Ruth King: Race, Rage, and the Healing Power of Mindfulness

Tami Simon:You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today is a special broadcast, hosted by Sounds True producer, Kriste Peoples, featuring insight meditation teacher and life coach, Ruth King. Ruth King is a core teacher in the dedicated practitioner program at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center and she's the author of the book Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace as well as a forthcoming book from Sounds True called Mindful of Race: Understanding and Transforming Habits of Harm. Ruth King is also a featured teacher in Sounds True's Year of Mindfulness program, an ongoing digital subscription in which Ruth offers a "Mindfulness of Race" online training. If you're interested in learning more about A Year of Mindfulness and joining this online program, please visit us at SoundsTrue.com.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Kriste and Ruth spoke about the value of paying homage to rage and its instruction. They also talked about identifying the impact of generational rage, its legacy and tolls on our bodies, lives, and our world. How to bring the practice of mindfulness to the investigation of racial tension and finally, recognizing discomfort as a core competency when discussing race.

And now, here's a special edition of Insights at the Edge, with Ruth King, hosted by Kriste Peoples.

Kriste Peoples: Hi, everybody. My name is Kriste Peoples, and I'm a producer here at Sounds True. Today, it's my pleasure to share with you a special conversation that I had with Insight meditation teacher and life coach Ruth King. Ruth is a core teacher in the dedicated practitioner program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and she's the author of Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible.

In this conversation, Ruth and I spoke about the differences between rage and anger, and the recurring patterns around rage which teach us about what we can shift in order to manifest what we want. Finally, Ruth looks into how we can apply these various concepts to help us heal the difficulties that can arise when discussing topics of racial difference and injustice. And now, here's my conversation with Ruth King:

Ruth King, thank you so much for agreeing to this conversation tonight. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'd like to open it up just by talking about how this work came about. How did you become an expert in healing rage?

Ruth King: Oh, that's a big, big question because I don't always feel like I'm an expert even though I've written a book [laughs] and done any number of retreats and been on many panels. I think that's—what I've learned about [rage] is that it's an energy that is always trying to teach us how to pay attention to aspects of our emotional lives that have often been neglected or violated or what-have-you.

So, what I think I've developed over the years is a sensitivity to just recognizing when that energy is alive and activated. Through my own mindfulness practice and understanding of the stories and the needs, if you will, of this energy for my kind attention, I think I've learned how to interrupt the agitation that I often feel when I'm in the throes of it.

I think "expert" is kind of strong, but I do think there's something to be said for attending to this energy and recognizing when it's there, and responding to it with a sense of care.

KP: So, let me take you back to the book itself. You mention landing in the hospital needing heart surgery and that plunged you into a really big experience of rage. You realized that you really needed to turn it around. Can you talk a little bit about that journey?

RK: Yes. I was 27 years old and I had been just kind of running myself into the ground quite a bit in my life. Actually, prior to this open-heart surgery, I had a hyperactive thyroid gland that had been undiagnosed for a number of years. So, my body was really speeded up and hyper. There was a certain fatigue that I had, but I was still running and racing in my life. It kind of aggravated a micro-valve issue that I had. It made the situation worse.

So, by the time I was 27, after they had finally treated the hyperactive thyroidism, they told me that I would need open-heart surgery. I think it was then, through this surgical procedure, that I saw that there was a need for me to deal with matters of the heart differently. It was through that slow recovery that I started to thaw out in my own body and recognize that I was living in a body, and that there were feelings and thoughts—and even beliefs and views—that I didn't necessarily agree with, but were running.

It was really poignant in the hospital [and] in the recovery in that stillness, if you will—or in that helplessness, or what some would call "a rock-bottom place." I realized that I had really been running from my life and running from a rage that had been waiting for me to kind of pay homage to it—pay attention to this being-on-fire part of me that had been so neglected for so many years.

So, in the stillness of that recovery, I started seeing the inflammation of rage—the roar of it, the way it occupied and really filled my body, my memories. It was like the atmosphere of my life, and I hadn't noticed it until that time. I was just righteous—and apparently dead right. This was a pretty important surgery for me to have.

KP: So, in that stillness, you say you realized that rage had been lying in wait for you to pay homage to it. How did you have the wherewithal to realize that it was rage and to separate yourself from the story enough to realize or to know that that's what it was?

RK: Well, I don't think this happened all at once. I think a lot of the revelation around this came in retrospect because when we're in a place of surviving, it kind of narrows the view and the understanding of what's happening. I think right after the surgery I was still in defense mode—of being this raw and vulnerable.

