Tara Brach - Waking up from Bias: A conversation with Tara and Anurag (Anu) Gupta

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Given how our biases create separation and unfold into violence and suffering, this is a crucial domain for each of us to explore. In this interview, author and teacher Anurag Gupta offers his wise perspectives and invites Tara to share some of what she has learned in navigating this terrain. We explore how to come into a healing relationship with unhealthy thoughts; forgiving ourselves for bias (it's impersonal); the inner freedom that arises from releasing bias and how to awaken compassion and deep respect for those we have habitually dehumanized. The interview closes with Tara leading a brief reflection on undoing bias. Anu's recent book is: Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From - and the Science-backed Method to Unravel Them. You can pick up your copy here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760282/breaking-bias-by-anu-gupta/ or on Anu's website at: https://www.bemorewithanu.com.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, greetings. There's a saying that we don't think our own thoughts. We think society's thoughts. And our society is built on biases about who's most important, what lives matter more, creating value in relationship to skin color, religion, class, gender, and more. So far from being immune, these hierarchies, these biases, are very much a part of the filter we live with. And if they're not conscious, they only get more and more grooved in.

You probably know the T-shirt that says, I just read about confirmation bias. It only proved that I already know. But we do go through the world trying to prove what our view is. And our biases shrink and root toward the world. They armor our world.

And of course, in our larger society biases really the grounds of violence and suffering. So, I'm speaking of this because, a month or so ago, I had a conversation with my friend and colleague, Anu Gupta, who's written a book, Waking Up and Biased, Discovering the Reality of the Longing.

He anchored a summit on this theme, and our conversation was really one of a number of interviews that he did with different people, and of course we both share our understandings. So I hope you find this really serves in your life. Thank you. Today, I am so, so thrilled. to speak to a very, very special person, someone who's been in a dear to me. Ever since I got off that ledge in 2009, I first discovered Tara Brock, her book, but also her podcast, which I would religiously listen to every week. I remember taking trips to the UK or Taiwan and just like having her in my ear as I'm like walking around town.

But for those of you who don't know Tara yet, Tara is a clinical psychologist and she got her degree from the Fielding Institute. And she's completed a five-year Buddhist teacher training program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. And she is the founder of Inside Meditation Community of Washington or IMCW, which is now one of the largest and most dynamic non-residential meditation centers in the United States. She gives presentations, teaches classes, offers workshops, and leads silent meditation retreats at IMCW and at conferences and retreat centers across the U.S., Europe, and I'm sure beyond. Our podcast, which is one of my favorites, is downloaded more than three million times each month. So without further ado, Tara, thank you so much for being here with us. It's my pleasure, Anu. I'm so grateful you're doing it.

It feels important and timely. So, yeah, thank you. Yes. So I want to kind of just get to it. And, you know, we met in 2015 at the White House at the first Buddhist convening, the convening of like Buddhist leaders from across the country where we were part of this initiative called Buddhist for racial justice in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre. And so much has transpired. in these nine years from 2015 to now 2024.

So if I would ask you in a word or a phrase, how do you feel about bias in our society today? And feel free to share any images or words or somatic experiences or stories that come to your mind. Yeah. Well, the word bias feels like it's a opening to probably the greatest suffering. in our world, which is separation, bias.

We can't judge another person, whether it's demoting them in some way or just feeling they're different without creating distance and then the possibility of violence. So when I hear the word, deep down, there's just that sorrow for the human condition that it's part of the architecture of our brains

to have hierarchies and bias, and this is the other piece, it's also part of our capacity to become mindful of them and to be able to wake up out of them. So that's where I also feel I've seen the most, you know, potential for us to evolve

is the work that's done to wake up out of bias. Yeah, and that's really literally the work of transcending these ideas of separation, you know, moving from these limited labels that we've been assigned because of the way we look or our biology or sexual orientation into like our common humanity, but, you know, His Holiness Adela and our primary identity as human beings. So as we hold that vision together, if you were to imagine a world without bias, a world where belonging replaces bias, How would you feel in such a world?

