To make a better world, first look within
Among other relatively new habits, meditation has profoundly changed my life for the better. I began engaging in various meditation practices regularly in 2014. In some ways, meditation saved my life. It has been crucial to my mental health, and to my professional successes in the midst of aglobal pandemic, a global civil rights movement and many other upheavals.
Since childhood, I have engaged in painful relationships with myself, others and my career. Such painful relationships came from childhood traumas that manifested in the forms of shame and excessive reliance on other people and achievements for approval, a sense of identity and safety. For me, it led to workaholism and perfectionism.
Such painful ways of relating to the world came to a head in 2014, when I experienced an existential crisis that inspired me to begin investigating how and why I was suffering, and the root causes of my many strained relationships.
Enough was enough, and I could no longer run away from myself. I began taking care of myself for the first time in my life. I began to let go of codependent relationships, excessive weightlifting and frequenting nightclubs.
I started studying and practising different types of yoga and meditation, because many of my friends and colleagues that experienced crises in the past told me that yoga and meditation transformed their lives for the better. I have also been fascinated by East Indian culture and history since childhood, and I knew that the ancient yogis had developed a variety of effective tools for introspection and healing.
So, I joined Toronto-based meditation communities like Kirtan Toronto, the Consciousness Explorers Club, the Quiet Company, H2O Float Studio, REALThings Cushions and Hoame. Every day, I used the Calm app — currently the world’s most downloaded meditation and sleep app — and I often meditated in sensory deprivation chambers.
I began learning from Vedic and Buddhist monks. I joined several support groups, I started reading many spiritual, psychology, philosophy, and personal development texts, and I doubled up on psychotherapy.
Some of the modalities that I engaged in, and still engage in, are not accessible to all people, but tools such as meditation, visualization, journaling and at-home yoga practices are available to the vast majority of people.
In addition to my established career in writing, photography, directing and different forms of media production, my experiences inspired me to become a mental-health advocate in 2017. I now work with several mental health organizations doing impactful work, including but not limited to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Calm and Thrive Global.
Furthermore, I am the art director for Operation Prefrontal Cortex, which is an organization and program harnessing the power of mindfulness and meditation to help reduce the incidents of gun, mass and police violence in Toronto, co-founded by Julien Christian Lutz, professionally known as Director X, and his longtime friend Danell Adams. Our organization is in the process of implementing our mindfulness-based programming throughout the Toronto District School Board, the Toronto Police Services and elsewhere
— a process that has involved many conversations with city councillors and other politicians, school principals, police constables and so on.
Operation Prefrontal Cortex exists because mindfulness and meditation have been scientifically proven to reduce violent tendencies and impulses in the human brain.
Toronto’s recent rise in gun violence has become alarming. In response to this significant problem, Operation Prefrontal Cortex now has a petition to bring Advance Peace to Toronto. Advance Peace is an organization that ends cyclical and retaliatory gun violence in urban neighbourhoods, reducing firearm assaults causing injury or death in Richmond, Calif., by more than 85 per cent between 2012 and 2019. Our petition now has more than 70,000 signatures.
As I look back on the most transformative existential crisis of my life, I realize that it was a beneficial opportunity — and that the collective consciousness of humanity is facing such a crisis at this moment.
Globally, humanity is in the midst of a mental-health epidemic compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The now highly publicized instances of systemic racism and police violence involving Black, Indigenous, and people of colour in Toronto is a result of many complicated factors that have been a part of human history for hundreds or thousands of years, including the current global mental health epidemic.
The gun violence in Toronto has been steadily increasing since 2016. This year is on track to be the most violent year in Toronto’s relatively short history, and many of the shooting incidents involve Black people and other people of colour, due to numerous factors, including but not limited to socio-economic stressors like a lack of affordable housing, access to healthy food and more.
As far as police violence in Toronto is concerned, the Ontario Human Rights Commission recently published its findings on racial discrimination by the Toronto Police Service. The report found that Black Toronto residents were 20 times more likely than white residents to be fatally shot by Toronto police between 2013 and 2017.
This year, amid global protests against police brutality and systemic racism, the Toronto board of health voted unanimously to declare anti-Black racism a public health crisis.
Economic challenges that stem from systemic racism cause many Black, Indigenous and people of colour to suffer. Due to the atmospheric pressure of confronting racism daily, and the generational trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of numerous Indigenous tribes, and far more atrocities, many marginalized communities and individuals are traumatized every day. Such trauma damages the structure of the brain.
More specifically, unprocessed, chronic trauma and stress lead to the brain’s over-reliance on the amygdala — the fight-flight-freeze part of the brain while diminishing the capacities of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain involved in rational decision-making.
Based on countless scientific studies and my experiences, meditation can reverse brain damage that stems from unprocessed, chronic trauma and stress, rendering the meditation practitioner calmer and less reactive than they would be otherwise.
A recent study published in Behavioural Brain Research has determined that only eight weeks of daily meditation can decrease negative mood and anxiety and improve attention, working memory and recognition memory in nonexperienced meditators.
Researchers at Central Michigan University have also found that mindfulness meditation reduces implicit race (and age) bias. The researchers focused on the impact of mindfulness on implicit age and racial bias as measured by implicit association tests (IATs). Participants listened to either a mindfulness or a control audio and then completed the race and age IATs. Meditation also leads to metacognition — an awareness and understanding of one’s thought processes, and the ability to observe thoughts and think critically. It also leads to mindfulness — non-judgmental awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surrounding environment in the present moment.
To me, metacognition and mindfulness are the first steps toward noticing and challenging racism in one’s mind and dismantling systemic racism. For example, through the process of meditating regularly for a few months or longer, one may begin to ask, “Why do I feel an aversion towards this particular group of people, and where did my aversion toward them come from?”
In my case, meditation has helped me to accept that I will face systemic racism in my personal and professional lives, for the foreseeable future, and that those that are perpetuating systemic racism have an opportunity to change, through tools like meditation.
It was challenging for me to develop a regular meditation practice. Meditating for a couple of minutes came with much resistance since I was used to running away from uncomfortable thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. The challenges were also due to common stigmas associated with introspection and mental health among most people in North America, especially within Black and other racialized communities. These stigmas include associating psychological weakness with talking about emotions and mental health.
For many people, meditation may equate to emptying their brain or thinking about nothing — but ceasing all thoughts is not possible, so the process of meditating is more about accepting and, in some cases, embracing thoughts, emotions and sensations.
Now, I meditate daily, usually for 10 to 20 minutes, but sometimes as much as two to three hours per day.
Meditation can be as simple as sitting in a comfortable position for a minute, with one’s eyes closed while noticing the sensations associated with one’s natural breath.
Such a simple practice also involves accepting all bodily feelings and thoughts that enter one’s consciousness at the moment, no matter how uncomfortable or alarming they may seem.
If I can meditate regularly, almost anyone can, simply because I found the process of meditating nearly impossible during the early stages of my practice, and the discomfort during my short, one- or two-minute long meditation sessions was overwhelming. However, as time went on, and as I began to meditate regularly, my aversion toward meditation subsided.
Meditation can be a revolutionary act, and I am confident that if most people begin a regular meditation practice, the stranglehold of systemic racism will start to lose its power.
Metacognition and mindfulness are the first steps toward noticing and challenging racism in one’s mind and dismantling systemic racism