Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 164: Ruth King, Being Mindful of Race

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

For many years it was Ruth King's job to work with large corporations, making them aware of racial bias within their company and helping them rectify it through diversity training and leadership development programs. Over time, for a variety of reasons, she decided it was time for a change. However, just as she was about to move in a new direction, she met a woman who would introduce her to meditation, which in turn would revolutionize how she approached the challenges of her career from that point forward. Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. The Plug Zone https://ruthking.net/ 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,

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I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how are we doing, guys? Apologies in advance. My voice is a little raspy. Got a cold from my son. He's three, so I can't really blame him too much. But anyway, I digress. Let's get to the show.

By the way, during the interview, my voice will not be as raspy because it was taped a while ago. And I'm really excited about this interview. I know I say that every week, but I really mean it every weekend. In this case, I mean it in an especially powerful and poignant way because Ruth King is among,

if not the best person I've ever spoken to about how to address. Perhaps the most painful issue in American public life and one of the most painful issues on the planet, which is race. And she just has an incredible way of talking about it and the role that meditation can play in helping us have successful dialogues. I say this not only is a result of having sat

with her to do this interview, but I've spent some time with her personally and she just has a way about her that just oozes intelligence and reasonableness, that's even a word, and compassion. So she's got a new book called Mindfulness of Race that I recommend. And during the course of this interview, we're just talking about the fact that she's done racial awareness work with major corporations, like Levi Strauss and Intel, so she's really been on the front lines of this for a long time.

She's also a long time meditation teacher. And I ask her straight up, you know, what about some of my fear or about addressing this stuff as a white man who has a certain amount of financial and cultural power. How can I discuss this without putting my foot in my mouth and her answers are fascinating and really helpful to me? So all that is coming up.

First though, I just want one quick item of business and then do your voice mouse. The business is that our guest next week is Orrin Sofer, who is one of the most popular teachers on our app, the 10% happier app, and in advance of him coming on the show next week, we've put up a couple of new meditations from him on the app. One of them is about a topic that's kind of near and dear to my heart these days, which is self-empathy, which can sound a little gooey, you don't be a nice to yourself.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, but I've learned through my practice recently where I've been getting into a little bit more of this sort of compassion practices, which I've talked about on the show before. They're a little bit annoying at least at first, but they are, I think, incredibly powerful and will be the subject or the,

at the core of the book I'm working on right now. And so he's got one on self-empathy, which is really just about how to get through tough situations. And I've always been of the view that, the way to get through tough situations is to beat the crap out of yourself. It turns out, I've been wrong about that. So this is a meditation that goes right at that. And that's one of two meditations we'll be posting on the app, with that or up on the app right now, so check them out, and then check out Orrin on the show

next week. All right, let's do your voice mails. Here's number one. Hey Dan, this is Scott from Orlando. I'm just curious what you think about the importance of having some sort of a community or someone to bounce your ideas off of as you move forward in your practice and as you're learning. For myself right now, I really am only learning through the podcast and a couple of books.

Yours included, very good. But I'm just, I do not have a teacher and I don't have really anyone else around me that's kind of into this. So I'm just curious what you think about that importance. Thanks a lot. Love everything you're doing. Bye. Thank you. You know, this is a question we've tackled before on the show. So I'll get through it reasonably quickly because I know that the next question is quite meaty. But yeah, I think teachers are incredibly useful but not a must.

So I spent the first year of my meditation practice just reading books where there was no podcast that I was aware of. I don't think I even listened to podcasts at that time. I read a bunch of books and you know I went to a few because I'm in New York City which is such a privilege to be in New York City where you there are lots of events you can go to where you can hear from teachers and that was really useful. I was really practicing on my own and it was before 2009, so I think it was before I did the meditation apps were out there. I was practicing on my own based on the basic instructions for mindfulness meditation are pretty simple. And I thought it was fine, but my practice really took off when I went to my first retreat. Which again, I always talk about retreats gingerly because it's not a must.

A lot of you listen to the show or of the view that you don't have the time or maybe even the resources to go on retreat and that's fine. I really, as anybody who's listened to the show for any period of time, knows I think even if you're doing a minute or two most days, then you're getting a lot of the benefits. So, I don't want to push you or by extension any of the listeners to get more aggressive than you need to be. So, it's a very individual decision, but if you're up for it, finding a teacher can be incredibly powerful and really depends on where you live.

Do you have access? Most major cities now have meditation centers of one flavor or another secular centers are popping up in New York and LA, Austin, Texas, Miami, Chicago, I believe in Chicago. And then there are more Buddhist-y places, which again, I don't think you need to be afraid of the Buddhist thing. I think they teach really solid meditation techniques in these spots, most of them, at least the ones

I've been to, and you don't like the smells and bells of it if there are even, if there are even our smells and bells and formal sort of Buddhist ceremonies, you can ignore that stuff and just focus in on the instruction. But I think the ability to ask questions of an experienced teacher, either one on one or raising your hand and asking questions from a crowd, the benefits are incalculable. To really be able to run by an individual who spent a lot of time traveling down the various byways of the mind, what you're experiencing, and they'll, if they're a good teacher, they're going to recognize it right away and be able to give you a couple of options.

So if it's available to you, if there are teachers in your neighborhood or if you find one who's available on Skype, I would say go for it. The other thing I would recommend is if you're on the app, and I know from the survey work we've done that a lot of the people listening to this podcast are on the 10% happier app, we have these coaches. Some of the happiest and most frequent users of the app are the people who talk to our coaches. These people, the coaches, are experienced meditators.

They live to answer your question. You can ask them as many questions as you want. Free of charge, once you're a subscriber. So take advantage of that. And these people, you will be driving a lot of the benefits of having a teacher by talking to these coaches. Thank you for that question. Let's get on to voice mail number two.

Hi, Dan. Thanks for all that you and your team have done in bringing meditation and mindfulness. If so many people, you've certainly changed this 33-year-old's life. My question is that, well, in one of Joseph Goldstein's guided meditations on fear in the 10% happier app, which I am a happy subscriber. he mentions how important it is to fully accept negative emotions

like fear rather than to resist them. And he even tells a personal story about it. In some situations for me, this works like a charm and the negative feeling does seemingly miraculously dissolve and it's amazing. But in others, my anxiety is so fierce that if I start quote-unquote, accepting it, it enlarges so much that it almost feels like I'm going to be drowned in it, like completely overwhelmed at my seat and that I might even fall off. And I don't know if I can go through with it. So what I do is I then clamp down once it gets to a certain point.

So my question is, have you experienced this before and how do you deal with it? I'm not sure that these types of negative feelings have the chance to go away if I keep clamping down and resist them at a certain point. And maybe at the point is I shouldn't try to assume that they'll or want them to ultimately go away, which is still at this point, but I'm not sure I can even get to the point of allowing them in because it's just so overwhelming and so large. Thanks so much, bye.

