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Dear friend,
In northern WI, the Western Ojibwe people call today’s full moon of May Waabigwani-giizis — the Flower Moon, celebrating the promise of renewal in this season. Indeed, we are currently rejoicing in the buds on the trees, trillium blooms, and robin, finch and cardinal symphonies, confirming our unwavering faith in rebirth and resilience. That is why this month, we are especially delighted to share a deeply restorative interview with our cherished friend, Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous scholar whose work has pioneered the Indigenous contemplative experience within Contemplative Studies. At Loka, we feel lucky to call her a friend and are always learning from her. Enjoy!
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Dekila Chungyalpa
Director, the Loka Initiative at the Center for Healthy Minds
University of Wisconsin–Madison
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Photo courtesy of Yuria Celidwen.
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Yuria Celidwen, Ph.D. is of Indigenous Nahua and Maya descent from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Her scholarship centers on Indigenous forms of contemplation examining self-transcendence and its embodiment in prosocial behavior (ethics, compassion, kindness, awe, love, and sacredness). She calls this work the Indigenous “Ethics of Belonging” rooted in honoring Life. For the past two decades her work has supported the advancement of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the rights of Nature as well as the implementation of the Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. In addition, she leads workshops on prosocial practices from an Indigenous perspective, raising awareness of social and environmental justice and conservation that restores authority to Indigenous Peoples Lands and Territories, and recently authored Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being.
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What issues are you as a faith or environmental leader, working on that are the greatest priority for your community?
Community incites the ancient analogy of breathing: inhaling expands dynamic awareness of our environment; exhaling deepens perceptive stillness within it. From here, when sensing community, I begin with the planetary, even cosmic, family that reveals to us our relatedness. This woven ontology composts narratives of alienation and births us into belonging. It manifests the warp and weft of collective lifeways: a quality of being with others that involves growing an acorn within its grove, where it attains its flourishing only when the grove prospers. The multiplicity of relations thus releases the bondages of isolation and turns harm into love.
It becomes effortless to realize how much we are in continuous relations with our environments, from the atmospheric forces and more-than-human kin around us to our social human worlds and identity narratives. These relations influence us, and we do the same in turn. We constantly enhance or weaken this web of living kinship with our presence. We may do so by reacting to external stimuli, ensuring our well-being alone, or responding skillfully by following an internal consideration to benefit the larger system. I begin there, with the commitment of serving the extended planetary family, which calls for an intentional relatedness through dynamic experience nourished by care.
My landline Ancestors—my kin of lands, waters, and skies—lie in the cloud forest of the Maya Bats’il K’op Peoples of Chiapas, Mexico. These unique forests hold 30 percent of the country’s freshwater resources. They are home to an estimated total of 50,000 species of plants and animals—more than 200 species of mammals, 117 of amphibian species, 230 species of reptiles, 700 species of birds, more than 4000 species of plants, and 80 percent of the known species of butterflies in the country, plus they are home to more than 200 migratory species. Chiapas is the most biodiverse area in the country, and the third in the world.
Today, however, this cloud forest ecosystem has lost 90 percent of its original boundary due to alarming degradation that threatens all freshwater bodies and the downstream supply of water systems. It is the most highly threatened ecosystem in the world. In North America, the only remaining cloud forest of this kind is where I was born and raised. Yet, despite their remarkable resilience, our more-than-human Relatives are rapidly losing their habitats due to this strenuous impact on ecosystems that depend on water sources. The cloud forests are diminishing in vegetation coverage, leaving the soil extremely vulnerable to erosion, wildfire spread, and imminent flooding, forcing species to migrate to the proper altitude ranges of their habitat.
Alongside this, our Indigenous families are equally endangered. Thirty percent of the population of Chiapas identifies as Indigenous—20 percent of the national total—but they make up two-thirds of those suffering extreme poverty. A fourth of them do not know how to read or write, and less than 2 per cent have earned a high school diploma. Similar to the lack of access to education, scarce health care services, forced displacement, and violence due to organized crime put these populations at the highest risk of extinction.
Linguistically, for example, our languages are vanishing. Globally, we lose an Indigenous language every two weeks; by the end of the century, the world will have lost 90 percent of its linguistic diversity. This cultural erasure mirrors the mass extinction of biodiversity loss in the tropical belt—we are witnessing a biocultural collapse.
