Restorative Mindfulness and Reparative Compassion
Dr. Murthi’s philosophy is rooted in a RMRC praxis that draws from counseling psychology, socially engaged Buddhism (Navayana Buddhism, Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh), and healing philosophies of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Rev. Desmond Tutu) and Truth Racial Healing and Transformation (Gail Christopher).
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RMRC praxis integrates individual and social healing and advancement by providing focused education and training through contemplative pedagogical practices including mindfulness, compassion cultivation, arts exploration, reflective wrirting, movement, yoga, group process, and community engagement and action.
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What is RMRC?
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Restorative Mindfulness (RM) is a method for developing critical consciousness (articulated by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire as reflection and action) of the systemic realities and conditioning that impact our health and communities.
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RM offers robust mindfulness practices to reconnect us to ourselves and our own humanity by developing the consciousness of harm, accountability, and repair in our lives. As a first step, such a consciousness can bring about individual and familial healing; but RM also engages the deeper work of social hope and healing by reimagining and transforming institutional habits, policies, practices, and systems that disconnect us from our common humanity by oppressing some while benefitting others. RM practices offer experiential learning and embodied understanding of how each of us occupies different and intersectional positions in a broader power context (interpersonal, familial, and institutional). These positions reflect hierarchies of care and belonging that impacts our access to health, education, personal dignity, equity, and basic human rights. RM practices support individual healing journeys towards personal and social accountability, hope, repair, and ethical action.
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RM as a critical and transformative consciousness can affect personal and systemic change only if it is embedded in Reparative Compassion (RC). RC is the bedrock of RM and offers a set of sustained practices to simultaneously cultivate personal and collective compassion and dignity. RC supports our reckoning with how our conditioning within families, institutions, and social systems shapes us and impacts others through implicit and explicit logics of inclusion and exclusions—i.e., how our conditioning (mind-body habits) and relationship to privilege and proximity to power may exacerbate or alleviate social suffering.
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​By centering humanistic ethics, personal and social dignity, justice, and health equity, RMRC offers robust training to support individuals, groups and systems to heal within a collective where everyone matters and belongs.
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"No Wellness Without Fairness and Worthiness"
-- Issac Prilleltensky​​