Mindfully Opting-In with Caverly Morgan

[Guided meditation]

Kelly: We have one of our favorite people here today.

Aurora: We sure do all the way from Portland, Oregon.

Kelly: Yes. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Caverly: Sure. Glad to be here. I’m Caverly Morgan and I’m the founder and guiding teacher or head of practice for the nonprofit Presence Collective and then also peace in schools. So Peace in Schools has brought the nation’s first semester long credited mindfulness course into the Portland Public School System, were in 90 percent of the high schools there now and presence through presence collective. I teach adults awareness practice. So that happens through retreats and workshops and classes, online offerings. We also presence collective also hosts teachers from other traditions and backgrounds as well.

Kelly: Wow. So how does one get here? How do you be Cavalry today?

Caverly: You know, the deepest answer to that question really has to do with feeling guided in my life. It would be easy to tell a story about my life that makes it sound like –

Kelly: Sequential.

Caverly: Yeah, linear. Like I knew where I was going or that there’s even this separate Caverly that has a plan and then knows how to execute a plan, which is a very popular way to be conditioned to perceive reality and leaves me feeling like I’m in control somehow. But the truth is that I do feel like I’ve just been following a thread that I could define as longing to know truth and longing to know what gets in the way of love – like where in our lives, or we habituated not to recognize what’s true and real and not to recognize how to love, and then what blocks love. So that thread I couldn’t have consciously articulated early on, but I can say now it has been the theme of the unfolding of my life to this date.

Kelly: And when you’re a child, is that something that you’re taught that your parents spring through to you somehow or?

Caverly: Definitely not. I love my parents. I have great parents. I think we all are following some thread of of realizing our connection in whatever way that manifests for like as a child. But I think we actually get conditioned to not listen to the call.

Aurora: Yes.

Kelly: I’m just making a ton of assumptions here. You were, you know, ma and PA and cavalry and siblings in a house on a street somewhere in Virginia? And it was it was nuclear. It was. It was like this regular upbringing.

Caverly: Yeah. Really –

Kelly: Regular white upbringing.

Caverly: Very regular white upbringing. And then you can just for the purposes of this conversation, you can toss into it that it was the South. So some people might not consider Charlottesville, Virginia, the South. But certainly and I don’t –

Aurora: I think we do now.

Kelly: Think it’s on the radar.

Caverly: I mean with what’s happened in Charlottesville in the last years it’s gotten revealed how South Charlottesville, Virginia actually is. And I grew up knowing that. I grew up knowing, identifying as a Southerner. White, from the South grew up in the same home that my mother grew up in. I think it’s interesting to reveal that I grew up in a house that had a buzzer in it, so that when the house was built, the buzzer was so that my mother’s mother could call the family full time. Servant maid. No one would refer to it as servant, but as I’ve like dug into my own family history, I can recognize that that’s actually absolutely what that role was. So. Then, of course, I say of course, because of the context. That was a black woman that I’m named after. But it’s interesting, this woman actually raised my mother but because of my mother’s position, it’s like her biological mother was the mother. Like in the community, quote, unquote. So this woman this Black woman who raised my mother, who I knew as a child as well and I thought of her as my family. She wasn’t she wasn’t like she was never. She never really got to be, like, honored as the woman who raised my mother but she’s the one that did the work of raising my mother.

Aurora: And that story is such a common story. For all of us, those of us of color, those of us that are white and we these are the untold stories and these are the untold contributions and reality of our intertwining as humans.

Caverly: Yeah, it’s really important for me to recognize that there’s like tremendous grief that arises even in speaking about this woman because. Like, I hold the pain that I saw that my mother had around my family’s relationship to this woman and her family. I mean, so think about it. This woman, Tommy, is raising the children in this context. But she has her own children. And I wasn’t even I remember when I must have been like 6 years old and learning that Tommy had her own children and having like a meltdown, like it couldn’t wrap my mind around, like, but she’s spending all from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. The other piece that’s particularly powerful to be present, too, is I didn’t know until an adult that the small bathroom in the downstairs of that house was built for Tommy. So that when Tommy started working for my grandparents, it was during a time in which it wouldn’t have been appropriate for her to use the same bathroom that other people were using in the house. And so it wasn’t until I mean, the last five years that I learned about the actual physical building that I grew up in and and how rooted race and race dynamic in the South is the walls of the home that I was raised in. And so I would say I have a master’s degree on being conditioned not to listen to the call of our interconnection. And it wasn’t until I met my first Zen teacher that I realized something else was possible for me.

