Lezione 1
PRISM®: The Toolkit For Breaking Bias To Build A Beloved Community
This lesson provides an overview of the PRISM framework, highlighting its integration of mind, body, and heart practices. We will learn the difference between conscious and unconscious bias, how regularly practicing PRISM tools help break bias, and reflect on the meaning of a beloved community.
Lezione 2
Mindfulness: Observing The Mind’s Habit Of Stereotyping
Mindfulness is the bedrock of breaking bias. It is the act of noticing and becoming aware of what is happening in the mind, body, and heart at the moment of contact with another person. In this session, we will learn why mindfulness is the foundation of building new habits. The meditation will support us in noticing our automatic habits of thoughts as we begin detaching ourselves from such conditioned behavior.
Lezione 3
Stereotype Replacement: Actively Replacing The Mind’s Habit To Stereotype
Stereotype replacement is the active practice of visualization to break our mind’s habits of putting people into stereotypical boxes. In this session, we hone our mindfulness practice by actively noticing stereotypes and replacing them with positive examples to neutralize the mind’s conditioning.
The meditation will guide us in gently strengthening our mindfulness practice and using the power of visualization to build new habits of thoughts.
Lezione 4
Individuation: Cultivating Curiosity & Celebrating Individual Uniqueness
Individuation is a practice that builds on the previous two to cultivate curiosity. This practice allows us to mindfully notice group-based stereotypes that arise in the mind and actively dissociate them from the person we are with so we can be with people for who they are instead of being stuck in our ideas of them.
The meditation will allow us to experience individuation by bringing deeper awareness into the sensations and feelings in our bodies.
Lezione 5
Prosocial Behavior: Using Loving-Kindness To Overcome Otherness
Prosocial behaviors are a set of tools that actively incline our minds toward positive feeling states, such as compassion, loving-kindness, gratitude, equanimity, generosity, joy, and forgiveness. When we cultivate these feeling states around the suffering of bias experienced by oneself and others, it helps build boundless resilience and courage.
We will practice a loving-kindness meditation to cultivate and feel the effects of this positive feeling state.
Lezione 6
Perspective-Taking: Using Imagination For Unconditional Connection
Perspective-taking is the ultimate tool of radical compassion. It is giving ourselves permission to imagine what it may be like to be in the shoes of another person. It’s what good actors and performers can do on stage—embody the life of another human in such a way that we get chills down our spine.
The meditation will guide us in a visualization practice to feel within us the capacity for radical compassion for ourselves and other people.
Lezione 7
Sustaining PRISM Practices: Using The Toolkit To Build A Beloved Community
Science shows that three to eight weeks of practice can dramatically transform our ability to build new habits. Bias is no exception and the routine practices of mindfulness, stereotype replacement, individuation, prosocial behaviors, and perspective-taking have proven to be powerful tools for breaking our biased habits of thought.
In this session, we will review some ways you can incorporate these tools into your daily routine. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our goal is to build a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative shift in our hearts and a quantitative shift in our lives.”
Through these daily practices, we can proactively initiate those shifts to create a world where all people belong everywhere.