ABOUT RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE©

Get Real About Race And Gender

GET REAL: HEAL YOUR DIVIDED SELF

To be effective in the world, you’ve got to know who you are, and who you aren’t. You’ve got to understand who you believe you are, who you actually are, and how to live, learn, and grow in that shifting gap.

Radical Inclusion Practice© challenges the stories and histories of race and gender that divide us from ourselves even before they divide us from one another. 

This transformative process helps us discover our unconscious biases and teaches us how to harness and heal our fractured personal, social, and civic identities. Be the change? Yes! But WHO are you going to BE when you ACT?

Begin your practice now with my programs designed for individuals and groups

GET REAL: WRESTLE WITH THE GAP BETWEEN WHO YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE - AND WHO YOU ACTUALLY ARE

Radical Inclusion Practice© explores our relationship with some of the most fraught and potentially healing dynamics of modern life: our own race, gender, personal identity, family identity – and who we believe the “other” to be.

Many of us are still working deeply with our family history, childhood wounds, and the themes of our lineage. Are still growing ourselves up. Learning to foster loving relationships. Starting to speak out. All essential personal work. 

And we are also individuals who live in societies. Race and gender shape us and our civic behaviors in ways just as profound as our family dynamics.

I am passionate about Radical Inclusion Practice©. Not because I expect it to yield easy answers, but because I know that a safe, supportive space can deliver the healing nutrients required to cultivate fresh vision, open-heartedness, and transformation. 

Radical Inclusion Practice© begins by asking us to turn around and inquire within. Because until enough of us have a change of heart and are resilient enough to respond rather than react to the realities of race and gender, our society’s institutional and legal protections will continue to miss the mark.

We want to get out there and meet this moment.  At the same time, we may have limited experience of working productively together across differences.  We may lack a skill set that is up to the task at hand.  

We may feel overwhelmed with the size of the problems and wonder “what’s mine to do?” and what next step to take. 

Getting real about race and gender begins with getting real with ourselves. Preparing ourselves so we can show up to do the work that is needed. Begin to open our eyes, minds, hearts, and wills. To change our own behaviors. And do so with honesty and enormous kindness for ourselves. 

GET REAL: YOU WORK THE RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE, AND THE PRACTICE WORKS YOU

Radical Inclusion Practice© offers enormous kindness. It invites us to slow down. 

To temper both our messianic tendencies and our learned helplessness.

To ask ourselves new questions.

What have I not-seen about myself?

What have I not-felt?

What assumptions and beliefs have I not-questioned?

These unquestioned assumptions mask our Rules for Living

Each time we notice what we have not-seen, we see more of reality.

Each time we feel what we have not-felt, we presence more of our humanity.

Each time we examine an unquestioned assumption or belief, we free ourselves to act from a broader understanding of life.

This is the WHO you can BE when you ACT. When you are in practice.

Our Rules for Living – for appearance and behavior – embedded in each of our stories give them great power over us.

As we begin to notice and name these rules, we begin to see how we were rewarded for following them. Rewarded with safety and belonging: security. Or, if we questioned, bent, stretched, or broke these rules, we were instead likely to have been ignored, shamed, accused/tried/prosecuted: unsafe.

The Rules for Living embedded in our stories are our internal equivalents of the laws, policies, procedures, and organizational hierarchies that limit access and advancement. That dispense and withhold incentives and opportunities from people whose appearance and behaviors do not conform to White standards.

What White People Learn

The “White Rules”

At the knees of our mothers and in the institutions of our fathers, we learn the “white” rules when we are very young.  

Don’t walk like that.

Don’t talk like that. 

Don’t play with that toy.

Don’t invite that kid.

Don’t listen to that music.

Don’t dance like that.

Don’t act like them.

Sometimes the “White rules” are taught with a look, sometimes with the back of a hand. Sometimes they are reinforced with words—matter-of-fact, loving, or harsh. 

Then we enter school, study history, and are indoctrinated with a collective sense of who “we” are. We’re taught that “white rules” are true for all people, all places, and all circumstances. The “white rules” — rule! The “white rules” become the dominant distorted lens through which we see the world.

Sometimes the “white rules” are perpetuated out of arrogance or ignorance, and sometimes out of spite. But most often, the “white rules” are taught out of fear. 

There is such a rightness to the “White rules”!

They affirm that there is an order in the universe. 

They safeguard our privilege, our place, and our personal identity.