Kelly: How did you meet that teacher?

Caverly: So I went on my first Zen retreat when I was working in this community for people with special needs in Virginia. And the vacation time I had was at the exact same time as this teacher’s retreat in North Carolina. I had read one of her books, but never thought pastor. That was a nice book. In light of being conditioned heavily not to focus on interconnection or truth or love, I really had no idea what I was getting into when I went on that retreat. I was just speaking with a coworker today about how on the way down to that retreat, I went with some girlfriends and we had beer in the car. We got in a car wreck on the way down. There was almost no storm. And we went into the retreat. And the person who came to greet me because we were late said, “Well, we all need to check with the teacher to see if you can enter.” And then she did a little bow. And as she was walking away, I turned to my friends and said, “Yeah. Oh, man, they’re bowing and shit, we’re out of here.” Like I was like I had no interest in like you.

Kelly: You’re like, those girls go
Caverly: Oh, my God. Exactly.

Aurora: This is what I love, right? Because it almost it’s almost perfect.

Kelly: Yeah.

Aurora: Right. Because you walk in, this is what you say to folks. It’s like walking in literally quite unconscious is almost the best way. Right.

Caverly:Well, it does speak to like you’re listening to something like something got me there. I mean, my girlfriend will never go with me anywhere again.

Kelly: And so were you in social work or something? Or was this volunteer work?

Caverly: Yeah, I was I was a full time caregiver at this community for people special needs. And it was really beautiful. It was it’s a place called Industry Village. And it’s beautiful because the focus there is on giving folks with special needs the opportunity to have a meaningful life. So there’s weaving and clay work and bread making and cider press. And I had the opportunity to feel quite connected to Spirit just through the loving engagement of that service work. But I didn’t have articulation around what what that really meant. I didn’t have any discipline around. And I didn’t I didn’t have any kind of practice to support me. And so that’s where meeting a Zen teacher came in.

Kelly: So you’re that white chick. You show up with your six pack and you’re wrecked car late to the retreat.

Caverly: Yeah. Wasn’t even my car. So that adds another layer of that white chick, right? Like your mom’s car.

Kelly: Yeah. Touche. And you come out the other side: I’m a changed human being –

Caverly: I actually that really my first retreat was so profound for me. I remember staring. This sounds like a drug trip or something. And I was not on drugs, but I remember staring at a raindrop for a very, very long time. And there was just something about being in a field of presence that was like mind altering for me. And I also I grew up in a context where there wasn’t any emphasis on presence. There wasn’t like that was like a cultivated field that I was swimming around in. So that it was incredibly profound to to drop into an experience of presence. And I left that retreat like really much like a drug trip, like I left the retreat with like colors brighter and more more aware of my surroundings, more aware of my inner landscape. And I just was completely jazzed by it. It was definitely the beginning of something important.

Aurora: And so that was you know, that’s profound. And so you have the intersection of exploring your history. You have the intersection of being that white girl that stumbles onto a retreat, and then that leads you in to a very profound journey of Buddhism.

Caverly: Yeah, so I. After that first retreat, I just started going on more and more retreats and it got to the point that I had a partner who at the time said like, “Okay, you’re officially getting obsessed with this.” And I realized that as that was being perceived, that I became I started defending it more and more. So we we parted ways. This person that I was with her for seven years and I parted ways. And then I was living and working at a craft school in North Carolina. And I had finished that tenure of the fellowship that I had received. And when that was completed, again, I’d gone on retreat after retreat. I’d set up living circumstances so that I could do as many retreats as possible. And this teacher of mine at the time said, “So it sounds like you’re in between things now. You know, you can come out to the monastery for a while and train if you’d like to.” And. And I very clearly remember saying. “I’m open to that, as long as that doesn’t make me a monk.” You know, I just wasn’t willing to take that step in my mind –

Kelly: Because what would that mean to you?

