Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 124: Rhonda Magee, Law Professor Using Mindfulness to Defeat Bias

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

"Part of what I have decided for myself - it's a decision - I don't want to be part of the pain, creating more pain in the world, for myself or for others," said Rhonda Magee, a law professor at University of San Francisco. "So it's that capacity with mindfulness to get a sense into ... what my own experience of feeling vulnerable, feeling afraid, what it does to me, how I start to look at the world through the lens of that ... now [I'm] at a place where I'm not reacting from a place of fear." A law professor for 20 years and a mindfulness teacher for lawyers and law students, Magee argues that mindfulness can be a solution to combating bias and discrimination. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING I'm Dan Harris. We have a great guest this week. Ronda McGee has a very compelling personal story and she's going to talk a lot about teaching mindfulness to what you might imagine would be a hostile audience of lawyers and also

whether mindfulness can help with racism, something that she's experienced personally. So we'll get to round in a second. First, I just want to say that if you happen to be in Austin for South by Southwest on March 12th, a couple of events you might want to attend, I'm going to be given to talk in the morning. I think it's like 9.30 in the morning. And then we're going to do a live podcast from there at 3.30 Central Time. So come say hi. But before we get to round in, let's take a few questions. That's our new thing here on the show. Question number one. Hi Dan. My name is Andrea and I am a high school teacher in Arkansas and in light of all of the happenings in Florida with the shootings and seeing the way it's affected my kids in class I feel like introducing some sort of coursework

or curriculum on mindfulness and meditation and just coping with stress is needed now more than ever. And I was just wondering if you had some tips or if maybe you could bring someone on and interview them that have experience with introducing this kind of curriculum or coursework into a school setting. Thank you so much, Dan. Love the podcast. Bye. Thank you.

Great question. And a really important question. I spent some time in Tallahassee not long ago with the survivors of the massacre in Parkland as they were, as these young people were lobbying their legislators to try to make some sort of change. And obviously it's just an enormous amount of trauma and fear right now among young people across the country based on these as a result of these ongoing school shootings. I've covered way too many of them personally. And yeah, I do think that introducing mindfulness in schools is a great idea.

There are sometimes issues around making sure parents aren't, you know, making sure parents are comfortable that it's not sectarian enterprise. Those concerns have cropped up in a few places. My view is that mindfulness taught correctly in a public school context is utterly secular and scientifically validated, and there are lots of studies that suggest it can be great on lots of levels for young people. To answer your practical question on two levels,

we actually have had some guests on who've talked about mindfulness for young people and I recommend you listen to the podcast with Susan Kaiser Greenland and Anika Harris, which we posted a few weeks ago. But even more specifically for you or anybody else out there who's looking to teach this in school, there's an organization called Mindful Schools. They're based out of San Francisco. You can look them up on the internet. There, as far as I can tell,

great, I've met a bunch of their people. They seem great, and they're in the business of teaching teachers how to teach mindfulness to kids. Okay, second question. Yeah, Dan, I just have one question for you. Instead of the medication, have you ever thought about prayer? Yeah, look, I am personally not a believer, but I like to call myself a respectful agnostic, so I don't, it's not like I can tell, I'm not hostile to religion in

any way, except for people who do bad things in the name of religion, because I've covered plenty of that in my time as a reporter. That being said, there are plenty of people who I know personally, who integrate meditation into their prayer life, and that I've heard time and again that having meditation practice, which can turn down the volume on random, discursive thinking, can make your prayer life more robust. It's just spending less time just caught up in your random habitual stories and you're more focused on the work you're trying to do in prayer. So I think the two can work together quite beautifully, but just for me personally, I have not

engaged in a lot of prayer because I think the prerequisite for that is that you have to have a firm conviction. There is a, well, maybe not the prerequisite, but at least for as far as I know, I wouldn't call myself an expert on prayer, but it seems like you would have to have a reasonably firm conviction that there is a God or a higher power of some sort. And I, like I said before, more agnostic. I just don't know. So I guess I'm just stuck with meditation.

But I want to be clear that if you're a person who has a prayer life that meditation by note, at least as far as I understand it, and you can talk to your pastor about it, if you've got some concerns, as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any conflict there. We should say, I don't hear these questions in advance, so I'm just responding off the cuff. And if you want to call the number 646-883-836-646-883-8326. 646-883-8326. You can leave me a voice mail and it's entirely possible that we'll play it on the pod and that I will answer your questions. Okay, to our guest, Professor Ronda McGee, she's a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction,

specifically for lawyers and law students, but she's also got an interest in how meditation can play a role in the widespread problem of bias, of prejudice, of racism in our country, in our culture. She is just so you have it, a full-time faculty member at the University of San Francisco. She's been there since 1998. Her story of going to California as a young woman raised in the South is very interesting. You'll hear her talk about that and much more. So here she is. Ronda McGee. Here's what I always ask everybody. How did you start meditating? No, great question. So I can answer it from a more traditional place, which is after law school and moving to San Francisco from Virginia way back in 1993. You know, I finished studying for the bar and yet had been really so focused on just

the traditional, you know, success path. I had been in undergraduate school, did ROTC on graduate school and sociology and law, with really no break. And along the way, I'd learned all of it. Just because I'm curious, where did you get, which schools? University of Virginia, the entire church.

Oh, the whole church. Triple Wahoo. Okay. Yeah, and you know, had,, and that over the course of that trajectory learned a lot of really important skills. But at the same time, I felt a real sense of the need for some grounding in something deeper than the kind of traditional way of processing

and thinking through the world that I'd picked up through social, through the sociological lens, but then through law, which was against the profound training. But for me, there was just a way in which I was feeling a little bit disconnected from my inner self. And I knew that, you know, I knew that to survive moving from the south to the west coast from a family that had not been steeped in professionalism or higher education. You're my birth family. My own, yeah, my birth family.

Into this new world where I had these incredible opportunities and kind of a different set of networks. But, you know, feeling a sense of groundedness in my own self was something that I was struggling with. And I just, you know, after passing or after studying for the bar and while waiting for the score, waiting for my first job, I discovered and started exploring on my own some specific practices for managing the stress that I had accumulated over the course of all of that, and also just sort of resting in what I now see as awareness, but at the time just like finding a way to relax, which I was having

trouble doing after all of that. So that began the process by which I ended up some years after that finding my main teacher in this meditation journey, who's been Norman Fisher, former avid of the San Francisco Zen Center along the way. So I started studying with Norman around 2003 or four. So that was quite a while after 1993 when you were in the West. Yeah, between that doing my own various and sundry reading and practicing and you know, but just more

let's join a song and you know, start at working with one teacher. Can you define song? Oh, sorry. So, the Sangha is just a practice community. It's just a Buddhist term for a community in which you sit together and you learn, you know, the kind of principles and practices that support deeper awareness and compassion. And there is a tradition of doing so in community that I personally found to be quite supportive

of me deepening my own understanding of what I was doing. But also just, there was some way in which I think part of my search was also not just for since in my own deeper self, but connectedness with other people. You said you came from, I don't know anything about your family of origin, you said that you seemed to indicate you were among the first, if not the first, to really go on to this level of higher education. Absolutely.

What did they think about you joining a Buddhist group? Well, they thought it was a little weird. They thought, again, as you noted, I had actually started exploring various aspects of more Eastern religious practices way back in 93. And so, you know, talking about Eastern spirituality and practice as I was leading up to making, you know, deeper commitments and studying more deeply Buddhism and mindfulness.

My family was just like, okay, well, we're from the South. And it was a Christian, I definitely grew up in a Christian family. And so they really didn't understand any of this and actually thought I was probably, you know, going straight to hell and needed to be had that breed out of me. So really, it was, you know, it's been a little bit of a, it's own journey to kind of find a way of, you know, being with this, which for me has just been tremendously liberating. And at the same time, you know, recognizing the extent to which it's quite different from the path that my own family was drawn to.

I should say, actually, when I think about answering the question of how I come to meditation, I answered it from a kind of a more, you know, sort of, how did I come to the Buddhist meditation practices that I, you know, practice every day now and teach to law students and others. People interested in social justice, educators. But actually when I think about how I came to meditation, I always, I think of my grandmother, who, again, though she would never have called a meditation

and certainly in no sense when she, Eastern influence in terms of Buddhism, many of that, she was a woman who had been born in 1906 and the small town called the region of the country, Lenore County, Kingston area, North Carolina, where I was actually born as well in 1967, some years after, but my grandmother had by the time I was born, been called into the

ministry on the one hand. So I would see her as a very little girl, having been born in that very segregated southern town. We didn't have a lot of resources. My family, parents and mother and father were going through a difficult time. So I was finding myself spending more time at my grandmother's house. And I would regularly see the light come on underneath the door for bedroom before dawn. And I came to realize she was in that her room having awakened an hour maybe before everybody else and spent that time in her own devotional centering practices.

Again, hers were really Christian practices. But what I saw in that was this daily, deep commitment to a kind of path for inner support that could support whatever one might do for the rest of the day. For her, she cleaned houses for other people during the week and on the weekend she was a Reverend Nanny Suggs so she supported community with sort of spiritual, again, Christian spiritual and religious practice. But as a little girl, what I saw was there's a way

to get in touch with who you are and what you are here to bring to the world. Whether or not the rest of the world really understands it or values it, that fast-forward to when I'd be, you know, after graduating law school and moving to San Francisco, a part of me was aware that, though I had had all these other advantages, there was something that was missing that my grandmother even had access to many all those many years ago. So for me, finding meditation in a certain sense was like coming home, you know, it was very different, but it was also coming back to self in a way that was actually familiar

to me and quite a solace when I needed it. You don't have to answer this, but what was going on with your parents that forced you to live with your grandma? Oh, yeah. No, they were just, you know, my own father had been a Vietnam veteran and, you know, had married my mother and quickly, and they'd had a few kids. I was in the middle. And they were divorcing.

And it was a very difficult family. You know, there were a lot of different types of dysfunctionalities that come from, I think, both, you know, the experience of having grown up and the quite still segregated South. My father was from Louisiana and I've since come to know an end Mississippi really. So, Balexie Mississippi and different parts of Louisiana. I've since come to know just what it was like for many black men during that era of deep still segregation. He was escaping it in some ways by going into the military, but to go into Vietnam was also it had its own I think scarring effects. So when he came back and rapidly get married and had children, it was just a very difficult time. He was drinking too much. The family was um

suffering from that and my mother finally left and it was in that period that we were staying with my grandmother while they were getting divorced. And they finally did get divorced. And then I moved, my mother remarried. We moved to Virginia. And that set me on the path to ending up going to the University of Virginia ultimately and in landing in San Francisco.

So many years later. Were you unique among your siblings in pursuing higher education or did they all do so? That's a good question too. I was at one sister outside of the, what I call the litter of three, once it was 10 years old and I am and she actually had gone to college. And so when I was six or seven and she was 16-17, I was watching the what first person in our immediate family to have, you know, set herself on a path to go to college.

So for me, as a young girl, it's like, well, this is what we do. This is we go to college. I didn't realize that really. She was one of the only people around me. And, you know, we were part of this first generation of four-year college grads. And so my older brother and younger sister, they had some college, my brother had community college, my younger sister didn't quite finish.

For me, education was a clearly a respite from some of the chaos that we were experiencing at home. And I would say that in addition to having some, you know, I was identified as, you know, using the phrase gifted in some way through the programs and that were in place at that time, in public schools to identify such kids. But in addition, I had some personality, I think some ways in which my personality was attuned to wanting to learn and being comfortable in school. I say that because I know that there are many people who were similarly gifted,

similarly talented, some of my family, some of my community who just didn't also have the kind of personal capacities, the ability to sit and listen and do the things that you need to do in the school environment to succeed. For me, it was like, you know, coming home and I just really, really felt safer in schools and really felt like this was the one path out of the chaos that I was. It's interesting because you described school as a respite and surely it was but it also created all the stress that when you arrived to California you felt you needed some help from.

That's true. So you get to California in 93, there's a 10 years of kind of So you get to California in 93, there's 10 years of kind of looking around and then you finally end up with Norman Fisher who I have not had on the podcast, but his name I've heard many, many times, very well respected teacher in this end tradition. You described earlier the practice as having been liberating for you. What do you mean by that? That's a word gets thrown around. What do you actually by that? That's a word gets thrown around. What is it? What do you actually mean by liberating? Well

well, you know, I mean for me it's It means to be Abel at a moment in any moment to To have the the lived experience of Not being led around by stimuli outside of myself, not being pulled in the direction of the latest thought, tweet, or advertisement, email, to have some capacity to create a space between stimulus and response.

You know, is one way I think of freedom. So it's kind of like a cognitive behavioral freedom, like to know that I have choice in how I respond to the world. But within and around that, opening up around that, you know, in the world in which for people like me, you know, women, African-American as it happens, petite, you know, you realize, especially, you know, coming into world in this particular packaging from that particular community at that time, historically and culturally, and then going into higher education, military, and law, you realize these were not institutional spaces that were created for people like me, or for people like me to

thrive in. So from this, you know, out, around and in, you know, expanding around the experience of sort of cognitive freedom, liberation from the stimuli. For me, there's just been a kind of a grounding in my own being that also has helped me over the years, literally deal with the sense of just being an outsider in, in- in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, instead of just yanked around by what other people think or what the latest marketing message is. So you just talk about higher education, law school, military places where you often feel like an outsider, outright overt racism or something more subtle than that or both. I mean mostly more subtle and not only racism asexism in the intersection of the two, you know, some classes and the term in there for your measure as would be because it's a lot of places. Yeah. So, you know, more or

less explicit, you know, more probably mostly subtle and implicit, but every once in a while, you know, explicit racist, you know, statements and sexist, you know, kind of in the me-to-era. You know, we all have some stories that are associated with, you know, explicit harassment slash some version of assault or molestation in these spaces and I have you know some my own stories of that as well. So again it's you know a person like me a brown-pity woman going into those spaces there can be many very subtle ways that I have been met with the experience of not being fully appreciated or fully feeling fully safe.

And you know, you never quite know, experientially from this side, whether it's about race or gender or some combination or that I'm, you know, looked younger than I was or whatever it might be, we can sort of create a narrative around what it was in that particular instance. But, you know, all we know or our life would feel in those instances was in some sense discounted in bi-degrees, disrespected, maybe even violated. So, there was that range.

I just gave you one example from when I was in San Francisco during that first year as a lawyer, you know, coming out of my law firm, law office, my suit on that I would wear and my trench coat and San Francisco. As you remember coming out of my office on Market Street near 4th. And you know just having some young white man walk right past me. Maybe he was in his 20s and he just said you know go home. And San Francisco. I mean, not that that's cool anywhere, but I mean, you would think it would happen. In 19, by then probably in 1994, maybe 1995 or so, so that first year or two in practice

there. Yeah. So and actually that was the first time anybody had said that that close to me in my face. It was, it was in San Francisco, California, not in Hampton, Virginia or Kinst in North Carolina. It was actually. I would have thought maybe, maybe in the military.

Well, in the military, I think it was actually more the gender, gender balance for me. Yeah, I think again, a combination, you never again, it's hard to, one doesn't really, from this side, tease out, is it more racers, it more gender, but the particular ways in which I was sort of vulnerable, I think, were quite tied to might being a petite woman in that space. So you've now managed to combine all of these things as a law bias and contemplative practice into what appears to me from a distance, and I don't know anything about it, but I'm about to learn to be kind of quite a beautiful synthesis.

So tell us what you're doing now and how you got there. That's a really big question so you can do whatever you want with it. But what do you up to and how did it happen? Okay. So what am I up to? So I'm literally in New York here, just this weekend I was very fortunate to be working with my friend and mentor John Cavitz

and he was as many of your listeners will know, you know, a leader in the movement to bring mindfulness meditation into the West and into the broader, more secular world, having been a creator of mindfulness-based stress reduction many years ago and having worked and established the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts. So John and I are, you know, friends and collaborators now. He's also a mentor and teacher of mine. But we were here to do a benefit at the New York Insight Meditation Center, focused on mindfulness. And the theme of it was, what good is mindfulness and a time of madness and fear? And what's the role of resolve in that, like in the face of madness and fear and how

can mindfulness help? So we did a Friday night program, a couple hours, in dialogue with each other and with the audience, and then we had a day alone retreat. And so that, I say that to say, that's kind of a lot of what I do in my copious spare time when I'm not a full-time law professor at the University of San Francisco, where I teach ordinary law classes like

Torret Law and classes dealing with race and law, but also have brought contemplative practices, mindfulness and compassion practices into my work as a professor. More explicitly in the race class and in a class I co-created with several others which is about mindful and lowering, compassionate and mindfulness as a way of developing one's professional identity and the skillfulness that it takes to be a lawyer, to be a wise counselor in the midst of a conflict scenario. So the class I teach on contemplative or mindful lowering one place where I am bringing these practices specifically to bear on how we form lawyers for dealing well with the conflicts of the world.

And then the class that I really have created on looking at race and law with the support of mindfulness and compassion practices to help discern more effective ways of dealing with bias through and in law and how to teach about that. So at USF, and then I, towards class, my personal injury law class with first year law students

and much more traditional course, typically I don't explicitly bring in mindfulness or compassion, but I do teach in a way, right, which creates suspiciousness around what we're doing. The opportunity for my students to come in, sit in, send themselves and be grounded, remind themselves, disconnect from everything else and focus on the copious material of tort law, which is what we, you know, and in the process of becoming a law student, my first year law students, I meet them in the fall, typically, and so I'm part of the process by which that intense socialization process for becoming a lawyer begins in law school. And so

there are very much more sort of subtle ways that I bring mindfulness even into that class. So my main job is to be a law professor. But I've had the benefit of being able to use the work that I've done there to explore how mindfulness might be a support in that setting, in education and higher education. And through that I've developed a network of others who examine mindfulness and higher ed, whether it be in physics

or economics, social work, law. And that's been a very, very rich and ongoing field of experimentation for me in field of in-sum-sense now leadership, because I've served on the board of organizations that help support this nationally and support the research around the effectiveness of mindfulness and meditation in science and in higher education. So in one sense that's my main job, but I now also just really have been, you know, again, privileged to be able to teach mindfulness more generally with people like John, Sharon Salisburg, Fleet Mall, who has brought mindfulness into the prison, and prison, mindfulness institute, and community engaged mindfulness

on one of the teachers in his program. So I do a number of things now to kind of bring mindfulness to bear in the really difficult spaces where we need deeper support, whether it be learning a discipline that's challenging or practicing that kind of discipline because I work with lawyers and prosecutors and judges sometimes as well. Or whether it be, you know, taking it out of this sort of institutional context into community where people are in conflict around race or around some incident with the police. So I've been a consultant with the San Francisco district attorney's Office helping cultivate the capacity to respond to bring community together in the face of brutality and incidents and the like. Yeah, and so right now I'm really exploring

what it means to be this sort of person who's been a law professor for 20 years, who has on long the way developed as a meditation teacher, a mindfulness teacher, with a deep kind of call or pull toward being of service in this moment, in this time, where conflict is, you know, and polarization is the order of the day, and where we have lost our way, I think, in a certain sense, in terms of our capacity to imagine ourselves in common community,

domestically and internationally. So, after today, later this evening, I'll be getting on a plane to go to London, where I'll be speaking at Parliament and at Oxford. So these are more and more being drawn into kind of an international conversation about how these practices assist us in wise action and community building and policy making in the face of the 21st century challenges though. Like all the best guests, you have left me in a situation where I have about 15 things

I want to ask based on everything you just said. Much more of our conversation right after this quick break. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us?

The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany.

Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. One of the things you said was that you just did this thing with John Capitzen, who's previous guest on the podcast here at the New York Insight Center in Manhattan. And I guess the central question was something along what's the point of mindfulness in these days of rage or something like that? So what's the headline? What is the use of mindfulness?

Where'd you come to? That's a Great question. Well, you know, John and I had an answer and we felt we were doing one thing. It'd be great. I'd love to hear what all of our, you know, hundreds of people who were there gathered would say a response. You know, I should say that in these times, you know, with my own daily mindfulness meditation practice, it has become much more a practice of loving kindness, that practice by which we very consciously cultivate.

