Well-Being Reflection
Heather’s last meeting of the year was with a group of democracy advocates setting their sights on 2025. Rather than talking about policy priorities or organizing models, they focused on strengthening their well-being and the well-being of their organizations and communities.
To begin that work, Heather led the group through a set of guided journaling prompts. We're sharing them with you now as we can all benefit from a focus on well-being in 2025. Pour a cup of tea, find some quiet space, light a candle, and see what emerges in your responses to the prompts.
Joy
Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley
FOR A JOY THAT TRANSCENDS
Honest God,
We don’t want to fake it. We can’t go on with forced smiles and feigned laughter when happiness seems so far from us. The weight of the work is so heavy, it feels as if we don’t have any strength left to carry joy along with it. Be with us now as we try to reclaim and attune to some beauty in the world. Keep us from despair. Let joy be the arms that carry us from hopelessness. Not that we would have to manufacture our own happiness, but that a mysterious peace would comfort us, that joy itself would be the ground beneath our feet when we feel weary. Grant us emotional honesty on the journey, knowing you will never ask us to dismiss our pain; rather, you ensure that our pain doesn’t consume us. Remind us that more than one thing can be true at once. That the world can be terrible and still dare to be beautiful. In the fight against oppression in all its forms, may joy protect us. Amen.
How do you reclaim and attune to beauty in the world?
What are the ways that joy might protect you?
Rest
The Nap Ministry’s Nap Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture by Tricia Hersey
Everything in our culture is working to prevent you from resting. Capitalism does not want us to rest or pause. Take a moment, a day, a week, a month, or a lifetime to feel and understand this. Centering care, rest, space, silence, and connection is how we disrupt grind culture. Today, you can begin the escape from your toxic socialization. There is a new way. You don’t have to earn rest. You can rest now.
To snatch rest - to reclaim your time for moments of rest - is to be so focused on liberation that you begin to transcend expectations about what rest is. Those socialized into a capitalist, white- supremacists patriarchal system have no clear idea of what rest is. These systems make us fearful, closed, and hard. The true work is to offer yourself grace and mercy as you slowly deprogram. We are creating and inventing. Find ways to snatch rest no matter what.
What might your creative, inventive, expansive version of rest look like?
How could you snatch rest? And how can you find ways to reclaim your time for rest?
Boundaries
Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley
FOR BOUNDARIES
God of boundaries,
Remind us that sometimes we need to walk away from people and situations for our own rest and survival. That when the demands of the world grow loud, we have full agency to choose silence and peace. The stories we tell ourselves about why we cannot do so are often grounded in guilt - a guild that has been carefully implanted by a society that believes we are products to be used and consumed. We have been pushed and pulled out of ourselves and our own desires. Grant us the courage to say “no” without apology, that we would meet the demands of this world with truth-telling and self-charity, knowing that our boundaries are holy ground. We will not survive by inching further and further away from safety. Show us that sometimes the boundary we fear setting marks the border between freedom and bondage. Be with us on the journey back to a solid voice. When we speak no, let it shatter chains. Ask:
What are the stories you tell yourself that keep you out of alignment with your own well-being?
What are the places where you might need to say ‘no’ or ‘not me’ or ‘not now’ for your own rest and survival?
Adapting
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Breath is a practice of presence. One of the physical characteristics that unites us with marine mammals is that they process air in a way similar to us. Though they spend most or all of their time in water, they do not have gills. We, too, on land are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must. The adaptations that marine mammals have made in relationship to breathing are some of the most relevant for us to observe, not only in relationship to our survival in an atmosphere we have polluted on a planet where we are causing the ocean to rise, but also in relationships to our intentional living, our mindful relation to each other. [...]
There is more than one way to breathe in the Arctic. As the narwhal, beluga, and bowhead whales.
Beluga shapeshifts, evolved to look like ice itself, and congregates in the shallow estuaries, singing.
Narwhal stays in deeper water, nearer to pack ice, grows a horn to break through, changes color over its life. Needs no other teeth. Just the one.
Bowhead says bigger is better and moves alone. Strong enough to break ice with a bare skull, old enough to remember before all of this. Never stops growing.
And you? Maybe it’s time to remember that there is more than one way to breathe in icy depths or summer heat. To thank your ancestors for how you have evolved in the presence of polar bears, harpoons, and other threats. To think on what you want to shift, how you want to grow, what you need to remember.
And me? It was always you I loved, not your elegant strategy. I will love you still, if you now outgrow it. I will love you more whether time moves forward or backwards. Whether ice melts or water freezes back. Whether your next move is protection, breakthrough, shift, or any combination. There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three.
What do you need to shift, grow, or remember to engage in individual practices of well-being?
If you are able to make these shifts, what might be possible for you? For your work? For our community?
Closing
Radical Gratitude Spell by adrienne maree brown
a spell to cast upon meeting a stranger, comrade or friend working for social and/or environmental justice and liberation:
you are a miracle walking
i greet you with wonder
in a world which seeks to own
your joy and your imagination
you have chosen to be free,
every day, as a practice.
i can never know
the struggles you went through to get here,
but i know you have swum upstream
and at times it has been lonely
i want you to know
i honor the choices you made in solitude
and i honor the work you have done to belong
i honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself
and your journey
to love the particular container of life
that is you
you are enough
your work is enough
you are needed
your work is sacred
you are here
and i am grateful