Category Archives: Contemplative Practices

Contemplating Action

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After hearing horror stories of the crisis in Flint, Michigan, the dark reality for those in Cape Town, South Africa, and the many other challenges that citizens in Honduras, Mozambique, and Nigeria, I realized I wanted to learn more. For our group action project, we chose to tackle the theme of water. Specifically, we decided to look into the crisis… Read more »

Reflecting on Food Accessibility and Our Own Impacts

Writing my final paper was a very useful and reflective experience for me, and it is one of the few “final assignments” that I have actually really enjoyed. For some background, my group was working with issues of food accessibility and we decided to interview University of Washington professors whose work was relevant to or intersected with that topic. We… Read more »

Raisin the Bar: Contemplative Practices to Facilitate Learning

I’ll admit that I was slightly taken aback and heartily amused when Professor Liftin proposed such a meditative approach to consuming a raisin. It was perfect; the lights were dim, the mood was set, and after having just watched the contrasting videos on raisin production before and after industrialization, I was ready to eat that raisin. Granted, I’m a raisin fan…. Read more »

Contemplative Practices: Systems As a Whole

Rarely in college classes do students get to sit down for a few minutes and absorb the materials that they learn in lecture. We sit through an hour or two of lecture and immediately leave when the bell rings without thinking about the impacts that the learning materials have on us as individuals. In a class that explores the environmental,… Read more »

Intentions Found in the Spaces Between

A delineation must be made between contemplative practice and contemplation of life.  To think that we don’t spend much of our lives contemplating our immediate situations is misguided.  Humans today are incessantly focused on themselves, their friends, money, careers, looks and trends. We contemplate how others see us, what grades we will need to achieve which goals, our lives are… Read more »

Eating: A Cultural Experience

Contemplative practices, as trivial as they may seem to others, have the power to inform in an interactive manner as well as generate thoughts about one’s role within regard to the rest of the food system. I personally have found our contemplative practices thus far to be very engaging and necessary. With an act as simple as being told to… Read more »

Reflective Learning Through Contextualising

Interactive learning is without a doubt integral to the ability of a student to be pro-active, not only in their own learning, but in relating it to their life more broadly. It is easy to see that this is the goal of the contemplative practices undertaken in class. Especially in a course that focuses on the human impact on, both… Read more »

Contemplating Contemplative Practices

I have taken two classes so far at the University of Washington in which the professor has implemented the use of contemplative practices as a part of their curriculum. Although I find the concept of them interesting, I personally do not feel that I am able to gain as much as desired from them. The biggest issue that I find… Read more »

Consumers’ Role in the Industrialized Food System

In the first contemplative practice, the first thing I thought about was how healthy this raisin was for me. As a health-conscious individual, I knew that this processed raisin had some nutritional value. And then it dawned on me: as much as we like to associate industrialized food systems with words such as “processed” and “unhealthy”, we can also associate… Read more »