The capacity did it since into the kind of tightness or pain that the way in which we may in our bodies be feeling the distress of the day, or the news, or the tweet, or whatever it is. And kind of again, create some spaciousness around that experience, and soften the tendency of whatever the reactivity that we might be experiencing in the moment. And from there, remind and rebody ourselves, myself, in the sense of my desire for well-being for myself and for others. So let me just look at, I just want to ask, just because some people may not be familiar with the technical differences between the two practices that you just described. So basic mindfulness meditation is you feel your breath coming in and going out and then when you get distracted you start again and again and again and again

And the noticing you're distracted is Many people think it's a failure, but actually that is the victory. Yes. That's where you see that you're nuts And it's cool. You don't have to be owned by the netiness. And you're human. Yes, exactly. Loving kindness, which is often taught in tandem, parallel, as a parallel practice, is and I often say that first blush, it seems irretrievably annoying and it frankly is. When you first do it, it feels very affected in therapy.

Where you sit and you envision systematically, specific people often, you classically start with yourself, then you move to a dear friend, then you move to, I often, I screw this order up because I often insert my wife after a friend, but that's not No, you do a benefactor then a dear friend and then you do a neutral person a difficult person and then all beings There's a way in which in science bear that bears this out that if you do this thing even if it feels cloying or as I often say valentine's day with the guns You're through your head That actually makes it different. A thinking it until you make it does work,

your compassion is a muscle, and you're working that muscle. And it feels weird, just like playing the piano for the first time, might feel weird, but this does work. So anyway, I just wanted to be clear with folks who may not know much about the specific practices you were talking about, but in answer to my question of, what is the use of mindfulness or meditation or whatever in the face of madness of today

and fear anger? Anger polarization. Polarization, your answer was, the beginning of your answer before I cut you off and went on my saleliqui was, was, was, you're really increasingly turning to loving kindness. I am.

And from that, again, for me, as a teacher practitioner, person who takes mind from us into the world, applying the research and the, you know, the kind of deeper analysis of what it is that we're doing, but seeking to apply it to the world's problems. For me, it's always about ground-edness in my own experience. So I'm not gonna go out and sit with the people at New York Insight Meditation Center and say, here's how my infants can help me with polarization

if I haven't been doing some regular daily work on that myself. And so I start with, well, what is it doing for me? How am I evolving and deepening and getting in the grittiness and look at my own practice and life experience? How is it that I'm in my own way working with madness, fear, polarization through these practices? And I have just noticed, let's just say, over the last year or so, that loving kindness

as a percentage of what I do is just being increased. And I think the broader message from that is for me. You know, I do feel like so much, as I was saying before, of what we're dealing with is this sort of disconnectedness from the sense of common humanity and common wealth that we are in this together, that we, and I say disconnectedness as if there was a time when we were, we had more of this. I don't know that we ever really did. I think in some places and communities. We've had that, but I think if we're talking about a sense

that in the American context, everybody matters and everybody's included, we talk about inclusivity and we have had a kind of a value in our political and constitutional discourse for equality for all, for very long time. But did we practice equality for all? Of course not. We haven't historically. And so in a very real sense, part of what it means to be American is to be in this sort of conflicted state of having this rhetoric and soaring, inspiring kind of aspirational vision for who we are. But then you look at our actual practices on the ground.

We've had segregation. We've had, you know, the male female hierarchies that have played themselves out and these inter showing up again today and sort of meet to movement in the evidence of ongoing ways in which women are still vulnerable, more so than they should be in professional spaces. So, you know, it's reckoning with, right? The contradictions of being an American in this time and place. Those contradictions are heightened right now in the particular political and cultural era. And people are feeling a lot of pain from that.

I mean, so whether it be people who are feeling vulnerable to different immigration policies that are coming down and being enforced in sometimes quite, I think, brutal ways. Or people who are feeling vulnerable by palp policy changes or tax policy changes or people who saw the march in Charlottesville and other evidence where I went to school and where I literally spent you know many

beautiful hours and days walking the grounds right where those statues were met with Tiki torches and right literally on the small avenue where protesters including Heather Hire were assaulted and in her case murdered. So all of that was a very, very, very personal meaningful ground for me, but I think for all of us watching our America become a place where those kinds of visually visceral sort of powerful and, you know, painful, evocative of a kind of a history and a time and a kind of divisiveness. We, most of us, you know, 50 this year, 50 years old this year, you know, I've been blessed not to

have seen a lot of that. And yet to be, to be brought up against the reality that this is still who we are is I think, you know, has been quite painful for me and for lots of people. And so again, for me, it's all of that feels like a highlighting of unfinished business around this broader American aspirational project of, are we the people able to really include everyone? Are we able to continue with a policy of encouraging immigration of the world's best and brightest? Are we able to continue this project by which we make more real the promises

of the 14th Amendment, of equality, for a broader and broader segments and in personages of the population in this country? Are we able to be leaders on the world scene that hold up these principles of human dignity and equality as international human rights norms. These are, I think, profound big questions for us right now. And at the core of the tension, I think, is this question of, like, do we value everyone? Can we increasingly see everyone as valuable, as worthy of compassion, of worthy of life,

full life? Okay. So, my influence in loving kindness practices, actually, I think, at the end of the day, help expand the capacity to imagine ourselves in common humanity, in common human community. Well, that's just what I was going to ask, which is, given the profundity of the issues and the scope of the issues and the seeming intractability of the issues that you just listed, what good does it do for you

to sit there and cultivate feelings of loving kindness, compassion, and towards whoever you decide to do it toward. of loving kindness, compassion, and storage, whoever you decided to do it to, or like, what is, in the end, is the benefit of that? You know, it starts with myself, because in the midst of all of this, what is our normal tendency?

