In these times of increasing authoritarianism, polarization, and violence, we are committed to engaging practices that help us collectively maneuver with strength, suppleness, and clarity. Specifically, we are interested in somatic, psychological, and martial practices that help us learn to navigate conflict, de-escalate stressful situations, and defend and protect ourselves and others when needed—without reproducing patterns of violence, domination and oppression. This is a transformative healing stance, rooted in care and compassion for all, which sits at the root of many contemplative, spiritual, and martial traditions. This course will bring together martial arts practitioners, spiritual teachers, and movement leaders for embodied and applied explorations of martial principles with the intention of helping us navigate the current waters with clarity. *More faculty to be announced!

Our 2025 annual symposium—co-sponsored by Ocha Dharma and presented in conjunction with The Arrow Journal’s special issue of the same title—is designed to introduce participants to a range of lineage-based approaches for engaging our physical, emotional, spiritual, and energetic well-being, in order to help untangle the knots in ourselves, our social systems and communities and realize our fullest liberatory potential.

The decolonial vision of the pluriverse—a world in which diverse epistemologies, ontologies, and forms of praxis—is inherently relational. Pluriversality therefore offers a critical reorientation to the intersecting ecological, economic, and social crises of our time which, in our view, require relational solutions. Relationality means interconnection and interdependence. To be in relationship is to be open to being transformed by the co-called other; to be able to learn, integrate, adapt, and recalibrate as new information, perspectives, and ways of sensing emerge. Opening to relationality in this way calls us to resist rigidity and righteousness, and the impulse to cling so tightly to our own view(s) that we end up obscuring, dominating, or shutting out other views. Relational practice invites us to learn to experience complexity, contradiction, and difference without needing to seek control or even total coherence.