radical bodhicitta is the awakened heart and mind of justice, liberation and transformative healing.
It is a living prayer-process-practice to embody justice in ways that enable us to access our own healing and liberation and to be/come portals of justice, liberation and healing for others.
It is the commitment to the internal soul work of planting, watering, and cultivating the seeds of skillful understanding and compassionate action that support our capacity:
to face the realities of bigotry, hate, oppression and white supremacy;
to tend to our suffering from the root causes and continuous traumatic impact of injustice and oppression;
to center our healing, transformation, and wholeness;
to nourish and sustain our well-being.
It is the energy of decolonizing, disrupting, dismantling, divesting of deeply-embedded ideologies, habits, ways of being and engaging within relationships (family/friendships/community/institutions/culture) that uphold the various harms and violence of white supremacy and other forms of oppression it feeds.
It is the energy of “relanguaging” to create a liberatory lexicon that honors the dynamic expression of selfness and the multiple identities we hold; that recognizes the power we have to question how language is prescribed versus how it is practiced; and that compels us to (re)create, (re)name, (re)claim, remix and remedy language to heal, free and elevate ourselves and others.
It is the energy that I lead with, value and wish to protect.
It is the energy that crowns, centers, roots and leads me.
— tara scott-miller, founder + facilitator
Tara Scott-Miller is an ancestor-guided and liberation-minded radical Black unschooling mama to a ray of light. An alum of New York University, Tara explored the intersections of race, gender, culture, media and psychology during her undergraduate studies and later received her M.A. from Tisch School of the Arts.
But Spirit is her first language.
For the past 14 years, Tara has followed the deep call to bridge her holy curiosity in cognition and behavior to the spiritual foundations of mindfulness — immersing herself in the study and practice of collective healing. She is an experienced meditation teacher, founder of a contemplative community, and a curator of transformative, sacred spaces dedicated to justice, liberation and healing practices — whether in private rituals, spiritual direction sessions, or communal gatherings.
Discovering an organic alignment between her facilitation of spiritual development and the frameworks of Healing Justice + Transformative Justice, Tara has designed numerous workshops on embodied awareness practices; hosted community-based dialogues for MSU’s Project 60/50; presented healing justice sessions at the Allied Media Conference; launched her healing justice project, radical bodhicitta, and led Quaker and Buddhist communities through this intensive inquiry-and-discernment model; co-facilitated workshops on health equity and social justice for a local public health organization; helped to seed the first Transformative Justice cohort in her community; and continues to develop her knowledge, capacity and skills in service of intersectional justice and abolitionist teaching.
In September 2019, when Tara was recruited to join The Firecracker Foundation as the Program Director for Sisters In Strength, she immediately recognized the opportunity as an expansion of her vocation and an extension of her soul’s call to cultivate legacy work. Affectionately known to her colleagues as the “Kween of Pump Da Breaks” (and most likely to be heard asking, “Have you factored in time to transition + rest?”), Tara brings her spirit of “radical bodhicitta” to the organizational mission of building a community invested in the holistic healing of children and teens who are survivors of sexual trauma and gender-based violence(s). In September 2020, she accepted a new role as one of the Co-Directors charged with stewarding the mission and legacy of this beloved survivor-led and healing-centered community-based organization.
radical bodhicitta 