In the past ten years or so, in my life outside Academia, I have delved into a course of independent study: a search for a more heart- and spirit-centered way of thinking than the one that predominates within the walls of the Ivy Tower, or in the modern western world. (Like many before me, I was propelled to this when “things fell apart” in my life and I faced some Life Challenges head on.) I have traversed a terrain of readings by spiritual leaders from diverse traditions, including varieties of Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, Sikhism, Toltec wisdom, and Christian mysticism; translations of Eastern thought for Western audiences (e.g. by Jack Kornfield and Pema Chodrön); the work of spiritual psychologists like Tara Brach (www.tarabrach.com); Jungian psychologists (e.g. Karl Jung, Marion Woodman); more edgy/New Agey social science (e.g. Ken Wilber, Michael Singer); and New Atheistic thinking about the nature of consciousness (Sam Harris).

Along with reading, I have tried a variety of practices: various forms of yoga and meditation, along with other embodied ways of getting out of my own head: swimming, hiking, running, and being in nature.

Admittedly, in all of this I have only skimmed the surface of traditions that could take a lifetime of study and practice to fully understand. I have not been in search of a singular “answer” or pathway to Enlightenment as much as an understanding of the many ways that humans throughout history have probed the mysteries of the universe and dealt with the challenges of life.

Indeed, I have found a common core to these diverse philosophies – one that stands in rather stark contrast with the dominant values of academia and the modern western world. The practices and philosophies all strive to get people beyond ego-centric, left-brained, rational/logical/analytical world views and to tap into something that goes under or over or beyond words.

This intuitive, organic, holistic, heart-centered, ego-transcendent orientation to the world has been an important guide for the ways I try to live my life and do my work today. From this immersion in a set of ideas that live outside of my academic world, the mindset that I had when I entered Academia with Ph.D. in hand in 1995 has been considerably shifted. Hopefully, my actions have followed suit.

And yet, for the most part I have kept this thinking separate from my public academic work. This self-surveillance is propelled by the wariness that reins within the Academy about anything that might be even remotely “unscientific,” religious, mystical or dogmatic. Things that cannot easily be dissected, tabulated, labeled, categorized and typecast are quite suspect in the Kingdom of the Left Brain. The Cartesian divide of mind and spirit is alive and well, and we police ourselves into maintaining it.

Ironically, perhaps, I have done some of the heaviest self-policing when I direct my work to activist-oriented scholars. I expect “push back” if I speak about such “soft” matters as love, kindness, compassion and acceptance, or call for using the word “transformative” rather than “critical.” I am aware that many may see this as too soft a way of responding to power. Injustices must be named head on, confronted, taken to task, pushed back upon.

For sure, there are exceptional scholars who traverse the divide between heart and mind, and between criticality and love, with grace and power. Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sofía Villenas are just a few who come to mind. These heart-centered scholars inspire and embolden me.

In recent years, I have taken on the topics of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness in public blogs (e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-faulstich-orellana/on-gratitute-genocide-rec_b_4400474.html), in ways that I think also take seriously the importance of recognizing injustice and oppression in the world. My recent book (Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love) calls for researchers to “see with our hearts” and for teachers to embrace a “pedagogy of heart and mind.” In the book I mention Thich Naht Hahn and talk about the “animus.” But I skirt widely around the word “spirituality,” and make no real mention of the many other influences on my thinking or on my life –  perspectives that are rarely heard in academia. My silence makes me complicit in shoring up the Cartesian divide.

But I’m feeling bolder now. Perhaps because there is more opening for such thinking: a growing recognition of the limitations of rational empiricism, as well as the limits of criticality. Perhaps, too, I feel a little clearer about how seemingly contradictory perspectives on the world can and do come together, how they can work in productive tension to point to new possibilities. I am more and more convinced that what the world really needs is a fundamental transformation in the ways we think about everything – not just critical analyses that simply topple or invert power, but then re-create it in some new form.

So I’d like to use some of these blog columns to work out and try on my thinking about these matters. (This will include thinking about not-thinking: understanding the limits of the analytical mind.)

I’ll continue to reflect on our ongoing practice at B-Club, and highlight the academic theories that inform that work. But I’ll try to make more visible these other influences on my practice, and the ways that I am seeking to integrate them into my voice as both a scholar and a social justice advocate.

I will also grapple directly with paradoxes and tensions between a “critical” stance (i.e. focused on naming and changing power relations in the world) and a “spiritual” one (i.e. focused on compassion, love and acceptance). Some may see these as irreconcilable, but I think such tension offers the most productive space for propelling the world into new possibilities. Specifically, I will explore the paradoxes of:

(1) accepting what is, as it is, and changing the world

(2) being in the Now, and preparing for the future

(3) naming inequities and injustices, and assuming a stance of profound gratitude for what we have, and

(4) naming and claiming social positionality, and questioning all forms of ego-identification.

These are not easy paradoxes to unpack, and I will be working out some of my thinking as I go. But thinking is much more powerful when it is done in dialogue with others.  (And then after thinking together, we can let it settle itself.)

So once again I will put out a plea to readers. Do you see the comment box below? I hope you will embolden yourself to write something there. Give me some “push back,” if you will. Some words of inspiration, if you feel inspired. Did something resonate for you? Give you pause? Something you want to think more about, or offer readers a different way of viewing?  Something you want to let settle, and see where it lands?