It's a contract, it's like, figure out, like, all right. How can I close ranks? Maybe I need to get with my own tribe. Maybe I too need a gun. Right? It's the fear reaction. So the first piece is, how do I still my own fearful heart? And kind of, because for me, one of the ways that I've survived the pain and, you know, the discriminations and and the discriminations and actual abuse and different things that I've seen in my own life. I don't articulate it often,

but I found myself trying to articulate last night but the way in which the lesson for me and all of that is we end the pain now as humans. Like for the next, I've suffered enough. I've seen enough suffering rather than trying to put suffering out there in the world for anybody else and certainly to minimize my own ongoing pain. I first need to stop, you know, stop the bloodletting. So if I find myself in that space of fear, contractness, youness, the sense of my own hypervonorability, the attraction to pull towards othering,

and that hyper adversarial model that I can do, I've been in the military and in law, when I feel myself being pulled into defensiveness and to othering into that dynamic. I can see the pain of that for me. And I think part of what I've decided for myself, it's like a decision. I don't want to be part of creating more pain in the world for myself or for others. And so it's that capacity with mindfulness to sense into how one is oneself, how we, what my own experience of, you know, feeling vulnerable, feeling afraid, what it does to me,

how I start to then look at the world through the lens of that, and to kind of notice that, and consciously choose otherwise. And from there, then I can sort of, first of all, I'm now at a place where I'm not reacting from a place of fear, I'm not reacting from a place of being triggered. I can then actually engage with other people in a way that minimizes the likelihood that we're just going to all organize ourselves

around our fears and go out to find an next scapegoat where the target for our weaponry. Do you have any optimism that enough people, and I don't know what that number is, would adopt these practices so that actually, we do see scale on a macro level, as opposed to the micro level that you've described so well. Yeah.

Well, I do, partly that's because I do work with, you know, the great people around the world that I do. So everybody from John Keynesians into Norman Fisher, but also Norman, as you probably know, was one of the people who was instrumental in supporting the development of search and side-to-side-yourself Google's effort to bring this, you know, to a billion people, as Ming will say. I just recently joined the board of search inside yourself, so because I'm working with people who actually are taking it to scale, and, you know, doing just this tiny bit to support that, I have some optimism.

I'm not rose colored about it. I is not going to happen over, you know, I mean, I happen in our lifetime. But nothing worth achieving happens at that, you know, in the very short term. I do think that's part of the sort of necessary maturation to how you deal well with conflict that we are being invited to do is to see the long-term nature. So we didn't get to where we are overnight, we're not going to get out of where we are, the patterns and habits and conditions that we are struggling with. We don't get out of this overnight. But if we can see our way through today and tomorrow and to an increasingly broad

through today and tomorrow and to an increasingly broad community in which we are practicing these things together. Today, broader tomorrow still ideally and so on. Yes, I can't optimistically imagine because I'm working with people who are helping me see that future and we're doing what we can every day away, a way in which we see this move from the personal, the micro to the social, the collective, the macro. So because I'm a news reporter and we speak in sound bites, let me just see if I can summarize what your answer to the question that you were wrestling with at New York Insight Center, which by the way, is an excellent place in anybody who lives in the area, the New York

area, a great place to go practice, New York Insight Med, which by the way is an excellent place in anybody who lives in the area the New York area great place to go practice New York Insight meditation center The answer is What's the point of meditation in the age of polarization? It is one? You will reduce your own suffering. Yes, too You will stop adding so much to the communal suffering and you may not solve the problem, but it's important in case like this to take the long view that certainly you can do a little harm

reduction and you can be taking part in what is a long-term movement towards sanity. Absolutely. And along the way there will be markers of some success I think. I agree with that. So remember like 10-15 ago, I said I was going to keep track of the questions I wanted to ask you. That was one down. Here's the other one. You talked about your work in using meditation to reduce bias. Is there any evidence that people who meditate or less racist, classist, sexist? Yes, but it's not as strong as I like it to be. It's mixed. There is evidence, for example, that people, sample studies of samples of meditators show less, say, implicit bias using the implicit association test at Harvard and others.

So that's like a web thing. That's like a little test you take on a computer to see what you're implicit bias. Now I've heard it criticized this, like you could take it one day and it shows that you're like an intractable racist. And then another day that says you're like Mahatma Gandhi. So do you trust that test?

I think it's reliable to a degree. I do. I mean, it's been shown to be at least in some measure capable of helping us see some patterns. Now at the same time, like any sort of skill or test using the online response times and the like, it's a little bit like a video game. I think there's a way in which you can develop kind of skillfulness in doing what the test at once you to do that can help

disrupt or counter its capacity to really get at what's happening, what's actually happening with you. So while I think it is helpful, I don't necessarily rely on it as, you know, in a biblical sense, you know, I think it's an indicator of something important. It's in that sense worthy of our consideration, but at the same time, not over-relying on it as a, you know, hard-and-fast indicator of where any one of us is. It's an indication. I find that many people who take it for the first time are in, you know, one way or another finds learns, see something about themselves that they hadn't seen before. And whether over time they are able to work with it and figure out, you know, devote themselves to kind of get in the score that they want, right? There are

some people who might manipulate it in that way. For many, many people, it's just a kind of a wake up to like a way in which they can see for themselves something undeniable about how their mind operates in a biased way in ways that contradict what they would say explicitly about how their mind is. So it like shows you pictures and you have to have reactions.

