Across the globe, social change leaders are responding with urgency to Coronavirus and the human rights issues the pandemic has laid bare. The work of social change can be as challenging as it is energizing, and progress also brings stress and fatigue, highlighting the importance of sustainability along the way. As we pursue equity in this moment, what’s the role of our personal wellbeing—and how does it fuel the collective justice we seek?
Rhonda Magee, a long-time law professor and meditation teacher who views mindfulness as one of the first steps toward justice, recently presented during the ongoing series of virtual seminars by The Wellbeing Project. In contrast to the “churning mind” of habits and to-do lists, she says, mindfulness helps us focus on the present moment and release judgements or biases, a practice that often leads to greater empathy and resilience.
As a form of self-care, Magee uses mindfulness to ground her identity as a Black woman, carry on her grandmother’s contemplative practice, and ultimately drive her work as an educator at the University of San Francisco. During her talk, she shared more about how we can create social change in a centered way.
Centering and Building Community
Born and raised in North Carolina, Magee’s childhood unfolded in the traditional American south, a region defined by the brutal legacy of racial hierarchy which she experienced in the everyday fabric of community life. Opportunity, access, and resources were not equally available to women or African Americans, an intersection of identity that she says limited her sense of self and possibility.
In her family, gender and generational factors compounded Magee’s experiences with oppression. Her father left the South and joined the U.S. military to “escape” racial hierarchies, only to learn that anti-Blackness was a problem everywhere. He returned home and coped with his trauma through addiction. Magee found herself spending a lot of time with her grandmother, who picked tobacco, cleaned homes for local white families, and led community care projects for a local church.
Magee noticed her grandmother had found a way to honor her own life and support others even as she struggled with personal hardships. She vividly recalls sleeping at her grandmother’s house and seeing lamp light shine from under her bedroom door early each morning. Magee later understood this was a period of prayer for her grandmother, a time for centering and contemplation. Afterward, her grandmother always came out of the bedroom and directed her energy toward the children, reading to everyone then cooking and preparing for a long day of work.
Her grandmother’s self-prioritization was striking and influential. “It made an impact to see her self-disciplined grounding for a life that wasn’t grounded,” she says. She saw her grandmother as a Black woman serving white families yet cultivating a sense of worth beyond the limitations of that role. Magee realized there were more opportunities than what was being shown by systems of racism, and it sparked her journey of using inner work as the starting place for doing work in the world.
As the civil rights movement paved more pathways for African Americans, Magee was able to pursue an advanced education. She attended the University of Virginia—following her father’s footsteps into the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC)—then set out for law school in San Francisco. In the lull before a new job, she found support in a mindfulness practice she later brought into her classrooms to equip law students for the challenges of their work.
Answering Structural Inequity with Personal Justice
Today, Magee teaches mindfulness in part to help minimize identity-based bias in the American justice system, which often carries out the very harm it seeks to remedy. It’s a paradox that can be observed in humanitarian work too, she points out. “The systems we’ve built to provide support are vulnerable when times get tough,” she says. “Resources fall and the precarious positions of people in these organizations reflects the precocity in the broader culture.”
In other words, even justice-seeking structures can hold and perpetuate broader cultures of injustice, a contradiction recently explored by Vu Lee’s questioning of philanthropy’s whiteness. Organizations often reflect larger patterns of marginality and privilege. This doesn’t change without individual care and transformation. “We’re always struggling with our legacies, cultural traumas, personality challenges,” says Magee. “And it’s hard to keep bearing up.”
The need for change leaders to “bear up” and take good care of themselves is gaining attention, as The Wellbeing Project offers a holistic approach to social entrepreneurship and activists like Austin Channing Brown and Rachel Cargle make self-care vital to their work. Cargle has been vocal about the value of her personal wellbeing as a Black woman, arguing for rest as a critical part of revolution. “I’m deeply invested in the ability to be my dynamic self and not just one who’s surviving white supremacy,” she says.
Magee has a helpful framework for anyone struggling to prioritize themselves when so many others need care and attention. She places mindfulness at the center of movement building. “I use the term ‘personal justice’ to describe how we might commit to taking care of ourselves as a first approximation to what justice might look like in the world,” she says. Only then, she suggests, can we gain a true sense of what we might look like together—the next approximation to justice.
To Magee, the primacy of personal wellbeing is key to ensuring the work we carry out is transformative. On a practical level, she says, when we take care of ourselves, it helps to relax the “churning mind” that tends to be agitated and automatic, reinforcing old habits or patterns. From a more conscious state we can go out into the world and “create spaces where we can work and heal—so we’re not just replicating systems of oppression.”
Sustaining Change through Self-Care
In 2006, teacher Mushim Patricia Ikeda published a vow for mindful activists as part of a Zen Buddhist practice. For the benefit of all and in our pursuit of justice and sustainability, it says, it’s important to work in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout. Magee often references the vow in her work and emphasizes this kind of thinking as essential to a changing world.
While change leaders continue responding to Coronavirus and seeking greater justice for the communities most impacted, we have an opportunity to prioritize our own care as an entry point to communal dialogue and social movements. To end habits like overdoing and burnout, tools like mindfulness will be instrumental—not only in reimagining social systems but also to the way we carry out that work, especially in times of acute crisis.
Working from the “churning mind” may seem useful at times, but it’s mindfulness that helps us to be present, resilient, and more connective. “How we are with ourselves and each other can create more change,” Magee says. “Yes, there will be conflict as a result of differing passions. Simply pause, reconnect to your values, and take the next best step. Day after day.”
Illustration: Bonnie Brown, “APART YET CLOSER THAN EVER”, 2020, Amplifier Art
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