Caverly: It would mean I was giving up on all the things that were part of the condition narrative of my dream. So to have children and to settle down – even though I had already been tearing at the the threads of that fabric. I had I had already been kind of playing with the notion that that life wasn’t actually for me. But it still was. I wasn’t ready to entirely let it go. So the idea of becoming a monk and releasing my relationship to the identity I’d been working hard to form was was threatened.

Kelly:Working hard to form. So were like, “OK, I’ll come sweep the floors for a couple weeks.” Or how do you how do you make that entry?

Caverly: When one first becomes a monk, you’re asked to leave everything behind. You’re asked to set aside everything that you’ve known to be how you define yourself in the world. And so I went for a six month period of practice and I thought that that was gonna be it. And it’s actually kind of a sweet memory of mine that after that six months I was asked if I would like to stay beyond that or what my intention was. And I very clearly remember flipping a coin because I knew I wasn’t ready to say, like, yes, I really am going to embrace being a monk.

Aurora: My eyes are bugging out at this moment in time. I can’t even imagine.

Caverly: When the coin was in midair, I remember saying, like, “If it says if it says go, I’ll do two out of three.” And that was deeply revealing to me the recognition that it’s like, OK, if it says leave. Yeah –

Kelly: If it says go.

Caverly: So yeah I ended up staying there eight years in training in this monastic context which again wasn’t part of the life plan, but through that eight years gotten more and more comfortable recognizing that I didn’t want to live a life that was just based on the crafting of identity or a desire to make money or to achieve certain external –

Kelly: Accolades.

Caverly: Right.

Kelly:Eight years. Does that seem like a lifetime? Does that seem like a minute?

Caverly: You know when I think back, I now feel like it was a really significant amount of time. At the same time, it feels like it was forever ago. Yeah.

Kelly: Like a different person, a different life time.

Caverly: Exactly. But I did have a mentor say once, you know, “You will -” I was asking if it was a good time to leave. And the mentor said, “Do you think you could carry what you have in this monastic context in the face of a dog eat dog world?” And I was like, ‘Hell no.” So that was one of those moments where I realized like -.

Kelly: I should go back in.

Caverly: Yeah, there’s something about being able to seep in a container in which the only thing going on was practice that I really feel made it possible for me to do what I’m doing now. Without that ground. And I don’t believe it’s important for everyone to go to a monastery actually never find myself encouraging students I work with to go train in a monastery unless that’s just what they feel called to do. So I don’t think it’s a requirement by any means. But for me, it allowed me to seep in something that now is definitely part of a foundation.

Aurora: And so then that’s the I love the question. Right. The ability to navigate a dog eat dog world and the ability to hold space with all that’s going beautiful in our world and all that’s not going so well in our world. And so one of the questions that I have when we we look at the theme of spirituality and we look at some of those difficult the difficult things going on in our world and with people in our humanity: racism and the intersection of racism within the context of spirituality. We’ve all heard spiritual bypassing. You know, for me that experience has predominantly been spaces that are very white. What are your thoughts?

Caverly: But for to be in a space where there’s a lot of emphasis on personal conditioning, but then entirely omit collective or structures of oppression. it’s just it doesn’t seem like an accident to me. Like what’s happening within our society and the conditioning that’s happening in our society, for example, how white supremacy is formed, maintained. White people tend to easily be blind to how these systems of of whiteness. And when I talk about systems of whiteness, I just am referring to the protocols and practices that maintain white supremacy. So I’m not just talking about being white. I’m just talking about that entire context. And so there was, for example, no attention brought to that, even though that’s as powerful from the perspective of conditioning that makes us blind to the fundamental nature of truth as any personal conditioning. And you’re saying the collective can. The collective conditioning is. And so that in the last years has just become really, really interesting to me.

Aurora: So we’re going to ask you to explain a couple of things. So let’s talk about when you say collective conditioning. Let’s just give folks a definition. What you mean by that?

