Mindfulness, Indigenous Wisdom, and Community Well-being An approach to healing rooted in local culture and relationship-building By Jeffrey Proulx with Chase Bryer and Jacob Cousin

When I was an undergraduate studying psychology, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s groundbreaking work1 introduced me to the concept of historical trauma. Historical trauma refers to the collective, cumulative emotional and psychological wounding experienced by Indigenous peoples due to genocide and the destruction of their cultures on Turtle Island, an Indigenous term for North America. Eduardo and Bonnie Duran’s influential book,2 Native American Postcolonial Psychology, went further into how trauma was transmitted across generations as a result of colonization and cultural disintegration, resulting in high rates of mental health issues, substance abuse, and chronic diseases in Indigenous communities. This body of work had a profound influence on me as an Indigenous (Mohawk) person.

I grew up in Western New York and Southern Ontario in and around reservation and urban Indigenous communities, where I witnessed historical trauma but didn’t understand what I was seeing. It wasn’t until I started reading the literature on Indigenous health and historical trauma that I began to make important connections. Everything seemed to click. Suddenly, I realized why I instinctively avoided discussing topics like boarding schools or alcohol use when I was younger. Reading through case studies and journal articles on Indigenous psychology, I kept thinking, “That’s my uncle! That’s my cousin! That’s me!”

Although the literature was disturbing, the Durans and Yellow Horse Brave Heart emphasized that the path to healing in these communities lay in Indigenous culture and healing practices. This insight inspired me to study the delivery of psychological care for Indigenous people in my region as a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate scholar. I soon found that few places offered Indigenized treatment due to lack of insurance coverage and best practice models for Indigenous-led treatment. Determined to make a difference, I decided to pursue graduate studies to become a scientist and develop those best practice models.

A Focus on Indigenous Healing

Growing up, my mother was married to an urban Black man during a time when the futures of Black men were even more constrained by discrimination and racism than today. He was a good man, and I cherished the weekend nights we’d spend with him, his brother, and friends, learning how to play chess and listening to their lively conversations. Even as a child, I knew these evenings were special. Despite enduring the indignities of an unequal America (and policies that perpetuated these inequalities) throughout the week, they found joy in their Saturday nights together. Many such men carried severe wounds, both visible and invisible, from serving in Vietnam. Some struggled to find work, or respect at work, but all agreed that systemic injustices and external decisions had cut them deeply. Yet on those Saturday evenings, they exuded strength and a sense of resistance through happiness.

Their lesson to me was clear: society was going to be slow to create the systems to get all people past poverty, discrimination, and health disparities. People in non-white, minoritized communities needed to create their own healing. Despite the dysfunction presented in the literature about minoritized populations, these communities had a plethora of smarts, strength, humor, healing, and wisdom. Tapping those characteristics would be the medicine to address the pervasive feeling of dis-ease in those communities.

Psychology alone didn’t offer the tools to answer my broader questions around historical trauma, so I sought more comprehensive approaches. I wanted to understand how stress and racism got “under the skin” of minoritized individuals, leading to stress-related diseases like diabetes and hypertension, and fueling intergenerational trauma. Fields such as psychoneuroendocrinology and epigenetics provided skill sets that allowed me to map the body’s response to stress. Additionally, I gained expertise in Life Course and Critical Feminist perspectives, which highlighted societal influences on human development, and emphasized understanding these issues through the lenses of underserved communities. Further, I sought out the perspectives of wise elders from the communities I wanted to work with, seeking guidance on how to undo the effects of colonialism.

Indigenous scholar Michael Yellow Bird argued that colonization was so pervasive that it altered the neural pathways in those who were colonized, leading to a sense of unwellness. Yellow Bird coined the term “neurodecolonization3” to describe the process through which immersing oneself in Indigenous culture could reverse the effects of colonization. This approach relied on strengthening people’s connection with their cultural identity and heritage, which in turn would promote both mental and physical healing. Further, the idea that colonization and racism penetrate our very nervous systems is a phenomenon that can be applied to a wide range of minoritized communities. Neurodecolonization thus guided me in the development of programs that were grounded in community strengths and cultural practices to mitigate the effects of historical trauma and racism, and strengthen community bonds and individual health. This approach also had the added benefit of incorporating mindfulness.

… the idea that colonization and racism penetrate our very nervous systems is a phenomenon that can be applied to a wide range of minoritized communities.

Mindfulness in Indigenous and Black American Communities

In my late teens, I came to mindfulness through watching, in deep appreciation, Buddhist monks from Hiroshima who came to the US to protest the production and testing of nuclear weapons. Often these protests were heated and emotional, but the monks sat to the side, fully present and emanating compassion and stillness in the midst of chaos, conflict, and anger between demonstrators and police. What they were doing (or non-doing) impacted me deeply, and I was compelled to learn more about mindfulness.

