Ravi Verma

Contemplative Witnessing

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“Reading Cindy Lee’s book feels like riding the breath of the Spirit as it flows into my heart, body, and soul, filling a deep longing. From a BIPOC-focused lens, Lee uses a rhizomatic approach that creatively enriches, challenges and expands what contemplative witnessing (spiritual direction) and communal care can be, and how these can guide all soul care practitioners in imagining new spiritual experiences and spaces. Through three movements—contemplative witnessing, sacred movements, and communal care—Lee uses her own experience and research as an Asian American practitioner to share stories of other BIPOC people, spiritual practices, probing questions, and other wisdom voices to bring this book alive. I am still resting with how she expands discernment by talking about ways of knowing and how sacred seeing leads to sacred responding in the face of injustice and harm. I wholeheartedly recommend this book for all involved in soul care work as a place of restoration and rest for BIPOC people and as a resource for all to expand their horizons, for people from many traditions or no tradition, formation programs, book clubs, spiritual practice circles, and many more. I will continue to linger with this book.”

Our Unforming

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“Through her lens as an Asian American woman, Cindy S. Lee offers a contemplative approach with rich resources and practices to reimagine spiritual formation from its Westernized, white lens. Through her own experience and wisdom, along with the other BIPOC voices included in this volume, she provides a clear way toward a more robust spirituality to meet the diversity and challenges of our times. It’s a powerful diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice treatise on spiritual formation.”