Good Life Project - Ruth King: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

Growing up in South Central, LA in the '60s and '70s, Ruth King (https://ruthking.net/) was taught to bury her emotions, to hide her heart and do what was necessary to survive. Feeling was not a good thing, getting home safe was. But, eventually, a call to reconnect with her big heart deep empathy came in the form of open-heart surgery in her 20s.Returning to school, King pursued her Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology, managed training and organizational development divisions at Levi Strauss and Intel, where she designed diversity awareness programs and consulted to leaders on cultural change initiatives. Over time, her interests expanded to include the study of insight meditation and Tibetan Buddhism. King is now an insight meditation teacher and emotional wisdom author, mentored by Jack Kornfield in the Theravada tradition.King’s work has been influenced by many cultures, and is often described as “ceremony.” Her intuitive methods, knowledge, and skills weave the fields of Western psychology, Buddhist philosophy, leadership development, mindfulness meditation, and fun! She is a guiding teacher at Insight Meditation Community of Washington and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, and the founder of Mindful Members Insight Meditation Community of Charlotte.King is also the author of The Emotional Wisdom Cards, Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible, and her new book, Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out (https://amzn.to/2MrygRN).-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Photo Credit VaschelleAndre-2017 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's guest, Ruth King, grew up in South Central LA in the late 60s and 70s, a time of incredible unrest where her grandmother, as she described it, would pace back and forth in the home, just kind of hoping and praying that the grandkids would make it home safe on any given day. The rule there was not so much how to live a good life, but how to survive. She had a large family with a lot of siblings. And she was sort of focused on how do I get through each day. But also she was the kid in the family that felt everything, that had a huge heart. And being tough and shutting down was not the easiest thing for her. As she grew up and became

more active and really wanted to change things, she eventually found herself at the age of 27 in open-heart surgery. And that was a wake-up moment in a lot of different ways for her. She had been putting herself through school, studying psychology, and started to build a life in corporations. And she wanted to focus her energies a bit differently and talk about the big issues and stay involved in learning and training, but also have conversations around race and power and differential and equality within organizations, within culture, and with individuals. And she wasn't afraid to do it.

But she also started to explore mindfulness and a path to her own stillness. And it changed her. It changed the way that she operated in the world. It changed the way that she went about her mission. She has since built a tremendous career in large organizations like Levi Strauss and Intel, and then developed a longstanding study and a teaching path in insight meditation, focusing on dealing with hard issues. And one of them is race. She has a really powerful new book out now called Mindful of Race that I strongly recommend. In today's conversation, we dive into her personal journey, her story, the things that shaped her, that awakened her, that challenged her, and how she sees the big questions that

we're struggling with around power and equality and race in individuals, in the workplace, in the world now, and some ideas on how to grapple with them, no matter sort of where you come from. Really excited to share this conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the heat of the civil rights and black power movements.

So this would have been late 60s, early 70s? Yeah, yeah. I was in my teens at that time, but yeah, it was a big part of our community, these forms of social expression and activism. Yeah. Tell me about how you experienced that from big picture. Well, it was mostly a witnessing of my mother,

who was very active in the NAACP and in the church. So those two were real big forces in terms of activism in our community. And we all in our home base and also just expression of sound and the full body in the churches. And the same people that played the jazz were also the same people that played in the churches and were also involved in the NAACP. And activism at that point was around jobs and police violations. So it was just witnessing that, witnessing the strength of organizing around community and families. I grew up in a working class, working poor family with a single mom and eight siblings. Eight siblings. Eight siblings, yeah. There were six girls and two boys, and the first six are a year apart. So you guys are close. Yeah, we were close, and there's two

of my siblings have passed away, but my mom has passed just as a few years ago, 2016, she passed away. And yeah, a lot of strength, a lot of warrior, you know, a lot of strength and people that were committed to making things better for the community and the family. I mean, one of the things I talk about is how I watched my great grandmother pacing with worry and how at a very early age when she died, I was around seven years old, I remember saying, I'm not going out that way. There's got to be a better way than pacing and worrying. She was so worried about these black bodies that she couldn't really protect,

