Ashoka
United States of America 🇺🇸
The mornings were usually cold and gray. I would wake up early and choose clothes that allowed me to engage in the activities we had planned for the day. Sometimes it meant building and painting houses, some others it meant playing with children, so fashion was the last thing on my mind. I was around 15 when I started volunteering with a church youth group in my hometown near Mexico City. I was excited to discover new ways of using my energy and skills to serve and connect with others. I felt excited that my weekend plans meant hanging out with friends and organizing crazy ideas with the intention of making people's lives better. We were lucky because "the adults" gave us space to decide what we wanted to do and we mobilized to make things happen.
Ever since then, I have been involved with organizing and developing narratives for understanding and collaboration. Many times I have found spaces for co-creation in Catholic structures like my university or different churches, but I have mainly focused on creating impact in secular surroundings.
While I don't consider myself religious and have broken up with the Catholic faith, I consider myself deeply spiritual and blessed. Changemaking to me is a privilege. I feel in awe when I engage in conversations with people who are changing the world for the better and I feel fortunate for spending my time designing and implementing strategies for social change.
My spiritual practice is a grounding mechanism. Making space to just "be" (connecting with myself, my body, and emotions, with nature, my people and my roots) is a way in which I claim that "I belong" in a world of constant change. My spirituality helps me gain clarity, regain agency, balance my emotions and thoughts, and enables me to show up with recharged batteries one more day! "Connected to the light" is how I experience the intersection between changemaking and spirituality: being in alignment with my purpose and values, and with the desire to keep learning from myself and others everyday.
Being a Spiritual Changemaker (to me) is closely related to innovation. It means collaborating with others to actively build a better world while allowing ideas to flow, offering what emerges, holding space for emotions and vulnerability, and making room for others to bring what is alive for them. It means slowing down and trusting that I don't need to have everything figured out. It means feeling protected by mom's blessings and feeling a little bit less lost as I navigate through life.