2018-08-07
56 分钟Today's guest, Ruth King, grew up in south central LA in the late sixties and seventies, a time of incredible unrest where her grandmother, as she described it, would pace back and forth in the home, just kind of hoping and praying that the grandkids would make it home safe.
On any given day, the rule there was not so much how to live a good life, but how to survive.
She had a large family with a lot of siblings, and she was sort of focused on, how do I get through each day?
But also, she was the kid in the family that felt everything, that had a huge heart, and being tough and shutting down was not the easiest thing for her.
As she grew up and became more active and really wanted to change things, she eventually found herself at the age of 27 in open heart surgery.
And that was a wake up moment in a lot of different ways for her.
She had been putting herself through school, studying psychology, and started to build a life in corporations.
She wanted to focus her energies a bit differently and talk about the big issues and stay involved in learning and training, but also have conversations around race and power and differential and equality within organizations, within culture, and with individuals.
And she wasn't afraid to do it.
But she also started to explore mindfulness and a path to her own stillness.
And it changed her.
It changed the way that she operated in the world.
It changed the way that she went about her mission.
She has since built a tremendous career in large organizations like Levi Strauss and Intel, and then developed a longstanding study and a teaching path in insight meditation focusing on dealing with hard issues.
And one of them is race.
She has a really powerful new book out now called Mindful of Race that I strongly recommend.
In today's conversation, we dive into her personal journey, her story, the things that shaped her, that awakened her, that challenged her, and how she sees the big questions that we're struggling with around power and equality and race in individuals, in the workplace, in the world now, and some ideas on how to grapple with them, no matter sort of where you come from.
Really excited to share this conversation.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
I grew up in south central Los Angeles in the heat of the civil rights and black power movement.