Caverly: So collectively, we’re conditioned that women should play X role in society. Collective we’re collectively were conditioned that this is what it means to be white. For example, I’m entitled to that, of course, comes with being white. You know that we’re collectively conditioned to believe that white equals entitled. So just because I’m white, I can walk around feeling entitled because of that collective conditioning. Now, of course, it’s all made up in the same way that personal conditioning is too. If I’m believing that voice in my head that says you’re a piece of crap, you’re never gonna amount to anything that’s blocking truth. It’s a veil. We could say that doesn’t allow me to touch in to the authenticity of my own true nature or the brilliance of my own being. And that being isn’t a personal being, it’s a shared being. So all of this collective conditioning operates actually quite similarly to how personal conditioning operates as a veil. We just simply because we’re so stuck inside the veil. There’s not a lot of name the naming of it. And I think fascinatingly enough, in particular in quote unquote, spiritual spaces.

Aurora: Okay, mama, we’re going to go there.

Caverly: She’s hot for this topic. I can feel it.
Aurora: Yes, because I think that so we think of spiritual places. We think of sacred spaces very much as what you articulated their heart spaces. But I think there’s a big part of the heart that is being opened up. Because it’s painful.

Caverly: Yeah. I think what I’ve noticed is that in particular, what’s painful is the lack of acknowledgement of what’s actually going on. So again, how ironic in spiritual spaces, apparently it’s all about naming. Like, let’s just say it at a Buddhist space that might there might be a lot of focus on naming how the ego creates the illusion of separation. But if you’re just ignoring how collectively their systems in in place that lead us to the perception of separation. If you’re just ignoring that, then that’s not a safe space for everybody to be in. Like it’s become a real passion for me to explore the ways in which by default I’ll fall into language. That is language that feeds the comfort of the white ear.

Kelly: Comfort? We love comfort.

Aurora: Yes. Wow. So there’s comfort. And then there’s you know, so my version of that is as a woman of color, as code switching now. Right. So I spend have spend an inordinate amount of my time on that on planet Earth, contorting myself to make people, white people in white spaces feel comfortable. And so that in and of itself is a conditioning.

Caverly: I mean, that is a deep conditioning that I bet you got to the point in your life. This is actually a question, I would imagine. But tell me if it’s true that you you got so good at it, you didn’t. You have to think about it.

Aurora: Oh, yeah.

Caverly: In the same way that someone else might be conditioned to always please their husband so they don’t get angry or whatever and we’re conditioned to do. Right.
Kelly: Yeah, a lot of conditioning is survival.

Aurora: Mm hmm. Absolutely. And survival and the consequences for surviving that are very real. Right. In many cases for people of color, it’s life or death. Yeah. Right. That that conditioning, that code switching that behaving in a way. That doesn’t make a white cop feel on comfortable. Saves. Hopefully our lives. And so that’s what I’d love to unpack. Right. I’d love to unpack because, you know, we talk about Kelly and I always talk about, you know, I’ve been on a journey of healing as a woman of color. It’s very obvious for many and for myself to see where my wounds are, where my opportunities of of healing, of evolution, of self-love. Exist. I think that’s harder for white people and I think it’s harder for white women to see the. That actually my trauma. May not be, as you know, you may not see your trauma as my trauma. But you still have trauma because I feel the impact of your trauma.

Caverly: Well, it’s deeply traumatizing any time we’re perpetuating an experience of othering, it’s it doesn’t matter where you are on it. And I’m not equating someone else’s suffering with my own right. But I think it’s important to recognize there’s impact from every experience of othering. I was so porting and serving and staff at this recent radical Dharma camp, and that led by Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams, who is the author of Radical Dharma this summer. And I really appreciated that she used this this very visceral image of imagine being a white person who enslaved people. Imagine just picking up a young body, turning it over, poking it, prodding it, selling it, reading it. Valuing it, devaluing it, putting it on a block for sale. Passing it. I mean, I’m embellishing it a bit, but I think it’s a really important image. Imagine how cut off from your own humanity. You would have to be to be that man or these things were attended. So there I am as a white woman in the audience. How cut off from my own shared humanity do I have to be to watch a body passed through a crowd to go to a new owner?

Aurora: So can I tell you that that is exactly what I feel? When I watch these television, the news or video clips when I watched Eric Garner.

Caverly: Yeah.

Aurora:I was sitting there going, “How can people watch this year and not see that another human being is being killed in front of our eyes?”.