Thank you. That's a great question. I've been thinking a lot about this because actually we're making a change in the way. We're making a number of changes in the way we handle the voicemail section on this podcast. The first change we're making is that here to four, I have not heard the questions in advance. We ran a podcast, we ran a podcast, listen or survey it a few months ago, and 500 of you took a lot of time and answered a really detailed questions. I am so grateful for that. One of the pieces of feedback we got was that why aren't you listening to the voicemails in advance so that you can give us more thoughtful answers.

Pretty good piece of feedback. So now we're going to be, I'm going to be doing that and I think in the future we're actually going to be bringing in, because one of the things I was often saying in my answers was, you know, I'm not an expert, but here's my take on it. We're actually, in some cases, going to bring in experts and pipe in their answers to your questions. So, stay tuned for more changes to come. Anyway, so a long way of saying I've been able to think a little bit about that question because I knew it was coming.

And let me just first talk a little bit about the guided meditation that she references from Joseph Goldstein. This guided meditation from Joseph is called fear. If you search for it in the app, you can find it. It's excellent. Talks a lot about it. The fact that Joseph, for many years in his life, even after a long time of meditating,

was dealing with serious doses of fear, both in his walking around life and in his meditation practice. But he found that he started to realize that the attitude in his mind toward the difficult of motion of fear was, I will be mindful of you. I will try to note that you're here, but there's this undercurrent of I want you to go away. He calls this, I don't know if he says this in the meditation, but he calls this often in many of his speeches in order to mind. That we think we're being mindful of a difficult emotion, but really, if we look closely, there's this subtle element of aversion. We're being mindful of a difficult emotion, but really if we look closely there's this subtle element

of aversion. We're being mindful in order for that emotion to go away. And that isn't real acceptance. And I'm not saying this with a wagging finger, acceptance is hard. And this is a skill that we are training. And sometimes it's doable, as we heard, in that excellent question. Sometimes it is doable. Sometimes we, you know, an emotion arises, and we are able to summon some mindfulness. We're okay with the feeling, with the feeling, and it does have a way of going away, or we just become okay with it and that being okay with it changes the nature and the force, the valence of the emotion. However, there are times in my experience where it's just too strong, if you have an anxiety disorder, in my case, I have panic disorder, I'm not of the view that I can meditate my way out of panic

that I can sit and just allow. I am not a good enough meditator yet to watch panic arise and pass with, I can't do it. But that is, I am and we are all training this skill. And so over time, I would argue, you will get better at allowing this intense anxiety to just be there. But you think about how far you've come

that you're able at times now at age 33, I don't know how long you've been meditating, to see sometimes the anxiety arise and to say, oh yeah, I see it. Here it is, I'm okay with it, and that it can sometimes dissipate, or you can just be okay with it and not be paralyzed by it.

That's a huge achievement. That sometimes it is too strong for you. I don't know what you mean by clamping down in order to stop it, but that sometimes it's too strong for you. I guess my opinion is, that's okay. And you're just gonna get better and better over time at this skill of true mindfulness

which has an aspect of acceptance. So I would say Bravo to you and keep doing the work. And I would really be interested to hear and this is an improvement we're going to make over time. As I said, in our voicemail section of the show, I would be interested to hear what somebody like Joseph or a meditation with teacher would say about exactly what to do in the moment where it's too strong. But personally, I'll tell you what I would do, which is if I was experiencing sometimes for me restlessness

is the thing that I, you know, I can sit with it, the body's the physical discomfort of restlessness. I can sit with it for a certain period of time, but after a while I have to stand up. I just, I reach my breaking point. And I've talked about this with Joseph. And he's just, and he's talked about this too with physical pain with me, you know, sometimes you experiencing physical discomfort unrelated to, to restlessness,

or restlessness that produces a kind of physical discomfort. And he says that, you know, we're training the ability to sit with this. You want to test your edge here, but at some point it's too much. It's okay to stand up. And in my case I will I'll continue the session of meditation while standing up. And so over time I'm just continuously I hope getting better at accepting and being with these difficult sensations, but you know at a certain point it's just too much. So that's my advice my overall advice is like or my overall response is you're doing a great job keep at it and you will improve continue to improve over time. I do want to say one other thing and I know I'm giving a long answer to this, but you know I've been doing I'm really really quite deep now in in the research into my next book tentatively entitled 10 nicer, although I don't know if that's what the title will be, but it's really about kindness. And I've been doing a lot of meta-MeTTA

meditation, loving kindness meditation. And I was on a retreat recently with the teacher Spring Washam who's been on this show twice and is incredible. We did a one-on-one, a loving kindness retreat, and I had a lot of really powerful insights during the course of that retreat, and one of them is directly germane to this discussion about acceptance. What I found was that for me, a lot of the difficult emotions I deal with during meditation are restlessness and

impatience. I just don't want to be doing the meditation and when I'm on retreat, I don't want to be done on the retreat. I had never actually been fully mindful of that before. What was interesting about seeing these difficult emotions arise within the context of meta, with loving kindness, which is often I think better translated as friendliness, this kind of meditation where you're cultivating friendliness, just as a brief aside, the technique here, as many of you will know this, but for those of you who don't, the technique here

is you are systematically envisioning people, including yourself, and repeating phrases of well-wishing. So may you be happy, may you be safe, may you live with ease, et cetera, et cetera. And so you're doing this really annoying practice, but over time, it's that you actually start to generate this feeling of friendliness. And within the, once you've created this kind of container of mental friendliness, once

these difficult emotions arise, in my case, restlessness, sometimes anger, frustration, all the, first of all, I'm more mindful. I'm seeing it because the mind is tuned up. And I'm actually accepting it with some friendliness. And this to me was a, I mean, meditation teachers talk about this all the time. That it's not just enough to note with some non-judgmental remove,

whatever emotion or sensation you're experiencing, but to do so with some friendliness and warmth. Well, I always ignored the latter part of that instruction because I didn't really know what it meant. But on this retreat where the mind is flooded with this friendliness, I realized, oh yeah, actually I can have some warped. It doesn't mean I'm psyched that I'm feeling so restless I want to run away. But I can see it as I can blow it a kiss.

So that has made a big difference for me in terms of accepting all of the difficult emotions and physical sensations that arise inevitably in any meditation practice. So I've said a lot, I hope it was useful. Let me get now to somebody who really knows what she's talking about, Ruth King, our guest this week. I said a bit about her at the beginning, she is just as a reminder, a long time teacher in the Insight Meditation tradition. She's written a couple of books on the issue of race.

