I ended up staying in Asia for a year and then went back to Europe for a bit longer. After about six years away, I came back to the United States. Because I loved vipassana practice, every single vacation I had, I would go on retreat. In those days there were no scholarships, so I had to save up all my money to do the retreats. I practiced as much as I could, and it really cured me. In spite of going on retreat and being a good practitioner for about fifteen years, I couldn’t find a sangha. Finally, I met Carol Wilson on retreat, and she recommended that I sit at the people of color retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in New Mexico, which was taught by Joseph Goldstein and George Mumford. The level of relaxation I was able to reach just by being with people of color was transformative. I met my teacher there, too—Joseph Goldstein—and after that, I would meditate there every year. I was on the faculty at the University of New Mexico by then, so it became my sangha.

As we know from neuroscientific studies, there are cognitive benefits to doing mindfulness practice, and after about ten years of practicing, I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley for a master’s degree in public health. I hadn’t been a particularly good undergraduate student, but my graduate faculty seemed to think I was kind of smart, and they even invited me to stay for a PhD. I had always worked in the American Indian community, and they felt that more PhDs were needed to work in Indian country. I’m convinced it was all the mindfulness that opened up this path, and I’ve been able to have a sweet little career as a college professor. I have worked on issues of equity and community engagement around public health, particularly with communities of color and Indian communities. Science has a pretty dubious history in communities of color, so I and other colleagues have worked to make sure that the scientific community truly engages with communities of color, to hear and respect the wisdom that we have, too.

The most recent chapter in my Dharma story is that Joseph Goldstein invited me to start teacher training five years ago. I recently turned sixty, and after being a practitioner for so many years, I have discovered that being a Dharma teacher is different than I thought it would be. The Dharma is the most precious thing in the whole world; it is a difficult and challenging task to teach it.

At a recent Dharma talk by Joseph Goldstein, we discussed pleasant and unpleasant feeling, which can be worldly or unworldly. We often experience worldly, pleasant feeling. For me it’s eating candy; for a lot of us it’s maybe sex, or sometimes it’s shopping. All of it provides a hit of pleasure, but it never provides the satisfaction that we’re looking for. It never lasts at the level of satisfaction that enables us to let go of wanting—that second noble truth. Then we talked about pleasant and unpleasant unworldly feeling, which is what we’re cultivating in our practice—the wholesome, counterintuitive qualities we’re developing that actually have a chance of being good for others and good for ourselves. One is the practice of generosity. It is counterintuitive, but to let go of stuff and give it away provides much more satisfaction than the accumulation of stuff.

Then Joseph talked about unworldly, unpleasant feeling, and how it is extremely useful and important, and leads toward freedom. A verb is associated with each of the noble truths, and the verb associated with suffering, dukkha, is that it is to be known. Perhaps the most meaningful moments of our lives are moments that have not been pleasant, but they are times when we could show up for ourselves, or show up for other people with an open heart. And yet we assume that we have control over how our lives are unfolding, and in order for it all to be okay, it has to be “good.” The only way our lived experience can live up to this pressure is if we repress about two-thirds of it—if we don’t open to the truth of most of it—and that’s exactly what mindfulness addresses, our inability to open to the dukkha. How many of us really know we’re going to die? We all want to throw impermanence under the bus.

In our social life together, some of the common perceptual distortions play out in our “isms.” My colleague Camara Jones, current president of the American Public Health Association, wrote a brilliant paper about the three levels of racism: institutional, personally mediated, and internalized.⁴ And it just so happens that those three levels align with what the Buddha taught. We tend to think of racism as only the second form: personally mediated, which I think is akin to the level of distortions of thought, sanna-vipallasa. The way we experience personally mediated racism is through micro-aggressions. We do these to each other all the time—I perpetrate them, too—so I always try to open a safe space in sanghas where we can tell each other about them and apologize. But what also happens at the interpersonal level is that we speak or act in a way that leaves somebody out. For example, at IMS, we’re trying to espouse inclusive values as part of training ourselves to be retreat leaders. In working with transgendered people, we’ve become aware of trying to use fully inclusive pronouns. This means that every single day, whenever anybody doesn’t use “he, she, or they” or say why we’re not including everyone, we call each other out in a very loving way—“Uh, you did it again!”—as a way to train ourselves.