What Black and Brown People Learn

The “Black & Brown Rules”

In the eyes of our mothers and in the physical and psychological prisons of our fathers, we learn the “black and brown” rules when we are very young.  

Be prepared to always have to prove yourself.

Be prepared to be silenced or rendered invisible.

Be prepared to be twice as good to get half as far.

Be prepared to be anxious or hyper-vigilant about the safety of your family and friends.

Be prepared to receive unequal justice. 

Be prepared to have legitimate emotions or demands misinterpreted as “anger” or “radicalism.” 

Be prepared to experience higher levels of chronic stress, depression, and illness, and to have your healthcare professionals (if you are fortunate enough to have any) dismiss your symptoms.

Be prepared to accept that it’s your job to make white people feel comfortable.

Be prepared to be the spokesperson for your race. 

What exhausting burdens of proof define daily life for Black and Brown people under White Rules.

Such profound vigilance and effort to manage the fears and biases of White people.

Radical Inclusion Practice© frees us to bring our most discerning, authentic, and still-imperfect selves to forge a just world for everyone. It is this WHO that we can choose to cultivate as we act to heal the divisions in our increasingly urgent and polarized world. As we embrace Radical Inclusion Practice©, we can free ourselves to navigate, speak out, and lead in our increasingly polarized world without feeding the divide.

From the founding of our nation, “We the people” meant white-men-only. Rules of the dominant culture: White. Rules of the dominant gender: male. To this day, America still favors the rights and privileges of white men who continue to dictate what societal norms and success look like – including standards of appearance, dress, language, values, authority, power, and the accumulation of wealth enshrined in policies and laws. 

Professional women have learned to “dress for success” if success is what they want. People of color “adopt white body language and speech,” if access is what they want. White men continue to experience a double advantage, while Black women continue to experience double jeopardy. 

White people see ourselves first as individuals while we see people of color first as members of a group, indistinguishable from one another and rarely identified as individuals.

A person of color who enters a public space—a workplace, a school, a restaurant, a sidewalk, a parking lot—is seen first as a group member and after that, maybe as an individual. Consequently, white people often “mistake” people of color for “the help” in professional, retail, and recreational settings, and as “dangerous” when encountered on an otherwise deserted street. A white male professional believes he is complimenting his black female colleague when he remarks, “you are so articulate!”  

This is why black individuals walking while black, driving while black, or shopping while black, face risks ranging from frustration and discomfort to embarrassment and harassment to physical injury and death. 

In the face of an unending stream of micro-and macro-aggressions, inner work for a person of color must center around fortifying individual agency and dignity while accelerating radical self-care and resilience.  

Inner work for a white person begins by seeing ourselves as members of the dominant cultural group, and not only as individuals. If we continue to avert our gaze from this truth, we deny others their humanity. And consequently, we remain divided against ourselves.

A white man must see and wrestle with his dual advantages of race and gender. A white woman must see and wrestle with her experiences of white-skin advantage on the one hand, and gender disadvantage on the other.

While the difficulties, gifts, and developmental tasks of inner work are very different for white people and people of color, for binary and non-binary-gendered people, for men and women, for any dominant group and its marginalized partner-in-conflict, the same healing tools are useful.

We each, with our combination of identities, have our own inner work to do to come into our full, imperfect, unique, and interconnected humanity.

Then engage together as whole human beings whose differences are precious and potent with co-creative power, “solutions” we cannot begin to envision from our wounded, polarized present.

THE TIME FOR RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE© IS NOW

Our own calling – to a moral life, to personal growth, to spiritual evolution – meets the world’s great need for justice. Right now. 
So in these times of spiking pandemic numbers, disrupted systems of all kinds, politicized chaos, and policing brutality: choose to dedicate some of your precious bandwidth to this inner work: 

PRACTICE BEING THE CHANGE IN THE WORLD THAT YOU WANT TO SEE.

FREE 30 MIN CONSULT: 

I welcome this half hour as an opportunity for us to get to know one other, for you to explore your questions, hopes, fears, intentions and focus for our work, and to assure we are a good fit. We’ll talk about where to start, and which nondual practices and explorations might best support you. Sessions are set at two-week intervals to allow for adequate integration of the work. 

6 ONE-HOUR SESSIONS EVERY 2 WEEKS FOR 12 WEEKS

Sessions are available by phone, Zoom, or in my Baltimore office.

