Belonging: Practices of Inclusion asks how spiritual communities, the academy and society define, disrupt and reimagine belonging. The conference gives particular attention to traditions that are small, new, marginalised or stigmatised, and to people who have been harmed inside spiritual communities.

It is convened by the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School, directed by Professor Dan McKanan.

Drishti (Vision) is a lived and experiential practice of belonging, expressed through contemplative art. Belonging is usually built on layered identity: culture, language, belief, personal history. Those layers give familiarity, and they can also create friction and exclusion. Drishti offers a different ground for connection, one rooted in soul consciousness, where belonging arises from inner qualities that are already shared. Peace. Love. Calmness. Power.

Each work is made while the artist is actively experiencing one specific virtue. When a painting is rooted in love, she stays immersed in the felt experience of love, and that state shapes the gaze, the colour, the rhythm and the presence of the work. The painting does not illustrate the idea of love. It arises from the state.

The eyes carry the quality. In a contemplative gallery setting, viewers meet the works one at a time and are invited to notice which virtue they sense in themselves, before any title is disclosed. Across settings, many name the intended virtue independently, often with surprise. That recognition happens across differences of background, belief and familiarity with spiritual practice, which is the substance of the claim: the qualities being reached do not depend on shared identity.

The practice is situated within the Brahma Kumaris tradition of Rajyoga meditation. Six works are shown at Harvard, each a digital painting, 18 by 24 inches.

Monika Kalra is a Rajyoga teacher and spiritual artist who has practised Brahma Kumaris Rajyoga meditation since 2001. She is the resident spiritual artist at Peace Village Learning and Retreat Center in New York, where she guides individuals toward inner stability and clarity through contemplative practice and leads the centre's spiritual art gallery.

Her artistic work emerges from sustained meditation and is expressed through oil painting and digital media, exploring inner virtues and states of being. Her recent series Rosary of Victory, examining self-mastery and inclusive inner transformation, has been recognised by Harvard Divinity School, Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts and View Arts.

Originally trained in fashion design in India and the UK, she founded the artistic fashion brand Monaara, a background that informs her refined visual language.