Sam Yan Press is proud to announce a new initiative: Samma Sati – Mindfulness in Action.
We live in a time when social media and artificial intelligence act as forces of both connection and fragmentation. While digital platforms can amplify civic movements and shared knowledge, they also accelerate addiction, burnout, polarization, and the erosion of deep listening. At the same time, AI increasingly disrupts institutional memory, attention, and the slow processes through which wisdom is traditionally formed.
In this landscape, communities rooted in inclusive dialogue, contemplation, and ethical reflection are not luxuries—they are essential foundations for civic renewal.
The Problem We See
Samma Sati emerges from a growing disconnection:
- Religious institutions often fail to engage with the real struggles of young people, their anxieties, creativity, and political realities.
- Young people, in turn, feel alienated from tradition, unable to access its symbolic power, ethical depth, and sense of belonging.
- The result is a double loss: traditions become hollow, and youth remain spiritually thirsty—yearning for meaning, grounding, and connection.
Samma Sati exists to rebuild this broken bridge.
Our Intellectual & Spiritual Lineage
This initiative is inspired by thinkers and practitioners who refused to separate inner life from responsibility toward the world, including Byung-Chul Han, Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil, as well as socially engaged Buddhist figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Sulak Sivaraksa.
From them, we learn that contemplation without action risks irrelevance, while action without contemplation risks violence, burnout, and emptiness.
Our Vision
Samma Sati seeks to cultivate youth activists, spiritual practitioners, and religious leaders who can grow together, and become a force for the common good.
We affirm that:
- Inner peace and outer peace are inseparable
- Spiritual life must respond to social suffering
- Civic courage requires spaces for reflection, silence, and listening
We are non-sectarian and multi-faith. Samma Sati supports the coexistence of diverse religious and spiritual traditions while remaining grounded in shared ethical commitments: dignity, compassion, justice, and human flourishing.
We do not retreat from the world.
We contemplate in order to act.
Our Current Focus
Samma Sati is in an experimental and exploratory phase, with an initial focus on youth activists. We work closely with spiritual leaders, monks, and teachers to create meaningful conversations that combine dialogue, meditation, and ethical reflection—helping young people sustain their engagement without losing themselves to exhaustion or despair.
What We Are Doing
- No Phone Day Campaign
A collective pause from digital devices, combined with guided dialogue and contemplative practices, to rebuild attention, presence, and shared reflection. - Spiritual Leaders & Youth: Dialogue and Meditation
Facilitated encounters where religious leaders and young activists engage as equals—listening deeply, practicing contemplation, and addressing real social questions together. - Public Film Screenings
Curated screenings followed by dialogue, using film to cultivate empathy, moral imagination, and courage in an age of ecological, political, and humanitarian crises. - Publishing Socially Engaged Spirituality
A book series translating and introducing works from socially engaged spiritual traditions, including Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, and B. R. Ambedkar, making their insights accessible to new generations.
Why Samma Sati Matters
In an age of speed, noise, and division, Samma Sati creates spaces of slowness, listening, and ethical depth, not as an escape from the world, but as preparation to engage it more wisely.
Samma Sati – Contemplation in Action is an invitation:
- to young people seeking meaning without dogma
- to religious traditions seeking relevance without dilution
- to activists seeking sustainability without burnout
Through contemplation, dialogue, and action, we hope to contribute however modestly to a more compassionate and livable world.