and there was so much harm pervasive in our community. And I remember that was a real potent time for me early on. There's got to be a better way than worrying myself to death. I think my grandmother would be happy to know I'm not pacing but doing walking meditation now. It's a different form of expression of what's in your mind. Yeah, but it's without the grip, being so gripped by what's happening. It's been a big part of my life to lighten up around that as I still do what must be done. Yeah, you describe it as your role as being largely witnessing. Did that at some point start to take on more of an activism? Yeah, but it was never, you know, like out there. It was more an activism of the mind. It's like, how do I work with my thoughts? And how do I work with my distress? I kind of think there was some

way I knew early on that it wasn't totally dependent on what happens out there. There was some way that I had to be with my distress that I think was important for me. I think it had to do with the fact that at 27, I had open heart surgery for a mitral valve prolapse, which I think was my first silent retreat, which I think was the beginning of... Not necessarily the way you want to have your first retreat, but... It wasn't under the best conditions, but it was a moment of me really getting that the way I had been running my life was really not working so well. And the recovery period especially just taught me because I couldn't manufacture energy and make myself be in the distraction of my mind and actually acting on it. I was stuck in my bed, didn't have the energy, and I really had to be with the rawness of healing and really attending

and caring for my recovery. And there was something about that that taught me that I think this applies. This applies to me in my life when I'm out in the world and seeing issues of injustice. This applies how I approach it. What was, you mentioned the way you were living your life before then. So this happened when you were 27. What was the way that you were living your life that you felt like? in a big part of my life, this urgency, this sense of desperation, of trying to get out, get away from what I saw in the community as a lot of violence and fear, and mainly that violence and fear within the family I was in, within the community I was in. So there were six girls and a single mom, and I saw my mom struggling a lot. And so, you know, there was this sense of, because there were so many kids, there was

the sense of high control in the family. So what I noticed was just this sense of feeling really tight and locked in. And my oldest sister, who had the responsibility of raising us, didn't really want that job. And so she had a lot of bitterness and cruelty, and that got passed down. And there was a part of me that just really felt there was an imprisonment in the household, there was an imprisonment in the community, and there was this burning inside of me to break out of a lot of that. So one of the ways I think I broke out was, you know, getting a baby and getting married early and then being able to leave the house and begin to start what I considered a new beginning.

But I don't think I got very far with that because we tend to take ourselves everywhere we go. And that didn't last long. It was a year and a half. And then I was fresh out of high school and got a job and struggle, just struggle everywhere, getting the job, raising the baby. So it was hard in terms of me fleeing and racing and the urgency and the drive to get out of what felt like a real tight and highly controlled environment. And the heart surgery was a result of having an undiagnosed hyperthyroid, which enlarged the heart and then aggravated a precondition around this mitral valve. So in my teens, I had the baby. In my 20s, I had these two medical issues that needed some real attention. And then by the time I'm 30, I feel like that's when my life just really began to take root

because I had had a chance to get my physical body in shape. And my mind was beginning to pull at me for me to work with that. Because when the thyroid condition is adjusted, the mind is still racing even though the body has slowed down. So I was kind of left with, how do I work with that? So meanwhile, I had moved from Southern California. I was coming out of graduate school. I was in Northern California. So this whole time, you're still, you're deep into pursuing an education and advanced degrees. Yeah. After education wasn't really emphasized in my growing up. Survival was. So there was make sure you cover your bases here because you got to cover your bases. Nobody's going to be taking care of you

and looking after you. So survival was a big underlining driver. And then after I got a certain sense of financial stability through my job and I could see myself caring for myself. I did pursue education and it did open me and make some other things available. And it's interesting because I guess you pursued, was psychology first? No, it was organizational development first at Pepperdine. Okay. And then what I learned from that was that a lot, again, my theme was how do we not stress so much or what's involved in changing the way we relate to distress? That's been an underlining theme for me. And I was first looking at cultures and organizations and the role

of power and leadership and how that created a certain environment, you know, again, mimicking family and how the leader creates a certain environment, right? And then after I looked at that closely, it really boiled down to what can individuals do? What does it take for individuals to actually change? And that led me into the field of psychology, clinical psychology, which I studied at the master's level. Yeah. I'm curious whether you ever saw yourself in potentially a clinical practice, or was this always in the context of how do we affect larger numbers of people? How do we affect groups, cultures?

