May Weekend Wisdom with Dr. Brandon Nappi

Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi. We have combined all of May’s Weekend Wisdom.

5.31.20

This is a time for deep curiosity about some urgent questions: What is the connection between spiritual practice and social justice in our lives? Can our headstand in yoga class help us to take a stand in the community? Can our private breath practice on a meditation cushion empower us to support the rights of others so all can breathe more freely? Can we allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable as we hear the stories of oppression? How can we give ourselves compassion when we inevitably encounter racism within ourselves? If mindfulness only teaches us to be nice, then we are missing the fullness of mindfulness practice. If meditation and yoga have taught us to keep silent in the midst of injustice and racism, then we miss the opportunity our meditation and yoga practices provide to transform us. Spiritual practice leads to transformation, both individually and as a community; it gives us the inspiration and courage to work for peace by working against injustice. The healing of our hearts and our communities requires daily care and intention. Undoing the structures that have allowed slavery to mutate into legal forms of oppression takes time and dedication. While we practice mindfulness for personal equanimity, we also practice mindfulness to see things clearly. We practice to take wise action. We practice to embody our values even when it’s uncomfortable. So let’s practice breathing into a new place of courage. Let’s breathe into brave solidarity with all people who are struggling. Let’s breathe to dismantle systems that oppress all marginalized communities. Let’s breathe to look deeply to see the seeds of racism in ourselves. Let’s breathe to recognize that breathing itself is a privilege in a world where some people cannot. Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi.

5.24. 20

We’ve been thinking deeply about how work can work better for us and for all people. Here is Part 1 of our reflections on how we can design the new normal based on going down and deep in the following 5 ways. We hope you’ll bring these issues and questions back to your communities for discussion.

1. Equity: Who is in our community or workplace? Who is not in our community and why? What barriers, real or perceived, intention, or unintentional need to be addressed? What privilege and power do I hold, and how does that affect my work and relationships? How can we co-create workplaces that are safe and empowering for everyone?  

2. Truth-telling: Racism is a pervasive part of white American culture. Are we having consistent, brave, ongoing conversations about bias, race, and the role of privilege in our community or workplace? Are we actively working to heal racism inside of ourselves, in our communities, and in society at large? 

3. Preserving Pandemic Wisdom: What disruptions caused by this global pandemic need to be saved? What cultural habits, patterns, and policies need to be changed or let go of? 

4. Contemplative Practice: Seeing clearly and cultivating compassion to accept what is seen requires practices. Mindfulness and meditation are two ways to ground ourselves in the moment, and to grow awareness and acceptance. Ask your team how some kind of mindfulness and resilience practice can become a fixture in your workplace.

5. Fear: Fear is just as viral as the coronavirus. Our wisest decisions are not made from fear. How does fear show up in your work and personal relationships? How does it show up in your community? When you are in a fearful place, can you pause before letting fears drive you to action? Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi.

5.17.20

It’s important to name that the old normal was not normal. The building blocks of normal that we’ve used to create society are now being revealed for the absurdity and cancer that they are. Greed, serial distraction, privilege, exaggerated individualism, and inequity have created social structures designed to benefit some at the expense of others. We can do better. We can stretch wider. We can love bigger. These days do not call for half-measures and subtle interventions, but a wholesale re-evaluation of how we have structured communities. So how can we redesign a normal that serves and supports our full humanity? I don’t know. It’s clear that no one knows how to do this exactly. It takes radical boldness to say we don’t know how to do this, and yet it’s critically important to stay in the not knowing together. We know that we need to start before we have the answers. We need to look for the root causes of inequity, and we need to be brave enough to find that these roots are alive and well inside of us personally. All we know is that the same tired answers are no longer sufficient. “Don’t waste a good emergency,” the saying goes. This is why we need mindfulness practice more than ever—to ground us in the not knowing so we can stay with the hard questions long enough to boldly live into answers that are equitable and just for all. We have a chance to do something different. There are too many lives and too much at stake to waste this opportunity. Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi.

5.10.20

Let’s discover this together place of freedom together in my upcoming course, called Working with Your Inner Critic: Freeing Yourself from the Negative Narrative. While many of you know me as founder of Copper Beech Institute, I’d love to re-introduce myself to our new friends and share more. I’ve STRUGGLED with paralyzing self-criticism for my entire life. I’m hard on myself. I often feel completely incompetent. My suspicion is that no matter what I do, how prepared I am, or how much training I receive, it will never be enough. I LOVE theater, cooking, classical guitar, honest conversation, ripe avocadoes, yacht rock, learning, real volleyball, rock documentaries, being silly, and smell of butterfly bushes. I CRY easily. I DISLIKE celery, arrogance, fakeness, and meanness. I GEEK out over Latin etymology, spirituality, and all things medieval. I FEAR blood, creepy crawly things, watching myself on screen, playing guitar in public, and not being as funny as I think I am. I BELIEVE all people have infinite worth. I VALUE gentleness, humility, seeing others fully, and listening to people who value different things than I do. FUN FACTS: I lived in Italy, wrote my doctoral dissertation on Zen-Christian dialogue, lecture at Yale Divinity School, and studied to be a priest after college. My GUIDING TEACHERS have been Brene Brown, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton, and Richard Rohr. I have PRACTICED mindfulness for 20 years, mostly in the form of Zen meditation. I’m quite sure this has saved my life. I found meditation practice at a time when the crushing heaviness of anxiety and sorrow could no longer be self-medicated away by my own distractions. I am a dad to two wildly wonderful teen girls who are wise teachers beyond my imagining. I am a partner to my wife for 22 years who is quite possibly the wisest, purest soul I’ve ever encountered. I’m LEARNING to be gentle with myself, to be bolder with my convictions, and to be more fully myself.

5.3.20

I’m stuck by our extreme relationship to anger. At one end of the extreme, we repress and pretend that our anger isn’t longing for expression. “Are you angry?” someone asks us. “No, I’m just frustrated,” we explain, eager to soften the heat and intensity we feel, hoping not to be viewed as “too much” or “out of control”. We can quickly smooth over the jagged edges of anger and apologize for what we feel. It takes so much energy it takes to edit and dam our emotions based on social biases, gender expectations, and old stories we carry about what it means to be “good”. Others have old rage that is activated by nearly any minor infraction, a storm cloud of anger waiting to discharge its lightning upon any unsuspecting bystander. Anger itself is neither good nor bad. Both the under-expression of your anger and the over-expression of your anger is paralytic for your growth; it freezes you in old patterns and habits. A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. When we bring mindful awareness to our anger, we can harness the energy for constructive change. When we bring deep curiosity and compassion to our anger and allow ourselves to feel the full depth of our anger, it becomes a catalyst for change, for growth, and for advocacy. More than ever, the world needs our anger channeled mindfully with self- compassion as a catalyst to create a more just and equitable community.  Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi.