Submission Type
General Submission
Abstract
On May 14th, 2022, a racially motivated mass shooting occurred in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Western New York. The trauma brought fresh anguish to a fraught social landscape already shaken by COVID-19 and resurgent racism. This paper explores the formation of a campus meditation group that emerged in light of the shooting tragedy and prolonged pandemic suffering, and its members’ journeys of healing, self-discovery, and transformation. While scholars have critiqued the neoliberal higher education for producing self-enterprising individuals motivated by economic rationality, this paper offers our humble attempt to re-center meditation as a liberatory pedagogy in fostering a caring academy. Drawing from bell hook’s engaged pedagogy, the quantum model of social activism, and indigenous methodologies, this paper sheds light on meditation as an anti-oppressive, anti-colonial healing practice. The learning we gleaned may seem accidental, indeed at the margins of the formal university education. Yet it allowed us to embrace relational healing as a becoming process to counter the privileged capital of rationalism in neoliberal higher education and move towards a lived experience of compassion, self-actualization, and interbeing.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Wu, Jinting; Wang, Yuejia; Wu, Yu; and Zhang, Qi
(2025)
"The Heart of Higher Education: Rediscovering Meditation from the Margins of Learning to a Liberatory Pedagogy in the Post-Pandemic University,"
Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education: Vol. 2:
Iss.
2, Article 7.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25035/jche.02.02.07
Available at:
https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/jche/vol2/iss2/7