That's a great question because it was never about being clinical. That was almost a little too structured for me. I needed a bigger box, but I needed the knowledge in order to even know that something else was possible. So going through a master's program in clinical psychology totally supported me in understanding myself, understanding my programming, my conditioning, my way of relating to life. It was pivotal to that, you know. So that was just crucial training for me to make sense out of how to serve and how to do activism at a different level, which was different than maybe being out physically engaged. I was always interested in the mental side of it all.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting too, especially growing up at a time and in an area known for very strong, very vocal and very physical and often violent resistance and activism. And to sort of see this, to see that, and then look at it to experience it from the inside out, and then to somehow arrive at a place where you're saying, yes, change is needed, and there's a lot that we all need to work through. And there's potentially potentially different way, like there's a different on-ramp to this, a different way to go about it. Were you aware of sort of you developing that different lens that was very much not against, but just very different from sort of the approach to activism and social justice to a certain extent that you grew up around. Yeah, I think it's kind of like the thread has always been there,

although I didn't quite know how to really pull the red thread out of the tapestry to see this stream that was flowing and had been flowing. Some of the signs of it, the early signs of it was I was considered the crybaby. You know, I was the one with, you know, I grew up where having a heart was really dangerous. Showing your emotions wasn't a great idea. You know, being out there vulnerable wasn't good because you became a target. But I always had this sensitivity and it never really quite left me. So I think that's why psychology was an attraction. And, you know, I talked to my older sisters about my feelings, and they just really wanted me to snap out of it because it was just too dangerous.

So even to this day, you know, my oldest sister, the one that I was mentioning was cruel growing up. She passed away just last year. And I remember she wasn't talking to me for the last two decades. And I remember bringing this tenderness. The relationship was me leaving her voicemails because she had pancreatic cancer and I loved her dearly, but she wouldn't let me in, you know, because she still had this iron heart. And I'm the one that had this, always had this mushy heart and had open heart surgery. I mean, everything was centered around the heart and caring for the heart and being heartful. So I'd send her these lovely mushy, gushy, West Coasty comments of, I love you. I'd love to be with you during this time. Please forgive me. And I never heard back from her because I just felt like it just wasn't

in her time to move to a place of tenderness. But it's always been what I brought and what I wanted to offer, you know, my family, that was hard. You know, there's always one person in the family system that got something. Everybody has something that belongs to everybody. And I think mine was around tenderness in my family system and then around offering up heartfulness in my form of activism. So I just think it's always been my, my way. Yeah. Yeah. So you, you have surgery, you pursue your education. And then as you were sharing,

you're essentially operating in large corporate worlds. I mean, you made the decision, let me, let me take this lens. Let me take my skills in understanding organizations and cultures. And when you chose that path, what were you looking to accomplish? dance that I was in in my family of kind of being silenced because I had all this softness. I was always very vocal about what I wanted and around emotions. So I think I was still attempting to get authority to hear what I had to say, even when I went in corporations. You know, it's almost as if I got a job, I got a high-paying, well-paying job, so that I can legally point out to people how screwed up they were and be paid well for it. On a large scale, too. Yeah, on a large scale. Not just one person. You're all messed up.

That's right. So I got a chance to really just say, you know, this is how I see it. And I was good at it. And I knew that as a Black person, there was a way I could say certain things inside these cultures with these powerful people that a lot of people couldn't say. Like I could point out the dynamics of power dynamics around white people and people of color. I could point out the shape of oppression that was operating inside the corporation. People wanted to know this information. They couldn't always hear it from anybody. There was great listening to me. So I was in this great position, you know,

exercising a lens of both pointing out what was wrong, but also passionately and with a lot of heart. And so I was heard a lot in this field I was in. But it took me a minute to really get that my hunger in some of it was actually being accepted and being able to have a voice that I didn't have growing up. And so it wasn't just totally clean around, I'm this professional. It had some psychological underpinnings that I could have a voice and I could say some things, I can bring heart to it. And I was actually paid to do it. There was some element of that. That changed over the years where I didn't have that kind of urgency or burning in me. It was just a fierce clarity that I could see and offer in my work.

