Naropa 2023 Commencement Speech
In Naropa tradition, I’d like to open with a bow.
I bow to the Original Peoples of this land, and the tribal communities residing here today. I greet you as a visitor and guest.
I bow to you, President Lief, thank you for your leadership, guidance and years of service.
I bow to you, Seann Goodman, Sue West, and Anne Parker; thank you for your commitment to Naropa.
I bow to you, Naropa trustees, faculty, and staff — thank you for the many lives you have touched through your dedication.
I bow to you, the parents, family, and friends of the graduates. Thank you for your love and support that has helped them to achieve this great accomplishment.
And I bow to you, graduates of the class of 2023 — congratulations!
I honor your journey, begun years ago and culminating today in the completion of this cycle of learning and growth, on the cusp of Naropa’s 50th anniversary. The legacy of Naropa is built on the premise that when East meets West, sparks will fly, and I have no doubt that your time here has sparked your mind and ignited your heart, that you may illuminate the world.
As distinguished graduates of Naropa University, your choice to conduct your studies here says a lot about your values and priorities as a world citizen. Whatever your concentration and credentials earned here, as a Naropa graduate your commitment to the liberation of all beings, to the alleviation of suffering, to social and ecological justice, will illuminate what you offer the world beyond these halls.
I am certain that during your time at Naropa, you’ve received insights from deep lineages and profound wisdom traditions. In honor of your endeavors, I make a humble offering today of four teachings that I have received from my elders and teachers, which include Indigenous peoples as well as sacred medicines that have shaped my life and path.
The first teaching is that you already have within you everything that you need, in fact you always have, although your time here has helped to refine and enhance the gifts that you came to offer the world. While the culture at Naropa is distinct from other institutions, academia and society generally insist that accumulating degrees and letters after one’s name enhances one’s value and importance. But beneath the accomplishments that brought you here today is the truth that you have always been enough, and you will always be enough, just because you are. This truth resides within the deep ocean of your true nature, the eternal and inviolable part of you. This True Self is the seat of your personal power, your beauty and your medicine.
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of “Rest is Resistance,” speaks of connecting with this True Self, saying that “to just be, to deepen into what already is and can never be taken from us is the praxis. We don’t need to have our eyes and mouths wide open searching to accomplish more, to be more, to do more.” Hersey invites us to enter the portal of rest and to plant oneself inside the soil of one’s imagination. An invitation all the more salient when you consider that, as adrienne maree brown has noted, we are in an imagination battle, and that to reclaim and strengthen the muscle of our imagination is a revolutionary act of decolonization. To imagine, to daydream, to be present to our true nature, requires that we pause and be still, which is in itself an act of resistance to the societal mandate that we hustle for our worthiness. In the days to come, may you continue to deepen into stillness, into radical rest, and into the knowing of yourself as enough.
The second teaching is that all wounds are the same wound. The illusion of separation at the core of modernity is a source of great suffering and harm, and restoring connection and kinship the remedy. Renowned botanist, educator, and citizen of the Potawatami Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of kinship as a verb, guiding us to restore our relationship to the natural world through acts of “kinning.” Practices of deep listening, feeling, and interbeing, challenge the perception that we are separate and distinct beings. She says,
Sometimes we think of our bodies or our skin as the end of us, the end of the individual... you end there, and I end here. But I think it’s much more helpful to think about the skin as a membrane—which is what it is. It’s actually our ability to hear the world. Think of yourself as a drumhead... You’re not ‘out there’ observing the world.. from your own perspective. The world is actually playing you.
This awareness of being played like a drum by the world may be a departure from ordinary states of consciousness for the Western mind. Such non-ordinary states can be achieved in many ways, including mindfulness, meditation, and psychedelic experiences. Research in the field of psychedelic science describes the so-called “mystical experience” that these substances can induce, characterized by a sense of wonder and awe, a feeling of unity and interconnectedness. Within the mystical experience lies the truth that one has never been and can never be outside of the world, but is instead interwoven, a cell in the great organism of this breathing planet. Of course, psychedelics offer but one path to an experience of non-dualism, albeit fleeting and not without a shadow side.
In Be Here Now, the late Ram Dass observed that
…many people who use psychedelics primarily experience …planes where their ego is present. Thus they often attempt to use the powers that are available in such a ... plane in the service of their own ego. This creates additional karma for them — for it is action which comes out of attachment.
