Community Spotlight: Meditating for Black Lives

By Kate Sederstrom

Breathe in through your nose…  

And out through your nose. 

“As a Black person, I spend a lot of time reflecting on my own existence, and the quality of my life and my breath – and that reflection allows me to recognize other people’s humanity,” says Brittany Micek, the founder of Meditating for Black Lives. Micek and her co-organizers hosted dozens of free guided meditations in Herbert Von King Park and Lincoln Terrace Park all last summer, all with the goal of supporting community efforts to heal oppression using principles and practices of various meditation traditions. “If I know I need to breathe to live, I can see in you that at the bare minimum, you need to breathe to live,” she says.

Meditating for Black Lives hosted their very first session last June. “The idea was, I’m just going to sit and meditate in the park. We’ll see what happens. I hand-wrote flyers and went to a Black-owned copy shop in Bed-Stuy, IMail and More (everybody go there!), and printed them out,” Micek says. She thought it would largely just be her 20 friends who would show up to this. “We were just going to meditate and think and hold this space for each other in light of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and countless others. That’s what was going to happen.”

That’s not exactly what happened. Roughly 2,000 people showed up on a warm summer morning to the first community meditation in Herbert Von King Park. 

Then every Saturday and Sunday, from June through the fall of 2020, Meditating for Black Lives led thousands more in Bed-Stuy and Brownsville in guided meditations that center Black and Brown lives. They took the winter off to heal, then partnered with Swivel Gallery for a special installation the entire month of May, then hosted Juneteenth meditations with both MoCADA and the Brooklyn Museum. Though one major goal is “for everyone all over to be meditating,” Micek and her team will never forget their roots in the park. That’s another major goal: reclaiming public spaces in our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. 

“We’re seeing Black and Brown people, even white-identifying people, co-exist. It’s this radical imagining,” Micek says. “Meditation is truly a means of recognizing yourself — how human and imperfect, but perfectly human you are — and to see that in someone else.”

When asked what we, as a food co-op, can do in the fight for Black liberation, frankly, Micek didn’t have great things to say about her experience at our store as a Black person. In the historically Black space in which our Co-op resides, community members are already doing great work to feed our neighbors — and have been for years — yet she saw that the Co-op was missing so many opportunities for collaborating with these existing organizations, and for bringing food justice to Central Brooklyn.

Micek has some key wisdom to share with us moving forward. “Advocate, fight for, demand food justice. There are historic institutions in Central Brooklyn who have been serving the Black community for decades. Insist on cooperating with them. New places that spring up in the neighborhood that signal gentrification isolate themselves when they don’t do things like that.”

Our food justice program has improved since Micek's experience. Store manager Willa Sheikh has stocked many community fridges near the Co-op herself, especially in the early days of 2020. Then in February of 2020, we started a collaboration with the first community fridge on Van Bruen in February 2020 alongside A New World In Our Hearts and Food Not Bombs. That network grew exponentially — now Willa only needs to text a Signal group for a volunteer to come pick up goods at the Co-op, then distribute them all across the city wherever there’s need. 

But I can’t help but think (meditate?) on what else we, the Greene Hill Co-op community, can be doing. How else can we support the efforts of those who have been in this space for a very, very long time, like the church across the street? Are there more ways in which we as a cohort of breathing beings passionate about food justice can act in solidarity with our neighbors? Let us know by emailing board member Hannah Weitzer or Amanda Pitt.

The next community guided meditation with Meditating for Black Lives will be at Lincoln Terrace Park at 10 a.m. on July 10. If the lawn at Herbert Von King Park opens up this summer, they’ll be there, too. So stay tuned by visiting their website or following Meditating for Black Lives on Instagram. In the meantime, remember to breathe — and consider donating to Meditating for Black Lives.