We must comprehend that the trend of biocultural loss is not only impacting Indigenous Peoples. Mountain degradation affects alpine areas, especially in Europe, North America, Central, South, and Eastern Asia. Globally, agricultural expansion drove almost 90 percent of global deforestation due to small-scale farming and livestock grazing, with the remaining damage resulting from illegal logging, infrastructure development, and fragmentation of forests derived from changes in water courses, like channeling of rivers and dam building. Biocultural loss is affecting our planetary family.
While endangered, Indigenous Peoples globally are equally resilient and fierce in the face of adversity. We have responded to the challenges through the skillful weaving of stronger relationships. My bloodline community is tackling the weaknesses in the production system by returning to Indigenous ecological sciences like watershed conservation projects and fire management strategies. It is a vision of collective rights that promotes sustainable practices with resource management sovereignty and Land rights that give us back the autonomy over our resources and the decision-making in restoring and conserving our ecosystem. But there is so much work yet to do!
Indigenous Peoples are role models for addressing the global crisis through collective, comprehensive participation in finding solutions through an intelligence model based not on problem-solving but on cultivating nourishing relationships. The insight of the Indigenous approach to intelligence—one that I learned as a child from my Father—is an approach that may blend public policy, the shift of a market economy toward collective flourishing, and what I’ve called Ch’ul jkanan, stewarding the Sacred, and Kanan k’inalat, protecting the Earth.
These lifeways bridge the larger cosmic community with the community of origin, like the breath continually flowing in a dynamic dance of sacred reciprocal service. In this relationship, holding the proper place of pause and action, we can embrace the flourishing of all.
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What do you feel has been successful in your approach so far and where do you see challenges?
The relationship between successes and challenges is profoundly complex. As with all non-dual emergence, the two are part of each other. We live in a society that tends to emphasize success. We may forget that we need the tension of the challenge to learn to find relief within chaos and grow out of it. It is the art of embracing the ever-shifting emotions and actions.
It’s been crucial for me to push for representation of the sophisticated systems of Indigenous traditions within contemplative studies—a field shaped by the same systems of privilege, exclusion, and oversight as the larger society. But I believe contemplative practices are extraordinary spiritual technologies. If practiced properly, they unbind the veils of delusion by encouraging us to see the world in its mighty beauty and chaos, discerning whether our lifeways serve the self or the collective, and unfolding a reckoning with the pain of historical wounds and their consequences. But the practices do not leave us alone in the horrors of humanity’s worst traits. The practices are the soothing balm capable of turning turmoil into order: a new order rooted in compassion, and thus, reparations—a return to reverence and respect for our planetary community.
Based on this map of how contemplation works, a central offering of my work has been the development in the past two decades of my thesis on the Ethics of Belonging. This broad proposition has two main components: (1) kin relationality—the understanding that all existence is kin; and (2) ecological belonging—that by being alive, we are already part of an extended planetary family, manifesting relationality through affect, cognition, volition, and motivation. It’s been moving to witness these insights taking root, finding resonance, sparking participation, and gently reshaping the field into something more inclusive, shifting toward the natural world, more aware of how our collective narratives shape our stories, and turning stories of hurt to ones of flourishing for the planetary community.
There have also been deep challenges in advancing these ideas and practices, especially my frustration with how contemplative wisdom is commodified, extracted, appropriated, and stripped of its context and tradition. Too often, these practices are reduced to business models geared to simplified ways for self-soothing instead of being honored as pathways for relationship-building and actual community development rooted in purpose and meaning.
Of course, there are deep challenges in bringing Indigenous sciences—rooted in reciprocity, intersubjectivity, and poetic observation—into conversation with Western frameworks that often prioritize objectivity, utilitarianism, and transactional knowing. Indigenous sciences base their insights on rigorous observation and analysis of phenomena, but their scopes and rewards are strikingly dissimilar from those of Western science. Our narratives are not hypotheses or tests to prove causality. Instead, we engage forms of knowledge too often dismissed and misunderstood in their depth of environmental and human behavior, grounded in relationship and lived experience.
Under contemplative analysis, colonial ideas about dominating all creation are exposed as false. The world has much to learn from narratives of reverence and inclusion, reparation, restoration, and relationality. Mine is a labor of fierce love that bridges belonging across paradigms while honoring the depths and distinctiveness of traditions, carrying forward a relational way of being and loving the world.
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If you had a message for environmental and climate leaders, what would it be?
