It's important to notice when we're too focus on that sense of our bounded ego based separate identity, and you know, to be in engaged in a kind of set of practices that can deliver us when we're getting stuck. Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I talked to law professor and mindfulness leader Ronda McGhee about her book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice. In this episode, we discuss our innovative approach to healing racial divides using mindfulness.
Randa argues that when we bring awareness and compassion to ourselves, relationships, and the environment, we invite healing and connection. We also touch on the topics of education, spirituality, liberation, democracy, and community, so that further Ado I bring you Ronda McGee. Wow, I'm really excited to talk to you today, and I thought we could just dive in because I you know, let's just have an informal chat, you know, yes, let's do. Thank you and thank you for the invitation to have
this chat. I'm a fan of your work and really just appreciating what you're offering right now in the world that needs who you know, so many different sources of support and I see you as definitely offering that, and I appreciate that very much, you know, thank you so much for saying that. And I feel the same way
about you. At your name just kept coming up among so many people that I follow and that I love, like Sharon Foldberg and my friend Corey Mascara and who are meditators, and your work just kept cropping up, and I love it. I absolutely love it. So yeah, I thought a really good place to start would be a little bit about your your early childhood experiences. This is the Psychology Podcast, after all. Would you feel comfortable talking
about that a little bit? Yes, Yes, I was born in North Carolina to you know, to parents who you know, have their own heritage and legacy in the soil and social and cultural context of the Southern United States. I was actually born in North Carolina. My parents, my mother is from North Carolina. My father was from the Gulf coast of Mississippi, you know, which has some you know, Biloxi in this part of Mississippi is known as a place that has at least some appeal for those who
delight in gambling, I guess, and just coastal living. But to be a black man growing up in that part of the country was not so much filled with that. In fact, when he was growing up in the you know, the forties and fifties, it would have been illegal for him to enter into the water actually in many parts of the coastline. And so my father actually kind of left Mississippi and joined the Marines during a time of war. He served in the Vietnam War. And my mother really, yeah,
was he My dad was in the Marines. He was in the Air Force, in the Air Force. Yeah, but you know, I mean service, Yeah, during the time of war. So, you know, and my mother had, you know, worked for a shirt factory and done done other kinds of you know, low skilled working class you know employment, and none of them, neither of them had gone to college. And so I say all that to say, you know, I'm like so
many people in the United States. On the one hand, you know, somebody who's benefited from all of the ways that prior generation or two more have struggled to open up opportunity more broadly for people whose whose backgrounds don't afford them a lot of opportunity. We were, you know, relatively poor growing up. You know, all of the ways that the history of enslavement and segregation, impact of family
were present. So impoverishment, you know, alcoholism was something that my family experienced and I witnessed, and then also some of the follow on effects that can happen from that, including physical abuse, domestic violence in my home. And then subsequently my mother and father divorced, married a stepfather who also another military veteran, this time in fact the Air Force. And nevertheless, we saw we saw similar patterns of alcohol abuse and abuse in the household that impacted me as
well directly as well. So you know, I, you know, I at the same time, I had the good fortune of being somehow well suited for or you know, the way we study in public schools. And and and I say that intentionally. I mean it's not to say that there aren't other ways we could be doing education that could
bring more of us along. But I certainly had the kind of capacity for patients for you know, long term commit you know, sort of persistence and all of the sorts of things that can coupled, when coupled with some kind of ability, which I think we all have to learn, can make one excel. So school was a place where I actually did find validation and found a relatively safe
place for me to to grow and develop. And certainly without the teachers and the community that I found there, and the you know, the affirmation of my abilities and my value that I found consistently through my own personal public school experience, I wouldn't be here with all of that. So yeah, that's a little bit of my path. Thank you so much for sharing that. I hope it wasn't
too painful to talk about. Well. I have thought about it, and you know, done some work on this, right, So it's actually not terribly painful, but I and it is something that I think is important for us to look at, for all of us, because those difficult things, as you know, are part of who and how we are wherever we are. Absolutely, I was wondering, you know, just personally in school, did did you have many experiences of racism that impeded your
ability to learn and grow? Well, you know, it's a good question because I think it implicit in that is this question of what do we think of when we think of the term racism? I think sometimes answer the question too right, right, what we tend to think of it as like these explicit So we think of racism as like a personal characteristic. We've been sort of trained. Many of us are working with this broadening of our understanding of what racism might be to include more subtle, systemic,
maybe unconscious or less than explicit manifestations of it. But I think for many of us at a certain age, we really imbibe this message, and most I think most of us in the US still today are working with a kind of a core definition of racism that is about, you know, kind of a personal commitment to an ideology and practices that reflect it, that are committed to an idea of categorized humanity, right, putting place in human beings in these categories of race, being placed in a category
of ourselves, and then rank ordering groups and therefore individuals who fall within those groups based on notions of implicit values culture, sometimes religious, sometimes languages. There are lots of different inputs of the ideas we have imvibed about race and racism, and so there are many dimensions of that.
