 Is Mike on? Oh great perfect. Thank you all. So my name is Patricia Nguyen and I'm an artist, community worker, builder, cultural shenanigan maker in Chicago and the piece today that I'll offer you all is on breath. And I actually want to invite you all to just close your eyes for a few seconds and just let your body sink into wherever you are, finding the rhythm that is pulsating through your body through the rise and fall of your chest, paying attention to the places in your body that feel tight and the places in your body that feel loose. Without any judgment, just breathing through the places in your body that feel loose to open up air to the places in your body that feel tight. In sitting with the stillness of your body and listening to the rhythm of your own breath, what is your body trying to tell you? What is the story that it's trying to share? Now I invite you all to slowly open your eyes and kind of wiggle yourself awake because I know we've had a lot of back-to-back events and it's been really wonderful hearing from everybody and all the powerful things folks are working on, musing on, thinking through. And so I'll begin. Who gets to breathe? Whose breath is worthy? Whose breath is disposable? How much breath does our body take up? How does this reveal how we have been racialized, gendered, breath muscles, breath and voice, breath and movement? Breath is fundamental to life. How do we take the daily pulsation that emerges from our bodies individually and collectively as a sign of possibility and its pace, rhythm and restraint shaped by an intransgression of the conditions of the world. War, genocide, racism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and the worlds we seek to make otherwise. A world where life affirming spaces enliven our breath. We as artists, organizers, cultural workers, how is our work grounded in the world while also transporting us to other worlds that are possible? Guided by our breath, stretching its capacity and sinking into its weight and weightlessness? Grief. Where muscles support the inhale and exhale of our lungs to be fully expressed. In traditional Chinese medicine, lungs hold grief. How can we grieve in ways that tap into the depths of our lungs capacity and know that in that capacity it's intertwined with the breath of others? Combat breathing. I return to anti-colonial theorists and psychiatrist Franz Fanon. How do colonial subjects breathe under conditions of colonial duress? When, quote, the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation are contested, disfigured in the hope of final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed and occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing, end quote. How has our breath muscles learned to constrict? How can expansion of breath be resistance? Revealing truth through movement and through voice and movement. How does our breath become the place where we grieve, rest and fight? The ebbs and flow of the rhythms of each move disparately and entangled. Flowing, falling, stumbling, propelling at a pace that is responding to what our bodies need and that which the world is calling our attention to. With every breath, we have the potential to expand our capacity. Engaged Buddhism. And also, there's a Buddha up there. I meditate with Engaged Buddhism, founded by Tai Thit Nhat Hanh during the Vietnam-American War. During the war in Vietnam, people sought refuge in the temples, searching for peace and hope. As bombs were dropping overhead, villages were being burned and people were displaced from their home. Tai Thit Nhat Hanh knew that he couldn't teach meditation and Buddhist practices divorced from addressing war. He then developed Engaged Buddhism, a Buddhism that is anti-war and grounded in deeply listening to what is happening around us. I'll share one of the precepts from the 14 precepts of Engaged Buddhism where he writes, Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world. This is where breathing meditation and Engaged Buddhism begins. An acknowledgement of our suffering and the suffering of the people of the world, a bearing witness that does not erase, neglect or allied what it means to be a human on this earth and create a more livable place for one another, a place of interbeing, where our breathing grounds us and expands our capacity to love, give and receive. Breath and abolition. Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions. Breath and abolition are intimately intertwined. It is grief work. It is combat breathing. It is engaged Buddhism. It is a work of presence. It is life-affirming. With every breath we take, we know we are alive. During the Black Lives Matter movement, Palestinians taught organizers and civilians in the U.S. how to protect themselves against tear gas that was manufactured in the U.S. and was already being used in Palestine. Palestinian activists taught folks how to protect themselves from exposure to the smoke, how to protect their breath against militarized policing. Quote, Always make sure to run against the wind, to keep calm when you're tear gas. The pain will pass. Don't rub your eyes. Hashtag Ferguson Solidarity from an activist, Miriam Bugoti, who tweeted during one of the most dangerous nights of protests and intense police confrontation in Ferguson. This was an act of solidarity, of international love and care through supporting collective breath. This is how you breathe under colonial duress. This is a combat breathing. In these strategies, there were messages of embedded love. We are in the struggle together. And now we witness the continued aerial bombardments and phosphorus chemicals being dropped in Gaza. How can our collective breaths infuse more life and more breath for those who continue to face colonial violence? Thank you.