Listen or subscribe in your favorite player:

Today I am speaking with Dr. Larry Ward, a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, and author of America’s Racial Karma. How do we heal from the trauma of racism, not just as a society, but in our own minds and bodies? In our conversation, Dr. Ward shares a profound truth: racism is a fiction, but one with very real consequences, and it lives not only in the structures of our society, but in our thoughts, our speech, and our nervous systems.

He talks about how the Buddhist path through mindfulness, trauma healing, and the cultivation of joy can interrupt those habits and create new possibilities for understanding, connection, and change. What does it mean to truly see another person? How can grief make us whole? Dr. Ward explains how inner work and outer change must go hand-in-hand, and why healing begins by simply remembering we are not human “doings,” but human “beings.“

This conversation changed how I understand race. In particular, revealing how the delusion of pride, seeing oneself as superior or inferior lies at the root of racism, and how we begin to dissolve it by calming our nervous system, training our minds to see others with compassion, and recognizing our shared, evolving humanity.

How Dr. Larry Ward became a Buddhist

Scott Snibbe: Dr. Ward, last year I read your book, America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal, and I was deeply moved by it. Some of its ideas are still bubbling up for me every day, so I’m really grateful that you’re joining the podcast to share your wisdom with our listeners. Many of them are deeply curious—to say the least—about how we can heal from the wounds of slavery and racism.

Dr. Ward, I’m mostly gonna talk to you about your book, but I would love for you to just talk a tiny bit about how you became a Buddhist, and especially your relationship to your teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Dr. Larry Ward: If I was going to answer the question of how I became a Buddhist, it’s a very funny answer. I was living in India between Kolkata and Maharashtra, Bombay and Mumbai during project work in villages and poorer areas for a couple of years. While I was in Kolkata, I decided to study Buddhism and I was encouraged by a friend I had met there who’s a kind of a singular monk.

We used to have tea together, and he said to me, The Buddha used to teach near here, it would be a pity to live here and not learn anything. So I decided I was gonna learn as much as I could. Even though I had been familiar with Buddhism—from a world religion’s point of view—this gave me a chance to put it into practice.

What I discovered was the most startling thing: that Buddha was not an Indian. That the Buddha was a human being. Meaning the practice itself is therapeutic, not religious. It can be done anytime, anywhere, by anyone. I so appreciate the practicality of it all. I have a Buddhist title, I have a Christian title, but my favorite title is Human Being. So I became a Buddhist because it holds the greatest collection of practices for me on how to be human and be human in a well way.

I have a Buddhist title, I have a Christian title, but my favorite title is Human Being. So I became a Buddhist because it holds the greatest collection of practices for me on how to be human and be human in a well way.

How Dr. Larry Ward met Thich Nhat Hanh

Scott Snibbe: I couldn’t agree more. How did you encounter Thich Nhat Hanh?

Dr. Larry Ward: I encountered Thich Nhat Hanh through my wife, who encountered Thich Nhat Hanh after her first husband was killed in a skiing accident. She went to a retreat with him and who I also knew as a friend. Then several years later, after he passed away, she asked if I wanted to go to a retreat to meet him? And I did. You can say the rest is history.

Scott Snibbe: What’s one of your strongest memories of Thich Nhat Hanh?

Dr. Larry Ward: This is kind of a funny but a memorable one. He was invited to South Korea where his book on anger had reached number one, and a few of us got invited to go with him. We were invited to stay in a Hilton hotel and some of the lay people there with us, along with some monastics, were really uncomfortable staying in the five star hotel.

So the first morning at breakfast where we all gathered as a Sangha, Thich Nhat Hanh did our daily rituals, opening the meal and he said the Buddha loves the Hilton Hotel. A week later, we were at the monastery up in the mountains of South Korea. It was a thousand years old and it was 40 degrees below zero and everybody was grumbling and complaining. The first morning Thich Nhat Hanh says, Oh, the Buddha loves this thousand-year-old monastery. Just a great witness to equanimity.

The Buddha loves the Hilton Hotel.

What is race? Is it fiction or reality?

Scott Snibbe: That’s beautiful. I think that’s a common misconception. One of my teachers, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, he died a couple years ago, we were at a five star hotel and someone was expressing the discomfort and he said, One of the very best places to meditate is a five star hotel.