Of course, there certainly can be this Again, the traditional, I think, kind of core paradigm that we still work with is like an individual who was committed to these ideas and pervade, you know, put promulgating them and maybe performing a certain kind of like outsized with the hood and the you know, the swastikas. Maybe an explicit commitment to these values and ideas is kind of, I think, still the core hope you think of when you think
of racism and what it looks like. But of course more subtle forms and systemic collective forms are the ones that are you know, the water in which we swim, the air that we breathe. And so when I think about your question of like did racism impact me, I would say that there are just a lot of ways. Oh my god. Well, first of all, you know, I grew up exactly like I grew up in desegregating Virginia,
I mean North Carolina and Virginia. And I say desegregating just to underscore that it was an active aspect of my experience, that we were in process. And I wouldn't
say that that process was ever fulfilled. In fact, I you know, we could talk about some of the ways that the efforts were dismantled, even in the latter part of my experience of public school in the South, but certainly, you know, I was a child who was bussed across town to help accomplish these goals of a more integrated public school scenario, and you know, what are the impacts of being a part of that social experience? Positive and negative.
But what I'll say is one of the things that I saw, certainly most of us who grew up in desegregating circumstances saw, you know, public schools that were very sensitively constructed to maintain appeal to white body families. So teaching staffs that were disproportionately white not integrated in the same way as maybe the classrooms. Evenmore so, most of my teachers were white, and most of of course the things that we learned in ways that were not always obvious,
were shaped around a kind of white Southern sensibility. That means that certain books were not taught available. These were things that I had to find on my own. So for me, racism then showed up in those much more subtle ways of yeah, of like what was available, what I was able to learn, what I was able to study, what I wasn't and by whom you know with them, what kinds of teachers and what kinds of experience experiences did they bring. But with all of that said, you know,
I can think of and I want to say this explicitly. Nevertheless, you know, the teachers, the white body teachers who were there, most of whom in my experience, were at least making an effort, you know, to to do what they came to do, which is to help identify and you know, move through or support students with some potential in the conventional sense. And so I can certainly think of and have in my like pantheon of teachers that I really appreciate.
