Below is a list of my recent work relating to contemplative education. This includes conference presentations and workshops. Please use the contact me if would like further information.
Conference papers and seminars
Contemplative Education and the Development of Ethics
European Summer Research Institute, Pomaia, Italy, 8th August 2024
Enaction, relevance realisation and the development of wisdom-informed approaches to contemplative education
Mind and Life Europe Friends Talk, 27th June 2024
Academic papers
Barratt, C., The Contemplative and Critical in Community. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry. 6 (1)
Barratt, C., (2016). Exploring the potential of contemplative pedagogy in health professional education. Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Professional Journal. 17 (2), 20-31
Videos and podcasts
Other writing and Blog Archive
Below are my favourite blogs from my time editing the Contemplative Pedagogy Network blog.
Coping with depression in academic life: creating space through contemplative practice
I have felt this blog developing in my mind for sometime and was finally inspired to get on with it after receiving an email on 4th February about it being ‘Time to Talk Day‘. I currently work as a Senior Lecturer and in this blog I explore how I cope with academic life when depressive symptoms arise and explain how contemplative practice has transformed my response to things when the colour drains out of life.
These are just personal reflections on what has helped me. I describe some symptoms that some may find upsetting. I am not suggesting that these steps will be appropriate for everyone to respond to acute mental illness nor should they replace seeking appropriate health care.
Waves with no ’cause’
I suffered from my first episode of severe depression when I was 19. It took several years, inpatient and out-patient treatment and antidepressants to begin to live independently again. Since then there have been numerous periods of depression some deeper and longer than others, each requiring different levels of intervention. I now consider myself to be well much of the time but I still experience waves of depressive symptoms at least once or twice a year.
The ways these symptoms manifest does shift but tearfulness, sleep disruption, no sense of self-worth, irritability, wanting to be alone (this is fun in lock down!) and poor concentration often feature. This excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘It was not death’ captures my sense of living with depression:
It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down-
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon…
As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like Midnight, some –When everything that ticked-has stopped-
And Space stares-all around-
Or Grisly frosts-first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground-Excerpt from It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up by Emily Dickinson (Accessed at Poetry Foundation)
I used to try and understand why these symptoms arose at a particular time, keen to fix whatever the cause was. However, I have found this investigation to be futile as often no one thing can be pin pointed. I have therefore come to accept that every now and again these feelings are part of my experience – this acceptance alone has brought its own peace. I no longer hold myself responsible for ‘curing’ myself or making these symptoms go away. My role is to respond appropriately to what is arising, take care of myself as best I can and when necessary seek help from others.
Mindfulness – noticing untrustworthy thoughts…
One of the things I find most challenging when one of these waves manifests is the sudden shift in my confidence and sense of self-worth. It feels as though suddenly everyone else in the world is doing amazingly and everything I have ever done adds up to nothing. Within academia where there is pressure to perform and show that you are performing as an individual I think this can be particularly pernicious. My thoughts drag others into this too and without any reason I suddenly feel that others don’t want to work with me or have a low opinion of my work.
What my mindfulness practice has given me is the ability to stand back and really question these thoughts. Why was I working very happily with these supportive colleagues just a week or so ago? Do I really think they have the time or inclination to be judging my performance? I love my job and for the most part I am very happy in what I do. I know that I contribute, that I am valued and that I can teach. So there is an incongruence between what I think and feel about myself in these times and what I know to be the case. The difficulty of course is that the longer a period of depression goes on for the harder it can be keep hold of these threads.
…but being cautious with meditation
The application of mindfulness awareness to my thoughts is therefore an important tool in getting through these difficult periods but one area of practice that gets more difficult for me during these times is meditation. I usually meditate in the mornings but during these times, on my worst days, I can find myself crying before getting out of bed. Long periods of unguided meditation when I am in this place can be unpleasant and unsettling and poor preparation for the day ahead. I sometimes avoid meditation for a period of time but more often do shorter guided practices that feel manageable. I find it important to minimise demands on myself in all dimensions of my life although the extent to which this is possible does vary.
