MINDFUL CONNECTIONS FOR BIAS AWARENESS

This evidence-based curriculum reveals how bias lives in each of us and how the use of mindful-awareness practices can mitigate the harm it may cause.* This course is designed for those who have done our MC4E/HP introductory program or already have a deep practice.

To be a practitioner of mindfulness involves looking at unconscious thoughts and beliefs that may be creating suffering and oppressive behaviors. MC4BA will provide a space to uncover and explore your own socialization and internalized biases to gain the understanding and awareness you need to head off harmful reactions or behaviors. You’ll learn tools that can be integrated into a life-long practice of working with your own mind and heart to help dismantle the negative biases so prevalent in our culture.

The MC4BA curriculum is twelve 1.5 hour sessions. You will learn:

• What is bias? What can we be biased about?
• Why would I want to work on my biases?
• How do biases harm others?
• How can we support people who have suffered bias and/or discrimination?
• Differential/negative life outcomes for groups who are victims of bias
• Why/how does meditation/mindfulness support working on our bias?
• Intersectionality of marginalized identities plus others such as social class that combine together to create complex identities and amplify impact
• Socialization and creation of our biases
• Structural and historical factors
• How to hold our biases with self-compassion to heal
• Exploring our own biases through practice in order to be more aware and prevent our habituated/unconscious biases from causing harm

We will use four areas of bias as our learning springboard

• Bias toward people with disability
• Bias toward people whose sexual orientation or gender identity is LGBTQ+ and/or different than mine
• Bias toward people who are of a different race than I am
• Bias toward people who are a different ethnicity or speak a different language than I do

*Mindfulness meditation is being shown to cause “a decrease in implicit race and age bias” (Leuke & Gibson 2016). Bendit-Shtull (2017) also found meditation to reduce biases towards people with disabilities. Among health care providers, mindfulness practices were shown to reduce “the likelihood that implicit biases will be activated in the mind, increase providers’ awareness of and ability to control responses to implicit biases once activated, increase self-compassion and compassion toward patients, and reduce internal sources of cognitive load (e.g. stress, burnout, and compassion fatigue).” (Burgess, Beach, & Saha 2017). These authors affirm that introducing mindfulness practices “focuses on the development of skills through practice, promotes a nonjudgmental approach, can circumvent resistance some…feel when directly confronted with evidence of racism.”

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