You know, a lot of white teachers who were I can think of, you know, a couple in particular, who were very, very instrumental in terms of their manifestation of let's say, some sort of a racial equity commitment such that they whatever they may have been raised with, because again, these were people who were disproportionately raised in the South, and with racist ideology and teachings having formed them, many of them, you know, nevertheless, were some of my you know, mentors,
and you know, help help identify opportunities for me and so on and so forth. So I think it's it's not. And then when going to university it was, I would say I saw more explicit examples of racism impacting me. For examples just in my first year at the University of Virginia, lovely school, but having examples of things like you know, instructors not having a negative reaction to me wanting to write about For example, I had a paper topic that I proposed comparing an analysis of segregation in
the southern United States with apartheid in South Africa. Today, I don't think people would think of that as like a shocking proposed experiment or you know, intellectual inquiry. But the particular teacher that I had, of teaching assistant that I had was just a gast How could they even
be considered even remotely similar? Again, a white bodied male teacher who was just coming from a perspective where something that was normalized in the US, as you know, part of our culture could not possibly be you know, this was in the eighties when we were in that anti apartheid struggle. It was quite you know or you know, seeing the seeing apartheid as a certain kind of evil that we needed to all many of us, you know, who were at all progressive, were thinking, we must that's
an evil. But we're on the other hand, Southern segregation, well, there's so many justifications. So that's an example, you know, being sort of having my own education and my intellectual interests sort of filter through that lens of a kind of orientation toward whiteness that I think is a legacy of our you know, our racism and our white supremacy. So those are you know, the more subtle ways. It wasn't until I came to California actually and heard the
inward hurl that me the first time. Oh well, no, that's once maybe once before that when I was in Richmond, Virginia, but San Francisco, Richmond, Virginia. So it's when it comes to those experiences whereby personal racism in the form of you know, the the epithets and the you know, the kinds of physical threat. This can happen in Richmond, Virginia or Hampton, Virginia as well as Half Moon based California or San Francisco. This is American culture. Yeah, thank you
for all those differentiations and for telling that story. I actually do see value in differentiating between personal racism and systemic racism and acknowledging that both exist in lots of complex ways. So I really appreciate you telling that story. Hey everyone, I'm excited to announce that the eight week online Transcend Course is back. Become certified in learning the latest science of human potential and learn how to live
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you're kind of inroad into mindfulness for us? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I write coffee like, hey we should pause? Yeah, no, absolutely, I didn't. I know, there are some, you know, people who grew up with parents who were meditated. Not No, I grew up in a kind of a Southern Christian context, and uh so I will say that, you know, a kind of a center in prayer, kind of meditation was very much a part of, you know, kind of the
context within which I grew up. I definitely had a grandmother who was have been called to the ministry herself. And so what I, as a very little girl witnessed when I would spend time with my grandmother, which I did fairly frequently. My parents were splitting up, so we were spending a lot of time there. I'd see my grandmother get up, you know, before dawn, well before she had to according to the things she needed to do for others or to make a living, and just spend
time in what I later learned. Right first, it was a little girl seeing the light coming up from out from underneath her closed bedroom door and knowing having been taught that like this is Grandma's time right for her own cultivation devotion, devotional practices, and later learning these this
was a time of prayer and centering. She would then follow that up with often she would come out and we would see her then reading scriptures, more prayer and praise and worship, and then you know, from there getting everybody up and going, you know, getting us fed and getting us off to preschool or wherever we needed to go. And so I definitely saw that kind of devoted self
cultivation practice. But of course it wasn't called my influence, right, and so it wasn't until you know, I had gone to university and come out to California and was in between law school and starting my first job as a lawyer when I just realized I had been studying for so long. By then, I had also gone into Army ROTC and Spay for school mostly and also because it's a great way to learn certain things, but not because I'm pro military. Let's just say, I'm kind of a pacifist.
Let's just say at this point, but I did, do you know, Army ROTC. I'd studied, you know, undergraduate, I had done graduate school and sociology and law school, and I'd just been very you know, focused on all these you know, ways of developing and conventional ways, like so many students and those of us who are trying to make it in the us, and here I was, for the first time in a long while, maybe the first time in my adult life, with I mean, finished one
major project, finished taking the bar. My job wasn't going to start for another few couple of months, and I just didn't know what to do with myself. I had just been so you know, so trained, my mind had been so trained to be constantly doing that I really
could barely relax. And it just seemed to me something inside spoke of a need to like reconnect to some kind of nurturing, restorative way of being, because I mean, I just sort of had a sense that this was not a good way to start my new career to be this kind of overwhelmed and overwrought. So I started, like many other people, just reading things. My partner is interesting. My partner is a His background is in engineering and
he's a patent lawyer. But his cultural heritage is that he has his parents immigrated from India, so he's not personally a meditator. But he had a book on his shelf that was called the Blagavad Gita for Daily Living, and so he you know, and there's a whole another story about that about how as a child of immigrants from a culture which does meditate coming to the US and kind of acculturating and assimilating called forth this sort of you know, putting to one side of all of that.
So he definitely wasn't even reading this book, but there it was on the shelf, and I read it and found in it descriptions of one pointed meditation kind of way of calming and centering the mind, specifically offered as a translation of practice for daily living in the Western context.
