Welcome to Tech Care, where we explore what it means to build tech that cares, so that we can take care — of ourselves, our communities, and the world around us. You can find past issues here, and join us here:
🌸 musings in full bloom today:
Upgrading your meditation practice with a sound bath
On Soul and the meaning of life
Pursuing socially-engaged Buddhism
Hi friends,
I hope you’ve been taking good care of yourselves! This past week has been a whirlwind — from my little sister dropping her first single on Spotify (!!) to attending the 2021 Women in Product conference — so I’m really looking forward to taking some time to rest this long weekend.
This week, I wanted to share some musings on my journey with meditation & mindfulness, and how I’ve learned to create space to breathe deeply, for myself and others.
To start this journey, we would have to go back to February 2020 — one month into the second semester of my senior year of college, and one month before the entire world as we knew it shut down. My friend Cindy (who is also a lovely soul in the Tech Care community!) and I met up at our college’s Lunar New Year festival to plan a post-grad Asia trip — something I had been dreaming about for years. I was convinced it was the soul-searching I needed to do before I started my post-grad life.
Mid-planning, some of the folks running the Lunar New Year festival shared that a couple of guided meditation sessions were happening soon, if anyone wanted to join. At the last minute, I decided to join one of the meditation sessions — “why not?” — where I would eventually meet someone who would change my entire relationship to meditation, mindfulness, and ultimately life.
When I first met Hojin, she was calmly sitting on a meditation cushion, motioning for me to come in. I had accidentally barged into the previous session thinking I was late, and was awkwardly hovering in the corner, waiting for my session to begin. Once my session started, I was immediately immersed — in the silence, collective breath, and the sound of Hojin’s bell. I remember the vibrations of the bell reverberating through every bone of my body. I remember jotting down my email on Hojin’s clipboard, eager to learn more about something called a “sangha”.
I started going to weekly meetings with Swarthmore Sangha, our Buddhist meditation club, and it was one of the best decisions I made as a second-semester senior. We had a few blissful weeks of in-person sits and discussions, chatting about everything from the science of meditation to Buddhist ethics. Even as the pandemic hit, we swiftly moved our meditation sessions online, holding space for each other in unprecedented times. I realized that although meditation encourages you to look inward, there was something special about sharing that inward experience with others.
I never did get the chance to travel Asia, to soul search, to “find” myself and the meaning of life. Looking back, I don’t think I was necessarily searching in the right places. Although I’m still musing on what the meaning of life is, my meditation and mindfulness practice has made one thing clear: there is power in being present — with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us. Maybe then, we’ll find what we’re looking for.
With this in mind, I’d love to check-in with you:
🍵 Conversations of Care: Breathe
Every week, we’ll use this section to explore what it means to practice self, community, and structural care, and if/how technology plays a role.
Inspired by this post, we’ll use a “circular” structure of care to help us unlearn the individualistic “pyramid” structure popularized by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Inspired by this digital garden, we’ll use 🌱 to denote newly planted ideas, 🌿 for budding thoughts, and 🌸 for musings in full bloom. For areas where there may be space for ideation, I’ll mark with a 💡.
tech x breathe x self-care
🌿 [Try] Rise & Shine. I started using Shine during my junior year of college, back when it was still Shine Text, and it genuinely felt like a good friend was checking in on me every day. Shine feels like a meditation app that’s coming from the heart, with meditations on everything from “loving your small wins” to “honoring your whole self”. It’s the crossover between therapy and meditation you didn’t know you needed.
🌸 [Listen] Take a (sound) bath. I’m not going to lie, I took a bath while listening to this playlist once, and it was maybe one of the Top 10 experiences of my life. This is the perfect playlist to help you create space to breathe deeply, and to help you take your meditation practice to the next level.
🌸 [Watch] Soothe your Soul. If you haven’t seen Soul yet, you officially have weekend plans. Although Soul wasn’t explicitly about meditation, it shared a beautiful message about what it means to live a meaningful, mindful, and present life — a beautiful antidote to our hyper-connected digital world.
tech x breathe x community care
🌿 [Try] Build your practice with Mindstreaks. Mindstreaks is a social meditation app that’s essentially the “Strava for Meditation” — complete with streak tracking, motivational quotes, and sharing mindful musings with friends. Meditation as an activity can often feel very focused on the Self, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my experiences with Swarthmore Sangha, it’s that mindfulness, like happiness, is best when shared with others. Mindstreaks is the closest app that I’ve tried that has come close to embodying that virtue.
