Dr. Yuria Celidwen

November 19, 2024

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From Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen comes a first-of-its-kind book about our aspiration for sustainable, collective flourishing through Indigenous wisdom, traditions, and practices that bridge Indigenous and Western knowledges and ways.

Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations for Collective Well-Being by Yuria Celidwen Ph.D (Author)

How do we cultivate happiness? When facing the monumental challenges of our world, we often end up disconnecting in order to focus on our mental health. Dr. Yuria Celidwen explains this focus on our own state of mind alone is precisely why so many of us struggle to flourish. “What’s been overlooked is the Indigenous perspective of relationality,” she says. “It is the understanding that happiness is only possible in community, when we cultivate our relationships toward all kin, from human to more-than-human, and to our living Earth.”

Dr. Celidwen’s research shows the tremendous benefit of integrating Indigenous approaches into our approach to well-being, while recognizing the gains made by Western positive psychology, mindfulness, and neuroscience. In Flourishing Kin, she identifies seven key principles found in Indigenous cultures worldwide that embrace virtue, ethical living, and spirituality. Each principle―Kin Relationality, Body Seed, Senshine, Heartfelt Wisdom, Ecological Belonging, Collective Well-Being, and Reemergence―is a seed to flourishing kin, and reveals how we can overcome isolation and climate anxiety, nourish healthy relationships with our communities and environment, and build strong foundations of well-being that elevate our life choices for the benefit of our whole planet.

Sustainable collective flourishing goes beyond optimism or resilience. Offering opportunities for exploration, reflection, and personalized insight, here you’ll find shared storytelling, cultural tradition, and other forms of enhanced contemplative practice like ritual, music, movement, and art to support your journey. Through poetic expression and authentic truth telling, Dr. Celidwen invites us to experience a path to fulfillment that allows us to meet the world in all its complexity with reverence and joyous commitment to participate in the flourishing of all living beings.

“Immense gratitude to the energy of the Nahual Kat for giving our very own Sister Yuria Celidwen the authority to share the wisdom of our Peoples. In her book the voice of the great Spirit gives life to the cosmovisions of our Indigenous Peoples of the world. I raise my word to the eternal infinite of the Divine Creator, the heart of the Skies, the heart of Mother Earth to bless her words. May they connect with the reader to awaken our practices, revitalize our cultures, and attain harmony with Mother Earth. This book is an opening path! Matiox Ajaw Jun, kamul, Ajaw, one, two, and three times thank you.”

Angelina Sacbajá Tun
Council of Planetary Elders and sacred knowledge keeper of the Maya Kaqchikel

“Spoken as a true Sage, Yuria Celidwen has voiced a mindful story of prayer, hope, and remembrance of the Indigenous Spirit of Mindfulness. It is a story of a Spirit that still exists and whispers to us its message of love, kindness, and reverence for undying Spirit of Life. A pleasure to read and an inspiration for all to move forward to mindfully face the intractable challenges of our times!”

Gregory Cajete, Ph.D.
Director of Native American Studies at the University of Mexico and author of Native Science

“Indigenous cultures have managed to live sustainably in their natural habitats for many thousands of years. They know things about life and land, kin and relationality, nature and sustainability that we humans need to wake up to and instantiate on every level, from the personal to the planetary. In Flourishing Kin, Yuria Celidwen shows herself to be a weaver of worlds, articulating the original indigenous sacredness and interconnectedness of all life on this precious planet of ours, and the need for us as humans at this moment to live our way into the very real strands of relationality and kinship that might sustainably right longstanding wrongs and injustices and repair the harm, the exploitation, and the grief that our othering and impulses to capitalize, extract, and dominate inevitably lead to. The only way to do this, of course, is for humanity to wake up to its deepest embodied and enacted nature, and this is what this book might just catalyze and nurture in us going forward.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.
Founder of MBSR and author of Full Catastrophe Living
and Coming to Our Senses

“In this brilliant and stirring book, Indigenous scientist, activist and teacher Dr. Yuria Celidwen will take you on a powerful and inspiring tour of Indigenous histories, cultures, and wisdom, all brought together in a moving synthesis of scholarship, personal story, and practice. Reading this book will transform how live your life, orienting you to your deep relatedness to nature and all living forms, and pointing you to a path toward collective flourishing, so urgently needed during these times of crisis.”