So it was being offered by an Indian American immigrant whose name was Eknath Estoran, right, So he had written this books specifically to support this translation and this kind of you know, sharing of these practices to those of us in this culture. So and I just name that because you know, sometimes when we think about how we come to these practices, we can be concerned about appropriation.
We can be concerned about you know how we often don't name the often Asian heritage cultures very diverse in
amongst themselves. But these you know, cultures that we are privileged to have received these teachings from and to recogn we'd often you know, often don't recognize the gift nature of how we you know how they came to be here, and that there was this beautiful conscious inter play and interaction of cultures that I think is again part of the genius of the American experience experiment, however difficult it
is for us to hold it. Yeah, So for me, it was reading first and really experimenting at home and just feeling like, oh, right away, like there was at least something here, not something easy for me to actually practice, but something that with practice I might from through which you know, with practice, I might experience some greater ability to calm myself and to support myself on this journey.
And so that's where that's actually how it started, you know, in my twenties, reading books, trying to sort of steady myself,
save myself in a certain way. And it's interesting, you know, because even though I was raised in a Christian household, there was some way in which, probably because of the way I've been doing certain kinds of mind training and higher education for Salon, I needed a way of entering into these practices that specifically spoke to how to cultivate, you know, and work with the qualities of the mind. And you know that really spoke about, you know, a
kind of almost psychology of well being. That's what we can call it now. It wasn't called that, but in other words, something that straight Christianity in the way that I had been taught it did not so much explicitly offer. So this is how I ended up, I think, just feeling a little bit more drawn to these teachings as a support. Cool. I'm proud of your uniqueness in the space because you've brought together two things that are so important in the world today, but I don't see them
going together as that frequently. So I want to brag about you, is my point, because you made this connection, and I'm wondering sort of so when did that career start where you brought you may have this, you had your personal awareness that wow, a lot of these mindful techniques that you that you're reading about really can help heal racial divides, can really help with the inner work that we all can do. When did you start to
form these connections? Because there is something really unique about that that that I associate with Ronda McGee, Like there is like like I think Ronda McGee when I think about that, and that is kind of special. So I was worrying if you're kind of comment on that, Yeah, thank you. You know, yeah, it is challenged sometimes to take that in. But I but I work with with sort of you know, really just with some people with humility being in some sort of right relationship with with
this journey. And so I thank you for the question, and also for the acknowledgment. I really do appreciate it. I mean it, Yeah, no things, So I would just say that, you know, it's hard to pinpoint any one moment, partly because you know, these are the sources of things that just immerge in a way from one's own life experiences. And in eight I think passions, orientations, if you will, I think I was drawn always to more deeply trying to understand these divisions that we seem to have somehow
inherited and invested in on so many different levels. And we're constantly seeming to try to reinvest in, rearticulate, you know, every generation, every generation, right, I know, I always think about that. I always think about, like, can we ever reach a generation where we just learned from our past like completely, like we're all you know, we're like you know, what we're done with all that? It seems like we have to work really really hard. Doesn't this gutt to
do that? I mean, because I do think I have that saying. I have had this conversation with friends just this weekend, like, wow, it looks like we just keep things aspects of it was where I come in as a psychologists. There a certain aspects of human nature that make it likely that certain things will be created each generation. But they're also parts of human nature that can allow us to override it, right, and that's that's where you come in, and that is exactly right where we come in.
I think those of us who somehow are I don't even know how we get here, I don't know, but we're certainly drawn to question how we could do things differently.