But, it was over time that I started to see. I started to ask these questions: What's the difference between rage and anger? How do I know that?

My background is in clinical psychology and I had done a lot of inner work of looking at my life and looking at my emotions and the stories behind them. But, there was this subtle discernment I started to have, again, in the pausing and the reflection and the inquiry where I could see that anger has this kind of energy that would arise and it would pass away. Of course, all of these arise and pass away. It would be like a heat flash.

But, rage—[which] I started to notice in my own mind and body—had this lingering, very gripped, older feeling to it. There was a shame and vulnerability associated with rage more than with anger. Anger was something I could feel—very hot. But, I seemed to be able to let go of it quicker. But rage had a deeper story, [and] it seemed like it was an older story, a more vulnerable story, and a recurring story. I started to notice the tattoo of it or the constellation of it.

It was very difficult to discern this without having a practice of really looking through the experience of the body and the sensations. But, that's the real gateway of understanding the experiences that you're having and their visitation, their frequency, and their regularity.

So, that was how I came to know rage had more of a feeling of [unresolved] generational story, view, [and] history that would just wake up. Sometimes, the experiences of rage I felt—I didn't always feel like they belonged totally to me. It felt like they were older, with deeper roots in what's unresolved. I feel also—or what I've found through the work of healing rage—is that we carry what's unfinished in this rage territory from our parents and ancestors. We carry it out of an unconscious loyalty to them, actually, and it's like passing the baton from one generation to another until the rage is really recognized and honored as an energy that's been a big part of our survival, but actually interferes with our healing.

KP: Do you find that this is something that's common to people across cultures? I know, growing up, that the message was, "Don't show your feelings too much," and certainly not the negative ones. It seemed that there was—speaking of agreements—an agreement to put on a nice face to the public or to swallow feelings, or to not make other people uncomfortable. What have you found is the commonality across people that you work with in dealing with their rage or coming to understand it for themselves?

RK: Yes, that's a great question. What I can say is that I've found that rage is kind of like an equal-opportunity emotion [laughs]. I think every living body has experienced or had the visitation of rage energy present in their lives at least a few times. I find that that's across the board, across culture.

I think that the way we're conditioned around expressing rage differs around gender. You can see that there's a lot more for permission for rage to be expressed, if you will, by men than it is by women. I think women are conditioned and programmed—or taught—to be polite and kind and hold the space and hold it together. That's not across the board in all cultures, but that's generally a social norm that we can probably all relate to. I think men have been more trained to express rage verbally, physically, through sports, through other forms of aggression—that seem to be a little more socially acceptable.

These are social norms that dictate how we behave, but the rage doesn't really go away. It just takes a different kind of disguise inside the body like depression; like distracting ourselves with obsessions and devices; like being dependent or really needy, or being dominant and highly controlling; or being outraged and defiant. So, there's these common ways that we play it. We wouldn't call all those things rage to the common eye, but they're forms that this energy takes that riddle our lives, and shut down our capacity to be fully alive and to be connected to ourselves and to the world.

KP: I want to take you more deeply into the inheritance [of rage] that you talked about and the legacies. Can you say more about how they impact us and how we can recognize when we are trapped in that legacy or in that energy?

RK: One of the things we can begin to look at are the recurring patterns in our lives, especially around intense emotions—with being physical in the family. Was anger OK? Or, was it a surprise? How did hold it together and maintain being OK? What role did you play in the family or did your parents play in the family that was important to keep the system together? And what was compromised as a result of it?

So, you can begin to tap into these kinds of habits or conditioning by looking at just the behavioral construction that's in the family and then looking at your relationship to that. Like, in my family, there were eight of us. My mother was a single parent. Everybody in the family played a role in keeping the whole system together. My role was to be angry. I had another sister who would get depressed. I had another brother who would just leave and not show up for several days.

So, everybody's kind of dealing with a behavior that the family knows and, at some level, the system tolerates. And if we look back further and further in generations, we can see that sometimes that's been passed down as a way of surviving. In my rage retreats that I ran for a number of years, there was a woman who described, as one of her breakthrough moments of recognizing how she kept herself silent, if you will. She told the story of her great-grandmother. She was close to death, [and] when they found her in the room dying, she had a sock in her mouth. She was doing everything she could not to make sounds or to worry people or to express the stress. She said that's what she had done all her life. So, here she is in a rage retreat wondering why this is what she's doing.

So, that's kind of a way that I think we're carrying what's unfinished—all of us—because we're so interrelated. But, we carry what's unfinished from those we love. Each generation is trying to elevate the tribe, if you will. The baton gets passed on to them to run, to make it better, to transcend that energy.