The newest one's called Mindful of Race. She also wrote a book about rage, which is a powerful emotion that arises from many people in discussions of race. And so she is gonna, she's gonna drop a lot of knowledge on us in this podcast. I'm really grateful to her for coming on. So here she is Ruth King. Great to see you. Yeah. Thanks for coming in. Thank you.

Congratulations on the new book. Thank you so much. Yeah. So as I warned you in advance, I'm gonna ask this question, how did you get into the meditation game? Yeah? Well, um, it's it's a I'll make this story brief because it's really rich. I was in China. Well, let me just say, don't make a brief. This is podcast. All right. You can, brevity is not rewarded.

Okay, good. That's even better. So I'm in China at the Beijing Women's Conference back in the late 80s, early 90s. I can't remember the year. When you were seven years old. I wasn't seven, but I was a well, a well-in-and adult. And I went to that conference and did a training on generational healing. And met a woman when I was there who we were both black women staring at this five-story gold and Buddha with tears running down our eyes for no apparent reason.

And she turns to me and she says, do you meditate? And I said, well, kind of. And she says, where do you live? And of course, in China, I said, well, I live in the Bay Area. Only people in the Bay Area would say they live in the Bay Area and China. I was assuming everybody knows where that is. But she said, so do I. And so as it turns out, she was on the board of Spirit Rock.

And she said, I want you to come and join me. I want you to be with me. I need you there. And I said, well, she's talking about diversity. Tell us what Spirit Rock is. I need you there. And I said, well, she's talking about diversity and spirit rock is spirit rock meditation community and would acre California, which is Northern California and So and I was living in Berkeley and which is across the Bay and I said, you know I'm just not feeling like I'm up for all this diversity stuff again

I've kind of been there had done that. She wanted me to join the diversity council there and just support the awakening that was starting to happen there. But I went to a meditation class with her, with her teacher, Jack Cornfield on a Monday night, just crowded room. And I fell in love with Jack Cornfield, basically. He offered a teaching that evening where he started off saying, oh, nobly born, remember who you are. Be willing to know for yourself. Don't take my word for it. Know for yourself.

And there was something about that message that I think I had been looking for in a spiritual practice that made my heart just crack wide open because I I wanted to know for myself. I didn't want to just trust somebody blindly and hear the good faith message without it being in embodied kind of spirituality. So there was something about that that kind of cracked me open, had me relax, had me believing that there was something more I could do to attend to my distress, which I was basically just grinning and burying and, you know, having positive thoughts, but really struggling on the inside. So, spirit rock meditation community became my song, my community where I practice. And I've been there every since.

Let's just go into that, the know for yourself, part of it. Because I think that is the, I don't know if I'm mangling the Buddhist words here, but something around the long lines of feeling for yourself. Exactly. Because I think there is, one of the biggest reasons, one of the reasons why people are attracted to Buddhism, I'll speak for myself at least,

is that it isn't somebody telling you, hey, you gotta accept my dogma. That's right. It's basically like, the Buddha himself said this, which was, hey, look, I'm gonna make some metaphysical claims, you can take them or leave them.

That's right. But just try out this meditation thing. If it works for you, then you can keep doing it. That's right. And you know, it's coming from being raised in a Baptist church, where church was really where the community lived. You know, I don't know if I saw everybody practicing the faith, but it was where the community hung out. It was where you took care of Sarah and her family who had the drug problem or the fathers

who got laid off work. There was all this sense of community. It wasn't so much about the teachings of the Bible as much as it was about community. there was a lot around faith, believe in God, put your faith in God, which is nothing wrong with it. The printer, a good friend of mine says, the Lord is, Jesus is my Lord and personal savior, but the Buddha left instructions. I think there was something about the instructions

of how to embody faith, how to know for yourself, how to relax into the experiences, the moments, the accumulation of moments where you get a taste, a potent homeopathic drop of freedom and release that really carries you to a place of really knowing what you're capable of letting go of. So that was really powerful for me. Those moments that have accumulated over the years where there's faith in what I'm capable of understanding in my mind that supports freedom. mind that supports freedom, not freedom as a destination, not freedom as heaven, but freedom each moment when I can let go of some entrenched stronghold on my heart and mind that interferes with me, seeing clearly and opening to what's here right now. You mentioned your childhood going to church.

Where did you grow up? I grew up in South Central Los Angeles and the heat of the civil rights movement and black power movements of that time. My family was very active in the civil rights movement, primarily the NAACP, the Urban League. And we all watched and was involved kind of peripherally in that very potent time. And so I grew up in South Central Los Angeles and in Watts and the church was big, but jazz was

also big as well as the civil rights movement. So there was this interesting blend of, again, improvisational jazz was a big part of growing up where we had these jam sessions at home and my mother played the piano so all the other instruments had to come to our house. And I think what I saw was this palpable, deep listening, attuning, creating, stream that was running through all of the struggles of civil rights and all of the despair that we saw in communities with struggling families. There was jazz, there was improvisational jazz. So there was a richness and listening and attuning to the collective, which is what jazz does. And so that was a

beautiful stream that was running as well, it was really a sense of creativity and connection and listening and creating something together that you couldn't possibly do by yourself. So, that's a big influence in my life, is of right being raised. It's a lot of syndrome. Let me go back to the Golden Buddha for a moment when you're standing in China. Where were you in China? We're in, yeah. You're looking at a Golden Buddha.

And Beijing. Two questions about that. One is, why are you crying? And two, when your new friend said, I need you to join me on the board because, you know, I'm assuming she was saying, I'm one of the few, if not the only African Americans out here in it's mostly white. And you said, I don't want to do that because I've already, I've already, I don't want to do more of this diversity stuff. Yeah. So you can answer those in whatever order you want, but I'm curious about both of those things. Well, the tears, I think, for both of us, she's since passed away.

Dr. Marlene Schunover Jones, who was very big and trying to bring more diversity and racial awareness to the Buddhist communities. So I bowed to her for that. But I think we were both in tears because of the just the majesty of this statue. stillness, equanimity, quietude, you know. And I think there's just a hunger and longing for, there's a recognition that this is something deeply, this is the thirst to a large extent that we have. And yet, it was so palpable. I mean, I think for me, I could

see myself, I've had dreams of sitting and being in that steel posture way before I even knew what Buddhism was. So there was a recognition. And I think along with it was an offer, an offer of something that you could do, you could sit, you could be serene. You know, this is touchable, tasteable. That was my experience. And just being so relieved in a way to see that and to be touched by something so simple, yet so profound. And your reluctance? Well, my reluctance is my whole career. My professional career was in corporations doing diversity, training, and leadership development

programs, and coaching leaders on how to wake up to the power and group dynamics and diversity, the skeletal shape of power dynamics that happens inside of corporations, the obliviousness around issues of race and our intended impact. So I did that work for many, many years and I was just retiring from it. I was just around that time leaving Intel corporation and Levi Strauss, where I did quite a bit of work, and deciding to pursue more of a stillness practice. I wasn't even sure what it was at the time, but I knew I was done with this grind of pushing against the system and efforting and trying to get people to wake up that really weren't that interested really around these issues,

but I was interested in it, but interested in addressing it in a different way. There had to be, in my mind, a way of addressing this kind of internal struggle without efforting so much, without burning out too many people. I knew it died early, diabetes, and all these you know, these worrying, warrior, black people that I knew and other races as well, people of color, primarily, who were just dying way too young from stress and rage and it just was not going to be my life. I just decided it was not going to be my life. So when I met Dr. Jones who was inviting me to come back into kind of addressing some of the institutional things is like I've been there. I've done that. I don't want to do that. I ended up doing that anyway. And, you know, and then- And by the way, continuing with the corporate work, right?