I was fortunate to find meditation teachers from Tibet, Nepal, and India and follow their instructions. Seeing the benefits in my life, I wanted to translate these Eastern mindfulness experiences into a framework that would resonate with the Western mindset. However, it soon became clear that mindfulness approaches were already being applied effectively in Turtle Island. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal work,4 Full Catastrophe Living, where he described Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), de-emphasized the religious aspects of mindfulness practice and emphasized present-moment awareness, making it more accessible to Westerners. Further research5 showed that mindfulness could enhance self-compassion and significantly improve well-being, while also promoting mental health through non-reactivity and emotional regulation. Given the growing interest in well-being in the US, it seemed that the number of people on Turtle Island engaging in mindfulness practice would grow if mindfulness was presented in a way familiar to them. So, I became a MBSR instructor and tried to spread Kabat-Zinn’s message (Johnny Mindfulness-Seed).

Further, I began to wonder if mindfulness could help reduce stress in minoritized communities. Often, I would find myself in underserved neighborhoods and think, “There are few places in more need of stress reduction than here.” However, the dominant perception in these communities was that mindfulness was a “white people thing,” which made introducing it awkward. At the same time, I realized that mindfulness could be implemented in a way that aligns with these communities’ traditions and uses their strengths as a vehicle for stress reduction. These conversations sparked people’s interest and opened up the possibility of integrating mindfulness into their lives.

Importantly, these communities had gatekeepers that needed to be on board before developing something like a mindfulness project. This could mean seeking approval from community ethics boards (institutional review boards), from clergy, or church or tribal councils before moving forward. Such trust-building with decision makers was especially important, as this work could uncover sacred and relevant knowledge. An outsider needed to prove themselves worthy of receiving and caring for that knowledge, given that many had come into these communities and simply taken “data,” never to return. I learned that following up on official steps to conduct programming in minoritized communities—and showing a true commitment to them—led to fruitful outcomes.

In my initial forays into mindfulness in underserved communities, I made cold calls to Indigenous or Black organizations to see if there was anyone interested in mindfulness who would want to collaborate. From there, we would introduce mindfulness to the wider community. Although not everyone was familiar with mindfulness, the boards or councils I presented my ideas to could appreciate our emphasis on stress reduction, conscious eating, better sleep, and other benefits of mindfulness. That said, widespread uptake of our ideas was slow to come. For example, we once planned a mindfulness project for older Black adults that drew little attention. Weeks went by. I mentioned the lack of interest to the pastor who was hosting our mindfulness project, and he suggested that I go to the service the following Sunday and announce my project after the sermons. There were two junior pastors who preached that day and each one of them focused their sermon on stress (“People, I am stressed!” “Amen!”). Afterward, I got up and announced that I was doing a stress reduction study focused on Black people, and people hustled up to the stage. We filled our participant slots in ten minutes.

Notably, it was receiving a Mind & Life Varela grant that catalyzed our original work in delivering mindfulness interventions to underserved communities. The grant provided enough funding for us to get a foothold doing mindfulness in underserved communities. We started by presenting MBSR classes in both Black and Indigenous communities. We urged participants to follow the class as taught, but to consider traditional practices or cultural exercises that could be substituted for the MBSR exercises. We chose MBSR because it provided a curriculum where we could examine each exercise and modify it to include content suggested by participants. In our Indigenous communities, we found that many cultural activities were already inherently mindful. People in our classes would often say that a grandmother/aunt/grandfather/uncle practiced mindfulness when they carried out daily activities as a way of being fully present, intentional, and nonjudgmental. They just didn’t call it mindfulness.

I used these experiences to lay the groundwork for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study mindfulness in Indigenous communities as a way to address diabetes. While I argued for the importance of distinct Indigenous tribes having their unique approaches to healing in my grant proposal, the NIH insisted that I create programming that would be pan-Indigenous and applicable to tribes across the nation. Of course, I wanted the grant, so I agreed to their terms—but I still wanted to create an intervention that was flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of each tribe I encountered. What resulted was a framework called IndigenousMIND, which offered flexibility to include community-specific traditions, stories, dances, languages, and spirituality as the vehicles for mindful practice. In the end, our success with IndigenousMIND had less to do with the actual class that was developed, and more to do with the work we put into building community relationships and tailoring our methods to uplift local culture.

Mindful Collaborations Across Turtle Island

The success of our work lay in building partnerships and setting people up to grow into key roles as our programming moved forward. Our long-term goal was to develop programming that could be taken over by the community. They would guide whatever emerged from our efforts. Of course, this meant educating the community about what we were doing, getting people into mindfulness teacher training programs, and developing mindfulness curricula with community partners. To educate folks, we held small weekend mindfulness retreats for our principal gatekeepers so they could experience mindful practice for a day and discuss their community’s input prior to launching any programming.

