Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

After meditating, I offer a prayer of gratitude dedicating the benefit of my practice to all conscious beings throughout the world. I then blow out my candle. I may journal what I am feeling and thinking, and I may even outline my day.

We must be willing to exchange comfort for racial consciousness and to be more curious than critical or dispirited. If I didn’t belong to you, I wouldn’t have written this book. If you didn’t belong to me, you wouldn’t be reading it. I’m you, and you are me—you just don’t know that yet. We are here, sharing these pages, to embrace our membership in

We can perhaps sense this transformative twinship from Martin Luther King Jr.’s report to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting every

“But when I look at you, I don’t see race.” As an African American woman, this well-meaning comment from the lens of the white individual renders my experience as a racial group member invisible, my history whitewashed, and my people at continued risk. It’s an innocence I can’t afford to have. When whites don’t see race when they look at me, they s

Would you tell me what you heard me saying?

Now, recall a moment of loving presence with another person or a moment of deep gratitude. Bring that recollection into your heart and mind. Allow yourself to recall that moment as fully as you can, as a way of igniting your direct experience with care, with kindness.

and mind. In this practice, we are discovering, step by step, the experience of walking—something we do a lot but are not aware of. This practice, regularly repeated in the course of a fifteen-minute walking period, sends a message to the mind that we can carry our own weight and balance our own lives. This is not a thought; this is a potent, direc

What happens in a family, whether conscious or not, still lives in a family—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We all play a part in patterns of racial harm—the constellations—until we can acknowledge and transform them. A precious way to talk to our children about race is through personal storytelling. Storytelling can be an act of love—a way to dee

can result through the practice of mindfulness meditation: regulating the body, attuning to others, balancing emotions, being flexible in our responses, soothing fear, creating empathy, cultivating more understanding, gaining awareness of our morals, and achieving heightened intuition.

Even with our best efforts, it can be messy. Primarily, we want to keep our fingers on the pulse of good intention, do our best, and never give up on the human spirit. Talking about what disturbs you is not a practice of perfection but a practice of humility that keeps us learning about what it means to be human. This practice is not meant to be li