And continuing to some sense with the corporate work, but bringing mindfulness into the corporate work. And so that limited my options, of course, but that was okay because the work was really juicy to work with corporate leaders that were really interested in how to integrate their habits of mind the way they think they're conditioning around race and diversity to kind of wake up to that right in the middle of corporations. But I was, yeah, so I don't do a lot of corporate work anymore, but I do work with a lot of teams and organizations and groups that want to deepen their relationship with raise their racial conditioning, want to unpack it, examine it closely to really see what their you know thread is in this tapestry of racial tension that just keeps being a repetitive motion injury in our social system.

So would you would be fair to say that you're that the introduction of meditation into this work of diversity revolutionized the work for you? I think it did for me personally. I totally think it was kind of a real deal changer for me. How so? Well, I think mainly because it's that know for yourself piece. But the other piece for me was really recognizing the impact that my actions had on collective well being. It wasn't enough for me to be right and rageful because I was planting seeds with all of my

actions. There was something about knowing that my drop from my energy and effort and pointing things out when it was twingeed in hate and righteousness, I was planting more seeds of that. And there was something disturbing about that on the inside that it was just, you know, doing harm just was no longer an option in me. I got in touch with just how much I was hurting too in the ways that I was so righteous and angry about what I was seeing. I mean, I was really good at pointing these things out.

I was trained well, and I was right, but there was a way I was dead right. I was dead on the inside. I was shut down. You know, when you're so right about something, you know, when you're so fixated on it, then something's always left out of view. You know, you can't have a tight focus like that without jutting something out.

And because I had open heart surgery at the age of 27 from a mitral valve prolapse, which I think was related to how I had been living my life up to that point and a lot of stress, a lot of rage, a lot of anger. They were just something about the heart has always been integral in my life. I was tender hearted growing up, I was a crybaby. You know, I was very sensitive as a child and highly controlled in my family. Eight of us, so there was a lot of high control. And I had to silence myself for a number of years. And there's a lot of violence both inside the family and outside and the community around

us. So there was ways I had to silence my rage in order to survive and then when I became of age or an adult I started raging all over the place. So I just feel like that just accelerated a certain kind of chemistry inside my heart and mind that just put my heart at risk. And it was enlarged and there needed to be surgery. And then there was the recovery, which was my first silent retreat where I didn't have any energy to defend myself anymore. And there was a profound experience of gentiline and softening and healing from all of the things I'd been running from, all of the things I was not really willing to face. So there's a lot to my upbringing that was also in the mix of knowing I needed

to find another way. You know, like I remember my great grandmother pacing when I was seven years old. She died. She'd paced a lot and worried a lot. She couldn't help. She couldn't protect the black bodies in our family that were going to prison and being harassed. So there was this atmosphere of fear and worry, but not the skills to be able to work gently and bring the heart into the mix of this. And I remember how hard it was that I couldn't comfort her at the age of seven. When she died, I remember saying to myself, I'm just not going out like that.

It was just something about that, is I can't do it that way. I couldn't comfort her. And that was a real moment. And I think she'd be happy to know I'm doing walking meditation these days instead of pacing the floor and worry. I really am not worried like I used to be. That's one of the things about meditation. You can kind of look back on your life. And it's usually in the practice you can look back and say, oh, I'm not dealing with that like I used to. Oh, I didn't react to that the way I used to. Sometimes this is a retrospection,

this kind of view of really looking back that helps you see that you're really handling things differently with a bit more clarity, with a bit more understanding of your impact, with the deep wisdom about our belonging, and that what we do really matters, we're all in the business of planting seeds. And we really need to be more conscious about what they are.

I'm not so quick to be in righteousness, and like I used to be, because it's deadening. You talked about, there were many things I want to ask you about from the paragraphs you just uttered, which were all very, very interesting. Violence in the family. I don't know if you're comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, yeah, there's violence in the family.

You know, yeah, there's violence in the family. You know, yeah. My mother was a single mom of eight kids. She had been married a number of times. And the kids were in different set. So the first three kids had a father. The second three had another father. And then the last two had different fathers. So it was like them a cause against the smiths. Which set were you in? I was in the second set. And then the first six kids were one year apart. So really tight, close-in age. But my oldest sister ended up having to be responsible for raising us, when that's really not the job that she wanted.

And so we really felt her raft around that. She didn't like that job, so she was very hateful and really angry because she didn't get to really have a life. She wasn't that much older than us and had this saddled responsibility of parenting us. She really wasn't that good at it. She wasn't interested in it, and she hated the job. And so we felt that, especially the second set of kids with a different father because there was just a struggle between whose dad was loved the most, it was complicated. But in my sister just passed away last year and there was a lot of healing that's been done over the years. I think again, this practice supported me and being able to return to that early imprinting of, it was violence, but it was mostly fear that I felt and a real terror of high control and also terror of doing something wrong

of upsetting anyone. So it was a really tightly-controlled critical environment. The violence was more of threats. It was a lot of emotional violence, you know, some physical violence, but it was just an atmosphere of terror, of being afraid, being afraid of speaking, of doing something wrong. You know, there was, I was raised in that atmosphere. Yeah. Well, I was just gonna say, and maybe you've just answered it, but I'd be curious to hear about the content

of the rage you felt, suffusing your life in the years before meditation. Was it about unexamined, unexplored, compartmentalized rage about the way your childhood went, or was it about the content of structural racism in America? Was it all of it? Well, I think it's hard to separate the structural racism out of the equation because of internalized oppression. I think a lot of the physical violence that African-American people, especially display, is the result of being so violated through generations of slavery and abuse and seen violence as a form of control.

So I think that some of that gets played out in the family setting as a way of controlling your children. I don't think it's necessarily conscious, but I, so it's hard for me to see how to separate structural racism and turn lies oppression from the equation of parenting, especially in families that struggle with day-to-day means and survival families that are, you know, don't have, you't have a lot of resources. Not, we didn't have great educational systems. So there's a whole cycle of systemic racism that puts a lot of pressure on families.

