What my MEDITATION practice taught me about BIAS

As I was doing my morning meditation on loving kindness, I was struck again by the profundity of this type of meditation when done as traditionally taught rather than the sometimes watered-down version of just reciting a few well-wishing mantras, which can feel quite insincere and formulaic. Rather than wishing others well from an entrenched position of separateness, of subject-object bifurcation, the spirit of loving kindness is the complete antithesis of such duality between self and other: we wish ourselves and others well in the knowledge that we are all equally looking for happiness and striving to avoid suffering. While such desires can manifest in what seem to be different or even diametrically opposed ways, the essential nature of this longing for genuine fulfilment, meaning, wellbeing and purpose is exactly the same and is shared by all of us.

Ironically what gets in the way of realising such authentic wellbeing (what the Greeks called eudaimonia) is that we fundamentally misapprehend both ourselves and the world around us – we posit ourselves as autonomous, independent, separate individuals and from this position we are then confronted with others (who are prone to the same fallacy). This can be seen as the most fundamental of all the unconscious biases and it is cognitive in nature, as it is based on a misapprehension of reality, which is, as scientists agree, one of interrelatedness and interdependence. We create an identity for ourselves by designating ourselves on the basis of different factors, none of which can ever capture the whole truth of who we really are: ethnicity, gender, religion, age, body, sexual orientation, political standpoint, education, intellect – the list goes on.

When we construct such a sense of identity we carve up reality like a cookie cutter cuts a shape out of the dough, discarding the rest. The narrower the definition, the more of the dough of reality has been jettisoned. There is of course nothing wrong with that, nor should we necessarily stop creating and defining our identity but it is liberating to realise that this is a choice, a conceptualisation, it is not dictated by reality, nor is it inherent in it. The more we fixate on such a sense of separateness, the more we and others are prone to suffer. The smaller the identity we have created the greater the anxiety around it – as we have just relegated most people into the camp of “other”. This can be a lonely place. If I identify with my position on vaccination, I carve up the world’s population into people like me and those who are “the other”. If I identify strongly with my country, anybody who criticises it will offend me. We can suddenly find ourselves to inhabit a minute world and feel very alienated. The more we loosen the grip on such constructs, which squeeze the rich and dynamic experience of ourselves in the world into a static concept, the lighter our sense of self becomes, the more fluid the borders between ourselves and others, until that border can eventually vanish. The border only exists in our minds.

I have encountered situations, which poignantly illustrate that bias can be brought into existence by the very act of designating differences and purported identities. A young black delegate on one of my corporate workshops on Unconscious Bias shared a deeply upsetting experience for her with the group. In a no doubt well-meant but clumsy attempt to be inclusive and welcome diversity, her company had invited her to a Black Film movie night. Her white friends and colleagues had not been invited, which compounded the issue. Being black hadn’t been a “thing” for her. It only became a “thing” because of this particular initiative, which designated her on the basis of her colour, singled her out and made her feel like “the other”. It paradoxically created the very bias it was designed to counteract. This process of objectifying people is called reification (from Latin res = matter, thing) and is by nature dehumanising.

So before we start creating diversity initiatives and stipulating guidelines for inclusive behaviours it would make good sense to have a closer look at the mind that is biased, the mind that superimposes onto reality its mental constructs and conceptual straightjackets, which it then conflates with perceptual experience.

We can observe and explore the mind that is biased but we need to look closely and bring an open heart as well as our full intelligence as human beings. Meditation can provide a powerful vehicle for healing insight as well as a sound methodology to observe and balance the mind, as all biases originate in mental imbalances of different varieties which are counteracted by meditative practice.

In my Transcending Unconscious Bias workshops I use meditation experientially to identify four different categories of bias and train the mind in overcoming them. With practice, we can cultivate our minds to prevent bias from taking hold and even from arising in the first place. Bias does not have to be unconscious – there are no impermeable barriers between what is conscious and what is not yet conscious – but it will remain so forever if we keep looking in the wrong direction.

?#unconsciousbias #unconsciousbiastraining #diversity #inclusion #diversityandinclusion #meditation #mindfulness #lovingkindness #workplaceculture #corporateculture #enlightenedleaders

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