What happens is sometimes we don't even recognize that it's there, so it gets passed on to the next generation. What we do next is really important. Rage is one of those emotions that invites us to wake up, to pay attention, to be mindful of what you do next—because what you do next is planting the seed of what will bloom now and in the future.

KP: In a previous conversation, we were talking about being caught in our story of rage. My question was, "Well, who am I without my anger or my rage or my grief?" If this is something that I've come in with—I've come into this world with this inheritance or I'm living into this legacy of grief—and the culture doesn't allow me anywhere to put this rage or doesn't provide me with proper tools for channeling it in a positive way. How do I really come to stand at enough of a distance from it to realize that it has some benefit or something to teach me?

RK: Yes. I think I'm hearing—and it's just a deep question with many rivers. So, let me play with it a little bit.

I think that what happens to all of us—and it's with rage or anything else; it can be addiction—at some point, some of us decide that what we keep doing is not working. Or, we lose somebody that we love because of something that we did. We regret something that we've done that we can't go back and fix. Or, we say something and lose a job. Or it's something like that.

After a while, I know for me there was a pattern that I started to see. There was a pattern that I started to see in my relationships—how I was relating to people—that actually was not getting me what I wanted. It wasn't manifesting the kind of response that I genuinely cared about—like being cared for or caring for others wasn't happening. There was this thing I was doing that was getting in the way of that.

So, one gateway is looking at our patterns that hinder us—that get in the way of something working. Then we're at a real choice point. We're at a choice point right there around how we respond. We need to make a deal. I call it sometimes "be it or pass." We can keep spinning in what we know because we've got a deep groove or habit around that kind of suffering—again, being dead right or being so righteous that our view is so narrow that we can't see what else is there.

Or, we decide that we need to do something different. There's something different that I found that profoundly helps me shift this pattern was the practice of mindfulness meditation, especially of Vipassana. [This was] a practice of gradually steeling myself so that I could remember that I live in this body and that it's not the enemy. Then, a commitment to slowing down enough so that I can be more choiceful in my reactivity to things.

Then, of course, having the tools of mindfulness to, over time, begin to examine and recognize that these visits of agitation and inflammation and disturbance—they're not personal, they're not permanent, and they're not perfect. We can actually see that they come, they go, there's other things that are happening.

I was just at a concentration retreat a couple weeks ago, and one of the things that was revealed—and it's not like I didn't know this, but you know these things in a deeper and deeper way when you have a habit of getting yourself still—was that I could really see clearly that I'm not the one doing the thinking. A lot of thoughts just come up. They arise, they arise, they arise. That's the mind's job—to be busy with thoughts and thinking 24/7.

What I could see is that I wasn't the one doing that. But, what I could also see was that when I started adding to the thoughts that were arising, I was contributing to the story prolonging itself. I was fueling it. I was adding to it. I was dancing with it. I was proliferating, if you will. But, there was that moment when the thought was just arising, and that wasn't necessarily me making that happen.

So, these are levels of discernment that you can begin to notice in a meditation practice of mindfulness. You can really see how thoughts arise—that we have a perception of something, then we have thoughts and feelings about it. The more we reinforce that, it forms a view. That view forms a solid self. Then we start believing the self is solid, and the ego gets more and more refined. It's a process of selfing and selfing and selfing, but that's a relationship to our reactivity of mind. We can have a different relationship to that activity.

So, when I'm looking at rage energy arising and the stories arising with it, the stories can just arise with it without me engaging a story, or hopping in the ring and fighting the story, or trying to fix it. I can watch it arise and then also notice when it's not there—when it has ceased to be an experience of agitation. That's a really powerful moment when you are witnessing and watching your experience, and you can see that shift happen—that you don't have a whole lot to do with it other than to really not miss when it happens.

KP: So, Ruth, I'm wondering what that timeline was from the moment that you came to Buddhism—and you started this practice and realized that you could get some healing from it—and the point at which you started to realize its impact on your relationships. I'm wondering how long that took and how it changed your agreements with the people that you were in relationship to.

RK: Yes, I don't know if there was a moment in time where that happened. This was kind of a gradual dance. It wasn't just mindfulness practice, although I think that was a potent part of it. I think there was some aligning I was doing in my life around my eating habits, around my relationships in general. During this time, I had shifted from working a corporate job into more of a devotion to spiritual practice. So, that was a piece of the shift. I had simplified my life a great deal, so I didn't have as many distractions or burdens—or debt.

