— Inner Mastery, Outer Impact —
Master Your Inner Core with our 9-day Reflection Journey
Rhonda Magee is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco, an internationally-recognized mindfulness teacher, an acclaimed author and keynote speaker. Having studied mindfulness, its underlying origins in Buddhism, and its potential benefits and applications for over 20 years, Rhonda's work has been focused on integrating mindfulness into higher education, law, activism and social change work, personal and collective healing, and leadership. She is the author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice, and has written extensively on how mindfulness supports engagement in the world in the face of multiple interlocking challenges, including climate distress, migration, war and political polarization. Along the way, she’s become a sought-after keynote speaker, inspiring others to explore the integration of socially-engaged mindfulness in research and its applications inside schools, workplaces, communities and beyond.
Why is inner work fundamental to racial justice and changemaking? What role do our thoughts, feelings and intentions play in shaping the way we live and lead change? How can we learn to embody mindfulness and exercise compassion, from the very core of our being, in our everyday words and actions? And how can we inspire and reorganize our communities that allow unity and harmony to bloom?
Find out from Rhonda Magee, as she illuminates the very heart of social justice work through the lens of mindfulness, exclusively in conversation with Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa on Intersections Podcast.
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Greetings everyone and a warm welcome back to Intersections. Our quest here is to unify, to dissolve boundaries, to explore the highest in human potential individually, as well as societally, collectively. On that note, I am taking great joy today in introducing a guest who has both made some really powerful strides in her own life journey towards this capacity to dissolve boundaries as well as playing a critical role in helping humanity advance through some major strides as well in her professional life.
Our guest for today is Rhonda Magee. She is a professor of Law at the University of San Francisco. She is an internationally recognised mindfulness teacher and an acclaimed author and keynote speaker. Having studied mindfulness and the underlying origins of that in Buddhism, and the potential benefits that it can offer and applications, over a course of 20 years, Rhonda's work has been focused on integrating this practice into higher education, into law, into activism and social change work, into personal and collective healing and into leadership.
She is the author of "The Inner Work of Racial Justice" and has written extensively on how mindfulness can support engagement in the world in the face of multitude, interlocking challenges, including things like climate change, migration, war and political polarisation. Along the way, she has become a sought-after keynote speaker, has been inspiring many to explore that integration of socially engaged mindfulness in research and the applications of that into schools, to workplaces, to communities and beyond. I love that sort of fusion between the inner work and its outer purpose.
She is also serving on the board of the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine's Centre for Mindfulness and is on the steering committee of the Mind and Life Institute.
Great pleasure to have you with us today, Rhonda. Thank you for joining us. Warm welcome.
Thank you so much. Hearing that bio I am realising I need to revise it just a little bit. Just to say, with great love, transitioned off of the steering committee for Mind and Life and transitioned on to the board of advisors of another organisation kind of adjacent and similarly, aspirationally conceived, University of Virginia's Contemplative Sciences Centre, which is a new, mindfulness, contemplative sciences organization and a hub for catalysing research and application in the face of all of these challenges. I am on the board of advisors now at the University Centre, which connects me in many ways with all of my passions, but also with a university, where I studied for many years and therefore have this strong sense of responsibility in a certain way, stewardship responsibility with them.
I came to the United States in 1988 after having just graduated from college. It was the allure of higher education in America. The mystique and magic of these institutions that foster just so much intellectual ferment and really support you in your quest to learn and discover, do research and teach and all of those good things. What I realised is that it was not clear to me that the most storied institutions, like the top 20 or the Ivy leagues or whatever that the community are the students who were there, who came out of there, were any lastingly happier and or any more virtuous than those who may have come from lesser, perhaps named institutions or maybe had never made it to college. At the very bottom of the pyramid, painfully so, you have some of us who are stricken by all kinds of challenges, like not even having access to literacy or basic amenities in life and all of that. Let us not compare it to that community, but who has been suffering deprivation needs to be immediately alleviated. If you take the normal kind of happenstance, folks who may go to high school and do nothing more or go to a certain college, it was not clear to me that the way we do the rank ordering has any way to do with producing people of nobility and character.
I hear in your observation there is something that resonates very deeply with my own. Also just to say, we are kind of the same generational cohort. I graduated from the University of Virginia's undergraduate program in 1989.
In India, the program that I went to was a three year bachelor's degree program. We are precisely the same.
It is beautiful. I stayed at UVA, finishing a graduate degree in sociology and was trying to decide between PhD and law. I knew I wanted to teach. I was studying how people resolve conflict, and I ended up discerning maybe the possible benefits of a law degree to enable me to teach either in a law school context or in a graduate program in sociology. I ended up going into law school, and here we are in a way.
Connecting the dots back to this move that you made towards being an advisor to this new initiative at UVA, this is the first time that I am hearing of it. Is it quite recent or has it been there for a while?
It has been kind of slowly building, probably between 7 and 10 years and it is having its grand opening next year having raised $100 million and done all this stuff. It is opening its physical doors to a new building and a newly constituted, really focused and purposeful centre starting now. But it has sort of been building slowly.
Lovely. I am just cheering on any or all of these kinds of university initiatives to embrace these deeper capacities in the human condition and study them, support them and encourage them. That is beautiful.
Coming back to your life path, early on, after your law degree, you became an insurance lawyer, if I am correct.
Absolutely. Representing a little company called AIG. I came to California. Really, my heart was drawn to California and had to settle into a job that would help me pay my law school bills and so on and so forth. It was the job that I got. It was not the job that I imagined I would be doing. It really helped pave the way. Because if you had looked at my CV or my resume before I took that job, it was very oriented toward public interest, social justice and looking at the history of race and racism, I had written in that area. In a way, doing this work at a sort of a corporate, civil law environment helped around out a little bit with sorts of things that I had actual experience with. Then when I later went on the market to teach, I had this more broadly experienced background. I was able to teach tort law and insurance law, but also classes looking at race and American legal history, and then from there to cultivate this sense of how to bring an inner dimension to all of those different fields.
