Reflecting On Our Practices

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. In Fall 2020 the group read Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. This post reflects and extends our discussion.

 

Reflecting On Our Practices

By: Skylar Tibbetts, Kate Brunell, and Katherine Fry

 

In class this quarter, we read A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Jaquette Ray. Simultaneously, we are in the middle of a global pandemic and in isolation within our own respective homes. This has drastically affected our daily lives and the way in which we experience and interact with communal practices. As a class, we took this time to reflect on our own personal practices with hopes to better understand ourselves and our communities. 

 

The first question we wanted to ask our class during this reflection actually came from a different book, one read a few quarters back in this same seminar: Emergent Strategy, by adrienne marie brown. In the workbook, brown mentions that “We spend our lives in our unconscious practices, practices that make us deny our true selves, our true power, our collectivism. It takes three hundred repetitions for muscle memory and three thousand repetitions for embodiment.” Brown then proceeds to ask her reader (and the question we posed to our class), “What are you practicing? (Include anything you practice/repeat in your life, things you feel positive about, things you feel negative about – from meditation to burn-out, listening to interruption, community accountability to public takedowns, exercise, escaping, etc.)” There were a variety of answers to these questions and a general mix of positive and negative practices being shared. The practices students deemed positive ranged from mindfulness, meditation & yoga to cooking & baking to personal reflection (like making art & music, journaling, etc.). On the flip side, students felt themselves needing to make more time for positive practices as they succumbed to the burn-out culture of academia. Do these thoughts ring true for you too? What are you practicing? 

 

The second question we chose to ask served to further explore our own community and it’s direct effect on ourselves. We chose to ask about our school’s own practices to get a grasp on what people think of the institution they’re heavily connected to. Our question of: What practices does Western Washington University Implement? How do these practices influence the collective student body and the surrounding community? Elicited a multitude of responses. At the start of the discussion, students mainly aired their grievances about the now-prevalent individualist and avaricious attitudes the university propagated, as well as Western’s botched pandemic response. The conversation slowly shifted to the practices that attracted students to Western; the focus on sustainability and Western’s green legacy of environmentalism. These questions served to help us reflect on the negatives and positives of an institution we are all heavily involved in. What are your thoughts on the practices of your institutions? 

 

Following our discussion on community and institutional practices, our third and final question was to look at how our personal well being practices can be used to address the aforementioned grievances of individualistic avaricious attitudes of the university. Our question, How do you meld your well-being practices and the practices of your community to dispel guilt/burn-out and create harmony in your own life? Lead to a discussion surrounding what it means to be an active member in our communities, but to also take care of ourselves. Many of the responses expressed that it was important to address the glorification of burn-out and to set personal boundaries. By disrupting the expectations of guilt surrounding “not doing enough”, we allow ourselves as individuals to practice well-being and emotional sustainability in our lives. 

 

By reflecting on our own practices, we have managed to gain a higher level of appreciation for ourselves as individuals and for the communities we are part of and serve. We hope you’ll join us in reflecting on these questions, and we hope you find similar clarity that we did through reading this book and reflecting on our current lifestyles. 

 

Examples of individual/collective practices to get you started:

• Conflict avoidance
• Glorifying burn-out
• Over scheduling
• Mission drifting
• Check-ins 
• Retreats
• Active listening
• Community accountability
• Curiosity
• Intentional reflection 
• Group dynamics
• Boundary maintenance
• Self-care

 

Bibliography:

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2020. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

Brown, Adrienne M. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. , 2017. Print.

How Can You Help Birds Beat the Heat? (2018, October 31). Retrieved November 23, 2020, from https://www.birdconservancy.org/how-can-you-help-birds-beat-the-heat/