Professor Rhonda Magee Is a Faculty Member at T

without really excavating the horrors that we suffer that are requiring us to dig deeper—having the deeper experience of those things... I know that was a really compound question but I just wanted to set the stage to ask you to talk a little bit about what that deep meditative approach is to these hard things so that we don't follow the spiritual bypass—and can you also talk about what is this color insight that you asked us to engage in?

Rhonda: There is such a communion that arises in this work. To look more deeply at this question of bringing insights to bear on issues of racial injustice and to examine what it takes and what I mean by development of color insight. When I previously said that I think everybody’s particular human life is sort of a gift I don't mean this from a Pollyanna sense, since I know there is a lot of suffering in the world that we each have experienced, and some more than others. I also don't mean to suggest a utilitarian or lightness about any of that as a facile way to serve—that you just take your suffering and simply turn it around as a gift. Yet I actually do think that the particular path we have each been fortunate to survive or otherwise we wouldn't be on this call. Whatever its journey, whatever its privileges and benefits, for each of us, has been perfectly suited to teach and to be a source of teaching for others.

And so the way I was thrown into a world in a segregated American southern town with all of the chaos I mentioned, in a body that was racialized by others as black. I didn't come into the world as a tiny infant thinking of myself as a black woman but those are the terms of the passage in this social setting. I am aware of that and I can at the same time be aware of the fact that it is not all of whom I am, nor that these concepts do not fully capture who I am. But it would be foolish for me in this context not to be aware of the way in which my particular embodiment is read in this culture, through the lenses of race, culture, class and education. I know this is happening in the world. And I know that I am an agent of that as well, that I do almost inevitably in the social world, in processing and recognizing people’s social identities and inquiring in some ways explicitly or implicitly about what that means and how they came to their views. That deep awareness and engagement with reality again to the degree that we are not living in a small hut somewhere totally disconnected, if we are in the world and in these different settings, if I am in the United States of America today, for me not to be aware that race and gender are issues that will meet me whether I want to engage with them or not—I must be aware of that, right? When I endeavor to engage others around these issues I recognize that their particular packaging and embodiment is going to be, just as mine has been, a setup.

To use the language of John Welwood, who is a spiritual psychologist, a student of Buddhism and who devised the term “spiritual bypassing”.  He wants us to think about how we come to these challenges that the Buddhists call marks of suffering and marks of existence. The suffering around wanting things to be permanent that is inevitably impermanent, right? These are all ways that we create our own suffering and including those that are tied to identity. His teachings, as far as I've read them, help us to see that we are, speaking on the social and relative plane of existence that is not fully comprehensive of our absolute being in nature, but on that social plane we are invited in certain ways we have cultural histories we have genders and lineages and stories particular stories, and we are set up in a certain way to see things and to be understanding about certain things, and to be blind and unaware about others. I don't know fully what it is like to be, let’s say a transgender male growing up in Durban South Africa—about that experience. Having some humility about the fact that our particular embodiment and positionality does indeed set us up for knowing and having some felt experience about some things and not really knowing about other things. That’s important!

I think that's where humility comes in. It can be a difficult term for those of us who have felt a life of disadvantage and disrespect. We’ve been humiliated. You should also have humility when you engage with other people about this—that can be difficult for us to understand and hear. But I think that on the path of development, we heal from our humiliation. If we are women of color and we lived a life of poverty and we've been abused, we know that we have our own healing to do, and that can be the center of our spiritual work. But as we heal, we can encounter a white male who appears to be very privileged; we won't know that person's full experience so we have to have humility if we are to engage on a fully human and spiritually informed level with that person. We can only hope that others will engage with us in that way too. So it takes a certain amount of patience but it also is an area where we must seek to develop our capacity to hold all of these different dimensions of truth, and to work on our own issues even while we honor and respect that other people might be works in progress.

We are trying to meet people where they are with compassion for the fact that we are all struggling in some way. Our struggles are not the same but we are all struggling, and to bring love and compassion to that is the core of the work. It is to say, no we are not going to bypass we are going to bring insight. I use the term color insight and it’s not just about race, it’s the insight from the tradition of Vipassana and the tradition of those Buddhist teachers who ground us in a capacity for calm awareness that can, over time or maybe in some instances, happen somewhat episodically and suddenly, yet we develop some insight into the true nature of reality and that same kind of developmental path can happen around understanding and how injustice arrays around identity, that is to be in calm engagement, to sit with what does it mean to be racialized in this way, gendered in this way, and then to develop some insight into how these identities might be showing up in our lives right now, might be factoring into why some of us feel alienated, some of us more vulnerable, some of us more protected, even now in this space in this setting in this group, that’s what I mean by color insight and I do see it as a way of walking the path that is about knowing suffering, knowing there are causes of suffering and there is a way to be released from that suffering through practice. It’s bringing all that to bear on those particular issues of our lives.

