Mindfulness, Meditation, and Movement at Highbridge Voices
by Elizabeth Breen
This semester, for my community engaged learning project as part of Religion in NYC, I was tasked with working with Highbridge Voices, an afterschool program that serves the 4th–12th graders who live in the affordable housing buildings managed by Highbridge Community Development Corporation in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. Since 2019, Highbridge Voices has provided family workshops to support their students and their families, focusing on life skills and disseminating information that the community traditionally has not had access to, including academic support, mindfulness and meditation workshops, and instructor-led yoga classes. My task was to formulate a research project exploring how spiritual practices may inform mindfulness, stress relief, and other interventions for families, especially in under-resourced neighborhoods. My research led me to discussions with several individuals involved in the workshops at Highbridge Voices, and eventually culminated in synthesizing what I learned from these leaders with my academic research findings to formulate a meditation for academic stress geared towards the middle school students at Highbridge Voices.
Ultimately, and somewhat unexpectedly, the central concern of this research project became discerning where secular practices ended and religious ones began; communicating about religion in religiously plural or unaffiliated spaces; and who gets to decide what “counts” as religious or spiritual. Throughout this project, I maintain the perspective that while the leaders within Highbridge Voices may not see their programming as particularly spiritual, this absolutely does not preclude the participants from harvesting spiritual benefits from the practice, especially when considering the extant literature regarding the spirituality of children.
The Highbridge neighborhood is a historically under-resourced, disadvantaged neighborhood for a variety of factors, including the neighborhood’s unique geographical features separating it from the rest of the Bronx and Manhattan, in addition to economic disarray from the Bronx fires that devastated much of the South Bronx in the 1970s. Highbridge Voices was born in 1998 out of the need for additional support structure for Highbridge’s children, which neither public schools nor parents could provide in such an economically challenged environment. Highbridge Voices is now a firmly established neighborhood institution, and provides around 15 hours of programming weekly (outside of school hours) to the nearly 200 students it serves every year.
I was tasked with working with Highbridge Voices, a secular organization, which therefore may seem like a curious choice for community engagement in a religion course. However, the recently-established mindfulness, meditation, and yoga workshops were identified as potential sites of religion or spirituality in the community, which is significant given the recent changes in the religious landscape of the Highbridge neighborhood (i.e., the demolition of St. Francis Church). The roots of meditation, mindfulness, and yoga in spiritual practice make them potential avenues for spiritual significance to be attributed with the loss of another religious space fresh in the minds and hearts of the community.
For better or for worse, mindfulness, meditation, and yoga have been appropriated by Western culture and are largely now seen as practices that can be taken with as much or as little spiritual weight as one desires. The fact that mindfulness, meditation, and yoga have their roots in religion and spirituality, and to this day continue to be of major religious/spiritual significance to many who practice, oftentimes comes into conflict with the reality that these practices can be and are frequently completely divorced from these spiritual roots and are instead appropriated as general wellbeing strategies for secular audiences.
I still had questions as I transitioned to the personal interview portion of my project, namely: Where is the line between religion and spirituality and secular practice? And who gets to decide where that line is? In order to gain more insight into how religion and spirituality were (or weren’t) incorporated into the mindfulness, meditation, and yoga practices at Highbridge Voices, through my connection with the Center for Community Engaged Learning at Fordham, I was introduced to Dr. Tamique Ridgard, Aryanna Ramos, and Dennis Teston, all of whom are involved in the programming aspects of Highbridge Voices.
The two major takeaways from my three interviews that seemed to be consistent across the interviewees. Firstly, and most relevant for this project, is the finding that religion and spirituality seemingly do not have an official place at Highbridge Voices, at least in the mindfulness, meditation, and yoga practices there. I cannot say that I am terribly surprised by this finding, as again, Highbridge Voices is a secular organization in a community that seems to be losing its religious resources in favor of further community development (e.g., the replacement of St. Francis Church with a brand new apartment complex and community center). That said, I find the juxtaposition, between these three leaders at Highbridge Voices and their assertions that there is not much spiritual about what they do, and my own lack of insight into how the participants in the programs feel about any potential spiritual benefits they may glean from the practices, unconvincing as to whether what happens at Highbridge Voices is or is not spiritual or religious. I simply feel that there is not enough information to tell either way, and furthermore, based upon my research, the spiritual benefits that the children gain from the mindfulness, meditation, and/or yoga practices may not be immediately apparent to those running the workshops.
Secondly, and more surprisingly, these three leaders emphasized across the board very similar things they see the Highbridge Voices students struggling with and similar ideas for messages they hope to convey through the workshops. That is, all three of my interviewees emphasized that the Covid-19 pandemic left the children at Highbridge Voices stressed and struggling with organization and task management, both academically and in extracurricular activities. Then, when asked what lessons they hoped to impart through the workshops, everyone said something along the lines of supplying students and their families with coping strategies to make their day-to-day more manageable, and help them lead more positive lives with reduced stress and anxiety. These are laudable goals, and something that meditation, mindfulness, and yoga have been demonstrated to achieve.
As the main investigation of this project remains unanswered, that is, whether religion and spirituality are present in the mindfulness, meditation, and yoga practices at Highbridge Voices, further research is needed in order to fully understand the answer to this question. I intend to continue my personal work with Highbridge Voices and their programming, and I hope, for my own satisfaction, I will be able to identify individuals who have a more complete insight into the spiritual implications of these practices with students. However, I think additional academic research and community engagement with Highbridge Voices, possibly in a future version of this course, in order to implement our meditation practice and my survey on spirituality, would be another worthwhile avenue to get this question answered as well. Overall, I think the student perspective was lacking in this project, and I hope that future additions to this relationship with Highbridge Voices will serve to address that deficit.
Overall, this project was a search for spirituality and religion in the practices of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga at Highbridge Voices. While lackluster endorsement from the organizers at Highbridge Voices has me convinced that any spiritual dimensions of the practices are not coming directly from the leadership, based upon the extant literature I am not yet convinced that the students that participate in these workshops don’t gain any spiritual benefit from partaking in these activities. Further research needs to be done in order to address the student perspective. Still, this project shed light on the benefits of these practices and the instrumental role Highbridge Voices has played in the lives of these students, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their collaboration with Fordham is an exciting opportunity for both institutions to learn from one another and further cement Fordham as a fixture of the Bronx community, not an unseen overseer. I greatly enjoyed my time working with the folks at Highbridge Voices and am excited to continue our work together in the future.
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I would like to thank the staff at Highbridge Voices, especially Aryanna Ramos, Dr. Tamique Ridgard, and Dennis Teston, for their time and contribution to this project.
Header Photo: Tess Mayer Photography