Do you have access to these feelings? Yeah, as soon as I imagine it, you know, I do the John Lennon imagine. Yes. There's joy. There's this kind of unencumbered loving, loving without holding back. Loving without holding back. And it kind of, with that, I mean, it kind of fearless heart. And, you know, I had an experience, and it was probably about,

12 years ago, it was one of the first truly diverse retreats that was ever offered, where the teachers were completely mixed, and as were those that attended. It was in Yucca Valley, California. And we had our bumps and our misunderstandings and reactivities and so on. But Anu, I remember Midway looking at the whole field of different things. faces meditating and just feeling that this is the world I want to belong to. I'm more at home when it's a truly diverse community of beings than I could have ever, I didn't know what I was missing in the white cocoon.

I didn't know what I was missing. And my only problem with the word humanity, our shared humanity, is that I feel like it needs to be bigger. that we feel our shared belonging to all forms on this living earth. And one of my meditations when I walk by the river is whatever being I see, whether it's a cardinal or a goose or a tree or my dog or another human passing by, oh, sometimes you meditate. We are friends.

And just in naming that, the intrinsic connectedness that's always already there becomes more felt. And we know we belong to everything, everybody. We can't be alone. There really is that joy. It's so beautiful. And thank you for bringing that in because I sincerely believe that too, like moving beyond, you know, our species to all species, right? And not just other living beings, but the living Earth itself.

Yes. Right. So because we know that this planet is breathing and living. And she basically sustains us and all of her other children, which are all the other species, right? So yeah, that's such a beautiful thought. Thank you for that because when we get the sentience, that is in all creation. It's the most profound mystical experience of them all.

And we truly sense the oneness that we are that field of sentience. And I know we're getting kind of out there, but it's actually the essential realization that helps us long to be awake from bias and actually make the energies. We want to know that belonging. We want that. Yeah. Totally. And, you know, for me, when I started this work, which really started in my own mind and my own heart, I started with curiosity and interest investigating that a lot of these stories I believed about myself weren't true.

You know, these were, and that's how for me bias is defined. Bias is, you know, our biases are learned habits of thoughts, you know, learned beliefs that distort how we perceive, reasoned, remember, and make decisions. toward ourselves, toward others, toward other species, thinking that we're somehow stronger or better or on a hierarchy of some sort. And these habits really trickle into our day-to-day actions. That's right. And as you kind of reflect on your life,

I'd love for you to share a little bit about how you came to be a Buddhist meditation teacher, because I know it's a circuitous, wondrous path. But I also, for me, I feel like someone with your intersectional identities, that work has also been around breaking bias for you internally, that you as a person could be a Buddhist meditation teacher. Well, I grew up in the era, you know, in the 70s and 80s where that was what was happening. And I also came from a very liberal. educated family in the East Coast. And so we were kind of all of us were, or a lot of us were leaving organized religion and going into spiritual communities and the like. So the hop from Jewish to

Buddhists was not a big hop. A lot of people did that hop. I was motivated, you know, it's two different very related polls. I mean, one of them was that I was that I was, was very much of a social activist in college. And, you know, at times I'd be joint, we'd go out and be on the streets and we'd be, you know, angry protesting and we'd swore pigs. And there was a really bad other that was the enemy. And they were always, there were conservatives. And then on Tuesdays, I'd go to my meditation and yoga class.

And it would be peace and love and really getting quiet and so on. And I remember on you one particular occasion, I was right after class, where I stopped. It was a spring evening. And I could feel that my body and mind were in the same place, in the same moment. There was a real sense of connectedness and of peace and of caring about the world. And in that moment, there was something in me that said, this is what is going to bring about transformation, not creating an end. enemy out there and railing and angry against the enemy. So one of my motivations was I caring about the world and knowing that it needed to come

from really inhabiting spirit that would be spiritually based activism. So that was a very strong motivation. The other was I wasn't at home in myself. You know, I was always down on myself and caught in the trance of unworthiness and really needed to make peace with my inner life. So those that's really what brought me to spiritual practice. What does it mean to have a spiritual practice? What does this word mean to you? Yeah, thank you for that one. I think of it as some way of consciously training our heart and mind so that we're here, like really present and open, not living out of the condition

that you described. So a lot of the conditioning of the society is to lean forward to what's next, to speed along, to try to succeed according to certain standards. And a spiritual practice will help us say, well, if I was at the end of my life and I was back, what would matter in this moment?

