Three Meditations for the Academically Estranged
Abstract
I offer this set of listening meditations as an invitation to dwell where your body intersects with the fields of academic discourse that matter to you. Each meditation is grounded in my own experiences, which include work as a musicologist, experimental and contemporary classical violinist, multimedia community-centered artist, and public-library barista. Accompanying each meditation is a pen-and-ink drawing I offer as a visual center for listening. The meditations are inspired in part by the work of Pema Chodron, Donna Haraway, Petra Kuppers, Pauline Oliveros, and Audre Lorde, whose demonstrations of radical acceptance, openness to complexity, and embodied connection have enabled me to lean into a more expansive presence within uncomfortable spaces. These are associations of sound, material, and ideas that I find meaningful, but not restrictive. I hope that the connections in each meditation will expand and shift with each person who practices it.
I offer this set of listening meditations as an invitation to dwell where your body intersects with the fields of academic discourse that matter to you. Each meditation is grounded in my own experiences, which include work as a musicologist, experimental and contemporary classical violinist, multimedia community-centered artist, and public-library barista. Accompanying each meditation is a pen-and-ink drawing I offer as a visual center for listening. The meditations are inspired in part by the work of Pema Chodron, Donna Haraway, Petra Kuppers, Pauline Oliveros, and Audre Lorde, whose demonstrations of radical acceptance, openness to complexity, and embodied connection have enabled me to lean into a more expansive presence within uncomfortable spaces. These are associations of sound, material, and ideas that I find meaningful, but not restrictive. I hope that the connections in each meditation will expand and shift with each person who practices it.
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Introduction
Here is our meeting point—a screen, light, your body in your space, mine listening to the sounds of Denver traffic and imagining you inhabiting your own now.
This is a set of three listening meditations. I offer them as sonic refuges, spaces that have been shaped by my experiences as an academic who currently centers my life outside academia. I invite you to interact with them in a way that makes you feel expansively embodied. Perhaps right now that means skipping the words I’ve written below, taking a deep breath, scrolling down to press play on one of the sound files, and noticing how your body responds as you listen. Or perhaps the words or images below might feel like an invitation to join me in embodied connection.
Estrangement and belonging
I work as a barista at my local public library. Each morning, I pour pay-it-forward coffees for our regulars, many of whom make their homes on the creekside grounds outside the library between daily police drive-throughs.
It's taken me many latte hearts to find my way back into a sense of connection with the possibilities of academia— academia in its tangled intersections of intellectualism, capitalism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, patriarchy, feminism, white supremacy, critical theory, and tender embodied experiences. I’ve completed two doctoral degrees, a D.M.A. in violin performance and a PhD in musicology, and I find the embodied and intellectual elements of my work to be inseparable. During my PhD studies, I struggled to find a place for my embodied self. As an artist and a woman of color whose ways of thinking and moving differed from disciplinary norms, I felt like I was continually asking for something that didn’t have a name in the language spoken around me. I had access to a world that it felt irresponsible to walk away from, even as my sense of who I was in that community contracted through daily migraines and chronic depression.
Since completing my PhD, I’ve put my energy into spaces and communities that support my sense of wholeness and interconnection – public libraries, experimental sound collectives, ecstatic dance. I’ve stepped into a divorce, fallen in love, and learned how deeply to trust my life-long inklings that I’m queer. In the process, I’ve met people who have helped me to reconnect with what drew me into academia in the first place: a sense of curiosity and a desire for closeness with complexity. These sensations coexist with the ways I’ve internalized hierarchical systems threaded through many of my academic experiences, systems that I have experienced in my body as a sense of fear and not-enoughness.
I’ve dedicated these meditations to the academically estranged. I leave the interpretation of those words to you: Perhaps you are coming to this from deep within an academic practice, and some embodied part of you (your neck? your breath? your identity?) feels sidelined in that practice. Or perhaps academia is a space that has been inaccessible to you, or in which you have not felt welcomed.
