Rhonda Magee explains how mindfulness helps people reclaim power and agency against oppression. She frames attention itself as power, mindfulness as a way to restore choice and a sense of goodness, and both as tools for moral action that can drive social change.
Chapters
Foreign. Begins with us. I believe this is why I practice mindfulness. This is why I'm here with you to share a bit of what I've learned along the way about how these practices and being in communities of practice and learning from teachers who are committed, how all of this has helped me with, you know, my day to day, moment to moment effort to kind of wake up to what is going on, to kind of fall awake, as my friend Jon Kabat Zinn wrote in one of his recent books, right to the reality that we do have agency, we do have power, as is identified in the Yoruba tradition with which I'm becoming a little bit familiar and kind of an African one of the various ways that the African diaspora has helped us understand how we might reinforce our ability to make changes and recognize we all have this life force, we all have this, what's called ashe in that tradition. And part of what oppression does is disconnect us from the sense that we have power. That's what various interlocking kinds of oppressions will make it seem that somebody else has the power, some product. If you interlock politics and capitalism and see some of the ways that we are really fixed at the intersection of political economy, capitalism tries to reinforce this idea that yes, we're not just hyper individualized, but there's a product out there that somebody else is likely making and we have to find the money to get for everything that we want to do in the world. And without money and without products and without the platform, we have no power. But actually, I think what mindfulness is here to share with us is the good news that actually the technologists actually already know, which is that there's nothing more powerful than our attention. There's absolutely nothing more powerful than, than the power we have to place our mind, should we choose to accept it and cultivate it at will, where we want to place it, as opposed to being dragged around, you know, by every other sort of temptation out there and narrative about what we all need and what I need to be better, look better, et cetera, et cetera. So coming, bringing back that. That wandering mind that want, that mind that's being pulled away, you know, very systematically and so subtly. Right. There's no accident about any of this, but being more aware that, you know, the battle is on and it's up to us to sort of halt some of the ways that we're being manipulated, you know, is I think, really and a very important entry point or a very important point for all of us who may have already you know, we may all in this conversation be fairly aware of, sold on to some degree these practices, but just to be, you know, just to remember and to be reinforced in this sense that yes, we can bring back our wandering mind and also reinforce the sense that we have of our power as real, right and impactful and maybe the only thing that's ever made real change from the bottom up possible. The fact that we each have the ability to impact each other, to influence each other, to have each other sort of reconnect with our humanity and the things that move us and that we care about. We all have this power. We can have a conversation with a stranger today that could change our lives forever. We could. You know, we all have had the experience of we're going along, feeling one way, we meet one person, we have a conversation, we're feeling another, positive or negative. The music someone sings, whether as a product or in our lives, because our beautiful voices are available to us all the time, know all of these. I'm just pointing to different ways that these soft bellied, carbon based bodies are radically again, sort of, you know, being impacted by a sensory lifescape that's always potentially available to awaken us. And we are always able from this standpoint as well to impact the lifescapes of those around us. So, you know, if we can really understand that mindfulness as it invites us to pause, to come back home to the choices that we have, right, to come back home to the basic goodness inside and the simple contentedness that we can experience by just realizing that, you know, from a conscious breath, in a certain way, we are 100, restoring ourselves to maximal, you know, ease like this is what the body has been formed to do to, to take from this bioverse like the universe in which we're seated, this biosphere that we're in, just what we need to help keep moving us in the direction of well being. Yes. That doesn't mean, you know, this. Of course we know illness happens, sickness happens. And we also know that the body is constantly changing and one day we'll be no more. But all of that said, in the midst of this life, we do have these again. All of this innate ability for a simple kind of good enough, well enough moment. And we miss that so often. So mindfulness from that place of helping us remember that we always have this capacity for a good enough, well enough moment right within us that can then give us a little bit more of the energy to do the next best thing we can from where we are, you know, to choose from the range of possible actions that we can take something that, you know, it may not we may have to change course because sometimes we think we're doing something that's for good, and turns out, oh, we get some feedback that actually wasn't so good. But again, mindfulness is giving us that opportunity to choose again from that place of, you know, this is the new moment. All right, I did that thing. It had this impact. Whoops, well, what can I do now? And it can keep us in that place of kind of confident in a way, choice like, you know, it gives us or can give us a kind of faith that we have within us the capacity maybe not to always make the right choice, but certainly to recognize a new choice can be made and we can always begin again and keep at it. And as we do that, we inspire others.