I wouldn't be to impress or sound good or, you know, I really say what would matter in this moment, it would be to be sincere, to be in a connected field with you, to be serving a world we love. And so spiritual practice helps us come home to what matters. It's the trainings of the heart, mind, out of the fear conditioning and into inhabiting our heart. Yeah. Oh, I really beautiful. That's such a beautiful definition to consciously train our hearts and minds to be here.

You know, and I feel like the scientists can get behind that, right? Because that's exactly what we all want, right? We don't want a restless mind that's constantly jumping everywhere and worried and stressed and kind of rooted in that limbic brain of fear that things are going to go wrong. But, you know, I want to return to your story. You know, it's so interesting that you talked about because like my understanding of what was happening in the 60s and 70s and these is that, you know, there's this like, you know, strange spiritual traditions of the East that have now come into the West.

You know, strange, not I'm from them, right, but to the Western mind, they were very strange because they were different and they were practiced by a lot of brown people over there. And they could be somehow, you know, looked upon as pagan or heathen or what have you by mainstream Western society. But how did that even appeal to a young person like yourself who was raised in that conditioning or maybe you weren't raised in that conditioning, but, yeah, like to my mind, I'm like, how does that even happen? Well, there's some really good reasons.

We were, again, in the generation where the music and the ideologies and everything had to do with more freedom and freedom of the mind and free thinking. And we were taking the psychedelics that helped to create in us the experiences that we really cherished for me. psychedelics woke up a sense of wow there's a much bigger reality there's nothing in this world that matters more than inhabiting that truth and I want to do the practices that can keep me waking up without taking the medicine medicine's one then but and so there were a lot of us that to meditation and chanting and prayer and yoga because we valued the quality of heart and mind that those cultivated.

Yes, yes. So it was almost like getting out of our heads into our bodies, into our hearts, into our spirits, into our souls, as some religious traditions, or they call it. No,

that's really beautiful. And when did you, how did your work, you know, your spiritual practices, your contemplative practices, turn into, you know,

you were wanting to, pursue a degree in psychology and becoming a psychologist, you know. Well, it became clear that the suffering that we get caught in is created by the mind, you know, by, you know, our thoughts and our feelings kind of cycle to create our emotions, our behaviors, and as I think was Gandhi said, our destiny. So it seemed very clear that studying the mind as a layer to understand. stand would be would help to serve in terms of really freeing the heart and mind. Yeah.

So I did I did my thing. I, you know, went and got my doctorate and for a couple of decades, worked as a psychologist along with teaching meditation. I kind of wove them together and they really inform my books and my teachings basically. I'm no longer an active therapist, though. Of course, yes. Yes, I mean, now you're providing a lot of inspiration to, you know, 100, thousands and millions of people, which is just as important as an act of, you know, self-care for a lot of us, you know, who do listen to your podcast and other, you know, lectures and retreats. So thank you for that.

And one question that I was reflecting on as I was thinking about our conversation is this idea of the mind, you know, just alluded to wanting to free our hearts, right, our bodies from the mind. And I think for me, this was a big, what appealed to me initially to Buddhist psychology was that thinking, you know, as just one of, it's a sense organ, like our brain, our mind is a sense organ and thinking is what it does. And it's not personal. It's just if we didn't think, we would die. Like, it'd be brain dead, right? So for me, that really helped me begin to cultivate a relationship with the mind. and then kind of overcome this lie that I'd been trained in that I think, therefore I am, which is not true. It's part of it, you know, but I also feel, right? I have a body. I have a heart. I have dreams.

I have visions. I have experiences. There's so many things, right, that as human beings, we've been allotted in our lifetimes. So I'd love for you to kind of reflect on this idea of the mind and the important. of becoming intimate with our minds, particularly as we're thinking about this idea of bias, these learned habits about ourselves and others. Well, you captured it in the words, cultivating a relationship with our mind. And I think when I teach a retreat or something like that and people leave, probably one of the biggest takeaways people ever have is,

I don't have to believe my thoughts. I am not my thoughts. So if I was here thinking, oh, you and I are different and one of us is better because of our race or because of our education or because of anything or gender, those thoughts would create separation. And yet those thoughts are hugely and deeply conditioned into all of us to have a way of reading people and putting people. up or down and it's very interesting to bring to any relationship and notice the subtle ways that we have inferior or superior and to sense who would we be if we truly felt the equality that really means we are of the same source we are expressions of the same awareness and love in this universe like truly equal it's like it just absolutely fractures the title of the prison we're in and opens our hearts. So for me, that training to be able to be in a relationship with my mind and see where my mind was causing suffering. I mean, the question is, are your thoughts creating suffering? Are they creating healing?

For me, the first big, huge domain of thinking that I had to really say, okay, be in relationship with this, but don't believe it, was all the negation of myself. You know, my body is too fat. I'm not good in relationships. I'm letting down people and, you know, not contributing enough, everything you could ever imagine. And just to sense, and this I call the trance of unworthiness, the squeeze it puts us in.

Because if we believe we're unworthy, we can't really be intimate with others, because we always are afraid that they'll see it and they'll not want to be with us. We can't be spontaneous. We can't enjoy the moment. Yeah. The first domain of mind that I had to work with. And just to be clear that although we're calling it mind, it's very much in our bodies,

that our issues are in our tissues. Yeah. The trance of unworthiness not only in my mind, but as a clench and my body. This gets around a bias because it took me longer. It took me longer to begin to see the conditioning of bias in myself. And the reason was that my father was an attorneyist and he did a lot of civil rights work and he was very much ahead of his times. I mean, he was the guy that brought the first black attorney into his law firm. And he just was very dedicated to racial justice. And so I just grew up assuming, you know, I was an ally to non-dominant populations and I was

unbiased and so on. So it really, it took some jarring wakeups to go, wait a minute. You know, I'm caught in a conditioning just because I live in this culture, not because I'm bad. Yes. We're not bad. It's just that you cannot breathe the atmosphere of this culture and not adopt some of the assumptions of what you deserve and who's better and so on. And so that took a lot of unwinding.

Yeah. And that describes the breaking bias journey, right? Of really unlearning and unwinding these stories that are not rooted in fact, but and made up ideas, you know. So it's really pretty, you know, beautiful because, so I come from a tradition called self-realization fellowship. That was like, that's my root tradition of Korea yoga. So Brahmanza Yogananda, I still consider him my guru, my teacher.

And, you know, he came to the west of 1920 and basically started a monastic order, kind of bridging the east and the west. And one of the things that always confound, because he was a very dark-skinned Bengali man with primarily, you know, a white congregation is this idea of black and white because he would always just say in his lectures like, this idea of black and white is just so unusual. It's so weird in this country because, you know, it's just like literally like the epithelial is so small. And if you peel the skin off, everyone's red and we're really incredibly gruesome beneath the skin.

this kid and he would really talk about this, you know, in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, our 52 transition. So it just kind of made me think about how this, there were so many people that were already operated like your father that already knew that truth, that embodied that truth, you know, with their actions, there were so many allies, abolitionists, you know, civil rights advocates, women's rights advocates of all backgrounds. And yet, you know, the dominant and culture, right, that we're kind of swimming in makes us forget that we've been part of a really long tradition of breaking bias.

Which really kind of brings me to this next inquiry is, you know, for me as I reflect on this work, breaking bias is really about shifting our consciousness, right? It's part of an evolutionary process. where do you see this happening? Because if you read the news, it feels like, yeah, or do you see this happening? Well, yes. I think that humans are evolving in their consciousness, and in all these areas of waking up to ways that we violate non-dominant populations, over time we are slowly catching it.

