Action: doing something toward a goal; movement; an act that one consciously wills.

Reflection:  The act of bending or folding back; to give back or exhibit as an image, likeness or outline; the act of realizing or consideration; to think quietly and calmly.

Praxis: practice, as distinguished from theory; application or use of knowledge or skills; convention, custom; a set of examples for practice.

Ritual:  A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers.  It may be performed on specific occasions. It may be performed by a single individual, by a group, or by the entire community; in arbitrary places, or in places especially reserved for it; either in public, in private, or before specific people. A ritual may be restricted to a certain subset of the community, and may enable or underscore the passage between religious or social states.

In community based organizing praxis is the result of action and reflection.  You need both to develop a practice, a life, that makes sense, and to move from one stage to another.  When it works, you ritualize it so that it becomes part of the lessons passed on from one generation to the next.

In the United States many folks ritualistically set down a set of resolutions couched in “I will do thus and so” for the coming year.  Part of what we’ve lost in doing this is the reflection necessary to move forward to praxis – an integration of what was done into our set of experiences to date.  Without this, ritual becomes meaningless (as evidenced by most New Year’s Resolutions going by the wayside as early as January 2nd).  If the action has no meaning (which would be revealed in relfection), then praxis does not occur in other than a superficial way.

2011 Challenge

Instead of a list of resolutions, or even, lately as is the custom, one word to guide us through an entire year, I suggest that we leave ourselves open to what arises in praxis as a result of both action and reflection.  Let us choose a question to guide us until we have integrated the answer and then let us move on to another question.  Let us not set time limits (as in:  OMG!  It’s February 1 and I haven’t lost 25 pounds and thus I am forever going to be loveless and ugly and never get a job so why bother!  That is an old story.  Let us integrate why we keep telling it so that we can let it go).

Here are some questions to get you started either in choosing a question to begin the year with, or in reflecting on your actions and experiences in the past year so that you can integrate the results and move from that ground of knowing instead of from an old story that no longer serves you.

• Where have you been in 2010?
• Where are you now?
• Where are you going?

• What has died?
• What is being born?
• What are the choices on your path?

• What do you believe?
• Why do you believe it?
• What keeps repeating?
• What are you not doing because “it just won’t work?”

• What areas of your life need more exploration and expansion?

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

Begin.

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

A question not asked is a door not opened.  Marilee Adams

Begin where you are.  Attend to your current state.  We tend to skip this part, leaping blindly toward wherever we think we should be.  But there is gold to be mined from what we find in our habitual and automatic states.  Victoria Castle