"Mindfulness Equity and Western Buddhism: Reaching People of Low Socioeconomic Status and People of Color"

Published in the International Journal of Dharma Studies, 2014.

This article shares research findings on the first pilot of the Mindfulness Allies Project -- a model to partner meditation teachers and centers with organizations serving under-resourced populations. For the pilot, I taught a summer mindfulness series at a community center serving low-income residents. Classes were free, as was childcare during and dinners afterward.

Abstract

This paper seeks to establish kinesthetic learning as an effective medium for religious studies education. A historical overview of the presence and absence of movement and dance in Christian worship and the academic study of religion is followed by illustrations of embodied commonalities between the dance experience and the religious experience. A discourse on the general efficacy of kinesthetic learning is followed by testimony specifically supporting its inclusion in the study of religion. The paper concludes with examples of the author’s own work in embodied religious studies teaching and what implications such methods could hold for the discipline of religious studies.

Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming by Kimerer LaMothe, 2015

Kazuo Ohno's World: from without & within by Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno, translated by John Barret, 2004

my body, the buddhist by Deborah Hay, 2000

Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics by Sondra Horton Fraleigh, 1987