More recently, it seemed like 2010, 2012, things started picking up. The more there was videoed the horror of what was happening to black men and women on the streets started picking up. There was some really strong moments around George Floyd where all across this country and the world. I mean, there were demonstrations and people were instituting D-EIA, diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility in all the different organizations and schools. I mean, now Florida, it's outlawed. Now we've had, we're having a white lash, you know, where, so it's one very dear friend said it's happening again. The white people are doing it again. So we see it.

We see it with, you know, voting legislation and on so many levels that we make some progress. And I don't know if it's three steps forward to suspect. I don't know what the numbers are, but we move forward and backwards. And I feel some grief about that. Just because like others, over the last handful of years, I got, you. inspired by the deepened, it seemed like more people were aware. They were getting it. Yeah.

And that's how we met initially in 2015, because we saw this atrocious massacre take place in Charleston and we're like, we have to get together. We have to organize our communities to speak up against such needless violence and suffering. But you know, this point around, you know, thank you for sharing, but sometimes you still feel grief around the state of the world. And what do you do when you, in your own heart, mind, body, you notice become mindful of grief and cynicism and doubt and a whole host of the library of afflicted emotion that we've been gifted as human beings? Well, I do some unwise things and I do some wise things.

Let's hear them both. All right. We'll start with unwise, is that when I feel how much suffering there is, I can get distressed, upset, and then blame, and blame others for not seeing and for operating from their own ignorance. And I can blame myself for not doing enough. And I remember this was some years back, one of the ways, I mean, I did a number of things to try to consciously wake myself up and did a year-long white awareness training.

And then I spent three years in a diverse group. And one of the things that I saw happen in that diverse group was how for the first few months, I felt that there were a few white straight people. And everybody else represented a real rainbow of everything. It was the largest, maybe a group of 12. But I felt very much like an outsider. And I remember, you know, and I felt self-conscious and awkward and uncomfortable saying anything like I would get it wrong. And I remember when I did my own processing.

And I, as you probably know, one of the meditations I love is the rain meditation because it weaves mindfulness and self-compassion. So when I, the rain stands for recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I recognized, you know, okay, I'm feeling a sense of personal badness, you know, that in some way I'm not, I don't belong because I shouldn't belong because something's wrong with me. And I allowed it to be there. Allow just means this is part of nature, let it be. When I investigated, and it's not a real cognitive investigation, I felt into a deep sense of, of shame about not enough that I really, because I was learning about all the suffering that so many people went through, you know, how one woman, when growing up, she'd be with her father

and he'd be stopped, African American, stopped by the police, and that she witnessed his humiliation and how deep it was because she was watching it, that he felt so humiliated. things like that just broke my heart. So I got in touch with this shame and it mixed with white guilt basically that I was part of the problem. I wasn't doing enough. And so I kept on investigating and underneath that guilt and underneath the not enough was real grief about the dimensions of the suffering. And I just sat with all the. images of, you know, families at the auction block being broken up, you know, for slave

auctions. And my friends now that go through all sorts of humiliations and obstacles just to live a life. So what happened on news, I went from that guilt to the grief to a deep sense of caring, just care. And that's where I, you know, the end was just bringing my, heart to that brokenheartedness really. Yeah. And the gift of that was that I was much more awake to when I felt distanced to get under it and sense this really comes down to caring and the more that I could inhabit that caring, that I care about this suffering.

The more I actually bridge the separations and this was 10 years ago, I have some very, very dear people in my life from that group. I wanted to share with you that story because in breaking bias, we have to be able to see with our mind, be in relationship to our thoughts, see what's happening. You also have to care. Just I care about this suffering.

I want to be part of a world where we're not hurting each other this way. And that is what keeps energizing me. It's just coming into the caring. That's so beautifully said. And the way you described Rain is really the prism toolkit, you know, what I talk about in the book, really starting with this idea of recognized mindfulness, become aware, and really shifting that into,

you know, eventually into individuation, curiosity. And then ultimately into nurture, which is pro-social behaviors in perspective taking, care, compassion, and like really feel into what it's like, not just the pain that I'm feeling, but the pain of others, right? Imagine what it's like to be in their shoes, which is where I think we're beginning to dismantle

those walls of separation between, you know, us and them and me and you, right? But oh yeah, we're part of this shared existence. And what you're saying, I think, takes a real dedicated training because our tendency is not to be proximate with other people suffering. And in order to stretch and really sense what's it like to look through those eyes, you know, to ask that question, where does it hurt and really lean in? We have to do it on purpose.

