Episode 14 - Buddhist Practice and Anti-Racism (feat. Jessica Locke)

Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:01

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. June 2020, a lot of white people in the US have recognized that anti-racism is an ongoing, even lifelong, process. And they've started to recognize that, in spite of their best intentions, many of them are racist even when they don't hold explicitly racist beliefs.

Ellie: 0:50

Yeah. I think a lot of white people have for the first time started to acknowledge racist habits of perception, the idea that I might have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to being alone with a black man in an elevator, to use an example that our former teacher George Yancy discusses in some of his writings on racism.

David: 1:09

And so there's been a lot of talk about white people, quote, doing the work, you know, whatever that means.

Ellie: 1:15

Yup. Doing the work. "I recognize that I'll be doing the work for lifetime."

David: 1:20

Yeah, but I think also a lot of white people sometimes just don't quite know what doing the work really means.

Ellie: 1:28

I mean, it sometimes kind of seems like it's about reading books and doing Zoom workshops.

David: 1:33

Or sharing Instagram infographics,

Ellie: 1:37

And don't get me wrong, I think reading books about anti-racism and attending Zoom workshops are really useful tools. In fact, I've done a lot of both of those things. Instagram infographics, I'm a little less certain about, but who knows? I do think that they have a good amount of potential as well, but in any case, what all of these activities are doing is working on a cognitive level. Reading books, attending workshops where we're listening to scholars and activists and organizers, is helping to transform our beliefs. But one thing we know research on racism is that it doesn't just work on this level of beliefs, right? That might not even be the primary way that it works. Implicit bias goes down to very deep levels, in terms of our habits of being, our embodied styles. It's practically impossible to root out implicit bias through conscious practices. We need to get at the unconscious in some way.

David: 2:29

Yeah. And this raises a real problem for people who are committed to doing the work, which is how do you pierce that threshold of what lies below conscious awareness, and change our habits in a deep and profound way? One way that some people have found for doing this is the practice of mindfulness.

Ellie: 2:50

And I think at first that might be surprising, because in the US, mindfulness has come to have a connotation of individualism and self development. What is mindfulness?

David: 3:00

And can it be helpful for anti-racist work? And if so, how?

Ellie: 3:05

In this episode, we talk about mindfulness and its origins in Buddhism as a resource for social justice efforts.

David: 3:11

We speak with expert in Buddhist philosophy and anti-racist educator Jessica Locke about her thoughts on the topic. Mindfulness is all the rage right now. It is touted for reducing stress, alleviating depression, and making us really all around better people. Although it has become somewhat secularized, especially in Europe and North America, mindfulness has its origins in Buddhism.

Ellie: 3:39

And of course, Buddhism is not a monolith. It's a religion and philosophy that has been around for over 2000 years and has three main branches, the largest of which is called Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism originated in India in the first century, and it's really come to be what a lot of people associate with Buddhism today, in part because of its emphasis on the project of liberation for all beings. So Mahayana Buddhism takes one of the central insights of Buddhism in general, which is this idea that life is suffering, but that there is a way out of suffering, and focuses on ways that humans can overcome suffering, not just for themselves, but for all sentient beings. So Mahayana Buddhism is associated, for instance, with the figure of the bodhisattva, who is an individual who has gotten to the point of achieving liberation and then said, " Actually I want to turn back, I'm not ready yet to escape the cycle of suffering," that's called the wheel of Samsara, "and I want to help others achieve liberation as well." So there's really a focus on Mahayana Buddhism on the ethics of Buddhist philosophy, as well as on the idea of interdependence, this notion that we are all connected, and that when we recognize that, we feel compassion for each other

David: 4:53

Yes. And I am mostly familiar with Mahayana Buddhism because as you know, Ellie, for the past five years, I've been working with a program called ETSI, The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, which is a program that was launched by the Dalai Lama-

Ellie: 5:09

Wow, flex much?

David: 5:11

Maybe a little, I guess, I don't know. But the Dalai Lama really wanted to begin an institutional dialogue between Buddhist monks in monastic universities in India, and Western science as a way of creating a rapprochement, essentially, between Buddhism and science. And as part of my work with ETSI, I've been going to India during the summers to teach courses in the philosophy of science, and I remember a conversation in particular that I had with a monk in one of these monastic universities, in which he talked to me about compassion, and just how central that is to their worldview. And I remember thinking just how undervalued this concept of compassion is in the West, where we typically foreground other notions, like fairness, or justice, that are not always aligned with what compassion would require of us.

Ellie: 6:04

Yeah. And I think the emphasis on compassion grows out of the Four Noble Truths, which are some of the most central teachings in Buddhism and are shared among traditions within it. Briefly put, the Four Noble Truths are one, life is suffering-- like fun, but don't worry, that's not the only one. The second is that the source of our suffering is clinging, clinging to identities, clinging to possessions, clinging to desire for outcomes, et cetera.