And so that gets played out, that pressure gets released in places where you can control them. I think this also happens in families that have a lot of money, but that's a whole another story. So I do think there's that. But I, so the rage that I felt was primarily about this high control inside my family. I think, you know, I wasn't as aware of the racism directly, as it came to me. I think there was a lot of overprotection in the family. But you were doing this work in corporations where you were pointing out the racism.

Yeah, I was doing work, but we're talking about my early, are you talking about my early? Well, I was just I was harkening back to the rage you said you saw the dis-utility of the rage you wanted to drop, which is what made meditation attractive to you. And you said you were you were right, but dead right, which I think is such an amazing way to formulate it. Yeah. And so I'm just trying to get a sense at that point, the Ruth King of right around the time where you're getting introduced to the meditation, which is your late 20s. What was my late 30s? Late 30s, sorry. What was the content of your rage? Was it was it all about your childhood or was it about the racism you were seeing? Well, I think it was a mix. Yeah, I think it was a mix.

And again, these are very gradations here. But I was so good at my rage that I got a high-paying consulting job that afforded me the privilege of pointing it out. So my heat was well utilized inside these corporations because I was good at pointing out what was happening, what was missed in that is my unfinished business. That was underneath it. That was really feeding it. I wasn't necessarily cleaning my own wounds around this, but I was real good at pointing out, you know, how screwed up you were, white boy, you know, because that's kind of what the job was. And there was interestingly enough,

there was some real listening of the message I had to say. So I felt very effective in the work I was doing inside of corporations, despite the rage I had, because I was able to still point out some very obvious messages. But what wasn't happening was me being able to adapt to my own burning internal destruction that was happening. In my own approach, so yeah, I think I was bypassing the needs I had to heal from being controlled.

My being controlled that hadn't been addressed, it became controlling and the work that I was doing. So it got projected under an oppression of professional, you know, suit wearing kind of experience. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E'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.

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Yeah. So how do you, how do you do this work without the rage? Well, I think if rage can be, I mean sometimes rage is loaded because it's just dipped in the waters of unfinished business. We have to look at the character of the rage because it's energy. It is a certain thing that's running through. That's alive and real time. It's not to be ignored, but I think we need to pay attention to its story. I think the story of rage oftentimes belongs to us more than it belongs externally.

It's old, it's usually shame-based. You know, we need to understand. My first book was unraged, by the way. So it's been a big teacher in my life, a very big teacher in my life. So yeah, the rage is still there, but I think we become responsible for the impact we have on other people. Through meditation, practice, you get tenderized to your impact and to, you get really acquainted with your habits of mind and your heart's

longing. And you learn, I often say how this life is not personal, it's not permanent, it's not perfect. You know. So when I'm in the heat of a moment, I feel like a rage moment, a racist moment, a racist moment. When I turn on the news each night or I'm looking at the prison industrial complex and how many dark and brown bodies are in it, you know, when I see the Starbucks and the two guys and the four women, black women golfing and the Yale black student napping and the police are called to fix the problem because these

bodies are so criminalized. I mean, I can still get pretty inflamed about it. But I think I'm more sensitive to how that energy gets used and really choosing where it goes. I don't want to waste energy at this time of my life. It's a utility. I don't want to just spew it all over the place and discriminantly. It's very important that I use it to really make a difference. I don't want to talk to people that don't want to listen. You know, I'm not somebody that would be out there on the front lines of of protests. I like to write books and I like to deal with people that are going to be able to hear what I have to say and to be able to reflect on it. I'm not somebody that can work in this area

in crisis situations, for example. My work is the places we are in before it becomes a crisis so that we can examine how we're responding because it's crucial. And of course, there's a lot of righteous rage out there right now around it. I think we need the fire. It's useful. It gets our attention. What we do next is what's important. What's most important. So let's talk about the new book, Mindful of Race.

You didn't accept my title suggestion. My title suggestion. Your phraseology, you had used, when we had breakfast a couple years ago, you used this term to describe the nature of your work and you said, it's messy at best. I said, that's your book title. You didn't listen to me, but that's fine. I'll take it personally. But what I did do, Dan, is it's the last chapter of the book. And it's on my wristband. It says, mindful of race, not there yet. It's not messy at best. But it's on my wristband that says mindful of race, not

there yet. It's not messy at best. But it is messy. It's so messy. That would be great book title. But it's the last chapter. That's what I leave people with because I'm not trying to say, I don't want people thinking that this is going to be solved in our lifetime. This is a life's work. It's deeply ingrained in this culture. There are moments of beauty work. It's deeply ingrained in this culture. There are moments of beauty that we can learn to recognize even in the thick of it. And there's just stuff we have to do with our heart and mind

in order to really turn it around. And I think that a big part of that is white people, especially, really recognizing that they're part of racial group identity. They are in, they are membered in whiteness and it hasn't been examined. And when that, when white people come to the table, it's just good, well-meaning individuals without being rooted in their history and lineage and how that gets played out socially, politically. Then I think there's a lot missing and our potential to really graduate to

real human and respectful conversations. So let's unpack that a little bit. So as I understand it, I'm going to try to restate what you're saying and you tell me where I go run a foul of accuracy. A lot of white people come to the table of racial dialogue, thinking, you know, having themselves on the back a little bit, thinking, you know, I'm a good white person, I'm participating in this. And they look around the table and everybody else is an racial group and they forget to notice that they too are in a racial group. That's right.

That's a big piece of it. So a lot of white people, I know, and I do a lot of mindful of race training. That's my primary training that I'm doing now. And a lot of white people come in, well-intended and want to address race, but it's the racial other. How do we fix the problem? Tell me what you need, tell me what I don't need to understand. And I think it infuriates people of color to have to tell white people about whiteness. That there are a race, that there's a dynamic in our social realm, that they're actually kind of oblivious to this thing called whiteness.

So it's such a crucial part of the equation right now that that gets claimed. I was in Charlottesville, I did this training mindful of race for the Insight Meditation Community there. They used this training to bridge separation and the community at large. So they invited a number of people from the community to come in and train together, learn together around this as race. It was all, the last meeting I had with them was in preparation of them getting ready for this alt-right kind of rally that took place there in Charlottesville.

