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

  • Kaira Jewel Lingo

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Kaira Jewel Lingo – Week of May 4

    We’re very grateful to have Caverly Morgan hosting our Daily Meditation Series for North America. To find out more about Caverly, and to view her past recordings and contributions to Sangha Live, click here. Monday, May 4 Releasing ownership, releasing suffering Wednesday, May 6 Seeing through the veil of the conditioned mind Friday, May 8…

    Read More

  • Willa Blythe Baker

    The Wisdom of the Body

    If you seek to deepen in your meditation practice, there is no better friend than the body. Like a venerable teacher, the body has the power to draw you into the present moment, show you how to find stillness and even—if you listen closely—wake you up.

    Read More

  • Antonia Sumbundu

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Antonia Sumbundu – Week of 24 February, 2025

    We are delighted to have Antonia Sumbundu leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is:

    Compassion in Action, Wisdom in Practice – Living the Six Paramitas

    This week we will be exploring how the Six Paramitas offer a pathway to living with more awareness, wisdom, and compassion by nourishing the qualities of generosity, integrity, patience, diligence, collectedness, and wisdom. Each day focuses on one or two paramitas, combining instructions for our sitting practice and reflections on how to integrate these qualities into daily life.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Bringing the world into the heart.

    What does it mean to bring the world into the heart? In these divided times, for those of us practicing peace, for those of us dedicated to liberation, we’ve been offered a grand opportunity to accept what we haven’t been willing to accept. To give what we haven’t been able to give. To love what…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Shireen Jilla – Week of 10 March, 2025

    We’re delighted to have Shireen Jilla guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May her teachings support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: The Ease And Simplicity Of Letting Go

    The invitation this week is to explore Wise Intention. When we lean into letting go, we experience the simple clarity it brings. Every moment we drop fussing, fretting and freaking out over our experience deepens our practice in our daily lives. The intention of opening our hearts and harmlessness leads us beautifully towards the bliss of blamelessness.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Liberation Now: From the Progressive Path to Direct Experience

    In a progressive path approach to practice, we sometimes fall for the idea that liberation is in the future. We are conditioned to believe that we must end thinking, master practices, meditate for years, and purify our minds. Without realizing it, our beliefs can maintain the conditioning that stands in the way of our direct…

    Read More