These tracks are inspired by sources that I got to know while studying for my PhD, sources that gave me permission to expand within the container of academia. Since leaving school, I’ve been fortunate to experience spaces that have helped my understanding of these sources deepen. Some of these spaces are sources of sounds that I’ve used in building these meditations. The first meditation, for instance, contains a recording of rain falling on a fence made of aluminum cans outside an adobe Earthship in Taos, New Mexico, and the second meditation is made from contact-microphone recordings of a grove of aspen trees in Ucross, Wyoming. I’ve also included sounds of embodied motion: my violin bow activating my great-grandmother’s koto and turning it into an organ-like drone; my violin echoing through the delight of popcorn and giddy musical gestures.
I invite you to imagine an academic community where these sonic spaces and sensations are not only the content of knowledge (the things held in place by the glue of words and reasoning) but also the glue that joins ideas and people: a logic in itself, structuring a community where something belongs not by virtue of its ranking on an assigned ladder of worthiness, but by virtue of being present in the fullness of its complexity.
A guide to the meditations
These are nonverbal meditations, intended to be experienced simply by listening and noticing what emerges in your body as you listen. I’ve included verbal descriptions of my inspirations for the meditations below, and I invite you to read those if you wish and then to let go of any need to retain them as you listen.
Because these meditations are embedded within an academic journal, there may already be a weight or quality present on an experiential level that is shaped by your relationship to the academic communities you've encountered. If you choose, each meditation offers a specific container for noticing what comes up in this context. Alternately, they may simply be experienced as open-ended meditations.
Before you begin listening, I invite you to find a position where your body feels supported. You might wish to close your eyes while you listen, or to allow the accompanying images to form a resting space for your eyes away from the tabs open on your browser. (Speaking from my own experience.) Notice what happens as you listen—do you feel parts of your body contracting, expanding, shifting, moving?
After you listen, allow your body to come back into relation to the space around you, to this screen and the physical materials that it's made of, to the bodies of discourse and the curiosities that brought you here. Imagine what it might feel like to center your embodied presence as an integral part of how you engage with academia.
Meditation I: Rain
This first meditation, Rain, consists of a thick drone-filled presence that activates the silence in its wake [footnote Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being].
There’s an image that has stuck with me from Pema Chodron’s discussion of Tonglen meditation, a Tibetan Buddhist practice that involves breathing in or receiving suffering and breathing out or giving relief. She talks about how important it is to initiate this practice with a brief “flash on emptiness,” which she illustrates by telling the story of being in a room in which a fan that’s been going and going suddenly stops running. This sudden silence was her sensory introduction to this frame of emptiness [fn: Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Boston: Shambhala Classics, 202), 55-60].
Pema Chodron's story offered me an opening for what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble,” which involves “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” (fn: Haraway 1) My partner calls it "sitting in the muck" (fn: Lore Stacey :)).
This meditation is shaped by my desire to make space for being with complexity-- sitting in the muck, staying with the trouble, breathing in what's present. I invite you to experience it on your own terms, as a structure for encountering yourself in the particular context of this place and moment. Donna Haraway glosses theorization as that which “makes cogently available” (127), and I believe that embodied experience is an inseparable part of theorization. If this resonates, I invite you to find a position in which your body feels supported and expansive, to breathe, and to explore what listening to these sounds and silences makes available to your senses.
Here is our meeting point—a screen, light, your body in your space, mine listening to the sounds of Denver traffic and imagining you inhabiting your own now.
This is a set of three listening meditations. I offer them as sonic refuges, spaces that have been shaped by my experiences as an academic who currently centers my life outside academia. I invite you to interact with them in a way that makes you feel expansively embodied. Perhaps right now that means skipping the words I’ve written below, taking a deep breath, scrolling down to press play on one of the sound files, and noticing how your body responds as you listen. Or perhaps the words or images below might feel like an invitation to join me in embodied connection.
Estrangement and belonging
I work as a barista at my local public library. Each morning, I pour pay-it-forward coffees for our regulars, many of whom make their homes on the creekside grounds outside the library between daily police drive-throughs.
It's taken me many latte hearts to find my way back into a sense of connection with the possibilities of academia— academia in its tangled intersections of intellectualism, capitalism, colonialism, anti-colonialism, patriarchy, feminism, white supremacy, critical theory, and tender embodied experiences. I’ve completed two doctoral degrees, a D.M.A. in violin performance and a PhD in musicology, and I find the embodied and intellectual elements of my work to be inseparable. During my PhD studies, I struggled to find a place for my embodied self. As an artist and a woman of color whose ways of thinking and moving differed from disciplinary norms, I felt like I was continually asking for something that didn’t have a name in the language spoken around me. I had access to a world that it felt irresponsible to walk away from, even as my sense of who I was in that community contracted through daily migraines and chronic depression.