In the ways we treat each other, we all tend to universalize our subjectivity. So we might assume everybody drives a nice car, and everybody went to college, and everybody had two parents growing up, and everybody was cared for by their parents, and everybody has enough money to go on retreat without worrying about it. Those are distorted views, right? Our perceptions come from a very limited perspective, but they inform our thoughts, and our thoughts harden into a distorted view, and that view makes us look around and not see the difference. We leave a lot of people out in our ways of communicating. We erase them, we erase their experience.

Jones also talks about institutional racism, and that is akin to ditthi-vipallasa, distortions of view, where whole institutions don’t consider what it’s like for certain people who are from particular ethnic groups or have different histories. And finally, internalized oppression or internalized racism is yet another distortion of view. In a way, all of these distorted views are what we tend to form our identities around. I work exclusively in tribal communities doing community-engaged research, and right now I’m doing a psychiatric study in twenty-two tribal colleges. Because I’ve been working with my tribal partners for more than twenty years, or maybe because of what I look like, they tell me the truth. They are not afraid to admonish me, to say, “We don’t like that!” and “You better not do that!” Why? Because they know I’m going to stick it out with them. They know that even though I work in higher education, I recognize that there has been a lot of egregious racism, and that the academic disciplines, higher education, and Western knowledge production had a huge amount to do with colonization, a huge amount to do with slavery, a huge amount to do with the confiscation of Native land, and a huge amount to do with the oppression of many people of color—and of white poor people and various immigrant groups.⁵ Given the long history of oppressing different groups in this country, the collective ditthi-vipallasa—the distorted view of them—that supports this oppression is held not only by the dominant culture, but it also seeps into the people themselves.

These types of misperceptions take place in the present day, too, with far-reaching effects. I recently read a two-hundred-page report from 2014 about disparities in school discipline across race.⁶ There is more and more evidence about disparities in the disciplining of black and Hispanic students, and it’s not based on different conduct. It’s absolutely based on the vipallasas, on distorted view. It’s based on expecting to see something in children, and that’s what you see. This has a significant negative impact on our children—and on all of us—because there are definitive links between school failure and later incarceration.

This is why we all have to clean up how we’re seeing each other and ourselves, and the Buddha taught that the mechanism for undoing these erroneous perceptions is mindfulness.⁷ The different kinds and levels of distorted perception occur when we see anything, either externally or internally. We all have two knowledge systems. There is our conceptual, linear knowledge system, which serves us pretty well for naming and counting things, and for building institutions. But we also have a second knowledge system based on intuitive awareness. I like to say that mindfulness is the data collection system for intuitive awareness. Strong mindfulness, or sati sampajanna—mindfulness with clear comprehension—trains us to see directly what’s happening in the moment, and prevents us from putting distorted conceptual overlays over what’s happening in the moment. Then we can see the truth of impermanence—that things are changing all the time, and that for us to expect it to be otherwise is the source of our pain. We come to see that no conditioned thing—that nothing at COSTCO (where I was today!)—is going to make me enlightened. Perhaps most important, we recognize that we’re not who we think we are. There is a reason this is an eightfold path. Our practice is 24-7, it’s not just when we’re on the cushion.

When we can strengthen our intuitive awareness, when we can rest in spacious awareness and not have these distorted thoughts, these distorted views, these distorted perceptions, this is where the truth is, which is where our peace is. This practice is what we offer the world and what we offer ourselves.

Bonnie Duran has been practicing mindfulness meditation since 1982 and is one of the founders of the People of Color Sangha in Albuquerque and in Seattle. She is an associate professor of public health at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, where she directs the Center for Indigenous Wellness Research. This article is adapted from a dharma talk delivered at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in November 2015.