[music]
So this is really an essential place for our attention because, in our personal lives
and our collective, there's so little listening,
and so the inquiry is how are groups that have been at war ever stop the cycles or
how will the ongoing racial and class and religious struggle,
the struggle with those of any kind of difference, how will it ever reconcile
if there's not a bridge of understanding
that comes from opening ourselves and sensing "Okay, what's it like to be you? I'm listening."
To be willing to be changed by what we hear... that's poet Mark Nepo.
We lean in to be willing to be changed by what we hear.
That level... it's radical openness.
So I think of it - and I was thinking of a story I wanted to share with you that was
in my own life where this came up, where it was really really challenging and
I have participated over the last decade in a number of groups now
that are multiracial and also of other, different sexual, gender orientations and so on...
that are to deepen understanding between people. So I participate in a lot of them, and a lot of trainings.
I'm remembering at the beginning of one group
- just we were kind of still in that forming and norming stage, and we were doing a go-around,
and kind of sharing where we were, sharing something about ourselves that wasn't as easy to share.
And I shared - now I've been very very public about it - but I shared
how much are struggling with health and how hard it was
to not even know if I was going to be well enough to show up for something
and how much vulnerability I had around that
and how even in forming this new group
my hope was we'd schedule meetings in a certain way so that, you know,
they wouldn't be too close in because I was afraid I would end up not being able to show up
and it felt terrible to feel that way.
And so I appreciated their understanding, I was glad I could share this and
one person of color was really, really angry at me
and she felt like I was creating a backdoor.
She wanted to feel my commitment to the shared work and right from the get go,
there I was, creating a backdoor: "I can't wait meet quite as often as..." - that kind of thing.
And we tried some back and forth, right then and there, but neither of us were listening.
So, on my own, I did that U-turn because I was upset and angry and hurt
- you know I felt like I had disclosed something that was vulnerable and not been well received...
And so I was into self-justification but then as I
listened more deeply I got in touch with, underneath that, a much
deeper place that wanted attention, which was a feeling of shame and guilt.
And it was basically that self-doubt: "Well maybe I'm not so committed."
And it was what now, over the years, I've understood as white guilt
which is basically I'll never be able to do enough to address the enormity of trauma that white people have created
from slavery to this current day, in terms of institutionalized racism: "I'll never be able to do enough."
And personal badness with that.
So I stayed with that and I kept on listening into that and sensed, even under that guilt,
the hardest place to go to, which is the horrific sense of sadness and grief
the heartbreak about it.
And when I could get to that place - to the caring place -
then there was room, to not make myself wrong and realize there's no measure that's enough.
And just to keep caring and keep responding; that was the wisdom place.
But it was a really important U-turn
of inner listening, because then it allowed me to sense and read in my heart and mind,
sense: "Okay, so where was she coming from?" and sense the natural mistrust
that would come up, you know, of feeling like, you know, I'm going to abandon ship.
And the feeling of separateness that would come with that.
And so we got together and talked, and then there was real listening.
And I learned so much from listening that round, because what I learned
was that she needed me to know how it was for her that
I had an option to space out meetings.
Being a white person. I had an option to do it when it worked with my schedule and so on.
But that for her, she said: "I'm on the firing line, it's daily and I can't take a vacation."
I can't do it according to other things and just
she just wanted me to understand that, to know that, and that was
the beginning of really one of my very, very close relationships of
"hey, it's different, moving through this world with white skin;
I can care about something and try to help
but I'm not on the firing line, it's not something I have to care about every single day
because it's always affecting my life in every situation
and that is the case for her.
Just pausing because I can still feel it in my body
and I still have to keep relearning what I learned then:
the power of that listening.
[music]