Marc Lesser's Blog, page 19

Resources for Racial Justice

Thanks to Liz (Olson) Swartz for sharing these resources:

Allyship Education & Action: Getting Started Guide by Luke Swartz.
OnBeing Podcast: “Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence” with Resmaa Menakem.

 

And to Viveka Ramel, Ph.D. (http://sevitar.com) for the following:

VIDEO

Stephen Colbert’s interview with Senator Cory Booker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayizzcv-NCE
Van Jones on racial justice: https://youtu.be/-oHHRv–8fc.
A courageous presence with racism, with Tara Brach: https://youtu.be/7MLGkGCLKw8.
Talking about race, with Dr. Bukky Kolawole: https://youtu.be/Hc8b0I36WeQ
Netflix documentary, 13th.

 

ARTICLES

Justice in June, by Autumn Gupta and Bryanna Wallace: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H-Vxs6jEUByXylMS2BjGH1kQ7mEuZnHpPSs1Bpaqmw0/edit.
The 1619 Project, NY Times Magazine (subscription required to view):

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

 

BOOKS

Between the world and me  by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
How to be an anti-racist by Ibram X. Kendi.
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin D’Angelo.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.

 

ORGANIZATIONS

The Loveland Foundation: https://thelovelandfoundation.org/

 

BLACK-OWNED BOOKSTORES

https://www.thedockbookshop.com/
https://www.kizzysbooksandmore.com/
https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/

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The Art and Practice of Engaging and Disengaging

The ability to engage and disengage is one of the secrets, or one of the key skills of mindful, effective leadership. It’s also an important skill to support our overall wellbeing, and our ability to take skillful action, especially in the midst of great change and uncertainty (in other words, in times like now).

This is what great athletes do all the time. Whether hitting a baseball, kicking a penalty shot, or serving a final point of a tennis match, great athletes are disengaging and engaging consistently throughout a game, often doing both things at the same time. This is also true of great business leaders and effective entrepreneurs.

The art of disengaging involves stepping out of being caught by the often powerful and quickly flowing stream of your stories, emotions, and thinking.  

The art of engagement means giving your full attention to what you are doing through a blend of focus while also having a wider perspective.

We are presented with opportunities to practice engaging and disengaging everywhere, at work, in relationships, during solitary moments, and in all parts of life.

Disengaging Practice

Meditation: this is the basic, core practice of radical disengaging. It’s the practice of stopping and noticing, and is both a cognitive practice and a body practice. This is the practice of developing a mind and body that is readily able to disengage.

Stopping when triggered: this means stopping when you are emotionally caught and/or triggered, and training in the art of pausing and stopping. It’s about making a shift from reacting to the ability to respond.

Stepping outside yourself: this is one aspect of mindfulness practice whereby we cultivate the ability to see ourselves and others from a multitude of perspectives. This is a way of not getting caught by judgments, comparisons, and blame.

Resting: this is essentially stopping. For me this is a 15 minute nap each day. Or it could be reading, listening to music, dancing, or walking in nature. It involves consciously stopping and resting the body and mind.

Engaging Practice

Meditation: paradoxically, meditation practice is also a radical practice of engaging in your thoughts and feelings but without getting caught or swept away.

Focused attention: this means practicing being with whatever you are doing in the moment. This might also be called mindful attention – being aware of your sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Not getting tossed around by ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. Of course you can learn from the past and plan for the future, now…

Perspective taking: part of engaging is being aware of relationships, patterns, and systems and how you create or interact with these.

Disengaging and Engaging

Energy Management: a core part of the practice of disengaging and engaging is noticing and managing your energy. Many of the greatest tennis players have mastered the skill of shutting down and resting in between points. For peak performance, we need to find ways to thoroughly rest in between activities. It also means getting enough sleep and other ways to support and utilize healthy, vibrant energy.