Besides the synchronicity of our journey through life up until college and the time you are graduating. I see this other theme, common between us. You pursue your law degree, I pursue my analytics PhD, wanting to extend my love for mathematics for a few more years in a business school, you go on to practising insurance law for a while, and I go on to working at McKinsey, coming to California, and doing a startup. But then both of us feel this pull towards wanting to reconnect with academia and be involved in that ferment of teaching. What is it that drew you to that?
That is such an interesting question. I think I always had a sense that amongst the professional doors that seemed available, teaching would be one that I want to eventually go through. I kind of knew going into law that I really wanted to teach. I practised law for about 4 years and was not sure how I would get into teaching, so I paused and was looking at different avenues and looking at starting up some sort of a business that would allow me to write a little bit and be engaged. I was looking to start a magazine for women lawyers and wanting to talk to women who were out there practising, that was the sociological lens also coming in a little bit, wanting to really have a finger on the pulse of what people in the profession who might have experiences somewhat similar to mine, but also somewhat different, what they might be dealing with.
I explored a few different things, not sure exactly how to get into academia, but I always knew that from amongst the options that seemed available to a person like me, I would love to have at least the opportunity to go into university teaching, and so I had my radar out for opportunities and met someone who happened to have just started teaching at the University of San Francisco and that just opened the door. I really believe in having a clear sense of what we care about and what our values are and I really believe in the power of that clarity to help present opportunities that if we are paying close attention, can lead us to the just the next right step for us. I feel coming to USF was really enabled by that kind of clarity.
There is a theme emerging in what you just shared around not getting too beholden to the pre-existing structures in society, that this is what you do, and then this is what you do and maybe that is what 80% or 90% of people would have done, but there are still 10 or 20% ploughing their own path, finding their own meaning and their own passage towards whatever it is they want to manifest and going through discovery and unfoldment and not feeling too restricted by you need this kind of resume or that kind of resume. Things like that.
Absolutely, and also, thank you for reflecting it back in that way because as I hear you are describing in that way, it is sort of we recognise we live in a world. I actually think that I had some aspirations to probably do this kind of work that I am doing right now, even as a young girl. But I also realised, I needed to pay my rent, I needed to pay my loans. I needed a pass through the thicket that I was not completely creating out of whole cloth. I went down this what looks like a fairly traditional path into law, into academia. But I had a feeling from somewhere deep beyond this body, that there was a bigger conversation and project in a way, something more to be done in this life than was necessarily already constructed.
Wow! That is really powerful. I have been investigating a little bit, what is the most reliable resource that you and I and all of us can claim to have access to for truth seeking in the world. We can look at science and the discipline of a logical, rational, fact-based mind and then you find that that has its limits. Then, we can look at culture, religion and then you worry, am I just blindly following somebody's interpretation and who knows what was the true essence of what that prophet was saying thousands of years ago? Something relative to what has been over time transmitted through interpreters of that message. Whichever way you look at it, there are always pitfalls and limits, but there is this other resource which lies at the very centre of our being, and I think you are sharing that with us that in your life that has been a resource that you have turned to in certain moments of like critical choice making.
Yes. At this moment, having reflected on this path has led me to this point. In relationships with others, having taught thousands of people, I used to believe everyone had this particular innate sense, driving or underlying experience, that is a reliable touchstone to something more. What might be called the sort of mystical window. I am not sure but I kind of have always believed that everyone does, but at the same time, I literally cannot say what anyone else is really experiencing and perceiving on this path. I can say for myself. There has just been, in a certain sense, I can remember from experiences in the playpen, like an awareness that like, well, here we are in this situation, looking at the light falling across the room and just knowing there was just something profoundly more than these very humble circumstances I grew up in where, there was violence in the home, there was not enough food all the time. So, having that connection to awareness that there is so much more has sort of always been there for me and I feel very fortunate to not have missed it.
You have just given us a couple of really powerful glimpses there of what obviously must be an incredibly rich, redemptive, and yet burdensome early experience in life. I am reminded a little bit of a person, who I am a big fan of, who lived in the first half, and a little bit in the second half of the 20th century, Jacques Lusseyran, a Frenchman. He became blind very early in his life as a boy with an accident. He reflects on how he, over time, started to discover guidance from within, a light from within, and he says on the days that he would be caring about others where he would be calm and he would put his own ego aside, this light was there shining through. It would guide him. He said, on the days when he was more just invested in himself or getting angry or judgmental or something, this light would just go away and he would be consumed with darkness. He said it was like, "I did not need any training on virtue or character because I had this traffic light signal right within me."
From a really young age, he grew up to fight in the French Resistance against the Nazi army as it is coming in and taking over France. He goes to a concentration camp. He survives that and he ultimately comes to America, and guess what? He becomes a college professor. He talks about how people think it is a disadvantage because I cannot see and so apparently students might be taking advantage of it in the classroom with me not being able to see. But I do not see it that way at all because the core connection between the professor and the students has to be energy. It is not like what people are saying or from the outside. I can sense the consciousness, the energy in the room. Anyway, it is beautiful.
Coming back to your journey, I think this would be a really beautiful lesson for us if you could share a little bit more, whatever you are comfortable with about how there were difficult, messy, imperfect conditions that sounded like it was experiencing in your own life, but also yet something that you were able to find within.
Well, thank you so much for asking about this. I will just preface it by saying, I do think we all in our very different and unique and particular ways know something about suffering and challenge, and I do think it is unique. I do not mean to say it is all 100% equivalent, but as I share the following, I kind of invite just a pausing for whoever is listening, sort of hearing, but also feeling what is coming up for you, what resonates, what we know about some analogous challenges that we also have come through or witness in the world or borne witness to.
For me, I was born in a small town in North Carolina, in the southern part of the United States and born again, as we have been alluding into that last third roughly of the 20th century and born into a family that were racialised as black African American in this, racially ordered, hierarchical, social, cultural world, where a lot of change had not arrived. There was a civil rights movement in progress, but the literal place where I lived was still racially segregated and ordered, and it had all the legacies of that whole history that came through our family. In terms of ceilings on what kind of education you could have, what kind of jobs people like me could get, the American version of caste. What that can do inside the home and it was not so for everybody, but for the family I lived in, we had folks who had tried to escape through being military involved. My father had gone into the Marines, had fought in the Vietnam War, came back with a lot of extra wounds having fought against racism in the South, then went out as a means of escaping, but nevertheless, getting wounded again, he came home. He has become an alcoholic and he is quite violent.
In my first home with my biological father, there was just a lot of domestic violence, mostly aimed at my mother. My mother escaped that, married a stepfather. Then there was another kind of domestic violence and violence aimed at children. He also was an alcoholic, also a veteran. So, I experienced another level of vulnerability in the home. I was molested as a child. I was always having to figure out how to get enough of the basic resources because we did not always have enough, and then called to help support my family in navigating a world because they did not have particularly good skills from education or circumstances that had limited them. I was the kid who was doing well enough in school to kind of be an adult before my time and try to help them navigate the system.
It was not an easy childhood by any means. I witnessed my brother and sister being harmed around me, but what I did find along the way were reminders of what I did know inside, about the fact that the circumstances that we are in are not the whole truth. They do not define who we are. They are not permanent structures.
For example, seeing my grandmother who had herself been raised up and through the post-Civil War. She was born in 1906. She lived and died at the end of the 20th century. She lived the entire course of an era in the United States, where the kind of segregated structure and its intersection with patriarchy, limits on what women could do was quite balkanized and quite firm so that she herself barely had enough education. She barely was educated out of elementary school, and the only job she had available to her was cleaning houses for other people. But she had found a way toward a spiritual depth that inspired her daily to get up before she had to, to centre herself and to be a resource for her family and her community.
Watching my grandmother find a way to translate something much more than she was given into a way of meeting these challenges. She was making her way out of no way. Watching her, on the one hand was an inspiration, but also feeling myself being met on some level in public educational spaces. I had teachers who saw something and would continue to sort of keep pulling me forward to affirm that I had something to offer. Even though I had had a very difficult and challenging set of circumstances within which to grow, that continued all the way through my time at home, the difficulties that I experienced in my family of origin. I also had this innate sense that there was more, and I saw enough support, outside of myself to keep me orienting toward the possible. I do think that that combination of an inner sense, but also really attuning myself to whatever signs that were outside that, yes, you can do this, you can survive this, you will be okay. There are ways of making it through this difficulty that if you keep inclining toward it, it will keep meeting you, and so here we are.
It is incredibly powerful, sharing what you have done and I want to recognize that it is really hard even to fully be able to fathom what it must be like as a tender little child having to go through those experiences, and yet, what for me is very affirming in what you have said is that capacity to do meaning making and to seek to be in a sense like the hero in your own life story and so much of that is coming out so beautifully in what you have shared, the idea that there are so many things we do not control in our environment, so many things that will never be perfect in the outer world, much as we quest to make it more perfect, and yet there are points of access, resources, supporting forces, individuals, moments, gestures from the outside, as well as these capacities from the inside that you will be able to observe.
You said something like, I wanted to always orient myself towards the possibilities. It is very profound.
Even in the midst of clear structures, there were barriers. And even with some heartbreak around the fact that I could see many people around me who had a lot of talent, brilliance, and capacity falling by the wayside. I could see that. For me, I feel fortunate that somehow, I was able to keep connecting with the signs that something more was possible.
Yeah. So that then ultimately catapults you into this University of Virginia college degree and then you go beyond, you do law school, you practise law, you come and start to teach. And was that at USF?
Yes. University of San Francisco, where I have taught my whole career, visiting a couple of times and a few other places, William & Mary and Berkeley. But really, my home has been at USF for these 26 or so years. It has been a while.
Amazing. We want to come to this path that you have trodden on, working on social justice issues and contributing a fairly unique lens to it through mindfulness. I am assuming that is not necessarily a very clear, concrete program that you launched right from day one, is that right?
Yeah, exactly. I was teaching these classes at USF and had created these classes that were orienting my students at taking the knowledge, skills and values of a traditional legal education and applying them to a deeper inquiry around, what is race and racism. Why is it that we keep seeming to make progress and then face backlash and retrenchment and have to start all over again? How do we understand the deep historical legacies that are always in the room as we try to do justice today? My effort to create places where we could address these hard issues that were close to my heart, because I was teaching these other things insurance and torts, but it was those kinds of questions about the promise of this country, of the United States, and of international law to help, support, the capacity of us as human beings to live in ways that open the door to all of our highest and best potential.
To me, having been born here and in this place, privileged to have this particular education, it was clear to me that part of what I would do as a law professor would be to try to find a way to turn us toward how it is that even with this, highest and best type of education, we still were missing the mark quite a bit. Because there was still a lot of suffering, a lot of people were unable to access and feel supported in reaching their highest and best individual and maybe socially constructed group potential. Why was that and really why was that?
One of the better answers to how we define the problem and therefore, what are the better answers to what kinds of possible solutions? Those are the things that drove me to say, we cannot just study the law and study the arguments and engage ourselves cognitively, although it is important to know those things. We have to figure out how to know what is at stake in ways that invited, kind of critical subjective experience, what we know from our own experience in the world and also invited us to learn from each other, that second person way of knowing. I was drawn, in other words, to thinking and experimenting with how we learn and how we know and what is relevant to know if we are really going to crack this problem. First of all, I was obviously doing my own inner searching work, trying to frankly, improve on the education I had gotten at the University of Virginia by bringing in this inner dimension and this interpersonal dimension of learning more skilfully through contemplative practices that I was engaged in.
Then I started to build out a network, a set of relationships with others who were doing something similar, maybe in different disciplines, but who were looking at different ways to deepen how we know and what we know and applying that. So, I was just experimenting with a way to bring that inner and outer together, in and around the most important questions that I was privileged to be able to help my students address in my law school classes. These questions of how we understand who we are in relationship to others, how we form a sense of ourselves in relationship to others, and how we enact a world together that, through these experiences and mindful of the experiences of others, might keep opening the doors to the possible. Bringing forth what Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi and others called a kind of love and action, mindful of people like Einstein and others who were always saying, we must support the individual, we now call them human rights, but this sort of notion of the individual in relationship to others and how we create more and more possibility for ourselves to thrive together.
I really wanted to do what I could do in those law school classrooms to kind of maximise the potential to address that. So, I started to bring this different way of teaching. We were not just reading the cases, reading the law books, but we were bringing our own stories to the floor. We were lifting our capacity to listen to each other, to notice what was happening emotionally, so deepening our emotional intelligence, clarifying the highest and best visions and values we could bring. I was trying to use that structure of a law school classroom to open that up and that led to the sort of more conscious articulation of a relationship between what I was calling and what I was experiencing and have been taught as mindfulness practices, connecting that then to these other pedagogical objectives, these other learning goals. All with this idea of trying to keep exploring the possibilities around remaking what we could do together using law, which is where I was using academia, where I am, but really open to other ways. Is it a greater spiritual path that we need to be on? I was integrating in a kind of spiritual way, but it was all trying to work with the system that we have, but also not take it for granted that the system we have was all we could do. That is what I have been about.
It is beautiful. So, energising to hear you talk about this. There is a sense I get here of progressive like unfoldment of things that you were not really very clear or sure about, when you started as to how and where it will go, but you had certain core pillars, really clarified for yourself. There is a sense I get of something that I find very special around in your work, which is that you are really trying to bring the inner and outer together like you said. It is like the outer work is the inner work. That is where your spirit gets tested. What is the point of going on those retreats and doing your prayer or mindfulness practice or what have you in the harsh light of day if you are not able to apply it practically to issues that really confront us in society.
What is that practice like? What is that practice where when you are having that heated debate or that argument, or you have this temptation to immediately reject or whatever it is, the other party or fight them, that you can hold back on that instinct and mindfully come to a different level of awareness, attunement, consciousness, capacity and all of that. That is what I see in your path, in your teaching, in your work, which is beautiful.
At a time when we are so emotionally aroused as a society and it is certainly happening in the general change making and social transformation work, but it is also happening in our relationships, at home and even just within our own selves, when you think about the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis that we are going through. So, this notion of emotional turmoil is basically present at every level of our human existence today. What is it that you have been able to innovate and hone and put out there and see work, when there are collectives that come together, small teams and a class, a group of people with a shared quest for something learning or some social movement. What are some practices that you have found that can be ritualised in that community? Once they do and it takes root, it kind of lifts their outer game to another level.
Wow! Thank you. That is a beautiful question. I will say I am a work in progress around discerning just the kinds of practices that avail, this kind of more embedded sense of how we move through these difficulties together. I am learning some things and seeing some things, but I am also a work in progress with this. I have two grounds of experimentation right now. I have an online course that I am doing, and I have a course here at the university that I am engaged with. I am working with law students, but I am also working with a kind of an intergenerational, year-long cohort group of folks who have committed to a year of practice. I am naming that because I think, in one case, it is like a multi-week course, where I get to experiment with some of the ways that practices and inquiry and relationship building together, I think, can help make some inroads into meeting the dynamics that you are naming more skilfully and embedding a way of doing that.
In the grand scheme of things, really just a few weeks, we take roughly the ordinary semester's length of time of engagement, 14 weeks. We condense it because we do a daylong retreat in the middle of that, which we have just recently done. We just bank some hours that way, and we end up ending a little bit shorter than a normal 14-week session because of that.
But that is on the one hand, and then on the other, this year long inquiry, we meet just once a month, several hours a month and then with resources to support inquiry and practice commitments through in the between sessions. Then, of course, there are others, the episodic one-hour presentation here and there. Hearing a little bit of feedback from folks and obviously my book is an intervention.
What I am seeing is that number one: personal commitments really are important. Personal commitments to practices that help us clarify our values, our intentions, the ethical commitments underlying what we do. Very important. Often skittering off of the conversation, it is hard to keep the ethical commitments in the conversation for a variety of reasons. But I believe that the work that I have been doing seems to reinforce that we really do need to create a space where we name, how we do what we do and why is really important. A foundation in a conversation around ethics and in tandem with that, a commitment to practices that unveil for us an almost organic ethics of how we live together in ways that support us to all of us and thriving. It is both the conversation and the making of intentional and ethical commitment as part of what we do, but also a commitment to the practices, so that we begin to evolve an understanding of why, how we do, how we move the world matters. How it is that our own way of being with each other is its own teacher about ethics and what we experience in the world is constantly teaching us where we suffer, where others suffer, how we can choose to respond to all of that rather than just being automatic reactivity.
I do believe that it is that combination of having a framework where you can point to what we are committed to and then also having practices that are personal and interpersonal in these classrooms matter. It matters that we come together as opposed to just trying to do everything separately on these devices, but having the practices, having the commitments together, not only on our own, but together and having some time, I believe what we are seeking to become more capable of within ourselves and together. Again, I come back to a kind of humility around the challenge of disrupting the dynamics that we are in and I do believe that, of course, we are always already in a world that we did not create that is impinging upon us, driving us in ways. And here, I have to talk about again a technological colonisation in a way, where we are all vulnerable to being formed in the ways and in view of the imperatives of an economic capitalist agenda, that frankly thrives on us being hyper emotionally triggered. We know that we are feeling ourselves in this emotional state that you named is not happenstance, it is again a feature of the world we live in right now, not a bug. So really finding ways to therefore stay engaged and to know that we are up against something to kind of clearly tether ourselves to something bigger and more than this environment. It will take the rest of our lives, I do not know, maybe I am wrong, maybe something will happen. I am open to being wrong here, I want to be wrong here, but, if the present be any guide, it will take a lifelong commitment to the kinds of intentions, objectives, and ethics of non-harming, of inclining toward the possible together of supporting each other and thriving. It will take a lifelong commitment to those intentions and then practises helping keep us tethered to those to the real possibilities, but also barriers, like awareness of what can get in the way with humility. We have to stay in that together.
I am looking at the different ways that that combination of commitments, practices and conditions that support us and learning together can be a feature of our lives and we need each other in this. I am working to figure out ways of helping make those circumstances available to more and more people.
Yeah. I am going to quote from an interview that you did, where you speak about social justice. You are saying, these social justice movements of all of our cultures, they seek to help us see that in addition to, one form of suffering like racial injustice, there are people who are systematically experiencing suffering and vulnerability because of the way we have organized ourselves. Perhaps it could be in some cultures, women, because the way they have arranged marriage or people with disabilities, because of the way we have arranged the accessibility in buildings and workplaces. Social justice is about looking at what surplus suffering is.
I think this is just very thoughtfully articulated. Social justice work is about looking at what surplus suffering is flowing from the way we have organised our society for the distribution of resources. It is like when I hear the expression surplus suffering, I am hearing you say something like, it is completely wasteful suffering, and it is not even suffering for a reason. At least, you know, if you are holding up great pieces of rock to build a cathedral, that is one form of noble suffering, but this is just surplus suffering. The answers will be unique to each culture and society. I really appreciate that it is not about a one size fits all that should emerge from some up on high and just kind of be everywhere. But then you say, "We must ask, where in our culture are the marginalised populations? How are the resources organised? Who is benefiting from the patterns of organisation, who is suffering? How have we embedded in our laws and policies a sense of who matters more and who matters less?"
I thought that was really very educative, very beautiful and thank you for that Rhonda. I also want to highlight that, here you are very invested and law is often a very natural foil for that, in social justice, and yet you have a very fresh voice and path to bring to this work because you have done so much of inner work yourself, you have not just merely emerged as somebody better, about some inequity in the world, but you are taking a lot of stewardship and ownership over how you show up, like you said. That is part of what you are inviting our social justice warriors to do. I think that is incredibly critical and so important to help grow our own capacity, to be able to approach these quests from a place where we can be the most positive agent of change that we can be.
There is a reflection you have done on these fundamental attributes for social justice work. I love these. Incidentally, I have been working on a set of principles for change making and I found so much commonality between some of the themes that are emerging in these 6 that I have read from you and the kind of things that I was codifying from my studies with Martin Luther Kings and the Mother Teresas and the Gandhis and Mandelas and others. Are you syncing with the 6 that I am talking about, like loving, kindness and compassion and others. Is that something that you could share with our audience?
Let us walk through them a little bit together because of course, I write these things and then I keep repeating them. So, I am happy to. But certainly, I will say loving, kindness and compassion are always maybe the top two for me as a foundation for this work. I am happy to maybe talk a little bit more about them. I had a reader who shared with me that they were reading through my book and maybe listening to the audio version of it that I read to myself, and they had this feeling that like, "Wow, she really seems to be mentioning the word compassion quite a lot." One of my readers said, let me do a quick search and see how many times the word compassion or some derivative of it shows up in her book and it was like over 700 times in a book of 300 or some pages. So really, it is on average of two to three times a page I am speaking about compassion as a foundation for this work.
By compassion I mean, the will to alleviate the suffering of another. It is distinct from pity and it is distinct from empathy taking on and feeling for another, feeling the suffering that another is feeling in or being able to cognitively or emotionally to understand what another is feeling is really important. But compassion is something different, it is about perhaps from sensing what another is feeling really seeing that there is a possibility for each of us to act in ways or to imagine in ways, it may be that we cannot do that much to alleviate the suffering of children right now who might be victimised by bombs falling on them in some unfortunate part of the world right now. We may not be able to do anything about it from where we are right now, but having the orientation toward compassion, the will, the desire to minimise; again, this is the kind of surplus suffering that we see in war making today is I think is important. The will to alleviate suffering is so important for me, underlying foundational orientation to the work that we have been talking about. So, compassion is really fundamental.
Then love and kindness, this is sort of orientation toward the friendly and the kind within ourselves. I believe within everyone and of course, some of us may manifest it more easily and more readily and more widely than others, but this sense that each of us almost as, I will use this metaphor, 'An aspect of the sun within,' and that we might, in ways we reduce to words or that we might just emanate in terms of how we are with each other, capacity for warmth and a capacity for again meeting that, which is warmth and emanating from others.
To me, this is really important, because we so easily get stuck in conflict, get stuck in our own habits of way of thinking and being in our own suffering, our own heartbreak. From that place of both knowing that and having the will to alleviate other's suffering, but also bringing this sort of kindness, then we can ask questions.
Back to your question before, about what are some things that work? Being willing to ask, create spaces where it is okay to be vulnerable together and to access the part of me that can turn toward you and ask what have you suffered? Where are you suffering right now? What can I help you hold right now? Creating spaces where we can meet each other and bring what is in need of healing and be met with some support because, again, we are always already embedded in relationships and some of us can help others just by being more grounded in our strength and then there will come a time when I might need you. So, creating those spaces where we can do that and get practice doing that, I think is really important. The foundation of compassion and love and kindness can support meetings just like that.
Beautiful. When I look at some of the moments in Gandhi and Martin Luther King, these very instructive sort of lives that relate to love and kindness, that relate to compassion, it is amazing how they were able to apply that. Of course, first and foremost to the very people that they were wanting to serve and support and advance, but also in a sense, their opponents, also those who are resisting their ideas and messages over maybe more powerful in the moment and the systems and structures than them.
In the case of Gandhi, he really felt for the British public. He was like, "When I'm asking you to peacefully pack your bags and leave India and allow us to determine our own destiny, I don't say that because it is going to economically hurt you. I say that because it's going to morally be the right thing for you, and you are morally really hurting right now with what you are doing. Martin Luther King brought some of that, famous conversations like I Have a Dream speech and everything.
This is such an important set of pillars that you have just given us love and kindness and compassion and really for everyone, including those that are being viewed as your resistors, your enemies, are the ones that are holding back progress. I do not know, what do you think of that?
No, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that aspect in, because I think it is quite easy for many of us, maybe we struggle applying love and kindness and compassion, even to ourselves, or we can more easily think of applying it or orienting toward people for whom we feel sympathy, for whom we feel an understanding of how and why their suffering is unfair, but it is not as easy for us to extend that branch of compassion and love and kindness in the direction of those that we see doing harm. Right now, I have to say, I think of those who are wanting to organise might and force as a means of enacting a structure or social control or power over others.
Again, to me, whether it is war making, whether it is the rise of authoritarianism and fascism and the ways of enforcing a sense of who we are and what is possible that threatens people's physical safety, where, by speaking, saying the wrong thing or associating with another person, non-harmfully can bring all kinds of force and harm into your life, up and into death. We know this. People's lives are being threatened. I find it hard to turn toward those who would kill another human being for speaking out against injustice, to turn toward that kind of tyrant with a view towards imagining a compassionate embrace of that person, but I think it is really important, it is something I do include in my own practice.
In a way, maybe that is one of the things that we are meant to help ourselves and others cultivate, when we are able to see such suffering in the world. I do not mean to be pollyannaish about this. I do not mean this sort of a bright siderism thing, but I do want to say that I always look for what is the lesson, and we are going through an incredibly hard time right now. Many parts of the world are feeling the slowly rising temperatures, maybe boiling temperature of a transformation from a more democratically engaged, more human rights-oriented ways of organising our society toward something less than that, more rights restricting, something that does feel more threatening to many of us and is more threatening to certain populations that get targeted.
In this time, where we are seeing the rise of these kinds of authoritarian types of ways of organising and people questioning whether democracy is worth the trouble, if you will. I mentioned democracy because in my own experience, looking around at the different ways we can organise society, it is not perfect, but it seems like the most consistent with the kind of aspirations that we have been talking about, enabling people to thrive as best we can and have a voice etc. Democracies are messy, to speak about this, but we know we are in a moment where the alternatives are gaining traction in certain areas. When I see all of that, I see organised systemic suffering, surplus suffering on the rise and I see those who are drawn toward that way as operating out of a certain kind of fear, by operating out of a certain kind of existential terror about the uncertainties that are fundamental to being alive as human beings. From that place of recognising that all human beings suffered like the basic existential reality of what it means to be these soft belly carbon-based beings in the world that we did not entirely create.
Many of us know what it is like to be afraid and to not know what the future holds, and in that place, any one of us can be drawn towards somebody who seems to have all the answers, some structure that seems to suggest at least people like me might be protected. I can understand that on a certain level. For me, these circumstances are at least inspiring me to seek help from my own experience, help me to be able to support others and seeing, that is the bait. The bait is you will be protected from the uncertainties if you just do these things and turn a blind eye to the suffering of these people. This life is so much bigger and more than that though, and we already have the blessedness of what I see as the abundance that is inherent in just being alive, and from that place, fear can be diminished and moderated without having to reach toward practices and policies that will harm other people, that put other people's lives and well-being at risk.
I feel like we are in a time where the practices that we have been talking about, if you really get orient toward this, you cannot help but meet that moment where you are tempted to either to close off and say, I am going to love up and care about these people and not those, or you are at a moment where you are like, I have to find a way to keep expanding. And so, when you speak about bringing love and kindness to those who are causing harm, and I am thinking of the most harmful are those in power and who want more power. Really, this is about trying to minimize the barriers to the scope of our compassionate concern so that everybody feels we are in one big system, one big earth, one pool of earth, where absolutely everything is connected. It really is not wise to put barriers around this message and this care. Even though we have no guarantee that it will get it in response. It is not about that. It is about seeing that this is the only way at this point.
We could spend a whole hour just to slow down, unpack, revisit and crystallise the many, powerful messages you just offered. They are coming from a very heartfelt place, and that is beautiful. I do not know if this makes any sense to you, one of the things to think about on that love and kindness and compassion front is that it is not something that you do as a sense of obligation to society or because you have been told by a certain scripture that is the right thing to do. You do it for your own self at some level because I feel like when you allow things like judgment, hate or othering of some kind to enter your consciousness, it is like your heart is getting less pure. Why not keep that heart really protected, pure in terms of your relationship with the universe? Any of those moments where those things happen, it is like you are doing a disservice to your own self.
I can. We can feel the way we are being corrupted by anger and fear. At least I can. In that sense, it is every bit about maintaining my own, more grounded access to love.
That is good. And that said, I do not see you as somebody who is shying away from the complicated issues in life and from engaging with them and seeking to reshape them, reform them and all of that. You are actively invested in all of that and yet you are offering this kind of principle of making sure it is done from a place of compassion which is beautiful. It is not like a weakening quality in you. It is actually a very illuminating quality in you.
It is not awakening. It is not bypassing, which is another thing that many people will worry about. Am I now just going to bypass all the hard issues? No.
I am looking through your other fundamental attributes, and in the space and the time we have, there are 1 or 2 that I feel like we have already covered in the conversation, for example, you really highlight the importance of the don't know mind. Our ability to engage in ongoing learning. One way I like to think about is that whatever it is that you might know about yourself and the laws of the universe and what has gotten you to this point in your life and everything, nature is constantly evolving, constantly shifting and constantly keeps us guessing. Yogananda, who is the spiritual teacher from the 20th century and someone I draw a lot from. He once said, "Spirit is infinite and then nature is finite and therefore, nature must constantly evolve because otherwise, how is that spirit going to be able to express itself with this infinitude of capacities and potentialities if nature was static and it was not always changing?"
I try to remind myself of that to justify what you just said, regardless of how strong you are, how powerful you are, how successful you are, reassured you are, confident you are, there is always something that is going to be changing and I have seen that in my classroom, I show up year upon year and I teach this successful and strong in good class and many of the themes in it are very similar to what you so beautifully described that you have evolved and been doing at University of San Francisco and the law school, which I am doing in Columbia Business School. But anytime I become complacent, I just feel like I nailed it. I can just go to the class and have us recreate that magic, something or the other shifts and changes, and I get humbled again to realise that it is a constantly evolving game.
Yes. I mean and also of course, we have been fortunate to be alive today, to be the beneficiaries of so much, scientific expert learning about the nature of life and the world in which we live and yet, as you say, there is so much that we do not know and even if we collectively knew it all, learned all, researched all, any one of us is only right able to take in so much. So, that quality of not knowing, I will say also one of the traditions of the meditative approaches that I draw on. It is an approach from the Zen Buddhist tradition, the peacemaker approach to that created by Bernie Glassman and taught by Roshi Joan Halifax, teacher, and friend of mine.
Uh, we had Roshi here in the podcast, many months ago. What a beautiful soul.
Beautiful soul, but that the peacemaker tradition of Upayas, particular articulation that I have received as a teacher and training in that approach has these 3 ethical foundational commitments. One is this not knowing quality, you recognise the extent to which whatever we know, there is always an irreducible quantum, like there is an amount or a gap we are never going to fully close, no matter how skilful we are, that will represent that which we do not know, and I really think cannot know. I have that sense that from this place we are still evolving as these beings. There are certain things that we will never know. So that not knowing mind, joined together with that willingness to bear witness to suffering, which is what we have been talking about in the entire conversation. Then, the third is willingness to take compassionate action.
Those 3 commitments are the foundational commitments of the Zen Peacemaker Tradition that amplifies a lot of the work that I do.
Beautiful. The last piece that I want to invite you to highlight for us is around the themes in any of these social justice kind of work, around patience and steadfastness, and I have also been reflecting on how critical it is to see change, transformation, social evolution as a continuing quest that humanity has been on for the past centuries and is involved with today and then will probably need to be for many centuries ahead rather than like it must happen here now and this is the perfect world that I expect needs to be created and why do not we have it like tomorrow? And maybe if we just change who is going to be in the White House or we get congress to pass this law or we throw some paint somewhere on an important painting and art museum, that will get people so roused up that it will happen. That may not be what they are thinking, they may have a strategic roadmap to the change that many people with such good intentions out there are questing for, but I do sense sometimes that there is a lack of this patience in our world.
Yes. Patience and steadfastness for the long journey, if you will, that seems implicitly being called for. As a person who has spent so much time in academia, I cannot help but feel that part of the reason why we have such a challenge with that is exactly the way we are trained in these beautiful, well-resourced institutions who promise all the time in exchange for a certain amount of money. We can prepare you through this one course, or maybe in a serious, long arc of 4 years or 3 more years. Somehow you can master whatever this field and you can understand through this research project or that book, this huge, complex aspect of reality that we seek to study.
I am trying to figure out a way to say this without suggesting, I believe we really need to start all over with how we think of education in these times. But I do think part of why we struggle so much with steadfastness and with patience is we are constantly reinforced and rewarded for its opposite. We are constantly reinforced and rewarded for, "what can you do? what have you done for me this quarter, this week? How do you prove it?" In different ways, everything we have been talking about, but this in particular patience and steadfastness with regard to hard issues is, I think, extremely countercultural. We are constantly being told, "Wait, what? Okay, where is the project? Where is the class? What can you show me that proves that this one intervention can do?" I mean, this is how all the systems and structures that we turn toward for helping us credential ourselves, for doing things in the world, that is what they run on.
Long term patience and humility about being a lifelong, you can extricate those values if you try, but they do not leave. When they go to law school, for example, we are not leading with it. What we are teaching you to do is be humble in the face of the prevalence of conflict as a feature of human existence, not a bug. It is what it is to be alive. We meet each other with conflict. How do we enact ways of meeting that and how can we become students of that for the betterment of ourselves and each other for the rest of our lives? And yet, if we cannot develop that kind of commitment, I do think, we are going to keep in our efforts to meet these challenges, we are just going to embed in the response really a sophisticated reaction or training. We are going to embed in our answer, the seeds of continuing the problem. I do believe that is what we are up against when it comes to the dominant modalities for addressing social justice issues. We are drawing on all of the power over versus power with dynamics that we have experienced. We are drawing on all the kind of limited approaches to identifying the problem that got us here, to thinking about ourselves and our people that got us here. We have got to find ways that are constantly about deepening our ability to drop what has not worked and to really seize upon what does. And that to me, it is about opening up more of my heart and I love feeling joyful connection with other people and, whatever is getting in the way of that feels like it needs to be dropped, but in traditional ways of thinking about problem solving, heartfulness and joyful connection usually do not feature as important dynamics that help us access solutions. So in the future, I am going to be leaning more toward trying to find ways and I have been in my work to bring in what we can feel in our bodies, about what works to connect us, rather than to divide us and to drop more and more of what does not. That is real change, but it is a little bit disruptive because that is not what we have organised all these great, powerful institutions to orient toward yet.
Wow! Again, just incredibly deep and rich. So much to take from that. Somehow, I got reminded of the story. It is very microcosmic relative to the macrocosmic that you just painted for us, but it epitomises some of the things that you are talking about.
There were these leaders who had come to meet Gandhi and had discovered as they were waiting for Gandhi to show up that morning that there had been some kind of a scheduling flub by his secretary, and all of them had been given the same time, and so each had their own one on one needs to spend time with Gandhi and here they were going to have to figure out how to sequence and stuff. They were arguing heatedly with each other as to whose issue was more important, who really needed to first meet with Gandhi and all that, and then Gandhi walks down and he sees them in this huffing, puffing state. He just looks at them and says, "Hey, we are not going to do any meeting right now. I am going to take a brisk walk, and whoever wants to come with me can come." So, all of them, of course, line up and they are marching there with Gandhi. He walks so fast that for most of them, they are not used to that kind of briskness to their walk and so they are stumbling and awkwardly trying to keep pace with this elderly man. As they are doing that, they are starting to laugh at each other and tease each other, the calming effect of exercise too and nature as well and all of that starts to play in and by the end of the walk, they were just like this playful group of young, little children and that was it.