Yeah, it shows you pictures of human faces and different types of humans, different colors. Yes, and then it asks you to associate them with different terms. So let's say an African-American face with the term professor or good or honorable, the delay with which many of us find ourselves associating blackface with positive terms versus blackface with negative terms, criminal, dishonest, etc.

We often are more quickly able to connect the keys when we are asked to connect, you know, the kind of traditional stereotypical pairs, Latino with janitor, as opposed to white face with janitor, a little bit harder time clinking those two up together and so on and so forth. It's very easy to do the test. It only takes 10, 12 minutes. So if anybody's interested in listening to this, to just see what it's like,

it really is a very low threshold. Anytime you want, you can just do 10, 12 minutes or so of it and get a feel for yourself. Cause it's hard for me to explain it in a way that may make it sort of satisfying to a listener. Where would we find the test? So if you look up IAT, implicit associations test, Harvard.edu, Harvard, all these Shabby schools,

Harvard, Stanford, and together have kind of been a part of a collaboration to kind of make this test as reliable as possible and accessible as possible. And so there is an IIT and an implicit association test for race, for gender, feelings about homelessness, age. So you can scroll through and see which tests you might be interested in and scroll through and see which tests you might be interested in and come back to it whenever you're ready. But yes, it is a widely accessible millions and millions of people by now have taken it. And I think it is of some value. And so the research indicates that those who have had some simple mindfulness practice

as compared to people who have not are often, you know, it indicate a reduction in bias simply by, you know, by having some exposure to mindfulness. You know, it's not clear whether or not it simply reduces the, how that happened or what's happening there is not clear. Like, are we in fact becoming more conscious of our bias and choosing as opposed to just reacting from the place of bias in the automatic ways that we might, if we don't have meditation practice in there or belt, it's not entirely clear. But there's not a lot of studies that show this correlation between meditation and reduction of biases

shown by the IIT. So it's a, you know, it's A-finding and one research study that I've seen, it needs to be replicated, it needs to be expanded, right, sort of a preliminary finding as far as I'm concerned in that sense. We need a lot more research, in other words, to really be able to say, my infallible meditation makes you less racist or sexist. I do think that the indications are at least encouraging in a world where we're beset with these problems. So I've been a person out there saying, that's, that's more whether my infallible skin support is in this. I will

say also there's some research that shows that loving kindness practices minimize bias as well. The loving kindness practices that we spoke about earlier, that they help minimize certain kinds of bias against aged people or aged people or disfavored minorities, homeless, right? There are different studies that have tried to see what kinds of practices may assist us in reducing bias against certain different types of groups. Again, not enough of that research yet. And I will also say I've seen some unpublished studies

that seem to indicate that what meditation can do is make you more aware of your bias, but not necessarily less biased. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's the thing. Nothing's gonna, I don't, yeah. I may think there's a kind of a two-step process is just my personal experience is The first thing is to what mindfulness does is just make you aware of all the ways in which we're you know If you look closely as Steven Bachelor that my one of my favorite writers has said if you look closely

You will see a murderer and a rapist, you know, they all have that capacity. It's in our mind somewhere, you know, the, so you see your homicidal urges, you see your racist urges, you see them, but you're just better at like letting them pass as opposed to being owned by them. But the second part of that, at least in my experience, in my understanding of Buddhist theory is that once you stop feeding, blindly feeding those urges and impulses and thoughts, actually you can start deconditioning them so they are less likely to arise. So it makes sense to me based on my personal practice and my understanding of the practice that both of these practice mindfulness meditation and loving kindness could reduce, both bias but also the fruit of bias,

which is racism or feminine or sexism or more classism. So let me ask you this, from a craft standpoint, most of my questions are craft. I'm a TV reporter, I would love to do a story at some point about ways in which these practices are being used to Reduced bias. What's the coolest stuff that's going on? I like, what are you doing? What does anybody else doing that would be In interesting thing to take a picture of?

Well, I mean, you know, I'm gonna go and talk to the college of policing in London and That is going to I hope Um part of the reason why they are interested in talking to me is because they haven't really explored, they haven't done the research yet. But they're interested in whether or not these practices can help police in the UK be less biased. We in the United States, we have police officers and people in law enforcement who are similarly interested in these practices, who are being engaged in training around these practices. So there are definitely places and populations where mindfulness compassion practices,

mindfulness and compassion practices are being introduced with a view towards determining whether or not they can assist them minimizing bias. You know the work of Anna Agupta, right? So there are a lot, there are a number of people working on it. Prior guests on this podcast. Yes, exactly. I had just saw him last night too. So there are some of us are working on it.