Time Management: to both disengage and engage requires a healthy and skillful way of swimming in the sea of time – sometimes letting it go, sometimes noticing with great precision.

Meaningful and purposeful action: explore asking and answering the questions, “what matters most?”, and “what do I have to offer?” and responding and acting in ways that are engaged and disengaged from outcomes. 

Some things to practice:

During meditation or during the day, experiment with disengaging.
During meditation or during the day, explore engaging fully.
Experiment with disengaging and engaging, starting by choosing a part of a day, or in relation to a particular project or relationship. 
Document what you notice, and consider how to incorporate the practice for a new challenge. 

In this demanding time that needs engagement and responsiveness from all of us, it can be overwhelming to try to find the right action. This process of engagement and disengagement can be vital in being able to respond. As Sadghuru, an Indian yogi and author, says: “Not doing what you can’t do is not a problem. Not doing what you can do is a tragedy.”

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You Reading This, Be Ready

by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life.

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Photograph by Christopher Ritter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stafford_(poet)#/media/File:William_Stafford.jpg

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You Reading This, Be Ready

by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life.

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Photograph by Christopher Ritter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stafford_(poet)#/media/File:William_Stafford.jpg

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Audio: SIYLI – Simply Pausing

In this 2-minute guided meditation, we learn the practice of simply stopping and noticing what it’s like to make the transition from activity to pausing.

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If There is No Struggle There is No Progress

In the realm of mindful leadership I’m often emphasizing the need to stay open, relaxed, and curious as essential attitudes toward envisioning, collaboration and problem solving.  Even though Connect To Your Pain, and Connect To The Pain Of Others are two of the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader (from my book), I don’t feel as though I’ve ever fully taken on these practices when it comes to my own attitudes, assumptions, and actions in relation to diversity, equity, and racism.

I recently stumbled across the phrase, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” When it comes to changing deeply embedded beliefs and long-term systems of bias and racism, real progress, real change internally and systemically requires heartbreak, pain, upset, and lots of struggle.

This phrase “if there is no struggle, there is no progress” is embedded in a speech given by Frederick Douglass in 1857.  His life is amazing and inspiring. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1817. He became a leading writer, statesman, and abolitionist.  In 1872 he was the first African American to be nominated for vice-president of the United States.

Here is a portion of a speech he gave on August 3, 1857:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

The origin of the word “struggle” is to stumble and wrestle. The root of the word “solutions” is to loosen, untie, to dissolve. It takes a good deal of stumbling and wrestling to find a way to loosen and untie our own attitudes, and dissolve and shift our mental models – this is true in our individual search for freedom as well as in the search for racial freedom which has lasted for generations, the result of lifetimes of greed, hatred, and delusion. Right now, many of us are stumbling and wrestling, feeling pain and heartbreak.

It feels important to not move too quickly away from the pain and struggle toward solutions. These issues don’t have quick or easy fixes.

It feels critical to work on loosening, untying, and dissolving our deeply held assumptions and beliefs, to really examine our conscious and unconscious models about ourselves, and to consider where we put our attention, and the actions we take to shift the systems that our individual and collective beliefs support and create.

Frederick Douglass put it another way:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

In this paragraph, I see a list of practices that provide a path toward finding greater internal freedom, as well as greater freedom in the struggle for a more equal and just world.

Plowing the ground: mindfulness practice and meditation practice begin with plowing the ground of our beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world. This means turning over the comfortable, well-worn soil of our thinking and emotions. Often the top layers are hardened and crusty, like earth that has been untended for a long time. Plowing them under is hard; a struggle. It’s not clear what we will find when we look more deeply. This plowing process I see as a combination of meditation, listening, inquiring, and allowing our hearts to soften.  

Rain without thunder and lighting: real change and sustainable freedom requires us to listen, to be surprised, and at times frightened and shaken by the thunder and lightning that accompanies shifting from being comfortably asleep to waking up to the terrible injustices being perpetrated on people of color. This is the practice of moving outside of our comfort zones, to bear witness, and to open to what’s possible.

