Our contemplative inquiry in Flourishing Kin has traversed from kin relationality as the web of life to the body seed and how it dialogues with inner and outer phenomena and into the senshine experience. This path suggests how living beings originate and nourish from their ecosystem and transform and decay to sustain the shared extensive networks. In this chapter we are flowing into the heart.
The Indigenous heart sings of the actions of love: the composting of self-centered perceptions and the regeneration of compassion and care practices for humans and non-human beings.
From the Mesoamerican perspective, the heart is the central animic entity weaving through all experiences. It is the seat of our emotions. Emotions here are the spiritual, interrelated forces or systems of impulses that offer opportunities for prosocial behaviors. In the social sciences, prosocial behavior relates to interpersonal, social acts that benefit or care for other humans. Here, I suggest an expanded definition that calls for radical actions of belonging based on love for all beings.
A prosocial self-construct or idea of self is the bedrock of Indigenous contemplative spiritualities and sciences. The Indigenous zeal for kinship sets the ground for relationality, mutuality, collaboration, and shared life. Traversing kin relationality, let us consider the idea of the social self through emotions—within our systems of relationships and our myriad symbolic artistic expressions.
It is well accepted that mind and culture are mutually constituted and socially constructed.1 In the last two decades, emotions have also gained prominence as crucial motivators of behavior, establishing them as a substratum of culture.2 Emotions can engender othering (when exclusive) or belonging (when intentionally prosocial). Emotions can also be the channel for exceptional artistic expression.3 Emotional artistry resonates in Indigenous communication patterns, responses, and expressions. Each song of emotional experience or symphony of constellations of emotions points to our prosocial values and collaborations among different species within local ecologies. We use Indigenous stories of empowerment, where regulation and orientation of emotional impulses generate better interactions and actions toward collective well-being, to support practices of care and belonging within our Mother Earth communities.
Today, however, climate and health pandemics seem to be causing an emotional recession that makes finding the heart increasingly tricky. Heart disturbances, from grief to moral injury, manifest as languishing through anxiety and depression, sadness, guilt and shame, anger and fear.4 Climate devastation has caused a context-specific ailment called eco-grief or solastalgia, the existential distress caused by the climate crisis.5 As opposed to nostalgia—the homesickness felt when separated from home—solastalgia is the distress of being connected to home and realizing its degradation. It manifests as dislocation, helplessness, and a loss of purpose from being undermined by forces destroying the potential for solace.
Meek public policies on climate action and political and economic-based decisions—like the US not being a signatory of the Convention on Biological Diversity—intensify heart grief and stress from a lack of influence and control on our life conditions.6 These power dynamics impede down-regulation and a return to emotional baseline, further impacting collective well-being. However, a change in cultural narratives can lead to social empowerment. Instead of our old cultural origin stories of exploitation, oppression, and abuse, which reinforce human supremacy, let us rewrite our stories to reflect ecological values that restore our Mother Earth system with the aim of collective flourishing.
Youth are especially vulnerable to these disturbances of the heart, falling prey to feelings of alienation, confusion, and disconnection from the principles and contexts of community. The global rise in depression and anxiety during and post-pandemic weighs significantly on youth, especially girls.7 Such forms of languishing in the last decade are related to technological dependency, poor peer relationships, decreased parental presence and nurturance, and increased parental rejection.8
These extreme forms of heart grief result in increased suicidal ideation and attempts. My own experience with self-harm as a young person is shared with an upsetting 14 to 20 percent of young adults. Adding to the collective wounds is the heartbreaking fact that teen survivors of sexual abuse have an increased likelihood of suicide, hostility, high-risk behavior, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and major depressive disorders (MDD). I know this story all too well in my flesh.
For everyone, especially youth, learning to find hope through resilience is now more critical than ever. Indigenous metaphors, songs, and collective movement (dance and ritual) reflect an unreserved kinship with our more-than-human Relatives. To know a phenomenon through its environmental interactions is to realize the complexity and plurality of Mother Earth and its kin relational quality. These brushstrokes of more nuanced outer and inner relational processes encourage an experiential sense of belonging, an essential looking outward for planetary health. They are the precursors to practices of compassion and care for flourishing kin.
Recent studies define compassion as the awareness of suffering of self and others, assessing the causes and conditions of such suffering, and the will to alleviate it. I want to emphasize the aspect of love action missing in this Western taxonomy. Compassion is action-oriented; it results in loving interventions intended to alleviate sorrow. Compassion also features mutuality; that is, the intervention transforms both entities. Compassion is not hierarchical as in benefactor-beneficiary. It is horizontal. The love action transforms all entities involved and connects them in fuller ways.
Thus, compassion is a profoundly moving emotional experience of self and others. In this way, it is not too distinct from an aesthetic arrest, an awe-filled stilling of the mind in the presence of great beauty. When we witness suffering, it causes us to reckon with our impermanence and our relationality. We recognize the same emotional experiences that occur in self and others. We assess their pain as our own. And we are motivated to alleviate such pain—to transform languishing into flourishing—and to participate in the care that benefits and connects all beings of Mother Earth, including all environmental phenomena.
For Indigenous Peoples, compassion enhances our actions of love and belonging for our flourishing kin. The song of our heart is one of bliss. It is a liberating, active, and creative force reaching ever closer to flourishing, enabling resilience, adaptation, and resourcefulness.
How can knowledge lead to actions that meet the challenges of our times: social and environmental injustices, health disparities, mass incarceration, and environmental destruction? Indigenous contemplative traditions have long sought to cultivate embodied and action-oriented knowledge. Heartfelt wisdom honors this goal. It encourages a shift from survival responses and intergenerational trauma toward care, connection, resilience, and flourishing. It builds on the prosocial values of reverence, respect, accountability, responsibility, kindness, generosity, awe, love, and sacredness.
We reflect on the heart as the seat of emotions and how they orient us toward collaboration and participatory actions for collective flourishing. We explore the colonial domination of Mother Earth and how it has impacted Indigenous Peoples and People of Color worldwide. Finally, as we move toward regeneration and planetary flourishing, we contemplate ways to build on our empowerment and resilience to enhance flourishing kin.
Here, we go deeper into prosocial behavior and how humans are prone to cultivate kind, social, and collaborative communities when exposed to diversified systems of being and knowing. Collective well-being centers on pluralism. It requires respect and esteem for cultural voices across lines of divergence and even conflict.
Conflict is part of learning how to be human. Conflict is present in, out, and through the human experience. When we ignore this reality, we have difficulties moving forward. We must accept that our worldviews may differ to encourage a critical view. We must assume they may contrast significantly with those deprived of language, culture, and Lands. Thus, we must turn our hearts to listen to their songs.
Indigenous traditions worldwide emphasize community well-being through kin relationality. This cultural value of prosocial emotions and behavior is vital for building resilient and flourishing communities of care and trust. We cultivate virtues and moral qualities through contemplative practices that embrace emotional vulnerability; individual concentration and equanimity; consideration of our place and impact on others’ well-being through observation and regulation of ourselves, others, and our interactions; and collective presence against oppressive cultural systems through engaged communities of transformative love, equity, and just action.
To listen to this practice, follow the link yuriacelidwen.com or the QR code on the table of contents.