Self-compassion – making space for what is
This lack of self-worth and sense of colour draining from life is not just a cognitive process but an emotional one too. The experience of depression is emotionally painful in a way that is so hard to capture but never forgotten once experienced and cannot be far enough away for those of us in whom it recurs. The need for self-compassion in response is key particularly when working in a demanding environment such as academia.
Managing demands
The first way that I exercise self-compassion is prioritising tasks that feel manageable and not embarking on anything new or pushing myself in areas which feel difficult. I focus on logistical and administrative tasks that are quite straight forward and give a sense of satisfaction on completion. I delay embarking on projects that I don’t have the head space for such as writing which requires creativity and sustained attention. I have to be careful not to take on too much in an attempt to reinforce my faltering self-worth. Sometimes, however there are limited choices and responsibilities that must urgently be attended to.
I usually find that work helps me through these times as it provides routine and connection with others. I usually don’t share how I am feeling with colleagues because I like work to be a way of distancing myself from how I am feeling for part of the day. This is not always sustainable though. I also know that for many people work is a key stressor that contributes to poor mental health and I am open to the idea that a wave in the future may require time off work to recover from. Self-compassion means letting ourselves off the hook, acknowledging where we are, knowing that others have experienced similar situations and responding with kindness. How this manifests with regards to work will be different for each of us. The key is not pushing on and pushing on despite cues in the body and mind that all is not well.
Experiencing kindness through the body
I also find that getting into my body can be an important way of expressing self-compassion. I have found practices such as the bodyscan or yoga nidra can be accessible ways of engaging with my body. Walking is also helpful – the soft repetitive movements and escaping from the house. Overtime I have found that being sensitive to my embodied experience helps me relate to how I am with kindness and become more accepting and curious as life flows moment to moment. I also use the physiological responses of the body to create a sense of greater safety and wellbeing. This might be through engaging in gentle or fun exercise as well as hot showers, heavy blankets and comforting food and drinks. I find that all these can help reduce the painful vulnerability and sense of exposure that characterises these periods.
Contemplating kindness
Meditative practices such as the Metta Bhavana (Loving-kindness) have also proven helpful for getting in touch with kindness when this feels very distant from my experience. It has also helped me to release the tension and defensiveness that can build up when I am struggling. However, sometimes it can just be too much and overwhelming. Often I try things for a few minutes to just see how I respond with full permission to step away if it becomes too difficult. But even this is hard – I often catch myself striving to make myself ‘feel better’ and ‘get it right’ which easily becomes another source of self-flagellation and blame. Written reflections as well as art and creativity may also appeal as ways of allowing space for how we are feeling to come to the fore. This is important – how can we respond with compassion if we are not aware of, or deny, our suffering?
Distraction – passing the time and finding pleasure
Lastly, sometimes when I am feeling really low the question changes from ‘how do I look after myself’ to ‘how do I get through the next few hours’. Even when I can engage more constructively, time out and small pleasures are really important for riding the waves.
Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.Excerpt from The Fury of Rainstorms by Anne Sexton (Accessed at All Poetry)
I agree with Sexton that depression is boring and yet it can be all consuming at times. I sometimes feel as though I can’t trust my own mind and having things that distract me in gentle, undemanding ways feels so important. Even if feeling joy or contentment feels out of my reach at least I know that the next few hours are taken care of. TV is my go to. Contemplative practice should not feel like a punishment. Recognising those times when we choose distraction as a way of looking after ourselves is very different from a mindless life caught up in perpetual distraction.
