Q&A: Mindfulness and Racial Healing with Tovi Scruggs-Hussein

Welcome! This article is a follow-up to our series on Mindfulness for Racial Healing by healer, leader, and one of the 2021 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement, Tovi Scruggs-Hussein. Explore the rest of the series here.

1. Can you say more about the role of meditation in racial healing? Meditation feels like an individual well-being practice. What is its role in this context?

Our society has branded meditation to be an individual well-being practice, but we also have the option to engage in meditation as an act of service. Initially, yes, mediation can create a sense of individual well-being, yet it is also a tool for liberation and empowerment. We’ve continued to see in the research that meditation supports empathy and compassion; these are both qualities and ways of being that go beyond personal well-being and truly support the way we engage with others and ourselves, not so much because we feel good, but because we have the capacity and competence to engage from a more heartfelt place. Racial healing is dependent upon empathy and compassion. In order to heal, we must learn to connect to the emotions of racialized experiences and take action based on those emotions to create a more just and liberated society. Meditation supports racial healing and racial healing supports justice, each building on the other. 

In order to heal, we must learn to connect to the emotions of racialized experiences and take action based on those emotions to create a more just and liberated society.

2. In your “Mindfulness for Racial Healing” article, you write about the importance of honoring our connection to ourselves in order to honor our connection to each other. What does that mean? Why does honoring our connection to ourselves come first?

Racism is a sign of disconnection to ourselves and to others. In fact, all of the “isms” are a sign of deep disconnection from our compassion and of the inability to see our shared humanity. When we are disconnected from that sense of humanity, it’s easier for us to dehumanize others. Racism is dehumanization. The atrocities of slavery and genocides stem from this sense of disconnection. Once we are connected to ourselves, we can deepen our connection to others, but it doesn’t happen unless we connect to ourselves more deeply first. Your embodiment of compassion and mindfulness first gets engrained in yourself and then it is felt outward. 

Meditation and its importance in racial healing also connects to nonjudgment—and by definition, part of meditation is the practice of nonjudgment. When we are in a state of practicing nonjudgment, we can be more equanimous and not put things or people, including ourselves, into categories of “right or wrong” or “good or bad.” When you deepen your connection to your own worth without judgment, you can begin to do the same for others. Neuroscience supports this growth as a competency that is built over time as you deepen your meditation practice—and we must always begin with self, starting within. Consider the wonderful quote by Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” You must embody it first. 

3. You talk about the importance of understanding. Can a White person ever really understand the experience of a Black, Indigenous, or Person Of Color (BIPOC)? For allies, does that matter? 

I love this question!  And I love that I did not have to grapple with responding to this one alone—I have dedicated, racially-conscious White allies in the work who took the lead on responding:  

Sally Albright-Green, a leader in Racial Healing Allies offers this:

White people can and should be about the business of actively listening to the voices of BIPOC, centering those voices in any conversations about systemic racism and anti-racism and working hard to understand. In the end, it’s important to shift the focus from words like “ever” and understand the nature of lived experience. Can anyone ever truly understand the experiences of another?

We are all still unlearning the things we were socialized to believe about racism and learning the truths we were never taught.

We are all still unlearning the things we were socialized to believe about racism and learning the truths we were never taught. Becoming a White ally really involves asking different sorts of questions based on years of working hard to learn about the world through the lens of someone who is not White. Understanding what it means at a deep level to be White—and the impact white dominance and oppression have had on BIPOC—is the understanding that White allies work towards. When that deep level of cultural humility is reached, then one can say a White person has become anti-racist and works to understand the history of racism so they can interrupt it in our systems and practices. When one can truly work beside BIPOC to interrupt racist practices, and demonstrate that they are motivated to work hard for the good of humanity, recognizing the depth and breadth of BIPOC struggles beyond a standpoint of white saviorism, then they will be close. It’s about recognizing that the work is more about learning the facts and working hard to repair the damage than it is about understanding what it is like to be a BIPOC.

Grace Helms-Kotre, a leader in Racial Healing Allies, offers this:

A White person will never fully understand what it means to be a Person of Color. That is not the goal. It’s not like a box we can check or a competency we can achieve. We’ll never have the lived experience of being targeted by systemic racism, so we cannot know fully. But we can engage in the lifelong practice of deepening our understanding by bringing presence and empathy to our interactions with BIPOC and with other white folks. To bring awareness to our racial experiences and systemic racism as it functions in every area of our lives.

For allies, what matters is that we are showing up with curiosity and humility again and again.

For allies, what matters is that we are showing up with curiosity and humility again and again. We are not going away. We are staying in the discomfort of racial awareness in order to challenge White supremacy culture in all its manifestations, through us and around us.

4. What does cultural-responsiveness mean? Where does mindfulness come into play here?

Cultural-responsiveness means: practicing learning from, valuing, and relating to people from different cultures with respect. To take it a step further, I view it as having an awareness and ability that allows us to engage with and honor the backgrounds, values, customs, and norms of groups different than our own. Again, this can be applied beyond race. Meditation and mindfulness support us in growing our awareness of ourselves, others, and our impact. Meditation and mindfulness invite us to practice pausing before responding so that our response can be skillful rather than habituated. The practice is not allowing our triggers to take hold of us, and connecting to others from a place that honors who they are. My heart swells with gratitude for a practice that can be done in both isolation and community to provide deep individual well-being as well as deep connection so that the future of humanity is held in love.