Working with Wounds We Carry Around Racism

An 18-minute practice to create the space and inner support needed to sit with difficult emotions.

For today’s practice we’re going to experiment with creating the space and inner support for working with the wounds we may carry around race and racism. 

To me, race and racism are aspects of our social world that can cause suffering and injury. We know this from so much that we’ve seen out in the world, and perhaps we know even more from our own personal experiences. Each of us have very different experiences and degrees of exposure to racial suffering, and so the invitation with this practice is to really open up to what you know in your own body and being, about the racial wounds that you may carry, and what others may carry. 

Thinking About Suffering

When we think about how it is that suffering may arise in us, there are many different traditions that invite us to think about, and to have an ethical engagement with the goal and practices for minimizing suffering in the world. For example, under some of the traditional teachings that undergird mindfulness, we’re invited to notice how our suffering can result from clinging too tightly to things that we need to release, pushing away things that might need to be brought…

GROW YOUR MEDITATION PRACTICE


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About the author

Rhonda Magee

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.