Turning Toward Life

Rhonda Magee on being with vulnerability, getting angry, and knowing joy and healing are possible.

BY STEPHANIE DOMET PHOTOGRAPHS BY BLAKE FARRINGTON

In this excerpt from your book, you detail the steps you took to help one of your students process his attitudes and biases. What kind of energy does that work require?

It requires a certain kind of commitment, a certain willingness to turn toward that which we could so easily deflect, turn away from, deny, minimize, avoid. For me it’s really important that when these opportunities present themselves for us to look into what’s arising around this, we turn in to that opportunity as opposed to away from it. I also think it takes a kind of grounding in a certain kind of love—kindness, lovingkindness— for me it takes some feeling of the value, of the possibility of connecting across lots of difference and the importance and value of trying to do it, again and again, even when it’s difficult.

Why is it worth it to you to do this work?

In my view, absolutely everything is connected, and that means all of us are connected, and so it seems to me that when we have these opportunities to expand the sense of our common ground, and we don’t take advantage of them and we don’t do what we can to heal and repair and transform the world, then it seems to me we are in effect contributing to barriers and obstacles to deep well-being. And so for me it’s worth it because it’s about practice. It arises out of deep practice for me—it arises out of the deep ethical ground of my practice.

Who does that work serve? Is it for yourself, for the other person, the greater good of society?

To honor the practice?

It serves life. The gift of literally being alive. To me that’s not about any one of us, actually. To be alive is a great gift, and therefore the only real response to such a gift is gratitude. And a way to show gratitude is to try to minimize harm wherever it arises, as best we can. Recognizing we’re not perfect, that we’re not always able to see clearly how what we’re doing contributes to harm, we’re all vulnerable and misguided in our own ways, so it’s with a lot of humility that I say this. But ultimately, I think this question of who does it benefit, it benefits life. → coming back, again and again, to the intention of listening to Dan—my student. And listening to him, I began to actually put myself in his shoes. Empathy and compassion naturally opened my heart.

Here again, my meditation practice helped. Years of simple mindfulness meditation practice—which helps you recognize more readily when you need to take a moment, as well as the STOP practice (see page 72)—which helps you develop the emotional intelligence and psychological flexibility required for greater mastery over the challenging moments when you engage in difficult conversations.

As I listened to Dan, I intentionally sought not only to hear his voice and story, but to listen as deeply as I could to what he wanted me to hear. It wasn’t easy. When my own reactions arose, I noticed them. Relying on my practice, I sensed the ground beneath my feet. I came back to the sense of my role as professor and guide. Sitting with him, I returned my focus to his words and the sense of the feelings beneath them.

I listened to him in a way intended to help him feel safe enough to share deeply about his experience. Knowing that he had truly suffered over this, I wanted to alleviate his suffering by truly listening to him—in a way that would enable him to feel a sense of my caring for him, while at the same time staying in touch with my own feelings and guarding against any emotional reactivity that could get in the way. I realized that I wanted him to sense that my concern for him would not be disrupted by what he had to say. Doing so required more than intent or will; it required the support of a nervous system whose capacity for just this had been built up through the regular practice of mindfulness.

So, with awareness of what was happening, but as little judgment about it as I could muster, I could guard against my own reactivity enough to actually hear Dan’s words. I could see and feel the complex set of emotions running through him as a result of what he had experienced in that classroom so long ago: anger, →

For a racialized person, a racialized woman, there are microaggressions everywhere. How do you take care of yourself to ensure you can do this work you want to do and feel called to do?

It has come out of a sense of my own agency and what I often call personal justice. This idea that justice starts with us, how we treat ourselves. Taking care of myself feels like the first approximation of whatever it is I’m trying to offer in the world. There’s a reason I live in San Francisco as opposed to North Carolina or Virginia, where I was born and raised. The environment in San Francisco seems a bit more conducive to this way of accepting people, working across cultures, multiculturally, working with people who have different ways of expressing themselves, whether it be about race, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status. I specifically talk about the environment first and then the practices. We tend to think that from the practices we can overcome just about everything and that’s a good way to think, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity to name the relevance of our embeddedness in the world, and what’s possible is, in some measure, aided and abetted and shaped by the circumstances, the environments, the structures and systems that we find ourselves bathing in all the time. I live in a community that provides a certain amount of buffer against some of the worst kinds of disrespect that a person like me might find out in the world. From this place of relative protectedness, then I actually am able to give even more. We have to keep fighting for opportunities for people who today are suffering from a new set of oppressive systems.

I wonder about your take on callout culture, or cancel culture. Is there a value in that approach, too? Your approach is one on one, which feels righteous, but slow. But what about other bigimpact approaches? Do they also move the ball down the field?

In the social justice arenas we may have overamplified some of the sharper ways of dealing with this. That’s not to say there aren’t times when we really need to take a strong, sharp stand. It takes a certain skill to act firmly and clearly and do so in a way that can minimize rather than exacerbate patterns of disconnect and separation. For me it’s never about just changing places with the people or processes that have been causing harm. It’s really about bringing around a new way of being with each other. There’s a certain urgency to figuring out how to work for some notion of justice and how to end oppression, but how to do that in a →

Listen to the full self-care conversation between Rhonda Magee and Mindful’s managing editor Stephanie Domet online. mindful.org/ Rhondaself-care fear, confusion, and the most toxic feeling of all—humiliation. I could see the suffering he still carried with him.