And to me, you know, just growing up, it was just so clear that there was so much unnecessary pain and division and missed opportunity for joy and and just like really feeling the miracle of what it means to be alive that's coming through all of this sort of acculturation to meet us versus them, you know, me versus you, and then us versus them, and then you know, fear and the kind of machinations around how I can have enough, and it just you know, even as a very little girl,
these questions about who we are fundamentally as human beings, the sense that we were all one human family, which is something I think my grandmother sort of conveyed in
interpretations I like, we need a grandmother like these. But like there's always a sense that like, yeah, I mean, could we lived in a very segregated, you know, neighborhood where I grew up it was like all black folk except you know a couple of white men who ran some stores that we would go to, right, some of the grocer but otherwise, you know, the original neighborhood that I grew up in in my kindergarten, completely all black, And yet there was this sort of teaching that like, actually,
we're all guys, children, We're all really one family. You know, that's forgotten who we are, And that was something that resonated with me in it. It never felt like it was just a teaching. It never felt like it was some story like a metaphor. It always felt like, well, of course, you know, and you could just tell we're all so similar in every kind of way, and yet
we're so deeply trained for division. And so I think because of my own being drawn to that question, how can we both both try and minimize the harm that comes from the legacies we've all, you know, grown up in and with. How can we minimize you know, work for justice in other words, But at the same time, keep our hearts open to the you know, to these mini missed opportunities for connection. Keep our hearts open to
what you're and your writing. I think called the sort of existential kind of gratefulness to be a quit, yes, existential gratitude right like we're right, you know, how can we keep that? Which you know, again to me, always seem like an innate like, of course, how can we keep those How can we do both those things at once?
That's the kind of a core koan, if you will that I feel like my particular embodiment as a black you know, racialized as I call it, because you know, on the one hand, I accept these identity terms and talk about them and in some ways, you know, brow but on the other hand, at the same time, know that these are just illusory ways we have of difining
ourselves and others. And you know, as much as we can keep clear that to use those terms is not to reduce our entire sense of ourselves to those terms. It can help us with this sort of perspective that I think is is you know, what's called for when we, if we ever, are going to find a way to not keep recreating the same pain and hierarchy and work up justice every single generation. Yeah, there are illlutionary ways
of dividing. There are definitely ways of dividing, and like people have made those choices intentionally to use that as one of the main dividing ways opposed to the million other things about a human or an individual that we could focus on. You know, so much of the beauty of the complexity of being human is just reduced to that that one thing. And so yeah, I hear you,
you know, reading so much of your work. I mean we could talk all day, right, I mean there's so much you've you know, you've you've talked, You've have this this whole five part uh, you know, ground y, I can go through the whole thing, grounded. Let me just read them so it's on the record. Can I do that at least because they're just kind of because for so much I want our listeners to hear about your work.
But so you have you the kind of ground this this the stages of the inner work process, with mindfulness, with grounding. It's part one. Part two is seeing. Part three is being. That's my favorite. From allowed to I'm allowed to pick a favorite. I like them, like them all three because and I resonate most because of my own work, you know, I really, I really love the being doing and the existential awareness all that stuff. I love that. That's my jam. Part four, yes, Part four
is doing. I was like, I don't know about that, but here you are doing in your own way and I'm doing it and I'm doing it. Yeah, exactly totally. And then part five although that this part five actually might be my favorite, liberating liberating. Can we jump Can we just jump right to the liberating because we don't have like five hours right to go through all that.
And I really deliberate, and I really I I do bring these up because I want our listeners to least get it on the record for them to hear, and then for them to want to go and read more of your work. For sure, I really recommend people that. But in the interest of time, can you kind of tell us, you know, what does it take to get to that point of liberation and what and how do
you define liberation? You know, be different. You know, through the centuries, through the course of human history, people have different thoughts and philosophies and what it means to be truly free and liberated. I'd love to hear some of
your thoughts on that. Well, thank you so much. I mean absolutely can jump because even though I have, you know, articulated this sort of five part approach, and of course, by nature of a book you started at the beginning, you end to me in common with people like you know, the venerable tick not Han who pass. May he rest in peace. May he rest in peace, May he rest no liberation? Yeah, may he wrest in liberation. And these
teachings continue as he would seem, as he taught so often. Right, they are here, right in a certain sense, He's not wrestling here. But but you know that this idea of intervening each of those you know, let's now say aspects of the inner work that I described in the book, certainly each embeds all the others, and so yes, of course you can start liberation. We can start with any of them and see different aspects of the others within them.