So, there were a number of things that I found myself leaning towards that kept things simple, which gave me some fortitude, I think—or some energy—to really attend to what was happening. But, mindfulness practice can happen for people that have outrageously busy lives and also very simple lives. But for me, I've found that this shift of absorption, if you will—where I gave good time and dedication to daily sitting and having a relationship with stillness; befriending my body—this went on for a number of years. I would practice mostly with just the body and the breath, and just relaxing and staying home—if you will—in the body for a while. I think with that stillness that I was cultivating, there was a bit more ease and space to not be so frightened with the activity that was coming in the mind.

So, I don't know if it was a poignant time. I think my friends might have noticed me changing before I did. I think what they noticed was that I wasn't as reactive. I didn't have to have things my way. I don't know—my partner would disagree with that today, but I think I've changed a lot.

[Both laugh.]

RK: But this is gradual. It was very subtle for me. There were moments that were stark, but I think mostly I was slowly arriving home in the heart. I recognized that what I did actually mattered and it had an impact, that I wasn't enjoying the impact I was having, and that I could shift that from the inside by resting more and making friends with my mind.

KP: You've said before in our previous conversations that "rage is what covers our soft spots" and when we engage metta, that's when we heal. I remember, going into this conversation, I was very much wedded to the idea that it's very dangerous to let go of rage in the wrong place or at the wrong time or under conditions that might have bad consequences for us if we start to peel back the curtain. When you said that—that it covers our soft spots—I was really curious about that because [I don't associate] rage with soft spots at all.

RK: Yes!

KP: And not even that it's covering the soft spots. When I'm thinking about my rage and I'm really in it, I'm just hot! [Laughs.] I'm angry. I can't see beyond my righteous indignation. I don't know where to put it. The last thing I'm thinking about is lovingkindness.

RK: Well, exactly. So, I think we don't have to be thinking about lovingkindness necessarily in those moments. But, there's a few things to think about maybe before you get there. I think what I mean by "covering the soft spots" is, in that blaze that you're describing, there's a tenderness that's been exposed that the blaze is actually trying to cover.

It's almost as if we have an allergic reaction to this exposure or this vulnerability that's felt when that match [of rage] is struck. We all have this tenderness, and nobody wants to be harmed. Nobody wants to feel vulnerable.

There are some people that go into a rage when they feel too much love, because they can't handle the tenderness that automatically emerges from the softness, the gentleness, the sweetness that's there. I've counseled couples that get into big fights the minute they become really vulnerable and tender.

So, that's kind of what I'm talking about. I think the story can be different for each of us where we feel that impulse or that rage explode itself, or we're on the verge of it. But, I think that if we look a little deeper and pause a little bit, we might discover that there's something very tender and vulnerable that we're attempting to create a little distance from so that we stay safe.

And then metta becomes not an immediate application, if you will—[laughs]

KP: [Laughs.] No.

RK: —because we can't really allow it. But, when we thaw out, when we come back into the body, when we recognize how sore and hurt we are because we've had to tighten ourselves in that defense of rage—which really contracts the body—what we recognize in those moments that we're really suffering, then metta becomes a gentle and kind way of attending and of loving these parts of ourselves that are hurting.

So, that's how I see the relationship between rage and metta. But, the soft spot is really that vulnerability that we all have. If you touch the top of a baby's head and if you touch your own, there's a little soft spot still up there that's been up there from birth. I've heard—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche talks about the soft spot all the time. Pema Chödrön describes it as "the weak link in the hard boundary of the ego."

So, the weak link in all of us is a spot that we can't make hard—this soft spot. But, we try to cover it. We try to protect ourselves. We try to do something so that it's not so vulnerable. But, it's inevitably going to be touched, because we're in these bodies and we're in this life.

KP: You also said that it's important for us to know the grip and to know the holding. What I took that to mean was that it's important for us to be able to be in a moment of rage and feel like we're enveloped in it without trying to resist what it's come to show us or give us. When you said that, I felt a bit of relief because a lot of time we hear spiritual teachings that have as [their] goal to get rid of—supposedly—negative emotions or to be free from feeling badly or angry or enraged about things.

Can you speak to that a little bit—the importance of knowing the grip and knowing the holding?

RK: Exactly. I think conditions happen that create the expression of rage or the energy of rage. There's things that happen that end up creating the experience of a rage moment. We can't always figure out what that is.