David: 6:30

Clingy!

Ellie: 6:32

Right. The third is that there is a way out of suffering. This where it gets fun. So don't worry, even though life is suffering, you can get out of this suffering. And the fourth Noble Truth is that the way out of suffering is through what the Buddha called the Eightfold Path, which is the path of eight practices that you are meant to develop over the course of your lifetime, in order to loosen the hold that suffering has on you. And some elements of this path don't necessarily have to do with our physical actions in the world, but are focused on our habits of perception and understanding. So for instance, Right View is one of the eight elements on the Eightfold Path, or Right Mindfulness is another one.

David: 7:08

And I think this is one of the most compelling things about Buddhism as a system of thought for me, which is that the way out of suffering for Buddhists is not just a matter of doing the right thing at the right time or having the right beliefs necessarily, it really is about developing habits of feeling, habits of thought, habits of understanding, that extend beyond, as we mentioned earlier, our conscious awareness. And so Buddhist practice is not content to remain at the level of the surface. It really digs underneath and tries to repattern our modes of being in the world.

Ellie: 7:46

Yeah, exactly. And I want to focus on one factor of this in particular, which is mindfulness. Mindfulness is an important vehicle of transformation.

David: 7:56

What is mindfulness? Because honestly, sometimes it has a super cheesy connotation to me, especially when it's taken up in the West. Uh, this stereotype of the white lady who demands her pan-Asian experience at the boutique yoga studio, while drinking her chai tea, and wearing Lululemon pants in LA and in San Francisco, um, where we both live, I'm sure it's kind of like 30% of our social network.

Ellie: 8:23

I am her.

David: 8:25

Maybe a little bit, I don't know your, um, mindfulness practice well enough.

Ellie: 8:29

Well, just a moment of making fun of myself since I practice yoga and have been practicing meditation for a very long time

David: 8:34

And you wear Lululemon pants, probably.

Ellie: 8:36

No they're too expensive.

David: 8:38

Like, for some reason, for me, that's the cherry on top. But the point here is that mindfulness really must not be collapsed into this stereotype, or this image, that some of us might have of the white consumer of mindfulness practice in Europe and North America.

Ellie: 8:57

Yeah, absolutely. Mindfulness has become this empty corporate buzzword. And I speak not exempting myself from this because I definitely started meditating when I was like 18 years old after reading that it could boost your happiness and make you a more productive student. But I like to think I've come a long way from that. In his book McMindfulness, Ronald Purser talks about the corporate rise in mindfulness and points out that corporate trainings for employees had a huge surge after the 2008 recession. And he basically shows that it's no coincidence that at a time when there were massive layoffs, stagnating wages, increasingly precarious employment and long work hours, that suddenly corporations started to say, "Oh, you're feeling stressed, let's help you with that," rather than letting the employees see that the corporate structures are themselves what caused stress. So Purser says the way that mindfulness has been taken up in the US has become extremely destructive because it serves to, in fact, uphold the status quo, keeping people ignorant of the social forces that are actually bringing them down by making them think that their stress, anxiety, and depression are all in their head.

David: 10:11

Well, yeah, because it's definitely cheaper to bring in a mindfulness trainer into your workplace for a couple of hours and work on the negative feelings of your employees than letting those feelings potentially snowball into a full blown uprising, uh, with Marxist undertones. So I can definitely see the way in which it can be mobilized and weaponized in this way.

Ellie: 10:34

And the irony to all of this is that the Buddhist traditions from which mindfulness derives actually are profoundly ethical in their content. Purser, for instance, talks about how, as a Buddhist practitioner, he's really concerned by the way that mindfulness is considered just this tool for self-development, maybe for relaxation, right? And it's stripped of its groundings, not only in Buddhist religion, but also in Buddhist ethics. And I think, for instance, about how the meditation app that I've been using for a very long time, because it's a useful timer tool, has all these guided meditations, and by far, the most popular category is meditations for sleep. So most people are going to this app and looking for ways to help put them to sleep.

David: 11:20

Well, and even sleep itself has been taken up as this fuel for productivity under capitalism. It reminds me of a talk given by Arianna Huffington, in which she says, you know, one of the things that we need as women in order to break through the glass ceiling is more sleep, not because sleep is inherently good, or because it's replenishing, but because it makes you more productive at work. So she has this whole joke about how women ought to sleep their way to the top.

Ellie: 11:52

Oh, my God.

David: 11:53

So it's about the ways in which things that are fundamental for human growth get taken up as the mandates for the sake of productivity at the workplace.

Ellie: 12:03

Yeah. This logic of self-optimization has really taken off around mindfulness in particular. And I think, for instance, about Google, which has been one of the major corporations promoting mindfulness among its employees. There's a Google engineer, Chade-Meng Tan, known as Meng, who created this program called Search Inside Yourself, and it's Google's meditation and mindfulness program. And when you hear Meng talk about the benefits of mindfulness, it sounds so managerial. He calls mindfulness a way of exercising your brain to achieve mental fitness, which I think is a very common conception of it. And he also said something that really terrifies me, which is that mindfulness can increase your happiness without changing anything else. Like you can't get more unironically apolitical than that, right? It's just like, "Oh, don't worry. You can feel better, but you don't have to actually change anything about your probably messed up habits of consumption and living in the world."

David: 13:03

Yeah. Why worry about changing the world when you can just change the way you feel about the world as it already is?

Ellie: 13:09

Exactly. And there's a kernel of truth to that, inasmuch as Buddhism does advocate non-attachment, but as we'll see, when we talk about a little later, mindfulness is anything but trying to keep the status quo as it is.

David: 13:22

And I like how these managerial metaphors mix sometimes with fitness metaphors as if mindfulness is like going to the gym for the brain. Yeah. I want to get- I want to get brain buff. I don't want to be scrawny without brain muscle. No mental pain, no mental gain.

Ellie: 13:39

Which is probably true, but not in the way that Meng is talking about it.

David: 13:44

Yeah, I don't want like a gym-rat version of mindfulness, that's like the last thing on my mind. And talking about this surge in popularity, in the US, of mindfulness, David Forbes talks about what he calls the Minefullness Industrial Complex, which is about- which has to do with the ways in which mindfulness has become so egocentric and self-directed that it's no longer about being mindful, it's just about being a narcissist who wants to advance in the workplace. And I think it's important for me to point out, especially since I often teach about this, that this corporatization of mindfulness practices also has a scientific arm. There are millions and millions of dollars that get poured into mindfulness research at major universities across the United States, trying to justify the benefits of mindfulness practices on neuroscientific grounds. And this really gives me cultural appropriation vibes, because it seems somewhat fetishistic and objectifying. It really does.

Ellie: 14:52

Yeah. Something that Ronald Purser talks about in McMindfulness is that universities want to capitalize on the cultural cachet of Buddhism, but they want to also void mindfulness of any Buddhist quote, mumbo jumbo, right.

David: 15:06

Yeah, I guess everything can be reduced to entirely objective accounts without taking into consideration the cultural tradition from which they emerge. Yes, that's right. Modern science at its best.

Ellie: 15:18

Yes. And it's profoundly ironic that mindfulness has become this egocentric backed-by-science self-optimization tool because Buddhism is nothing if committed to the idea that the self is an illusion. So what does mindfulness truly mean? Well, it's a translation of the Pali and Sanskrit word Sati. The Buddha describes Sati in a talk called the Satipahna Sutta, and then it sort of develops differently in different traditions. But one way of describing it is as present moment awareness or presence of mind that sometimes gets called bare awareness. Our usual modes of consciousness are wrapped up in all kinds of clinging, desires, aversions, et cetera. We tend to think about ourselves as individual entities that are separate from other things in the world, and to have a kind of orientation towards our experience that's always focused on either the past or on the future. And so mindfulness helps us to recognize that for what it is, and to sort of loosen the bonds of our desires, our aversions, and our past and future orientations. So I think sometimes it gets associated with detachment, right? Like, "Oh, I'm just going to zone out. I'm separate from my experience." That's not at all the case. It actually enables you to engage with the world in a much more authentic and immediate way, because what you're doing is cultivating a neutral type of awareness where you're less reactive, you're less self-focused, and you're less clouded by your own vested interests and your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.

David: 16:56

And I like the way you phrased it in terms of loosening the bonds that desire has on us and loosening the bonds that our own aversions and our own fears have on us. Because once you look at it from that perspective, in terms of letting go of things that have been at the root of the way in which we deal with the world, you can see how something like mindfulness practice can be useful for what we have called doing the work, especially in relation to something like race, where one of the things that white people can do is really rely on mindfulness practice as a way of detaching, not from the world and receding into this individualism, but from their own desires, those desires that have been conditioned by white privilege.

Ellie: 17:47

And their investments in seeing themselves say, as a good person, because another key feature of mindfulness is that it's a nonjudgmental awareness. Usually we're stuck in these judgements of good-bad, black-white, right. And so one thing that mindfulness does is help us gain space from those judgments. It doesn't mean that suddenly we're going to be nonjudgmental, but it means that we can recognize our judgments for what they are and start to distance ourselves from them, or create a pause before acting on them.

