Ifm_116 Can Meditation Help Heal Racial Trauma?
[0:03] Series Introduction I’ll be doing a series, primarily shorts, but I want to lead off with a full video here for you. I’ll be doing a series on mindfulness meditation and how it can help with stress, anxiety—different things, different topics. Feel free to add your questions below this first video. I’m starting off—it’ll probably be 28 days, not 30—and it’s going to run up until right before my Soulful Mindfulness program begins, which is October 5th. So do check that out. I thought this was a good segue into that. What I did was I asked ChatGPT what are the most common questions asked about meditation, mindfulness, stress, and anxiety, and how they relate together. [1:03] Meditation and Racial Trauma So, for Black folks, the first question that came up, according to ChatGPT, was: Can meditation help heal racial trauma? I thought I would start off there. Obviously, that needs more than a one-minute short; it doesn’t need just YouTube Shorts, it needs a longer video. I’m going to share with you from my experience. When I began meditating, it was when I went to college—that’s really where I started in earnest. As a Black girl coming from the Bronx, South Bronx, I went to a predominantly white college that was very, very wealthy. First day, Jaguars (the car) went by, and I was like, “Oh my God, so beautiful!” Girls from the Middle East were wearing sapphire rings that looked like candy, they were so big. So, I started meditating at that college. The thing is, I wouldn’t have said to you—this was back in the day, people—”Oh, I have racial trauma.” No, all I knew was that I was really, really stressed. [1:57] Personal Journey with Meditation I also want to go there in that, you know, I was a minority in that school—racially, but also economically. As I told you, I didn’t have a sapphire or an emerald the size of a rock. I came from a working-class background and scored very, very well on my SAT tests. So, I was part of an effort by the academy to diversify. This was before all the uproar and backlash—they knew they needed diversity because it wasn’t happening naturally. I did perfectly well there, against women who had private schooling and the best of everything. Obviously, I would be under a lot of stress, and I was stressed before getting to college. I suffered from anxiety, depression, difficulties in the home. Suffice it to say, my parents didn’t, for instance, drive me to college. I was the first one to attend college in my entire family, ever. So, I was there in a difficult situation, but I went in with very much an immigrant mindset: “I’m going to do it, I’m going to go for it.” I wasn’t thinking about racialized trauma, but I had tremendous stress growing up—alcoholism in the home, a lot of trauma and drama, even though I didn’t have a broken home. That’s when I began meditating, and that’s why I think I can speak about this. [3:50] Healing Through Meditation Meditation can absolutely help heal racial trauma. There are so many different ways, but the primary way is that, as you practice mindfulness-style meditation, it gives you the tools to deal with upsetting emotions, upsetting thoughts, even physical sensations that are disturbing. Through practice and proper guidance, you develop strength so that something that previously would have felt really upsetting becomes less so, and you’re able to withstand it with less effect on your persona, on yourself. It’s really a beautiful practice. Meditation can absolutely be part of your toolkit. Now, it wouldn’t be the only thing, but I believe especially for Black and Brown folks,
