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Celebrating the Wisdom of Recent CIIS Commencement Speakers
California Institute of Integral Studies has gathered together voices at edges of the known. Across recent years, these speakers have woven Mayan prayer with somatic abolitionism, Yoruba poetry and heart opening expressive arts practices. What follows is a celebration of their gifts.
54th Commencement · 2022 · Invocation & Benediction Poet, Preacher, Public Theologian · Minister of Celebration at Glide Memorial Church
Marvin K. White opened with "Bright Futures Casting Poetics" in the cascading, accumulative rhythm of a preacher who is also a poet, and a poet who is also a preacher. As Minister of Celebration at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, a Cave Canem fellow, and the author of four poetry collections including the Lambda Literary Award-nominated last rights and nothin' ugly fly, White has spent decades articulating what he calls a vision of social, prophetic, and creative justice.
This whole thing has always been about love.
Marvin K. White
His invocation built like a call-and-response with itself — each line answering the last, each claim opening onto the next. He told graduates they were what became of their people, known and unknown, strange and estranged. That they must hear themselves called by many names and answer for them all. That they are archive, holding in every breath the creativity, the invention, the recipe, the revision.
He called them creation in motion — a stir, a commotion — and urged them to get out of control and to let themselves be free.
Watch the Invocation
Watch the Benediction
55th Commencement · 2023 · Keynote Address Author, Yoruba Poet, Founder of the Emergence Network · Honorary Doctorate Recipient
With humor, storytelling, and the cadence of a Yoruba poet, Bayo Akomolafe told graduates he wasn't there to encourage them. He was there to offer something stranger and more generous.
He told the story of promising his two-year-old daughter Alethea that he'd say yes to anything she asked. The experiment led them away from a swimming pool to a lake, where the child silenced her father with a single sound: shhh. In that sacred shush, Akomolafe found a metaphor for wisdom itself — not as accumulation of knowledge, but as the disruption of knowing. The place where the world kicks back.
Wisdom is what remains when we've come to the end of everything we know.
Bayo Akomolafe
"I'm not here to say to you that you can change the world. Quite to the contrary… you can't. That it is not about you. That the world is not reducible to problems and solutions. And that you will not save the day."
He invited graduates to permit themselves the grace to fail. To understand that if our noble successes gave us the Anthropocene, perhaps our sensuous failures might usher in something even justice cannot articulate.
"Wisdom is what remains when we've come to the end of everything we know."
His closing invitation was to meet at the site of our deepest work — the thin place where, like Jodie Foster in Contact, we can only exclaim: "They should have sent a poet!"
Experience the Full Address
Revisit the 55th Commencement Ceremony
56th Commencement · 2024 · Invocation & Benediction Integral Eco-Psychologist · CIIS Doctoral Alumnus
Drawing from a work produced by Mayan spiritual leaders called Mayan Worldview: Fullness of Life, Adrián Villaseñor Galarza shared the elders' vision of a new baktun — a new era rooted in love, solidarity, community, and respect for one another and the earth. He invoked Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú and the mission she described: returning to our mother earth to begin this new era.
He presented the Mayan concept of the clarified self — one who cultivates respect for Mother Nature, recognizes the gift of being co-creators of life, and accepts they are continually guided and protected by the universe, Mother Earth, and the ancestors.
A clarified heart is one that recognizes existence as an expression of the joy and happiness of the eternal movement of life.
Adrián Villaseñor Galarza
In his closing benediction, Adrián called the four directions in ceremony: wisdom dawning from the East, ripening from the North, transforming into right action from the West, and reaping the harvest from the South. From above, the blessings of star people and ancestors. From below, the heartbeat of the earth's crystal core. From the center — which is everywhere at once — the light of mutual love.
He then invoked the Mayan prayer to A How — Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Earth:
"Heart of heaven, heart of earth. Give us our descendants, our succession. As long as the sun walks and there is clarity, let the dawn come… May a how heart of the heaven, heart of the earth enlighten us and give us much wisdom so that no one is left behind."
