5 Steps to Working with Intergenerational Pain & White Fragility

I’m writing this piece just before the Solar Eclipse at 1 Cancer on the Summer Solstice of June 21, 2020. More information about this historic eclipse— once in 26,000 years— follows in the conclusion.

In the spring of 2020, seemingly suddenly, we are collectively aware that the physical security of people viewed as “other”— especially BIPOC— is threatened constantly due to white supremacy. Though the awareness may feel “new,” this is our permanent reality. None of this is new, as our black, brown, and immigrant friends, colleagues, and neighbors have been telling us our whole lives.

Every spiritual tradition says that we are all connected and that the “I” of the ego is a false, but useful self. When one person’s humanity is denied, all of us suffer.

Though generations of white privilege has protected me from physical harm— like being murdered by the police while I slept—it has deleterious effects on my mental and emotional health. Racism is a disease and I have it. The logic of white privilege keeps me subjectively safe, while suppressing my self-expression, empathy, and rage.

It’s time to sit with the pain that white supremacy has caused for generations. It’s time to sit with the fact that our country is founded on human rights violations and that these fundamental violations continue every moment in America.

Here are my 5 Steps to Feeling the Pain of Racism and Integrating It. I welcome your feedback and response.

1.Make Your Body a Safe Vessel to Do the Work

The June 21st solar eclipse happens at 1 Cancer; the Chandra degree symbol for this degree is: A Potter at Work. Cancer is symbolized by the hard, outer shell that protects a soft body on the inside. Likewise, planets in Cancer teach us about our own experiences as children and adults who can be vulnerable and nurturing to others.

Intensifying this solar eclipse in Cancer, Mercury will be retrograde in Cancer from June 18 through July 11.

Dismantling the effects of generations of racism is a full-body commitment. It doesn’t happen through mental activity or reading; it is going to require re-patterning and increasing your body’s capacity to hold challenging emotions, whether those belong to you or others.

This is a long, slow process that occurs through mindfulness and a willingness to experience discomfort, sometimes physical pain.

To help you nurture your body’s capacity to hold and integrate pain, fear, and equanimity, I’ve created a guided meditation.

2. Listen to Your Inner Child & the Voices of Your Ancestors

If we have spent a significant portion of our lives living in mainstream America, our social interactions and inner feeling states, from conception to this very moment, have been suffused with racism. The first step to unlearning, or undoing, racism is bringing to consciousness countless moments in our lives and witness them.

In my experience, this happens through mindful practice — whether that is meditation, active imagination, or dialogue with your inner child and your ancestors— combined with expressive writing. To bring something to consciousness is to re-experience it, acknowledge, and examine it. But what really makes this process work is to do so with compassion.

The Expressive Writing process I use was created by Leesa Renee Hall and is available here. Or pre-order her workbook coming out in February 2021!

3. Identify Core Beliefs that Disconnect You From Your Heart and Others’ Pain

After listening and expressing your and your ancestors’ experiences and pain, the next step is to identify the core beliefs that are still active inside you, like a script running from your subconscious at all times. Through regular mindfulness practice, expressive writing, and perhaps therapy or conversation with a trusted listener, you will start to hear your core beliefs asserting themselves.

Here’s a sample related to, but not limited to, racism. ( I’ve presented them a little bit playfully, like a bad Country song.)

• The Pain and Grief Will Last Forever (So Avoid It)

• What Would People Say (If You Spoke up)

• Our People Suffered, Too (We’re Jews!)

• We’re The Good Ones (I Don’t Feel Good)

• I’m Unloveable (And So Are You)

• I’m Not Enough (We’re Stuck In This Forever)

The practice is just noticing when your beliefs come up and how you react. Then, ask yourself, “Who would I be without this belief?” (Or, in Country Song Title mode: Who Would I Be (Without This Belief).)

4. Release Limiting Beliefs & Commit to Lifelong Transformation

Gabor Maté teaches that forgiveness is for your own sake. Holding onto anger, pain, and sadness restricts your independence.

Yet actively forgiving means letting go of the right to punish someone, even if this is punishing someone with your own anger.

I truly question whether forgiveness is possible until we have completely released, or dis-identified, with our pain. (See the teachings of the Buddha for more information on dis-identifying with our suffering!)

Overcoming our pain and white fragility is a process that requires repetition. And forgiveness is an essential step.

Below is antiracist spiritual activist (and actor) Mehcad Brooks’ Forgiveness Letter from his Church of Antiracism 21 Day Challenge (Day 10, June 16, 2020). He asks everyone to handwrite this letter 10 times in your journal. I also have enjoyed reading it aloud. Note: emphasis mine with a few, minor edits to commas. Please credit Mehcad Brooks if you share this!

I, ____________, have been lied to since the moment of my birth. This lie was alive long before my parents or my guardians brought it to my attention. I offer forgiveness to them for any miseducation they spread to me. I offer compassion for the morals of their time and I cannot judge them for their shortcomings even if they are clear to me from where I sit today.

I acknowledge that the society that I was born into has always had systems in place to oppress darker-skinned people, and the darker the skin, the higher the likelihood of oppression they received. I acknowledge the pain, trauma, anxiety, fear, loss of hope and grief this has caused millions of people. I acknowledge I do not know everyone’s story, just they cannot know mine. I offer forgiveness to my ancestors for what I believe they should have done differently.

I offer compassion to my ancestors for their experiences. I activate my own DNA to rewrite the story of my family from here on. I release myself from the guilt and trauma my ancestors carried in their cells. I release myself from being held by my ancestors’ stories. I acknowledge that hate, complicity in the suffering, or silence about the suffering are no longer moral options. I ask my ancestors for permission to release their beliefs and strike new agreements with the collective consciousness.

I forgive myself for the hate, complicity, and silence I was taught. I forgive myself for not identifying it sooner. I forgive myself for the pain and suffering my hate, complicity, and silence may have caused. I acknowledge I have work to do and I accept my fellow brother and sister as my own. I am willing to do this inner work, which begins with self-love and self-forgiveness.

I am setting the new agreement that everyone I see I will perceive as an individual, free from the prejudgement of the group I once believed they belonged to. I am setting a new agreement to acknowledge we are one race, one planet, to share and protect, and that there is only one way to love. I am here to learn, listen, and embrace the hard truth of others and the promise of a better world is in my hands and can be built through my antiracist actions. We are here as a collective to repair the pain cased by the last 500 years.

I acknowledge how difficult that sounds, but I am aware that people’s lives depend on my actions. By unlearning the inherited agreements of the past, I can truly be at peace with myself. We are here to repair ourselves, each other, and the world, action by action, word by word, thought by thought, and policy by policy. We are here in this transformation together.

Finally, I also use my Akashic Records teachers’ Forgiveness Prayer regularly.

5. Learn to Be Less Reactive

Step 5 integrates the previous 4 steps. When we are able to stay with emotional and physical pain in our bodies, listen to our inner child, identify core beliefs, and release them, then we can notice our reactions, reactiveness, and reduce “being triggered.”

A key part of having “the difficult conversations” about racism is being able to handle the perception of criticism. Feeling triggered, criticized, or hurt is inevitable in unlearning and un-being racist. (That’s why white fragility is a phenomenon.)

Two resources I use in working through my perceptions of criticism are Byron Katie’s The Work and the Shitty First Draft process in Brene Brown’s Rising Strong. Moreover, the Compassionate Inquiry counseling method developed by Gabor Maté is designed to reveal our core beliefs and become less reactive to perceived criticism.

Note: I would love to include resources created by BIPOC in this section and welcome suggestions to edit it.

Conclusion: Solar Eclipse on June 21, 2020

I firmly believe that changing the world starts with changing our inner landscapes. Yet, I also want to share a larger container for your individual actions by looking at some of the details of June 21st’s solar eclipse.

One way to understand the astrological significance of a solar eclipse is that the sun, our the masculine, outward-focussed part of our consciousness— is infused with the energy of the moon, which is an inward-focussed, yin energy. With this eclipse happening in Cancer, a moon-ruled sign, after such a prolonged time period staying at home and being inwardly-focussed (also Cancer significations), our perceptions of what matters in life are being infused with greater emotional awareness.

At the same time, the pull towards outward change is equally strong as we gather our strength to take a stand against hundreds of years of oppression, injustice, and trauma.

The Shamanic Astrology Mystery School is having a free webinar on June 20th about the global and historical significations of this eclipse. One thing I noticed in their discussion, is the fact that this eclipse will take place on the outstretched hand of the constellation Orion. And that this point is known as “heaven’s gate,” where many traditional cultures thought that souls incarnated.

Finally, this is the last summer solstice eclipse on Orion’s hand for 26,000 years!

While we may not be able to fully comprehend the world-changing significance of this eclipse, we can start by changing our relationship to our country’s racist past and present.