Caverly: Yeah.

Aurora: How can we not feel the impact of that?

Caverly: Yeah only through. A deeply thick veil. This is where this piece of collective conditioning has become such a passion of mine. You know, there’s a very thick veil that would keep us from being able to feel that injustice in our bones. And again, I’m not talking about an intellectual discourse about race relations. I’m talking about feeling the rupture in our own shared being. How cut off do we have to be to be numb to that?

Aurora: Yeah. Honestly, I don’t understand. And and that’s the question. And that’s the work that I think collectively we all have. But I look at white people and I’m like, how can you watch this and not –

Kelly: We’ve been programed to not feel in a lot of ways. Like I have to sometimes go through a paper that says a long list of emotions to then say, “Oh. Yeah, that’s what I was feeling.” I literally can’t name automatically, most emotions that may I should or should not have been having at any given time. I realize that anger cover the bases for a lot of them. We’ve been taught that anger is quick, quick to power is anger and joy is not – we are not to be frivolous. We can’t just be enjoying. We have to be working for our enjoyment. You know, there’s just so many ways that we’re taught not to feel. Because if we really did and we would know that that good white person we thought we were is not true and that cognitive dissonance is real uncomfortable and if it’s socially acceptable to not go there, then we don’t go there. We’re just programed to not feel in so many ways or else we won’t be able to do what we did. And accept what we accept.

Aurora: And so how do we evolve? Like, how do you evolve? How do we begin that journey? Because what I am very clear on is that my journey is your journey. Your journey is my journey.

Caverly: As white people, we have got to cultivate practices of knowing how to be with discomfort. Because there’s such protection over staying in this veiled world of comfort and it’s so threatening to us to step outside that. There just something about being willing to move into discomfort that requires not just personal courage, but a type of collective courage that can only be driven by our deep love of truth. It has to be driven by this recognition that we know that we want nothing other than to see love and truth shine in our experience I think that’s that thread that I pointed to at the beginning of the conversation, like what what in our lives honors that pull for truth and a lived experience of of our interconnection and what’s actually so versus the playing of a game. And not just any game, but a game in which no one wins.

Aurora: And I think, you know, Kelly speaks about this, about no one is winning.

Caverly: No one’s winning in this game. And I think that’s really important for white people to hear, and I don’t say that for a preachy place. I say that for myself as well. Like I don’t win in this game. Nobody wins in this game. I love Reverend Angel quote Kyoto Williams. I heard her at one point say, I want to take this word privilege out of the conversation because it is not a privilege to be that cut off from your – like if that’s privileged, I don’t want your privilege like you can have your privilege if that’s privilege. And I think you’ve been just redefining the way we think of what it means to be privileged as important. Like it is not a privilege for me to have existed in a home where there was that much imbalance around how a human being is treated based on class, based on the color of skin. That is not a privilege to be privy to that before really present to that level of heartbreak. Because it’s so off, it’s so out of alignment with truth and reality.

Aurora: It’s one of the concerns I have in Kelly and I speak about this all the time.
Because you can go back to your life. Your upbringing and examine it and look at it with this consciousness that you have and a beautiful, intimate relationship that you had with a woman of color who raised your mother, who helped raise you and the honor and love and reverence that you had for her. You felt that. And one of my worries is I don’t know if white people are having connected and intimate relationships with people of color.

Caverly: The system benefits from white people not creating those relationships. So when I was in school, my father was really adamant that I go to a private school and we could afford it. To him education was everything. And my mother looked at the school, saw that it was ninety nine point nine nine nine percent white and said over my dead body. And I will never forget that as a child. She consistently modeled for me: you will not live inside a bubble. And of course, it was reacting from her own trauma of seeing how Tommy was treated. Tommy was very loved by the family. But as I talk about with a very good friend of mine who’s a person of color, it’s like, OK, so how much money was she left in the will? Yes. So she was, quote unquote, like family. Well, really? Was she left a fifth of the inheritance then? No, of course she wasn’t. I do benefit from the fact that I was raised by a woman that constantly looked for ways to break that bubble.

Caverly: I was lucky enough to have a mom that took me to soup kitchens and made sure I knew what it meant to be of service in the world. I mean, once she was old enough to have a particular relationship with Tommy, that meant that we were going over Tommy’s house and I was interacting with Tommy’s family. Right. Like there’s there’s a way in which having someone model this is important deeply affected me. And we have to do that for ourselves. And that takes if you’re a white woman, that that is sort of inside a particular bubble, which you’ve been conditioned to be inside. It takes not only courage, but it takes a recognition that this bubble doesn’t serve you in the same way that the bubble of only being alone in a room with the inner critic doesn’t serve you in the same way that your liberation depends on being able to see through the veil of conditioning, personal and collective.

Aurora: Wow. So I want to take us to a couple of things that you articulated. One was obviously discomfort. But I want to go to the next level, which is trauma and the unpacking of trauma within self to then support the unpacking and healing of trauma in the collective and beginning that work. And you know, one of the examples. That I know you share is part of that is getting quiet. Part of that is meditating. So share with us how that for those listening who are saying, oh, shit. I don’t have an intimate relationship with a person of color. Oh shit, I didn’t even know what collective consciousness was. I go to therapy. I’ve tried meditation. I didn’t know I had trauma. But that trauma is keeping you us, we separated. And so it just compiles trauma upon trauma upon trauma.

Caverly:Yeah, well, one thing that I find really helpful when speaking about trauma is to have my eye on and my feet firmly grounded in that, which is not traumatized while we talk about it, because it can be overwhelming and I think especially overwhelming for white people who are like, “Oh, I don’t want to I don’t want to deal with this. This is scary. I want to run,” whatever. You know, to to recognize that are our true nature is wholeness. Our true nature is unbreakable, our true nature. And I think because of our collective conditioning, a lot of the people of color in my life would say they’re more required to be in touch with that than many white folks. Like, I have to know this resiliency. And I have to I’m required to to survive. Right.

Kelly: To get yup every day. Yeah. Deal with all this.

Aurora: And I and I don’t wanna interrupt you, but I. But I actually think when you can sort of look at that, the trauma, you can look at those horrible situations, whether you were called the bad names, whatever, that indignation, that dehumanizing that you’ve gone through, I look at it as a person of color, as a woman of color, and I can look back now and for a majority of it, be grateful because it has been the unpacking and the UN-revealing and the reintegration back into myself, into my wholeness. And I can be like “Oh, wow.” And then it becomes actually. You can see it when it’s it’s not there for others. And holding that space without judgment, holding that space with love and holding that space and saying, “Hey, if I can do it. Yeah. The opportunity is there for you to.”

Caverly: Absolutely. And this is where the beauty of the collective comes into play. It’s because we’re in it together. So, yeah, I think we’re conditioned to live in a very like individualistic societal structure that suggests that it’s all up to me. But when we actually remember, this is this is about the we. The conversation can change through that remembrance. The conversation can change. Because I think that’s the place from which we can say, “Yes, these traumas have happened and. Again, what is it that’s not traumatized in it in us?” What is it that is actually fundamentally true? It’s no, it’s it’s unchanging in us? What is it that actually can’t be just separated out as, for example, Aurora’s true nature and Cavaliers true nature? That separation only comes through the veiling process. It’s not actually innate.

Aurora:And that I that’s, I think, one of the hardest things to see.

Caverly: Yes, it is. And what so we live in a cultural context where if someone’s not grounded in this deep understanding and recognition, it can be invalidated, invalidating. So I would never say to one of our teens in our piece in schools program like, well, your trauma is just like created fail and it’s just appearing in black consciousness. But it’s not it’s not real. Real. Yeah. Like that. That’s that’s actually not true. On vent, yet you’re not broken. Yes. So on one level of reality, that is absolutely a felt experience. And on another level of reality, you are that which is unbreakable. So what does it mean to hold both those truths? Because just holding one of them leaves out a really important conversation. And I only began seeing this by paying attention to the collective. So I went to hear a very well-known spiritual teacher speak. And I brought a friend who’s a person of color. She’s someone who is a practitioner within our presence collective community. And she went up onstage to have an interaction with this spiritual teacher. And she was describing, having grown up in the south and having dogs sicked on her when she was 5 years old and having having the fear of what would happen to her on a very physical level, being black. And she was actually from birth. She’s from Virginia as well. And she was worried in this exchange with this white spiritual teacher that the spiritual teacher was going to utter the words, you’re just you make up racism, which would have been deeply invalidating. So on how do we hold in our spiritual practices that, yes, all these collective structures of conditioning are create creations and they have very real impact. And even what feels to be the most real impact isn’t the most fundamental level of reality, which we don’t say to bypass all of that more and get a free pass if you’re white. You you can recognize that so that you keep your eye on that, which is most fundamentally true. Which again is that we are that which is never born and never dies. That we are something much larger than these body minds, that we are something much more than our personal conditioning and our collective conditioning.