And I think that's part of the commitment of anyone who wants to wake up out of bias is to first go inside the way we've been talking about, like recognizing and allowing, investigating ourselves with kindness. You know, I read somewhere that if white people are going to be courageous and honest in this, they also have to be able to forgive themselves because it's not personal. It's nobody's fault. It's just the air we're breathing, the water we're swimming in. We have to forgive themselves, but then make the,

effort to get proximate, to lean in and get close with anyone who is being violated, our group being violated, learn about it, read about it, watch it, get to know people. Yeah. Now, I think there's two really important points here that it's not personal because there are trillions of causes and conditions that have created these consequences, right? These are the root causes of biases. But I think the more important point that we can apply right away is that we really have to start with ourselves. And what I found is that it's really difficult for us to be proximate with others if we're not proximate with ourselves.

So when you kind of talked about earlier that you recognize the trance of unworthiness that was percolating in your own heart mind, and you addressed it, I mean, or you're still addressing it, I'm sure it's, or maybe not, Part of it is like seeing it and holding it tenderly with care, with compassion, with kindness. And, you know, along these questions, though, one thing I often get asked, and I'd be curious to hear your take on it, is a lot of people that are doing, you know, the work of self-healing, self-love, self-compassion, and addressing, you know, their own trance of unworthiness, they notice that some of their loved ones are not. and they want to invite them into this. And when they do, you know, I'm just calling one student, they feel like they're being preaching. So how do you, like, how would you support a lot of them?

I'm sure a lot of people that are watching us, listening to us have these similar questions that, oh, I'm working on myself, but my mom isn't or my sister isn't or my husband isn't. And I want them to because I love them. and yet they were just not willing to go there to start with themselves. Yeah, one of the things that has happened is that sometimes the white allies are actually pretty violent and judgmental towards others who are not just has not, by grace of the universe, evolved the way they have. And so I've seen it in myself, the sense of intolerance towards others that don't get it, you know. And that, again, I call it a U-turn.

Instead of focusing on the one that's not getting it, I need to bring the attention back here and sense the judgment. And we, you know, bring presence to it. It's like underneath our judgment, our anger maybe at someone close in who's not. not doing the work, underneath judgment and anger, there's something that matters to us. I mean, we're only angry because we care about something. And if we can get back in touch with the care, then we're able to communicate from a place of more vulnerable tenderness and not raise up defenses. But if we go at somebody and we're preachy or judgy, it's just going to shut other people down. It's just plain not smart communicating.

Yeah. No, I think it's so beautiful and it reminds me of this quote from the Bible that, you know, instead of pointing out the splinter and another's eye, you know, have a look at the log in your own eye or something along those lines. I might be butchering it. The idea really is moving from that you turn to eye turn, right? And it's bringing that well of compassion within ourselves to be a witness to other people suffering, be a witness to their challenges. And that could be tough. Yeah, well, that's where the training and practice comes. And you and I, when I say you turn and you say I turn, we're talking about the same thing.

The you turn is instead of me blaming you, it's me turning down to be with what's here. And I think if more of us could just do that, we'd have a less violent, more loving world. Yeah. Because as we said, we have to defend what's going on inside us so that we can come from a more vulnerable, open-hearted space in our communicating. I think the key for me is not to have it end with, okay, I'm more at home with myself, but rather to then take the next step and really sense for the other, what's going on for them? How are they vulnerable? How might this person be having a hard time?

