ONE OF THE MIND’S FEATURES, as we discussed in the previous chapter, is its tendency toward bias, a way we have of distancing ourselves from others. We might be firm in our conviction of the importance of loving thy neighbor as thyself. We might recite it and exhort others to follow that adage. And deep down, we feel it’s right. But maybe we are afraid of our neighbor. Maybe we’ve never said hello to them, let alone loved them. Maybe we’re often distancing ourselves from others and don’t even notice how.
Mahzarin Banaji is a social scientist, a leader in studying implicit bias: how thoughts and feelings that reside outside our conscious awareness affect our judgments. She is co-author of the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. In the book, Dr. Banaji poses a riddle I remember very well from when I was young. The riddle goes: A father and his son were in a car accident. The father dies at the scene. The boy, badly injured, is rushed to a local hospital. In the hospital, the operating surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” How can this be if the father just died?
I remember grappling with the riddle, feeling mystified, frustrated by the tortured mental gymnastics I tried. I remember complaining, “I hate riddles.”
In her 2016 interview with Krista Tippett for the podcast On Being, Banaji describes her own reaction: “When I was asked this riddle in 1985, my answer was, ‘Oh, the father who died at the scene was the adoptive father, and then the father who was the surgeon was the biological father.’ Now, this answer is so convoluted compared to what is the actually correct answer that it boggles my mind that I did not get the right answer. So I put this riddle up on a website recently, asked lots of people. Today, 80 percent of people who read this riddle do not know the right answer. Eighty percent.”
The riddle’s answer is simply that the surgeon is the child’s mother. Banaji goes on to say: “How could this be that I didn’t get this answer?”
Many, perhaps most, of the people who wrestle with this riddle could otherwise sincerely assert that women make fine doctors, wonderful surgeons. But somehow, below the level of conscious thought, we make an assumption that defies the world as it is. (I did read one charming account, however, of a five-year-old responding, “Of course, it is the boy’s other father,” which even further challenges the culture-wide layers of assumption.)
Banaji continued her conversation with Tippett about the riddle: “Now think about this. There’s something odd about the mind … If 100 percent of surgeons were men, this would not be a bias. This would be a fact. I’ve talked to doctors who work in hospitals where 80 percent of the entering class of surgeons are women. And they don’t get the right answer. That’s what you mean by ‘monolith.’ What is it about our minds that doesn’t allow us to get to an obvious right answer?”
She goes on to say that the stereotype is like a firewall sitting in our minds. I would concur, and as a meditation teacher and a longtime meditator, I would also heartily support her observation that “there is something odd about the mind.”
Odd, indeed. Look at how often we silently label others and plug them into categories of our own devising. Look at how commonly we fabricate stories about others based on little or no information, or very old information. This is how our species tries to manage the world around us. Yet we can also see that if we automatically and perpetually fear strangers, or dismiss potential friends, or hurt others because we’re not aware of ways we are lost to stereotypes, we are in the grip of a hurtful and damaging habit.
While this habit of erecting mental firewalls may provide us with a fleeting sense of control in a chaotic world, it also restricts our sense of identity and narrows our experience of life. We start to inhabit a world of mental projections, filled with shadows and ghosts bred in the mind. In other words, we’re brainwashed by our knee-jerk reactivity. We live in a small, cramped world of our own making.
In the United States—and in many places around the world—we are reminded almost daily of the way assumptions about race intersect with judgment in our lives. Anurag Gupta talks about the massive disparities in how care is delivered to patients of color compared to others. On average, he says, “doctors prescribe lower doses of pain medications to darker-skinned patients, even when the patients are exhibiting the same symptoms and expressing the same pain thresholds.” Somewhere there lurks a deep assumption that perhaps, Anurag says, “darker skin can withstand more pain.” No doctor would say they consciously believe this but, Anurag points out, that’s the nature of implicit bias. It perpetuates absurd mythologies that even a small amount of examination would reveal as wrong.