EXCHANGE: $130 PER SESSION

10% discount for single payment option
5% discount for 2 payment option

 

 

Purchase Your Sessions



 FREE 30 MINUTE CONSULT WITH GROUP LEADER:

I welcome this half hour as an opportunity for us to get to know one other, to explore the intention, context, and desired outcome for your group’s work, and the focus and language that will make for a meaningful and useful workshop experience. We will also discuss, as needed, the pros and cons of meeting in affinity groups by race or gender identity/expression.

2 HOUR INTRODUCTION SESSION to Radical Inclusion at your venue in the Baltimore metro area or online via Zoom.  Minimum 8 participants

EXCHANGE: $40 per person

CLICK HERE TO SET UP YOUR FREE 30 MIN CONSULT

GET REAL WITH EMBODIED PRACTICE: BEGIN THE DIFFICULT WORK OF HEALING THE RACIAL AND GENDER DIVIDES IN OUR FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, AND WORKPLACES

Explore Differences in Power: Racial and Gender Conflicts Are Rarely Between Equals

From the founding of our nation, “We the people” meant white-men-only. Rules of the dominant culture: White. Rules of the dominant gender: male. To this day, America still favors the rights and privileges of white men who continue to dictate what societal norms and success look like: including standards of appearance, dress, language, values, authority, power, and the accumulation of wealth enshrined in policies and laws. 

Professional women have learned to “dress for success” if success is what they want. People of color “adopt white body language and speech,” if access is what they want. White men continue to experience a double advantage, while Black women continue to experience double jeopardy. 

Explore Differences in Perception: The Individual Vs. The Group

White people see ourselves first as individuals while we see people of color first as members of a group, indistinguishable from one another and rarely identified as individuals.

A person of color who enters a public space—a workplace, a school, a restaurant, a sidewalk, a parking lot—is seen first as a group member and after that, maybe as an individual. Consequently, white people often “mistake” people of color for “the help” in professional, retail, and recreational settings, and as “dangerous” when encountered on an otherwise deserted street. A white male professional believes he is complimenting his black female colleague when he remarks, “you are so articulate!”  

This is why black individuals walking while black, driving while black, or shopping while black, face risks ranging from frustration and discomfort to embarrassment and harassment to physical injury and death. 

Honor Differences In Inner Work: The Black, Brown, and White Of It

In the face of an unending stream of micro-and macro-aggressions, inner work for a person of color must center around fortifying individual agency and dignity while accelerating radical self-care and resilience.  

Inner work for a white person begins by seeing ourselves as members of the dominant cultural group, and not only as individuals. If we continue to avert our gaze from this truth, we deny others their humanity. And consequently, we remain divided against ourselves.

A white man must see and wrestle with his dual advantages of race and gender. A white woman must see and wrestle with her experiences of white-skin advantage on the one hand, and gender disadvantage on the other.

White, Black, Man, Woman: Real Lives, Not Labels Engage in your particular journey of wholeness-making

While the difficulties, gifts, and developmental tasks of inner work are very different for white people and people of color, for binary and non-binary-gendered people, for men and women, for any dominant group and its marginalized partner-in-conflict, the same healing tools are useful.

We each, with our combination of identities, have our own inner work to do to come into our full, imperfect, unique, and interconnected humanity.

Then engage together as whole human beings whose differences are precious and potent with co-creative power, “solutions” we cannot begin to envision from our wounded, polarized present.

As human beings who are white. . .

  • We want to face our ignorance and examine our assumptions and beliefs.
  • We want to engage with people who are different from us and break out of our silos.
  • We want to go deep in conversations and face our fear of being vulnerable learners who will make mistakes. 
  • We want to see ourselves more clearly and face our guilt and shame in the mirror of our privilege.

We want to bring about conciliation, transformation, and social justice, but in today’s politically polarized climate, we question — “How can I be useful?”

As human beings who are people of color. . .

  • We want to be treated with unconditional human respect and freed from the unconscious bias of others.
  • We want to send our family members out the door in the morning without worrying whether we will see them again.
  • We want to move through our daily activities without anyone following us, calling the police, or interrogating us about if we “belong here.” 
  • We want to be liberated from the psychic exhaustion that accompanies silent erasure, daily micro-aggressions, escalating threats to our emotional, psychological, and physical safety, and the burden of educating white people about non-white people.

We want the master key to unlock the invisible chains of systemic racism and racial terrorism. 