Since completing my PhD, I’ve put my energy into spaces and communities that support my sense of wholeness and interconnection – public libraries, experimental sound collectives, ecstatic dance. I’ve stepped into a divorce, fallen in love, and learned how deeply to trust my life-long inklings that I’m queer. In the process, I’ve met people who have helped me to reconnect with what drew me into academia in the first place: a sense of curiosity and a desire for closeness with complexity. These sensations coexist with the ways I’ve internalized hierarchical systems threaded through many of my academic experiences, systems that I have experienced in my body as a sense of fear and not-enoughness.
I’ve dedicated these meditations to the academically estranged. I leave the interpretation of those words to you: Perhaps you are coming to this from deep within an academic practice, and some embodied part of you (your neck? your breath? your identity?) feels sidelined in that practice. Or perhaps academia is a space that has been inaccessible to you, or in which you have not felt welcomed.
These tracks are inspired by sources that I got to know while studying for my PhD, sources that gave me permission to expand within the container of academia. Since leaving school, I’ve been fortunate to experience spaces that have helped my understanding of these sources deepen. Some of these spaces are sources of sounds that I’ve used in building these meditations. The first meditation, for instance, contains a recording of rain falling on a fence made of aluminum cans outside an adobe Earthship in Taos, New Mexico, and the second meditation is made from contact-microphone recordings of a grove of aspen trees in Ucross, Wyoming. I’ve also included sounds of embodied motion: my violin bow activating my great-grandmother’s koto and turning it into an organ-like drone; my violin echoing through the delight of popcorn and giddy musical gestures.
I invite you to imagine an academic community where these sonic spaces and sensations are not only the content of knowledge (the things held in place by the glue of words and reasoning) but also the glue that joins ideas and people: a logic in itself, structuring a community where something belongs not by virtue of its ranking on an assigned ladder of worthiness, but by virtue of being present in the fullness of its complexity.
A guide to the meditations
These are nonverbal meditations, intended to be experienced simply by listening and noticing what emerges in your body as you listen. I’ve included verbal descriptions of my inspirations for the meditations below, and I invite you to read those if you wish and then to let go of any need to retain them as you listen.
Because these meditations are embedded within an academic journal, there may already be a weight or quality present on an experiential level that is shaped by your relationship to the academic communities you've encountered. If you choose, each meditation offers a specific container for noticing what comes up in this context. Alternately, they may simply be experienced as open-ended meditations.
Before you begin listening, I invite you to find a position where your body feels supported. You might wish to close your eyes while you listen, or to allow the accompanying images to form a resting space for your eyes away from the tabs open on your browser. (Speaking from my own experience.) Notice what happens as you listen—do you feel parts of your body contracting, expanding, shifting, moving?
After you listen, allow your body to come back into relation to the space around you, to this screen and the physical materials that it's made of, to the bodies of discourse and the curiosities that brought you here. Imagine what it might feel like to center your embodied presence as an integral part of how you engage with academia.
Meditation I: Rain
This first meditation, Rain, consists of a thick drone-filled presence that activates the silence in its wake [footnote Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being].
There’s an image that has stuck with me from Pema Chodron’s discussion of Tonglen meditation, a Tibetan Buddhist practice that involves breathing in or receiving suffering and breathing out or giving relief. She talks about how important it is to initiate this practice with a brief “flash on emptiness,” which she illustrates by telling the story of being in a room in which a fan that’s been going and going suddenly stops running. This sudden silence was her sensory introduction to this frame of emptiness [fn: Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Boston: Shambhala Classics, 202), 55-60].
Pema Chodron's story offered me an opening for what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble,” which involves “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” (fn: Haraway 1) My partner calls it "sitting in the muck" (fn: Lore Stacey :)).
This meditation is shaped by my desire to make space for being with complexity-- sitting in the muck, staying with the trouble, breathing in what's present. I invite you to experience it on your own terms, as a structure for encountering yourself in the particular context of this place and moment. Donna Haraway glosses theorization as that which “makes cogently available” (127), and I believe that embodied experience is an inseparable part of theorization. If this resonates, I invite you to find a position in which your body feels supported and expansive, to breathe, and to explore what listening to these sounds and silences makes available to your senses.