Of course, not all assumptions are wrong. We rely on assumptions informed by fact. But it’s vitally important that we hold assumptions up to the light, because there are real consequences of mindlessly living by them. Sometimes deadly consequences, such as when a police officer assumes that a black teenager holding something must have a gun in his hand.
One of our more prevalent patterns of assumption is attribution error, which Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, describes as follows:
If people we identify as members of our tribe do something bad—if they’re mean to someone, say, or they break the law—we tend to attribute the behavior to “situational” factors. They had been under stress at work, or they were pressured by bad actors into misbehaving, or whatever. If members of the enemy tribe do something bad, we’re more likely to explain the behavior in “dispositional” terms—the bad behavior emanates from their basic disposition, their character. It’s just the kind of thing that people like them do.
Notice how each seems to call for a different remedy when something goes wrong. In one case, we forgive and seek to help. In the other, we punish and shun. And yet the behavior we’re responding to is exactly the same.
If we look, we will likely see many types of assumptions we make about others, assumptions that hold us back, hold us apart, that cause pain to ourselves and that clearly cause pain to others.
MINDFULNESS MEDITATION CAN help dissolve the grip of habits like stereotyping and attribution bias, leading to a cleaner, clearer view of what we are encountering, and of various possible resolutions. A principle of mindfulness training is that clearly seeing our assumptions will deconstruct them. With mindfulness we can observe our assumptions as thoughts upon their first arising, instead of noticing them only after they have driven us to action. We then have room enough to question our assumptions instead of filling all mental space with reactivity, holding on to those thoughts and building an entire projected reality upon them. With mindfulness, we also learn to view assumptions as fluid and not fixed.
A writer friend of mine was once shocked to realize how often he quickly and unconsciously sizes up another person. This realization came up at a restaurant following a talk he’d just given at a midwestern university. He was enjoying a meal with friends when a woman approached their table. My friend recalls:
She was rather frumpy looking. I automatically assumed she lived in a rural area, probably on a farm. I also pegged her as someone who hadn’t had much education. She told me how she’d come to the lecture, and my heart sank. What could her response possibly be? I wondered. She went on to say that she had enjoyed it, especially the part about Proust. I thanked her and was turning back to my friends when she blew my preconceptions right out the window. This plain-looking woman, about whom I had rushed to judgment, announced that although she thinks there are some decent translations, she much prefers reading Remembrance of Things Past in the original French.
There is plenty in this interaction to be mindful of. His thoughts: She looks badly educated. His emotions and his body: My heart sank … How learning of her mastery of a foreign language immediately changed his perception of her worth.
Mindfulness doesn’t entail uptight self-scrutiny or hypervigilance, or inserting a long, awkward delay before we can say something while we inspect our thoughts and feelings. Through practice, mindfulness—which starts by working with highly focused attention—evolves into a light and natural, ever-present awareness. And it works swiftly. It’s also kind; we don’t have to judge ourselves for these thoughts and feelings because we realize it’s our involvement with them that’s the problem, not the fact that they arose to begin with. We learn to let go.
We also might enhance and extend our mindfulness practice with habits like these (as appropriate):
None of these responses is about shaming or chastising ourselves. We simply see an assumption and recognize it as a thought or feeling. We recognize it is not true or that it may not be true, and we let go of it or put it in abeyance for now as we stretch mentally to see what life looks like without it standing in the way.
Fortunately, when we’re committed to addressing the stubborn injustices and seemingly intractable problems of the world and we are not bound by so many assumptions, we have the chance to look at deeper patterns in our minds and in how the world works. We have the space to cultivate insight and discernment, to break out of old habitual perceptions and take action on a different level. This is where creative efforts are born, unexpected collaborations are nurtured, rigid time lines are disrupted, and actions based on a greater vision of interconnectedness can find support.
ONCE ON A visit to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa was asked how to combat the sex trade in Thailand. He replied, “If you want to really affect the sex trade, look at Thai agricultural policy.” In other words, look deeper. He went on to say, “There is a reason those farmers are selling their children. They are starving. Why?”
