Spirited Dissent

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Karen Mahon, 43, is executive director of the Hollyhock Leadership Institute, a Vancouver-based organization with a mission to reinvent social change activism so that it is deeply informed by spiritual traditions. Since she joined Hollyhock, she's led the training of more than 2,000 activists on a variety of topics from corporate negotiations and grassroots organizing to avoiding burnout. Before this, she worked at Greenpeace Canada for 10 years in a variety of capacities, including managing director. She led Greenpeace's successful campaigns to protect Clayoquot Sound and the Great Bear Rainforest.

Challenges: Despair and burnout, and they're interrelated: One feeds the other. The greatest offering an activist can make is a positive vision, painting a picture of a new world and shepherding us there. But when we let despair and negativity overwhelm us, that's not possible. A positive vision helps people do the work in a more balanced way. Activism is not a balanced lifestyle -- it never has been -- but it can be livable. I have an ax to grind on this because the way that many people do activism is such that you can only do it in your 20s and 30s, when you have fewer responsibilities, so that means you grow no healthy elders. Reinventing activism from a place of love means being able to have an activist culture in which you can do this as a lifelong practice.

Practices: The only thing I truly do every day -- and I teach people this -- is a meditation in the shower, because I know I'll be there every day. I also do several spiritual retreats each year, sing in a weekly community choir, do yoga, and dance. I tell people to do whatever spiritual practices they can do and try to bring this into their work and into their lives. We do a little meditation before our staff meetings here.

Effect of these practices on activism and personal life: In some ways, activism and spiritual practice are one and the same. Both are about giving your life's energy to what you find sacred. For me, power comes from wedding those two things. The connection to spirit clearly helps us as individuals, but it also changes our work: our strategies, tactics, and the way we communicate. The emerging spiritual activism movement is the hope for the future. It's blending the best of our minds and our hearts, and informing that with the power of our souls. Many progressives have shunned spirituality, but they forget that the great social change leaders from Martin Luther King to Gandhi have been deeply grounded in a faith tradition. Fierce grace -- that's what spiritual activism is.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print