And even if that is where we find ourselves, caught in the grasp of craving, resistance and pain our response is still the same – noticing, softening and kindness. I have tried fighting depression for many years both internally and externally. But found that fighting and denying it just digs a bigger hole. That is not to say we should not address things in our life that are causing us harm, to the extent that that is possible. Or reach out for help when we feel we need to. It is not about being passive in the face of suffering. What a contemplative approach has taught me is the need for awareness, kindness and patience and a responsiveness that makes space for my vulnerability without making me a martyr to it.
I hope this is helpful in some way.
To cite: Barratt, C. 2021. Coping with depression in academic life: creating space through contemplative practice. Contemplative Pedagogy Network Blog. Accessed 16th August 2024 Coping with depression in academic life: creating space through contemplative practice | Contemplative Pedagogy Network
What’s love got to do with it?
The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.hooks (1994: 298)
When I first read Zajonc’s ideas about an ‘epistemology of love’ in 2014 (Zajonc 2006), I decided that this talk of love wasn’t for me. I could stand up and talk to students and educators about the value of contemplation but talk about love? No way.
Yet now, in 2019, love suddenly feels important and relevant. I have recently started reading bell hook’s work for the first time. I have been touched by her willingness to talk about love. She liberates love from the suffocating shackles of the romantic ideal and celebrates love as a liberating force in a way that makes my heart tremble. She also talks about love not just being a feeling but an action too. The idea that we can simply ‘love everyone’ may seem trite, yet the desire to act lovingly is accessible and grounded: ‘openly and honestly express[ing] care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment and trust’ (hooks 200: 14).
The current political difficulties facing the UK have also brought this to the forefront of my mind. When I was pondering what banner to make to attend the anti-prorogation protest in London last Saturday I decided I just wanted to take a love heart on a stick. That for me encapsulated why I was going and yet I did not have the confidence to make that banner, fearing ridicule. Didn’t I have anything sensible to say? Didn’t I want to take sides? To ridicule Johnson?
Whilst there, although I had attended because I had disagreed with the action taken by the government, I came to the conclusion that my overwhelming motivation was love, not sentimental love, but an embodied sense of care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment and trust that hooks so pertinently describes. My fear about what was being lost through the government’s action was not just about me (although that was certainly part of it) but part of something much bigger – our collective freedom.
So what has this got to do with contemplative pedagogy? My contemplative and spiritual practice has been fundamental in making me wake up to love and the responsibility that this entails. Mindfulness practice in particular (both on and off the cushion) has helped me see how fear and ignorance contain and restrict me as I mould myself to accommodate and ameliorate dominant world views, ensuring that I am OK often at the expense of seeing the realities of others. Embodied practice such as yoga has also facilitated access to my experience of heart and body where injustice cannot as easily be explained away as it can in my mind. It is felt and once felt, at least in my experience, it cannot be easily dismissed.
In recent months I have come to see that contemplative practice, critical pedagogy and love are intertwined. By engaging with direct experience and seeing more clearly what drives my actions and decision making, my commitment to creating social change grows. I can see, and more importantly feel, how interconnected we are all are. The friendships I have developed with others who are wiling to be honest about the terrifying vulnerability of what it means to be human, have helped to open my heart and acknowledge how recognition of this fear can reveal love. Bristow (2019) describes how mindfulness practice can help to shift thinking from ‘me’ to ‘we’ and support the development of equanimity and insight capable of holding the complexity of the difficulties we face. This is not to say that love instantly makes everything OK – this is not naive hocus pocus, but it does mean I can start to see the world differently and want to take action as a result.
The relevance for educators is that if we are to start drawing critical and contemplative pedagogies together, establishing deeper connections between the personal, internal world and the social, external world we also need to be prepared to talk about love. Friere in his development of critical pedagogy did not shy away from love, identifying it as both the means and ends of a critical education. He noted that education occurred “when [the teacher] stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.” (1970: 34), seeing his work as contributing to the creation of a world ”in which it will be easier to love” (1970: 24). However he was not explicit about how he defined love and the centrality of love in his work is often over looked (Schoder 2010).
