We are delighted to welcome The Arrow Journal to their new home in the Courage community! The Arrow Journal is a publication with a rich 10-year history of providing critical and much needed space for investigating the meeting point of contemplative wisdom and pressing social, political, and environmental challenges.
We are also excited to share our first collaboration as partners and communities: a special fall Arrow Journal issue on the themes of collective power, precision and protection which will be curated alongside a spring conversation series and our 9th Annual Summer Intensive on the same topics. Please see our call for proposals below!
The Challenge and Response: We are collectively facing the intensifying and brutalizing force of Empire’s violence within the United States and globally, and its impact on the intersecting social and ecological crises of our time. The root cause of this violence often hinges on a dualistic logic of separation, and manifests viciously via exploitation, extraction, and genocide. In other words, the crises of our times require relational solutions, including both a non dual frame of spiritual practice and a capacity to build collective power for effective action.
While calls for a relational paradigm shift have been growing over the past few years, we still require skills and tools to affect transformative and systemic liberatory change. We are not simply trying to recalibrate our bodies, minds, and hearts towards a new normal in this time of crisis. We are rather called to, as relational beings, develop skills to address the separation deeply rooted in the intersecting crises of our time and leverage our power to envision, create, and embody new, liberatory ways of being.
The Call for Papers and Conversations: We are eager to explore how we, as spiritual communities in service of collective action and liberation for all, might step into our power in the face of these ongoing crises, to actively create new and liberatory paradigms. At this urgent and challenging time, The Arrow and Courage of Care are seeking contributions for a special journal issue and conversation series that explore themes of collective and personal power, protection, and precision. The objective of this special issue and conversation series is to, from a grounded, nondual practice, investigate how questions of power, precision, and protection can propel us from calls for a relationship paradigm shift to the reality of a relational future. Specifically, we ask:
How do we work with our attachment and aversion to power to deepen our collective and nuanced understanding of power as a tool of liberation and not domination?
How can we call forth embodied spiritual teachings within our lineages to help guide us in wielding personal and collective power with precision in service of creating new, liberated worlds?
How do we wield power precisely and effectively while simultaneously attuning to the need for protection of ourselves–and ultimately all others–on this path?
We do not take on these themes lightly–much is at stake. Spiritual activists have resisted for generations, and such resistance has been met with crushing violence at times. We are therefore committed to rooting these reflections within our community of practice in ways that help us not only deepen our collective understanding of power, but also help us strengthen our relational networks. As part of this commitment, this special issue will be curated alongside a conversation series and in-person summer workshop that authors will have the option to participate in.
We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore these topics:
Relations of power: power with vs power over
Self-defense and the rhetoric of non-violence
Embodied practices of self-defense (martial arts, survival arts) and spirituality
Strategies for endurance: thinking sustainably for 7 generations
Practices–somatic, contemplative, collective–to metabolize and transmute anger and grief
Self-love, revolutionary love, & staying tender under empire
Archetypes and new models of sacred/divine warriorship
Examples of Buddhist or spiritual communities responding to the crises of our time through effective collective power-building action
Tools to develop our capacities for risk-taking in solidarity
In all of these topics we encourage an awareness of the multilayered ways in which race, gender, class, and other dimensions of social identity and oppression intersect. We invite the work of authors from diverse traditions, and we welcome a variety of formats, including scholarly articles, essays, and poetry for the special fall issue.
Please read our Submission Guidelines prior to submitting. Please submit your submissions via this form: https://forms.gle/6c6kfCkPorxUNP7z5. We are accepting either abstracts or abstracts with full manuscripts at this time.
