Richard Williams
Psychosocial Scholar-Practitioner
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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Richard (he/him) is a scholar-practitioner of education, compassion, mindfulness, and meditation. Publications include “I Can't Breathe: The African American Male with Emotional Disabilities in Education'' (Griffen, 2020), “Handbook of Research on Challenging Deficit Thinking for Exceptional Education Improvement” (2022), and “Healing in While Studying: Reflections and Strategies for Healing, Coping, and Liberation of Graduate Students of Minoritized Identities” (2023), and the founder of the psychosocial change-oriented business The Human Experience Project.
https://www.connected2human.com/
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Contemplative and Compassionate Leadership: Beginning with self to teams to organizations
This interactive and experiential workshop provides participants with a common and accessible language of applied compassion, contemplative practices, and leadership to experience individual and collective compassion, contemplative practices, and leadership beginning with the individual, teams, and then organizations in being and doing spaces. The workshop utilizes the Learning by Doing approach developed by the Stanford University Design School and the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford.
Participants of all experience levels are invited to learn, experience, connect, and grow together. Participants will gain a general awareness and confidence in applied compassion, contemplative practices to cultivate sustainable compassionate leadership, and guided group compassion cultivation meditation.
The workshop facilitator, Richard Williams, is a former special education teacher and district administrator, editor of the ‘Handbook of Research on Challenging Deficit Thinking for Exceptional Education Improvement,’ ‘Healing While Studying: Reflections and Strategies for Healing, Coping, and Liberation of Graduate Students of Minoritized Identities,’ and other publications. He is a contemplative practitioner, certified Ambassador of Applied Compassion from Stanford University, and Compassionate Leadership and Resilience for Global Leaders.
Compassionately Curious Contemplative Strategies to Return and be at Home
This panel discussion proposes the question of practitioners and scholars broadly in the contemplative practice umbrella of compassion, Buddhism, somatics, and applied psychology: How does being compassionately curious bring us home into the body with the potential to home in the interconnectedness beyond physicality? Using both the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh in his beloved call home, “Breathing in, I arrive in my body, breathing out I am home,” and the posit of Bayo Akomolafe that Home is not a physical space, perhaps not even within us but home as a process or state of being Akomolafe B. (2017). Applying compassion in noticing a departure from home through suffering and weaving curious contemplative strategies to return to the bodily or unseen home that is a sanctuary from suffering from the lived experiences and lenses of a diverse panel practicing and guiding for others to find a home on the journey to the field that Rumi describes in:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.
Audience members will be asked to write questions during the discussion for the final Q&A to be answered at random and invited for more ‘burning’ questions in the allotted pauses in panelist discourse.
Richard Williams
Psychosocial Scholar-Practitioner
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
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