Our long-term goal was to develop programming that could be taken over by the community.

As of this writing, we’ve developed mindfulness programs in Indigenous communities in New England (Narragansett, Wampanoag, Mohegan), Oklahoma (Chickasaw), Arizona (Navajo), North Carolina (Eastern Band Cherokee, Lumbee), California (Hoopa, Yurok, Karuk, Modoc), and Oregon (Klamath, Paiute). We are excited to see that some of our IndigenousMIND partner communities are nearing the threshold for complete autonomy over their own mindfulness programming. All of this required securing smaller private grants (we were supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, BESS Family Foundation, Mind & Life Institute, and others), which allowed us to build momentum and collect data on the growing tapestry of Indigenized mindfulness approaches. We have growing evidence that these programs are well-received by the community and have led to positive outcomes, including weight loss, reduced blood sugar levels, fewer falls, and improved well-being. We hope to secure additional funding to expand this work. A priority is generating more community-based, well-trained mindfulness teachers.

Collaborations with my students became instrumental in this effort. I took a job at Brown University at the Mindfulness Center (MC@B), where I eventually became the Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and conducted mindfulness research in underserved communities. I also served as a professor in the departments of Public Health, Psychiatry, Contemplative Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, which meant I was fortunate to regularly engage with amazing students and faculty. One of those amazing students was Chase Bryer, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a social work Master’s student at Washington University in St. Louis when he first reached out to me. Chase wanted to conduct Indigenous mindfulness research with Two-Spirit/LGBTQ+ elders, so I strongly encouraged him to come to Brown, where I became his PhD advisor. Interestingly, I had just started working with Shondra McCage of Chickasaw Nation Tribal Health (CNTH) and Dr. Emily Jones of the University of Oklahoma to apply the IndigenousMIND model for pregnant Chickasaw moms with gestational diabetes. Chase and I got to work right away on a culturally-tailored mindfulness program to reduce the risk of gestational diabetes among his own people at CNTH.

In addition, Chase fostered strong relationships between our work and the Two-Spirit Dry Lab (2SDL), Turtle Island’s first research group focused exclusively on Two-Spirit people, communities, and experiences. The term “Two-Spirit” was coined in the early 1990s at the third annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Canada, and denotes an Indigenous person who identifies with these cultural understandings of what many now call “queerness.” It has been an important cultural repatriation tool in a society that has sought to silence Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ+ people. Chase and I were keenly interested in how mindfulness could facilitate good health in that community.

Another Brown student, Jacob Cousin (Oglala Lakota) from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, guided our efforts to adapt mindful movement to include Indigenous movement, such as tribal dances. Together, and with the aid of many other people such as Megan Warren at United Indian Health Services in California, and Aislyn Ukpik at Klamath Tribal Health in Oregon, we set out to create the movement and yoga content that would include Indigenous content but also encourage exercise among our participants. Jacob and I made connections with Tria Blu Wakpa of World Arts and Culture/Dance at UCLA, and Haley Laughter of Hózhó Wellness. Hózhó, central to the Diné way of life and spirituality, represents a state of being that includes physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual harmony. We also tapped the expertise of Acosia Red Elk from the Umatilla Tribe in creating our exercise modules. In particular, we were interested in Acosia’s brilliant blending of yoga with tribal dance, called Pow Wow Yoga (Acosia is depicted doing this practice in the cover image).

We began to conceptualize movement sections that included tribal dances specific to the communities where we were working. Over the course of the mindfulness classes, typically lasting eight weeks, participants would not only learn mindful movement skills but also a traditional dance, as we iteratively built into the yoga/movement sections the steps for specific dances that the elders suggested we teach the community. We developed videos of these yoga poses blended with Indigenous music and handed the videos out as homework. The goal was to instruct mindfulness and stillness in movement, but the people who followed the videos would also learn a dance important to the tribe.

Additionally, we incorporated Indigenous language into mindfulness practices such as the body scan, a meditative activity involving non-judgmental attention to physical sensations throughout the body. Participants typically lie down and systematically focus on each body part, starting from the toes and moving up to the head, to increase awareness and promote relaxation. We integrated the community’s language into this practice, pairing English terms like “toe,” “bottom of foot,” and “ankle” with their corresponding tribal words. This approach allowed participants to gain the health benefits of the body scan while also hearing and learning their native language, reinforcing their cultural identity. Our intention was that listening to the recordings as part of their mindfulness homework would catalyze the embodiment of culture.

