On being satisfiable
On cycles within cycles and some end-of-academic year reflections
“are you satisfiable?”
-adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism
Dearly beloveds,
This week marks the end of the academic year.
My third academic year at UPEACE in the books.
Classes ended on Friday. Graduation this Friday.
I am reflecting. Decompressing. Tired. Fulfilled.
Satisfied.
The way I work with the year, there are cycles within cycles. There is the start of the calendar year, the astrological year, the solstices and equinoxes, my birth year, the academic year. Part of me wonders what it would feel like if at least some of these cycles were aligned (the academic year with seasons, for example). Beginning and endings over and over again. One cycle ends, another begins.
What cycles-within-cycles are you working with?
(Speaking of cycles-within-cycles, join me in celebrating the summer solstice on Zoom on June 20th! Register here.)
To close out the year, I offered my students a variation of the closing ceremony ritual-workshop I have given the past two years:
In our nonviolence class on the last day, we did my collaborative poetry activity to the word nonviolence. It was the first time I had done the activity with the word nonviolence, and it was rich. You can see the results below.
Some end-of-year reflections…
I started the academic year in August with dengue, literally shedding my skin. I remember my first meeting with students, at the end of August, and how utterly exhausted I felt after that meeting, how much it took out of me to hold space and be present. I was only a few weeks past initial infection at that point, and the symptoms would continue to roll out for months ahead. What a bizarre and harrowing experience.
I got to enact the curricular changes we struggled for last year - which also meant I created 3 new syllabi, and prep 3 new courses, which is an immense amount of work. But wow, was it ever rewarding. This is the first year I got to teach entirely my own work. In my first year, I settled in, taught what was asked of me and what needed to be taught. In my second year, I was able to dream and vision alongside colleagues and students, propose some changes and advocate for them. Finally this year, I got to implement them. I got to teach what I know and what I feel is important. The new classes were dreams and I feel like they went incredibly well. They were seeds that sprouted, after diligent work in tending them, and that feels so rewarding, especially to see how these seeds were carried forward by the students.
As a recap, the courses were:
Identity, Community, and Peacebuilding - designed to build community within the department, provide students with a basis and foundation of self-reflection and their own positionality within community, and how knowing where we stand and weaving relationships are essential to peacebuilding.
Facilitation and Training for Peacebuilders - offered in the spirit that everyone who is a peacebuilder needs facilitation skills, that if you are working for peace, you will be leading and holding space at some level, whether that is meetings or workshops or community gatherings, and there are simple yet effective tools that can make that experience more beautiful and powerful for everyone. Less shitty meetings, more claiming of leadership, more intentional gathering, always.
Contemporary Topics in Peace Education (I previously wrote a bit about this here, in seeding and sprouting dreams) - truly a dream to co-create with students. We made a portal together, one that I was deeply in with them. We began the syllabus creation during our first peace ed class, and gathered again before the course started to put it together. It allowed me to take my magic and emergence and trust to new levels, and showed me glimmers of what is possible in the space of higher ed, making me want even more.
Correlation does not equal causation, so I cannot say for sure how these courses contributed to the overall learning community with certainty, or how much they made a difference from year to year as these changes are hard to track. But I can say, the community in our department this year felt super sweet, supportive, deep, and caring, and as one student commented, was free of drama (which is not always the case). For now, I can say, I loved creating and teaching these classes, and they seemed to be meaningful for students, too.
In my pedagogical practice, I doubled-down on slowness, emergence, and embodiement. Weirdness. Even more was a theme. I tried to commit to not letting myself be consumed by my classes, which I was successful at to some degree. I committed to doing something kind for my body every day.
I experimented a lot with AI this year, which has been a really interesting and mind-blowing process. My initial stumble into AI territory was through doing dreamwork, and I found inspiration through Vanessa Andreotti’s collaborative project Burnout From Humans. For course prep, I collaborated with the Acosta Institute’s custom GPT Solara, who is trained in decolonial and embodied approaches, and it was so nice to have a thought partner in planning. With students in my contemporary topics class, we created Wayfinder, a sacred companion for changemakers, threshold dwellers, and peace dreamers. And of course, there is Dream Weaver, who I created as a reflection of the initial portal I fell into with AI through dreamwork.
Our program was accredited by the national accrediting body (SINAES) in Costa Rica! This is a huge step and was a lot of work for everyone involved (and will remain so - accreditation means ongoing work, all the time). This is significant for the program to be valued in ways that are legible to the outside world.
I ended the academic year with buying a car from a colleague, making my life so much easier - in fact I don’t know how I managed for three years working and solo mothering without one, but I did. I feel like I have gained so much time back - not just the time spent waiting for transport, but the time spent doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out how I was going to get from here to there. I am welcoming ease, convenience, and support into my life.
