Many Paths to Presence: Delivering Mindfulness in a Culturally Grounded Way

Discover how to make mindfulness more inclusive and impactful by exploring culturally grounded pathways to presence, healing, and connection.

Mindfulness has become a cornerstone of modern wellness, embraced by therapists, coaches, and healthcare professionals alike. Yet for many, especially those from marginalized or culturally diverse backgrounds, the way mindfulness is typically delivered may feel disconnected.

“People don’t just want to be present—they want to feel connected, seen, and whole.”
—Dr. Shelly Harrell

Dr. Shelly Harrell—clinical psychologist, professor, and founder of the Soulfulness Center—invites us to expand our understanding of mindfulness. She challenges helping professionals to move beyond standardized scripts and consider how presence can be accessed through culturally grounded pathways rooted in ancestry, spirituality, emotion, and community. Her work reframes mindfulness not just as a practice, but as a deeply relational and liberatory experience.

In our on-demand workshop, Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practices, Dr. Harrell shares insights and guided practices that support clients in connecting to mindfulness through their own cultural identities and lived experiences.

Drawn from Dr. Harrell’s teachings, this article explores the importance of cultural attunement in mindfulness practice and introduces soulfulness as a resonant path to presence. Discover practical ways to help clients reconnect with their inner and ancestral wisdom, along with reflections and practices to support your own journey toward deeper presence.

Contents:

1. Why Mindfulness Doesn’t Land for Everyone
2. Why Cultural Attunement for Contemplative Practices?
3. Soulfulness: A Path Through the Inner River
4. Practical Reflection: What’s Your Path to Presence?
5. A Culturally Resonant Practice: The Sankofa Inner Community
6. Learn More: Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practice

Why Mindfulness Doesn’t Land for Everyone

Mindfulness is often presented in therapeutic settings through structured scripts, cognitive frameworks, or technical instructions. While this approach can be effective, it may miss the mark for people whose healing traditions are rooted in community, storytelling, or spiritual connection. Dr. Harrell notes:

“Sometimes the practices don't always feel accessible to everyone, but that doesn't mean that the core of the healing that's embedded in mindfulness isn't relevant to everyone.”

Too often, mindfulness is taught through individualistic goals—greater productivity, improved performance, stress relief—without acknowledging collective trauma, ancestral wisdom, or the cultural lens through which healing is understood. For individuals from collectivistic cultures or those carrying intergenerational wounds, this framing may seem narrow or detached. In these cases, the challenge isn't with mindfulness itself, but with how it's delivered.

Harrell suggests that when mindfulness is culturally mismatched, it may feel self-absorbed or out of sync with a person’s values and lived experience. For example, detachment or the concept of “no-self,” central in many Buddhist teachings, may lack resonance with people whose healing journeys emphasize relationality, spirituality, or ancestral connection.

Why Cultural Attunement for Contemplative Practices?

Culture shapes how we make meaning of suffering, healing, and transformation. Dr. Harrell challenges us to ask:

“How may your cultural experiences contribute to resonance with different contemplative practices?”

Many cultures offer their own contemplative traditions—rituals, proverbs, body-based practices, or community ceremonies. Yet, these sources of wisdom are often excluded from mainstream mindfulness programs. Culturally grounded mindfulness asks us to honor these lineages and weave them into how we teach, share, and practice.

“Culture is a profound source of healing and wisdom and presence... it can facilitate healing and contribute to engagement in therapeutic and coaching processes.”

When practitioners adapt their methods with cultural humility and integrity, they open new doorways for connection. Whether by using culturally resonant metaphors, drawing on ancestral symbols, or invoking spiritual references, we can help clients access presence in a way that feels meaningful and alive for them.

Soulfulness: A Path Through the Inner River

Dr. Harrell offers “Soulfulness” as a culturally grounded framework that brings the deepest core of experiential wisdom into the practice of mindfulness. She defines soulfulness as:

“An inner synergy of our humanness and our spiritness. It’s that deepest core of experience—that soul knowing—that moves us, connects us, and reveals truth.”

Soulfulness expands mindfulness to include emotion, ancestry, and spiritual resonance. Where mindfulness invites us to be present, soulfulness invites us to be deeply present—attuned to the ancestral, relational, and intuitive forces flowing within us.

She uses the metaphor of a river:

“The inner river refers to that deep flowing wisdom... flowing back to source. It’s embodied, ancestral, and beyond our individual lives.”

This soulful path provides an alternative gateway into presence. Instead of focusing solely on breath or observation, it embraces music, memory, feeling, and spirit. For many, soulfulness is the route through which mindfulness becomes not only accessible, but transformative.

Practical Reflection: What’s Your Path to Presence?

Dr. Harrell outlines seven culturally grounded “sources of wisdom” that can serve as gateways to mindful awareness:

• Somatic: Sensory awareness and embodiment
• Emotional: Feeling as wisdom
• Mental: Cognitive reflection and discernment
• Relational: Presence through connection and attunement
• Soul: Intuitive, ancestral, and inner truth
• Communal: Collective experience and cultural memory
• Spiritual/Transcendent: Connection to something larger—nature, spirit, cosmos

Each of us has a unique path to presence. What resonates for one person may not work for another. Harrell invites us to explore and honor our entry points.

