Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Dismantling Racism in Our Minds and Hearts

With Nina La Rosa recorded on July 15, 2017.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

If one lives as a human on this earth one is affected by racism. Power and privilege have been unfairly awarded throughout history to certain groups of people based on race while disempowering others.

These systems function on a systemic and cultural level, but also within each of us individually when we unconsciously internalize messages about each other, ourselves, and about race. Simply growing up in a racist world causes subtle and not so subtle habits of mind and heart to take on racist patterns.

Mindfulness meditation can help one to observe preconceptions as they arise in the mind, providing space for cultivating kindness and care. Mindfulness can illuminate implicit bias, the usually unconscious prejudices that color so much of our mind’s judging nature. Uncovering these habits of mind with a generous heart can cut through the guilt, shame, hatred, and fear that cause so much contraction and suffering in us and in our relationships around race. Observing these habits of mind with wisdom can allow a healthy transcendence of self to arise that does not bypass individual and racial differences, but includes them.

This session is for you, no matter the color of your skin, if you’re interested in investigating more deeply how racism in the world has impacted your mind and heart. We practice ways to undo racism in our lives and uncover a generous, spacious heart that has room for differences and the universal.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Forgiveness: The Practice of Returning to Love

    A heart rooted in compassion longs to uplift and free all beings. Yet holding such a heart is not always easy. We stumble, we protect, we carry wounds. In our time together, we’ll explore forgiveness as an act of self-compassion-a way to meet our own suffering with kindness, and to restore the dignity that pain…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    The Wisdom of No Escape

    Our lives include facing things we didn’t choose, and often cannot change; such as getting ill or injured, or loosing something or someone that we love. Dharma teachings invite us to turn towards these, instead of turning away from them. What is the wisdom that is available to us when we meet our experience with…

    Read More

  • Martine Batchelor

    What is this?

    In this session Martine leads a guided meditation on the question “What is this?”, and then explores this questioning practice as a means to encounter each moment with awareness and as a means of developing a stable and open heart.

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    The nature of experience. Part 3: Non Self Existence.

    Today’s session is the third in a special run of three consecutive sessions with Martin, where he looks deeply at the nature of experience through Buddha’s profound descriptions of reality – Impermanence, Emptiness, Non self-existence. The classes point directly to how these themes can come alive in our practice and understanding, looking at the personal,…

    Read More

  • Expanding our Understanding of Loving Kindness Practice

    Many of us have habitual ways of practicing loving kindness (metta), Some of us love loving kindness practice, and others find kindness practice difficult, or merely routine. Join Diana to explore a more expansive approach to loving kindness where we learn at least three different types of kindness practice. We’ll discover the roots of these…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    The nature of experience. Part 2: Emptiness.

    Today’s session is the second in a special run of three consecutive sessions with Martin, where he looks deeply at the nature of experience through Buddha’s profound descriptions of reality – Impermanence, Emptiness, Non self-existence. The classes point directly to how these themes can come alive in our practice and understanding, looking at the personal,…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 8, 2021

    This week’s topic is The Freedom of an Unassuming Mind.

    The Buddha used the image of a tangled and knotted thread to represent the complex roots of human suffering and distress. It takes sensitivity, persistence, and care to disentangle the tangle of ‘dukkha’. A tricky part of this is that our assumptions about the world radically shape the way the world appears, while remaining quite hidden to us. Fortunately, wisdom teachings and practices bring assumptions into view and support the untying of these unseen knots, opening us into a wide and free existence.

    Read More