What happens is we leave ourselves. We leave the body the minute we start trying to figure out, "Well, what's this about and whose fault is it?" and all of that. It's kind of like—I say in the book that [if] you see child hit by a hit-and-run car, you don't run after the car. You run to the child to offer it help. That's kind of what happens when we're in a rage—we kind of run after the car, but we forget that there's a wounded one. And that's usually us.

It's useful to drop the object of our agitation or our fury—running after the car or being dead right, if you will—and come back to know and attend to the parts of ourselves that are suffering, that are hurt by it. Pause with that. Attend to that just like you would any wounded child that you would see hurt somewhere. We need to attend to ourselves that way.

That doesn't mean putting the fire out. There's a way of bearing witness to our pain in a loving way that allows us to see its nature. The nature of rage—just like any other emotion or any other hurt place—is that it's going to have its emergence and then it's going to soften and shift and change, because change is all there is.

So, it's useful for us to know intimately that we can bear witness to the impermanence of the experiences we're having. We don't have to change them. We don't have to fix them. We just need to watch their nature—and their nature is that they arise; they meet our attention; they show us fully who [and what] they are in an atmosphere of kindness, in an atmosphere of metta, in an atmosphere of nonresistance, ain n atmosphere of no warzone. They can show us their beauty, their glory, their radiance, and then we can watch that die out over time.

And if rage is something that visits all the time and you just feel like you're really in a spin with it, and you find yourself at war with it—what I say to people sometimes is, "Stop being mad that it's showing up." That's a form of violence towards yourself. If it's coming with regularity, expect it to be there.

You can even have a seat for it in your mind and in your heart. When it arises—because you know it will, or you believe it will—you can just welcome it with a sense of grace and welcome. Say, "OK. Sit here. Sit with me for a while. Let's be together with this." Just find a gentle way to not be at war with yourself or with this energy that has played such an important role in our survival. But, it's just not needed as much as a strategy as we begin to heal and be more whole in our lives.

KP: I can just feel a softening as you're speaking about that.

RK: Hopefully, we're cultivating more space in the body so that we're not so contracted. That, again, is just the machine of mindfulness, if you will, that hopefully—with regularity and with our consistency in practice, we're cultivating a way of loving ourselves and relaxing that allows us to be with whatever arises in our mind and body without being at war.

KP: I want to take you back to the foreword of this book. It was written by Jack Kornfield, who—as you know—is a popular Sounds True author. He was also a mentor and teacher to you for many years. What he wrote was that you dedicated much of your life work to understanding the fiery energies of rage, hatred, and fear. "As a Buddhist meditation teacher, I was first simply trained to mindfully experience and tolerate these energies. Beyond meditation, I then struggled with the need to face them head-on, to work with them, and to express them without creating more suffering. In this book, Ruth teaches and encourages us to be brave, wise, alive, and compassionate—to both honor our rage and its causes, and use them to heal ourselves and the world."

So, I wanted to explore that a little bit more, because you've said that Buddhism is instrumental in healing rage, which we've talked about at length. But, I also want to know how you apply it to healing racism.

RK: Oh! The book I'm working on right now is going to be looking at how we bring the mindfulness practice to investigating the energies of race and all of the tensions that arise in those situations that we're in where we can't bear the conversation, we can't bear what gets stimulated when we hear the "race" word or the "racism" word or the "racist" word—or those experiences where we are just hijacked immediately [at] the moment we think someone's talked about it or talked to us about it. I mean, all of the defenses that get raised.

There's something to be said about this relative world we're in that I think is very related to sangha or the community or the relational side of our lives that is required—that is a big part of how we wake up—this rubbing against each other, being in these conversations, being able to dialogue. But, there's a way that—when it comes to race, which is kind of like a forbidden topic for some people, just like rage is. I think we kind of lose ourselves. We leave our bodies. We leave our minds. We're just hooked right in our stories.

I think mindfulness practice is a beautiful way to begin to investigate that habituation—that reactivity, that activation—that happens when we find ourselves around people that are different, when we find ourselves locked in our stories about race, when we find ourselves thinking we shouldn't go there because we're good Buddhists and it's only a concept. There's the practice of sitting on the cushion and looking at what arises in your mind and working with that through the practice of mindfulness and investigation. But, if you're sitting on the cushion and race never comes up, it's kind of hard to investigate that. Or, if you're sitting on the cushion and race is the only thing that comes up, then it's just another form of lockdown.