💡 [Brainstorm] Meditation that’s shared but not social? As with every sociodigital interaction, there are downsides: sharing for the sake of external validation, toxic comments, bias & disinformation, etc. What we’re left with is this notion of feeling more connected with others than ever before, yet so deeply disconnected from ourselves. As such, I can’t help but wonder: is perhaps the new frontier of “social products” one that is centered on sharing experiences with close friends & family (or even new friends with similar interests) vs. socializing with the world? If so, meditation could be a great place to start — we can learn from how sanghas create collective space to breathe deeply, and ultimately enable community care.
🌱 [Try/Learn] Grow with the Tree Yoga Cooperative. I’ve been following the Tree Yoga Cooperative, a BIPOC Worker-Owned Yoga Cooperative in LA, for a while now, and absolutely love their mission of making yoga and mindfulness more accessible to communities of color. If you’re in the LA area, you should definitely check them out, but if you’re not, they also offer virtual classes!
🌿 [Watch] Heal with UMI. If you’re not in LA or can’t make time for an IRL group meditation, you’re in luck because UMI, one of my favorite singer/songwriters, has decided to grace us with this ethereal guided meditation experience. I’ll dive into care x creator economy more in the coming months, but despite the pitfalls of social I outlined above, there’s something incredible about platforms like YouTube facilitating an asynchronous, ongoing feeling of community care, especially in times of extreme social isolation. Until then, enjoy this lovely care.pkg from UMI :)
tech x breathe x structural care
🌿 [Read] Unpacking Silicon Valley’s obsession with meditation. Have you ever searched inside of yourself? Ok, how about attended a Google-sponsored employee meditation program called “Search Inside Yourself”? On face, I think it’s great that companies are providing more health & wellness resources, like meditation programs, to their employees. However, this article does an interesting deep dive into the intentionality behind Silicon Valley’s obsession with meditation — are we optimizing for inner peace and acceptance, or productivity and career advancement?
🌸 [Read] Creating space for socially-engaged Buddhism. I read this article with Swarthmore Sangha back in January, and it has been a guiding text for me as I deepen my own Buddhist spirituality practice. Professor David Loy recaps what he terms “The Three Roots of Evil, Institutionalized” (institutionalized greed, institutionalized ill-will, and institutionalized delusion), their intricate relationships to capitalism, and how Buddhism might offer a spiritual path forward. I absolutely love this article, and return to it often — if you end up reading it, I would love to hear your thoughts!
🌿 [Read] Channel your inner Love & Rage. One of my good friends from college recommended this book to me last summer, and it transformed the way I think about the relationships between meditation, mindfulness, & structural care. Lama Rod Owens is a Black, queer, Buddhist author who completed a 3-year silent retreat program at Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery. In this book, he offers a unique perspective on the pursuit of racial justice and liberation from the lens of meditation, mindfulness, and the de/coupling of love and rage.
🎁 Care.pkg
Inspired by the concept of the Gift Economy, the goal here is to support and amplify anything you’re working on or thinking about along the lines of tech x care.
If you want to be featured in next week’s issue, hit reply and let me know!
🌺 Say Haloha, c/o Amy. Amy is a lovely soul in the Tech Care community, who is also the CEO & Co-Founder of Daily Haloha, a self-care app focused on improving our social wellbeing. The app invites you to check-in with yourself, share your check-ins with others, and be part of a bigger picture with the Haloha Wall. Definitely show Daily Haloha some love if you’re looking to level up your social wellbeing routine!
👩🏻💻 Tech Care, Tech Action
To take care is to also take action, so let’s create space for mutual aid.
If you have more mutual aid funds + networks to add or hit reply and let me know or directly comment them on the thread via Twitter!
If you donate to any of the below mutual aid funds, hit reply and let me know and I’ll make sure I do what I can to support you too ❤️
💌 Take care,
Michelle