Sujatha: Wonderful. I’m going to go to the first caller.

Caller: Hi this is Kozo from Cupertino and I want to thank all three of you for all that you are doing in the world of law which you know for me is a difficult other. But I have an observation and a question. My observation is that all three of you who are doing really powerful work with compassion in law are women. There is this gender force, I call it, and then gender lack on the other side. In terms of spiritual paths, I find surrender to be one of the most powerful and important aspects of the spiritual journey and I think about Gandhi and I think about Nelson Mandela—how they were both lawyers and they both were adept in the law rooms yet in their quest both spiritually and politically they surrendered deeply. They stopped the argument and they surrendered to ahimsa, non-violence, Mandela surrendered to prison—so I am wondering how, Rhonda, how do you see that working within the framework of law where surrender is such an important part of the spiritual journey but so antithetical to law to arguing and to the courtroom. You rarely see a lawyer say “I surrender—I’m going to take one for the team.” Would you comment on this?

Rhonda: I appreciate your observation about the gender force. I do think there is something to be reflected on. It invites a reflection on what we mean by surrender and the different ways it shows up in places and times. When I look at the lives of Mandela and Gandhi and King, King wasn’t a lawyer but wanted to seek a PhD in Philosophy and ended up doing divinity partly because he didn’t get into the program of Philosophy but you know Philosophy can often be about arguing a particular point. All three were very interested in these kinds of ways of being in the world that were about engaging systems intellectually and arguing with them, and yet, their life paths did go through right, deep surrender as a dimension of their practice and their social change work. For me, I think one doesn’t have to relinquish the role of lawyer to be engaged with surrender, in fact, I think if you are trying to do social justice work at all today, whether in law or not given the circumstances and the nature of the challenges, we inevitably have to surrender a lot as we go. And choosing when to pause, and be patient, and surrender for now as I would put it, which is a way that I see these models of surrender as you mention, they kind of shifted the terms of the debate I don’t think they relinquished—I think of King from the Birmingham Jail writing that letter and saying to the Christian ministers out there who don’t understand why we need civil disobedience this was just saying these laws are profoundly unjust and this is how we are going to fight them not that we are not going to fight them but that we are going to fight them in a different way. So how we surrender is a really interesting and profound question, but to not necessarily be caught up in a sense of “it’s either surrender or fight”—it’s much more nuanced than that to me. And there’s a certain kind of spirited fight that goes with the kind of surrender that these models embody and there’s a certain kind of surrender engagement that the best lawyers who are staying in the system are in, those of us like Sujatha embodying and working in the spaces of trying to change the systems to bring in restorative justice. It’s staying in the system and speaking the language of it and going to Harvard and Yale law schools the center of the powers of the legal universe and saying even here we need to talk about restorative justice. That is a way of sort of taking the energy of surrender but not leaving the arena. And I think that’s what we’re asking of ourselves.

Sujatha: It makes me think of some of the death penalty lawyers, who really are somehow able to hold both truths. That somehow everything that they do matters and that everything in the universe is going to operate the way it’s going to operate. Thank you, Kozo, for the question. Now, some comments and questions from the web.

From Ebony (via the web): Thank you all for having and sharing this conversation. Can Miss Magee give an example of a specific activity besides critical evaluation and conversation that illustrates her approach to teaching law with compassion? Rephrased can she give an example that compares her teaching approach and the traditional approach to the same issue?

From Amit (via the web): First I want to say thank you for being the person you are and using your life to be an agent of change. Not just for others but for also focusing on you. I think that is the part that many people myself included at times sometimes forget that if we really want to make a change in the world we have to start with ourselves and to see you do this on both fronts is inspiring and I wish I could jump through the phone and give you a big, big hug. Also I have two questions for you: What skillful means do you use when you engage in this type of dialogue especially with other lawyers when the conversation is so often at the level of intellect, and ego how do you move it down to the Heart level? And question 2, how do we make the personal societal awareness in mindfulness more a part of the legal mainstream conversation whether it is at the law school level or say in the Am law 200 firms or legal publications?

Rhonda: Thank you all for these questions Ebony and Amit—and for the hugs and appreciation. I send that right back to you because I am sure we are all trying to engage in ways that are making a difference. So I honor everything that everyone who is taking time to be on the call is contributing already as well. So to speak to the question about examples of teaching—I am eighteen to nineteen years into this particular Law School and have succeeded on the terms of my institution. This is how we do things, we go in with a sledgehammer and have to go in and sort of look around and figure out what it is that they are asking of us, what are these terms and how can we meet them? But once we do that I've found that it gives you a little bit of leeway to start to change the terms. So what I've been able to do is introduce these practices as a kind of pedagogy for social transformation that I can bring into my Law School classes. So in each of them, in different ways whether it’s a personal injury law class or my contemplative lawyering class I can bring these practices in explicitly more or less. Let's take the race law class where I have a lot of content that is sort of traditional case law content on the one hand and then make this effort ongoing at the same time to bring in these practices. So what I do is I have gotten permission to give myself more space as we do this work. Traditionally in a law school class you are racing through tens of cases a weeks, right those of you who have been in law school know that the pace and the scope of coverage is so broad it doesn’t leave a lot of time and space for the kinds of reflective increase that I have brought to bear in this contemplative pedagogy married with the substantive work that needs to be conveyed. If I didn't go to my Dean and say I'm going to need more time, I'm going to need permission to cut out some of the coverage to give more time in reflection and pausing in deep conversation and deep listening and working on ourselves in this classroom space, if I can't do that we're not going to learn in a deeper way. And I went to my Dean and asked for that and I got that. I wasn’t able to do that at first but I was eventually and am able to do that now. I say that as an encouragement to those of you who are working in institutional settings where you see some changes that should be made—again patience—I couldn’t do it in year 1 but I am certainly doing it in year eighteen!

So what I do I have curated and selected particular important cases that help speak to convey legal substance around the development of the equal protection jurisprudence for example, or the development of the discovery doctrine by which we justified taking the land of this country away from Native Americans. So pulling those particular cases out, like Immigration cases, important ones that would help demonstrate the way immigration law has been a vehicle for racial oppression in the country, identifying a number, but then realizing if I am going to do this in my contemplative way instead of teaching forty cases a semester we are going to teach fourteen and then allowing time and space to read and do the analysis and pull out the dimensions of thinking like a lawyer and analyzing ways, but at the same bringing in meditation. So we sit together. We do everything from personal meditation practice commitments right, I invite them to practice in class and out of class. I give them support for that online and in-class, and we practice sitting meditation, we do the compassion practices such as Loving Kindness meditation. I have introduced this to them by explaining the way that research has confirmed that these practices actually have been shown at least in some degree to help us deal with bias and to deal with the challenges of conversations on this topic. So they come into the classroom settings now ready to learn on all these Dimensions. Now you're starting to re-conceive what it means to study law embedding the notion that you study it substantively, and you have a role in this—you look at your own life, as your life history has perhaps taught you something about this substance. And you work on your emotional kind of reactivity and your place in all of this as we engage with each other around what justice might look like informed by the study. That's how I do it. It is taking the traditional “Think like a lawyer” approach, slowing it down enough so that we can infuse it with spiritual practice. But I don’t call it spiritual in the class I call it mindfulness or awareness because I'm in an institutional setting where I need to use that secular language. But it is kind of a way of embedding every dimension of what we talked about and marrying it with the intellectual work. That is an example of how I teach that.

Now, in terms of bringing this into law settings, they are surprisingly reaching out more and more to people like me to come and offer presentations. It's a challenge to bring it into a continuing legal education model, which is like an hour and a half where you come into the law firm. You offer maybe some sitting and offer some comments and Q&A’s and then you go away and you wonder if it’s had any impact. But increasingly firms are asking for that. More and more people from those firms are coming to retreats for lawyers. And as I said before often they are motivated by the desire to deal with issues in a utilitarian way, with stress or with conflict that is raising Intercultural, racial or gendered social identity-based conflict that is happening in their firms. So they have been calling me to come and offer presentations and workshops that feel frankly a bit too one-off but I do it because I think the introduction to these principles of applying an inner dimension to law practice is in itself an invitation that might lead to deepening work and if I can open the door and support people by saying “here's how you can follow up”, I'm willing to do that work as a service.

Sujatha: Thank you so much for the wonderful answers to these questions. We are coming to the end of our time together. If I could just ask you really briefly—how is it that we can as a larger ServiceSpace community support your work?

Rhonda: Thank you so much. You know the message I've been carrying really is about how each of us has a role to play in helping advance understanding and compassion around the many ways that social identity bias, in particular, causes suffering in the world. And so I would just invite everyone on the call, everyone in the ServiceSpace community, I mean I assume that many already are doing this, but I invite us all into deep kind of communion around and commitment towards seeing our spiritual work as the very place where we actually work on and help others work on social identity-based bias and suffering because you know that kind of suffering is happening pervasively in our world and in our midst and I personally believe that the insights and tools of spiritual work are beautifully capable of helping support liberation that begins with ourselves as individuals but actually has an interpersonal and a systemic dimension as well.

Sujatha: Thank you so much.