What I think is important is that we use this practice—we use our lives. When we sit on the cushion, we bring our lives with us. I'm encouraging people to bring an intentional inquiry around their habits as [they relate] to working with this explosive time in our lives—once again—around racial ignorance and suffering that's just plaguing the world right now, and that we not be afraid to go there, to invite inquiry, to be with people and have conversations. [We] then take what we feel—where we're triggered, where we feel numb, where we're confused. Bring that to the cushion to investigate what's happening in the body, what's happening in the mind—"Where am I contracted?"—without trying to figure out the story so much, but to be able to rest in the body enough so that you can befriend yourself around this enough to be able to have conversations out in the world and do what's important to support our sangha, our container of love.

It greatly needs attention in this area. I don't think we have to dodge or go into a spiritual bypass around this obvious distress that's all around us under the umbrella of, "Oh, race is a concept and we shouldn't entertain concepts," or, "We should just work with breathing and not look at it." I do think that we need to educate ourselves and build literacy around racial suffering in our lives, and then be willing to relate to this energy in a very intimate way from the inside.

KP: What do you say to those practitioners who would respond that they are colorblind—those who are also the same ones who are saying that race is a concept or a construct?

RK: Well, I get that a lot because I do a lot of training of meditators and Buddhist concepts through a variety of multiyear programs at Spirit Rock. The way I talk about race is to have people look from a couple different lenses in our relative reality—in the world we walk in day to day; the news that's on. We could say, "Well, we don't need to listen to any of that."

But, we can look at any of these things through the lens of the individual. I'm an individual, and I'm looking at this. I'm a good person. I can do my practice and I can go on retreats. I can sit with myself and understand this.

But, we're also members of collectives. We're racial beings as well. We're part of racial collectives that make a certain gestalt or constellation that have—like any tribe—certain characteristics and habits. There's something to be said about stereotypes here, but I think there's also something to be said about patterns that we can readily see in our society—especially patterns of harm that are hurting certain races and not others. Or, this kind of thing that we can't really argue with that's right in our faces.

So, I think it's important that we wake up to harm. It's an issue of fila. It's an issue of relational ways of being in the world. It's an issue of non-harming and seeing the subtle way the collective patterns cause harm.

Sometimes, I talk about it as the stars in a constellation. I remember talking to a group of people when Michael Brown was killed. We were in a small circle, kind of processing our experiences. The question was for us to share how we felt about what happened. A white guy who was sitting right next to me—an attorney, and very passionate about human rights—he said, "I can't believe that man killed that boy. It shouldn't have happened. I have people in my family that are police officers. This just shouldn't happen, and I'm appalled. It just shouldn't have happened." And he was very sincere.

So, he was looking at the stars. He was looking at a single incident and describing how he felt about it. But, when I looked at the incident with Michael Brown, what I saw was a constellation. What I talked about was that it was horrible that, "The police officers have once again killed an unarmed African-American male. I'm very disturbed by it. It's a pattern and it needs to stop. This could have been my grandson or my son, and this just needs to stop." I was looking at a constellation; I was looking at the Big Dipper in the sky. He was looking at the stars.

This is the way we miss each other. This is the way we need to start being curious about how other people are seeing what we see. I could certainly understand him seeing from the lens of the good individual or caring, sincere individual—white individual. But, what he couldn't see was the constellation, which was an experience I had at the collective level—being a part of a racial collective that is a target of harm that forms a constellation [and] forms the Big Dipper. If you look in the sky and recognize the pattern, then you'll be able to see, "Oh, yes. That's the Big Dipper."

So, I think there's ways we miss each other when we try to have conversations because we can only see through our experience. But, there was a learning moment there when he connected some dots about this constellation that's in the sky, where he had been seeing just the stars.

Sometimes, I could see where I get too stuck on the constellation and I forget that there's other stars in the sky. There's a wide open space there that I can open to as well and not be totally fixated on the big picture. There's things that we can learn about this if we're willing, and we can bring this to our seats—to our meditation cushions, if you will—and begin to sit with the disturbance—what gets activated in those conversations, where we feel it in our bodies. Can we allow it? Can we bear witness to it? Can we see it for what it is? Can we recognize when it's no longer ablaze? Can we rest in the awareness of it?

That's my prayer around some of the racial work. My work is not so much centered on fixing the social issue, but I would like to be able to influence our capacity to have the conversation and to rest a bit more with our own activation around these issues—when they come up.

KP: Yes, because it really is a point of activation no matter how subtle. When you come through a door and a person says, "I don't even see your color," it's saying to me, "Well, I can't allow the whole of you to enter into this room."

RK: Yes! That's right.

KP: [Laughs.] Right? Yes.

RK: I just wrote this article in the Buddhadharma magazine on the sangha, and I was responding to a comment that came up when somebody said, "I don't see you as a black woman." It's kind of like, "Well, if you don't see me as a black woman, I actually feel at risk—"

KP: Right!