David: 18:24

Enjoying Overthink? Please take a minute and rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. To help us think about the connection between mindfulness and doing the work, we have our very good friend, Dr. Jessica Locke, who is an assistant professor at Loyola University Maryland. Dr. Locke, or Jess, as we knowher is an expert on Buddhist philosophy and moral psychology, who teaches meditation and has developed and facilitated contemplative diversity and anti-racism workshops. She has written several articles about mindfulness practice in connection to moral development and social justice. And she was also my co-teacher in India as part of our work with ETSI.

Ellie: 19:10

Something of a BFFL.

David: 19:11

Jess. Thank you for joining us.

Ellie: 19:13

Welcome.

Jess: 19:14

Thanks so much for having me.

Ellie: 19:15

We couldn't be more excited to have you on today to talk about Buddhist philosophy, which is an area of expertise for you, and how it relates to anti-racist education, as well as social justice in general. To start off with, tell us a little bit about how you got interested in Buddhism.

Jess: 19:31

I became a Buddhist practitioner in 2008. I was living in Colorado. Time- I was a total hippie, I basically wore hemp from head to toe, true story. And I was working at the time as a non-violence educator. I worked in a juvenile detention center teaching a weekly social justice course for kids in jail. Part of my role was organizing youth activists to do social justice and anti-oppression peer education in schools. And I also was teaching anti-racist workshops for both youth and adults. Something that I noticed in doing my social justice work was this experience of feeling destabilized by de-centering whiteness and white privilege and having that challenged in anti-racist workshops, and there seemed to be a need to build up the inner resources and resiliency, for being able to ride those challenging conversations and really kind of hold your seat in the midst of that. Those conversations tended often to get really, really painful, really, really sharp, people, not only white people, but also people of color, were getting triggered and traumatized in various ways in multiracial anti-racist conversations. And it just really struck me that a resource like meditation provides a kind of nourishing context for being able to do that really difficult intrapersonal work. That it's not just about blissing out and having a nice time and going on like bootsy retreats. But it's also like being able to show up in our lives in a more authentic way and be able to really, kind of, abide hot sticky situations. And I was interested in just getting more training in meditation. So I kind of just wandered into a Buddhist center and the rest is history, I guess you could say. I eventually quit that job as the non-violence educator and went to grad school.

Ellie: 21:35

With us!

Jess: 21:37

Yes.

Ellie: 21:37

Where we made all sorts of memories that we can't share on this podcast.

Jess: 21:44

But meanwhile, when we were in grad school was when Ferguson happened, and that was really when I felt this tension of being in this ivory tower, studying philosophy, being at this fancy university, and going to my nice idyllic little meditation center on the weekends, and I really felt this tension that there's other values that I want to be able to live out.

David: 22:07

And I think this is a really important point, especially for those of us who are not Buddhist practitioners and who are not familiar with Buddhist practice, that sometimes we tend to have this image about, especially white Buddhist practitioners, as just, you know, trying to have a relaxing time. And you're really showing that there is something else that Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist practice can offer, especially in the context of anti-racist education, anti-racist work. It's super important. I want you to talk to us a little bit more about this.

Jess: 22:39

So I ended up writing my dissertation on moral self-cultivation and that involved Lojong, this Tibetan tradition. So Lojong means literally, in Tibetan, mind training, and the problem that it's addressing is that most of us, most people are self-cherishing a-holes. Most of us are caught up in this process that's known as self-cherishing. We think of ourselves and most importantly, I think, feel ourselves as this self-enclosed, separate individual, like me, myself and I up against the world. You and I are different. I have interests that are different from yours. Don't tread on me. As soon as we sort of like draw that little boundary between this capital-S Self and the capital-O Other out there, then we bring out the bazookas and we want to keep all of you jerks out of my little zone of selfhood. That is the sort of orientation and feeling of self-cherishing, and in Buddhism generally, and especially in Mahayana, Buddhism, that kind of separation and protection of the self is a real problem for us and for the world. And it's a problem for us because it's mistaken. We do not exist as these separate, independent beings whose self-interest is totally cut off from the interests of others. And it's a problem for the world because when I think of myself that way, then of course, I'm going to go about the world, like, middle fingers up, not caring about others, pursuing my own benefit, being indifferent to other's suffering and all of this. So it produces a bunch of ethical problems, and so Lojong really is this heat seeking missile that's here to bust up self-cherishing.

Ellie: 24:34

That sounds so badass, like this ancient, Tibetan practice of meditation. Is it ancient?

Jess: 24:43

It's pretty old. Probably like 11th century, but it was codified in the 14th.

Ellie: 24:47

Okay.

Jess: 24:47

The idea with Lojong is that you're really targeting and interrupting self-cherishing, and as a habit, self-cherishing isn't part of our human nature, per se. It is something that we picked up and learned and habituated ourselves towards and we reinscribe it and repeat it and ourselves deeper into it every time that we engage in those habitual behaviors of self-cherishing.

David: 25:11

I see.

Ellie: 25:12

Yeah. In a recent article, you wrote that the whole Buddhist tradition is rooted in the belief that our inner lives are pliable. So, I guess, what draws you to the Lojong tradition specifically, as opposed to say maybe other contemplative practices that would encourage us to reflect on our habits and try and shape them?

Jess: 25:31

One of the things I think it's really useful about Buddhism is the no-self doctrine, that the self, what we experience as the self, is actually not some permanent, inherently existent, substantively real, solid thing. It's actually a bunch of processes that are just kind of converging and intersecting and always moving. I think that it's so liberating to realize that we, and everything that we experience, are perforated, full of gaps and space, so I think that it's precisely the impermanence of our selfhood that is for many of us anxiety producing. But this is actually the engine for all of your growth. And the engine of liberation is this lack of permanence that we have, or that we are. And it's precisely the spaciousness of ourselves and of our thinking that is what we can open up through practice in order to accomplish change. And that I think is really powerful and really inviting, and so Lojong really seeks to interrupt those habitual ways of thinking and behaving and replace or reverse the direction of that self-cherishing by inculcating Other-centered care and compassion.

Ellie: 26:56

How does it do that?

Jess: 26:57

Well, there's a couple of different methods. One of the most well-known is an actual meditation practice called Tonglen, which means in Tibetan, sending and taking. I can explain the sort of broad brush strokes of Tonglen, but I also want to say that, like, please don't take this as a meditation instruction. There are instructions that you can get in the world, and from a qualified teacher in the right context and even some probably online and in recordings.

Ellie: 27:25

What? Listening to one episode of Overthink doesn't make us experts on Tonglen?

Jess: 27:31

It's, it's just kind of like a health and safety warning, you know?

Ellie: 27:34

Yes, yes.

Jess: 27:36

So, Tonglen, you use the breath as the sort of vehicle for practicing giving away the things that you're ordinarily attached to, or the things that you would ordinarily horde for yourself, and taking in the things that you ordinarily would want to stay away from. On the out-breath, you breathe out all of the good stuff that you ordinarily would cling to, you visualize giving it away to others. And on the inhale, you actually bring in the things that normally you would reject or flee from, so pain, suffering, discomfort, stress. Basically it requires that we repattern our affective responses to our attachments and our aversions.

Ellie: 28:21

Can I ask how this relates also to compassion?

Jess: 28:24

Yeah. So compassion is basically what happens when we're not caught up in this drama of self-other dualism. If I kind of explode that little, uh, line of demarcation of, uh, separating the capital-S Self from, from the capital-O Other, then what we have is actually, not only intellectual, but affective and sort of embodied, sense of our deep interdependence with one another. And the fact that I am not, in any ultimate true, real sense, separate from you. That metaphysical fact is known as emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and the sort of affective and ethical outcome of that is compassion. Suffering is a problem wherever it happens, you know, both within me, but also within you. And there's no logical basis under which I would be indifferent to your suffering or the suffering of others. So that's really what compassion ultimately can be.

David: 29:29

And so I can see how there would be a clear connection between this ethical system of understanding interdependence between self and other, and then that desire that you described earlier to really incorporate into your life a much more proactive racial politics. I want to hear a little bit more about that connection and how this discussion of emptiness and compassion led you, in particular, to really sort of affirm this commitment that you already had to anti-racist education and practice.

Jess: 30:04

That's interesting. I had never quite like put such a fine point on it that way. And in a way, like, I don't know, I almost feel shy about articulating it in that sense, because it's not like I want to say that, because I've realized emptiness in some ultimate sense and like the skies opened up now, like, I can be some like white racial savior. But I do think that if that process of rehabilitation works, it starts feeling off to be indifferent to suffering and to see social problems as somebody else's problem. So ideally, those practices would undermine one's ability to actually think of myself as being able to go about my life and be happy, get the things that I want, pursue professional successes, pursue money, and go on my little Instagramable vacations, and while --it's not like we're not allowed to have joy. But yeah, I think that maybe there's almost cognitive dissonance of saying like, these are my intellectual political commitments, but I'm not going to actually act on them.

Ellie: 31:10

I'm wondering a little bit about the timeline of this, because everything you're saying sounds extremely appealing, right. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners are now like, "Oh my gosh, I want to practice Tonglen, develop compassion, and then instantly not be racist anymore," right? Which, of course, is an extremely naive thing to think. And so my guess is that it takes quite a long time for these new habits to form and our old habits to fall away.