But it's at an early enough stage that I think the findings to confirm exactly what works and what works for what populations are to come. But cool things to look at right now are just the different ways that we're bringing these practices into diversity related work. I mean, that's actually an area where I'm more and more human resources officers and companies and higher institutions of higher education,

government entities. A range of institutions who have mission oriented and public responsibilities to kind of serve everybody are sort of taking up these practices. Whether into what extent they will show, you know, actually prove, to minimize biases, something that again is a work in progress. I think it's again, we do need to talk about this more. We do need to incentivize the research community to look at mindfulness and compassion practice with this kind of research,

these kinds of research questions in mind, because really what's been happening is, you know, there's been an explosion of different types of research around this, but most of it has been very much about like personal effectiveness and You know all the great things that have gotten us all talking about mindfulness because we can see a pathway from like our own chaotic mindlessness to a more Effective productive way of being with our own messiness and our own mess So a lot of the research has just been about just very personal productivity, focus, health consequences and health benefits, right, aging more effectively. These research that would bear out these more public, pro-social goals is sort of in a set, it's like the current phase of mindfulness research

is starting to look at this, but it has not been what motivated the field. So for people like me who are not just practitioners and advocates, but in community with researchers, I'm engaged with the Mind and life institute as well, which does a lot of research around mindfulness. Part of what I, why I'm engaged as a volunteer and a steering committee member there,

advising the board or directors and the staff there, is to help be a part of the process by which PhD students, neuroscientists are seeing this is a place where they can also have an impact. Inspiring them to see these sort of social applications of these practices is really important right now. So that's kind of where we are. And so this summer, the Garrison Institute

in Garrison, New York, not too far from here. The minor life institute, we regularly hold a summer research institute where, again, these PhDs and postdocs were just kind of, you know, in the early stages of building their careers are brought together for a week with more or less senior scientists, teachers, and people who are applying these practices in the world like me. And we are encouraging and helping form the kind of next generation of researchers. And so for the last several years, a number of us have been really trying doing the best we can to help seed amongst the research, you know, in that population, a desire to kind of look at the way these practices actually do benefit

individuals, but have these broader social, whether it be education, whether it be, you know, education policy, whether it be policing policy, healthcare, right? Because we're seeing more and more that mindfulness might be seen as a public health intervention. The research around that is a warning, right? It's really in the early stages. But I do think their stories to be told about how this will develop. We're, I've held you for a long time.

I'm sensitive to your time. I know you got to catch a plane sometime soon. Um, uh, last question is, is there anything I should have asked you, but didn't? Uh, well, okay. One thing that I have been talking a lot about is just, frankly, the whiteness of the field, right? So as an African-American woman, the whiteness and the, um, to some extent, the, the male orientation, male and us two, but really that, um, to some extent, the, the male orientation, male

and us to, but really that, um, what we call mindfulness in America has been created, of course, by a certain wonderful group of people, my friends and teachers, uh, almost all white almost all Jewish. Yeah. And so, and they taught their friends and so on as well. So I do think that has had some, you know, we're living with the implications of that right now. We go to an event like at New York Insight Meditation Center,

which is one of the more diverse meditation centers in the country and still, we find disproportionately the population who's there, the research population that I just spoke about, it's still a rate around, you know, white experience. And, you know, more and more, it's just apparent that if we're going to survive as a species, we have to expand these practices. This one billion meditators image that that mean,

and others that search inside yourself and Google, and not to plug them too much, that particular organization. It's not. It's not. It's not a plug-friendly zone by the way. Well, they're not at Google. I should make that clear.

Now, I'll spin off. But the idea that we might have meditators around the world depends for its viability on our finding way to make these practices much more accessible to the people like my family still back in North Carolina who think of all of this as a little bit crazy still. The people, you know, in Southern California who, you know, recent immigrants who, you know, English language learners who haven't yet found a lot of places where they could safely

come and explore meditation, we have to be thinking about that if we're going to go forward and really see the benefits that I imagine we can see for the application of these practices. I strongly agree and I say that as a white half Jewish man. So I mean, I as part of the sort of overrepresented group. But I would say, I think the way this is going to happen is that is to, and where I think maybe somebody like me can help is to elevate voices that will speak to these groups. Because I think I have limited reach by

dint of the package I come in right we all do we all do right that's that's the incident yes but I happen to have a platform yes so like I can put people on this platform or on the Tembers Hand happier app who can reach groups that I might not be able to reach and you have been doing that so I thank you for this yeah well it's a kind of a no-brainer you know and you know what maybe a little bit, maybe I wouldn't have done this before Sharon Salzburg forced me to do so much loving kindness, but I didn't know. But yeah, it's an IFAI, I consider it to be one of the most

fun parts of the job, but you know, hey, I have still plenty of bias left. And this is all a lot of work left to be done. We all do. And so, again, thank you for this conversation for the work that you were doing, to really help, again, expand just really knowledge about what's happening with mindfulness, expand the sort of sense that it is accessible to all of us and might be of benefit. Let's just say that. It might be of benefit to anybody willing to explore. Almost certainly benefit, and it is a birthright of all of us and might be of benefit. Right? Let's just say that. It might be of benefit to anybody willing to explore it. Almost certainly benefit and it is a birthright of all of us. Not just something that's available to all of us.

Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for coming on this podcast. We've been trying to get you on here for a long time. So it's really nice to find out. Thank you. I'm so glad I was able to be here with you. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics,

you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at DanV Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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