Our adaptations also included larger Indigenous concepts, connecting participants to the winds of all time, creation, and the Creator during breathing meditation exercises. We encouraged participants to envision how these winds connect us to ancestors and the Four Directions, which are sources of healing and wellness. We partnered with tribal elders and cultural knowledge holders to craft these exercises, using local voices for the recordings. Our research model emphasized community engagement, ensuring that participants and their loved ones had substantive ways to contribute to the program.

Engaging the Community

For those interested in adapting contemplative practices to underserved communities, it is crucial to develop trust and maintain regular communication with local partners, with the ultimate goal of ensuring community sovereignty over the programming.

To fully engage and tap the wisdom of the community, we offer the following guidelines. For a deeper dive, this paper6 offers more detailed information.

1. Examine the assumptions underlying your approach. What perspectives are represented? Who is guiding the planning? What positionality does the research team reflect?
2. Plan ahead. Learn about the community’s history. Who are the key local stakeholders? What type of programming has already been tried/accomplished there? What are the community’s needs? How might you go about getting approval and funding for your project?
3. Value and protect cultural and community strengths.
4. Develop relationships with community mentors and follow their advice.
5. Consistently refine your own mindfulness practice, and encourage members of your team to do the same.

Engaging in this process and building trust with community members is crucial for success. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to refine myself as a researcher and a person, and to use those skills to benefit the people I love.

Pursuing a Vision for the Future

Our work to examine the diverse ways mindfulness can be adapted within underserved communities continues, often in an iterative fashion. In one project with inner-city Black teens, we explored how mindfulness could help them better cope with living in a neighborhood with high gun-violence. One aspect of mindfulness that resonated with the teens was focusing on the sound of a bell, as other modes of present-minded focus seemed uncomfortable for many. As a next step, we hope to partner with a group in California that has developed a sound-healing program that we hope to bring to the teens. Concurrently, we have put in motion a project to deliver mindfulness to rap artists to see how it affects their art. Since many of these rappers grew up in situations similar to the teens in the high gun-violence neighborhoods, we will ask the rappers to create a message about mindful living for those teens through hip-hop.

With funding from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, we are also engaging police and Black community members in mindfulness programming with the goal of bringing the two groups closer together. The community members and police will engage in separate mindfulness classes designed specifically for Black people and police, respectively, for six weeks. Then, we’ll bring the two groups together to engage in a day-long retreat. So far, this approach has been well received and we hope to expand it to other cities.

We continue to pursue projects in Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. These include mindfulness classes with a focus on diabetes and hypertension, and others that foster connection between Indigenous elders and youth. One of our strongest goals moving forward is to establish a mindfulness/yoga teacher training program in minoritized communities. We are increasingly confident that the models of mindfulness we are creating for underserved communities are effective, but we need people from those communities to become the teachers and grow those programs based on their needs (with our support, of course).

In the long run, we hope to make all of these programs widely available. To that end, the Indigenous Mindfulness Coalition (IMC) has emerged as a collection of Indigenous people from across Turtle Island who are interested in promoting mindfulness in their communities. We have held numerous local and national gatherings. Each time we meet, we generate more ideas for contemplative practice and ways to make it more accessible. For example, we are currently engaged in an effort to get these types of interventions covered by insurance, which would greatly expand mindfulness access in underserved communities.

As these efforts coalesce, we have taken pause to reflect on where our journey has taken us. Sometimes I fret over childhood difficulties and I weep about the histories of minoritized communities, but I also realize that those experiences have made me the person I am, and instilled a degree of persistence that I hope will be helpful for the communities I love. I also know that within the communities we serve, there is sufficient strength and grace for healing and thriving—as we have experienced first-hand. Perhaps our work can be a part of a larger cultural revitalization in minoritized communities, and contribute to making historical trauma an issue of the past.

Notes

1. 1.

   Brave Heart, M.Y.H., (1998). The return to the sacred path: Healing the historical trauma response among the Lakota through a psychoeducational group intervention. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 68(3), 287-305. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377319809517532

2. 2.

   Duran, E., & Duran, B. (1995). Native American postcolonial psychology. Suny Press.

3. 3.

   Yellow Bird, M. (2016). Neurodecolonization: Applying mindfulness research to decolonizing social work. In Decolonizing social work (pp. 293-310). Routledge.

4. 4.

   Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Random House.

5. 5.

   Loucks, E. B., Gilman, S. E., Britton, W. B., Gutman, R., Eaton, C. B., & Buka, S. L. (2016). Associations of mindfulness with glucose regulation and diabetes. American journal of health behavior, 40(2), 258-267. https://doi.org/10.5993/AJHB.40.2.11

6. 6.

   Proulx, J., Croff, R., Oken, B., Aldwin, C. M., Fleming, C., Bergen-Cico, D., … & Noorani, M. (2018). Considerations for research and development of culturally relevant mindfulness interventions in American minority communities. Mindfulness, 9, 361-370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0785-z