In our final episode of season 2, we speak with a founding member of the Integrative Law Movement, Rhonda Magee. She talks with us about her journey from insurance law to teaching mindfulness to law students. We also discuss the intersections of inclusivity, mindfulness, and racial justice and how awareness of that will improve our performance. Rhonda Magee is a lawyer, legal scholar, law professor, author, practitioner of mindfulness, and one of the founding members of the Integrative Law Movement. She teaches mindfulness to her law students and others. In her book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice, Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, she addresses how mindfulness and compassion can help bring people together across cultures, and provides mindfulness practices throughout the book. Music for this podcast was created by Toby Leach. He may be contacted at: tobby.leach@gmail.com
Professor Rhonda V. Magee
Email: rvmagee@usfca.edu
Website: www.rhondavmagee.com
Short Bio:
Rhonda Magee is a lawyer, legal scholar, law professor, author, practitioner of mindfulness, and one of the founding members of the Integrative Law Movement. She teaches mindfulness to her law students and others. In her book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice, Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, she addresses how mindfulness and compassion can help bring people together across cultures, and provides mindfulness practices throughout the book.
Show Notes:
In this episode, we discuss:
Clips:
Quotes
“There is every reason to be confident that we can better communicate across these painful differences in our experiences … healing ourselves first and then transforming our communities through mindfulness. That is all possible and, you know, it is something that keeps me excited about bringing mindfulness into law, into social justice work, into our lives more fully at this time.” Rhonda V. Magee
On Integrative Law
“It’s about holistic. It’s about the opportunity for us to participate in healthy or therapeutic ways of interacting within a conflict scenario. It’s about helping us see our own humanity and with humility to learn from each other about how to navigate this time. It’s opening the door on the original medicine that each one of us brings into the law.
What is that we might to do to deepen that sense that this is about a holistic process through which we might heal ourselves, heal the separateness between and amongst our communities, each other, and between human beings and our planet.
To me, it about the notion of integrative – is fundamentally about healing separations --- and that I think is the deep call of this, not just this subfield or orientation to practicing law but of this moment. I feel like there is a reason – just all of us in a pause with coronavirus on the one hand, climate distress on the other, inequality happening at radical levels. We are at a time where we, I feel, are called – called to really look at how are systems including the powerful system of law – - how these systems that we inherited and that we participate in are perpetuating separations that are not to the ultimate good of us as human beings or the planet.
So, how can we bring our integrative repair, restorative dimension right into our particular role in the system. That’s the question that animates integrative law.”
On Racial Justice
“Justice is about love in action. Racial justice is love in action for the alleviation of the harms of racism, the harms they do all of us, but certainly particularly those who are its targets and intended victims. We’re really bringing love and action to repair the separations – but to heal the separations and repair the harm of racism”
To me, that’s the joy that comes in this work. It’s not that we find the ultimate resolution of these big questions that have plagued humanity for all time. It’s that we recognize that in doing the work together, there is some sense of the resolution if, you know, the ending of suffering in being together in ways that make the most of the moments that we have…you how that is justice.”