I'm curious about that. Tell me more about that transition. Yeah. Well, let's see if I can. I don't know if it was a point of it. Yeah, I think there was a shift that occurred over time where it wasn't important whether I was agreed with or not. I'm trying to see if there's a specific story around it. I don't think there is. I think it was very gradual where my need wasn't whether there was agreement or whether I was liked or I wasn't pushing to make a point. And I just saw that that kind of relaxed approach where the underpinning of it wasn't really driven by more of a psychological need to be accepted, that the juice was more afforded, more of an atmosphere that people could relax in and hear more. So I was joined in clarifying issues and seeing them as opposed to pushing. The volume of my offering wasn't loud.

I know this is more metaphoric instead of a specific example, but it was a real gradual awareness. And it coincided with mindfulness practice that I was actually self-managing my energy and my expectations around change weren't so driven. There was a way I feel like I was accepting more of this kind of human way that we are. And I could see that seeing my own self that change wasn't always an easy thing to do just through my own life. And so my respect for what it takes for people to actually change a view and shift a way of being in the world got real humanized because we just don't change just because somebody says so or thinks it's a good idea. It's a lot more that goes into it. Especially when we've built not just our own personal identity around a set of beliefs and a lens that we have in the world, but when we've built generations of cultural identity around that. I mean, that is not something where somebody just shines a spotlight and all of a sudden you're like, oh, yes, boom, we're done, you're operating on the level of a shift in identity, which is a very deep, necessary, yet very often fraught and not fun and painful process for so many.

Yeah, exactly. I think that was the shift from studying organizational development and just looking at cultural dynamics. You know, you can see cultural dynamics, but when you really want to look at what's required for people to change, you're almost in a psychological realm of seeing why we hold on to the things that we do. And I certainly saw that in myself. growing up that had, I actually had to keep it under wraps until I could express it. And then it came out couched in all these righteous, professional, I mean, I could have, you know, again, professionally point out, use my heat to point some things out very laserly, but to own that it was really a strategy of protecting myself was a whole thing that I had to see. It wasn't that people could point that out to me because I wasn't rageful. I was right, you know.

Protecting yourself from what? Yeah, protecting myself. I mean, I just felt like there was a need for me to finally have a voice, you know, for me to have my feelings, which I couldn't really have when I was growing up. To feel was dangerous again. It made you too much of a target. And you had to be tough. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You brought up mindfulness. How do you start exploring mindfulness? Like, what was your way into that and why? Yeah, well, I met a woman in China who happened to be on the board of Spirit Rock Meditation Community. Which, for those who don't know is his legendary place.

His legendary meditation center in Wood Acre, California, Northern California. And she's a black woman. And we're in China looking at this five-story golden Buddha. And she asked me where I live. We happen to live in the same area. She invited me to come to Spirit Rock. And I live. We happen to live in the same area. She invited me to come to Spirit Rock, and I did. I joined her one night and went and heard Jack Kornfield speak. He became my teacher for, my root teacher in the Buddhist tradition for many years. And it was the first talk when

I heard somebody, because I was raised in the Baptist church, and there's a lot of fear there, and the need to be obedient was part of our culture. And when I went, I always had this need to have my own feelings in my own way, because I had felt so tightly controlled growing up. So I got out of the church. I wasn't really involved in a spiritual community, but I was quite contemplative and reflected a lot and had done a lot of, you know, I lived on the West Coast, which is the center of spiritual materialism. So I had a lot of opportunities to experiment with this tradition and that and dreams and, you know, and so a lot of different modalities. So when I heard Jack Kornfield speak, he customarily starts his talks by saying, you, oh, nobly born. And the message is always about

know for yourself, see for yourself, know for yourself. And there was something about that invocation that supported me in knowing that I could trust and look inwardly instead of outwardly for what was true. And I just took that to heart. I've been practicing ever since. That was a big moment, a big turning for me. So I think that was the beginning. That was in the early 90s. And then I was in a 10-year meditation group with him and a few other people organized by our lives. It was like a wisdom circle. And it really was a way for me to know for myself, to look inward at my mental habits, the way I was relating to my thoughts and to make some shifts and integrate some practices of being still with what's here right now that was pretty pivotal for me in turning my way of relating to life around. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because I think obviously mindfulness, just as a phrase, has become part of the zeitgeist these days, and it's, quote, hot. It's big in business. It's big in life. It's, to a certain extent, commoditized.