A lifelong Buddhist practitioner, Sivaraksa was urging us to look at causes and conditions that lie beneath this terrible problem, going as deep as we could go, to find responses that might actually make a more fundamental difference. I took from that evening the intention to look more consciously for causes and conditions so that the love and compassion I try to develop, the good-heartedness I cultivate, can be joined with clarity and creative vision about where to try to make change.
An old story from the Buddhist tradition drives home this point about how compassionate action involves looking deeply at causes and conditions. The Buddha was talking to a king and suggested to him, “You should be just. You should be fair. You should be generous.” The king remembered the first two points but forgot to be generous, so people in the kingdom began to go hungry and started stealing. The king focused on punishing thieves. In response, the Buddha pointed out that the way forward is not to start making laws against theft; the way forward is to look at why people are hungry.
I’ve witnessed the extraordinary impact that incorporating an understanding of causes and conditions into social justice strategies can have. Take Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan zoology professor and grassroots organizer who saw the link between an increasingly depleted environment and the impoverishment of her people.
“If you destroy the forest,” Maathai observed, “then the river will stop flowing, the rains will become irregular, the crops will fail, and you will die of hunger and starvation.”
She started the Green Belt Movement in the late 1970s, a confederation of community groups that has, over the years, planted more than fifty-one million trees. The trees help to stem erosion, produce food and firewood, and create habitat and livelihoods. For this and her other conservation work in the face of political opposition, Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She died in 2011, but the Green Belt Movement carries on.
For anyone working in the realm of social change, where suffering can seem intractable, tackling what seem to be the underlying causes of a particular problem is valuable. Otherwise, we may feel like we’re running in place. For example, those working to ease poverty often see it as a symptom of a deeper problem—such as the denial of basic rights to certain groups, such as women. Bhikkhu Bodhi, the Buddhist monk we met in chapter 1 who helped to form an aid organization called Buddhist Global Relief, talked with me about his work in searching for causes and conditions in trying to address poverty:
One thing we came to see, in dealing with hunger and malnutrition, is that it’s not sufficient just to provide direct food aid to those in need. We realized it’s necessary to look for the underlying roots of hunger, malnutrition, and poverty. As we were investigating these issues, one of the things that we kept coming across is the way chronic hunger and malnutrition are connected to the subordinate status of girls and women in many traditional cultures. Consequently, we came to understand that one of the most effective ways to rectify the problem of hunger and malnutrition is by promoting the status of girls and women—by providing girls with education, which would widen their social and economic opportunities, and by helping women receive training that would equip them to set up their own livelihood projects.
Dan Vexler of the Freedom Fund, a global philanthropic initiative to end modern slavery, wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about using something called systems thinking in working for social change: “In the fight against slavery, a systems change approach might address weak rule of law, harmful attitudes toward women or certain ethnic groups, or irresponsible business practices—in contrast to a narrower approach that focuses on, say, rescuing victims. This is how we tend to use the term at the Freedom Fund, and it underlines the importance we place on preventing people from falling into situations of slavery in the first place.”
WHEN I FIRST came across the notion of systems change in this context, I was intrigued. It felt like a shift that could potentially make a big difference. If we look for rock-bottom essential causes, we might be tempted to say greed, hatred, delusion, evil, or human nature—however, the deepest roots of harm are expressed in our moral codes, philosophies, religious tenets, and beliefs. But we’re also looking for root causes at a level that is actionable in a social context, not merely the philosophical underpinnings to our worldview. One single cause is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to isolate in complex systems, so in the effort to create change, we must consider the interconnections among the many causes we can identify.