As such, psychedelics can engender profound mystical experiences of non-duality, but can also reinforce the ego, the grandiose and messianic, the extractive, and the exploitative. Naropa founder Trungpa Rinpoche warned that the ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality, and spiritual materialism is abundant in the field of psychedelics. These powerful substances have been described as non-specific amplifiers, amplifying what is present in the psyche and in the “set and setting,” which in these times includes the setting of late-stage capitalism. The growing popularity of psychedelic therapy is revealing, in that so many people are seeking a remedy for the agonizing paradigm of separation that we live in.
Which brings me to the third teaching, that these systems of modernity/coloniality are dying. Those of us who have incarnated in these times have the opportunity to hospice modernity, to bear witness to the decline of a global system built upon the illusion of separation. Decolonial scholar and author Vanessa Machiado de Olivera instructs that when we consider unsustainable systems of modernity as being beyond reform, theories for change include walkout, hacking, and hospicing. To walk out is to search for alternatives, an approach susceptible to romanticization and often embedded with colonial values. Hacking involves playing the system from the inside, a risky endeavor whereby one can find oneself a pawn in the game and complicit to harm. To hospice is to attend to the dying of these unsustainable structures, whereby humanity can learn important lessons about the mistakes and accomplishments of modernity so they can be applied to midwifing the birth of what is to come. Hospicing modernity includes grieving our own investments in modernity’s promises: promises of convenience and comfort, and of the illusion of certainty and control.
I find respite during this time of the Great Turning in the prophecies of cultures with long memories, whose people tracked cycles of time and passed down their observations and insights through oral traditions for millennia. In her book, As We Have Always Done, Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson cites the importance of thinking forward and backward at the same time: when we think in cyclical rather than linear time, we see more clearly the ways that the generations are linked, the ways that we are nested within relationships with both our ancestors and descendants. In cyclical time, time travel is possible. We can go back in time and retrieve our younger selves from traumatic experiences where they were left frozen, or visit a 10th great grandmother to retrieve a piece of epigenetic wisdom, or metabolize the burden of untended grief from an ancestral lineage — or visit future generations and tell them: we are holding you in our hearts as we imagine a future where you survive and thrive.
Our ancient ancestors recognized the synchronicity within non-linear patterns of time and the earthly experience of astronomical, seasonal, and lunar cycles as being part of an intelligent and living cosmos. Through empirical observation of the natural world over eons, systems of precise mathematics and astronomy, art and culture evolved across the globe. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is evidence-based science, and in many ways Western science is still catching up. Elders and teachers that I have been privileged to study with instruct that according to many wisdom traditions, over the course of these long cycles of time the world has ended many times over. As Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his chapter “The Tether,” in the book How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World:
…this is not the first apocalypse we’ve experienced. In Australia there are many stories about previous cataclysms, and a lot of them are supported by the geological data. They’re quite survivable, so if people are looking for hope, that’s a good place to start. It just means we have to change a bit...
The fourth and final offering that I’ll leave you with you, Naropa Change Makers and Thought Leaders, is that all of these teachings are grounded in the body and in the community. The soma holds the dignity of the True Self, the knowing of our interdependence, and our location between past and present in the eternal now of these vast cycles of time. The generative somatics centering practice orients us in time and space and to the four directions:
Join me in centering on the dimension of length, connecting with your inherent dignity and worthiness. Bring awareness to your contact with the earth below and extend through the crown, lengthening into your personal power and feeling your basic goodness.
Center on the dimension of width, expanding to fill out the breadth of your connection and belonging. Allow yourself to take up space and feel your place in the community of human and more-than-human beings.
Center on the dimension of depth, bring awareness to your back as you lean into the lineages that uphold you and the allies who have your back, and all that you've learned along your journey. Past and present meet in the belly, your center of gravity, the seat of what you most care about and are committed to. From here, move forward toward the future that we are co-creating, as we imagine new possibilities and midwife a new world into being.
Graduates, may finding your center in the body and in Beloved Community fortify you in these times of change. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Your presence and practice of kinship is medicine for these times. With the compassion and solidarity that you have cultivated here at Naropa, you are well prepared to show your appreciation for the world through your service to it.
As I conclude, I bow in deep celebration of each of you. May the flame within you illuminate the world.
Brown, AM. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
de Olivera, VM. (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books.
Haines, SK. (2021). Centering Practice with Staci Haines. Strozzi Institute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77EJgznvqLc
Hersey, T. (2023). Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Kimmerer RW, Hausdoerffer J, Van Horn, G. (2021). Kinship Is A Verb. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/kinship-is-a-verb/
Ram Dass. (1978). Be Here Now, Remember. Hanuman Foundation.
Simpson, LB. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Trungpa C. (1973). Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala Publications.
Yunkaporta, T. (2022). The Tether, in Gray (Ed) How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World: Visionary & Indigenous Voices Speak Out. Park Street Press.