And yet the essence of the practice is so powerful. But I'm fascinated by that sort of the intersection between mindful practice in the context of change, because it's not like the practice itself is about change. Right. And yet you hear it increasingly spoken about as a really powerful tool or element of either an individual's process of change or a community's process of change. I'm curious, what's your experience of the relationship between the two? Well, I think there's a deep relationship between the two, but it's not so much about change. It's really about relating to what's here, relating to the change that's actually happening,

being able to see that and attend to it without being gripped by it or without being so immersed in it that you, you know, there's this powerful way of witnessing the activity of change instead of being so thrown in it. This is a subtle Aikido move, you know, in terms of relating to what's happening. So it's a very kind of, it's slight, but it's the shift from being your thoughts to actually attending to them or watching what's happening and seeing the nature of them. What we bring to the social change in terms of our mindset, our energy is in a place of more stability, in a place of more clarity, in a place of knowing I can be with this because I can see the nature of it. I can see that it's not going to, it's here. It's not permanent.

It's not personal. And it's not perfect. That's one of the things, like a mantra I create in my own mind to deal with what's here. Can I stay in my seat? Nelson Mandela says that if you can be with what you don't like without needing it to be different, then you are free. And there's just something about being able to, you know, he was free way before he got out of prison because he worked with his mind, I believe, to be able to weather and not just tolerate, but to see that this circumstance I'm in is not the end of it. It's not the all of it. It's not the sum total of who I am and what I'm capable of.

And there's something about that that I found in my own practice of, you know, I can be in the face of just every time I turn on the news, I can feel that impulse to just go into righteousness and blame and judgment. And I can also see that, you know, I don't have to do that. I can kind of just see this and not be in reactivity as if it's the end. We're always in the middle of something that's happening. So those are some of the ways that I work. I see this intersection very intimately that way. I mean, it's interesting you use the word reactivity because that's been my experience of one of the biggest benefits of a committed mindfulness practice over a period of years. And I didn't become aware of it for a long time because it wasn't like, you know, okay, so I've done my 10 sessions.

I'm less reactive. That's right. It sneaks up on you after months and years. And then, you know, what I would start to notice is it wasn't so much the things I was doing. It was the fact that I would be in a scenario that would have a couple of years back really rattled and consumed me. That's right. And I still felt it.

And I still wanted to do something about it. I'm still moved to respond in some way, but I would sit with it more openly first. Right. I would sit with it more openly first. I would ask how much of this is my construct and how much of it is like the capital T truth, if in fact there is one. And then what it really has allowed me to do is to then say, huh,

what is the elevating way to respond in this moment? Not that I'm good at this. I have not mastered it in any way, shape or form. I fail miserably all day, every day. But there's been an edge that's been taken away and there's an opening, a softness, a more deliberate versus reactivity. That's a really beautiful way of describing it. I think it's often in retrospect that you can see that you've shifted your response to what life can often spit in our faces. There is a shift, a subtleness. I see it with death. I mean, I used to be really gripped by people that died that I love. And, you know, I have a different relationship with death. It's not the end of the world.

I mean, I don't have that same reactivity to it. Yeah, I can sit with a broken heart, I think would be the way I would say it. and yet when you live and you work in a container where there's still a lot that's not right in the world where we've got tension where we've got divides we've got exclusion you know sitting with it and seeing as much of the truth as we can as step one yeah but then there's the work to do. That's right. You know, this is when we really have to remember our deeper principles of why we're here and what we're doing.

For me, the deeper principle that I try to keep in my mind is that we all belong to each other. I have to keep this whisper in the back of my head. We all belong to each other. I have to keep this whisper in the back of my head. We all belong to each other. That harming is no longer an option in my life. That's just something I keep in the back. Non-harming is something that I really try to live true to. And that compassion is a weapon of mass healing. That if I can keep my heart tender and

open to the humanity and all the ignorances, you know, warts and all, if I can just recognize myself and what I don't like just a little, then it just kind of supports me in those gripe times. And it's not easy, but I think that's, you know, when I take action or when I feel that strong impulse to point something out, and I'm not perfect at this by any means, but when I feel that, there's a part of me more and more that looks at the fact that what I do has impact. What I do plant seeds. What I do not only plant seeds, but they're going to bloom. What I do is impacting, if not this moment, the next moment or the next generation, that that's the quality of interdependence that I think we represent as humans in the world.