Kelly: What do you see happening with some of these white meditators that you work with? In the form of anti-racism and meditation? 

Caverly: Shambala has reached out and asked me to write a book. And it’s striking to me. I’ve been asked to write a book before. And I just haven’t had the bandwidth until until now. But it’s striking to me that when I’ve been asked to write a book before, it’s always just been about practice. Now, granted, that was from a different publishing company, but it’s just about spiritual practice. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But this book interests me because what’s being asked for is OK, and how does the rubber meets the road? So OK, we’re talking about all these spiritual ideals, all OK, one ness and inherent goodness and all of these things, but then even trauma and in all of the negative, you know, charge attached to that. Right. But that you have to actually go to work and. Yeah. So how do we apply these things to race relations? How do we apply these things to what’s happening on the planet? I think that one of the reasons they’re asking me to write about it is this understanding that it’s that it’s important for white people to talk to white people about what the work actually is.

Aurora:Yeah, I feel like. Well, and I would also say is that you are able to hear each other. In a way. That you are not able to hear our voices or people of color voices. You, Kelly and I talk about this all the time. I don’t. I think it’s part of the conditioning. I think it’s it’s part of the conditioning of which voice, which vessel. So do we choose to lean into and listen to and value and validate? Which is why I I continue to believe it’s so critical for white people, white women, to be having that conversation and helping lead the conversation.

Caverly: Hopefully with the support of willing people of color who. Who can jump in as you have. Jump into the conversation without just feeling re traumatized by the experience of even having to talk about all of these things. For example, I – the first workshop I did for White identified people about whiteness and the intersection of whiteness and specifically meditation and meditation practice. It was really important to me that I had a friend who’s a person of color point out, and you shouldn’t profit off that. I just want to be really clear that as this is becoming a more popular conversation, you know, white people shouldn’t be forging their own path of like anti-racism work and leaving people of color behind in that process and then profiting off the work that that there is only needing to happen because of white people in the first place.

Aurora: So. With all of this Miss Caverly, really, what are you hoping that white people, white women opt in to? 

Caverly:That we listen to our deep longing for truth. And that we surrender to the exploration. And the unveiling of that truth. And that we back up that call with our action so that it’s not just like, yeah, “I have this call, so like I meditate for five minutes a week,” but we actually allow ourselves to make choices that are honoring of that call for love, for truth, for connectedness, for the recognition of our wholeness and the recognition of our shared being. Because I really believe that we all have that call, it’s just that it’s very clouded in some of us. Unfortunately, many of our political leaders.
Aurora: Well, we’re all bound by the same place, which is love. That’s the truth. It’s love. That’s the only way through out and above. 

Caverly: Yeah. 

Aurora: Love. 

Caverly: Thank you. 

Kelly: I love you, Caverly. I love you. Thank you. Thank you.

OUTRO:

Kelly: [Deep in exhale]

Caverly Morgan does not fail. Seriously, every time I talk with her, I come out of the conversation with a deeper understanding of our connectedness.

Aurora: And in talking to her we really can see the ways that our conditioning separates us.

Kelly: Exactly, and when we identify the collective conditioning that segregates us – we can start pushing back. And it’s going to be uncomfortable, but it’s so worth it.

Aurora: This was a fast track course on anti-racism work and spirituality. And we know that you may have a lot of thoughts.

Kelly: So we want to hear from you. What your relationship to spirituality? How does it shape your understanding of race? Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @the opt in.

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: Talk next week.

Aurora: Bye.