Alright, I want to get into talking to you about the meat of our discussion. In your book, America’s Racial Karma, very early you write, “Our minds have been conditioned to see race as real,” and that your aim is to help people better understand the mind’s grasping, clinging, and attachment to the fiction of race.

Our minds have been conditioned to see race as real.

Can you talk a little bit about what race is and to what extent it’s fiction versus reality, and how do we hold the truth that race is a fiction with very real impacts?

Dr. Larry Ward: Well, I want to begin by saying every fiction has real impact. We have many fictions in human history: race, gender, left, right, up, down, etc.—we have many social constructs for pointing to who we think we are, at least in the moment, in history. My point in the book is that our consciousness of being human has been racialized, therefore obscuring our view of our true humanity.

Our consciousness of being human has been racialized, therefore obscuring our view of our true humanity.

We will live with these constructions that we’ve made. We can’t get them out of our minds. We have to learn how to see through them, how to use them as vehicles for our own healing and transformation. It is not about running away from our racial experience, it is about going deep into it. So deep into it, we discover our own humanity and its possibilities.

Scott Snibbe: In the book, you trace the first racial exclusion laws to 15th century Spain, forbidding the people of Jewish ancestry from holding office, receiving church land. It was very striking for me to read that because my ancestors are Sephardic Jews and were kicked out of Spain, Portugal at that time.

Was this the origin of the modern construct of race that later justified the enslavement of black Americans and so on?

Dr. Larry Ward: It was the modern origin of legalizing that—bringing it into law, bringing infrastructure, and beyond custom, but into law itself. It was, to me, the first example of really doing that.

Scott Snibbe: Then how does that story help to make the argument and tell the story that you tell in this brief but really powerful book?

Dr. Larry Ward: The story I’m telling underneath it all is that our human consciousness can so much fancy itself that it both disregards and marginalizes others, which in turn, marginalizes ourselves. The suffering is shared even though we think it’s not. It’s that pattern of that response to difference to class, to whatever construct we invent, how we use it to create suffering in other people’s lives is the point.

It is always going to be descriptions of one another, but to use our descriptions to cause suffering is another matter. That’s a willful act. It’s an act of volition, of organization, of structure. It is not just an attitude.

What is racial karma?

Scott Snibbe: You use the word karma, right in the title of your book. You say, “Karma is living energy that gets manifested in economics, politics, and the justice system.” For someone who’s not a Buddhist, how would you help them understand karma in the context of America’s racial history and these patterns you’re talking about?

Karma is living energy that gets manifested in economics, politics, and the justice system.

Dr. Larry Ward: To me, karma is by definition which others have created is action. My point in the book is that every action creates itself, downstream or upstream, if you will. Every action has the power to continue because it creates conditioning in others: others’ thoughts, others’ ways of thinking, others’ speech and others’ behavior. Karma is the action that can continue once it is initiated by cognition and the way we think shapes by speech and shapes our behavior.

I don’t mean anything religious about it. I don’t mean anything about afterlife, about it. I just mean the habits you have individually and socially will continue unless you change them. That’s all. Neurologically, every action in our neurons of our brain system, every action creates pathways and clusters. The more we repeat the same action, the same thought, the same speech, the same behavior, our neurons form a cluster—like a suburb, a subdivision—of going back to the same place over and over.

This too is the continuation of action. That’s what I mean by karma.

Scott Snibbe: In the context of American history, how does that play out? I like your emphasis on action. Because that’s, as a Buddhist, as a religious Tibetan Buddhist, it’s the same emphasis. Karma is more about action and the seeds you’re planting now, you can’t do much about what you planted in the past. But we have planted a lot of seeds in the past in America with respect to race.

Can you talk about those deep grooves and how we become more conscious of the intentions behind our thoughts, words, actions, to steer us out of those grooves?

Dr. Larry Ward: First thing I think now at this stage of my life is that we must deal with our own inherited trauma because what goes on in our nervous systems is we tend to be with the race always in the fight or flight mode. What we know from science is that when we are in that mode, we cannot hear very well, we cannot speak very well, we don’t hardly know what we say. It is like when we have an argument with the beloved one, nobody knows what happened. Everybody just knows it wasn’t well.

For me, the therapy of Buddhist practice of meditation and of mindfulness trainings or of our morality and self-discipline is how we can create a stability in our bodies and minds to see what we create and therefore can choose whether this is a thought I want to continue, this is a speech I want to continue, or this is the action I want to continue. Because it either creates a sense of safety and wellness or it doesn’t. I’m able to be mindful of the time—my thoughts—before they get out into history.