Meditation II: Roots
The second meditation is inspired by a Zoom meditation led by Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma, in which she guided participants through our points of contact with chairs, floors, and surrounding spaces, gradually deepening our scope of awareness to encompass expansive and difficult historical and ecological enmeshments. Here I offer the sounds of an aspen grove, recorded using a combination of ambient sound, contact microphones pressed against the trees’ trunks, and a geophone anchored in the ground beneath them. I invite you to attend to different layers of these sounds, and to follow them into the parts of your body where they feel most alive. What do you feel as your attention moves through the registers of these sounds? My offering here is contextual: it’s an invitation into what I experience as a sensation of groundedness.
Meditation III: Flight
The third meditation is inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay “On the Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in which she describes the difference between the experience of painting a back fence and writing a poem as one only of quantity, not quality. She distills the erotic to the sensation of “self-connection shared,” something that is “a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling” (31).
In this track, I’ve combined sounds that bring me a sense of embodied presence and delight: a flock of birds taking flight from a tree in a Southern Colorado courtyard, popcorn popping on the stove, flaily violin gestures, the sensation of humming.
I offer here an invitation to embodied connection, inspired by Pauline Oliveros, whose text-based scores for listening and sound-making epitomize the idea of self-connection shared. If you’re in a place where you can comfortably make sound:
Breathe deeply. As the meditation track plays, listen for a sound that resonates with you. On your next exhalation hum that sound for the length of a full breath. Continue for as long as it feels good.
Closing thoughts
I hope these meditations chalk out a circle in which you feel invited to take up space in the specific context of interacting with this journal, and more broadly with academic communities. I invite you to explore both what these contexts activate in you and what your presence activates in these contexts.
What I want to share here (with these sounds and with the accompanying references) is a ritual gathering of voices and experiences that have contributed to my sensations of belonging and embodied connection within the container of academia. My hope is that this container will continue to open and to become more and more inclusive as its channels become increasingly vital homes for those who are pushed out of other spaces less well equipped to withstand the pressures of capitalism, racism, transphobia, and other ongoing legacies of colonialism.
I hope these meditations chalk out a circle in which you feel invited to take up space in the specific context of interacting with this journal, and more broadly with academic communities. I invite you to explore both what these contexts activate in you and what your presence activates in these contexts.
What I want to share here (with these sounds and with the accompanying references) is a ritual gathering of voices and experiences that have contributed to my sensations of belonging and embodied connection within the container of academia. My hope is that this container will continue to open and to become more and more inclusive as its channels become increasingly vital homes for those who are pushed out of other spaces less well equipped to withstand the pressures of capitalism, racism, transphobia, and other ongoing legacies of colonialism.
References:
Chaimbeul, Brighde. Sunwise. 2025. Digital album and LP. On Bandcamp at <https://brighdechaimbeul.bandcamp.com/album/sunwise >.
Chodron, Pema. The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Narrated by Joanna Rotte, Random House Audio, 2017.
Gay, Ross. Inciting Joy. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2022.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico: AK Press, 2020.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
hooks, bell. all about love: new visions. New York: William Morrow, 2001.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. New York: Scribner, 2024.
Kuppers, Petra. Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
----. “Starship Somatics: Movement Sensations For Everyone.” Bodyfulness, online course, Advaya Institute, 2022.
Lee, Haruna. Multi-hyphenate: Liberating Our Creative Selves. Stanford University course, 2020.
Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007, 53-59.
Oliveros, Pauline, performer and composer. "The Gentle." hat ART records, 1985. On YouTube at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-3vnuHmaJc&list=PL-YqbZM_hCbqchuw23zctg0B1FmYtCkON&index=6>. Accessed May 13, 2024.
Rose, Deborah Bird. "Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed." Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (Ghosts of the Anthropocene), ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Spalding, Esperanza. Songwrights Apothecary Lab. Beverly Hills, California: Concord Records, 2021. CD. On Bandcamp at <https://esperanzaspalding.bandcamp.com/album/songwrights-apothecary-lab>.
Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument." The New Centennial Review 3, 3 (Fall 2003), 257-337.