The awful roar: hearing and responding to the pains and injustices of the world can be painful and heartbreaking. We are called to open ourselves and our hearts to the painful roar of people who’ve been calling out for centuries. It also means listening to the roar of possibility, care, and compassion.

We find ourselves living in extraordinary times. There is so much pain and so much possibility.  But it is through this very struggle, as Douglass so wisely said, that we can realize true progress, individually and collectively.

 

There are so many important resources on this topic. Following are just a few that have come my way recently. If you have others that you’d like to share, I welcome your suggestions. Just comment below to share your recommendations.

Awakened Action: Women Leaders Speak to Race, Poverty, Climate and the Pandemic

On Being Podcast with Krista Tippett: Eula Biss – Talking About Whiteness

Tema Okum – white supremacy culture 

 

Here’s a poem that was published on the cover of last week’s New York Times Book Review…

Weather, by Claudia Rankine

On a scrap of paper in the archive is written

I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out

in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher,

is without. We scramble in the drought of information

held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face

covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet

under for underlying conditions. Black.

Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck

with the full weight of a man in blue.

Eight minutes and forty-six seconds.

In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way

to asphyxiation, to giving up this world,

and then mama, called to, a call

to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say

their names, white silence equals violence,

the violence of again, a militarized police

force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil

unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever

contracts keep us social compel us now

to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out

to repair the future. There’s an umbrella

by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather

that’s here. I say weather but I mean

a form of governing that deals out death

and names it living. I say weather but I mean

a November that won’t be held off. This time

nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm

that’s storming because what’s taken matters.

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How Pain Can Provide a Path to Possibility and Purpose

In a recent post, I wrote about Winston Churchill’s three leadership (and life) lessons: 

Don’t sugar coat 
Apply cautious optimism
Engage with purpose and meaning

Those lessons are really sticking with me lately. I suspect it’s because Churchill’s lessons emerged at a time of tremendous urgency, challenge, and transformation, much like today, and the last many days. They came at a time when things looked particularly bleak during the early days of World War II. Right now, we find ourselves in turbulent and challenging times. The world is at war with a novel virus, and the United States is roiling in the face of racism. We are in uncharted territory where, just like Churchill’s era, there is great pain and suffering, but also great possibility, being held and driven by purpose and meaning. A question I’m asking myself a lot lately is: “Can I, and can we, meet the moment? Can we turn towards the pain, envision and work for what’s possible, and be guided by the underlying depth of purpose and meaning?”

Sugar coating pain is easy, but it ends up hurting us more

Is pain due to events or systems? Is it personal or cultural? A practice of not sugar coating is to answer yes, and yes. Right now we have access to horrific events and it can feel very personal. It’s hard not to turn away. The first time I witnessed George Floyd’s killing, I kept flinching and squirming. I couldn’t believe the amount of time, the dismissive attitudes, and the lack of intervention. Event, event, event; so many events. Not sugar coating, not turning away is really hard. 

Experiencing heinous events and taking them personally feels important but isn’t enough. We also need to allow ourselves to see the systems, the cultures, attitudes, assumptions, and social contracts. This is really hard. It takes lots of listening, reading, and shedding our most embedded and perhaps even dearly held beliefs. Lots of listening, questioning, doubting, and speaking out – with a fierce kindness and compassion for ourselves, and others.

Of course, I’m writing as a white man, and can’t possibly know the perspective of a person of color. What I do know for me is when it comes to race, equality, and inclusion, if I’m not feeling uncomfortable, I’m not doing the work.

Apply cautious optimism while welcoming possibility 

I keep returning to my favorite quote by writer Wendell Berry: “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts.” Perhaps right now, when joy feels so difficult to drum up, we can try to be optimistic, while considering all the facts.