Scott Snibbe: This is the emphasis on inner development. Even in seeking outer change, that you point towards inner development as the critical first step. In a book, you write about how many of us, especially white people, freak out when we’re confronted with some of the realities of racism. You say, “because we get fixated on an external life and forget our internal life is much deeper and more rewarding.”

What do you say, on both sides of the race equation, for those people who are focused on outer change, for example, like wanting to change laws, policing practices, hiring practices—how would you explain to them why inner development is equally essential or maybe even more essential for racial healing?

Dr. Larry Ward: In my mind, external development in society, and internal development in culture and persons are linked: one births the other, one sustains the other, if we have a sustaining, well society as an individual, but our external system does not support that we wither. And the other way around. If our external environment lifts us up, supports our development and transformation, we can develop and transform much quicker and much deeper if we do it together.

For me, it is not just a matter of doing individual practice, we have to learn how to practice together, heal together, face our grief together, and self-regulate. Our experience has been once we are able to self-regulate, even for a moment, co-regulation becomes possible—when co-regulation becomes possible, co-imagination also becomes possible.

For me, it is not just a matter of doing individual practice, we have to learn how to practice together, heal together, face our grief together, and self-regulate.

Becoming whole by embracing our grief

Scott Snibbe: You mentioned grief, and in the book you have a quote, “We become whole again by embracing our grief.”

We become whole again by embracing our grief.

Can you speak a little bit more deeply to the role of grief in healing, you know, both personally and collectively?

Dr. Larry Ward: Yeah, at least for me, grief is a continuing practice of honoring life as it is and letting go—realizing I am not in control. Grief is also coming to terms with your heartbreak. I had a gentleman who grew up in south USA ask me one day, Am I cursed? And I said, no, you are not cursed unless you wanna be.

Grief is a continuing practice of honoring life as it is and letting go—realizing I am not in control.

This too is how we heal. If you want to heal, let’s heal. If you don’t, you don’t. You can’t expect to be healed if you don’t want to be. It takes some work, it takes some intention, it takes some spiritual practice, it takes some therapy, it takes some getting together in small groups where we can de develop enough trust to listen and hear one another. And because we’ve been conditioned to be separate and to live separate, this is very hard for us to imagine.

Scott Snibbe: In the book, you were mentioning some of the external factors that contribute to the challenges we face as individual society. You told a story that really moved me about, Harry Belafonte, who was just such an extraordinary musician and activist. But you told a story about someone asking him, That it seemed like we were making progress on race and then things went sideways, why is that? You quote him as saying, “We underestimated greed.”

Dr. Larry Ward: Noam Chomsky asked him that question.

How greed and economic injustive play into racial division

Scott Snibbe: Oh, I want to look that up and watch that. How do you see greed and economic injustice playing into the persistence of racial division?

Dr. Larry Ward: Well, you have to go back with an understanding of slavery as a business. That’s all it was. It was a business. If you don’t understand it was a business trying to make a profit like every other business, you cannot understand it. Now, of course, there’s everything else on its subjective side, but objectively it was a business. It ran like a business. It kept books like a business. It counted people like a business.

When slavery ended, the business of slavery was rewarded for giving up slavery. They received reparations to let slaves go. It fit right in with everything American, which is a business. Long years ago, I worked with Fortune 500 companies on different things, and I realized America is a business and we don’t know where we live. We don’t not understand that.

America is a business.

Scott Snibbe: I heard someone once describe the American philosophy as work or starve.

Dr. Larry Ward: I’ve had the pleasure of living other places in the world where it was not like that.

A liberated understanding of work and worth

Scott Snibbe: No. There’s so many beautiful quotes in your book. This one really relates to this. You quote Francis Weller saying “The idea that you have to earn a living is a tragic way to think about being a human being.” I think we can all agree with that, or most of us, but what would it look like to reclaim a more compassionate or liberated understanding of work and worth? Is that possible in America?

The idea that you have to earn a living is a tragic way to think about being a human being.

Dr. Larry Ward: I think it’s possible, but I think it’s at the creative edge of our imaginations. I’m so conditioned to work, I’ve been working since I was 10 when I had the paper route. Even now, if I’m not working, I feel like I’m not doing something. When in fact I am being. One of the things Thich Nhat Hanh said to us, To always remember, we’re not human doing. We’re human being. Learning how to just be human and willing to be human.