I actually take that pretty seriously. That's my practice. That's what I try to live. And if I try to live that, that means I'm going to have more pauses and more questions. I'm going to slow it down a bit. I'm going to know that I have impact when I'm moving in the world. I try to live by that. There's something really tantalizing to me about the concept of slowing it down

so that you know that when you do move, you will move with the level of intentionality and directionality that will probably create impact, even though it may have happened further down the road, that when you do make that choice, you know, it's laser pointed. Yeah. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. At some point, part of what you were sharing earlier, you said that you could speak truth to power to a certain extent within these organizations and the way you did that and maybe to a certain extent why you did it shifted over time. But you also mentioned that people were

open to hear this, to hear conversations about race, to hear conversations about power inequality within an organization. The conversation around race within organizations and also an organic shift in saying, like, this is where I want to spend a lot of my energy? Yeah, I don't think there was a moment. the pain of it most of my life with my great-grandmother pacing, my mother and the civil rights movement, me trying to have conversations with white people and other people of color around this topic, just the rage that got activated or the shutdown that got activated and just the pain around the literal separating that happened and the divisions that we see as a result of it. It's a division of heart in my mind. So we're back to the heart again. But I just became curious about that space of shutdown, that space of shutdown that happens just the moment race is raised, you know, or it's pointed out how we go to our corners and armor up or turn our backs. I got really curious about what that's

about and how we can begin to turn towards what's happening and to know it more intimately. I think there's work to be done around it at the individual level where we can, you know, sit on our cushions and just be with our own personal distress. And then there's, you know, exploration to be done at group levels with our own race and also with other races. But we need tools, you know, and I felt like the tools that were missing in corporations, where we had all of the teachings and many training programs around diversity, it lacked this contemplative piece of being able to sit with the distress itself. So there's, even if you had all these ways of communicating with each other, here's these steps,

and, you know, you say this, and you wait, and you listen. It still didn't have this way to sit with just the pain of it and to be able to know you can survive that. There was something about bringing mindfulness, kind of a meditative approach and some of these principles into this inquiry are into the complexity of engaging with each other that was fortified and strengthened through adding an investigation of how you're working with your thoughts and perceptions and projections that often go along with race and other diversity complexities. Yeah. And I mean, also, that makes so much sense to me. And what I was thinking as you're offering that, too, is that, you know, in the context of the typical training, whether it's, you know, communication or diversity or all the range of, you know, quote, professional education and things that are sometimes voluntary but often mandated.

That's right. People don't want to be in the room. It does seem like a lot of that is really built around how do we take this stress point between people on a team or two individuals and train you to resolve that rather than what if there is actually, what happens when we're dealing with something on the scale of race and massive power differentials where there is no instant resolution to that. That is a long process where people are going to have to sit with bigger truth and sit with their own truth for windows of time and have conversations and grapple with it.

What happens when it's not just an instant solution and a quick mirroring technique? You know, so it feels like what you're bringing to that are the tools for that deeper, longer exploration. Exactly. It's so important that we really get our conditioning and our habits of mind around race. But a lot of the diversity issues, you can replace race with any of the other social ills, and you'll see the same skeletal shape of how we're programmed around dominating and subordinating racial dynamics. We can find ourselves in it and really see how we're habituated around it to protect ourselves. You know,

racial tension is wrapped around early trauma because of vulnerability associated and that comes up even when you're trying to have the conversation. The terror of it often is wrapped around other vulnerabilities that we have and it gets very confusing internally, unless you have a way of really kind of, again, slowing it down, relaxing into seeing more clearly without being so defended. That's one of the beauties of mindfulness meditation, that it actually teaches us to live our lives more intimately in these intense ways. Yeah. You, in your book, Mindful of Race, you share a whole bunch of ideas and tools, which I think are really important. You also talk about something you call,

