Prisms dangle in at least eight windows of my home, welcoming rainbows as the sun makes its daily journey across the sky. One mid-morning, my five-year-old godson caught a rainbow on his forehead. His seven-year-old sister noticed, and gently held him there a moment longer, enjoying the color dancing on his alabaster skin. Now we do it all the time. We love this practice! We call it rainbow basking.
Rainbow basking took on new meaning for me a few months ago as I sat in my sunlit study reeling from the news out of Colorado Springs. I said the names Daniel, Derrick, Kelly, Ashley, and Raymond, the then most-recent victims of a mass shooting in our gun-mad nation.
A few days before, I had walked a beautiful college campus with a chaplain friend who was in her first trimester of pregnancy. She showed me the spacious arch-ceilinged chapel, where the sun slanting through the contemporary stained-glass windows at noon bathes the center aisle in every color of the rainbow.
“You should bask here,” I said, telling her about my godchildren and the practice we discovered together. “You should bask here while you’re pregnant!” I said a little louder, gaining energy as an idea bloomed. Both of us laughed with delight at the thought of her growing belly awash with every color of the rainbow, while she lifts a prayer for this wee one emerging in their original goodness, one unique expression of humanity currently taking shape and form within her.
In the midst of that week – full of grief and delight – a practice took shape for me. It is a practice for honoring LGBTQ+ identities and prayerfully rejecting gender oppression of all sorts. I offer it in hopes that it brings some solace, a bit of stitching back together this world torn asunder by random violence. Do it alone, or better yet, invite a friend to do it with you.
Rainbow Basking:
Find a rainbow – in a college chapel, a local church, a sanctuary repurposed as a pub, or create a rainbow of your own with a prism and free sunlight.
Situate yourself within the rainbow.
Let the rainbow dance on one part of your body.
If you’re lucky, maybe you can spread out in a rainbow large enough to engulf your whole body.
Take seven deep breaths, eyes closed or open, one for each day of creation.
Take five deep breaths, one for each young life we lost to the world this week.
Feel the power of the rainbow dancing on you.
Give thanks for your body, just as it is or as it is becoming.
Give thanks for your sensuality, how you delight in touch, smell, taste, sound.
Imagine the rainbow affirming and blessing you.
Lift up in your imagination loved ones or friends who struggle to find safety, affirmation, or self- acceptance because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Imagine the rainbow affirming and blessing them.
Lift up those who have died because of gender oppression.
Lift up those who struggle from depression or anxiety because of gender oppression.
Welcome any feelings that arise, knowing they will ebb and flow.
If you are alone, hug yourself.
If you are not alone, hug yourself, and offer a hug to someone else.
Bask in this rainbow as long as you wish.
When you are ready, go on with your day.
If you are hurting, find a safe person to reach out to.
Rainbow basking is a practice I created, in the spur of the moment, as I stared at the color strewn chapel floor and considered my friend’s gestating body. What other practices like this lie at our fingertips? What ancient practices lie ready to be rediscovered, reinterpreted by cultural creatives innovating out of necessity?
I’ve accumulated a list of fifty-five such practices, and the list grows with each thoughtful conversation I have around mental health. Our culture of mass violence, police violence, climate justice, political polarization: all of these add up to make life particularly challenging to young people in the process of adulting these days. How might we support them?
Brain research shows that spiritual practices can mitigate against the severity, duration and outcome of depression. It’s that small truth that launched me on a journey to develop Our Own Deep Wells: Bringing Soulful Practice to Campus as a way of addressing the mental health epidemic facing young adults.
A team of gifted facilitators will help me launch a pilot of Our Own Deep Wells in Virginia a few months. Our desire is to increase the capacity student life professionals to integrate a wide array of soulful practices into their leadership in such spaces as residential life, first gen student retention, sexual assault prevention, and freshman orientation.
If we succeed, a student won’t have to show up for an additional offering. Rather, they will experience a shared practice, such as rainbow basking, praying a rosary, creating a hedge of protection, or welcoming the wisdom of one’s wise and loving ancestors into the day – as an invitation, lightly held. Over time, if leaders across a campus adopt such practices with care not to proselytyze or demand strict orthodoxy, we could envision a more mental health friendly culture arising. People might form community around shared practices such as a Quaker clearness committee over pizza; a session of story-based theological reflection before Friday happy hour.
We’ve all become accustomed to encountering mindfulness exercises – mostly derived from Eastern religious traditions – in secular spaces. Our Own Deep Wells diversifies the mindfulness movement to be more inclusive of all of our traditions. We draw from the deep wells of human experience to surface practice that we can use as sources of healing for today. Such sources include: the Black prophetic church in America, the Quaker movement, Ignation spirituality. Celtic spirituality, forest bathing, grief waking, sitting Shiva.
Each of these deeply textured practices arise out of specific cultural contexts which we honor carefully as we share across traditions. Each practice offers a unique pathway for tending the weary soul and accompanying one another on the journey to becoming more human.
Wouldn’t that be helpful to people struggling with the daily traumas of life, especially as we all reel from ongoing social isolation and pandemic-related loneliness and climate despair?
Our Own Deep Wells seeks to provide more access to such practices for the first generation coming of age in the spiritual-but-not-religious era.
It’s an experiment. It happens to be keeping me up late some nights – emailing friends around the country to learn about new practices they are naming and discovering. Did you know there is a Jewish ritual for moon seeking? Stay tuned! And let me know if you’d like to learn more.