We’re not human doing. We’re human being.

We should be processing our life, processing our consciousness, processing our pain, processing our greatness, celebrating our worthiness, but we don’t have time for that. We can’t even remember. We have that. How do we get in a situation? That’s one of the things I like so much about retreats is I have a little to do, enough little to do that I can really do something.

That’s part of the wisdom. I think the Buddhist and other traditions is to take time out and not take time out in the day and in the night. I have many retreats throughout the day for myself, in order to slow down, in order to listen to the woodpecker, and the wind and just see the millions of trees that surround me, and feel their rootedness all under where we live. It’s just amazing to look out and see that vision and to know we are like that. We are like that supported by many, many roots of the earth is what makes our life so very precious and interesting.

Hyperindividualism vs interbeing

Scott Snibbe: We are part of nature. I’m sure you know this nice Buddhist injunction, Don’t just do something, sit there. What you’re talking about, points to what they sort of poorly call emptiness, what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. You talk about in your book, you quote him, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.”

We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.

How does America’s culture of hyperindividualism get in the way of seeing this interbeing, and especially someone listening to this who maybe hasn’t been on a meditation retreat, doesn’t meditate, how could they come to experience interbeing?

Dr. Larry Ward: I think the experience of interbeing is everyday life. It is nothing mystical, super fantastical, it’s everyday life, which is super imaginative, super fantastical. When it just rained here yesterday and while it was raining, I was remembering how I am nurtured by the rain. How the rain cares for me, how the rain cares for the gladiolas that are blooming right now.

Interbeing is our conscience of being connected to life itself in all its manifestations and all its phenomena. For me, I don’t have to go somewhere other than where I am to experience. We were on a retreat at Princeton last week, a conference, and we put our dog in the kennel. I noticed that the whole time I missed my dog. I never did not miss him. And that’s interbeing—an emotional kind of connection we have with life. And to be grateful for interbeing.

Scott Snibbe: Thich Nhat Hanh writes about this right in one of his books, he says, There’s the sun is in this page. Because the sunlight nurtured the seeds, the water came down. He says all of those things.

Dr. Larry Ward: The printers and the page, you, the inks, and the page.

Scott Snibbe: It’s so beautiful to remember that the sunlight and the trees and the seeds are in the book you’re reading right now.

Dr. Larry Ward: For me, the point of meditation is to train my mind so that I can see that all the time. I’m still working on it, but it’s improving a little.

The delusion of pride and its central role in racism

Scott Snibbe: One of the many insights I got from your book, this might have been one of the ones that that stuck with me the most, is that we speak of different delusions in Buddhism, like attachment aversion. One insight I took from your book was another delusion: pride. This delusion of superiority or inferiority, sometimes how it’s central to racism, like reading your book made me see, oh yeah, that’s where it comes from.

Can you talk about that, how this delusion of pride functions and how we can apply the antidotes to it?

Dr. Larry Ward: Okay, well, the understanding of pride I present a little bit on, in the book comes from my understanding of the Yogachara tradition of Buddhism. It’s about the manus level of consciousness. I was thinking the other day about how to help people understand that level of awareness, that functional level of consciousness I was thinking this morning, it is the part of us that fancies ourselves. Thich Nhat Hanh used to call it the lover.

Everything that comes up in us, it loves because it helps us identify as a separate self. It really takes a conscious effort, which is not hard or impossible to train ourselves, to see the world differently, to see each other differently. I now know how to look at anyone and see their baby face. That usually does it for enemies.

We can train our minds just to be still and calm. That’s wonderful. We can also train our minds literally on the path of seeing as this cause, how we realize the actual world and phenomena we are in the midst of, in our interactions in this life.

How trauma can lead to growth

Scott Snibbe: To see through those fixed delusions, people seem so solid and unchanging and annoying or lovable depending on those. To see that arc, that’s a meditation we’re also taught to do all the time. When you see people to imagine when they’re born, imagine when they’re going to die.

Imagine whatever hope or dream is center centered in their mind right now, and get a bigger picture, right. That’s beautiful. You talk about trauma, everyone’s talking about trauma these days, right? It’s a very, very big topic, but your book takes a little bit of a different approach to it because you also talk about how trauma can also lead to growth.

Could you share a little bit how that happens?