My experience suggests that if we start to speak of love in education we also need to acknowledge fear too. Seeing ourselves and the world differently can be fearful. It requires courage and yet it is through touching our own vulnerability and seeing that of others that love can emerge and become a force capable of transformation, that can help us move towards freedom.
‘As our cultural awareness of the ways we are seduced away from love, away from the knowledge that love heals gains recognition, our anguish intensifies. But so does our yearning. The space of our lack is also the space of possibility’hooks 2000: 221
References
Bristow, J. 2019. Time for new thinking about mindfulness and social change https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/time-new-thinking-about-mindfulness-and-social-change/
hooks, b. 2000. All about love: new visions. New York: Harper Perenial
hooks, b. 1994. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge
Freire, P. 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum
Schoder, E. 2010. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of love. https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/27183/
Zajonc, A. 2006. Love and knowledge: recovering the heart of teaching through contemplation. Teachers College Record, 108, 1742–1759.
To cite: Barratt, C. 2019. What’s love got to do with it. Contemplative Pedagogy Network Blog. Accessed 16th August 2024 https://contemplativepedagogynetwork.com/2019/09/09/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it/
Waking up to suffering and the possibility of change
I had been reflecting for several days on how to bring this series of responses to the ‘The Mindfulness Conspiracy’ to a close when I randomly opened a booked of poetry on ‘Singapore’ by Mary Oliver. I will let you read it before I explain why I thought it relevant.
Singapore
Mary Oliver
In Singapore, in the airport,
A darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl.
Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.
A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together,
and neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.
Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as hubcaps,
with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.
I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and
fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?
Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
The way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.
First featured in Poetry July 1988, freely available through Poetry Foundation
_____________
This poem captures for me something fundamental about the social and critical aspects of mindfulness practice – that mindfulness practice can wake us up to suffering, our own and others. It can ‘rip darkness’ from our eyes. It also points to our preference for poems which help us ‘stand in a happy place’ which unknowingly, yet beautifully captures the tension between a mindfulness which connects us to a ‘happy place’ yet fails to develop real awareness.
My own practice has helped me to become aware of the discomfort I feel in situations like those described so poignantly above. It is through the very personal and painful exploration that deep mindfulness practice encourages that I have come to see my own prejudice, privilege and self-absorption. I have come to see how heavily edited by version of ‘reality’ was (is!?), how the strong sense of self-determination in my understanding of my life course led to complacency, disconnection and a undervaluing of others.
Purser notes that mindfulness has been promoted in such a way that personal stress has been disconnected from societal causes. This is not without foundation in some contexts, but I have found that mindfulness practice has provided me with a way to see societal causes of suffering more clearly, as well as acknowledge my own role in perpetuating those stresses for others and the planet. For me mindfulness has collapsed the distinction between the personal and social so that work to create change ‘out there’ is not distinct from creating change ‘in here’. For me this has simultaneously led to greater activity and engagement in the world to acknowledge and address the challenges we face as well as a more sincere commitment to personal practice.
Later in the article Purser describes how ‘proponents of mindfulness believe that the practice is apolitical’ and that this underlies many of the issues he raises. I admit that it has taken me some time (and a little help from my friends!) to come to understand just how political it is and how it is intertwined with concerns about the weaponisation of resilience and the responsibilisation of wellbeing.
I have confidence from the responses to the article that there are growing numbers of individuals within the mindfulness movement, as well as those interested in contemplative pedagogy, who do consider it to be political. However, it is important that we are not complacent; that we are open to the valuable critique offered by Purser so that we stay awake, aware of different challenges and view points so that opportunities for meaningful change are not lost.
Thanks to everyone for your contributions in this important debate.
To cite: Barratt, C. 2019. Waking up to suffering and the possibility of change. Contemplative Pedagogy Network Blog. Accessed 16th August 2024 https://contemplativepedagogynetwork.com/2019/07/03/waking-up-to-suffering-and-the-possibility-of-change/