Writer Rebecca Solnit is a fierce defender of the environment who fights many of her battles on the page. She’s not one to shy away from hard truths, as in the essay “When the Hero Is the Problem,” which she wrote for Literary Hub. In it, she noted our tendency to hang hopes and expectations on a single savior with a magic cure rather than expand our thinking and efforts more deeply:
Even the idea that the solution will be singular and dramatic and in the hands of one person erases that the solutions to problems are often complex and many faceted and arrived at via negotiations. The solution to climate change is planting trees but also transitioning (rapidly) away from fossil fuels but also energy efficiency and significant design changes but also a dozen more things about soil and agriculture and transportation and how systems work. There is no solution, but there are many pieces that add up to a solution, or rather to a modulation of the problem of climate change.
Certainly, our passions, our responsibilities, and our time commitments might lead us to focus on the issue we are most moved by, rather than trying to address the world’s every ill. And devoting ourselves to one issue or one remedy might well bring about the most effective and meaningful course of action in some instances. But if we bring a broad perspective to the forefront of anything we do, we will extend and bolster the compassion we develop. Our actions can align with the clearest, most inclusive truth we can uncover.
David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, led a study of whether mindfulness practice resulted in acts of compassion using two groups of subjects: one that had done eight weeks of meditation training and a group with no meditation experience. Here’s how he set it up: Sitting in a staged waiting room with three chairs were two actors. With one empty chair left, the participant sat down and waited to be called. Another actor using crutches and appearing to be in great physical pain, would then enter the room. As she did, the actors in the chair would ignore her by fiddling with their phones or opening a book.
Would the subjects who took part in the meditation classes be more likely to come to the aid of the person in pain, even in the face of everyone else ignoring her? And indeed, the results bore that out, leading the researchers to posit a link between mindfulness meditation and compassion: among the non-meditating participants, only about 15 percent of people acted to help. But among the participants who were in the meditation sessions, “we were able to boost that up to 50 percent,” said DeSteno.
Acts of generosity and kindness are the vital, day-to-day, moment-to-moment channels of transformation. We badly need more of them as this world splinters into hyper-partisanship and infectious ill will. It can also be helpful to recognize the value of thinking in terms of systems change even as we might be focused on acts of personal goodness. We rely on analysis and conscious reflection to make that distinction. When I heard of DeSteno’s experiment, it made me think in terms of systems. I wondered, for example, if anyone questioned how the people running the lab were allocating resources if they were putting so few chairs in their waiting room?
I have experienced over and over how mindfulness meditation brings forth compassion. Countless times, a new meditator has come up to me and said something like, “A street person asked me for money, and my automatic habit has been to give a few dollars. This was the first time I looked the street person in the eyes and realized that they were a human being.”
That realization is genuine and unforced, not a result of trying to seem “spiritual” or “perfect.” The power of such a connection can’t really be overstated. And yet, this person may not go on to reflect, I wonder what the housing policy is in this city.
To think in that way, involving whole systems, is often based on a certain kind of training. We look not just deeper but wider. That ability to consider a bigger picture of influences and elements coming together to form this moment gives us not only discernment but a more expansive space for creative expression, whether we are trying to help one person or change a policy. One of the core tenets of the Holistic Life Foundation is expressed in its motto: Look at the Whole, Not Just the Parts. As HLF’s three founders work with individuals intimately within the Baltimore school system, they also work for systemic change at the level of the school, the city, the state, the country, and the world, which is one of the reasons they chose holistic as a key word in the name of their organization.
JUST AS WE practiced looking at a tree or a piece of paper differently to sense interconnectedness in chapter 6, we can use what we could call network looking (carefully observing a web of interrelationships) to remind ourselves of the many constituent elements going into an experience, and in doing so, we bring alive a bigger, more inclusive picture.
In day-to-day life, this translates into a much more realistic perception of the larger patterns and confluences we are all a part of. Consider for a moment the shirt you are wearing … the materials, grown or spun … the labor of many hands to weave or sew the garment … the process by which you came to own it. Through the use of active imagination, this kind of reflection brings us to realize, “There is a great deal of life embodied in this shirt. It’s not just an object or commodity.”