Sitting with Dan, with a desire for him to experience relief from his suffering, was not easy for me. The Rodney King video had shaken me to my core. Watching that instance of police brutality left me fearful of police for years and years to come. Despite my reactivity, however, I understood that my role as teacher in that setting was not so much about me. It was about creating a space in which Dan’s truth could be uncovered, unpacked, and given a chance to be met with other truths that would allow learning, healing, and potential transformation to take place.

Walking the Walk of Mindful Racial Justice

As Dan and I took the time to have a series of difficult talks together, outside the spotlight and group dynamics of the classroom setting, I learned that in that very first moment when I decided to pause, to respond rather than to react, and then to take a timeout before meeting with him again, I’d not only reconnected with my own center but had also taken the first steps in helping Dan find healing. And by the end of the semester, he’d come to realize it too.

In the final week of the class, after giving a presentation in which he sought to make an argument that hewed closely to his original premise, Dan told the class, “I realize I have been holding on to some of my own pain around this incident. And it’s something I have to let go.” He wasn’t necessarily a completely changed man. But he could see a glimpse of a way forward that no longer involved painful, unnecessarily provocative confrontations with others whose looks just happened to remind him of his earlier trauma.

So much of what we know as reactivity begins as an emotional charge in response to what we see, hear, read, think about, and otherwise experience in life. That charge leads us to act in ways that may appear to be fully rational, but on reflection, often are not rational at all.

As I think back on my experience with Dan, I realize that dealing with this very triggering moment and relying on my own mindfulness practice over the course of that entire semester many years ago is what solidified my decision to bring mindfulness and compassion practices directly to bear on teaching and facilitating conversations about race and law. I realize that what had been my own, personal strategy for dealing with difficulty around these issues—compassionbased mindfulness practices—needed to come out of the closet and into the center of my work.

Now, in my work as a law professor at the University of San Francisco, and as a facilitator of restorative, trauma-sensitive MBSR, I can see the power of working through race issues with the support of awareness and compassion practices. Each time I sit with others in their pain and vulnerability, listening with compassion, I’m reminded of something my grandmother (GranNan) used to tell me: We are all one family who have forgotten who we are. Through mindfulness practices, we can begin to infuse our experience of ourselves in culture, community, and context with a sense of the valid, often painful experiences of others. ● way that opens the heart, and that expands the capacity of all of us to be agents of a kind of public love that can help us sustain human life. Because the universe is going to go on in whatever way, but human life is vulnerable right now because of our failure to figure out how to live more gently and effectively together on this planet and to appreciate this brief opportunity we have between the birth and the death date to make a positive impact on this world.

Do you ever lose your cool?

Reprinted with permission from The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda V. Magee, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2019 by Rhonda Varette Magee.

I often lose my cool intentionally, as a tool for my own healing. If I’m feeling agitation and despair or some sudden rage at something I hear that seems completely nuts, my own practice journey at the moment is allowing those feelings to be expressed and as much as possible doing that regularly enough that they’re not creating a boiler that is going to explode out there. So if I’m here, at home, where it’s safe, it’s part of my practice to let the anger and the rage that I feel about injustice come right out. There are so many things happening that if you are willing to look at these difficult issues—I mean, my heart is breaking all day every day. I hum, I sing more nowadays, I hum and sing with others more nowadays. Singing, holding hands, humming, those are ways that human beings have across times and cultures managed to get through difficult times together. I sometimes forget just how many generations of human beings before recorded human history— for hundreds of thousands of years we don’t know the numbers of battles, rages, the despair, the inhumanity to each other, and yet we survived, and yet we didn’t burn down the planet, and yet we figured out how to keep getting up every day and feeding the children. There’s a planet’s worth of wisdom about how to get through difficult times and about the holistic nature of what that takes, so that’s what I’m about these days.

I thought losing your cool would look more like— I don’t know—do you ever want to swipe all those books off the bookcase behind you?

I mean, sometimes! When I hear this I’m tempted to think of those who say: We just need to start all over again. Blow it up and start all over. I don’t have kids, I’m not physically a mother, but I kind of feel like most moms and most of us in these communities that have suffered a lot over time, you know, we’re here. We’re usually not the ones who say let’s burn it all down. Because our children are in that. The things we have lovingly protected from the worst, as best we could through generations, whether through slavery or whatever our cultures and heritages have suffered through, we suffered through so we could live another day and find the sources of hope and regeneration. That mothering instinct, I believe it’s in all of us on some level, that instinct that would protect, that would go into the fire and pull out what we can and start again, mindfulness of that, cultivation of that is what I feel called to help support and that comes at least in part from my own particular lineage as the granddaughter of the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. There is a way that even in the darkest times, intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this, there’s a way to love, to help bring about places where joy and healing can happen, and my goodness, if people could do it during much darker times, the holocausts of our history, the enslavement periods of our history—if it could be done then, then we can do it now. I have some love and compassion for those who feel so beleaguered that the call is just to burn it down. And I say, before you light that match, look into the eyes of a child, hold the hand of a friend, realize that these very human gestures matter, and look for that will, that capacity to live another day in love.

“There is a way that even in the darkest times— intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this—there’s a way to love.”

When I look at what’s happening in the world today, the level of unrest and aggression, hate and burning, I see a lot of “men in the room.” What do you think about the role of women in helping bring about this “new way of being with each other”?

I sometimes think of this in the conventional terms of identity—it seems obvious that we need more women in power! But I also think that more fundamentally and importantly, we need to see more empowered feminine energy in the world: that energy which lives in all of us—to greater or lesser degrees—the energy that nurtures, that cares, that sees the imprint of the future and the past in everyone and in everything we do. Any one of us can do this. And every one of us should. ●