Dr. Larry Ward: First, from the nervous system point of view, as we’re able to heal our traumatic spaces in our body where it’s been stored, we open up new places of energy and we open up new places of insight, literally our biological system starts to function better. It starts to purr, it starts to recognize its own wholesomeness—when it in that zone of wholesomeness and when it is not.

It’s okay not to be in that zone of wholesomeness, but to be mindful that you’re not or that you are is the key because you can go recover. Thich Nhat Hanh gave a great talk once and once you know how to suffer, you will suffer less. It’s a practice suffering. I didn’t talk much about this in the book because it would take another book, but part of the issue we’re dealing with in America is that we have a collective majority psyche who’s not ever learned how to suffer.

Part of the issue we’re dealing with in America is that we have a collective majority psyche who’s not ever learned how to suffer.

I see people in line at Starbucks freaking out that they screaming and going, carrying on like something’s wrong with the whole world that they got the wrong coffee. I mean this is childishness at its greatest height. If we do not learn how to suffer, acknowledge our suffering and work on ourselves to heal our suffering individually, we’re never gonna get to do it as a whole group.

Scott Snibbe: To acknowledge that our traumas are a place of growth. You talk through traumas, new possibilities emerge, empathy deepens. This is a big one we get from Buddhism is when you suffer, you can realize how much others suffer and the greater appreciation of life too that you talk about.

Dr. Larry Ward: Post-traumatic trauma, what people are doing, what they’ve learned, what the journey has been and what we’re learning, we’re still in the first stage of really learning how to work with our bodies as our living systems and our trauma and our pain.

Reconnecting to our roots

Scott Snibbe: Something else you encourage in your book is particularly for white people to explore their own ancestral traditions, being cut off from those is a big part of childish attitudes. I don’t know if you ever read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. He’s famous for having written The Ministry for the Future, which is a kind of solution to the climate problems.

I recently read a book of his called Shaman that vividly describes what life was like for humans in Europe 30,000 years ago. And one of the biggest things I got outta this book was realizing that regardless of race, every human being on earth comes from communities like the indigenous ones that we’ve displaced with modern societies, and that emphasize ritual art, connection to nature, small group living.

It was a big realization for me. No one’s separate from these communities. We all come from those traditions. You encourage this also in your book, getting in touch with our ancestral traditions, but how would you recommend that people reconnect with these kind of paleolithic roots in today’s world of screens, cities?

Dr. Larry Ward: Well there’s several ways a person could do that, and one is to know enough about your heritage of your ancestors. It starts can start with just putting pictures up in your house and we have an ancestral altar in our house. My mother’s here, grandmother Peggy’s parents are here. We remember that we’re not just an I. It can start in the house in a very small way, pictures in your wallet or in your purse, so if you don’t forget, you are a We.

You are a We.

Then I think it also, we went to a practice at Plum Village one year, over a month where the first week of the month we listed out our ancestors that we could remember, and we wrote down what was wholesome about them, what did they contribute that was good, true, and beautiful?

The next week we took and listed out what was unwholesome, what did they contribute, energy that was not true and beautiful. The third week we listed out how we had internalized either one or both. Then the last week we looked at what we could do to redeem the gifts we’ve been given. It was very practical. We wrote things out in the journal. We took them in the meditation, meditated on those things we wrote.

When I spent time in Africa, I studied with shamans there, for example. I also studied with the Celtic from Europe. I’ve also studied with Native Americans. Anytime I get a chance to study with another human being, traditional community and gain a little bit of wisdom, I’m open to doing that. We have to become like that. I’ve discovered so much wisdom around the world. I cannot begin to say how grateful I am for all the ancestors that are not directly mine.

Scott Snibbe: I like your emphasis on universality of the human experience. Another one of your great quotes I have here is, “If we see ourselves as belonging to a family of humanity, distinctions like skin tone, age, gender, or class can become celebrations of diversity, not divisions.”

How can people of any background—black, white, male, female, rich, poor—all honor our unique identities without becoming divisive?

Dr. Larry Ward: Well, this brings me to the Lotus Sutra in particular, which is really trying to help us understand our true identity, which is the identity of a Buddha, a bodhisattva, a wise being is our true identity. Everything else we just made up and we have to know that. We just made it up. That’s fine, because we can make up something else, as long as we know we’re making it up and not getting trapped in separate self, we will create this and we will create that and permanence will rule. It always does. Learning how to be human in the midst of change without hating it is a very deep practice.