RK: "—because you can't see who I am in this relative way. Then, what are you seeing?" What are you seeing? So, it's some projection that people are working off of.

This happens all the time. This is a painful place in a lot of our spiritual communities right now—that we can't seem to apply our practice to this very obvious and recurring and painful manifestation of race and racism that's in our society right now. In some ways, it's been there all along. But, our narrative around it—I would like to believe that there is a way that this practice in particular—mindfulness—the Buddha specialized in suffering. I think we ought to be able to take this one and really have some traction here.

But, I think the choice—especially here in the West—is that we see this practice as a silent practice—as an individual practice. The idea of us being a collective—even within a community that engages each other. You go on retreats and we practice. We're in silence. We're not engaged.

It takes being in an engaged sangha that's intentional about wanting to have intimate experiences. It doesn't take long before that issue comes up—that divide that's in our world around this comes up because that's kind of where we are. To not talk about it is to actually be in collusion with it staying the way it is.

So, I'm very interested in us having a wholesome way of talking about something that's so important to all of us.

KP: And quite uncomfortable and challenging at times, too. You've actually said that discomfort is a core competency for waking up to racial ignorance and suffering. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Why is discomfort a competency?

RK: Because the one reason it's a competency—which I think is good news—is because we know that we're in the zone. A funny thing about discomfort is that it gets our attention. When it gets our attention, again, what we do next is so important. So, it gets our attention, which means it's something that we can give mindful attention to.

So, it's important. Of course we're going to be uncomfortable having these discussions. Of course. It's to be expected that there would be some awkwardness, some itch, some ouch and oops—some playing dodgeball around it.

[Kriste laughs.]

RK: That happens in these discussions. All of our strategies will flare up to protect this soft spot because we've come to conversations about rage and race bruised and kind of beat up. Then fingers [have] pointed at us. So, we're appropriately uncomfortable and even a little resistant or afraid that this soft spot is going to be totally exposed and damaged. I think a lot of us have that fear.

So, to feel a touch of that discomfort seems appropriate. We can be uncomfortable and also maintain the intention of being respectful, recognizing the impact that we have when we do what we do. Again, this is an issue of fila—of non-harming. It's almost as if we can come to this conversation—this is still a practice of mine. We can have these difficult conversations and all this discomfort and all this activation that might be happening on the inside, but we're still holding each other's hand.

It's just kind of that idea that we're talking about it, but there's no absence of love. We haven't left our hearts out of the equation somehow.

KP: In your Dharma talk on diversity—where you use the imagery of stars and constellations to illustrate how we sometimes miss seeing each other—you also brought up the importance of us noticing dominant and subordinated group dynamics when we're dialoguing across race and across any other—I imagine—difficult topics. It made me think of a transgender friend of mine who was trying to school me on her pronouns of choice. And she said—

RK: Of their pronouns.

KP: There you go. Exactly! That's it.

And it really brought to light what you were talking about with dominant and subordinate group dynamics, and how entrenched it is in us, because every time I went to talk about my friend, I goofed the pronoun.

RK: Yes.

KP: It made me think, "My goodness. I'm so used to male/female or his/her, and never really had to bring my attention to my friend's experience." Can you say a little about that—about the dominant and subordinated group dynamics, and how they impact our experience in daily life? This is a really important conversation too.

RK: Yes! Yes. Well, I think what's important about it is that—if we can understand that we're all parts [and] we all hold membership in any number of collective group identities in this relative realm that we live in.

So, there's female/male—there's a gender group identity that we belong to, and a sexual orientation group identity that we belong to. There's a racial identity [and] a religious identity that we might belong to.

There's the identity of being right-handed or left-handed. That's a real simple one there, where the dominant group is right-handed people. So, the left-handed people always find themselves having to make some kind of adjustment. That's a subordinated group.

The same is true with transgender not being the dominant group of gender or dominant gender. Then they have to make adjustments in the dominant culture.

So, when we look at the dominant culture of race, we see white people. So, other races are subordinated races at the cultural level—at the societal level here. So, [they] have to adapt or find a way or develop different strategies to work within this dominant culture and to change it or to shift it.

So, there's always this dance of dominant/subordination. What we forget is that when we're looking at race, we can always talk about white and people of color, for example. But we don't always think about gender. It's complicated. As a woman—I don't think my example is good, because I'm usually on the subordinated categories as a woman, as a lesbian, as an African-American. All three of those areas would be considered subordinated in our social construct.