And I remember after that incident where the woman was killed, the mayor said, you know, these white nationalists and people that come to our city, they just need to leave. They need to leave our fear city. And I was thinking, where in the hell are they going to go? Where are they going to go? Where do you think they go? And when white people put them out and disown them, which is a lot of that is understandable to some extent, they are somebody's mother

father, sister brother, you know. So there is, you know, there is a connection to some extent. When white people disowned that kind of charge, people of color end up having to pick up the slack. They end up having to be the one that's addressing the issue, starting the movements, you know, rallying against the complexity of these very deep groups. So this idea that they need to leave is a piece of, you know, they're not me, that's not my people, is a piece of lineage and history and memory that

I think is problematic. When I get white people in a group to talk about whiteness together, they look at each other and scratch their heads. What are we going to talk about? Well, I think it's such an interesting point because I don't think when I see people marching with teaky torches in Charlottesville, I deplore it, obviously, but I don't think, oh, there's a problem with my people. We need to address it. Whereas, just as a rough analogy, after 9-11, there was a lot of talk about the onus being on moderate Muslims to deal with radical Muslims, violent Muslims, because there was a problem with those people.

It really speaks to the fact that we white people don't often say, I put myself in this category. I'm just learning about this now. Don't really think of ourselves as a group of people. We kind of think of ourselves as the mainstream and everybody else is part of a group of people. Yeah, that to me is a real missed opportunity. Because we're all individuals who've suffered and had our lives and our stories and our traumas and had to do these dances with our parents in order to get approval in a stay love. And but we're all in support of racial group identities.

And that's a collective experience that, you know, that people have as a race. And then all races are not created equal. There's a dominant and subordinated group dynamic around race in our country. This is a relative reality that we live in. It's not ultimate reality. It's a relative fact. Some people might not know the difference between relative in the whole of the world. This is a Buddhist concept.

So Buddhist concept, I think it's a concept also around this idea that we all know that we're not a race, that we're not just simply a race, that we're not defined and, you know, these concepts that we live with is not totally who we are. We're more than that. But it's the concepts and language and identities are ways that we navigate in our day-to-day life. But we know, especially from faith traditions and spiritual practices

that, you know, the heart is bigger than all of that. The mind is bigger than all of that. So when I'm talking about this, I'm really talking about that relative day-to-day conceptual way that we navigate our relationships, our communities, our politics, and our love actually. We're making choices. We're making choices based on how we've been conditioned to believe certain things and fear certain things and naturally kind of open to certain things. So the ultimate reality is that,

I guess you could use the somewhat controversial and also very cliched term of oneness with the universe were all one that you can argue about that, but let's just leave it there for a second. That would be the ultimate truth. The relative truth is that actually, you know, you are you and you have to put your pants on in the morning and you do have a certain pigmentation and you will be viewed in a certain way and you will view others in a certain way. That's right.

And a mature spiritual practice deals with both. That's correct. That's well said. I try. Yeah, I think you're a teacher. I don't know about that, especially not on this subject because I really feel like I'm at the beginning of a very steep learning. Yeah, and we're all learning.

And that's another reality around this. We're in different places with the waking up piece around race and racial harm and injury. You know, I was just talking at the Zen Center, the New York Center for Contemplative Care. Right. I was doing a talk there and a woman of color raised a question about, you know, how do you deal with just the fact that so many of our Buddhist institutions are so so white and so segregated and how do you work with that? And I get so tired of seeing that.

And I said to her, I said, how can they not be that? I mean, you have to look at our conditioning, most institutions, most organizations that are organized by white people. Does not take into consideration people of color from the story. It's just not in the consciousness. And what happens when there is no examination of racial group identity or whiteness, then the same individualistic mindset,

I'm a good person, I'm a good white person even, but it's individual, not collective. That same consciousness rolls itself into the institution, into the organization. Well, that same lack of consciousness. Yeah, yeah. And so to me, it's not a matter of rather these institutions are raised, you know, have racism. I mean, how could they not? The issue is, what do you do about that? What do you do with your privilege? What do you do with this once you wake up to it? And how do you not go back to sleep? How do you not just kind of just ride on the privilege and all of the benefits that come with, you know, just a privilege of having power like that. What do you do with the power? What do you do with the privilege?

What do you do with the power? What do you do with the privilege? What do you do with the waking up? The God, I have so many questions I want to ask you. I've become very interested recently in the issue of bias and I'm writing a new book and about all the ways in which we are kind or unkind and specifically looking at my own lack of kindness. And I want to look at bias and I will get to the question, this is just a long-winded way of asking a question, but I'm interested in my bias on lots of levels, racial bias, but also political ideological bias. And so I've really made it my business of late to start listening to podcasts on all ends of the political spectrum. And as part of that, I've been listening to conservatives who argue for reason I can't fully understand this. I'm still at the beginning of my research, but they argue that white privilege is a myth. I don't agree with that. I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that white privilege is real. But what would you say to somebody

who was arguing that white, for example, Jordan Peterson is a very popular guy right now, and I haven't watched his YouTube speech on this, but it's a whole thing about white privilege not being real. Ben Shapiro is a similar argument. What is, I wish I, it's a little bit of an unfair question because I can't reproduce their arguments. But what would you say? I don't have to know their arguments because it's a real common, you know, posture, a common thing that white people would say. I don't know a lot of people of color saying there's no such thing as white privilege,

which is a piece of why this is so significant. And they would argue, just so you did, their argument is, well, that's kind of a victim mentality and etc. Right, I understand. So for me, what I would, I have this rubik, and I would, I have this Rubik. And I, and this Rubik's cube.

This Rubik's cube, and I talk about the racial awareness Rubik. You have it in your hand right now. I have it in my hand right now. The first pair is around what we've talked about a little bit, which is individual and then racial group identity. Why people tend to focus at the level of individual. This is also where bias is at the individual level. So we all have biases. White people, all people have biases. We're all part of

racial group identities. Some of us know that. Some of us don't. Some of us buy that. Some of us don't. Most people of color get that they're part of a racial group identity. Most white people relate to themselves as individuals. This is crucial. The second pair is on dominance and subordinated group dynamics, races. White people are a dominant race. This is where privilege lives. It lives in the collective. It doesn't live at the individual level. Most white people I know would not describe themselves as privilege, because we know there's only this one percent. I mean, it's all it's it has a lot to do with how you're defining what privilege is. But privilege, white skin privilege is this ability to

The privilege, white skin privilege is this ability to acknowledge that your race or not engage around race or not, and there's not really a lot of consequence around it. You can flip it off, you can turn it off. That in itself is white privilege, but it's mostly the denial that you're part of a collective that is on top, that is in a dominating role in this society. So the only way to understand privileges is to understand group identity. The reason that's not understood is because group identity has not been vetted among white people. There has not been a coming together to examine the historic pervasive not been a coming together to examine the historic pervasive inheritances of whiteness that exist at the collective level.