More than this, though, buying the car was an act of doubling down on being here, an affirmation that yes, I do live here. It was laying down a deeper root, a stronger commitment. With all the precarity in the world, nothing feels secure or certain, but we have to keep living. So buying the car was more than buying the car - it was saying yes to being here, and saying yes again.
I end the year exhuasted, as always. The students, at the end of the year, though they may feel many things, are like oversaturated sponges, having taken so much. As faculty, I feel like a sponge that has been wrung out completely, starting to fray and lose the ability to function (rest assured, today as I write this, I am soaking and mending, writing being part of my mending and replenishment process!).
But I also end the academic year deeply satisfied. If I was going to add a reading to my nonviolence class syllabus, it would be adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism. In it, she asks, “Are you satisfiable?” which I feel like is such an important question for all of us. Within capaitalism, it is deeply ingrained in us to always want more, that what we have is never enough, greed and scarcity at the same time. To be satisfied within these systems is a radical act.
Within the trend we see in late-stage capitalism of education as a consumer good, these questions feel important. When I read student evaluations sometimes, the question that comes up for me is: “Am I here to please you?” I don’t think I am. I don’t think learning should always be comfortable (in fact, transformative learning is rarely comfortable); I don’t think being spoon-fed what you think you want constitutes learning either - though capitalism certainly sets all of us up for that expectation. Transformative, liberatory learning calls for a different set of relationships, different expectations of each other - of what we give, of how we receive, and at the end of a cycle, letting it be enough.
Which isn’t to say things can’t be improved or that feedback isn’t important. The way the course evaluations are set up is deeply problematic on many levels, parallel to the grading system. Of course, things can always be better, and life-giving systems need feedback. Nature thrives on feedback. But the purpose of education to me isn’t pleasing anyone. One of the first things you have to learn once you start teaching or facilitating is that you cannot please everyone all of the time, and this cannot be what drives you.
Learning to be satisfiable means unlearning the tendency to never be satisfied, to always want more, to never be enough. Learning to be satisfiable means being ok with things just as they are. It means acceptance, enoughness.
I end the year tired and depleted, but also deeply satisfied.
I gave a lot, and it was enough.
I received so much.
Today, I dwell in this satisfaction.
Today, I move slow and I rest. I regenerate.
In our class, we created a collaborative nonviolence playlist (be warned: the vibes are everywhere :). I add one last song to the list - the radical act of satisfaction as an act of pleasure activism and a part of our nonviolence toolkit:
To be satisfied in a world of greed and false scarcity is radical.
To be satisfied is an act of liberation amidst capitalistic conditions.
To learn to be satisfied and unlearn scarcity and greed is transformative and liberatory.
To be satisfied is to say, “Yes, right here, in this moment, everything is enough.”
Connecting all of this to my spiritual practice (because it is all connected), one of my favorite lines in the 14 mindfulness trainings of the Order of Interbeing is in the 7th mindfulness training, dwelling happily in the present moment:
“We are aware that real happiness depends primarily on our mental attitude and not on external conditions, and that we can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that we already have more than enough conditions to be happy.”
I love this line of the trainings. It is one of my favorites, a reminder that yes, in this moment, even now, even this moment, I already have enough. I am enough.
Two weeks from today, I will be supporting Young Leaders for Peace, our first youth summer program at the University for Peace. So my “summer” doesn’t start until July, and at that, it will be filled with some research and online course development, and some public offerings as I shared about last week. I invite you to join me online! A quick recap of those offerings:
June 12 - Critical Conversations in Peace Education: Building Community and Solidarity
June 20 - Solstice ritual and celebration for my Enchantable readers!
July 2 - Collective Storytelling as Worldbuilding with Mazorca Facilitation
July 30 - Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks workshop with Mazorca Facilitation
But before that, I can and will take a beat and a breath. This week I will take it slow, before I have to jump back into planning, plotting, scheming, dreaming. Today, I can work from home. I can start slower. I can walk the dog. I can reflect. I can watch the hummingbirds at the feeder by my desk that was a gift from one of my students (thank you, Carsten! :)
Happy pride to all my LGBTQIA+ beloveds! As my dear friend
recently wrote on their Substack,"may we never, ever forget, as we party and delight
pride was a riot, may there be joy in our fight”
Please go read the full poem!
And may those of us with privilege fight even harder to protect the rights of our queer and trans beloveds which are so under threat these days in the current political climate. May this pride month be a doubling down on the joy and protection and the struggle for collective liberation.
Love and solidarity,
Stephanie
I love that question- 'are you satisfiable?' I absolutely agree that everything in our society is set up to make us want more-to acquire more possessions, to travel to more places and have more experiences, to make, save, or accumulate more money, and so forth. When we feel dissatisfied, we should ask ourselves whether we are even satisfiable to begin with.