Mindfulness And Race (2)

Mindfulness can help awaken us to the way dominant/subordinate social structures shape our thinking and behavior. As we start to become aware of these embedded patterns, we are freed to choose our future. Each of us can set an intention for ourselves and our society as to who we want to be.

Transcript

For our meditation, We'll start by checking into your posture, Looking for a way to stabilize the body, Feet on the floor, Hands resting gently on your lap or at your side. If you're erect, But not rigid, Be feeling the way that you can align your spine. Just maintain a sense of relaxation. If you're comfortable, You can close your eyes and take a few full cleansing breaths. Feel how the chest expands on the in-breath. The body relaxes, Releases on the out-breath. Just a few of these full, Deep. You can now let the breath be natural and easy. Notice the different sensations of the breath. It's the movement of the chest with each in-breath and out-breath. Perhaps the sensations of the breath as it moves gently through your nostrils. Now, Imagine that you find yourself in a safe. It's the first place that comes to mind for you. What sort of place do you picture? Maybe it's a beautiful garden, Mountains, An open field or a beach. Picture a place that feels calm and safe. A place you feel cared for and the details of your surroundings, The colors, The textures. You can notice the ground, Grass, Soil, Sand. Are you barefooted? What does it feel like beneath your feet? Now, Allow yourself to lie down in a safe place. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Notice the gentle earth warming you. The earth holding you, Allowing you to relax. You can use all of your senses to take in the colors, The smells. Feeling the warmth of the sun resting in this calm. Now, Imagining there are many other beings there as well. Each lying peacefully nearby. All of you enjoying this beauty and serenity, The peace of this place. People are alike here of many races and languages. Different physical and mental abilities. Different sexes, Ages, Gender identity. Each feeling safe, Cherished. Each held in this caring embrace. Each at ease, Content. If you can soak in this scene, Picture yourself slowly bowing to all these other beings. Honor them, Reverence them. Slowly rising and slowly opening up. This will be the second of the talks on mindfulness and race. Last time we focused on how mindfulness can bring things into conscious awareness. It's from the unconscious to the conscious. Moving that separation between the two in mindfulness. On a personal level, What a lot of people report is that they find these habituated patterns of negative thinking that just cycle over and over and over in their heads. And they're probably remarkably similar between many of us. If you make a mistake or do something wrong, Then all of a sudden you find your mind cycling into such an idiot. I can never do anything right. I'll never amount to anything in life. Kind of catastrophizing over whatever this thing was. And it's really with the help of mindfulness that we can slow down and pause and start to realize what is going on. And then just kind of hold it gently. And when you start to do that, Then you start to realize this is just a story about something that went on. This is not really me. In fact, Most times I do things right and most times I'm not an idiot. Actually, My life is full of a lot of blessings. And the same thing goes, I think, With implicit bias. That mindfulness can bring to light these habituated patterns of negative thinking that arise precisely out of this dominant subordinate structure within our society. And as I quoted Krishnamurti as saying last time, We think the culture's thoughts. These thoughts don't necessarily arise from ourselves alone. And in this case, They're the story about who the other person is. Sometimes this is called othering in meditation circles. Meaning that we just create this person. We take this person who's in front of us and we create this other who is different from us and not as good as us. And this whole fictional story about who they are begins to arise. And again, With mindfulness, You can pause and you can start to understand and bring that unconscious pattern into your consciousness. For the dominant group, There's a real impediment. Because when this starts to happen, And two, You sense sometimes the depth of the implicit bias, Then it can be overwhelming. And people can draw back, Feeling like, Well, I'm not a bad person. It's like, I'm not a bad person. And start almost arguing with these feelings that arise. Or this notion of white fragility. If you just crack open one of these questions, Then all of a sudden there's all this resistance that comes up. So I think that mindfulness here is just such a great resource because it allows for this open, Steady awareness, Which is non-judgmental in and of itself in the sense that it permits anything to arise. Anything to arise into this spacious awareness where it can be known. And maybe known for the first time. And you can awaken from this false sense of self that we all carry to some degree. There's a saying by a famous meditation teacher that meditation is a path to self-knowledge. And then he would pause and say, Unfortunately, Most of the news is bad. Imagine yourself. It's a complete overstatement. But you get the point. You get the point. There's also a danger, Particularly for meditators, In that mindfulness has this natural, Calming effect on the mind and body. And it can soothe and just bypass all these difficult emotions and feelings. There's a term for it. It's called spiritual bypass. Where you're just avoiding. Once it arises, You're avoiding rather than comforting. The great mindfulness teacher, Joseph Goldstein, Had this one saying where he said, Well, Mindfulness is you put your hand into the fire and you have awareness of everything that's happening. Burning, Burning, Burning. He said, But that's obviously not enough. He says, You have to have the wisdom to pull your hand out of the fire. Mindfulness by itself is not enough. So the importance of intention on the personal side. We can change our lives by changing our intention. Join the gym or you can decide to go back to school or you can decide to start a meditation practice. And then the direction of your life starts to change. It's the same thing with implicit bias. That on the personal side, You allow it to arise. And then the question becomes, Well, What will you do? What will you do? And this is one insight from Ibram Kendi, The how to be an anti-racist author. One of the many great points in his book is it's not enough to not be a racist. You need to move from that to be an anti-racist. Because what's really required is positive action to move in the opposite direction, Not to stay where you are. And the last thing I think I'll say is that this is also a challenge for meditation communities. When I started sitting long retreats, There were no teachers of color. And so for the meditation community itself, This has been an active struggle to recognize the need to open up spaces for black, Indigenous