for healing, visioning, mindfulness, and more.
Playing Through the Pain
I’ve written recently about violence in our everyday lives, in our shared social world. For many of us, this violence is internal and personal as well. Even though I aspire to self-love and self-care, I fall back into patterns of negative self-talk and “playing through the pain.” I continue to push myself even when I recognize the desire to slow down. I do violence to myself even when I set the intention of being gentler, kinder, and more forgiving. With this ... Read more ...
Imperfect Meditation and the Desire to “Slow Way Down”
Lately, I’ve been craving time to feel-think-move my way through transitions and even physical pain, as my lower back has been speaking up again. In response, I’ve been practicing daily meditation: sitting for just 10 minutes on my yoga mat each morning. Even when practicing imperfectly, I find that meditation gives me the permission, the opportunity to slow down. I’m finding that the more time I spend in meditation—breathing, noticing, releasing thoughts, and being ... Read more ...
Exploring Exhaustion and Energy Loss
I’ve been particularly exhausted, as is so often the case at the end of each school year. I often feel that the further I get into spring semester, the more I become tired, grumpy, and on edge. It’s as though my brain becomes over-worked, my body under-utilized, and my balance thrown totally off. This year I’ve also been experiencing exhaustion as more than regular semester stress, and I feel certain it’s due to the routinization of daily assaults on personhood. It’s ... Read more ...
Practicing Yoga Through Writing
This fall I returned to Milwaukee after a year in Washington, D.C. The move back home allowed me to re-see familiar spaces, including where I practice yoga-asana and where I write. Though seemingly unrelated, yoga and writing have blended for me, as I’ve constructed a single contemplative-working space. In this week’s post, I ask about the spaces that energetically nourish, revitalize, and activate work for justice. My return to Milwaukee allowed me to feel/sense more ... Read more ...
Today Resistance Looks Like …
How do we work to align feelings, thoughts, and actions (heart, head, hands) with the world we’d like to see? How do we go about our everyday lives for the “ought to be,” for justice? I’m thankful for Jardana Peacock (of the Liberatory Leadership Project) for modeling a contemplative writing practice that I’ve been using to think through these questions. At the end of each day, I’ve been filling in the answer to her prompt: “Today resistance looks like …” I ... Read more ...
Gentle Yoga Practice for Healing
In the past week, I’ve experienced some new/renewed lower back pain. And the pain has brought me back to my yoga mat and specifically to this gentle yoga practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKVunWMHNm8 I appreciate this video for the s-l-o-w movement, the focus on breath, and the ways my body responds. With each day’s practice, I’m feeling a little less pain, a little more openness, and a little more myself. This practice also invites a quietness for me, allowing ... Read more ...
Heart, Head, and Hands: Explaining the Blog’s Name
For months, I kept a list of keywords and imagined titles for this blog. For months, I ran possible names by friends and family, who responded with “nope,” “eugh,” and “huh?” Then, casually and unsurprisingly, my friend and frequent co-author Rasha Diab said, “Beth, your blog is heart-head-hands. That’s your thing.” I guess this exercise—this linking of feeling with thinking with acting—is “my thing.” Often in classes and workshops, I use the contemplative writing ... Read more ...
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#Repost @chiara.acu with @use.repost
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let us feel this one in our guts
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nourishing kinships of care is resistance against capitalist dehumanization
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sometimes fighting for more just worlds is less about the big picture stuff and more about building connections to each other,
connections that are vital to create possibilities outside of competition, commodification, isolation, trauma, and the privatization of care
connections that make our organizing possible, and that build up our immunity to conflict, fracturing, and manipulation from a system that wants us divided and alone
connections that quite frankly make life worth living
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a shout out and big love to tanuja for making space for me to work on this art, to oona and cole, to giselle, ace, ebony, robin, crystal, micah, loisse, karen, diana, tulia, brian, molly, mary, and nazafarin for the care shared in the past couple of weeks
i am so grateful❤️
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[image ID: one rectangular slide with semi-transparent rainbow letters spelling "nourishing kinship of care is resistance", and pearl-colored letters spelling "against capitalist dehumanization". The background shows green and blue vines growing from a multicolored flower meadow. shiny hearts, stars, and flowers are scattered throughout]](https://heart-head-hands.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