To me, that's the missing piece. So we can hang out at bias, we can hang out at individual opinions. That's all individual. It's still not the work at the racial group identity level. That's still an itgenous scratch for white people. And I think the question needs to be, why is it so hard to go there? We have, I want people to read the book so we don't need to, I don't want to get you to say everything that's in the book, but can you just talk a little bit about the sort of

the basic thesis and structure of mindful of race? Yeah, it's kind of like this rubik that I'm talking about, even though the rubik as a symbol didn't come up until after I wrote the book. But the first part of the book is really the belief. So what we're doing with this book is we're intersecting mindfulness meditation and meditation principles rooted in Buddhist teachings, but not all of them. We're integrating this kind of technology, if you will, with recognizing and being able to understand racial distress and injury. So the first part of the book is really allowing people to really diagnose the issue, to diagnose

their racial conditioning. It's really sharing these two pairs, first two pairs on the rubik of understanding yourself as an individual, understanding yourself as a racial group member. It also is talking about the dynamics of dominating and subordinated racial groups. There's a pattern, there's constellations we can begin to recognize. The book offers six hindrances to racial harmony that we can begin to notice both internally and externally in the world and to make some choices around. And so these are very important ways of looking at how you have been conditioned around relating

to race, both yourself and to others. So that's important. That's not so much Buddhist teachings. That's teachings more from the work I've done and understanding race, racism, and power dynamics within my corporate and community work. And then the second part of the work of the book is really speaking to meditation specifically, establishing a meditation practice where you can work with the distress that you feel internally in diving into this inquiry of race and racism, especially your own conditioning. And it offers a daily meditation practice, how to develop a relationship with being at ease,

so that you can bear witness to all of the rise and fall of craziness that happens as we start to pay attention to our mind when we start looking at race, the way we think, our habits of mind, the shame, the blame, the guilt, the rage, all these things that come up in the mind, how the body collapses. So we're learning how to kind of be with this, this weather landscape, seasons of internal

experience inside the heart, body, and mind. And learning how to forgive ourselves, we're learning about compassion, we're learning about kindness, we're learning about compassion. We're learning about kindness. We're learning about reign, recognizing, allowing, investigating and nurturing, distress that moves through the heart and mind. So a lot of instruction on how to just be with the tension and aversion and the ways we distract ourselves

is in part two of the book, which is meditation, which really is the intervention. I talk about racism as a heart disease and it's curable. It's curable through, to a large extent, the intervention of mindfulness that's supporting a certain inner atmosphere that allows us to respond more wisely to the to the distress in ourselves and in the world. And to see clearly first. And to see clearly and to see clearly that's a really good point. And then the third part of the book is really speaking to a culture of care. And this is looking at our interdependence, the way we are part of something larger than ourselves. And I have a lot of fun in this section because I have a chapter on how to talk about what

disturbs you, which is some really pointed instructions where a good third of the instruction is about turning your attention inward to deal with your own distress. And there's a section on equanimity and not just equanimity that we learn about how to, again, that Buddha, the five-story goat in Buddha, just the posture of sitting and staying in your seat with a sense of dignity and awareness and full heartedness. So I'm talking about not just our capacity to do that, that we gain some of the fruits from sitting meditation, but also our, there's a social equanimity that we can concern ourselves with the gifting, the extending of our practice to the communities that we live in and our families. There's also a chapter in that section on artistry as cultural

medicine and how when we are involved in some kind of artistic expression that's natural for us, we're really kind of being, we find more aliveness and more creativity and more joy in our lives when we have tumbled into the territory of creating and offering. I think if we weren't in the struggle of racial tension, we'd be creating. We'd be dancing more, singing more, be more light in our hearts around what's possible, because I think our energy would be a bit more purified and cleaned to, to leaning towards what's possible instead of what's wrong. Finally, let me just ask you, Lee, X-rays has my privilege as the host of the show, because that privilege to sit and talk to you. What advice would you give me as a white male who has enormous privilege, you know, economic privilege, I give public platform.

How could somebody with my, everything I've been given and in the position that I'm in? What do you think somebody like me can do to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? That's a really good question, Dan. And I'm taking that to heart. Because sometimes the suggestions I have for people like this, you know, is not always well received. One hope that I have.

Let me have it, I don't care. One hope that I have. Let me share a story with a guy who I worked with that was very senior in a bank. And when the, I think it was the Florida hurricanes hit, the ones just a couple of years ago, he decided to take a crew on his own, you know, he hired a couple of trucks and took a crew of people down there to help clear out some communities because the mold and the environment had gotten so toxic for a lot of people. He ended up right in the heart of a black community and was in there and with a woman

who was a hoarder. And so there was all these papers and things stacked up to that she still couldn't get rid of, even though it was all damaged from the hurricane. And so he's counseling her and telling her. And meanwhile, the crew is with her consent, clearing things out. And in the middle of that, his boss called and said, you know, you're in violation of a company policy, you need to return the work right away. And he

said to them, when you can come down here and see what I'm seeing, and not do what I'm doing, then we can have a conversation. And state, and there wasn't any real repercussions from that choice that he made. But I was intrigued with him because he made a choice that was not so much his job, but it was a use of his privilege to take care of something that he saw, and he organized it and took care of it. I think those are ways that people in positions, you know, they can push the bar on authority. I mean, it could have been the case where his job would have been at risk, but it really wasn't. I think he maybe knew that to some extent.

Maybe it would have been at risk if he wasn't white. It could very well have been a risk if he wasn't white, but I don't know that. But I'm looking at what he did. I'm looking at what you can do in terms of being able to push that bar when people of color can't. I also think that there's a collusion dynamic among white people that includes blindness, sameness, and silence. I think white people in positions like you're in can break the, you know, the collusive dynamics of not speaking about race, not confronting race. You know, turning a blind eye, you know, you can be the person that's just not having it, you know. And so that's another thing, you know, you can, you know, there, I mean, I'm sure you

run into many situations where the thought arises and maybe it's not spoken, but it could be, it could be an interesting practice to see what it's like to be different in a sea of white, powerful people, to raise these issues, to work with the itch and scratch of that, to be different, because there is a white collective, it's just not claimed. But you know what it is when you start doing things that are outside of it. And I think a third thing is to, one of the things I really advocate in the book is forming racial affinity groups. I mean, what would it be like if you and one or two other white guys got together and committed

to unpacking this thing called whiteness and really understanding it more intimately? What is it? What is our conditioning? I mean, really keeping the focus inward on how we've been conditioned to not be remembered and what is the consequence of that. Again, I think this is a life's work and it's not about fixing as much as it's about

understanding how we've been tightly conditioned to stay in our lanes and not question how we got here. So much as I see I'm going to be careful about what I'm about to say although the fact that I'm being careful says a lot because there's a lot of fear about talking about this issue. Exactly. Yeah. But I just finished taking a class online class through the Barry Center for Buddhist Studies and organization I highly recommend.

