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Badlands National Park. May 2018
TO JOIN THE STILL/WILD MOVEMENT
1. Make a commitment to honor the quiet, contemplative dimension of your life by engaging in a regular contemplative (i.e. "Still") practice. This need not take the form of meditation in the traditional sense...
2. Bring the WILD, empyreal energy from your practice into every aspect of your life: Work, art, change-making, home. Go HERE.
ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS
3. Follow S/W on Instagram (not required, obviously, but the photos are informative and, we hope, inspiring).
4. Reach out to founder Sara Sharpe LaMance if you feel so led. She is happy to correspond with you as you lean into both your Stillness and your Wildness. Beginning and committing to a regular STILL practice can be hard - Sara is happy to be an involved, fellow traveler!
STILL/WILD: Contemplative Practice for Change-Making Women
THIS IS NOT YOUR USUAL MEDITATION PRACTICE
In light of the exhaustion activism can bring, STILL/WILD offers a contemplative (and rejuvenating) practice for *change-making women.
Ultimately, it offers much more than that.
*At S/W, our idea of "change-making women" casts a wide net.
At home, at work, in the community or on the world stage, all women have daily opportunities to bring about change.
A note from the founder
The wheels of change turn slowly.
Activist women – those who shed light on human suffering and work to relieve it – know all too well the potential, personal cost of sustained change-making. Bearing witness to extreme suffering on the one hand, and callous indifference on the other, takes a toll on those who refuse to look away. Of course, those who suffer directly don’t have the luxury of looking away, and so it is helpful for the rest of us to hang in there - to find ways of speaking truth to power for the long haul. One way is to regularly honor the mystical, contemplative dimension of our lives.
A regular and rugged contemplative, or “Still,” practice is the portal through which we enter this dimension, and it is sustaining, yes. But it is also much more than that. As Fr. Thomas Keating taught us, “To move into that contemplative realm is the greatest adventure. It is to be open to the infinite and hence to infinite possibilities. Our private, self-made worlds come to an end; a new world appears within and around us and the impossible becomes an everyday experience.”
We invite you into the contemplative realm - into the Stillness - so that you might have some reprieve from your change-making work. More importantly, we invite you into the Stillness so that you might, in every way, experience a new world.
Beginning and maintaining a regular practice is challenging in the beginning, especially if you are new to the Stillness. But we can practice together, and inspire one another, here and everywhere.
We enter into the STILLNESS so that we might bring our disciplined WILDNESS to bear on the most pressing issues of our day; not just today, but for as long as it takes.
Wild hope,
Sara
More about Sara Sharpe LaMance HERE
STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY
Today, and every day, we stand in fierce solidarity with our Black and Brown colleagues and community members. Within the STILL/WILD tribe, white sisters stand sentry so black & brown sisters can speak.
The transformative power of rage is welcome here.
"We burn with righteous anger but also love beyond understanding. We are not consumed."
~Julie Polter