Reviews For Radical Inclusion Practice©

Radical Inclusion and uncovering unconscious bias was much more than I hoped for. Issues of racial inequality are important to me, and yet I have felt limited in my ability to become more actively involved. I thought I might get some tips on how to better behave in social settings where race was an issue for me. Instead, I was able to safely explore parts of myself which limited my ability to engage. This opportunity to explore unconscious beliefs, woven unknowingly into the background fabric of my world view in childhood was transformational: I have moved away from the fear of ineffectively communicating or being uninformed about race. I have a new curiosity about “other,” and most unexpectedly, I discovered a willingness to step up and be more ‘out loud’ with my formerly shy voice, on not only racial matters, but in other important areas of human rights. I am most grateful for this opportunity to explore and release limitations based in unconscious biases. I believe each of us in the class came away with our own unique shift in how we are able to be present in the world.
Carol Wetherill
MTP, LMT, CCP
The Radical Inclusion course helped me process a lot of unspoken thoughts and feelings around race, especially that uncomfortable topic of white privilege. It's a very organic process, not linear, and that allowed it to be exactly what I needed to open up my heart and mind to a new perspective on how I view myself and others. I now have a strong emotional foundation from which I can do the continuing work of listening to others, listening to myself, and questioning my assumptions about how things work. In a world that is constantly changing, this is a valuable tool for understanding how the world really works (not just how I think it works or want it to work), and that is very empowering to me. 
Sara Korn
Writer
With Sara’s teaching, encouragement and guidance, I was able to discover early narratives that impact attitudes towards racial and gender bias.  These surprising revelations, along with new practices have given me new tools moving forward.
Susan
Acupuncturist
Sara consistently created a space where moments of understanding could unfold. During one of the course’s many excellent exercises, I made a profound connection—it was about my own sense of belonging and the conditions of life for Black people in our country that could preclude a feeling of belonging. Sara invited us to reflect on body memories of belonging, and of not belonging. I recalled memories from high school, from working as a young professional woman in a male-dominated field, and even from my first marriage, and I reconnected with how painful it is to try and keep failing to belong. As I let myself be present with that pain, I realized that I now have a built-in sense of belonging—to myself. The feeling is internalized, and that moment was the most solidly I had ever felt it. As I stayed inside the meditation, I understood that experience depends not only on my own wholeness, but also on my stability, security, and, indeed, safety—things I can take for granted at this point in my life. In that same moment, I understood that Black people are not safe in this country, and without safety, how can there possibly be internalized peace and a deep sense of belonging? In that mediation, these two understandings became linked in my consciousness, and in my body awareness. The connection is now visceral for me, as well as intellectual, and oh so powerful.
Deborah Green
Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee Chair
The biggest transformation for me is that I feel like I was tentative in my own explorations, and now I need to turn more in this direction. I need to have courage in doing it. Let the tears roll. They're always right there. An extraordinary level of pain, personal challenge and real suffering in the world. I'm willing to pause. Listen to my heart. Consider who I want to have real conversations with, about love about respect, race, gender. It involves an ask of my friends, to have intention and create space for such conversations. I want to listen in ways I've not before. And I want to share honestly and openly, even as I recognize that some material may be uncomfortable, that we may disagree, or misunderstand or understand things differently. I am inspired and appreciative of the intentional space you created to begin to explore this complex and multi-layered material, even to see how much is buried in me and in others about race, gender, aging, class, and to hear others’ honest thoughts and reflections.
Jennifer Downs
Licensed Acupuncturist, RN
This course has been a great pointing tool helping me to locate in which directions to venture, what I want to pursue, where I want to dig, as it were. It has been an enlightening means to exploring and understanding better the things I observe around me. I very much valued hearing the other class members’ experiences with race, and engaging with people whom I felt from the outset I could trust in inquiring “What’s the source of this belief? What are we really reacting to? What's underneath this?”  Even though we came from many different backgrounds—except for their commitment to caring, nobody was like anybody else in that crew—their stories were markers along the way. They were people who really feel, who really think, who really want to act, who really want things better. And they were willing to be self-aware out loud, to risk putting themselves in the way of a others’ resistance in order to understand themselves; they welcome insight and expect the need to change. They respected and trusted me, as well: “We’re a group and we’re going to pull our threads, together.” 
Suzanne Strutt
Baltimore
We all suffer from the sickness of racism. If we deny it, well, that’s an unconscious bias! Like any disease, diagnosis is the key to a cure. This course helped me unpack and clarify long-hidden assumptions that I now realize were getting in my way. I discovered personal insights that are already paying dividends…and I believe will continue to benefit me as I build on the course’s foundational, perspective-expanding structure.
Greg Conderacci
Good Ground Consulting LLC

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