S2 E12: Grounding Practice with adrienne maree brown: Lessons of Abundance
About this episode:
In this Grounding Practice, adrienne maree brown—activist, facilitator, and writer of works such as Pleasure Activism and Emergent Strategy—guides us in connecting with our present state, recognizing our needs, and acknowledging the care and abundance in our lives.
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Join our Patreon Community for bonus content from our interview with adrienne maree brown.
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Follow @adriennemareebrown on Instagram or visit her website adriennemareebrown.net — where you can become a member to support her writing, if you feel like you might benefit from her writing or ideas
Join the This Is How We Care Patreon to support the production of this podcast and check out bonus content from adrienne, including:
The role that our identity may play in pleasure and pleasure activism
adrienne's answer to the question, “do we all hold queerness?”
adrienne's distinctions between representation versus relationship, particularly important when looking at diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives across organizational work
The evolution of community in a digital world and what we can learn from a younger generation
How the Emergent Strategy Institute started, ended, and learnings from this experience
If you want to listen to the episode that accompanies this Grounding Practice check that out separately here.
Full Episode Transcript:
Emily Race-Newmark: [00:00:00] Welcome to This is How We Care, a podcast where we look at what it means to embody care, not as an individual practice, but a collective one, and to see what kind of world emerges from this place.
Thank you for being here. I am your host, Emily Race.
This grounding practice is brought to you by adrienne maree brown. To listen to our interview, please check out that separate episode wherever you listen to the This Is How We Care podcast.
Giving you a few moments to transition, if you're able, into a space of intentionality, so that you may receive this short guided practice from adrienne.
We hope that this serves as a gift to you, wherever you are, wherever it meets you in your day.
Without further ado, let me hand the mic over to [00:01:00] adrienne.
adrienne maree brown: All right, beautiful. So I would just ask folks to take a moment wherever you are and if you can, if you're not driving or biking or something, if you can close your eyes and drop into your breath for a moment. Notice how you're doing right now in this present moment. Notice, if you can, what of your needs are met? Where do you feel satiated? Where and from whom do you feel care flowing towards you, flowing through you? [00:02:00] Even if it's self care, like, "Oo I've been taking care of myself today." And notice where you can feel abundance in your life. What is there an abundance of right now in your life?
And even if it's something that might be a negative, I have an abundance of grief in my life right now. One of the ways I turn towards that is there's abundance in my life. There's something for me to learn about this abundance. What do I do with an abundance of grief? What is the lesson of that?
What do I do with an abundance of love? What is the lesson of that? And if you're one of the few people who has an abundance of money, what do I do with it? How do I redistribute that? What do I [00:03:00] do, right? Just noticing your present moment, noticing where you feel satiated, noticing care, and noticing abundance.
And regardless of what else is happening in the world, there's a little bit of each of those already present in your life. And so for that, offer some gratitude. And you get to direct the gratitude inward towards yourself because you're a part of receiving anything that you're able to receive in this world. If you're not open, you can't get it. So gratitude for the part of you that's open to receive the gifts, and then gratitude towards the world that's giving them to you. And if you hold that in a divine sense, like I do, I say grateful, grateful, grateful to the divine entities that are sending me all of this blessing.[00:04:00]
Take a deep breath in. Let it out. And open your eyes.
See if the world around you looks a little different at all. And here we are.
Emily Race-Newmark: you. If you want to continue with us on this journey, please check out the full interview with adrienne..
Hope to see you there.