Reflection Prompts:

1. When do you feel most alive, grounded, and connected?
2. Which source of wisdom—body, emotion, mind, spirit, community—feels most natural to you?
3. What ancestral, cultural, or spiritual practices bring you into the present moment?
4. What metaphors, music, or rituals speak to your soul?

These reflections aren’t just for personal growth—they’re tools for helping others, too. When working with clients, asking these same questions can uncover paths to presence that are culturally attuned and richly resourced.

“There are many paths into presence… the question becomes, how do we invite people into awareness, presence, into the experiencing self in ways that feel resonant?”

This is the heart of culturally grounded mindfulness: not replacing traditional practices, but expanding them. Making space for soul. Making space for story. Making space for culture, community, and liberation. Many paths lead us home to presence. Our task is to honor them all.

A Culturally Resonant Practice: The Sankofa Inner Community

To bring these ideas to life, Dr. Harrell introduces a powerful guided practice: The Sankofa Inner Community. Inspired by West African wisdom and the Adinkra symbol Sankofa—which means “go back and get it”—this practice is about reconnecting with inner, relational, and ancestral resources for healing.

“Mindfulness fundamentally is a practice of return... and Sankofa invites us into that reclamation process.”

In the practice, participants visualize a sacred gathering place and invite into a circle their ancestors, loved ones, elements of nature, and powerful life memories. Each is acknowledged with gratitude and love. This inner circle becomes a refuge—offering strength, wisdom, and care from within.

Mindfulness is not merely a tool for individual stress relief. As Dr. Harrell reminds us, it can be a liberating force—both personally and collectively—when taught in culturally resonant ways. By embracing soulfulness and practices like the Sankofa Inner Community, we invite people into presence through paths that feel authentic and powerful.

The practice counters disconnection—a root of so much suffering—by helping participants remember who they are, where they come from, and what supports them. It’s a practice of soulful reconnection:

“Knowing that each element of the circle has come from you, from within you… and you can surround yourself with this circle of reconnection and refuge anytime.”

In clinical and coaching work, this practice offers a gentle but profound way to help people re-anchor themselves in their lineage, community, and spirit. It holds potential to be both deeply personal and culturally affirming.

Learn More: Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practice

Interested in learning more? Deepen your understanding of culturally grounded mindfulness in our on-demand workshop: Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practices with Dr. Shelly Harrell.

Through this rich, practice-based resource, you’ll explore the Soulfulness framework and experience guided practices like the Sankofa Inner Circle, designed to help clients reconnect with ancestral wisdom, cultural identity, and inner refuge. This workshop includes high-definition video lessons with professional transcripts, an in-depth learning module that supports you in delivering mindfulness in ways that are inclusive and resonant. Empower your clients with practices rooted in culture, connection, and liberation.

Feel free to share this post with friends, family, or colleagues. Thanks for your ongoing interest and support!

Dr. Shelly Harrell, Ph.D., Harvard-educated and UCLA-trained psychologist, award-winning educator, and certified meditation teacher. As an experienced therapist, mentor, and professor she has been helping, healing, teaching, and training for over 30 years. She is a researcher and published author in the areas of culture and psychotherapy, sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of stress, racism and mental health, and psychological well-being among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Her soulfulness approach to wellness and resilience represents an integration of her work that is informed by cultural, African-centered, and liberation psychologies, contemplative practices, and stress science

Sarah Kraftchuk, MSc, RP (qualifying), is Head of Learning at the Mindful Institute. She is a licensed clinician, certified mindfulness facilitator, art therapist, and children’s book author.  

 Michael Apollo MHSc RP, is a licensed clinician, mindfulness educator, and Founder of the Mindful Institute. With over 15 years of experience, he specializes in practical, evidence-based mindfulness training for helping professionals. Formerly Director of Mindfulness Programs at the University of Toronto, Michael has collaborated with organizations like the World Health Organization, the UK NHS, and the Canadian Parliament to support mental well-being and resilience in diverse settings.

References

Harrell, S. P. (2000). A multidimensional conceptualization of racism‐related stress: Implications for the well‐being of people of color. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70(1), 42–57. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0087722

Harrell, S. P. (2018). Soulfulness as an orientation to contemplative practice: Culture, liberation, and mindfulness. Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 5(1), 9-32. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/joci/vol5/iss1/6

Harrell, S. P. (2022). Rising up rooted: Black wisdom as emancipatory contemplative practice for resilience, healing, and liberation. Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 9(1), 171–198. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/joci/vol9/iss1/9

Harrell, S. P., & Malebranche, D. A.  (in press). Reclamation and emancipation in mindfulness and nature-based contemplative practice: A Sankofa-oriented collaborative autoethnography. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry.

Duran, E., Firehammer, J., & Gonzalez, J. (2008). Liberation psychology as the path toward healing cultural soul wounds. Journal of Counseling & Development, 86(3), 288–295. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6678.2008.tb00511.x

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present, and future. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 144–156. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1093/clipsy.bpg016 

Nussbaum, B. (2003). Ubuntu: Reflections of a South African on our common humanity. Reflections: The Society for Organizational Learning Journal, 4(4), 21–26. researchgate.net

Temple, C. N. (2010). The emergence of Sankofa practice in the United States: A modern history. Journal of Black Studies, 41(1), 127–150. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1177/0021934709332464 

Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230227736 

Disclaimer

The content in our blogs is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your health provider with any questions you may have regarding your mental health.