Jess: 31:36

I'm really glad you asked that question because there's a couple of things that follow from it. So number one is I don't think it's true that Buddhist practice, on its own, can function as a complete anti-racist education. And I think that we really can run into this problem where somebody could be a very accomplished Buddhist practitioner, and have done no racial self-reflection. A white person might have done plenty of hours practicing meditation on the cushion and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have awareness of how whiteness is conditioning their thinking. I actually think of Buddhist practice as a really useful preparation for doing anti-racist education, but it's not anti-racist education in and of itself. And even the preparatory work, something likeTonglen or these Lojong practices that you're talking about, presumably take a really long time to master. Yes. And so that's the second point, that this is a really useful thing, particularly for white people thinking about being engaged in movements for racial justice, that a Buddhist practitioner knows that like you don't just go on one weekend workshop and you've got it all figured out. One weekend workshop and you'll probably walk out feeling worse than you came in. There is the sense that this is a lifelong practice that you've got to really dedicate yourself to, and it's going to feel super stressful at times. There's going to be times when you feel like you're kind of falling apart as a person, because really deep parts of how you organize your world and experience yourself are getting reorganized. So that feels scary but it's obviously, I think, it's really worth committing oneself to, but I think viewing that process of personal development in a Buddhist context can help bring into view the temporality of what we need to commit to when we're actually serious about reflecting on and undermining and uprooting the habits of whiteness. It's going to be a long process.

David: 33:40

I really liked that you point out this temporal dimension, because I know you have written about the uptake of Buddhist practices in contemporary, Western neuroscience. And one of the problems that I have with a lot of that research is precisely this, that they will take people who often are not rooted in these traditions, they will just sort of shove them in an FMRI machine and tell them to like, contemplate for a little while, and then draw all kinds of conclusions about the scientific basis of the benefits of meditation. It seems like the temporality here is precisely what's missing.

Jess: 34:14

Yeah. There has been a feeding frenzy in mindfulness research. There are a lot of people doing good research in this area, but I would add that as far as I can tell, the Venn diagram of the contemplative scientists who are producing good work in this area, and the contemplative scientists who are Buddhist practitioners or contemplative practitioners, is basically a circle.

Ellie: 34:40

So if you're a good scientist of contemplative research, you're probably also a practitioner.

Jess: 34:44

Yeah, and I think that what produces good research in this area is exactly the dynamic, David, that you're naming, which is some personal history of being able to witness the timeline in which actual transformation occurs in a contemplative context. I think that some research just doesn't seem to be informed by how meditation really works. I was discussing with a sort of colleague in psychology some mindfulness research that she's been involved in, and I asked her how she defined mindfulness. And she said, "Oh, just any instance in which a person can self report paying attention to something."

David: 35:20

Exactly Yeah.

Jess: 35:22

And I just think that that is like-

Ellie: 35:23

You mean consciousness.

Jess: 35:27

And I think one could only arrive at that kind of a definition of mindfulness having not actually worked with a mindfulness practice, or at least done the work of studying a mindfulness practice.

David: 35:40

And in these cases of people who approach a Buddhist practice without having put in the time to learn the tradition, we get really close to something akin to a fetishization of an Oriental object, that is then consumed by Western science. And it seems like in order to do that, well, you have to do it from within the tradition. Both feet firmly planted, well, maybe not firmly planted, but maybe your butt firmly sat upon the cushion.

Jess: 36:11

You know, this mysterious wisdom of the East, or, um, or this notion that like meditation is about relaxing, like sitting on a lily pad in Ojai and playing with your essential oils or whatever.

Ellie: 36:26

The Goop model of mindfulness.

Jess: 36:30

It does kind of break my heart, honestly, it's really missing the profundity and humanness of what contemplative traditions are really about.

David: 36:40

Well, and I'm wondering how we get white people, let's say through meditation, to really confront their commitments to white supremacy, when one of the ways in which white supremacy functions is precisely by rendering invisible all the benefits that get attached to being white. So it seems like in order to really meditate about white privilege, you already have to understand that you have white privilege.

Jess: 37:07

Yeah. So one thing that I'll say is that the sort of aspect of this problem that I write about and that I've worked on is really not the process of convincing someone that racism is a problem or that a whiteness is conditioning how they're thinking. That piece is a really sticky wicket. The piece that I look at and have written about is what comes after that point of when I can intellectually assent to the problem of racism, the fact that we all do live within a white supremacy and that I, as a white person, am conditioned by that white supremacy to think and feel in certain ways and that there are aspects of white supremacy that ordinarily are invisible or at least difficult for me to see precisely because I'm centered within them. How do I go from that intellectual admission to bringing that from my head into my heart, and actually integrating what follows from that intellectual understanding at a level of embodied awareness and affective being in the world. And I think that that's a different learning process. There are lot of people who might call themselves kind of liberals or progressives who say racism is a problem, that white privilege is something that exists, but then you can see that that doesn't cash out necessarily in how they actually behave in their lives.

