Despite mindfulness being about stretching our comfort zones, after a couple decades of practice sometimes it feels like it is my comfort zone. I’ve been steeped in the practice for so long—studying Buddhism as an undergrad and grad student, writing about it, and sharing mindfulness practices with my students at the school where I am a Mindfulness Director and PE teacher. I’ve become something of an ambassador to stillness, willing to discuss mindfulness and meditation anytime, anywhere. Yet there was a moment last year when I felt stumped.
I was attempting to link mindfulness and social justice for an upcoming series of health and wellness lessons I was teaching to fourth graders. After a couple of weeks of teaching basic mindfulness, the next few sessions would integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Despite engaging in numerous professional development workshops centered around DEI, I had never been the one to teach that material directly in a classroom setting. As a white-identified, cisgender male, it’s no wonder I felt at home discussing mindfulness, a practice that has largely been taken up in white, privileged spaces. Reflecting on the experience, I think I was afraid to step outside my comfort zone because I misguidedly thought my personal identity would somehow make these conversations feel inauthentic. As I approached the lesson, the link between sitting still and taking action felt somewhat arbitrary.
Rather than go it alone, I teamed up with our school psychologist, who had more experience implementing this curriculum, and watched with admiration as she engaged the students in lively and purposeful discussions. We practiced deep listening in order to better hear one another’s stories, and engaged in a loving-kindness meditation to stoke compassion. Yet the experience left me wondering how connected mindfulness and DEI truly are. If practice struggles to support justice in a school curriculum, how valuable can it be?
To dig into this a little deeper I reached out to Rhonda Magee, author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice, and a trailblazer in linking contemplative practice with intentional action. It was a stirring and emboldening conversation that illuminated why my own discomfort, vulnerability, and willingness to engage is precisely the point from which lessons centered around mindfulness and DEI can occur. It is a message I have taken to heart. As Rhonda Magee made clear, to ask whether mindfulness and justice are compatible in a school curriculum misses the point. Not only are they mutually supportive, they are essential.
A Q&A with Rhonda Magee
Alex Tzelnic: How did mindfulness begin to inform and support your DEI work?
Rhonda Magee: I approach mindfulness from this body and my own experience as a Black woman in this world and therefore the two have always been inter-experienced for me. To live in a world that has increasingly been opened up by, supported by, and infused with mindfulness has meant being more open to the understanding of my social experience, including those experiences that have to do with the topics of DEI. I move through the world experiencing the world and these experiences influence how I think of mindfulness. So it’s not one direction but it’s this iterative experience.
Your experience and mine arise in a world I didn’t create, and you didn’t create, but one in which race, gender, and identity are part of the experience of being alive. These practices that we call mindfulness have been available to me as I have sought to be more clear about what it means to be alive.
Alex Tzelnic: In The Inner Work of Racial Justice, you write, “With mindfulness, we can develop the capacity to sit with these hard truths of ‘the way things are’ long enough and profoundly enough that we might not only see more, but also begin to disrupt the patterns within ourselves that help perpetuate racism. In so doing, we begin a crucial process capable of creating real change in the only place we can be sure that real change can happen: our own minds.” How does real change in our own minds become actual change in the world?
Rhonda Magee: Once we become more clear about the nature of reality, the conditioned nature of things, the fact that we’re constructing and creating our world, that applies to everything. That applies to our identities in the social realm, the stories we apply to our identities, the wounds we carry, and the suffering that our people have experienced. How we relate to all of this experience is at the heart of mindfulness and compassion practices.
At the core of all that is opening up that aperture of how we relate to all of these experiences. Once we can see more clearly how we carry these experiences, thoughts, and narratives in our body, how we pass them on in our interactions with each other and intergenerationally, how we seed these, we can become more aware of this dynamic interplay that is present in ourselves and our interactions with others, and the broader contexts in which we move. Then we can realize that our actions matter, our words matter, and while we cannot change the broader systems or patterns, each one of us has some agency within those systems and patterns. This is as simple as saying that our lives already all do matter in a very fundamental way, we all already do belong, we’re all e