And I often use a metaphor where if you're going for a walk and you see a dog under a tree and you go to pat it and the dog leaps at you with its fangs bared and you go from being friendly to being really angry, see that the dog has its leg in a trap. And then you shift. You might not get close, but you're caring. And we need to see where other's vulnerability is, both the vulnerability of those who are not yet ready to examine themselves and the vulnerability of those that we're allied with and really get it, really get where life is difficult.

Yeah. I so beautifully said and I'm curious if you'd be willing to share a little bit about how do we cultivate this sense of caring, this sense of compassion. Yeah. Well, I remember for me one of the kind of wake-up experiences was I was with a group of meditation teachers and it was a diversity group. It was mixed group. and we were trying to tend towards diversity issues. And it was during a phase of my life when I was going through a lot of illness and I was having a lot of chronic fatigue. And so at one point I said, can we space our meetings out by an extra week? You know, I'm just not keeping up so well. And one of the black teachers just said,

I am just so disappointed in you, Tara. You know, you're just another white person who is not prioritizing this. And we didn't come to, we didn't come to a conclusion that time, but I went off on my own. Because as I do, I had to make the U-turn and say, okay, you know, because I felt angry. I felt like, how could you say that? I'm saying, you know, I keep in a bit, you know. So I did that kind of, you know, being with myself, offering myself compassion. And then I tried to see her more clearly, like, where was that coming from?

And I had a hard time. And so, because I was trying to see the leg in the trap and so on. So I consulted with a mentor who's another African-American woman who took me on, you know, said, I'm glad to help you. And she said, you know, Tara, for you, it's, you know, stress and difficult. But for her, it's a matter of life and death. And then I started paying more attention and realizing, wow, her grandson's in jail. And everybody that's being killed in the streets, she thinks of them as her children. And I could see the vulnerability that was underneath that disappointment that she talked about.

And so when we talked, I was more attuned to her. and she had done the same kind of in her work. She's totally on. And, you know, we were able to talk. But it took both of us really seeing into the vulnerability and making a conscious effort. Because before we look for vulnerability, we get really sold by our reactions and feel like we're right.

Yeah. Ultimately, you know, seeking safety, right? The goal is to really seek safety. and, you know, really diverse groups of people and feel not only safe, but be able to trust across difference. And that's kind of, I think, our work for the century. Yeah, and I broke trust. And, you know, soon after that, Anu, I was on a vacation with my husband, and we love open water swimming, and we were swimming to this little island.

And I felt like this Olympian, you know, I was just, for some reason, And I was just filled with energy and felt graceful and strong. Coming back, I was floundering, exhausted, and it became very clear that the currents had carried me out there, but they were against me coming back. No. And it was just so profound to realize how much of my assumptions and worldview come from having the currents carrying as a white person. And in that group that I told you about, I, you know, I founded our meditation community. So I was a founding teacher and I was a white woman. And to not see the power dynamics, to not not understand the privilege that I was living with, that was part of the wake up.

Yeah. And I feel like what I'm hearing is in care and compassion all the way out because we may never know all the things. that every being has ever gone through and the histories, intergenerational, historical, ancestral that they may be carrying consciously or unconsciously in their bodies. But we can care for them. We can't care to connect with that, right? And what happens, I think, because I think that's what it is, that we don't know how much of the particulars we can get.

But we can start sensing things that we care about that we know they care about. And I think it's where the hope is for us to all be able to step beyond the biases and hold hands is to mutually look for that. And what I'm thinking of is, you know, right now, we're in such a fractured world around what's going on in Israel and Palestine and just the horror of it. and so many people have their position. You know, I'm pro-Palestinian or I'm pro-Israeli or I'm anti-Aidist or I'm whatever I am. And I was following some of the different protests. And one of, and the L.A. protests really caught my attention because what happened was the anti-Semitic group and then the anti-Palestinian group, you know,

were really came into a really very, very violating kind of protest. And I'm really offensive, really physically brutal at times. And at one point on the Sunday of that, so both sides here they are completely entrenched in their anti-bias positioning. Their narratives. basically stories of the mind. Totally different. There are different worlds.

Yeah. On Sunday of the protests, there was one man from standing together who was kind of between them, between the two groups. And here they were, you know, shouting insults and being sometimes physically violent. And he started chanting.

