Delphine Batho

Delphine Batho

Member of Parliament

Delphine Batho is member of the French parliament for the Deux-Sèvres (French department) since 2007. She has been reelected during the June 2017’s legislative elections. She has been Minister of the Ecology, Sustainable development and Energy from 2012 to 2013.

She committed early into volunteer work. During her teenage years, she contributed to the Médecins du monde campaign: « Action Ecole ». She was president of the high school union the FIDL from 1990 to 1992, and vice-president of SOS-Racisme from 1992 to 1998.

During her professional life, she worked from 1999 to 2007, as a specialist in security and the fight against violence’s politics.

At the National Assembly, she is particularly committed to ecological issues, energy, agricultural and industrial policies, the moral improvement of public life, as well as the fight against lobby influence. She is at the moment member of the Commission of the national defense and armed forces.
Delphine Batho is the author of Insoumise (Grasset, 2014).

She followed a first training in meditation in 2016. She has been one of the first French political leader to publicly testify about the contributions of this practice. With Pacôme Rupin, MP of Paris, she boosted the setting up of a practice group at the National assembly for Members of Parliament and collaborators.

Her testimony in Psychologies Magazine (January 2017): 
« To open politics to the human being »

« I came to meditation through a political process, a thirst for new thoughts, and also through a reflexion on the exercise of power. Working on circular and collaborative economy, I met people who didn’t try to convince me to meditate, but whose examples where eloquent! So, I read a lot of publications on the subject of neurosciences. As I used to practice yoga, I empirically used some breathing methods, and I’ve always cultivated a strong bond with nature. But this is not enough in a political world which can be very toxic. 

Finding the path to the practice has not been simple. As thousands of persons, I didn’t know where I could ask with trust. I am a non-religious, atheist person, and the term « full consciousness » keeps bothering me, I do prefer the one of « full presence » or « full awareness ». I followed with a school teacher friend a MBSR training program of 8 weeks. I didn’t intend to testify about this subject, I lived it as a private matter. This is my meeting with Chris Ruane, a British deputy, who carried the Mindful Nation program to the UK, who convince me to take a word. It is staggering that an enthusiasm so deep for this practice, within the French society, is never evoked by the political world. This is what I want to change, with, as a priority, the diffusion of meditation among children at school, in the area of health, and to prevent the burn-out at work. 

Good if there are meditation sessions in Davos, but as we had to fight during the last century to democratize sport, I consider that brain training must not be kept to an elite. Meditation isn’t a shelter, but a strength of change. It is not a palliative to resign oneself to a stressful universe, it is a scientific progress which can be put to the service of an ideal of well-being. »

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