First, I suggest dropping the perception that our current challenges only involve environmental and climate leaders. We live in unprecedented times threatening most life forms, our social, political, and economic systems, and our health and well-being. Under such circumstances, we must move toward a horizontal way of participation guided by traditional ecological knowledge and technological innovations that follow the ethical system of collective flourishing. Organizational structures should be grassroots and community-led initiatives, rather than oligarchies and autocracies. We need the whole community’s participation, a new collective ecology based on reverential ethics, aesthetic expression, and spirituality in the service of the planet.
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How do you personally deal with challenges and uncertainty and what are techniques that you find work for you?
Community, community, community. Community has the unparalleled power of restoration by enhancing others through sharing ourselves. Community-building is a way of caressing the world communally. It is a soothing way of cultivating a safe and tender home while embracing our full and fallible humanity. Nowadays, when a crusade of segregation and othering restricts freedom of movement and silences the calls for awareness and reckoning, we are vulnerable to the grip of the expectation of danger and unpredictability. Returning to building communities of belonging, awe, play, and joy is crucial so that our sense of place is one of connection and purpose, not defense mechanisms and maladaptive behaviors. Returning to the aspiration of planetary flourishing sows all of our inherent right to life. Indigenous contemplative practices like the ones I have brought forward consider the personhood of Nature and emphasize the importance of relationships. They are my haven and home for caressing the world. Tending to Nature is the art of becoming home.
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How can someone reading this newsletter support your work?
Please support me in contemplating collective flourishing through discerning awareness that undoes separation. Let’s join in chasing away the stories that guard an inner cell against our dreams and set these free to bridge communities of caressing the world. Meet fear, guilt, and shame with kindness, holding their vulnerability through reckoning and reparations. We need each other to compost the decaying stories of othering and a planetary community to caress the kernels of home. Challenges are insurmountable, but also limitless is our compassion. Like the breath, we require a pause to continue the dynamic way forward. If any of my words touched you, follow my work. There are many ways you can get involved in supporting it.
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LOKA INITIATIVE NEWS AND UPDATES
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The paper calls for a shift in the way humans relate to nature, moving away from a contemporary scientific approach toward one rooted in Indigenous perspectives, aiming to foster true sustainability and justice in the face of the Anthropocene.
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Loka had an amazing time on April 23 as co-host of this year’s UW-Madison Earth Fest Forum: Climate Courage - Finding Resilience in the Midst of Change! If you missed this in-person event, we are happy to share the Nelson Institute’s recordings:
“Psychology of Deep Resilience” - watch and learn about resilience in today’s landscape and Loka’s current research explained by Dr. Christy Wilson-Mendenhall and our Director, Dekila Chungyalpa, plus an awareness practice, led by Dr. Richard J. Davidson!
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SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO
REVEREND ANNE BOOKLESS!
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Loka team members Dekila, nisch, and Mirtha recently had the profound experience of attending an exhibit at the Nelson Institute’s Robinson Map Library - The Disabled Wandering Atlas. Curated by Anne E. Stoner, the exhibition consisted of drawn and interpretive maps, field recordings and field video, and explored the everyday experiences of disabled individuals, asking if disabled wandering exists and how it functions, with representations of disabled individuals based in the US and internationally.
We felt blessed to have been invited by Rev. Anne Bookless, pastor, artist, and wife to Loka’s esteemed advisor for Creation at the Crossroads, the Reverend Dr. Dave Bookless, Head of Theology at A Rocha International. Anne contributed multiple pieces to this exhibit and we are so grateful for her insight and wisdom and the teaching of how to transcend our confinements in these times. During the early pandemic, Anne, being clinically vulnerable, isolated in her bedroom for over 100 days. To maintain mental health, she designated one side of the bed for work and the other for relaxation, a boundary stitched into a quilt. Despite physical confinement, she discovered new ways to "wander." As a pastor, she worked remotely via Zoom, feeling she could virtually enter people's homes. For relaxation, she creatively "wandered" by virtually joining family events, watching live webcams of meaningful places, taking immersive virtual trips, and even converting local wheelchair strolls into progress on a virtual Camino de Santiago. Here, Anne shares a reflection on being a disabled Priest, in which she gives more insight into aspects of her art in the exhibition.
Thank you, Anne, for sharing your stirring work!
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Loka is an interdisciplinary collaboration among different programs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It is housed in the Center for Healthy Minds in collaboration with:
The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and don’t reflect the opinions or beliefs of
UW-Madison, the Center for Healthy Minds or their affiliates.
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