Robert Marx, the son of a refugee and Co-Lead of the Sussex Mindfulness Centre, describes his experience of running a mindfulness course for refugees and asylum seekers
Faiths offer hand of friendship
As we approach Christmas, and the start of both Channukah and Rajab, we can consider how the founders of three of the world’s religions were themselves refugees. Jesus and his parents fled Herod’s massacre and found safety in Egypt. Moses fled the persecution of Pharoah in Egypt and sought refuge in Midian. The Prophet Muhammad fled persecution in Mecca and sought protection in what was later called Medina.
All these religions call for us to offer hospitality to strangers: “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut. 10:19); “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (Matthew 25:35); and the Qur’an instructs believers to offer protection to anyone who seeks it, even from an enemy group (Qur’an 9:6).
Yet hate crimes send shock waves through communities
And yet only weeks ago, I was deeply distressed to discover that the mosque round the corner from where I live in Peacehaven suffered an awful arson attack, just coming on the heels of the deaths at the Manchester synagogue. Antisemitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise. We live in a world in which people can be displaced thousands of miles from their families and homes through no fault of their own, and the way they are received is also affected by the reverberations from events thousands of miles away.
Mindfulness for refugees
It is into this context that we wanted to offer our mindfulness courses to refugees in the Brighton area. Last year, our Sussex Mindfulness Centre team, won a national award for this work. This year we’ve run two more of these 10-week courses using the curriculum devised by Ariana Faris and Sheila Webb, with money from the award and funds generated through other Sussex Mindfulness Centre work. I was fortunate enough to co-lead the last group which finished in September. This was a group like no other I had run in several ways.
We held the group outside in the Secret Garden in Kemptown, Brighton, a beautiful and protected space. The location was so important. I have never run a group outside before so this was an interesting adjustment for me, having been trained to run groups with very particular kinds of set up and structure and always assumed to be inside, or more recently online. But people repeatedly referred to the beauty and peace of the garden as a key to their therapeutic progress. And indeed, more and more research is emerging to demonstrate the benefits of nature for mood and stress, and specifically for the benefits of sustaining mindfulness practice and improving attention.
We also had a refreshment break during the sessions during which we provided snacks and drinks, offering a space for participants to chat. Again, this was a big departure for me from what I had been used to. My training has tended to discourage breaks in which people might go back into their discursive mind as a distraction from the work of learning to pay attention and drop the storyline. And yet, this too seemed so important for the connection they needed with each other in a normal way, that had been so deeply interrupted in their lives. At the end, some of the participants brought their own traditional foods to share and we were able to enjoy the richness of these varied cultures. We also enjoyed listening to Rumi’s famous ‘Guest House’ poem, much beloved by many mindfulness teachers, in the language it was written in – in Farsi. This created a beautiful full circle in which we were bringing teachings to people that had been brought to us from the cultures of some of those same people. Not only had the participants migrated but so had the content of the course.
Sanctuary and safety amidst the hatred
Probably the most important element running through the whole group was safety. In order to protect our participants, we tended to avoid asking about their histories and where they had come from. Some of this information emerged as the weeks went on, but organically, not from the kind of assessment I was used to doing prior to offering any kind of therapeutic intervention. That just wouldn’t have set the right tone here of welcome into a space that was safe: non medicalised, non-stigmatising and non-intrusive. And yet we knew our participants had experienced some awful and traumatic events and their very presence was evidence of having been dislocated from what they had once called home.
Empowerment, sharing and reflections
This group was also the first of the four we have run that included men, as well as women, and there were some concerns about how that might impact the sense of safety. However, our experience was that the men added a broader diversity to the group, and contributed to what might have been a new experience for some women of a safe, respectful, mixed space.
In the final session, the participants talked about their experience of the course. Everyone shared what they would be taking away and how they would miss the sessions. People named different breathing practices they would use, time they would commit to take out for themselves from their caring duties, examples of empowerment they would draw on and how they had normalised their experiences for each other, rather than having them in lonely isolation.
I found myself thinking back to my own father, who arrived in Littlehampton as a child refugee in 1939, barely speaking English, and the lifelong journey he had from then on to make a home here. I was only here myself thanks to the sanctuary he was given, and I wondered what he’d make of the attacks on the synagogue and mosque in the context of the welcome for which he always felt so deeply appreciative.