The ARRE Barry Center for Buddhist Studies, your name came up a lot and it was an online course on race and the dharma taught by four teachers, two of whom have been on the show, seven a. Celessi, I'm having a temporary Brian. No, no, no, the other Joanna hard. Joanna hard. It was also a teacher on the 10% happier app. She used to be named Joanna Harper,

but now she's Joanna Hardy. Yes. And I found it to be incredibly interesting, the course. And we did do all these readings. And there was one reading on something called white fragility that I had never actually heard of before. And it was written by a white person. They talked about how the fact that you're familiar with this, on something called white fragility that I had never actually heard of before and it It was written by a white person. It talked about how the fact that you're familiar with this I'm not telling you anything you don't know but I'm talking to our listeners here

The that white people when confronted with the things that you've been talking about which is that we are a racial group And that we do have privilege often we get super super fragile around that. We get angry or defensive. And that struck me as true, but I also got the sense that it puts white people in a double bind, because if I question anything, then I'm being fragile. If I say, if I do the uncomfortable thing of questioning any statement that's being made when we start talking about the structures of racism in the United States, then, well, maybe I'm just being defensive, maybe I just won't look at the thing.

And I fear that at times, so you have the vast majority of people who don't want to talk about this at all, and that's the bigger problem. But even in the smaller groups where people are willing to address this stuff, I think there's another issue which is the, sometimes we wipe people get so cowed that we turn off our critical thinking a little bit. And we, I think we, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, but I do notice a dynamic where I see among my fellow white people, I sort of this mode of just overwhelming contrition, which some of which is totally warranted, but awe.

But I don't know if it's fully thought through on some cases and not what do you mean that thought through? Well, everything is just so for example, I noticed that when I would question, even in this paper, there's a seminal paper on white fragility. And basically, there are all these footnotes in it and it looks like an academic paper. But I'm not sure that just because it's an academic paper

that everything in there is true. I actually think white fragility is there. Abby read it, I thought, this is mostly spot on. But there were some parts of it, I was like, man, is that true? I don't know if that's true. Am I allowed in this situation to ask that question? Yeah, I see.

That's the dynamic I'm trying to get at. And can you have real dialogue if the white people in these situations are just trying not to get in trouble? That's what I'm getting at. Exactly. This is a really important point that you're bringing up. Let me say a couple of things. I'm familiar with Dr. Robin DeAngelo's work. She's one of the endorsers on my book. I

think she's doing some really important stuff here. We don't have to agree with all of it. I think there's a difference between fragility and vulnerability. I think this term she coined is really trying to get it something very specific about white people, which is, I think, the fragility of the way I understand it is this fragility that happens when you're not in control, things are not perfect, and you're feeling vulnerable. That these things start happening. So I think she's trying to really nail something that people of color have been talking about a long time,

but wouldn't have quite called it fragility. We would call it privilege and a number of things. So she's getting into the whole emotional territory and the ways we hide out are can escape the exit doors that why people can take and do take right in the heart of the vulnerability of engagement around it. So that's one piece of it. But the piece I think that's so potent

about what you're saying, Dan, is here's how I would say it. If I can't argue from my experience, as a white man with people of color, if I can't talk about what that's like for me, if I can't disagree without being then seen as blah, blah, blah, or of not really being a good, white ally or not being somebody that's really listening. Then what is this?

So do I just roll over and be run over or do I get to have a voice? Do I get to screw it up? Do I get to learn if I'm really, you know, can I learn without, can I learn in the ways that I learn, you know, can I learn without, can I learn in the ways that I learn, you know, and I think these are really important things, I think, a real compliment. See, I think though this is, but there's a few steps. The step of the step of white people doing their work together is crucial, because when you start unpacking the way you're describing in this way, well, I don't see it that way, or I have feelings, or I have this point of view, when that discussion

starts unraveling or opening, and there hasn't been work around whiteness, then a lot of the unawareness that might go with that ends up having to be pointed out because there is a collective dynamic that's pervasive in the social realm. That's a piece of, that you swim in, that is also a piece of the mix. So when that's not incorporated into the dialogue, this sense of understanding, whiteness and how it could be also engaged in the very thought that you're having, the sense of understanding, whiteness, and how it could be also engaged in the very thought that you're having, the expression that you're, you know, when that's not a piece of it, then you're speaking as an individual absent of rootedness and whiteness.

And I think that's where it gets, it can go downhill. So it's real important that this kind of collective piece is engaged and well understood because otherwise you know it's having to be how it lives. It's never going to be perfect. Again, it's messy at best, but it is going to be recognized and respected when white people start, bring your charge, bring your energy, but also bring your history, bring your group identity. You know, you're not just some individual with a point of view. You've been conditioned and whiteness and that's the piece that's missing, I feel, in

our engagement. But I do think the challenge is important. I think it's a real compliment when white people are firm in what they're bringing, but they need to be educated and really coming from. A compliment how? A compliment that you're seeing. Yeah, you're standing. This is my experience.

I've done my work over here. I'm bringing this experience. I don't know if I agree with that or whatever it might be. I don't know what it is. But I think being willing to get in the rough of it and have a real dialogue with people of color is not, you know, that's my hope. But I think there's some work that why people need to do

before they bring to that. Rather than either hiding out, denying it, or being condescending and pretending I agree to everything. That's right, that's right. Yeah, that's really patronizing, right? I mean, that's not what we want. There is a place of deep listening and hearing, which is part of the educational piece. And you do have to know your buttons. And when you're getting defensive, because

we all have defense patterns and ways that we protect ourselves, we have to know when that's playing. Every people of color don't always know when that's playing, right? So it's messy, you know, but I think the piece that we all need to really bring to these discussions is a sense of ourselves as individuals and as a racial group, I can't. He's got the Rubik's Cube again. I'm holding it. This is it. This is it. Before we go, let's do the plugging that I like to do. So give me a sense name every book you've written tell us what you're where you are on social media or what your website is. Give me everything.

Okay well this is my second book. The first book was Healing Rage, Women Making Interpiece Possible. This book is Mindful of Race, Transforming Racism from the Inside Out. I've got a few transforming racism from the inside out. I've got a few audio meditation books, one around the rage. I have a DVD on cultural competency that's available as a download and a bunch of stuff. I have these wristbands mindful of race. Where can we get them? Not there yet, all on my website. I have one of them. Which is Ruth King.net. And the book is there, the products are there, the recordings are there, a number of recordings, guided

meditations are there, resource pages on racial awareness is there, Guidelines on forming a racial affinity group is there. Upcoming retreats and meditation retreats, mindful of race retreats. A lot is there. The website is a good resource. Very grateful to you for coming in here and thank you. Thank you. and this is so great. Thank you. Thank you to your community.

We appreciate it. 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 Dan B. 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 ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

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