And certainly for me, I could well start any in some in a certain sense, do begin my own work at this point from this place of let's say, liberation from some of the the ways I have been taught to think of my own self. You see me already kind of drawing in the sort of a fist to sort of self contained atomize. I'm totally sufferate from you. We can't, you know. We got to struggle to understand each other and in each other reporters, Yeah, with borders.
So to me, it's about that hearts beyond right and it's and it's to me liberation has really, as you lud to it, so many different dimensions. But in this book, I am talking about a kind of spiritual if you will, you know, a kind of way of being in relationship to reality that is more and more kind of open to noticing when we're getting caught in ways and limitation,
in separation, in division, in reduction. It's really about the way that the practices of mindfulness or just if you will, kind of whatever the term is any one of us may have, or how it is that we work to disrupt our own delusions about who we are and how things are. These practices for me can help with you know, to me, liberations from what or for what. It's liberal from the temptation, the tendency toward isolation, towards a sense of self that to me is a delusion. It's at
least in part of delusion. Right. There's a way in which, of course, we have our own agency and our own work to do and opportunities, and we live and we love, and there's some reality to that. I think as a kind of a metaphor for psychological development in a world in which everything is an inter relationship. It's important to notice when we're too focused on that sense of our bounded ego based separate identity, and you know, to be in engaged in a kind of set of practices that
can deliver us when we're getting stuck. You know. So I keep coming back to this idea of stuckness and unstuckness and you know, opening up to psychological flexibility, social flexibility,
existential flexibility. Like the world is constantly always changing, how can we notwithstanding all these changes, notwithstanding demographic change, just to say one example, notwithstanding technological challenge, or you know, the stress around resources that come from climate and other you know, issues that we are facing notwithstanding all of that, how do we, you know, notice the temptation to sort of orient ourselves from a place of fear and anxiety
and notice what we can do within ourselves to open up to a place of spacious realization that we have, we always have. Life itself affords us infinite options, infinite creative opportunities to respond to the challenges that we face. And to me, you know, being in that liberating place is about you know, the practices, and I often do think of it again, it's like liberating, not liberation, right, It's like, how are we actively opening up whenever that
temptation to close comes to all of us? And it can come to all of us, so with humility, this is like I'm in this too, you know, I open the news the screens and see you know, war mongering and saber rattling at the border of Russia and Ukraine or whatever, at the border of the local school board that's arguing over a critical race something called critical race theory. And you know, parents, you know, like those these things, like anybody needs to be pitting parents against anything in
a concept of public school. But that's happening in our neighborhoods. So wherever we see these borderlines being redrawn, how are we in relationship to that, and how can we resist, you know, the bait, you know, not take the bait of making someone else an enemy. To me, every different way that we practice to minimize the likelihood that we do that from which so much human suffering and needless
bloodshed has flowed over human history, over the eonchs. Everything we can do to minimize that is falls within the scope of what I call liberating practices and mindfulness and compassion, and this existential gratitude, this gratitude and being alive, which I think, frankly is kind of the core of mylest practice,
I really truly do. I don't think of that as a separate practice, and it comes from grounding and a certain awareness that we you know, life is selected for us, so no accident here, and as we breathe, we are in connectedness with this thing we call the environment out there, but actually it's always has been a part of our being, for which again seems to me, the only right response
is gratitude. And then from there again, so many different, you know, opportunities to free ourselves can emerge if we keep remembering that these simple facts in our existence beautiful. There's something you said I want to just double click on because I very much agree with it, and it's that liberation, I would phrase, is a direction, not a destination. Right, You never have become because what do you what's what
happens the moment after? If you like I'm liberated, then the moment after you're going to be like, wait, what do I do now? With the rest of my life? It's always a process, right, And it's always it's kind
of like a north Star goal, right. I kind of view like self actualization, right, you know, like we can kind of make choices in the course of our day to choose growth, but you know we'll mess up because we're human, right, Like, it's not like you know, you ever reach the liberation there and you're like perfect the rest of your life. I like that you emphasize that. Something else I want to double click on from that chapter is the fact that you say bringing compassionate mindfulness
