Mission Statement

Heart Light Action uses mindfulness awareness meditation and other contemplative practices in community-based educational settings to help people working for a better world realize their goals.

Vision

Bringing together people from diverse backgrounds, Heart Light uplifts conviction in the unconditional worthiness and potential of all human beings.

History

Heart Light began in October of 2023. It builds on earlier projects such as Bornworthy Arts (2008) which taught meditation, writing and leadership skills to incarcerated youth; Community Lab for Intentional Practice (2017) for community-based activists working on various issues including climate justice, anti-racism and mutual aid; Freedom Schools 360 (2018); and Abolitionist Restorative Justice Workshops (2019) which worked with people from various backgrounds focusing on ways to identify and repair the harm of institutional racism.

What People Are Saying About Heart Light Action

  • Care was taken to ensure that everyone felt heard and valued. Really enjoyed the structure of learning, contemplating and then creating. I think working on the personal poster gave me time in a more body-oriented, sensory way of letting the info I was processing sink in, Also helped relate the issues to personal experience more directly.

    Anonymous

  • I enjoyed [sic] mostly everything. I felt that many of the exercises did a very good job of giving us an experiential feeling for many truths--white privilege, white dominant society, ignorance of the structures and history of oppression of both black and indigenous peoples (past and present). I will really remember the feeling of experiencing these truths.

    Participant

  • Visual/arts based learning allows for different types of learning/integration ... I’m not sure how I will use this but I'd like to figure out how to apply similar methods (but different content) in my own teaching. The recognition of intergenerational trauma of settlers was profound - I could see the cycles that had happened in Europe repeating itself in North America... this can be used to help create connections rather than differences.

    In-person workshop participant

Heart Light Action Founder Damita Brown

Damita Brown teaches mindfulness meditation and leads workshops and retreats. She developed the contemplative social action approach in order to provide community based workshops for people interested in learning how to bring more compassion into their professional and organizational work.

In 2023 Brown created Heart Light Cards: Contemplation and Activities for Ending Racism. The cards support people in hosting anti-racism gatherings in their own homes. See the home page for more details about Heart Light cards.