This is one of the primal paradoxes of our lives – feeling the pain, the harsh realities, without being consumed by them, so we stay open to what’s possible.  Acknowledging what is, while allowing ourselves to experience the pain of any given situation, can be a potent doorway to understanding and deep insight, thereby creating new possibilities for connection, and for solutions on both personal and systemic levels.

Engage this time with meaning and purpose

I also continue to reflect on a statement from Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki where he says “Our life can be seen as a crossing of a river. The goal of our life’s effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. The true wisdom of life, is that in each step of the way, the other shore is actually reached.” Nirvana is a way of being where we are not caught by desire and suffering, where we are not caught or limited by our usual ideas of birth and death.

The first part of the statement, about the purpose of our lives being to cross the river, is much like Churchill’s first directive of no sugar coating. It’s the practice of seeing what is, of acknowledging our pain, confusion, and tight spots. It’s the practice of seeing where we and our systems need to change. The second part about “the true wisdom of life” is much like the practice of meditation. It’s the practice of cultivating the body (our bodies) of radical acceptance of ourselves and the world, just as they are. Paradoxically, this radical acceptance allows us to open our hearts and minds to the possibility of profound personal and systemic change. Real change is at the heart of what it means to be human. With each change we learn and we re-create ourselves, and by extension, our world.

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Interview: Conscious Writing, Living and Leadership

Marc Lesser speaks with Julia McCutchen on Conscious Writing, Living and Leadership podcast about the essence of mindfulness and how it leads to developing awareness, effective listening, emotional intelligence, curiosity and compassion, not just for business success but also in relation to the future of humanity. Marc also discussed the Seven Practices of a Mindful Leader as a roadmap for leadership and for life. You can listen to the conversation below.

 

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Interview: The Ontological Leader

Marc Lesser speaks with Maria Marc on The Ontological Leader podcast about how building character and way of being can lead to authenticity. You can listen to the conversation below.

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Leading, Living, and Loving Between Worlds

Right now, it feels as though we are between worlds, and the need for compassion, and for wise leadership, has perhaps never been greater. This is almost always true, but the stakes and intensity appear particularly profound at this juncture. Major changes in world assumptions about race, communities, economies, politics, health care, and our food and water systems are collapsing and being reborn at the same time. 

All are being catalyzed and transformed with this same power — the power of shifting from autopilot and denial, fear and greed, to greater attention, awareness, and wakeful consciousness; the power of acknowledging our pain and the possibility of transforming this pain through not turning away, right in the midst of our intense discomfort. All, right in the midst of accumulated racism, going back in history to the founding of our country, and deep into the history of humans.

Greed and hatred have been popular, and incredibly destructive forces for thousands of years. Perhaps we are at the brink of waking up to what is, and to what is possible. I’m holding this cautious optimism. This awareness — of greed and hate, power and powerlessness, of the poignancy of how difficult it is to change and grow, combined with the fleeting nature of our lives, can at times feel crushing. 

I’m reading Thin Places, a non-fiction book of essays by Jordan Kisner. She writes that “thin places” is a Celtic concept that comes from an old proverb that says “Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places, that distance is even smaller.”  She goes on to describe thin places as “Invisible things, like music, or love or dead people or God, might become visible there…Distinctions between you and not-you, real and unreal, worldly and other worldly fall away.”

These days feel poignantly like thin places, between pain and possibility, dread and hope, being alone and being together. Many are feeling and living in the thin places between rage and love, past and future, connection and disconnection.

The question that arises in my heart, in these thin places, and in all places, is around connection. How can we shift from disconnection to connection, from mistrust to trust, from fear to love? How can we see, feel, and embody our similarities and profound connection as humans on this small, fragile planet?

I’ve been reflecting on a few lines of a poem by Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh that calls out to see and feel from a variety of perspectives. The poem is called Please Call Me By My True Names:

I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am also the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving…

My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.

It’s time. This time is asking us to find a way to open our hearts and enter the door of compassion.

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