into community based engagement. But this is a common threat throughout the whole book. So even earlier in the book, you say, as I'll see from my as you'll see from my story and those of others you'll meet here, healing takes place in community. So this is this is the theme you keep coming back to over and over again. You brought up the critical race theory kind of criticisms, and those discussions get so ugly. Regardless of where you
stand on I don't I want to. I want us to step above for a second and not get into the way of the debate. I want to say regard because I know that's where you're at with this so and I love it regardless of where you stand those no one's listening to anyone in this right on, everyone's just yelling at each other. And so how can we all rise above that using your amazing work of mindfulness of the community healing and then truly truly listening to each other because this is the society I think we
both want. It's more of this act of listening and less immediate knee jerk response, right, right, right, And I think of these things on multiple levels. Right, you know, there are things that we can do and we will do, and we are doing even in this conversation, I would say, right, yeah, to offer yeah, right, you know, models and ways of kind of practicing listening for understanding and connection, and really that's that could be his whole, whole spiritual path I
think right and whole self development path. How can I practice listening and speaking for connection and understanding? What are the other goals that people have for listening and speaking other than right? Because to practice for understanding and connection is to invite inquiry? What are the why? What else are we trying to do with some of our communications? Are we trying to understand or or are we trying
to experience power over in some way? Be right? But also come across this right, but again even more so now the systemic collective piece. All of this is happening within a broader environment. It's not just the interpersonal dynamics which are so important in which we you know, do do we recognize and we take agency for? And yes?
And right? We live in a world you know, people are making money, how making aggrandizing and developing and building up power through the manipulations of our emotions, are you know our communities? Frankly these so so In other words, we're up against a lot right now when it comes to this being willing to see more clearly more of what we're up against. That isn't just I'm not skillful
or I'm not being the best person. It is that it is part of you know, It's partly like can I be more skillful, can I listen a little bit more with little less judgment, like a little less judgment, and can I put myself in the shoes the other a little bit more? But it is also you know, recognizing that we on the one hand, have these beautiful, lovely devices around us that have enabled so much, including us connecting and sharing more richly in the world during
these pandemic times. Beautiful, absolutely where would I be without these devices and the way they have been developed and we all now know churns division, right, it's kind of is you know, has as a as a profit model, the narrowing of minds and the kind of the reinforcing of you know, those things that trigger intense emotion, including fear, anxiety,
that can that lead to this other. So so there is you know, so this is where you know that strong brought back that sort of you know, how do we act in wise relationship not only to how our own personal conditionings, our upbringings, right, the things we learned, the things we haven't prefigured us to be open or not to what we are hearing from another person. That's really important, and that's you know, we have some control
over that. We must make the most of that. And I think how we relate to technology and need and the different ways that that organized efforts are arrayed at kind of keeping us diluted and keeping us at you know, loggerheads and at pointed spears at each other. I mean,
this is not just happening, It's not just natural. So how how are we in wise relationship with the whole array from like my personal what's happening into personally, how and where we meet the structures for that, because all of those things are part of the I would say, the ecology for justice and for connection that we work with, like so bringing awareness to every dimension, the personal, the interpersonal, the sort of social where we meet and how who's
in charge and right, how we set up the rooms. All of these things matter. But also this you know, really hard first world, high level edgy problem of existential crisis of how we were with technology more wise, Yeah, all of that has to be brought into our conversation
and I think we can though with compassion. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up, and I would yes end this and say that I see the media, mainstream media is a big problem with this, with the silos of the very you know, like c and envers Fox News for instance, Like you couldn't talk about two completely
different worlds with two completely different worldviewsut about humanity. We need like a different I want to opt out of all of that and have like a one a oneness news tattle or something that takes into account the principles you put forward in your liberation liberating sorry liberating chapter, things like expanding the circle of compassion, deepening healing for ourselves, contemplating all humanity as one family, deepening the path of wisdom.
Where's that in the news cycle? Exactly? Where's where's the pr campaign for? For all that it is? Seriously well money is it all about money, money and power over There's no money and power over right as opposed to power with with right money equally as much money and power with How do we have that world? What? There is at least some And I think that's part of that, That is a part of the reality. Like you know, we are finding ways to amplify more of the good.
