Embracing the Gift of Being Alive with Rhonda Magee

Stephanie Domet: Hello, and welcome to Real Mindful. This is where we speak mindfully about things that matter.

We’ll meet here twice a month to introduce you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness—and the heart of it.

I’m Stephanie Domet. I’m the managing editor at mindful magazine and mindful.org. And this is Real Mindful.

Rhonda V. Magee is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. Also trained in sociology and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), she is a highly practiced facilitator of trauma-sensitive, restorative MBSR interventions for lawyers and law students, and for minimizing the effects of social-identity-based bias. Magee has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society and a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice has just been released in paperback by Penguin Random House. The Inner Work of Racial Justice is a “rewarding, vital, and timely journey” into using contemplative practices to peer into and beyond our biases. 

The book was first released in the fall of 2019. Soon after, we ran an excerpt from The Inner Work of Racial Justice, in which Rhonda writes about working through a difficult conversation with a student. Here’s a bit of that excerpt:

Talking about race isn’t easy for anyone—and teaching about race can be a minefield. One of my own most difficult moments teaching about race happened when I encountered intentionally provocative behavior from one of my students, Dan, an Asian-American cis-gendered man.

Dan was in his last semester of law school, and this was his third course with me—it was a course on contemporary issues of race and law.

A major component of the course was a research paper and the students each took turns discussing their thoughts on their projects. When we came to Dan, he said, “I want to do a paper on the Rodney King beating.” His likely “thesis,” he announced, was that the beating King received at the hands of police “was deserved.” 

Even as I write this now, I can feel a blip of reactivity. I can see the policemen in that grainy video that we’ve all seen, appearing to let loose with as much force as they could muster on Mr. King, raining strikes with their batons on the head and torso of a man already on the ground beneath them. And I can feel the empathetic pain, sadness, and anger coming up for me as a result. 

So, when Dan made this announcement to our small seminar-style class sitting around an oblong table, I could sense the tense silence that fell across the whole room. And I could feel my mouth go dry with fear and a bit of intimidation. 

I felt my temperature involuntarily rise, the blood seemingly rushing to my head. “This is what anger feels like,” I knew enough to admit to myself silently. And I certainly felt viscerally and immediately the sense of energy of judgmental thoughts arising in my own mind (“You are wrong!”) and indignation (“How dare you?”). This was what confusion, anger, and dismay all mixed up together felt like. And it was what deep concern and compassion for my other students felt like—several of them were black and brown, and had felt the direct impact of nationwide patterns of over policing of black men. Finally, on top of all of this, my own ego was on the line—I’d been tasked with facilitating this conversation and guiding it productively, and this moment certainly wasn’t feeling like success.

So, you can read the rest of that excerpt at mindful.org. Rhonda details how she worked through a series of conversations with Dan, uncovering what was motivating him, and helping him work through some of his own trauma and arrive at some healing. It’s a really powerful excerpt—but it left me with a lot of questions, as a reader. So I connected with Rhonda Magee in late 2019, to ask her some of those questions. Here’s our conversation.

SD: In your book The Inner Work of Racial Justice, 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?

Rhonda Magee: 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, loving-kindness— 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. 

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

RM: 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.

SD: Who does that work serve? Is it for yourself, for the other person, the greater good of society? To honor the practice?

RM: 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.

SD: 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?

RM: 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