On the elusive balance of being and doing
Happy Equinox and a few invitations to join me in the coming months
Dear enchantable ones,
Happy Equinox!
I love the equinoxes and solstices, some of my favorite days of the year. My first Enchantable post was on the spring equinox, so it has been a half-turn around the sun that I have been writing here. Whether you are new or have been here since the beginning, I thank you (again, always) for being here with me!
The equinox is (in part) about balance - a day of perfectly balanced sunlight and darkness in the turning of the year. It’s a moment of balance, really, reminding us of the elusive, fleeting nature of balance.
My life doesn’t necessarily look balanced at the moment - I am in an intense period of doing, which will most likely carry on through the end of the year. But when I can look at a larger scale - at the cycle of a year, rather than just the day-to-day - I can see that there is balance in the larger whole. And I can bring as much balance as I can in the day-to-day through mindfulness practice.
On Being and Doing
In the Plum Village tradition of engaged Buddhism, we talk about the balance of being and doing, the importance of the work we do together but also the importance of just being together, and just being with ourselves, and the relationship between our being and our doing. I know for me, the quality of my doing is enhanced by moments of not-doing, of just being.
In 2015 I served as staff at Deer Park teen camp, an intensely happy, joyful time which grew some deep life-long friendships with other staff members. At this point, I had been going on retreats at Deer Park for about 4 years but had never served as staff. This role was a great lesson in finding being amidst the doing.
When you go on retreat, there is a lot of down time. Activities are scheduled in a spacious way, so that there’s time to enjoy a slow cup of tea under the pepper tree, or to walk up the ridge after dinner, or to take a rest in the tent between lunch and dharma sharing.
When you serve as staff, many of those spaces are filled with staff sharing and debriefs, activity planning or setting up, otherwise organizing or tidying. When you are a retreat participant, you are resting into the retreat experience. As staff, I was learning to find restfulness in the doing.
There is an art to this, and that art is the heart of mindfulness practice. How can I do what I’m doing with as much attention as possible? How can I do it with as much restfulness as possible? How can I relax and find ease in the task at hand?
In practice, this might be noticing if you are holding tension while you are doing the dishes, for example. It might mean slowing down, even if just by a microsecond.
The other day, as I was going to pick Daphne up from school, this practice looked like walking slower and enjoying my steps. I had been going non-stop for weeks, it felt like, and as I headed out the door to get her, I realized I was rushing. But there was no reason to rush - I had about an hour before school closed, and the walk is just a few blocks. It was just habit energy, moving from one thing to the next. So I stopped, paused, and started again more slowly. I noticed a wall of ivy by our garbage bin that I pass every day that I had never noticed how beautiful it is. In intense periods of doing, it can be hard to remember to stop, and it can be hard to notice the beauty that is all around us.
This week marks our one year anniversary of living in Costa Rica, one year at UPEACE. There is so much to say about this, but in short, but I am so grateful for all of the gifts of this past year, and that we get to continue here.
It takes a year to feel into the rhythm of a place, of a job. To feel the seasonal shifts. To feel the pace of the academic year, in its bursts and lulls. To know how to pace myself. To rest when there is time to rest, and find rest amidst the busyness. Balance can feel illusive, but when we can see it over a larger stretch of time - even a lifetime - we can see that there are periods of fallow, periods of planting, periods of harvest.
In the northern hemisphere, the equinox marks harvest time and the start of autumn. We do not experience fall here (or it’s more like the life cycle of the tropics is falling and regenerating all the time), and the big seasonal shift is from rainy to dry season which happens around the beginning of December. I’ve been watching this vine grow across the electrical lines on my street since the start of rainy season in June, and it has almost reached the other side.
We are just barely north of the equator here, but I can feel the harvest. I can see the intense period of doing I find myself in right now is a result of seeds planted long ago - this spring, or even years before. I am harvesting and sharing fruits, and harvest time is a lot of work, and filled with so much beauty and abundance - including having planted the seed of Enchantable exactly one half solar turn ago!
On that note, there are two opportunities to learn with me - sharing fruits - that I would love to invite you into!
The International Healing-Centered Education Conference organized by the Acosta Instittue - Register for free here!
I am honored and beyond excited to partner with the Acosta Institute on the inaugural International Healing-Centered Education Conference to explore Building Thriving Classrooms, Cultures & Institutions.
The Conference, taking place online Oct 6-8, will include presenters such as Angel Acosta, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu and more. Together, we will activate a generative social field to inspire new approaches to thriving in education for K-12, adult learning, and professional education.
I will be on a healing-centered peace education in higher education panel on Friday with two of my amazing peace education students, Jill and Oshan, and on Saturday I will be offering a community dreamwork workshop with my dear collaborator, co-conspirator and friend, HyoYoung Minna Kim. The conference is free to join, and I sincerely hope you will join us!
Within a dynamic community of scholars, educators and curious learners, we will explore questions like:
How can we leverage healing-centered approaches for thriving classrooms?
What are the best practices for nurturing healing-centered environments and defining thriving cultures?
How can we employ healing-centered practices to support justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in education and organizations?
I hope to see you there to explore these questions and more together :)
I also invite you to join me in the online course I am teaching for the UPEACE coming up, Transformative Education in Precarious Times. It is part of the UPEACE online masters degree programme, but is open to the general public for credit or to audit. I would love to have you join us! The course description follows:
Education has oppressive and liberatory potentials. It holds the possibility to uphold, reinforce, and perpetuate the status quo of separation, domination, and violence, or serve as a pathway of transformation and liberation towards other ways of being, knowing, and living that honor life and our interconnectedness. If we wish to see more just, peaceful, sustainable worlds, we need to create educational spaces for learning and unlearning towards them, and we need to cultivate spaces in which we can imagine, embody, and practice them now. In this online course, we will explore different branches of transformative education such as peace education, human rights education, global citizenship education, and education for sustainable development. We will explore best practices and possibilities from these fields, as well as their limitations, and dream and envision with and beyond them.
This course explores education in the broadest sense, from formal to informal settings, and is open to anyone with an interest in exploring education as a pathway of transformation. It is ideal for educators who are looking for new inspiration in their work, parents with school-age children, students and life-long learners (which we believe includes everyone!).
The course is asynchronous so anyone from anywhere in the world can join us. Again, would love to see you there! You can register here.
Another small but powerful reframe that helps me these days is “get to do” vs. “have to do.” There is a lot I have to do right now - but I also get to do all of it. There are moments when it can feel like a lot, and, when I can remind myself of how truly lucky I am to be given the opportunity to do all of it, it feels lighter. There is a lot on my to-do list, but I get to do it all. There are things I have to do that are less fun - the pile of dishes that never stops growing in the sink, lol - but a little mindfulness or listening to a favorite podcast while I do them goes a long way (a favorite Sunday morning ritual is listening to Ghost of a Podcast’s weekly forecast while doing the dishes :)
On that note, off to the dishes! And podcast listening and planning and prepping and hopefully some Sunday adventures to the river, too :)
Sending you equinox blessings, wishing you a bountiful harvest in whatever you are harvesting in your life right now, and sending wishes for balance in whatever way that looks for you, in your unique human life :)
With love,
Stephanie