Sandra Filippelli will present her dissertation proposal, titled: Circumambulating Poetic Text: Cultivating Compassionate Sacred Space in Writing An Intertextual A/r/tography Investigation on Wednesday, July 19. All are welcome to attend.
Date: Wednesday, July 19
Time: 1 pm
Location: Ponderosa Multipurpose Room
Supervisory committee: Dr. Carl Leggo (LLED), Dr. Kedrick James (LLED), and Dr. Rita Irwin (EDCP).
Abstract:
This manuscript dissertation will be a work of A/r/tography, which will address the three areas of this methodology – art, research, and teaching – through the view of a fictional female character named Sonam, or merit in Tibetan, who is a Western Buddhist woman living in a third, liminal space encompassing East and West. In her endeavor to gain merit along her Buddhist path, Sonam will undertake a journey into the landscape of the mind as she walks her participant readers along a path through grief to self-compassion then compassion for others and, ultimately, to Great Compassion, or the wish to attain Enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. She will show us how to be at home within ourselves and, thus, create our own internal and external sacred spaces through the practice of contemplative writing.
Sonam will ground her literary art in research on grief and compassion, addressing how, through contemplation of Buddhist philosophy in our difficult, uncertain contemporary times, we can gradually transform our troubled minds to a more peaceful state. She will engage in literary and visual art research, as well as explore environmental settings, in her endeavor to locate compassionate sacred space within poetic and scholarly text. Sonam will consider how these artistic forms, including her own literary work, can be explored by students through an art education curriculum template addressing the teaching of creative writing and visual art focusing on the arc of transformation from grief to compassion. Teaching will also include some contemplative sitting and walking meditation presented as poetic inquiry, through which students can cultivate their own sacred spaces.
Sonam’s working research question is as follows: How can we cultivate a practice of creative writing and reflection on art that will enable us to transform grief into compassion so that we can create a sacred space within ourselves and, thus, in our external world? In her consideration of the mind as our home in which to dwell spaciously, Sonam draws upon Bachelard’s (1958/1994) metaphor of the house as an oneiric place of the imagination. If, as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh advocates, we can adopt the practice of “‘dwelling in the present moment’” (Hanh, 1987/2005, p. 15), we may cultivate a view of ahimsa, Gandhi’s notion of non-violence, and reflect on its relevance to quelling grief and internal dis/ease in our conflict-ridden contemporary society. A mind of ahimsa is a home of emotional stability, abandoning attachment to hatred and malice toward oneself and others. Sonam will reflect on Kabat-Zinn’s (2013) study of the catastrophic effect of stress and dis/ease in contemporary life and advocacy of mindfulness as a process of engendering such mental stability and well-being through inhabiting the moment. In our oneiric house of dreams, we can engage in a compassionate writing practice through which we can awaken awareness of an interdependent planet. This view adheres to that of 7th century Buddhist scholar, Shantideva (7thC/1997), who advocates commitment to contemplative practice aimed at pacifying a wandering mind and creating space for contentment and joy with a mind opening to compassionate altruism, or bodhichitta. Sonam maintains that, in this space, we can create art through our reflections on life and, in this way, educate ourselves and others.