The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community by exploring the pain of bias.  We used our imagination as an ally to help look beneath the surface of others.  We cultivated empathy and offered loving kindness to ourselves and others.  This is something we can practice informally as we go about our day.  We can slow down, pause and imagine the wholeness of a person we may see behind the wheel, mowing their lawn, shopping for groceries.  We can wish them well.

We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s loving kindness practice around the pain of bias.  This practice engages imagination to call people who have experienced the pain of bias into our hearts.  We visualize and sense their presence and the goodwill and love we share for one another.  In this way our individual separate practice becomes relational in a sense.  We cultivate prosocial qualities that can incline our minds toward beloved community.

We drew insight from Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer.  His fascinating Tricycle Magazine article, Saved from Freezing, is an exploration of how our imagination can be our ally in experiencing life beyond the limitations of the beliefs, ideas, assumptions, even worries.

He gives examples of how music and poetry can transport us to a “different mind” that is more open to life.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community.  We considered how identity enables us to flourish and how it can also divide us.  We explored Anu Gupta’s Individuation inquiry in which we imagined being subject to bias – someone’s mistake beliefs about who are.  We also imagined the counterposing experience of being recognized as who we really are. I hope these inquiries will help us to be more mindful and present with one another and ourselves.

We drew inspiration from Sharon Salzberg’s conversation with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh. Simran is the Executive Director of the Inclusive  America Project.  We also drew from his book, The Light We Give. This book is part memoir, spiritual journey and a call for greater acceptance and love.

We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s Individuation exercise.  This inquiry recreates the experience of being subject to stereotyping and then imagining the experience of being truly recognized without bias.

We heard the prosaic lines of Omid Safi’s On Being essay, May We Cherish a Love That Is Raw, Gritty and Real.  Omid is a professor of Islamic Studies specializing in mysticism and the liberationist traditions of Dr. Martin Luther King among others. He teaches in the Sufi tradition of Radical love.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community.  We brought mindful inquiry to the human habit of stereotyping.  We often make assumptions about others.  We don’t often know what difficulties a person might be carrying.  The practice of awareness and intention, presence and persistence, can help us to think and feel beyond our assumptions to recognize a person’s humanity.  Love inspired short moments many times can move us toward beloved community.

We drew inspiration from Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi.  Her play, English, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It portrays the difficulties faced by immigrants.  It explores how we construct and adapt identity considering complexities including: sex, ethnicity, nationality, age, socioeconomic status and language.  As a first generation English speaker it reminded me of my immigrant mother and grandmother.  I feel so much empathy for the struggles to communicate and to be recognized.

We heard Micky Scottbey Jones’ inspirational poem: Invitation to Brave Space:  The poem is an invitation to “call each other to more truth and love.”

Our mindfulness inquiry was based on Anu Gupta’s inspiring Breaking Bias work.  He explains that stereotype replacement involves “a conscious act of replacing our mind’s habit to stereotype another human being with positive real life counter examples.”  We borrowed his teaching to help reveal implicit bias and then practice imagining another person’s full humanity.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored how mindfulness can help us to build beloved community.  We all need connection to flourish.  We can expand our circles of relationships by examining the obstacles to connection.  We can become aware of the implicit bias that we all learn as developing humans.  Awareness is the first step in relearning more life-affirming habits of connection.

In a lively and moving conversation with On Being’s Krista Tippett ,we heard Professor john a. powell’s observations about how we approach belonging.  In exploring race he focuses on our shared human needs.  He offers many examples of how we can learn to resolve many of our race related social problems.  He shares personal memories of learning what is most important in relationship from his father’s example.  He is professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

We heard about mindfulness approaches to building beloved community from the Boundless Love Project.  You can access many resources including their tenets of building beloved community.

We heard Anu Gupta’s approach to mindfully “breaking bias,” a habit that we learn and can unlearn.  You can watch Anu’s TEDtalk, What We Can Save by Breaking Unconscious Bias.

We heard part of poet and author Mark Nepo’s inspirational essay, More Together Than Alone.

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