Research Center for the Study of Consciousness and Indigenous Sciences
Can meditation help us create community and shared experiences as a path towards climate activism? And if so, can Indigenous sciences inspire us to design shared experiences while visiting places of power?
There is an eminent disconnection with the environment, the people around us and with ourselves. There is a general spirit of entitled colonisation, mixed with a lack of empathy for other humans and non-human organisms like animals, insects, trees, moss and fungi.
I grew up in Mexico, close to the monarch butterfly sanctuaries and played on ashes on the outskirts of the youngest volcano in the world: El Paricutin (‘place at the other side’ in Purepecha). It was through my experiences in these places of power that I fell in love with nature and butterflies. Volcanoes and sanctuaries are considered places of power for having strong magnetic fields, this is how monarch butterflies find them during their epic migrations in North America. Due to loss of habitat, the monarch butterfly colonies have relocated to nearby volcanoes situated on the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. In 2012, an unidentified object was documented entering one of these volcanoes, causing magnetic anomalies registered over central Mexico in synchronicity with volcanic activity around the world. I visited this place to practice meditation with a group of friends with whom I shared an experience of expansion of consciousness (a.k.a. the coherent state in neuroscience). According to Grinberg (1988), the coherent state can be achieved through meditation, which embodies the self-reflection necessary to shift our experience of reality and can help us achieve unity with the universe.
In order to further research the coherent state and how places of power can enhance the process of reconnecting with ourselves and the environment, I created a Research Center for the Study of Consciousness and Indigenous Sciences,dedicated to the creation of collective experiences inspired by ancestral wisdom. Our objective is to study the effects of the different activities aimed at the concentration of attention, exploration and expansion of consciousness, on all aspects of human life, while integrating the ancestral and collective interest of understanding our bodies as sophisticated biotechnology in harmony with the Earth. To inform the outcome of this project, I visited and shared experiences in two places of power, both in Mexico: the volcano Iztaccihuatl (‘white woman’ in Nahuatl) where new monarch butterfly colonies have been reported hibernating in recent years and the third largest monolith in the world: Peña de Bernal.