But it is true, I mean some of it isn't saleable and some of it will never be, you know, something that we can profiteer off of and shouldn't be frankly, and this is radically counterculture for me to talk about like things we should be engaged in that are that will never make us money and shouldn't be about making us money. But I think that's yeah, it's it's you know again, this is where again my heart, I have to put a handle of the heart because we are yeah,
you know, we Yes, it's painful, it is. We're all suffering. We're all suffering in different ways, right in different ways. Oh no, no, no, I don't. I take this as like you like healthy inspire each others. So yeah, and I you know, we could we could talk about this forever and hopefully in a certain way we will, if not explicitly, but just nowhere in conversation where we are about these these really really important aspects of in a way,
the dilemma. So, I mean, I guess I would say, you know, because I'm a law have been trained in a law in law and worked as a law professor for so many years, you know, I am kind of aware that again life law professor and mindful the teachers
life is multi dimension. My existence is multi It's like it's I can at the same time be aware of the oneness that interconnects us, all us as as being part of one family already who all belong already and don't really have to struggle for that, and at the same time recognize that for us to work together in the world to minimize the harm that we do as we go forth, you know, seeking to make the most
of our own agency in the social realm. We do need agreements, we do need ways of working together, and we do need ways of trying to find collective consensus
or non violent ways of resolving conflict. So yeah, so there are It's I think therefore, I'm always trying to be a student of you know, political science and philosophy, and if someone could show me in more effective way for human beings to come together than the hard work of trying to despite our different backgrounds, despite our different languages, despite our different cultures, find the common ground in any conversation, in any community, find the capacity to resolve a conflict
peacefully for today, provisionally we know we may come back again, but for today we've agreed this is how we resolve will resolve it, and we'll live another day to meet
and share and maybe come to another result. In other words, what we have called the rule of law and democracy as opposed to every other kind of way seems to be the best approximation we can find for a kind of public frame for discourse that allows for you know, more free expression, more of these liberating practices, right, more
of us to kind of find our own way. And so while you know, I'm aware that you know, democratic rule of law activity political is not necessarily the ultimate when I think about, you know, just the basic challenge of like living with neighbors who come from different parts of the world, and oh it helps to have rules by which we drive on this side of the road and not that side, and we stop themselves. I mean, just basic things that keep us from killing each other.
To kind of arrive at those kinds of that those you know, right, we don't need the hat to have a provisional consensus, these ways of coming at provisional consensus.
That's what to me, law has always been, you know, at its highest invests, is seeking to help us do and so we have to keep investing in the inputs of the ability to use language as bad as it is, right, as manipulable as it is, but nevertheless, we have to resist that cynicism that says, you know, words don't matter, and trying to talk to each other and listen to each other is just you know, never war. I think
we have to pull ourselves back always. The temptation is to pull ourselves back from the kind of abyss of cynicism that can come from this kind of awareness of the infallibility of language, or you know, the kind of indeterminacy of it. Like you know, the word dignity community thing, I can you know, I could use it, Hitler could
use it. I mean, it's like, nevertheless, if we can come together around the circles, around the tables, the campfires, in our starting at home, in our community and our schools with humility, with love, if you will and say that word in this podcast right with love, with care, then you know, all we can do is keep meeting each other around that campfire with some commitment to care and figuring out what language works for today and maybe
use another language tomorrow, but not missing that we're just human beings struggling to find what works to keep us from killing each other. Rightly, and keep us thriving in the abundant appreciation of the gift of this life beautiful. I'm going to end quoting you. You say I have suffered enough. You have suffered enough. We have all suffered enough.
May we bring ourselves into continual conversation with one another and with the racial injustices here and now, ending the suffering and making things right one moment, one risk, one luminous reconnection at a time. I'm really glad to make a connection with you. I look forward to a reconnection another time. Thanks for the real important work you're doing in this world. I really support it. And thanks for being on my show today. Oh my gosh, thank you, Scott.
Same same. I reflect that all back to you. Thank you for you really important work. And it's an honor to be in this conversation with you. Yes, may it continue in some ways explicit and implicit from here. Thank you, Thanks Rondon, Thank you, thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycologypodcast dot com. We're on
our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.