If we only see objects—a shirt—there’s a perception of inflexibility, even intractability in our world. By contrast, as I’ve been suggesting, we can practice looking in terms of networks or systems, which could be especially useful in looking at a nexus of suffering in a society. In looking in this way, breaking down what might at first have seemed static and monolithic into constituent parts, we also ignite a sense of dynamism and change. That’s why it doesn’t feel more oppressive to consider a problem in this way—it feels freeing. We see life pulsating within any object, any system.
The dynamics of the moon’s gravitational influence upon earthly bodies of water are such that the waters, except in rare instances, will act in concord. The tides come and affect the water level in the ocean and then in the rivers, then in the smaller streams. With the tide, the great ocean swells, and the river swells, and when the river swells, the smaller rivers in the delta will swell. When the ocean ebbs, the rivers will ebb and the smaller rivers will ebb. With the arising of one thing, there is the arising of another thing connected to it, conditioned by it. Nothing in life stands alone.
In an ecosystem, various elements—the animals, plants, water, terrain—make up an interconnected, dynamic structure. Think about how many transport systems and communications systems you’ve utilized today and how the different components rely on one another. A change to one element affects the entire system. From this vantage point, interdependence is seen as the very fabric of every experience. A systems approach tends to focus on the relationships, structures, and feedback loops that make up the whole. That way we are constantly learning, seeing the problem as an ever-changing process.
MORE THAN A decade ago, I was at a conference about love and social justice. One afternoon, there was a presentation by someone who was going into prisons in Texas to hold literacy classes. They told several moving stories of people whose lives had been turned around by learning to read. I could well believe it. As a child, reading had been my salvation, the public library my strongest refuge. And I know how difficult it can be to go into a prison to teach. In most cases, it’s a soul-killing atmosphere designed to be the opposite of enlivening for anyone who walks through those gates.
Then Rev. Sam Mann stood up. Rev. Mann was a white minister with an African American congregation in Kansas City. “I’m wondering,” he stated, “if you have ever investigated the terrible racism that pervades the criminal justice system in Texas, that sends so many of those men and women to prison to begin with.”
This was a powerful moment for me. While I felt great respect for the first speaker, who described leading classes in some awful circumstances he was not obliged to volunteer for, I also realized Rev. Mann was describing a prevalent pattern that, when I overlooked it, severely limited my understanding. There may be many strong contributing elements to a situation that we are oblivious to because they don’t tend to touch us directly. There’s quite a lot each of us is trained to take for granted. There’s quite a lot each of us fails to notice. I realized that my action becomes a very different action when I commit to the big picture: Look at the Whole, Not Just the Parts.
THE WORD SATI from the Pali language (the original language of the Buddha) is usually translated as mindfulness. When I was studying in India, the term was most often used as part of a compound, sati-sampajanna, which means mindfulness and clear comprehension. The sati part (mindfulness) is sometimes called bare attention, a single-pointed awareness of what is happening to us and in us, without falling sway to interpretation, to holding on or pushing away. It allows us to observe our experience with fresh eyes.
We build on that open and free perception—not trying to confirm a belief, advance an agenda, or manipulate our experience—and develop wisdom, or clear comprehension, the sampajanna part. Classically, clear comprehension refers to analyses like, “Is the action I’m intending really in accord with my purpose in life?”
Deciding that an action is ill advised could come out of the greatest compassion for ourselves. We might discern, “I originally thought that was such a formidable way to speak to my opponent. Look at how much fear is laced throughout that act. Look at the residue all this time later.”
We look at purpose. We look at motivation. We look at the difference between reality and what we might have been taught. Is vengefulness all that satisfying, really? Is compassion actually weak? Am I as alone and in control as I’ve always thought? It’s not just a question of intellectual probing for curiosity’s sake to ask these questions; it’s a spur to come closer to our experience and observe for ourselves what seems to be true.
Rhonda Magee is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco who uses mindfulness in classes and workshops to facilitate racial understanding. In her work, Rhonda provides excellent and timely forms of inquiry into interconnections, causes, and conditions.