David: 38:37

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm a- I'm a person of color in academia. I live and breathe amongst good white people. And they live and breathe me too.

Jess: 38:53

So that, I think, that process actually, of being able to go beyond just intellectually assenting to the right politics, and actually be able to transform our consciousness, in the language of bell hooks, that I think is where a process like mind training can really provide us with a useful model. But as for the earlier process of bringing somebody around to that intellectual commitment, I'm not sure that I have a good answer for that, frankly.

David: 39:28

That's so tough, that's the question, in many ways, in anti-racist education. How do you talk to somebody to make them see what their social position prevents them from seeing?

Jess: 39:41

Right, right, right. Overt racists are obviously a huge problem. But it's also really destructive, the people who sort of are in this kind of middling stage of being somewhere between overtly racist, but not yet fully aware, particularly among like white liberals. That's perhaps the low hanging fruit that we still need to pluck more and more.

David: 40:05

And I want to ask a final question about this because you brought up the language of liberation. I'm wondering to what extent the kind of liberation that we get out of Buddhist practice has its own limits, in particular, the way it might be limited to an individual form of liberation, because one of the main points that people who specialize in the study of these structures will point out is precisely that they are social structures that go beyond the individual, that go beyond personal experience. I can see why Buddhist practice will be extremely helpful in helping us change our modes of perception, our modes of interacting with the world, and I'm just wondering whether there are resources to think about that supra-individual level of social structures and how to change those.

Jess: 40:59

Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting question, because you're right that, you know, Buddhism began as a source of individual liberation. The term the Buddha means the awakened one, so when the Buddha woke up, his first teaching was not about political systems, it wasn't about society. It was about individual psychology and the nature of suffering as rooted in our psychology and our clinging to the self. And the path, then, that he proposed was one of individual practice. And there are like these little moments in the history of Buddhist thought where we can mine it for a political or a social philosophy, but fundamentally it doesn't really have a robust politics in the way that we would recognize it from the standpoint of Western philosophy, because politics simply just wasn't the main insight that the Buddha espoused when he woke up. However, there are some useful tools, I think, for thinking about social and political life in Buddhist philosophy. And I mentioned one earlier, which is interdependence. That's both a metaphysical and an ethical teaching. From the standpoint of Buddhist philosophy, interdependence is just naming the way things are, how literally everything around us exists and how we exist in relationship to it and to one another. And that I think is just a really beautiful way of understanding what we are and what our interests really are. It's impossible for me to theorize what would be good for the world in isolation from what's good for me. And it's impossible for me to theorize what's good for me that would be harmful to someone else. That too is incoherent on this model of interdependence. So I think that that has a lot of implications in a social -political dimension, even if that's not embedded in kind of like old-school traditional, canonical Buddhism, but in- there's this field today called engaged Buddhism, that's largely contemporary thinkers actually bringing these concepts from Buddhist philosophy into a contemporary realm and saying like, what does this have to tell us about how we should be living together?

David: 43:26

Yeah. Well, we'll definitely ask you for recommendations, both for us and for our listeners about those resources.

Ellie: 43:33

Yeah. Jess, thank you so much. It has been such a delight having you join us.

David: 43:39

Thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us.

Jess: 43:41

Thanks so much. It's great talking philosophy with you too again.

Ellie: 43:52

Wow. It was so great to talk to Jess. David, what are your thoughts?

David: 43:56

So many thoughts. I think Jess' work really highlights the ways in which mindfulness can lead to a deep kind of self-transformation that has effects on how we move through the world. And again, because we are not here just talking about exercises that relax you, we're not talking things that help you go to sleep so you can climb that corporate ladder.

Ellie: 44:18

Sorry Gwyneth Paltrow.

David: 44:19

Definitelynot. And so we're talking about something akin to a science of the self, to a set of practices that can change the way you perceive the world and perceive yourself in the world.

Ellie: 44:32

And when you say science of the self, you don't mean sitting under an FMRI scanner and having someone scan your brain while you meditate, but rather a profound set of transformative practices in relation to self and world, which is exactly the kind of thing that I think we're seeking when we talk about the idea of quote doing the work, whether it's in a social justice project of anti-racism, or an any other kind of project where we're seeing the self as in relation to its world with an ethical, liberatory aim.

