Healing Ourselves and Our Communities Through Mindfulness with Rhonda Magee
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All right. Welcome everyone to the mindfulness exercises podcast. Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Rhonda V. McGee in conversation to explore her experience with mindfulness and meditation and her teaching. Rhonda is a professor emeritus and founding director of the Center for Contemplative Law and Ethics.

at the University of San Francisco, just across the bay from where I am now. Professor McGee is a leading mindfulness teacher and practice innovator with a focus on applying mindfulness to the hardest challenges of our times. She's an internationally recognized teacher, someone who I've been aware of for a few years now in a lot of mindfulness circles.

She's a guide and mentor, and she's focused on integrating mindfulness into higher education, law and social change work. And she's also a prolific author. She draws on law and legal history to weave storytelling, poetry, analysis, and practices into inspiration for changing how we think and act

and live better together in a rapidly changing world. She's the author of very popular and highly rated book called The Inner Work of Racial Justice, Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness. You can find on

on Amazon or anywhere you buy your books. For more than 20 years, Professor McGee has studied mindfulness, its underlying origins in Buddhism, and its benefits and applications in our world.

As both a law professor and a mindfulness teacher, Rhonda has been exploring the integration of mindfulness into teaching and learning, social engagement, and in support of personal and collective healing and activism and leadership. She's written extensively on how mindfulness and other contemplative practices

Support engagement in the world in the face of all the challenges that we're living through right now, including climate distress, migration, political polarization, which seems to be really hot right now here in the U.S., migration, war.

and all of their effects on us all. Along the way, she's become a sought-after keynote speaker and thought leader, inspiring people to explore this integration of socially engaged mindfulness in research and applications all across society, including schools and workplaces and our communities.

Professor McGee's current research and practice focus on the intersection of mindfulness and the African-American aesthetic and practice approach that emerges from the Black social gospel tradition, which she calls soulfulness. And she's also creating community as well, which we'll talk about later. But Rhonda McGee, it's a pleasure to meet you today and welcome to

this conversation. Thank you so very much. It's a pleasure and an honor to meet you too. And it's a little embarrassing always to sit through one's own bio, but thank you so much for the graciousness of sharing a bit about my background to your audience. Absolutely. For everyone listening, I highly encourage you to check out Rhonda's work at our website, rhondavmcgee.com. Put links in

in the podcast show notes. But Rhonda, I'd like to start just by learning a little bit about how you "discovered" mindfulness or meditation in your personal life

And what were those early moments in practice like for you? Thank you. Well, when I hear that question, I think of two things. I think as a kind of a backdrop to the actual discovery of meditation and mindfulness, there was the fact that I grew up in the southern part of the United States.

Often spending time with my grandmother, Nanny Suggs, Nan Suggs, who had been called to a kind of Christian ministry. And certainly a very disciplined practice of getting up every day before dawn and centering herself to prepare her for the particular way she was taking care.

that calling into the world. And so, you know, as a little girl, I would see my grandmother get up every day and just, you know, we knew she was been the

30, 45 minutes on her own, centering herself, getting herself ready for whatever the day might present to her. And, you know, she wasn't as fortunate as I have been to be well-educated and to create the career of her dreams. You know, she having been born in the

early part of the 20th century in the southern part of the United States, was relegated to some pretty hard work. She cleaned houses for other people. And so to see her figure out a way to have a sense of the dignity and value of her own life, the sense that she had a message to give, and that all of that could be brought forth on a regular daily basis,

by beginning the day with a kind of centering practice, I think that created a background for me so that, fast forward to the point where I became an adult, had the benefit of education from the University of Virginia, three degrees there, and training as a military officer and a

lawyer and all these things I was ready to do upon arriving by that time in San Francisco, about to start my first law professor or law job. I was a lawyer before I became a professor. I kind of realized I had been so busy studying all the time that it was very hard for me to kind of pause.

pause to shut off that energy of like do and learn and be engaged. Even when I had time and permission to relax, I had trouble relaxing. So I looked for some support, you know, and I happened to find a book on the shelf of my

partner in life then and now, who he had a book that he actually hadn't read, but it was called the Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living. And that book, as some of you may have a sense based on the title, is from a Hindu perspective, and it's by the author and meditation teacher, meditation community builder, Eknath Estoran.

So he was an immigrant to the United States who had come a generation or so before me and created this Blue Mountain Meditation Center and practice set of commitments and invitations. And I had written this beautiful book.

As a way of conveying the essence of how one might practice meditation for clearing one's mind centering was on centering one's mind. So I remember reading just enough of that and really getting the sense of like one pointed meditation as a way of.

really becoming more intimate with my own mental habits and patterns and conditionings and developing a way of kind of choosing how to be in response to all the dynamics around me. And that, so that book really was the first window into meditation in the kind of more Eastern sense. Uh,

As opposed to the kind of prayerful centering prayer was our meditation practice. My grandmother wouldn't have called that meditation. But so this invitation I got through reading the book.

The Bhagavad Gita for daily living gave me this more mind focused practice, this practice of like getting to know my own mind. And I really sort of was drawn to that. And that opened the door for me to study and explore more of these kind of Eastern inspired meditation practices that are a lot of what I love.

practice and offer today. I do blend those practices with a lot of the, I would say, heritage-based learning and teaching that I learned from my grandmother. So now they're actually coming together in a beautiful way. Beautiful. Would you be able to give an example of one of those practices from that book, the Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living?

that helped you to center or do you have any insight into your grandmother's like practice and like what she did and how she centered herself? Yeah. So I'll say from the Bhagavad Gita, again, this idea of one pointed meditation. So simply to contemplate,

pause, feel the body in a dignified posture, almost resting like this idea of the resting like a mountain in the body. And then just allowing a focusing on the breath to support centering, resting the busy mind on the in-breath and the out-breath and allowing in that moment of choosing to place yourself

attention on the anchor of breathing in and breathing out, just allowing that to center and concentrate the mind. So that is an example of the kind of practice I received from reading that book and from my grandmother.

You know, there are many different ways that she drew on the, I think her interpretation of the religion of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, you know, from the Sermon on the Mount and the way that so much of the teachings that were close to her heart and that formed the basis for her centering prayer practices and teachings. So much of them were about really, frankly, bringing love into the world.

You know, it was, you know, recognizing the good news of the gospel that we really didn't have anything to fear that, you know, we could be protected. And so there are many different ways that I think the particular orientation that she had toward, again, prayer was.

but also kind of chant and reflection on the teachings of Jesus and teachings from the Old Testament that she was inspired by, particularly Psalms. Right. So my grandmother's was, again, a very Christian based centering prayer and meditation practice.

And I'll tell you one Psalm that we were taught as a, as children to remember, like the first thing, like first, last and always, I think for her was the 23rd Psalm, right? Which for those who may be familiar, it begins, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want, right? And it is just a beautiful, in a way, calming and sort of a meditation on the protectedness that, that,

that basically somebody has. That in those moments when we feel a little loss

afraid, or in need of a sense that we are not alone. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want that 23rd Psalm, you know, and I can recite it by heart because I learned it, you know, as a little girl all the way through. That is really kind of, I think, the foundational practice of my grandmother's that inspires my efforts to interweave her energy into my work as well. Yeah, speaking of like weaving that energy, there's just so many...

parallels between those teachings and Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita and what we're learning from neuroscience and studying the brain. So it's beautiful to hear all that. When you were talking about that, it just felt so comforting. It's in my own nervous system. It's not wanting, feeling protected. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I love the part of the 23rd song where it goes, you know, Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. There's a way that those words invite a remembering that we're all already surrounded by the kind of miracle and, you know, miraculous gift of

of being a part of the natural world. So there's a ready way for me that so much of these practices from the different traditions invites us to kind of feel our already always inherent interconnectedness with not only one another and the more than human world,

But literally, you know, all that is and certainly beautiful, gives me these beautiful touchstones into, you know, just appreciating this, what we call the natural world, the environment, the climate that we're a part of. Yeah. When you mentioned the...

Sermon on the Mount brought me back to my time in Jerusalem at Mount of Olives and touching the olive trees that may have been alive back in the time of Jesus and just feeling the roots and the natural world that

that connects us. And you mentioned green pastures. I mentioned to you earlier, I'm flying to Ireland today. Yes. Probably be golfing on green pastures shortly. But yeah, I think when we really connect with our

our breath, connect with our hearts and helps us to open to the beauty of the natural world around us and vice versa. They can support this practice of presence and sense of awe for naturally unfolding life that's all around us. Thank you for sharing that. I was going to ask you to recite part of the song, but I didn't want to put you on the spot.

I appreciate you sharing that. I understand that you did some work with, I believe, Jon Kabat-Zinn and University of Massachusetts. And can you share a little bit about your journey into, say, like Western mindfulness, as we may call it, with some of these teachers in America and how you forayed into this world? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I started to connect with mindfulness through, frankly, realizing that as a, you know, a law professor, whatever insights, whatever this kind of calling was for me to kind of deepen, let's call it like this interior gaze, this sort of commitment to some kind of inner work that might support the outer work. I was aware that, you know, to

To whatever degree I might be inspired to try and bring that into the legal academy, I would need to do some maybe some translating and be, you know, mindful of language and way in which, of course, if we're going to teach in a public educational space.

We have to do so in ways that are fully inclusive and embracing of all different perspectives and certainly don't seem to partake of any particular religious approach. So, you know, the idea, it started to occur to me that there might be a way to integrate some of what I was learning into my work as a law professor. I found some other lawyers.

and other law professors who were interested in these kinds of, at the time, what I found was folks who were interested in like a spiritual kind of analysis or critique of law. And so there were some law professors who were thinking about that. They weren't always meditating. You know, law professors are scholars. They're writing articles about the spiritual critique of law. But when I would meet with them,

As I did in person for some period of time, I would often be the one saying, but we should also maybe pause and meditate and sit together and center ourselves. And so they were sort of like, I think you want to be, you know, connect with the sitting lawyers. There's a meditating group of lawyers. So, yeah.

It's like a whole path. And amongst the sitting lures, we were mostly, we were led actually by a Buddhist teacher, Norman Fisher. And together we were meditating. But we were beginning to think together then. It wasn't just my impulse. Together we were all thinking, right? Professors at Berkeley or UC Hastings, you know, Bay Area based folk about how to bring this forward. Somehow we started offering lessons.

translations of Buddhist practices that were really focused on, you know, what we have in common, that we all have a breathing apparatus, right? So the kind of centering breathing practices presented in a way that did not require us to have a Hindu or Buddhist or Christian or any other kind of background to just be able to breathe together. So we started bringing those forth.

And along the way, I got connected to Jon Kabat-Zinn. It was kind of a, to me, it's a sort of a funny story. I started creating courses to bring this to law students in around 2009, 10 or so. And I was invited as a result of having presented about this and shared about it. I was invited to present about it at a conference in New York.

And I was put on stage with John Kevinson. So I met John first when sitting on stage beside him, he being presented as the person who's helped bring meditation to medicine. And me with my little class and my little tiny experiment being presented as the person who's helped him bring meditation to law. That was back in like, yeah, I know. It was sort of like,

Okay, one of these things is not exactly like the other. He's like this world-renowned person. But we really did connect very deeply and beautifully. So much so that he ended up writing the foreword to my book. What I kind of...

quickly realized was that I, in our group, didn't have to reinvent the wheel of how to bring mindfulness into law or into the world. We could partake of the work of people like John Kabat-Zinn. So I took a training in the teacher training program of mindfulness-based stress reduction. And yeah, it was my way of saying, there's this beautiful way in which we can bring these practices into secular, institutional, academic, professional spaces and

Through the language and lens of mindfulness. And so that really, in a way, from being inspired by Christianity and Buddhism originally, and a kind of interest in the sort of spiritual critique of the legal structures that run our world.

Like I kind of had this big kind of almost funneling to what that led me in deeper to mindfulness. But of course, then I kind of bring it back out in this bigger way. I hope this makes some sense. Yeah, it's fascinating. I love that story of you on stage being the person.

bringing mindfulness into law right next to John. Right, and there's John and Saki Santorelli, who was his partner at the University of Massachusetts for so long. Yeah, that's interesting. When you started asking, you know, your colleagues or your peers in law to, you know,

and meditate, bring awareness to the breath that it felt like maybe some people gave a little bit of pushback, like, no, you need to be with the other people. We're writing about that and talking about it. We're not practicing. Yeah. Right. Can you share a little bit more about that journey of how you,

maybe brought some of the methods that you learned from MBSR teacher training or like what you discovered to help not convince, but be gained permission to talk about mindfulness or to share certain practices in these very secular places.

Like, how was that journey for you? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, you're hearing just a part of it and what I've alluded to, which is, you know, when you come together with people in academia, you know, we're just so often used to doing the research and analyzing and writing it up that even now it can still be challenging to bridge from, you know, the sort of more academic challenges

training and modalities, right, that tend to be much more kind of third person oriented. What do the other researchers have to say? What are the kinds of ways that we can know this using the traditional means and methods of science, right? The scientific method. We love all of that. We love all that.

But the piece that's about first person knowledge that can only come through one's own experience, that can only come through one's own practice. You know, I've been drawn to bring those two together because it's just always been apparent to me that to fully know anything.

You know, it might be important to expand the epistemologies, the different ways we know. Right. So to know in this third person sense is beautiful, but it's not the only way to know. To know in the first person sense that meditation, I think, opens up for us and other modalities can. Modalities that help us sort of know from the inside, explore from the inside. That's beautiful. It's not the only way to know. And I should point to as I'm speaking now, I'm really sorry.

sharing how I came to see this as part and parcel of a kind of project called Contemplative Teaching and Learning, right? We're opening up the aperture on how we know and how we teach, supported by a kind of a much more open embrace of various epistemologies.

third person on the one hand, first person on the other, and even second person. How we can know together, right, by being together and the we, right, can know some things that I can't know by myself and a third person researcher can't find out alone, et cetera. So basically what I came to was this deep interest in,

And expanding how we know and how we apply what we know using these first person practices, meditation and other practices for contemplation. So then I had to sort of find folks who were who could help me get permission to do that. And so, yes, I found first, of course, first.

folks who would help me deepen my own ability to engage in this sort of first person exploration, deepen my own meditation practice. And that was the Sitting Meditation, Meditating Lawyers. And they were supported, by the way, by this organization that's no longer in existence, but it was called the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society, a wonderful organization that existed for some 30 years and

was a casualty in a way of the pandemic. But it helped in the United States and actually beyond create a network of thousands. I think at the highest, there were some 6,000 members of higher education who were drawn to this network of contemplative mind and higher ed. And so we were all through our different disciplines.

Me over here in law, but folks in the whole range from architecture to physics to dance. We would come together and explore different ways of bringing the first, second and third person ways of knowing into higher education. For me, it was finding others who were interested in similar things and

And when you find other people, whether they were in law, they weren't so much in law. So, you know, we didn't have a lot of people in law. We had just enough that I didn't seem crazy and alone. And then I was able to kind of find other people in higher ed. And we together made each other feel like that we might be the only one in our particular, you know, department or institution.

We were, when we saw what we had in common across the disciplines, across higher education, what we had in common was this commitment to expanding how we know what we know and how to apply it using contemplative practices like mindfulness, like movement practices, yoga, journaling, right?

And so what I started to do was like network and connect with that, with those in law and outside of law in higher education generally and research generally. And that led me to organizations like Mind and Life. Right. I became a board member and then the chair of the board of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society. And then I connected with the organization Mind and Life, which even today still supports the research into education.

these practices and the greater application through the science of mindfulness. And so it was through, you know, kind of really the fits and starts of connecting with other people in higher education who were kind of similarly drawn to broadening the way we

learn and how we can teach and how we can benefit from this sort of first person exploration of our experience and what we know and that we can only know again through meditation and other kinds of practices. Yeah, that's sort of, you know, absolutely

at the high level, how I got permission. It was actually connecting with and then helping to strengthen organizations because we can never do anything alone, right? But to help connect with and strengthen organizations who were already, who were doing this. And we started to understand that we weren't alone and that together we can make an impact. And so I kind of am still on that journey. I'm still connected with the mind and life, but

I am the advisor to many different organizations, including the University of Virginia Contemplative Sciences Center. University of Virginia UBA is my alma mater, of course. And so I've been fortunate to have been connected up

with this beautiful group of folks who brought forth a contemplative sciences center on the campus there. And it and other institutions, Harvard and other institutions where I've connected, presented, we continue to bring forth this energy of a contemplative approach to teaching and learning. And I just feel very proud and humbled to have been a part of that journey for a while now. Yeah, really impressive work.

resume and a list of experiences that you have. I think you're also, forgive me if I'm mistaking you, but I think you're like the, you were the president of the board for Search Inside Yourself. Yes, yes, I was. Yeah. So yeah, I've done that. And, but to be more concrete, so that's like a little bit at the high level, like I connected with all these organizations, right? And the funny thing is, I don't even think of myself as a networker or a connector, but in following my passion, I did all those things.

And more concretely, I just started bringing these meditation practices into my law school and finding a few other similar souls, like other professors who similarly felt like something was missing in legal education and who were willing to roll up their sleeves with me, create places where our students at our law school could practice meditation together. So I didn't have to do it by myself, a couple of other law professors.

And we just were like committed. We're like, we don't care if just one student shows up, a teacher shows up. We're just going to every week at this time. Well, the rest of our lives, as long as we're there. And we did it for 10 years straight. And we were together doing this collaborating. I'm now professor of merit. So I'm not on campus regularly now, but.

We offered meditations on a drop-in weekly basis. We experimented, we created courses. We created one of the first courses for credit in an American law school where we integrated into the curriculum something called contemplative lawyering. So our law students could regularly count on a place in their three years of studying law where they could spend the semester

exploring how who they were and their habits and patterns and their personalities and their own challenges, right, could be better known, better mastered, if you will, transformed into effective ways of bringing the knowledge, skills, and values of a legal education into the world and with compassion and with love. So we were doing that for many, many years. And I still may teach from time to time at the University of San Francisco. There's an invitation there for me.

But so that is just to say. And also I started bringing it into classes around race and racism. And that fueled the work, the inner work of racial justice, because I was teaching these classes with these young law students from all different walks and backgrounds in San Francisco, many who were recent immigrants. It just became clear to me that we needed more.

than simply just studying the cases and the policies. People's hearts were broken to talk about, to look at, you know, race, racism, other forms of bias and oppression, how the legal system had sometimes been a source of liberation and, you know, some sort of redress, but sometimes was the reason

you know, the harming factor, right? The law had sometimes caused the problems and the policies were sometimes part of the problem. So to look at that and to study it, we traditionally, and when I was in law student, we just looked at it, you know, in the way that we studied anything. But I started to see that it was a missed opportunity for us to do healing personally and to heal across our lines of real and perceived difference. So we started bringing meditation, but also food and storytelling.

into those classes and going on retreat so that we kind of study and read, but then take a break and go out into nature and really sort of help ourselves integrate what we were learning. So those are some of the places where I experimented, you know, the creating the contemplative luring class, having created a class on race and American legal history, and then bringing it into that class.

But then I was also teaching personal injury law, tort law, you know, traditional insurance law classes. And in my personal injury law class, this was all first year students or, you know, I'd have a big swath, a big, large class of first year law students and not infrequently. They would start to just get stressed and freaked out about being first year law students.

And so they knew I was bringing these practices into my seminars for contemplative law and race and law. And so they started to meet me in the hallway around midterm and say, Professor McGee, we know you're doing this drop in meditation session. Can you please bring a meditation into our tort law class?

We just had midterms and we're all freaking out. And so I would find ways to just start the class with the kind of a pause, a way for all the students to just rest, remember where we were last class, remember their notes and questions about today before we just launch right into it.

So in these ways, I just started to change how we were teaching law. And then that spilled over into like faculty meetings where I had my faculty members sometimes come up to me and say, you know how you sometimes will start, help us start the meeting by pausing. Can you please do that today? Maybe even bring your bell. We're going to have a hard conversation about hiring today. We're going to need some of that energy. So really, I was

in a certain way, starting to change kind of the culture at the law school to bring, to make space for this inner dimension of our work. There's so much in that. And it sounds like you approached it really nicely in that you helped, you know, you, you found people you could co-create with. You didn't go in and say, Hey, this is what we need to do. This is why we need to do it. I'm going to be the leader. You, you went in and you,

It sounds like you found co-champions, people who are already interested and or practicing and found a way together to make something work that felt aligned with schedules, intentions, goals. Yes. Learning objectives, etc. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of people have questions around, well, what do I call this thing? You know, this mindfulness in the workplace project that I have or this initiative. And we don't have to use the word mindfulness. You know, you're using the word contemplative. Contemplative or awareness. Now, of course, well-being. I often don't use the M word, certainly the meditation word. Sometimes mindfulness, but not even all the time.

It's a question of skillful needs. What's called for here? How do we align what we've learned and what we know might be of benefit with the objectives, the core objectives of the organization or the place that we're wanting to meet? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Use the languaging that's going to...

feel welcoming for the leadership, the people on the ground. There's so many great takeaways there. And thank you for getting into some of the nitty gritty too and how you created spaces for people to be, pauses before classes or meetings.

Yeah. You know, trying courses. Yeah. Drop in spaces. We did brown bag for a while before we did any of what I just described at the very beginning. We were just like, let's just create a brown bag lunch series where we just invite anybody to talk about food.

some sort of mindfulness opportunities might be a benefit here. And that helped create buy-in too, right? So it didn't just seem like we were coming with an idea. We were just like, what do y'all think about the possibilities? And so it was a very kind of slow and very intentional effort

effort to kind of work with the culture to create mutual shared buy-in and what would be a benefit to those around us yeah i helped consult the formation of the mindful epa and the first things that were done were mindful snacks like little 15 minute breaks for people to come together to talk about this and you know bring a snack and just explore it kind of loosely beautiful and

You know, you noted that these spaces are not just spaces for pausing, but for raw emotions to surface. And we discover what kind of healing needs to be done internally, interpersonally. Yes. So creating space for us to be able to start that process of manifesting.

meeting ourselves and each other's in ways that are caring and that offer that opportunity to heal yeah not just stress reduction right and you know that can get sticky search inside yourself just as another example you know they talk about emotional intelligence is kind of the the framework but

And they start with emotional awareness, emotional regulation. They move into heart work and they move into spaces of noting suffering and pain and offering ourselves and others care in the midst of

And that can get sticky. So I'm just wondering if you'd be able to talk about any either challenges you've seen with that and or practices or ways that you found effective for meeting the healing part of this. Thank you. You know, that dovetails a lot with what I'm inspired to bring forth right in this moment right now.

I shared with you before we were recording that I've somehow felt called to help create a community, kind of a community of practice that I call Mount Iris. And that's a place which I think exemplifies some of what you're describing, which is bringing the heartfulness into mindfulness and really exploring the consciousness.

of capacities that we have to deepen our mindful relatedness with each other, how we are in relationship with each other. I mean, I think that part of this part of the work is in a way, I almost want to say healing how we tend to think of mindfulness, because I think that we tend to think of mindfulness as hyper individualized training of the mind.

Right. For reducing stress, focus, maximizing our productivity. Now, all of those things seem like reasonable things to seek to do, especially in the world that we live and work in. However, I think that when you really look at the underlying teachings that we draw on for mindfulness, that we started our conversations.

looking at the Hindu teachings, Buddhist teachings, there is an underlying, let's just call it ethical dimension, right? This dimension that is at the foundation of these practices really, really calling us to consciousness about who we are in the world, how we think of ourselves, how we are with each other,

can be harmful or healing, right? Any moment, any action, any way that we are with each other. So I really think that when we point to how we often receive mindfulness in these kind of hyper individual focused ways,

Bring in emotional intelligence, open up the heart qualities of compassion and empathy. It can feel a little like a stretch because it seems like it's not necessarily what we thought we were getting into.

When we were at a workplace event and we were just, or in a classroom, right? When we were thinking we were just developing some knowledge or some professional skills, we start to realize that we're human. Underneath anything we do, we are still just these sort of soft belly carbon-based beings that have landed on this Goldilocks planet that we did not create. In other words, there is this, to me, a way that mindfulness just

unmask the miraculous and the mystical about what it means to be alive. And from that place, yes, we have these heart qualities and, you know, all of the different ways that being these, you know, hyper vulnerable beings, the fact is,

We know that we have these opportunities to live, but we can't live forever. And so a life well lived is going to have loss and pain and what we call in Buddhism, the eight worldly winds, right? We're feeling good one day, we're feeling, you know, beaten down the next. All lives, right? The core Buddhist teaching, right? There is suffering. There are causes of it and there are ways to release ourselves from it. So there's a way that, you know, loving kindness and

and compassion as supports for just being human in the time of change and challenge.

like the time we're in right now, seems like really the foundation of these practices for me and the foundation that we don't always see integrated into our introduction into mindfulness. So I almost feel like this is healing mindfulness, but yes, I'm really, really inspired right now. Everything that's happening in the world to reinforce the idea in the way that for me, love, the love that my grandmother saw in the teachings of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount,

the love that I see in

And it's really foundational to whatever inspires us to bring these practices for our own healing, to support others in the workplace. We might not call it by the L word, but there is that dimension of care. So I'm really feeling like bringing in that dimension of care, but also reinforcing our connectedness, practicing together and letting the community dimension take center stage in a way not to disregard that we have agency and separate identities, but

but that we're always in it together. That we're, you know, nobody's really alone. We think we're alone all the time. Nothing we accomplish is by ourselves. For me right now, that kind of interweaving of practice in community with love is where it's at. And I want for this time in my life to really help create spaces where we can learn and grow together with those touchstones of love and practice in community at the fore. Yeah.

Amen. Well, may it be Rhonda McGee. I feel like I just feel very aligned with everything that you're saying and count me as a big fan. Wonderful. Join us at Melanars. I would love that. Yeah. Can you share a little bit more about like,

When that's going to happen and how people. So it's happening, right? We've got MountIris.com. You can find it right now. And on Sundays, we have a couple of opportunities. Every Sunday for the next eight weeks, I usually after eight weeks, we'll pause a week or so and then we'll restart.

But maybe we'll keep it going now, right? Now that we've got some momentum. But so it's really happening now. And everyone within this hearing, you're invited to just sort of check us out online. It's going to be a hybrid space. So online opportunities to meditate live, right? Not just recordings.

but live meditation spaces, and then some in-person opportunities as well. We have a big vision, but it all starts right here in the small spaces of our hearts and our commitments to practice together. So thank you very much for asking.

Absolutely. Yeah, people can find that at MountIris.com. That's O-U-N-T-I-R-I-S.com. Building a just world together through soulful mindfulness. Yeah, we didn't have a chance to really talk very much about soulfulness, but this soul heartedness really is at the heart of it for me too, this mindfulness.

which is this kind of, again, well, James Brown, Godfather of Soul was quoted as saying when asked what he meant by soul, he basically said, it's like how you meet the energy of I can't with a quality of creative, you know, kind of I can't. Right. And that creative I can can be musical, can be heartful, can be storytelling. But remembering where we come from and allowing that, you know, the,

the teachers from our own traditions to kind of live through us as part of our journeys is kind of how I think of soul heartedness. Beautiful. Yeah. That heartfelt courage to. Yes.

Break out of your bubble and meet other people. Yes. You know, tune into the emotions within to meet the needs of our time. All that takes soulfulness. All that takes. Yeah. It's a creative, powerful energy. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

I love that it touches on this depth of mindfulness. It's not just this head-based, navel-gazing thing that a lot of us may think it is. But as we as practitioners discover, it's so much more than that. And there's so much depth and layering and connection that is cultivated moment to moment. And it takes community. Buddha said, community is not...

zero percent it's not 50 of the path it's all over the path and so we need unity and that's right everyone who's listening to this nodding their heads please check out my mountiris.com ronda mcgee's website that we'll post a link to in the show notes ronda thank you so much is there anything else you'd like to share before we bid farewell today oh

Thank you. First of all, just thank you so much for all that you are doing and for this wonderful conversation today. I really, really appreciate it. It's kind of really felt full in my heart to be with you. And just to say, I know it's a hard time for a lot of people out there right now. One of the ways that we respond to hard times like this is to feel sometimes disheartened.

really isolated in that, you know, there's nothing we can do. But I think that these practices that we're talking about are really meant to sort of, they're meant for times like this. They're meant to remind us that we are much more than what other people say about us or what the dominant discourses and politics are doing. You know, they're meant to be a lifelong, lifeline and a touchstone to something that is eternal, I think, that is more powerful than we can really ever know.

So I just want to, for anybody that's feeling that, you know, that is a hard, hard time, you are not alone. And these practices, everything we've been describing, it's meant in a way I got my hand up like it's like like a hand at your back. Right. To remind you that you already matter. You already belong and you can make a difference right where you are. And we're here to hold hands with you in a way from afar. Right.

in a big practice community, a worldwide practice community. So thank you. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you. Thank you. Be well.