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Indigenous scholar Dr. Yuria Celidwen guides us in a reflection on our interconnection with water, encouraging us to see it as more than just a vital resource, but as kin.
How to Do This Practice:
Last week we explored the scientifically backed healing qualities of water, focusing on how connecting with water through sound, sight, and touch can support our well being. This week, indigenous scholar Dr. Yuria Celidwen guides us in a reflection on our interconnection with water, encouraging us to see it as more than just a vital resource, but as kin.
- Find a quiet space where you can engage with water— a nearby river, ocean, or even the faucet at home.
- Focus on the sound of water. Whether it’s the gentle drip from a faucet or the sound of waves, listen deeply to how water calls to you.
- Contemplate how water transforms between solid, liquid, and gas. Let this remind you of your own potential for transformation.
- Let the water flow, guiding you to feel its presence within and around you, awakening memories, imagination, and a sense of belonging in this shared world.
- Take a few moments to reflect on how different manifestations of water connect with you.
Today’s Happiness Break Host:
DR. YURIA CELIDWEN is an indigenous scholar of contemplative studies, and author of the new book, Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations For Collective Well-Being.
Read more on Yuria: https://www.yuriacelidwen.com/#about
Follow Yuria on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuriacelidwen/
Read Yuria’s work on kin relationality: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.994508/full
Related Happiness Break episodes:
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
We’d love to hear how this practice goes for you! Let us know how you connect with water in your life. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu
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Transcript:
DACHER KELTNER: Hi, this is Dacher Keltner. Welcome to Happiness Break, where we offer practices to support your well-being and deepen your sense of attunement to the world around you.
In our last Science of Happiness episode, we explored the healing qualities of water through our five senses.
Research shows that connecting with water through things like sound and sight, can make us feel better by reducing stress, enhancing focus, and promoting calm.
Studies also find that a meaningful connection with water often fosters a stronger commitment to protecting water sources.
This week, we're honored to be guided by Dr. Yuria Celidwen, an Indigenous scholar, who invites us to experience water as a reflection of our inter-relationality with all life.
She leads us through a practice that taps into our full sensory awareness of water, tracing its presence both within and around us.
So settle in, and join Yuria in sensing our relationship with water.
YURIA CELIDWEN [Speaking Nahuatl and Tzeltal languages.] Good day, dear relatives. I am Dr. Yuria Celidwen, of Maya [Speaking Nahuatl and Tzeltal languages] from the Truth Bearer Peoples of the Highlands of Chiapas in Mexico.
Today, I am offering a practice on water, its properties, gifts, and challenges. Pollution, the climate emergency, are bringing environmental disasters that are threatening our waters.
Indigenous elders have warned for decades. Bringing awareness for Mother Earth's most valuable resource, because we know clean water is essential for life.
So in this practice, I invite you to engage with an aim of deepening our sense of kin relationality, that is, seeing the whole world as a relative, I'm inviting you to examine how we relate and how we perceive our relationships, mind that there are tremendous differences between just merely thinking, reflecting, or observing an object. And analyzing how we relate to a subject and then dialoguing about the impact that each of us have on the other. This kind of contemplative practice is one of wonder.
Perhaps this opportunity will wake the responsibility that we all have to support the efforts of caring and tending to the waters for the present and for future generations.
And you know, the most beautiful part of this is that you don't really need to go to the ocean. You can also even just open a little bit of your water faucet at home and just let those droplets go down and engage with it.
[Speaking Nahuatl and Tzeltal languages.] Waters. From your abysmal wombs, infinite potential comes cohesive, graceful, flow.
The waters closest to us are calling.
We are calling them, too.
Rivers flowing within and around. We start by making an offering.
An offering of deep listening for guidance.
We're not asking, but giving, tending, learning to develop a relationship with waters by listening. We're being claimed by waters.
We allow them to transform us, learning from their power to become solid, liquid, gas.
We learn to flow instead of flooding.
We go from inflexibility to streams of renovation. Indeed, water is the lifeblood of Mother Earth, is the lifeblood of our bodies and dreams.
We listen to the waters to try to hear how they need tending.
Let these waters to just keep flowing, guiding you, allowing you to wonder, feel each of these cues as the waters that rise in your body, in your heart, and how they bring memories, imagination, and belonging to the waters within and outside, all in the same shared world, a home for us all.
After this practice, wonder for some time how the waters connect with you. What are their different languages?
How do the different states of water come to meet you?
How the different manifestations of waters raise emotions, and how do you relate to whatever rises in these interactions with waters all around and within you?
May all these wonders bring all our waves and tides closer to each other, relatives.
Until next time.
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