I think it was the six hindrances. Yeah. Can you talk to me a bit about that? Well, the six hindrances have to do with dominant and subordinated racial dynamics. So there's six ways or shapes we can begin to recognize. And the first one has to do with white people as a good individual. We're looking at, in this model, we're looking at the white race as a dominating race, and especially Western culture, people of color as subordinated races. So the first hindrance is that white people see themselves as good individuals and not so much associated

with being a part of a racial group identity, not being associated with whiteness. And this lack of identifying as a collective is part of what cripples the discussion. Because when we come to the table, talk about race, white people come as a good white part of what cripples the discussion. Because when we come to the table, talk about race, white people come as a good white individual. People of color come very identified with a racial group identity that has been subordinated often by the dominant culture. So we start to have a conversation about race and we're tripping over our feet. It's like you're talking across each other. Yeah, and it's almost like white people have amnesia around racial history and roots and

lineage and inheritances. There's no connecting with that. I don't, and it's funny because it's not funny. It's very real. And I think what's happened, you know, in our culture in the U.S. at least, I mean, we have a global audience of listeners, but I think this is happening around the world, but it's really, there's been so much more media attention, I think, shined on the true nature of the culture in the U S that, you know, it's interesting that the idea of white folks having

amnesia, is it amnesia or is it just like, this has been the reality of the world for a long time and we just, for whatever reasons, it's been convenient and easy for us to just to not see it. And I think it's as much as there's so much harm and so much pain going on right now, I think the fact that so many of us are starting to have conversations that we've never had before, I hope that that's a good thing. I hope that that ends in us starting to see and hear and understand on a different ladder. We shall see. See, I've lived long enough at 70 years old to see that the period we're living in right

now isn't as hard as it's been. So there's been many turns of the wheel where white people can begin to see and turn this around. I'm hopeful too. There's a quality of hope and consciousness that I feel is growing. But I think what needs to be included in this hope is actually some practices that white people are doing to recognize themselves as collective forces in the culture to be membered. And I think this is what this first hindrance is really speaking to, that as long as white people see themselves as good individuals doing their best without seeing themselves as a collective, that there is a thing called whiteness that can be investigated and looked at and understood as a force in our social context.

I think we just see another cycle of, oh, this is a hopeful time, then it dies out. You know, and privilege, white privilege is one of the six hindrances. And the white privilege is, you know, you can choose to be white or not. You can choose to, you know, take action on it or not. And there's no consequence. There's this kind of, oh, I see it and then I don't have to see it cycle that we've seen for many, many generations. And it maintains itself through a sense of blindness, sameness, and silence. That's a collusive dynamic that keeps white people at large from seeing that there's a collective dynamic among white people that is not really taken to heart or engaged.

Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting point, right? Because we have, we identify people of color as like, we have acronyms. You have not aware of conversations where it's like people of color as like, we have acronyms, you have not aware of conversations where it's like people of whiteness or, well, I guess there are, but the subcategories of that would classify themselves as like a particular identity within the larger population of white folks, I think very often are subpopulations where the vast majority of white folks are more actively focused on letting people know I'm not one of them. Exactly. That's a common thing.

Rather than saying like, I am actually one of this larger group of people and operating on the level of identity and impact around that. These are ideas that I'm just, I mean, literally at the age of 52, starting to barely understand and barely grapple with. And this is a beautiful thing to grapple with around race and to invest some curiosity and engagement around. One of the things I recommend in the book strongly is forming racial affinity groups where white people and people of color can be with, like racism, begin to dive into our conditioning. I mean, how is it that we got to, I mean, white people can really look at, you know, why is it so difficult for us to come together and

talk about race? What's the oops and the ouch and the itch and the scratch around talking about race? Many groups that I've seen that form around exploring race and the racial affinity groups, white groups, they say they get together and it's so boring. And I can't really learn about race unless there's people of color here. I don't like being with these people because they don't get it. And it's like, well, if you can't get them to get it, who do you think is going to pick up that slack? And, you know, why is it boring? Why does it lack aliveness? That, to me, is the work of white people membering themselves and seeing, you know,

what is it that makes it difficult to talk about race? Us being a white race. What is this thing called whiteness? You know, and what is our conditioning around avoiding it? So I have a lot of instructions on how to really unpack that. Yeah, it's so important. One of the other things that you talk about, I believe it's in one of the hindrances, but you'll let me know, is the difference between intent and impact.

