Spirituality (or heart) in higher education

Serendipity intervened again with my attendance in the Shalom Center's Occupy Spirituality discussion group.  Predicated on the "Occupy Wall Street" Movement, this book seeks to put the heart (spirit) back in higher education via the mobilization of youth creativity.  Not only has our first week got me thinking about how to infuse assignments with 'heart,' but it has me pondering the ways in which diseased social institutions might be created anew through sustained, small social movements.  For a fabulous introduction to the book and its authors, consider watching this interview dialogue between Bucko and Fox.

The book directly connects to mindfulness in education in that it seeks to put us in touch with our deepest needs and to have those, rather than polarizing ideology, motivate policy.  I see using the text to free discussions from 'us/them' dualistic frameworks.  I also see using the book to encourage horizontal relationships between professor and student.  I further believe the text can be used to model discussions of compassion fatigue in modern society.  With technological 'advancement' has come ceaseless intrusion of the 'bad' in the world.  I would like to acknowledge (in the spirit of mindfulness) the 'compassion fatigue' attendant to this media transparency and then see if we can work from the pain we feel for ourselves and others to design solutions.

I am excited to see how the book and our Shalom Center discussion (our group includes several sisters from various denominations employed in social justice work with the homeless, etc.) inform future course policies and assignments.

I am also excited to see how the book will continue to overlap with my mindfulness readings as they pertain to individual, collective, and ecological "doing that comes out of the non-doing" (pg. 135 Full Catastrophe Living).  For example, Zinn (pg. 125 in the same text) talks about the benefits of training judges in the court system in mindfulness as follows: "cultivat[ing] being intentionally non-judgmental to do their job requires enormous concentration and patience and both compassion and dispassion.  Having a systematic way of handling one's own intrusive thoughts and feelings and reactions might be particularly useful professionally for a judge...[and reduce] his or her own stress levels" (pg. 125).  To me, this sounds just as applicable to community college professors as it does to any judge!  :)