I’ve thought a lot about what up-to-date inquiry and analysis leading to clear comprehension might look like. In that light, I’ve adapted a practice of conscious reflection from Rhonda’s book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice, to be found at the end of this chapter here.
This application of mindfulness is distinct from intently focusing on developing concentration or one-pointedness. It works with cultivating the broader awareness, the kind of “network looking,” the clear comprehension (sampajanna) we’ve been looking at.
IT’S EASY TO overlook the question of whose perspective is central and defining versus whose is marginalized—especially if we think of ourselves as being at the center, a point of reference that just seems “normal” to us. Our perspective simply expresses reality for us, and our assumption is that it expresses reality altogether and for everyone.
Interestingly, when I spent time in a hospital in 2019, I had many male nurses. I can remember one who pretty much always identified himself as a “male nurse,” instead of simply a “nurse.” Somehow, he needed a qualifier. And in a time when gender fluidity is becoming more pronounced, requiring a qualifying term is likely only to get more complex. You can tell the world is changing when the qualifiers drop away and language changes, indicating our conceptual framework has been shaken.
Sulak Sivaraksa started me down the path of looking with more vigor at causes and conditions. Ever since the moment when Rev. Mann stood up at that conference and asked whether we had considered the deeper causes of the prisoners’ situation, I try to look at a more inclusive, system-wide range of influences and conditions. This has led me to reflect on some hard questions, sit with some uncomfortable feelings, listen more, and step out of the box when considering what actions I might take. Hence my comments about those chairs in the DeSteno lab waiting room. What about if, in addition to cultivating good-heartedness through mindfulness and other means, we were trained to apply analysis to any system we’re looking at, to engage in network seeing and deeper inquiry of the kind Rhonda Magee does with her students?
Ellen Agler, CEO of the END Fund, working to eliminate neglected tropical diseases, talked to me about taking one’s awareness beneath the surface of the immediate problems you’re addressing:
Pretty much across any political spectrum, any cultural perspective, people can rally around the idea that kids should not grow up with hundreds of worms in their bellies absorbing nutrients. Or people should not have to go blind by the age of thirty because they were bitten by infected flies and contracted river blindness. But I think those of us involved in social action in developing countries need to realize that there’s a legacy here we have to be very aware of—with histories affected by colonialism, paternalism, exploitation, and “othering” of many types—that could easily crop up unintentionally.
Sometimes how you solve a problem is as important as solving it. Mindfulness has taught me how to stay with the conversations that have the scary potential to shift the whole way I see myself or the way I’m working. It has given me the willingness to question the ways we can collaborate. It has given me the sense that this moment, every moment, is history turning all around and through us. We are being called to wake up and recognize our actions in the context of both a moment and in the context of how history has unfolded over centuries at the same time.
I’VE SAT IN discharge planning meetings for a friend getting ready to leave a psychiatric hospital after a long stay; meetings about working in Syrian refugee camps; meetings for a candidate’s political campaign; meetings about changes in zoning laws; and countless other highly charged meetings involving engaged people who care about things that matter. It usually becomes apparent, whatever the scope of the work, who is the kind of leader who thinks outside the box, and who works to bring other participants together rather than singularly shine themselves. It also becomes apparent how valuable that kind of leadership is.
When dealing with large-scale change, a common term these days for that valued leadership is system entrepreneur. A system entrepreneur is someone who seeks to address social needs by drawing upon the strengths and assets of diverse actors in a system, inspiring creative collaboration. They help like-minded organizations and individuals focus on a problem of shared concern, like the eradication of malaria, or educational innovation—and act among the members of the coalition to help bring forth each one’s capabilities and resources.
And those feedback loops among those who are coalescing around an issue are key. A systems approach helps shift us from formulaic, mechanical responses to issues to fluid responses that see the interconnected and constantly changing elements that keep emerging.
