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.