I am coming to understand that racism is like this: some people working out their imbalance, their insecurity, their fear and frustration, on others. It compels me to consider that perhaps the work that is deeply lacking from the movement is interior work.

Maybe these are just words. Maybe calling it practice, instead of calling it work, changes very little. But today, let’s pretend that words can mean everything. 

So I became very aware of my checklist, the movements I have memorized, the things that I do. But mostly, I was wondering why. How that checklist got formed. And why my process looks the way that it does, whenever a Black man dies.

There is something really enchanting and vulnerable about knowing not only what another person is deeply committed to, but why.

What I have found, in short, is that when I worry about what other people are doing, when I judge the way they are tending to their corner of the world (e.g. the way they’re protesting or not, posting about these injustices or not, and yes, even, being hideously racist or not), I forget to tend to my own corner.

I was a devout member of the Catholic Church for over a dozen years before I came out of the closet, and quietly slipped out the back door. Doing my best not to make any noise. Not to disrupt. I just left. Never really to think about all that I had lost.

My old therapist once told me that I have a lot of cognitive resources. She didn’t really mean this as a compliment. Or an insult, necessarily. Just an observation that the way that I deal with “problems” in my life almost always involves a largely cognitive component. I try to intellectualize my way out of suffering. Not surprisingly, I often fall short.

And essentially, she said, if you are pushing people away to practice this thing, you are doing it wrong.

But I also struggle with understanding who is benefitting from this show of support. When the whole Internet is flooded under the weight of our demonstrations, and the so-called transparency of our work, is it ever really possible to sift through these spaces and to learn?

Listening requires something like surrender, I think: yielding the illusion of control over another person, their thoughts, and their circumstances. And doing the hard work to simply be present, instead.

I believe that we are wading around in these deep, dark, waters together, trying to find a way to get free.

Racial violence, especially police brutality, happens on impulse. The body feels something. The body repeats an old story. And then someone is murdered. Because the body felt fear, and the person decided that fear pointed to a truth about their safety. White minds convincing white bodies that black bodies are inherently dangerous.

This is how I have moved through the world, then. With white and non-black folks believing it is their birthright, their duty, to police me. To assume I’m not old enough or wealthy enough to be driving the car I am in. To decide it’s appropriate to comment upon how I look. To use whatever means necessary to intimidate and disperse a group of us, should we have the audacity to gather.

I think there is something to be said for shifting the way we are looking at the world. For doing something that scares us. For considering a different point of view. Even, if only for a moment.

Sometimes it feels impossible to not get stuck in my expectations. To be flexible and, thus, free. I felt this a lot around liberation work when I first got started. So obsessed with the end game that I couldn’t experience the freedom of a singular moment. I couldn’t be present for the journey or for the opportunities that life offered, because they veered off from my rigid vision of the future.

But to commit to sitting with yourself and excavating your interior world? To give yourself the gift of knowing your own story? That, I think, is how we all ultimately get free.

One of my favorite cues that I hear in a Yoga class is something like “Can you find ease?” My teachers usually offer this cue when they’ve put us into a posture that is really pushing the edge. That’s causing our face to contract into a grimace. Our teeth to grit. Our breath to catch.