people of color to both be cultivated as teachers but also to be welcomed. Maybe I'll stop there, And I'll see if you win. I would invite your reflections as well. Thanks, Tim. And thanks for holding this space, Too, And for folks that are curious enough about it and interested in it. Tim contacted me a little bit earlier this week because one of the things I love the most about this space that we've cultivated together is the opportunity to connect with people like Tim. So we've had a couple of conversations just on this over the past couple of Friday talks about what mindfulness and meditation has expanded my own practice and thinking. And I will just call it. And something that Tim said about there's something about meditation. I think many of us came here. We were looking for ways to self-suit. And I'm totally about walking. Give me this tool so I can feel better about myself so I can shut down these thoughts in my head. And the more and more you practice what you think about, I think it's very mindfulness community to be like it's suffering. Like the Buddha expounds, It's like they're suffering. And very specifically, Though, It sent me Tim asking me to reflect upon it. I really did start reflecting on it. It's even ears, Too. Mindfulness has helped me so much. And I've used it as, I guess I would say tool in two instances. Number one, To self-soothe myself. I'm very conscious of the space that I inhabit as an Asian-American cisgender woman. This also holds a bunch of other identities. And so I use it to self-soothe and to comfort myself through the suffering that I experience and maybe other people here have experienced because of identities that hold in histories that they've had. And then the expansion of that is just like, So that field of using mindfulness, Like I suffer and other people suffer, Too. But the extension of that and why the practice has been really supportive to me. But it's also, What did you say, Tim? Like meditation is a path. The point, I think, Of mindfulness, Too, Is to hold space for the discomfort. And so for me and for many of us, We all suffer. And another one of the noble truths is that there's a cause to suffering. And sometimes we may be causing that suffering either to ourselves or other people. So these implicit biases that we might have that we want to tell ourselves that we're good people. And we are. I believe that everybody here is implicitly a good person. And we might be harming people and ourselves in ways that we don't know. And that's really where the practice has been quite astounding, I think, To me. To hold that discomfort, Too. Because where it gets to be spiritual bypass is when you stop at the level. You just want the comfort. And you want to comfort yourself to know that you're not doing anything bad. Like I'm not responsible. My parents or myself, I didn't even come to this country until like a certain time. And at the same time, Once you get to the point of holding, I think, Not only the comfort but the discomfort. But this is really the thing that I'm still working through myself. It's like it makes you think about, Well, I just want to do something more intentional or active. And seeing if I can like stop the suffering for one person. If not one person, Maybe myself. That I know that I'm more aware of. You may or may not have seen that I actually joined this a little bit late. So I came at the very end of the very nice guided meditation that Tim had. And that's actually because me and a couple of other of my colleagues, Who I see here in RMR, We are starting another course where we're. . . It's a reading course about exploring the basics of bias, For lack of a better term. We're reading a book. This is the book I can show you all later. It's called, Is Everyone Really Equal? And I actually took the course before, So now I'm coordinating the course together. And everybody approaches us like, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I'll do a training. An orientation session with our facilitators. Like, This is not for you to just like come in, Absorb content, Use this as a tool and then walk away from here. The process is actually the product. And this is no shade on people that come in just for like, Hey, I just want to go to my. . . Amanda, Play me something from 10% Happier and I'll be fine. That is like the door that we walk through. That's definitely the door that I've accessed for many years. And just something broke in the last two years, Which I'm sure that y'all have experienced as well. And I knew I could choose to avoid it. I actually have tools that I use just to like self-soothe. And then it was like, It wasn't enough, You know, Not for me anyway. And when I dug in and it's still really uncomfortable, It's still a process for myself. It invited me to like, Think of something else. It invited me to like, Say, What can I do at work? What can I do, Someone on the street? Like, What's that feeling I get when, You know, You know, Like an unhoused person. Why do I feel that in myself? As an Asian American person, I think folks here are familiar with the term BIPOC, Which is Black and Indigenous People of Color. Differentiate it because my experience as a light white adjacent privilege is really different from someone in a black and brown, You know. My cisgendered identity is like really different from someone with a transgender identity. And so it's what I'm going to do to the purpose of practice that's opened up is like, What does compassion really mean? I think all of us maybe come to this too. I want to be like a good person. I want to be a more compassionate person. But like, Kind of what does it really mean? And so the extension of it beyond the tool, You know, If you choose it, I think, Or if anybody is just curious about it, Like that's really how it started for me. I was kind of like, Oh, This is like interesting, You know. I hope that this is a, I hesitate to say safe space. I think that when we're volunteering to bring the meditations to folks, It's like, I think all of us are thinking like, You know, What can we do with it? It can just be at the base, Which is just a really supportive thing for all of us in working in this job at this time. Whatever you do to have just an easier experience. And in what ways can we cultivate a space to invite people to use that for other things? Because I think that's the point, Right? Like, Tim doesn't host these. Tim, You were joking, We were joking how Tim's partner basically says, Like, This is a lot of time you're spending on this. And it's because you're maybe like, You're just kind of called to do it. Whether that's like for just your own practice. Like, You know, I just want to sit for five minutes to think about this. And it can just be for your own comfort. But what does it mean if we invite ourselves to be, To confront those aspects of ourselves that might make us more uncomfortable? I think that's where the practice really has a potential to expand. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. I think that we'll close this session, The 30-minute session, And thank all those who could just attend for the 30 minutes.