Yeah. Talk to me more about this, because this is something that was like a light bulb in my life last year. And I was like, oh. Yeah. You know, I consider myself a good person. So I couldn't be this or I couldn't be that because my intent is noble. And yet that is not the entire story. It's not. It's so true. So intent and impact is so important because it also goes to the first hindrance, which is about the good white individual. Again,

the white, most people I know, white people I know consider themselves good individuals, not members of groups. People of color see themselves as membered, as a part of a racial group identity, a collective of people, and they all share oppression in common. So the intent and impact is a parallel hindrance. It has to do with white people seeing their good intention, but not their impact, and people of color experiencing their impact and not their good intention. And that's just another way we miss each other. It's kind of like I have had people say to me, when I look at you, I don't see race. White people say that to me. And it's like, that's a good individual statement of good intention. But the impact is, oh, I need for you to see that I am a black woman with a history and legacy and part of members in my family that have been in prisons.

I mean, I want you to be curious about I want you to see the texture of my life. I get that ultimately I'm not a race or I'm not a black person, but relatively speaking, I absolutely am. And you would never hear, I don't think, a person of color make a statement like, when I look at you, I don't see race. It just wouldn't be part of our experience because there is such sensitivity to group membership. I mean, there's so many different directions we could go down. You have an interesting lens also on sort of how you define race, almost like a disease capable of a cure or capable of recovery. Yeah, I think it's true. I often say that racism is a heart disease and it's curable. I think it's curable in terms of being able to recognize how we are shaped. We can recognize the disease itself. We can diagnose it by looking at our conditioning. We can apply surgery of mindfulness and a certain dissecting and understanding of the nature of our experience as we can, again, slow down. We can look at what's

happening without being in a reactive place. We can train the mind to be observant instead of reactive as an intervention to the heart to surgery. And then we can be in service to a culture of care. We can commit ourselves to waking up to these six hindrances and recognizing our impact and understanding that we all are a part of a larger body and what we do next matters. We can commit ourselves to waking up to our ignorance and to doing no harm. We can lead with our hearts and to use the pain of recovery from heart surgery as a way of connecting more deeply with others. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say about this, but I think fundamentally, having had heart surgery and recovered from it and mindfulness, recovery being my first silent retreat, I really feel hopeful in our capacity to heal from the inside and to open our eyes and hearts wide and really invest in a culture of care for each other. As we start to bring our conversation full circle,

I know on my mind, having spent a bit of time with you now and also having familiarized myself with your work and your recent book, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are probably saying to themselves, well, this is pretty interesting and I've learned a lot and what now? And these are great ideas and these are big ideas and here are concepts that are really important. But when this conversation ends and I'm walking down the street and I go home and I feel inspired and empowered to do something. What's the first step? How do I begin? How do I make this real?

Not the full scope of it because that's obviously a much bigger conversation, but how do I start to make this real on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, it's a good question. There's nothing really simple about it. But I do think I often talk about this conversation as a stimulus. You know, we get stimulated with this very question of, you know, this is a life practice. So to reduce any urgency around it, the urgency clouds a sense of clear seeing. So this is a life practice. You've got your life to work with it. That doesn't mean you get to be a slacker, but it does mean that you get to see that this is not going to be immediate. It's going to really represent some very to all be starting to see where we put our foot in our mouths and we need to forgive ourselves with regularity.

So I say get 10 get out of jail free cards on one side of the cards. You talk about where you put your foot in your mouth and the other side, what you learned. But I think just a stillness practice of five minutes a day, five days a week, five weeks in a row. The body and mind naturally wants stillness. It's where we can get our grounding and take a breath and, you know, kind of open our eyes and hearts a bit more. So five minutes a day of stillness where you're just centering yourself in the body with the breath, five minutes a day, five days a week, five weeks in a row, and you have a new habit. You naturally want to do it longer. This is good medicine to bring in a counterbalance to urgency,

to the troubles in the world. We need an antidote to just feeling like we're ungrounded. A mindfulness practice will help us be on the ground more and have us be in a place of more choicefulness and heartfulness instead of reactivity. And I also think being with others kind of forming a sense of ongoing conversation. I talk about the racial affinity groups a lot. I mean, I have a link on my website where people can really get some clear instructions on how to set that up, where you have one or two or three other people where you're kind of committing yourself to just continuing this conversation and sorting through and supporting each other and being more conscious and literate around race and our impact as individuals and racial groups.

I think these are fundamental things that we can do to begin certain groundedness in this work. Yeah. So as we sit here today in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer out the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? Yeah, I think what comes up for me is remembering that we belong to each other. We really do belong to each other. If we were to treat each other like our children and our pets, we might bring more pause and care to the interaction. That's my prayer.

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