ABSTRACT
Activists and social workers are beginning to realize the importance of both inner and outer work for global transformative social practice. Social movements of the past attended primarily to changing material conditions and, today, a new generation is inquiring into the importance of attending to internalized oppression, intergenerational trauma, and sustainability as manifested in the healing justice movement. The Buddhist concept, paticca samuppada, or interdependent co-arising, was fleshed out by scholar, activist, and teacher, Joanna Macy, to show how every person, object, feeling, and action is influenced by a complex web of interconnected causal factors. Her groundbreaking approach to activist pedagogy in the environmental justice movement has encouraged grief and despair work for what humans have lost and are losing, widening the sense of self beyond Western individualism, and cultivating what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as bodhichitta, the innate impulse toward compassion and liberation. As Eastern and Indigenous body-mind-spirit practices take hold in social work settings, classrooms become an important space for engaging in critical and embodied inquiry into the impacts of oppressive social systems as well as to learn vital skills in awareness of the bio-psycho-social-spiritual-ecological self.
