Week 8 - Group Post (Michelle, Harry, Matthew)

Spirit Realm in Academia: A Movement for Spiritual Liberation

In "a belief in mental health", Kai Cheng Thom details the struggle she faced as her parents pressured her about his academic life while she struggled through finding himself as a transgender female, even trying to commit suicide. Her experience is a perfect example of how our current culture involves working to the point where we are unhappy. Success is the sole goal in life with little to no regard of mental health. I notice especially in immigrant families that they have worked so hard to get where they are that they expect their children to also be able to push through. I too struggle with this concept sometimes. Often I wonder: if I'm not struggling, am I working hard enough? This kind of thinking is toxic. I believe this mentality was born because we do not put enough focus on mental health. And why not? I feel like our society is so driven towards progress and producing novel ideas. We expect more and more out of each new generation. Instead of asking a general question, I want to ask: do you feel like the progress made in the world is worth risking the mental health of our society? Is our purpose in life to push ourselves so hard to what we now consider success?

“Earth Song as Storywork” is a recollection of Brownwyn Frederick’s and Frances Wyld’s encounters with Earth’s natural tones within their own academic careers. “Earthsongs” refer to the sensible textures of our observation of the world—sound, sight, touch, etc. For them, such awareness is attributable to indigenous teachings, because their classical approach to learning involves making sense of the environment and each other. Moreover, this institution predates modern academia, which emphasizes for knowledge to be scrutinized through closed-minded empiricism. The monotony eventually comes over Fredericks and Wyld; so, both women describe what it means to briefly pause on academics. Fredericks describes a story where she breaks from the normalcy of her university schedule and is introduced to a stranger. She and the stranger converse while she her car is pulled over and cars line-up behind her; yet, no car rudely tells Fredericks to move has she continues her conversation with the stranger. For Fredericks, she believes that the instance she listened to her Earthsong the environment rewarded her with calmness and friendship. Overall, both scholars are dissatisfied of how the academy compromises theirs’ and others’ abilities to seek out Earthsongs. As a result, Fredericks and Wyld both “learnt how to break the silences that continue to make a Eurocentric view dominant.” (Fredericks 8)

A key point circulating through class is that academia perpetually suppresses investigations into our spiritual selves. For one, by learning scientific methods and construction of logical arguments we develop a stigma for metaphysical concepts like “Earthsongs.” For Fredericks and Wyld, this is the “silencing” pursued by academia. (Fredericks 8) Many of us experience a silencing within the university eventually. Self-care, adequate diet and sleep, or recreation are put off by homework, extracurricular, and exams. Truer still is that our awareness to the environment is turned off; we study or think too much while walking to class and often don’t pay attention to the rustle of the trees, squirrels chasing each other, or shadows caused by buildings. In silence is potential deafness, and for this reason I like the analogy made between songs and the natural order of the environment. Perhaps by listening occasionally, students may understand how the world continually speaks to us. It may serve as a guide for leading our lives, just as it did for Wyld in her lessons from the Elder.
Lastly, we look at the article “Spirituality in the academy: reclaiming from the margins and evoking a transformative way of knowing the world” by Riyad Ahmed Shahjahan, we find that it is hard to come across a school that will offer and or teach some form of spirituality. Whether it has a significant religious meaning behind it or just about faith itself, schools just don’t seem to offer children these types of courses based on that the school systems just don’t want to allow it. School systems don’t want students to think about spirituality and practices that can’t be explained, but focus it on studies that have been done and can be proven, the concept of “being” and “non-being”. 
  Coming from one of the best high schools in the California, spiritual classes were not offered as the school system could not find a curriculum that would fit with a spiritual realms class. Even yoga was a hard class to get into the system as it had some resemblance to spiritual realms classes. Not realizing it at the time and not focusing on that there weren’t any spiritual classes, it is really shocking to see how a top tier school would reject such a class because it couldn’t follow a curriculum and or that they didn’t want a class to be offered that had no real evidence to back up its practices.

Image Souce:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/146788380@N02/34552612656?ytcheck=1

Works Cited

Fredericks, Bronwyn. "Earth Song as Storywork: Reclaiming Indigenous

Knowledges."ResearchGate. N.p., n.d. Web.

Shahjahan, Riyad Ahmed. "Spirituality in the academy: reclaiming from the margins

and evoking a transformative way of knowing the world." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18.6 (2005): 685-711. Web.

Winch, Guy. Why we all need to practice emotional first aid | TEDX | TED.com. TedX, Nov.

2014. Web.