David: 45:02

No that's right. I certainly do not mean a science in that sense. I do mean it as a set of practices that are rigorous, and that are demanding, and that have causal power, that have the power to change who you are. And when thinking about the causal power of mindfulness, I am reminded of a book, The Body Keeps the Score, by the Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who is a world expert on trauma. And he talks about one of the most important causal powers of mindfulness practice, which is that it can really help people who have experienced deep trauma reconnect with their bodies, and even reconnect areas of the brain that get disconnected by trauma. So especially forms of trauma that lead to dissociation, he says, mindfulness has the power to help with that. And he presents a lot of empirical research to suggest that- that mindfulness has this very direct clinical therapeutic application.

Ellie: 46:01

Yeah. And I might not have been as excited about that book as a lot of other people.

David: 46:05

What? You did not like it?

Ellie: 46:07

It's kinda interesting, but I- I do think, you know, it's good to be skeptical sometimes about the conclusions that are being drawn about mindfulness research, as we heard in our interview with Jess. But I definitely do think the point you've just made, David, is super interesting, in terms of the idea that mindfulness can be beneficial for people who experienced dissociative states, because what it suggests is that mindfulness is doing precisely the opposite of detaching you from your experience. It's actually a solution to your detachment from your experience, because it brings you back into your body. It brings you back into the present, and allows you to have some distance from what is happening, or in the case of dissociative therapies, from what you experienced in the past, right. And to have a sort of neutral level of awareness with respect to it that is not the same as detachment from that experience. It's not the same as flight. Dissociation is the flight and mindfulness is the solution.

David: 47:00

Yeah. And I think by now, the empirical evidence in favor of mindfulness is pretty overwhelming. Over the last 10 years, there has been even a new wave of scientific research, coming primarily out of Europe, that shows that mindfulness practice go so far as to even change the morphology of the- talking about brain function, or brain connectivity, or improving cognitive performance, we're talking about mindfulness practice having the power to regrow, physically regrow, parts of the brain that have been damaged, which honestly just sounds like magic. Um, almost, yeah, almost as if by thinking about something, you increased its size. And so this is being presented as a clear case of what is sometimes called top-down mental causation, which is that the content of your thoughts can change not just your other thoughts, but the physical substrates that make thinking possible, i.e. the brain.

Ellie: 48:03

Yeah, a lot of the mindfulness research is premised on the idea that the mind and body are not separate, which I think is a really important insight and something I definitely agree with. And I will say in my own personal life, I've experienced a ton of what we might call quote benefits of meditation, from a psychological perspective. It has definitely reduced my anxiety significantly. It's helped me to weather painful periods of my life, for instance, a period of depression. And, I mean, it's almost weird to like, think about what my life would be like if I hadn't been meditating, because I've been meditating almost daily since I was like 20. And so, um, I don't really know what I'm like without meditating regularly, but would be a very, very scary person worse than I already am- no I'm just kidding, um, maybe. But I think, you know, it's helped a lot with reactivity to situations, and encouraged me to embrace life as it appears and love life, but also be sensitive to the way that I'm impacting others.

David: 49:07

Yeah. And I find that very profound and very meaningful, um, and what this new wave of research shows is that it even goes to the very physical morphological organization of our brain. So who knows, maybe mindfulness is the gym for brain, because then, you know, if you're mindfulness, you have like a really buff amygdala or like, a really well-defined hypothalamus.

Ellie: 49:29

It's just maybe not the gym in the way that the Mindfulness Industrial Complex sees it.

David: 49:34

Yeah, definitely not that.

Ellie: 49:37

Of course mindfulness is not the only way to quote do the work, especially if you are, like me, a white person who is engaged in what I take to be a lifelong project of anti-racism. But I think our discussion with Jess suggests that mindfulness can be a really beneficial way of doing the work, or perhaps a preparation for doing the work, since she said that meditation itself may not be anti-racist.

David: 50:00

And I think that's probably the most important takeaway for me, which is that the point of mindfulness is not to make you not racist; it's to give you the emotional and psychological tools that you need, as a white person, to begin having discussions about race without falling, for example, into patterns associated with white fragility. Now this is not to say that meditation is only for white people who don't want to be victims of white fragility or perpetrators.

Ellie: 50:30

Came from Asia? Well, white people have co-opted it.

David: 50:32

Yeah, no. And so there's a much wider application. It's just that this is the slice of the pie, as Jess says, that she focuses on, as a way of creating a bridge between mindfulness and anti-racist education. But of course, the benefits of mindfulness exceed that particular slice.

Ellie: 50:49

Yeah. I mean, if we're taking seriously the Buddha's idea that mindfulness is key to the liberation of all sentient beings, then of course it's going to be a lot bigger than that.

David: 51:00

Well with that in mind, as it were, see you next time.

Ellie: 51:07

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 51:14

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 51:22

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 51:36

Thanks so much for joining us today.