By Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR
Our field has gotten very good at talking about personal transformation. Become more aware. Less reactive. More present.
But then what?
That question kept surfacing while I watched a multigenerational conversation between Simi Khadra, a millennial fashion icon, and legendary community organizer, Professor Marshall Ganz. He helped organize the United Farm Workers and later influenced Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, bringing the farmworker movement’s “Yes, we can” message into national politics.
Ganz wasn't talking about mindfulness. I kept hearing it anyway.
Self, us, now
Ganz is known for a framework he calls public narrative, which moves through three questions. Story of self: why do I care? Story of us: what do we care about together? Story of now: what does this moment ask us to do?
We are very good at the story of self. I'm stressed, I want to suffer less, I want to be more aware. Those are fine reasons to begin. I began there. The trouble is that most practice never gets past the first question, and we've built almost nothing that asks what comes after it.
Ganz connects his framework to three questions attributed to Hillel, a Jewish sage who taught in Jerusalem around two thousand years ago:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?
Self, then relationship, then action. Action doesn't have to mean activism. It might mean apologizing, setting a boundary, staying somewhere you'd rather leave, or leaving somewhere you'd rather stay.
It might also mean doing nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is wisdom. Sometimes it's fear or complacency dressed up as acceptance. I've certainly used my practice both ways and I wasn't always honest with myself about which one I was doing.
Freedom, not stress reduction
Ganz distinguishes between reaction and response. Reaction is automatic. Response makes room for agency.
A little more space between anger and attack. A little more between thought and belief.
None of it guarantees I make the right choice. But it does give me a better chance of having one.
Stress reduction is a real benefit. But we're operating in an attention economy engineered to capture and monetize the exact reactions we're trying to get free of. Against that, feeling calmer is a small ambition.
Try this: After practice, don't only ask whether you feel more relaxed. Ask whether you have more freedom and choice.
Brave spaces
In his classroom, Ganz says, they try to create a "brave space, not a safe space." A respectful environment where people can take risks, be seen, and learn.
Safety matters. Trauma-informed teaching matters. Consent matters. None of what follows argues otherwise. But practice brings us into contact with what we'd rather avoid, and if safe gradually comes to mean nothing difficult should happen here, we've traded challenge for comfort and called it care.
A good practice space isn't one where nothing difficult happens. It's one where difficulty can be met with support and agency.
We trained people to need us
Ganz's mother was a teacher who called herself an educator, because her understanding of education was to draw out rather than put in. His job as an organizer wasn't to put courage into people. It was to help them find the courage already there.
Now look at what our field has built. Apps designed around a celebrity voice in your ear. Retreat cultures organized around a guru's presence. Practitioners who have sat daily for years and still can't do twenty minutes without a recording. The problem isn't that people pay for things. It's that teacher dependence is being monetized.
Guidance can be enormously useful. But guidance should be scaffolding, not the building.
Try this: If you listen to guided meditation, sit a portion of your next practice in silence, with your direct and unadulterated experience of the present moment.
Two notes, two pockets
Near the end, Ganz shares a Jewish teaching. Carry two notes, one in each pocket.
One says:
"For you the world was created."
The other says:
"You are dust and ashes, and to dust you will return."
Maybe practice is partly the capacity to hold both.
You have agency. You do not have control.
Trust your experience, and stay open to having misread it.
Respect safety, and don't confuse discomfort with danger.
Then, every once in a while, end your meditation with two words.
Now what?
Mo Edjlali is the founder of Mindful Leader and creator of Meditate Together. He is the author of Open MBSR.
This is part of our Wackfulness Series: a thoughtful critique of the mindfulness field.
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