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley
Founder of the Greater Good Science Center, and author of
Awe: The Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life

“Dr. Celidwen has made a profound contribution to the study of human flourishing, which has traditionally ignored rich Indigenous traditions and focused on the individual. Flourishing Kin provides a deeply needed antidote by bridging Western and Indigenous science and centering on relationality, interdependence, mutuality, and the meaning inherent in all living phenomena. Celidwen makes a convincing case that only by striving for the flourishing of all our kin can we achieve true well-being.”

john a. powell, Ph.D.
Founder and Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute
and author of The Power of Bridging

“Yuria Celidwen is an Indigenous healer, scholar, and scientist of Nahua and Maya heritage from Chiapas, Mexico. Flourishing Kin is her extraordinary book that blends the ancient wisdom of her Elders and Mother Earth with modern science and presents a sorely needed recipe for reverence, respect, reparations and more to help restore our balance with our planet and with each other. She provides us with simple, accessible Indigenous contemplative practices that are relevant for us all and will help us to re-connect with our Spirit, our kin and our planet. A very timely manifesto that will be of great benefit to our future.”

Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D.
founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds
and author of the NY Times bestseller The Emotional Life of Your Brain

“The essential truth reflected in this heartfelt and scholarly work is the powerful indigenous wisdom of community. Yuria shows how much the beauty and vision of the collective has been neglected in the individual focus on contemplative practice, and how important it is to awaken together with all!”

Jack Kornfield, Ph.D.
founder of the Spirit Rock Center, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, and author of A Path With Heart

“Our ecological crisis and global violence arise from us humans forgetting our belonging, our embeddedness in the web of life. Drawing on the vast repository of wisdom from indigenous contemplative traditions, Yuria Celidwen offers us a pathway of awakening from an individual identity to the cellular realization of our collective belonging. This powerful guide is a spiritual transmission that flows from Yuria’s own indigenous roots and directly evokes a reverence for the sacredness and connectedness of all life. Flourishing Kin is profoundly relevant to our times, an urgently needed medicine for planetary flourishing.”

Tara Brach, Ph.D.
founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C.
and author of Radical Compassion

“This extraordinary book brings us to the very heart of what it means to flourish in our world today and to nourish flourishing in our world. Drawn from the deep roots of indigenous wisdom, it is a brilliant light in our imperilled world.”

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D.
Abbot, Upaya Zen Center
and author of Being with Dying

About Dr. Yuria Celidwen

I am a native of Indigenous Nahua and Maya lineages, born into a family of mystics, healers, poets, and explorers from the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I grew up with one foot in the wilderness and another in magical realism. My Elders’ songs and stories enthralled my childhood. They enhanced my mythic imagination and emotional intuition, which became the fertile soil where the seeds of kindness, play, and wonder dig their roots.

My research converges the vibrant threads of Indigenous studies, cultural psychology, and contemplative science. I am interested in transdisciplinary approaches to how the experience of self-transcendence is embodied and enhances prosocial behavior (ethics, compassion, kindness, reverence, and a sense of awe, sacredness, and love) across Indigenous contemplative traditions worldwide.

I have developed a broader statement I call the “ethics of belonging,” encouraging awareness, intention, and relational well-being and actions toward planetary flourishing. Within this work, I examine how our personal stories relate to cultural accounts that can transform our identities and the social and racial injustices of our times. This ethos orients us toward an ever-expansive unfolding of a path of meaning and participation rooted in honoring Life.

My work at the United Nations supports international humanitarian efforts for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. My specific concentration is the advancement of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the rights of Nature. The materials we create are distributed globally and reach vast audiences, from Heads of State, academic institutions, and the general public. I also established the first long-term mindfulness and compassion training workshop for UN staff in 2016.

I teach Indigenous epistemologies and spirituality and my work pioneered the Indigenous contemplative experience within contemplative studies. In addition, I lead workshops on prosocial practices (such as heartfulness, compassion, kindness, gratitude, etc.) from an Indigenous perspective. I emphasize cultivating a sense of reverence and ecological belonging, raising awareness of social and environmental justice and community-engaged practices, revitalizing Indigenous languages, traditional medicine, clean energy, and conservation.

I am affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Psychology, where I am conducting research into how Indigenous Peoples psychologies are expressed through self-transcendent practices of contemplation, and developing my talents for laboratory science, including experimental design, physiological measurement, and the concepts and tools of social and cultural psychology. I am also a proud Senior Fellow at the Other & Belonging Institute (OBI) of the University of California, Berkeley, where I am engaging in bridging and belonging work to reclaim spaces for Indigenous Peoples and our Mother Earth.

I co-chair the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and I am part of the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Unit.
I co-chaired the Indigenous Religions Unit and was the Women's Caucus Liaison to the Board of the Western Region of the AAR (2018-2021), where I previously co-chaired the Psychology, Religion, and Culture unit (2016-2019).

As an Indigenous woman and as a scholar, I have taken the quest to reclaim our Indigenous voices as holders of sophisticated systems of contemplative insight. I am committed to the reclamation, revitalization, and transmission of our Indigenous wisdom for social and environmental justice.