Learning how to be human in the midst of change without hating it is a very deep practice.

Because many people I meet as I go around really hate their life. It’s so sad. One of my thoughts recently was to encourage people to gather in small groups where they can recover some quality of intimacy: listening, naming, hearing stories, crying, having an emotional circle. Because to me it cannot be worked out in a large group.

How to get in touch with our buddha nature

Scott Snibbe: This idea of fundamental goodness, they call it buddha nature in Buddhism, which is a funny term, because the Buddha probably wouldn’t have called it. He kind of called it everybody nature. But how do you help people who hate their lives, hate themselves, start steering towards that? This is one way I guess you’re talking about getting into small groups and which is fantastic. Are there any other ways you can recommend for people to get in touch with that?

Dr. Larry Ward: An example is when Thich Nhat Hanh led retreats in the USA, he often started with a children’s group in the beginning doing Q&A one retreat in Colorado, I think it was a 10-year-old boy asked him, “How did you get to be so peaceful?” There was total silence in the room. Finally, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “First, I decided I wanted to be peaceful. Then I decided to surround myself with peaceful people. Then I decided to practice peace every day, in my walking and in my breathing.”

For me, it is the same. If we want to transform our racial karma, we simply have to learn how to stop, calm ourselves, gain emotional and neurological stability in our nervous systems so we can occupy the space in our ventral nerves that is beyond fight or flight. In that space, which is a space meditation open for us. Contemplation can open for us. Mindfulness can open for us that space of where we are in equanimity. But until people can experience that, it’s not real.

The American Society for Psychology a couple of years ago produced a paper that said nobody can change unless there’s an experience. The question for me is, what kinds of experiences can we create for people to experience another way of seeing the world? Another aha, heart-opening, mind-opening, calming, safe space. That whole collection of experiences people need to have to heal.

Scott Snibbe: I remember I only saw Thich Nhat Hanh once. It was right when he was opening the Plum Village down in Southern California and someone asked a question and was kind of angry because they said, Oh, this place is so nice. But everyone coming there is peaceful and happy. What about a place where people whose minds are very disturbed and who are mental illness, shouldn’t they be allowed to go?

Thich Nhat Hanh, he thought for a long time—you’ve probably seen this a lot—before he answered and he said, we need at least 80% healthy minds. He said, If you have any less than that, then it won’t work. That strikes me that you say that, because it is quite important, right? Who you surround yourself with.

Dr. Larry Ward: You have to work at it, and you have to have the courage to do that. For a lot of people, they don’t have that courage yet.

Practices to bring your body back into the moment

Scott Snibbe: This is something that’s encouraging because I have a 13-year-old daughter and she said they taught her, they’re much better with emotional intelligence in schools now. They told her, whenever you say like, I can’t, etc., always add “yet” to the end of this sentence. What a great thing to learn as a child.

Speaking of that though, practical things you had there, one of my favorite parts of your book is all of the practical exercises in the back, and you had some exercises called Help Now! practices. You described 10 simple embodied practices that aren’t meditations, but ways to bring us back into the body into the moment.

Could you just share a couple of those and talk about why they’re useful, how they work?

Dr. Larry Ward: The first thing is for me to ground myself with a natural encounter. I can peel an orange. I can go sit on a tree and lean against it. I can stand outside and listen to the woodpeckers, which we have a lot of here, and so that I realize I’m in body. Drink a glass of water, juice, or a cup of tea—that works because it brings you back into your whole system of processing life if you are willing to give it attention and not do it too fast.

Look around the room or space, wherever you are, and pay attention to what you notice: colors, art, images, etc. I often do that for myself. Just to look around and see where I am and what it’s amazing. What I forgot was here when I look around, Oh, I didn’t know I had that. I didn’t know this was there. Learning how to do that often, it engages the neocortex.

Name the colors that are around you that you see. Again, getting the neocortex back online, because often what happens in trauma is our neocortex shuts down. It becomes dysfunctional, unable to communicate or orient, and so what we’re having to do is to help it recover its function. Very mundane, practical things help us do that.

For example, I would never have a group of people meet on race unless we did all this stuff first. The reason is, back in 1970, I was at a conference in Chicago on the white racism and black heritage. It was a small group, but once everyone was in the room, I already knew it wasn’t going to work. And it took me 40 years to figure out why: because we’re all so traumatized. We could not get beyond fight, flight, or freeze.