And what he chanted was in Gaza and Tel Aviv, all children deserve to live. In Gaza and Tel Aviv, all children deserve to live. And he kept chanting, and soon people from both sides started chanting and clapping. And only moments before,

they had been, you know, hurling invectives. And there's something so powerful about them coming together and you could kind of sense from the reports that there was a good feeling about that. like, oh, this is something we all care about.

That's the hope. It's not one of those very idealistic ones. It takes you with this much trauma. It's going to take generations, but it's never too soon to hold hands when we can. Yeah, it's a lot of that unlearning, right? The Israeli kind of Israeli-Palestinian, non-violent, you know, peace group, combatants for peace, you know,

the two co-founders have this beautiful quote that we could either choose to live on the land or be buried beneath it. So. And they did a beautiful, beautiful ceremony a few weeks ago together where just mourning. It was a day of morning, mourning the loss on both sides. So it's really worthy group for people to look up that and standing together, both really beautiful groups. Yeah, indeed. Well, it's been such a delight, Tara.

Would you mind kind of maybe doing like a two minute or three minute exercise with us? It could be Wayne or anything else to really help us feel into some of the topics we've talked about? Sure. I'd love to. So for anyone listening, you might sense for yourself what bias you know you're in process. of unlearning, you know, whether it has to do with you're catching on to racial bias or religious, ethnicity, socioeconomic, body size, disability, whatever it is, a bias that you really are wanting to wake up from. It could be a bias born of active current conflict where there's bad othering, where you're in some way putting another down, dehumanizing. So take a moment to let

whatever the arena is. And take a moment as you reflect on this of letting the bias be there and recognizing what it's like, recognizing the kind of thoughts and feelings that express the bias. Or in some way you're sensing others as less human, less moral, less real, less objective, of less mattering. Just take a moment to think of that. Paul Farmer says, feeling like others' lives matter less than our own is the heart of suffering in this whole world. Whose life matters less?

So once you sense that, we start with rain just to recognize what's going on, you know, judgment, aversion, bias. And let it be there. the allowing is like, it's a wave in the ocean, it's a wave of conditioning. Fighting it just creates more conditioning. So just let it be there. So that you can begin to investigate with curiosity. What is under the bias, under the judgment, under the aversion?

Is it fear? Is there some fear that these others are going to hurt? You or those you love? Is it hurt itself? Is there some sense that this could be you and your own feelings of shame make it so you don't want to be like that person? What's underneath? And since the deepest vulnerability underneath the bias, that if you didn't hold this person

as lower in some way, what you'd have to feel? this other wasn't lower, what would you have to feel? And just whatever that vulnerability is, you might even put your hand on your heart and nurture. Just hold it with tenderness. This is just part of being human. And send some kindness inwardly. In some way, trust your goodness, trust your heart, it's okay. Let your very touch be a message, a gentle message of of kindness so that you can sense the larger sense of your own being, that you're the awareness that is witnessing this, you're the compassion that's holding this. And inhabiting that larger space, you might then look at the other and imagine if it's

a group, just one person, and try to kind of scope in, get proximate enough so that you can just ask that question, where are they hurting? What's it like to be them? What might be going on in their lives, in their worlds, that would bring out the behavior or expressions that you judge? And see if you can see the way that being has their leg in a trap in some way, including a whole group. We're all conditioned.

And see if you can sense behind the conditioning, behind that being's fear, sense of exclusion. If you can see behind it, just the way we say Namaste, that there's a life, a sentience, a basic goodness shining through. You might even mentally use the word vow or the bow of Namaste and just sense that you're honoring the sacred that lives through all beings. And since the freedom that comes when we really have a reverence for all of life, sense who you are when there's a reverence for all of life. Namaste. Namaste. Thank you so much, Tara. What a joy to have you here. It's a pleasure to be part of this and a deep bow to you, Anu, for bringing us all together.

for what you've written, your book is amazing. I recommend it to everybody that wants to grow in this area. You're really serving in a beautiful way. Thank you. Thank you.