2 June 2020
Dearest Members of our Mindful Birth and Parenting Philadelphia Community,
We greet you in the presence of great pain and suffering in our communities around the country. Like so many, we feel compelled to reach out to you to communicate in the service of connection.
We know many are turning to their mindfulness practices as a place of refuge in these difficult times. Indeed, we have suggested the same, and as facilitators and practitioners, we believe that mindfulness is a practice of freedom from suffering. And yet.
As you all know, one of our foundational meditation practices is Breath Awareness. We start with the assumption that while alive we can return to the breath again and again to help rest in (open-hearted) awareness of the present moment. As Jon Kabat Zinn says: "As long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you." And yet.
In the protests against the killing of George Floyd and the many murders of black Americans in the hands of law enforcement, there is the literal and metaphorical chant: "I can't breathe." The breath, too, is quite literally at the center of our suffering with regards to the Coronavirus. The virus has the capacity to diminish and rob us of our breathing. And here is a truth: lethality of COVID-19 is more than three times greater for Black Americans.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eloquently invoked the breath this week in his piece in the LA Times, telling White people in particular:
What you should see when you see black protesters in the age of Trump and coronavirus is people pushed to the edge, not because they want bars and nail salons open, but because they want to live. To breathe. And today, despite the impassioned speeches of well-meaning leaders, white and black, they want to silence our voice, steal our breath.
We both have been reflecting deeply on our roles as facilitators of mindfulness meditation. We teach Awareness of Breathing and, as Mindful Birth & Parenting teachers, we ask our students to look deeply at fear: our own fears, our relationship to fears, if there's anything we can do about our fears. In fact, we led both of these practices this past Sunday as part of our current MBCP series' all-day of practice.
As we reflect back on the weekend, and in the midst of all this, as mindfulness practitioners and facilitators, we find ourselves asking a question: Is freedom through our awareness of the breath a given? In addition, we are aware that the exploration of fear / awareness of fear, can be for some, (re-) traumatizing. In this moment, breath and fear are both potent forces of struggle, literally, and metaphorically.
While we aim to study and examine the MBCP/Mindfulness curriculum with discernment--and with the intention to do right by our students--we study/examine/teach/engage in the midst of our White privilege. The events of the past few months, and particularly the past week, continue to lift the thick, sticky veil of our un-seeing.
In so many ways, Coronavirus and George Floyd's murder have acted as unveilings, especially as regards to racism and inequality in our society. The current moment demands that we not allow the veils to continue to be rearranged, replaced, or reinforced. We want to address the ways in which our work falls short for new parents, particularly for Parents of Color. Hopes and fears present during pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood are tightly woven together. We have heard many times over the past week about the deep fears of bringing up Children of Color in America.
We acknowledge that the majority of our Mindful Birth Philadelphia community identifies as White, and that much of the worldwide secular mindfulness community also is White-identified. As the events of the past week have shown us as White people--indeed, as the events of the past 400 years should have shown us--we cannot retreat to a place where we are allowed to turn away. Indeed, mindfulness practice over and over again asks us to turn toward, and to turn toward even the things that are difficult, challenging, uncomfortable, painful. Indeed, we must turn toward seeing the triadic poisons the Buddhist texts point to--greed, hatred, and delusion--which are the causes of our current conditions.
We want to acknowledge that the time of pregnancy and birth and, especially, parenting, as a Person of Color in America, can be for some, an experience of holding one's breath and living with fear on a daily basis.
As Chanell Fletcher, Executive Director of ClimatePlan (an equity-forward environmental advocacy organization), wrote in an email to colleagues this week:
As a black woman with two black sons, I am exhausted, I am angry, and I am afraid. I've been alternating between rage, despair, and hopelessness. I am angry that black bodies continue to be killed and dehumanized--and that we, the United States of America, still have not had a real conversation about how systematic racism and oppression is built within the very fabric of our nation. I grieve the loss of people that look like me and that could be me. I live in fear--for my life, my sons' lives, my nephews, and my family. I know that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nia Wilson, Sandra Bland, Oscar Grant could have been me. And that is the terror I have to live under every day.
We know Fletcher's words are the words of millions of American parents.
We intend to work to dismantle racism and build a better society for all of our children, and especially for our BIPOC families. We are sure many of you are engaged in this work already, and for those who aren't and are interested in finding ways forward, here is a blog post from another worker with the ClimatePlan group that lists some questions to ask and resources for White people who have the intention of helping dismantle racism.
We learn in the MBCP curriculum that pain is a message from the body to the mind to pay attention. Perhaps we can see that the pain we see/feel in the body politic right now is this same message: pay attention.
And we hope to use this moment to, as Jon Kabat-Zinn mentioned this week, sit down in order to stand up, to turn our mindfulness practice towards both the internal and external work of dismantling racism in ourselves and our society, and to begin over and over again in the present moment, by shedding the light of awareness on what is already here before us. We are dedicated to exploring the questions of breath and fear in the current moment and in our Mindful Birth and Parenting work. We welcome any experiences others want to share as well, including your own insights on breath awareness and fear practice in the current moment - or anything else that is arising for you right now.
May we help to build a world in which all are safe, healthy, free from unnecessary fear, and able to breathe.
Thank you for reading this post, and for teaching us so much.
With love,
Carol & Molly