Creating Safe(r) Spaces for Mindfulness of Breath: Non-White Western Practitioners’ Experiences of Race, Racism and Whiteness in American Mindfulness

In Vipassana meditation practice, the first common object is the breath. By allowing the breath to be the focus of your awareness, one lets the social world full of discursive thought, self-reflexivity and judgement move into the background. Yet, we know that as intimate and solitary as this breath practice is, many individuals turn to communities of solitary practice such as sitting groups and retreat spaces, as safe grounds or anchors to turn their gaze inward and attend to the tacit, embodied dimension of their being. This presentation critically evaluates how for non-white people of color in North America who practice in institutional spaces that are predominantly white, such silence and safety is interrupted by race. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in California among mindfulness communities, I explore key assumptions about mindfulness that North American black and non-black people of color expose and problematize through their engagement with mindfulness. The presentation asks, how in the context of racialized history of the United States and institutional whiteness, how we might more fully appreciate the “noble” breath of meditation, not as simply empty and neutral, but rather as supersaturated with history and power.

This presentation is part of the Buddhism and Breath Summit, which took place online in 2021, with a group of researchers exploring Buddhist practices of working with the breath or the “winds” of the body. The event was co-hosted by Frances Garrett and Pierce Salguero, and co-sponsored by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto and Jivaka.net. You can watch the video of this talk and find other resources from the Buddhism and Breath Summit at Jivaka.net