But, if you get a straight, black male for example, then he would be dominant in "male" but he would be subordinated in race. He would be dominant in being heterosexual. You see?

So, it's complicated. We tend to focus more on where we're subordinated, but we forget we also have experiences of dominance—and that that's at play. Like, if you're a parent, you're dominant over your child. If you have a job, you're dominant over people that are unemployed. But, we don't always look at that dynamic.

The characteristic of being in a dominant group is usually [that] people in dominant groups don't have to look at themselves because they're on top. They don't have to look. There's certain things that they don't see and don't have to know because that tends to be characteristic of anybody in a dominant role.

Subordinated group members tend to know a lot about the dominant group because their lives or their situation is highly dependent upon understanding that kind of influence in their lives. So, they have PhDs in understanding dominant cultures.

People in dominant cultures tend to focus more on being good individuals, or individuals. This is where we see in our dharma practice—if you have a predominantly white-group sangha, most of the conversation or the view of the collective is white-dominant independence points of view. This is why a person of color coming into a situation like that would feel the subordination because most people of color enter from an experience of group identity. Most white people—because they're in the dominant role—enter situations from the individual lens.

So, this is the same as the stars and the constellations example. We miss each other, or we don't feel safe. We bridge our conversations in a way that supports a sensitivity to seeing something other than what we're used to seeing.

KP: Ruth King, I could talk to you all day long. And I want to! [Laughs.]

RK: [Laughs.] It's just been a joy.

KP: So much insight and information every time I talk to you. We have time for one final question. I'd like to ask you for maybe a tool or a mini-meditation or practice that we can use when we find ourselves in the midst of the old story, or in the hold of anger or rage or a particular challenge that we find it hard to step outside of.

RK: OK. Well, I think a couple of things could fit here. One is just a little mantra that you can give yourself that I walk around [with]. It actually tickles my ear often. That is: "Life is not personal, is not permanent, and it's not perfect."

So, when I find myself really snagged or kind of dressing up for war, sometimes I'll take a little pause and ask myself, "Am I believing that this is personal?" Then I'll back up a bit. "Am I believing that this is going to be permanent and go on forever?" And it's not. I know it's not. We know enough about our experience to know that change is all there is.

Or, am I believing that this should be perfect or my way? Am I kind of in a place of arrogance or indignation? And I just back up.

So, me reminding myself that life is not personal, it's not permanent, it's not perfect—and also it's not permanent, meaning we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. So, let's not waste that time on war. Let's be discerning here.

So, I play that in my head and then sometimes I turn it into an inquiry. Am I taking this personal? Am I believing this is forever? Am I thinking it should be perfect? Sometimes that snaps me out of my constriction. I laugh at myself a little bit there.

In terms of a meditation practice, I think the most fundamental thing that can be done is to relax the body because there's a natural awareness that reveals itself when the body is not tight. Sometimes, that is the biggest struggle of anything—when you're in a moment of activation or contraction. It's simply to remember to relax the body. It's simple, but not easy.

You want to relax the body. Do the body scan. Move from the head throughout the body. Invite a certain awareness and relaxation of each part of the body. What you'll find—and I think a lot of people do, is they'll start with the body scan and then they'll find themselves drifting off into their story, and trying to fix something or compare something or judge something. But, to come back again to touching into the body—feeling yourself sitting on the cushion; feeling your feet touching, your hands touching; feeling the breath touch and move the inside of the body; doing what you can to stay home, stay in the body, stay in the heart; and to relax there. It's fundamental. I think it's fundamental.

It's also the first foundation of mindfulness—to come into relationship with the body and breath is one of the best things we can do for race activation, for rage activation. It's just allowing ourselves to know our lives and to be intimate with the experiences of our lives—the good, the bad, the ugly; not just those things that we want to experience, but what arises. That would be my suggestion as a fundamental—those two things, of the mantra and the first foundation.

KP: Thank you so much for that and for bringing us back around to cultivating a home in the body. That's so important. I wish we'd had more time to talk about that.

[Ruth laughs.]

KP: Next time! [Laughs.]

RK: Well, thank you so much for this. It's just what I thought it would be—like having you here in my living room. Like having a cup of tea together, and just talking about these things that I think are greatly [important] to us and to other people. So, I'm very grateful to be able to share with you.

And may it bring a sense of support and ease to all of those who listen and are doing everything they can to be in a wholesome relationship with life and all of life that is made available to us.

KP: Ruth King—thank you for helping us make inner peace possible.

RK: OK. Well said.

KP: SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey.