Resources for Teaching Mindfulness by Donald McCown Diane Reibel & Marc S. Micozzi

Author:Donald McCown, Diane Reibel & Marc S. Micozzi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

How and Why Mindfulness Can Help

Addressing the challenges of racism and other forms of Othering in the context of mindfulness may not be easy for any of us. We may encounter any number of obstacles and objections—from a concern that doing so departs from the noninstrumental foundations of mindfulness, to, as noted above, a claim that as we simply practice—release attachments and release a view of the self or embrace oneness—problems such as these will naturally dissolve. I want to suggest that, like other teachers over the years, I view the question of instrumentalism versus noninstrumentalism through a lens large enough to contain and indeed merge the two. What we might call instrumentalism here or elsewhere (e.g., in the invocation of a loving-kindness meditation) may be better seen as a path to the noninstrumental. It may be that the greatest gift of mindfulness to the world is its capacity to help us see these patterns in our lives and in the world more clearly, to experience our inherent interconnectedness, and from there, to assist us in acting more effectively and compassionately in response to the race and other identity-related conflicts that plague our world.

So then, what, if anything, might we do to help minimize pervasive-biased reactions and reactivity to the racially, culturally, or otherwise “different”? Through more than 10 years of engaging with law students and mindfulness practitioners seeking greater understanding of race in our daily lives, I have been working to evolve a set of practices that support not only working with differences that may arise (and sometimes painfully), but also bringing greater understanding to bear on how they operate and impact experience in the world. I call these practices ColorInsight practices.

As we all know, as a general matter, mindfulness practices assist us in becoming aware. This state of awareness encompasses the multitude of feeling tones, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions by which we know the world, and the patterns and habits by which we have become conditioned to respond to these perceptions and stimuli. Naturally then, mindfulness may assist us in becoming aware of habits and patterns associated with the phenomenon of race in our lives.

As the experience of race is embodied and connected to thoughts, sensations, perceptions of likes and dislikes and so on, mindfulness practice provides limitless opportunities for enhancing awareness not merely of racial difference, which alone may mean nothing, but of the many, various, and mostly subtle ways in which we relate to these differences. Over time and with practice, mindfulness brought to bear on this field of experience in our everyday lives can lead to insights about how these perceptions shape our own actions and those of others in ways which reflect these subtle mental and social-interactional dynamics. This awareness is what I refer to as mindfulness-based ColorInsight. Mindfulness-based ColorInsight can assist us in seeing what there is to see in the realm of race and color in our own lives, acknowledging as my colleague did how these issues impact us. This insight leads us to compassionate action.

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