Mindfulness teacher and grassroots community organizer Shelly Tygielski joins Sharon Salzberg for a conversation around supporting one another through community and integrating mindfulness into social activism.
Shelly Tygielski focuses much of her work supporting underserved communities, community organizations, non-profits, and schools. She is deeply involved in offering trauma-informed healing practices to communities affected by gun violence and mass shootings. In March of 2020, Shelly created the Pandemic of Love, a mutual aid organization intended to help those adversely affected by the Coronavirus Pandemic in her local community in Florida, which has grown monumentally to become a global movement with over 6 million dollars in transactions, over 50,000 matches, and hundreds of full-time volunteers worldwide.
Are you in need due to the recent Covid-19 pandemic? Do you have the resources to help another individual or family who is running out of hope? Visit pandemicoflove.com to find out how you can give or receive aid quickly, discretely and directly.
A Pandemic of Love
Sharon and Shelly talk about how people around the world that have been financially impacted by the Novel Coronavirus are being connected with individuals who want to help. Shelly shares why she created A Pandemic of Love as a platform for helping others get their needs met and how in a very short time the project has grown exponentially in scope.
“Community takes care of one another. It seems like a foreign concept in the days we are living in, where a lot of us don’t know who our next-door neighbors are. Back in the day, so I understand, there was a great concern for one another – a tending to each other. There was this true development of what we would like to think of as a community which has somewhat dissolved over the years. It is this return to a formalized structure, but it does not need to be geographically bound.” – Shelly Tygielski
Mindful Activism (14:30)
How has mindfulness informed Shelly’s role as an activist? Shelly speaks about how she became introduced to meditation and how she has integrated the principles of mindfulness into her life, work and social activism.
Just Sit (46:45)
Shelly closes the show with a guided meditation that reconnects us to our bodies and grounds us in the moment.
