I focus on how mindfulness can be utilized to unlearn racial bias. In this effort, I will teach how mindfulness enables healthcare providers to better navigate the limited time and multiple cognitive demands of clinical care, in order to promote the adoption of structural competency skills. I will also teach mindfulness to my audience and how they can best utilize their inner resources to spread healing within and beyond the clinical encounter based on my experience of teaching mindfulness to older adults for two years at Parkview Community Hospital and my experience of utilizing this practice to collect patient histories at Tzu Chi Medical Foundation.

1. Anti-Racist Mindfulness
Abhi Dalal
Research Associate, “ACHEE: American College Health Emotional
Empowerment”
With Center for Healthy Communities

2. Anti-Racist
Mindfulness
 The deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and more
have brought attention to the deep racial inequities in
our country.
 This society-wide discrimination and biases exist in us.
 But mindfulness lowers the threshold of consciousness
to become aware of this cultural internalization and
then not act on our implicit biases.
 Mindfulness illuminates our own internal reactions
and biases and provides greater skillfulness to respond
to our racial biases and others’.
 Mindfulness is a tool to cultivate an anti-racist way of
being.

3. MentalMaps
 Unfortunately, the time-constrained, cognitively-
challenging atmosphere of any healthcare setting
limits our anti-racist way of being.
 In the intense healthcare environment, we all attempt
to minimize spending cognitive energy by relying on
our mental models of patients.
 We may end up treating a patient differently if they
are female.
 Mindfulness enables us to provide the same level of
care to all by consciously putting aside our mental
models in order to best connect with whoever the
patient may be.

4. WhatExactlyis
Mindfulness?
 Mindfulness is training the mind to pay attention to what
happens in the present moment in a non-judgmental way
and with an attitude of friendliness instead of being
constantly preoccupied with what happened in the past or
what might happen in the future.
 Bringing our attention to our internal theater interrupts
the habitual patterns of our emotions, sensations and
thoughts and illuminates our racial biases.
 Through gaining impartiality when cultivating
mindfulness, we have an empowering vista to consider
novel responses to our situations such as how to respond
to our own racial conditioning or that of others.
 Ultimately, Buddhist psychology is a positive psychology
that points us toward our own fundamental dignity and
others’ and that trauma/grief are temporary visitors.

5. Beginner’sMind
 Mindfulness involves a beginner’s mind. This is a
conscious attempt to identify our mental models which
may or may not match our territory and then to put
them aside accordingly.
 Bedrock of Intentional Communication
 Beginner’s mind in clinical communication means
stepping outside of our therapeutic lens of care and all
collected assumptions about our patients to really hear
the patient and be present.
 Creating this openness is a foundation to best take into
account a patient’s lived experiences, social contexts,
and diverse identities.

6. Presence
 Mindfulness deepens one’s attention and the presence
that we bring into our human interactions, laying the
foundation for compassionate care.
 In order to be most present with the patient and really
hear and see clearly, we are aware of our own reactions
and mental models so that we are not being guided by
them and our perception is not being filtered by them.
 We are consciously seeing and hearing the patient as
s/he is.

7. Respond
 The Self in Empathy
 Through the act of becoming in touch with our daily experience, we
understand the relationship between ourselves and our
circumstances, a level of interpersonal intelligence which helps us
understand our patients better and respond skillfully in order to
connect more deeply with them.
 Skillfulness
 By bringing attention to our internal theater and illuminating our
conditioning, our impartiality through cultivating mindfulness is an
empowering vista to consider novel responses.
 In action
 We put aside all our mental models to best take into account a
patient’s lived experiences, social contexts and diverse identities,
creating space for our patients to unburden themselves.
 We can better involve patients in their own care and work with
them to understand their barriers to health as the result of complex
cultural structures and unequal conditions that racialize health
inequalities.
Respond

8. OurDirection
 Mindfulness is a self-regulation and cognitive
management tool which promotes culturally-congruent,
structurally-competent and emotionally-responsive
care, furthering our anti-racist way of being.
 In other words, mindfulness promotes patient-centered
care to diverse patients as it strengthens our
interpersonal intelligence, communication skills, and
ability to continue finding vitality in patient care.
 Mindfulness provides the means by which to become
structurally competent and serve patients skillfully at
the micro and macro levels.

9. KeepitSimple
 Our practice starts with contemplative exercises.
 Mindfulness is returning to a moment-by-moment awareness of
our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and/or surrounding
environment
 Just do it.
 You may fall asleep or lose your concentration or keep thinking
about other things.
 Mindfulness is nonjudgmental, but our programming to seek
pleasure and avoid pain shows up in our practice.
 Our barometer is often defined by the level of pleasure in our
practice. We think a practice was good if we feel good and bad if
bad.
 All of this is your experience in the present moment. And we
are not changing our present experience but becoming aware of
it.
 Everything will change again and again.
KeepitSimple

10. Breathing
Exercise

11. MindfulLiving
 Stepping out of habitual thinking.
 Responding with “clarity, compassion, sincerity, and
wisdom” to help the world.
 Realizing your own experience to find your direction.
 Don’t worry too much about all these teachings but
“use the practice to discover your own experience and
use that experience to attain your true” way and help
the world.
 Each one of us has different conditionings and
circumstances.

12. Contact
 Abhi Dalal
 abhi.k.dalal@gmail.com
 ad4839@berkeley.edu
 Delighted to share wellness and mindful healthcare
practices!