Mission, EMERGENT VISION, AND APPROACH
Mindful Living Revolution
Dharma teacher Deborah Eden Tull founded the nonprofit 501(c)3 Mindful Living Revolution in her transition from living/training as a Zen monastic at a silent monastery for over 7 years to living and teaching out in the world.
Mission
Mindful Living Revolution is dedicated to bridging personal and collective awakening by helping people embody compassionate, courageous engagement in all relationships - with self, each other, and our planet. All of our programs are based in experiential learning and realization through direct experience. This work celebrates the personal, interpersonal, transpersonal, ecological, mystical, and societal impact of engaged dharma practice.
Emergent Vision
Our vision encompasses sustaining and expanding our programs, growing our Scholarship Fund to make the work more accessible to those in need, and building a Center for Eco-Dharma in the mountains of western North Carolina. Our vision continually emerges in conscious response to the polycrisis of our times.
Our vision is focused on expanding the 6-month Heart of Listening program, including turning the curriculum into a book, to empower individuals, leaders, communities, and organizations to redefine leadership and facilitate change from the foundation of deep listening, relational presence, and shared power rather than the old model of power over.
Our vision consistently includes growing our Scholarship Fund. No one is turned away due to lack of funds in this practice, and this is made possible through the generosity of community. This work transforms lives and cultivates regenerative leadership in our world. In Buddhism, donations are offered in the spirit of dana, or generosity. We practice cultivating generosity towards one another, ourselves, and our world.
Our vision includes beginning to look for land in North Carolina to start a Center for Eco-Dharma. This will be a sanctuary for Sacred Activism and will allow us to teach and guide the work of presence and partnership with nature to more people in a sustainable way. This vision was first seeded in 1995 when, as a student of permaculture design and Buddhism, Eden created a self-designed major in college on Ecology, Community, and Social Change: Design for a Sustainable Future.
Approach
This work supports us to meet the challenges we face globally from presence, resilience, love, and relational intelligence. We create impact for hundreds of people per year through programming online, in person retreats, consultations, and through a library of resources. Our programming includes a weekly online sangha, trainings, retreats, workshops, and individual dharma mentorships. Eden’s work is unique, in that it honors ancient tradition with care and integrity, while also including fresh forms of teaching and inquiry. These creative methods of teaching include Relational Mindfulness, Earth-based practices, somatic inquiry, and conscious dance, all emphasizing relational presence—perhaps the most important quality we can cultivate today.
We work with both Buddhist meditators and secular mindfulness practitioners, psychotherapists, activists, community organizers, leaders from social justice and environmental justice fields, organizations and corporations such as the Environmental Protection Agency, indigenous leaders, mindfulness teachers, Buddhist teachers and monastics, marriage and family counselors, and concerned citizens across the country and internationally. It is our intention to continually co-create a field where all are welcome and where we are empowered to learn in reciprocity with and through one another.
HISTORY
Mindful Living Revolution was founded in 2008 by Deborah Eden Tull, as she transitioned from 7.5 years of Zen Buddhist monasticism in a silent monastery in the Sierras to living and teaching as a lay person in Los Angeles, California. The initial focus was teaching the integration of Buddhism with Eco-Dharma and an approach that acknowledges embodied meditation practice as medicine for the polycrises of our time.
When Mindful Living Revolution first began, Eden was teaching Zen meditation classes and conducting workshops and retreats on sustainability. Incorporating organic gardening, permaculture, and ecological living her work, from the start, drew meditators who wanted to step into more compassionate action in the world as well as drawing activists/community leaders who wanted to bring more meditation/contemplation to their work.
Over the next few years, as her lay life and teaching evolved, Eden recognized two vital pillars of spiritual practice in the modern world. The first is the need for Relational Mindfulness - in relationship with each other, ourselves, and the planet. The second is a recognition of the need to rebalance the sacred feminine and sacred masculine in our world and in our leadership. This required acknowledging an extreme imbalance caused by a legacy of patriarchy. In response and to share these teachings in the wider world, a powerful curriculum was developed with a focus on deep feminine-centered leadership (for people of every gender) and regenerative leadership that calls forth the power of receptivity, deep listening, embodiment, inquiry, compassion, and relational forms of knowing/being. This curriculum has been shared through dozens of retreats and workshops, as well as the six-month Heart of Listening Training for facilitators and leaders and the one-year Seeing with the Heart Training: Re-Wilding Our Perception Lens.
Today, Mindful Living Revolution offers retreats, workshops, trainings, mentorship, and weekly Sangha to an international community of Dharma practitioners. We also offer regular women's retreats and a monthly women's group.
Our Board of Directors is actively involved, with members based throughout the country.
In 2015, Mindful Living Revolution became an official 501c3 nonprofit, and in 2019, MLR moved from California to North Carolina, where Mindful Living Revolution is now in the process of starting a center for sacred activism.