I see what you are saying about connecting about joy and Gandhi took a very non-linear approach towards resolving their issues. Rather than a logical approach to saying, let us look at the schedule and let us get them to a joyful, calm place and then naturally, so the solutions will come, the desire for co-operation and giving and taking will come and good things will happen.
Let's literally walk together. I will say that this past weekend, when I did my retreat with my law students, we did a walking meditation like that. We had done our personal individual practice. We had done individual walking, and then we did a group walk around, just a kind of a meandering walk on campus, silently, but together. There is something quite powerful in that story and it really resonates with me as an example of the kind of non-linear, non-obvious way of delivering ourselves to a practice. What could be easier than walking together? That can work a certain kind of reformation of separate minds, separate bodies, separate projects, all of the things that we fundamentally have to disrupt if we are going to create the new ways of being that we have been describing here.
As I try to synthesise the incredibly rich arc of what we have gone through, there are a couple of themes coming to my mind and I will maybe end with this and ask you to react to this and test these with you.
One, is this realisation that in what you have shared with us, you have really brought to focus how our very basic system of cohabiting and living, which democracy is at risk and you made a very articulate case for the importance of having us be aware of the threats to the system and finding our own loving paths towards withstanding those threats and addressing them. You talked about human rights as a key part of what the institution of democracy really upholds, and at the same time, I actually see in everything that you have shared with us, a balancing of that, an appreciation that democracy is not an entitlement, it is a commitment, and it is something that requires all of us rather than just as bequeathed to us. There are, as some, like Gandhi might have said, human duty is not just human rights and some of those are inner duties, they are about the inner work, like you said, the inner work of racial justice, social justice, any pursuit of goodness. I am seeing that in the arc of our conversation. The beautiful balance between the outer and the inner.
The other thing I am seeing is how do you get there, and you are challenging the idea of this logical, very structured, very sensorily fact based milestoning practical project outcomes. What am I going to get in the first quarter and the next quarter from the funding I'm going to give? The promise and commitment I make to you is that you are going to get this thing very tangibly mastered, one year or four years or what have you.
That sort of Western model that has led to a fair amount of progress and advancements in the world, wealth, and power accumulation in the world, what have you. At the same time, we are kind of seeing that it is running its limits now, you keep multiplying that and what are you going to get? A planet that is very fatigued from just indulging every hunger.
On the other side, having grown up in India, I see almost like an eastern ethos, seeing nature unfolding in multitudinous ways in ways that you are just a little dot in that ocean of creation and yet a dot that has the capacity that if you tap into them, can manifest so much goodness and greatness, but it is non-linear. It is not predictable. It is unfolding. It is intuitive rather than just sensory from the outside. It will make you stand up like a Martin Luther King one day and as he gave in his address at Selma, he said, "How long, not long, but like the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." You will have that orientation towards possibilities and yet you may not be able to precisely develop a quarterly plan or an annual plan and keep completely to it and because that unfoldment needs to happen in its own natural interplay between you and the universe. I am seeing a lot of that come out in what you were saying.
Yeah, it's really life. To me, I just recently reread a quote from the great teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, in which he is summarising that his sense of where he belongs, his home and that tour, which his entire practice approach inclines him is toward being at home in this richness that we call life and the multiple complexities of life. Being at home in all of these things, the known, the unknown, the ever changing is what we are talking about. Because once we can find ourselves at home, I can readily be at ease and at home with you. I am already at home. I don't really need; I am not reaching out. And so, in fact, just as you know, as I closed to say, the effort that I have been making to find ways through law and these other traditional, received disciplines and institutional spaces in some way create space for the kinds of awakenings, if you will, consciousness shifting that we have been talking about here. It allied with my friends in science and in the different disciplines. In a way, it has really been about both and of bringing those contemplative approaches to those systems, but also kind of challenging how we do contemplative practice to enact or embed the aspirations of those external systems so that we do not see it as all about just me and mine nor do we see those systems as not being about me and mine. But in other words, we do start to see the multiple complexity that wherever we are, we are invited into a deeper questing.
Lastly, I will just say, when I was in law school, I had the good fortune of being on the law review, which is an opportunity to write and to structure this intellectual inquiry that some law students are able to get. One of my first projects on law review was to review the scholarship of others who wanted to be published at the University of Virginia Law Review and to review a paper called the Question that Killed Critical Legal Studies. The question right there to me was, I had not heard about this thing called critical legal studies, and I was so curious, what was the question that killed it? And the question was, what would you put in its place. Which is always the question that change agents are asked, right? If you are going to try and change the system, what would you put in its place?
My work has been about, yes, helping us see the value of democracy and human rights, but also seeing some of the ways that those constructions of the individual rights bearing entity misperceived this beautiful life that embeds in it pre-responsibilities, not just responsibilities, we who are gifted with being alive together have responsibilities that come from someplace we never will know the root of. That engagement with how do we transform using the highest and best? Yes, human rights democracy is the highest and best, but it could be better. Yes, bringing in contemplative and spiritual practices, but they need to be mindful of these systems that we are up against. That is the work, and I really honour what I feel is an allyship with you, that we, from our very different backgrounds and experiences, see something important about doing just this. I am honoured to be in this conversation and may it continue in ways seen in that scene from here.
The heart is very full. Thank you so much, Rhonda. Let this last heartfelt expression from you be the final words of our podcast for now. But I know that all my listeners are joining me and cheering you on in this beautiful work. You talked about visualising the sun, the source of light within us, it is also the source of energy in the world. One thing I discovered in researching for writing my book is how incredible it is, but at the very centre of the sun, they have this thing called the sun's inner core and that is responsible for 1% of the sun's volume as a sphere. But it is actually generating 99% of the energy that you and I, we all live with. 99% of the energy is coming from that 1%. That is what you are doing. You are reminding all of us to go to that light within, go to the source of energy, but then practise these mindfulness ways of being and then create those spaces, locally between us and those we converse with and then collectively in the world at large. What a beautiful life's mission.
Thank you so much. Cheering you on. Wishing you all the best!
Reflecting back the same and cheering you on as well. Thank you.
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