He guided graduates through the turning of the tassel, welcoming them into their new era.
Watch the Benediction
Revisit the 56th Commencement Ceremony
56th Commencement · 2024 · Keynote Address Author of My Grandmother's Hands · Creator of Somatic Abolitionism · Honorary Doctorate Recipient
Resmaa Menakem began his address with characteristic honesty: when CIIS first offered the honorary doctorate, his instinct was pessimism — and he meant that as a compliment. Pessimism, he told the graduating class, is sometimes the brakes we need to slow down and examine things, a form of protection when the empire wants to pick our pockets, our brains, and our genius.
He described how his work in Somatic Abolitionism emerged from being held by his ancestors and elders rather than from the ravenous forces of empire. He spoke of those who gave, rather than consuming, and those who lived as stewards rather than owners."We are living beings living with other living beings on a living being," he reminded the crowd.
Be fugitive in your thinking.
Resmaa Menakem
He told the story of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s autopsy revealing the heart of a 60-year-old man in a 39-year-old body — a testament to what the system does to those who resist it. His antidote: don't do it alone. Connect with the people who love you. Develop relationship and community with each other.
He also celebrated the essential weirdness of CIIS: "Y'all some weird people! Y'all had a band come up here and talk about Mama Earth! That's some weird stuff at commencement! That's what we need — we need weird people. We need the people that are resisting capture. That are fugitive in their thinking."
Experience the Full Address
Revisit the 56th Commencement Ceremony
57th Commencement · 2025 · Commencement Address Professor Emerita, Expressive Arts Therapy · 19 Years at CIIS · Drama Therapist and Community Builder
Shoshana Simons began with an invitation for the audience to breathe, close their eyes, and place a hand on their hearts. Retiring after nineteen years at the institution, she spoke from the threshold of her own passage while blessing the graduates at theirs.
She described CIIS as a place that dared, from its founding, to reimagine education as a full-bodied, soul-rooted endeavor, weaving wisdom teachings from North, South, East, and West.
She framed the gathering of people before her as a "symphony of improbable coincidences" — the unplannable web of meetings, choices, accidents, and acts of courage that brought everyone together.
You are improbable. You are miracle. You are ready.
Shoshana Simons
Drawing from her decades in expressive arts, she offered practical wisdom for life beyond the institution: Remember the Yes that first brought you here and let it be your compass. Say “Yes, and” — not because everything is easy, but because anything is possible.
Her closing was a declaration and a blessing: "Integral means everything belongs. Everyone belongs. Mind and body. Grief and joy. Methodology and mystery. Imagination and action."
Experience the Full Address
Revisit the 57th Commencement Ceremony
57th Commencement · 2025 · Invocation Professor Emerita, Women's Spirituality · Associate Professor and Former Department Chair
Annette Williams, retiring from the Women's Spirituality department after years of leadership and teaching, offered the invocation at the 57th Commencement as another member of the community embarking on a very new stage in life. She grounded the crowd in the current moment of joy and success before casting their minds back to honor their struggles as well.
"You adapted. You reimagined. You persevered. This is what resilience looks like — not perfection, not ease — but showing up with courage and compassion when the path ahead is unsure or unsteady. In doing so, you not only uplifted yourselves, you uplifted one another."
This is what resilience looks like.
Annette Williams
Over her distinguished career, Professor Williams has been a true scholar-leader, continuing to pursue her curiosity and learning while also bringing her knowledge to class after class of eager students. Each student at CIIS, she reflected, had arrived through a similar commitment to knowledge, community, and transformation.
“Today is more than a ceremony. It is a testament.”
Watch the Invocation
Revisit the 57th Commencement Ceremony
From the shush to the resistance, from the prayer to the improvisation — these voices remind us: Seek the cracks. Weight your heart. Accept the offer. Show up with courage. Remember that no one is left behind.
These speakers did not send graduates into the world with easy comfort. They sent them to the edges — where wisdom lives, where the world kicks back, where co-creation is the only way.
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