I’ve become fascinated by this idea, whether one is trying to effect change at the level of an individual, a family, a community, or a country facing a crisis. I think of the open-mindedness and agility needed to maintain a big vision and also be able to pivot from the path one is on to one that may be more creative. And I think of what I have heard philanthropist Jeff Walker—a leading thinker on system entrepreneurship—speak of many times as a “managed ego”: you highlight collaboration rather than competition and are committed to leading by helping others work together to the very best of their ability toward a common goal. Given fierce competition for resources, including in the worlds of doing good, we need all the creativity, cooperation, and systems thinking we can muster.
Erica Ford is co-founder and CEO of LIFE Camp, which provides youth impacted by violence tools to stay in school and out of the criminal justice system. LIFE Camp—which includes a team that specializes in interrupting violence by mediating conflicts and de-escalating gun incidents—works in some of New York City’s most underserved communities. They build relationships with young people who feel they have nothing to look forward to. They listen deeply.
Here is how Erica responded when I asked her about her work and her experience of violence as a public health issue:
Let’s look at a typical young kid we’ll call Michael. Inside his house is domestic violence. Outside his house, somebody got shot last night. They got the yellow tape, the chalk outline, cones for the bullets. He continues past that on his daily walk to school. Then he sees a gang fight going on up the block. He sees a girl cursing out a guy. He goes into the classroom, and the teacher’s talking and he’s not paying attention. And then somebody hits up next to him, maybe to get his attention, and Michael punches him in the face.
Michael gets suspended for 180 days and put into another school with a bunch of people like him who never got help. They’re sitting there in a cesspool of poison and infecting one another with their disease of violence. But nobody is getting looked at as a human being with health issues. Nobody is getting diagnosed, looking at what happened to this kid and why did he respond like that? And what happened to his mother? And what happened to his father? And what happened to his grandmother? And why is this cycle of violence and irrational behaviors and irrational decisions happening in Michael’s life and community? Nobody is looking at the treatment: What can we do to transform these vicious cycles he is caught in? Instead, we’re asking how many years can we lock him up or how many days can we suspend him—as if we don’t know that suspending him will just make him come back even more mad with his emotional wounds untended to?
We’re instilling cultures and conditions and beliefs that breed separation, not interconnection. Why can’t Medicaid consider yoga as medicine, or LIFE Camp as medicine, or going on a nature retreat as medicine? We have to shift how we look at violence, how we put people in buckets and brackets and hold them there for their entire life because they made one mistake at sixteen or seventeen. We cannot do that to people. We can’t.
Viewing violence as a public health problem is a perfect living example of the adage attributed to Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve significant problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” If we are willing to experiment with expanding how we pay attention and deepening and broadening our inquiry, I believe we have the chance to arrive at a different level of thinking. With the insights we derive from that, we can take big steps toward solving some of the deepest problems and reducing some of the most egregious forms of suffering we see in our world.
Take a few minutes to bring your attention to your body in this moment. Gently focus on your experience of this very moment. Get granular: Notice the subtle sensations of breathing in and out, including the points of contact between your body and the ground beneath you. Rest in the strength of these grounding sensations.
Now call to mind one aspect of your outward identity that other people notice by sight or sound alone when they encounter you. This might be your gender, your age, or what you may think of as your ethnicity—aspects of language and culture that are part of how you identify yourself in the world.
Home in on this aspect of who you appear to be.
Consider how this affects how you are received, what opportunities may be available to you, whether you are given the benefit of the doubt.
Pause and notice what thoughts, emotions, or sensations are arising in you right now.
What were you taught to believe about bodies like yours? About differently racialized bodies?
How might this aspect of your social identity have shaped your experience in the world? Have you spent more time in places where you were in a significant minority or majority based on your race or gender?
Are there ways that this identity has been a source of comfort to you? A source of advantage to you?
Are there ways that this identity has been a source of discomfort to you? A source of disadvantage to you?
Then, practice letting your thoughts (judgments, stories) go. Imagine each as a cloud floating across a blue sky, and return to the sensations of the body and the breath.