We could not have an intelligent discussion about anything. There’s a sequence here. We want the end result without going through the process. We’ll never be liberated from our racialized consciousness without working on it. I know that from my own experience.

Scott Snibbe: Yeah, but the beauty in what you’ve shared is that it’s actually not that hard to come down from panic. Do you know Kazu Haga? I’m a big fan of his. and I just interviewed him about his new book, Fierce Vulnerability, and he talks about this, the comfort, stretch and panic and how to get yourself out of a panic. His book was the first I read that explains why these things work—just having a drink of water or a little snack—because your body, when it goes into that panic mode, shuts down your digestive system.

For example, when you take a little snack or a drink of water, it’s like the reverse engineering. It tells your body, things are okay. Like, I’m having a snack, I’m having a drink. I think this power of these things can’t be underestimated. It’s almost the best part of your book, for ordinary people to see these 10 things you could do at any time to come out of panic. Thank you for that chapter .

Dr. Larry Ward: One book I’m very impressed with is called The Master and the Emissary. It’s a neuroscientific treatment of the last 500 years of Western civilization from a neurological point of view. His basic summary is that for 500 years, we have overemphasized the functions of the left brain and denied and denigrated the functions of the right brain. If you put that in perspective, with our colonial heritage, a whole lot of things make sense.

We want to transform our racial karma, we’ve got to work on the part of us that is soft, that can listen, that can cry, that is vulnerable, that knows heartbreak, that also knows joy and peace. So many of us don’t recognize these spaces in ourselves. We can’t transform our social pain without beginning to recognize the non-pain in us, the goodness in us, the worthiness already in us—our true identity.

We can’t transform our social pain without beginning to recognize the non-pain in us, the goodness in us, the worthiness already in us—our true identity.

Dr. Larry Ward’s meditation

Scott Snibbe: Each of us is fundamentally good. I could talk to you all day long, but you’ve kindly agreed to lead a meditation in our next episode. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that is. Maybe you’ll make it up as you go.

Dr. Larry Ward: I wanted to introduce a meditation that is really traditional mindfulness practice so that people can access it on their own. Many teachers have a version of this, of course, the genius of Buddhist practices, you have to figure it out for yourself. Or it doesn’t work. Two things have trained me the most in how to make my mind happy.

The first training I had that really helped me understand how to make my mind happy. I’m doing it in reverse order. I learned in Taiwan from a nun stationed there. She had a stand outside in a circle and she said, Okay, now spend your attention on three breaths. Then she said, Send your mind someplace you want to go. Then she said, Bring it back. Then she had a share. And people were just amazed at how the mind could travel.

This is what for me, we have to remember, if we want to learn how to make our minds happy, is that it can travel. I can go to my high school, I can go to my grandma’s house, I can go here, I can go there, I can go to the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated. I can go to anger where I’ve been in my mind, the mind can travel because it can travel. We have to be careful where we let it go. Because wherever we take our mind, we’ll have consequences for it.

The second meditation that has helped me is the full awareness of breathing practice. Just the first four verses are really great because I practiced the whole 16 over time, both pragmatically and academically. But maybe we’ll spend a few minutes going through the first four verses.

Scott Snibbe: Well, Dr. Ward, thank you so much for taking some of your valuable time to talk to me about addressing the deepest roots of racism and division and hating your life, as you’ve said. I think this conversation’s going to be of benefit to many people and looking forward to your meditation, that will air in the next episode, and please continue all your very beneficial work, leading retreats and writing books, teaching, and so on. Thank you.

Dr. Larry Ward: Thank you.

Scott Snibbe: Thanks for joining me in this conversation with Dr. Larry Ward. His book, America’s Racial Karma is one I continue to think about again and again: short, profound, and full of wisdom that meets the painful racial wounds of our time with insight, compassion, and hope.

If our conversation moved you, I highly recommend reading his book and trying the practices he offers to heal both personal and collective trauma. In our next episode, Dr. Ward leads us in a guided meditation, rooted in mindfulness, and an awareness of breathing. It’s designed to help us find stability, clarity, and connection in the midst of life’s challenges.

If you’d like to deepen your meditation practice and connect with a community, exploring ideas like those we discuss in the podcast visit, how to trainahappymind.org.

Credits