![]() He is creating a meditation and wellness center through a generous grant from the Kataly Foundation called South Side Liberation Center to bring healing to his new community. ![]() He currently teaches mindfulness meditation with South Side Insight Meditation Circle and Taoist meditation with TaoYoga Chicago. Recently, he taught his first 10-day retreat entitled Liberating the Heart, Dismantling Oppression. He graduated from the Community Dharma Leaders Program through Spirit Rock Meditation Center in 2012. He has also taught in the corporate setting, at MNDFL, New York Insight, the Brooklyn Zen Center, East Bay Meditation Center, public schools, and universities. Wanting to bring vipassana practice to the youth, he began teaching mindfulness practice to incarcerated, court-involved, and system-vulnerable youth through New York’s Lineage Project in 2010. This sparked a rich journey into different styles from the Hawaiian shamanic, Hindu, Sufi, Dzogchen, Taoist, and vipassana traditions. Even though I’m reading from a script, I really bring it from the heart.Joshua bee alafia ’s meditation practice began in 1989 when his mother gave him a mantra to work with. Luckily, buddhify has been giving me material where I can feel that way. Little did I know that I would years later be one of those voices, so I try to make it as real and sincere as I can. An experienced cinematographer, editor and film-maker, Joshua also a long-time meditation teacher with a specialism in mindfulness for people of colour and. There’s something that just lacked sincerity. I remember growing up and listening to self-help tapes in the ‘ 80s that somehow entered the elementary school, and feeling like it wasn’t pure, having this doubt in the intentions of the speaker as being completely genuine. It’s something that should be honored and approached with a certain degree of reverence, people’s intentions should be pure. ![]() It’s this very intimate place where you’re being allowed into someone’s mind and subconscious. Guided meditation is such an intimate thing really. It’s like you’re whispering in someone’s ear. For the Kara program, I was thinking about people who are suffering in the hospital and being this warm, friendly presence that they’re listening to intimately with headphones. I really like doing the studio work and thinking about the various people that might hear it. How are you going to tell this story differently? How are you going to expand this sense of narrative? They’re both very interrelated for me. Or playing with form and not having three acts. ![]() Taking people through the four foundations of establishing mindfulness is very similar to taking people to three acts of a story. A lot like the journey of leading someone into relaxing the body, being present in the body, and then opening up to the sensations of the breath and opening up to maybe emotions or thoughts, which are very slippery. You don’t just cut to the moral of the story in the first two minutes, you know? It’s a journey. You’re in the position of guiding the mind through a story in a very meticulous methodical way, releasing information as it’s appropriate. I approach filmmaking with the same kind of reverence and honor as teaching meditation. I am a participant, in this, experiencing it. But then, you also have this mindfulness moment of I am watching a movie or I am in a body. It can even cause muscle contractions, visceral contractions, and expansion. You go between being so caught up in the protagonist’s story that you’re in this vicarious receptivity, where you can even have reflexes. I think filmmaking, like film watching, is a concentration practice. This is completely opposite from teaching other folks, where the first thing we’re doing is usually sitting for 45 minutes and after that it’s a dharma talk. Most of the class is me working on earning that trust, through talking and opening up about how I went through a lot of similar things when I was young, and then the last few moments of the class is me trying to share this sense of tranquility and freedom in a mindfulness meditation practice. When you’re dealing with people who have been severely traumatized, both outside of prison and through the experience of being incarcerated, you’re not going to be given the sense of trust without earning it. It involves a different approach to teaching. Reaching kids in that kind of oppressive atmosphere was nothing short of magical and really felt great. It was extremely challenging, but it was also very rewarding in the long run. They don’t really want to practice listening to themselves and looking inwardly when they’re going through so much. It was very hard, difficult work, in terms of teaching kids who don’t really want to be there and who are miserable about being in jail. This is something I started doing back in 2010 and continued with until I left New York recently - so I taught with them for about seven years.
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