Nine Messy Experiences That Opened My Heart And Mind

For this blog, I’ve promised to help you uncover more joy in your life, but I’ve also promised to be real with you. To be real means looking at the messy pieces of our lives that are a natural part of being a human being, then choosing the path to joy through the mess.

As I sit down at my computer this week, I can’t think of anything else but Charlottesville. I see white male faces and torches and anger. I see hate. And I can’t ignore it. To ignore it and write about finding comedy while traveling with a sick baby would be me expressing myself without integrity. If I don’t live in integrity, I can’t sleep at night. If I can’t sleep at night, there isn’t a lot of joy in my life. So now I finally write my response to what happened in Charlottesville…

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” I think many of us say that we are not racist, are not misogynist, are not afraid of people that are different than us, that we want equality. But for many of us, I don’t believe it’s true. We think and act differently than what we say. This doesn’t lead to joy.

The world is a big beautiful diverse place and many of us live sheltered privileged lives. We have big hearts; but when we come across people different than us, we group them, separate them, think we are better than them. We wrong them, and believe only we are right. We are afraid that equality for others means less for us. Deep down we are scared.

There will always be fear in our lives. In fact, we need fear in order to know courage. We need fear in order to be guided towards and through our comfort zone so we can grow and become better human beings.

But fear of other people is something different. If we live with fear of others just because they are different, no matter how little that fear may be, we put up a wall. We miss out on the richness of life. We can’t live in full integrity and joy.

Where does this fear come from? I asked as Michael Franti shared his video Love Will Find A Way across Facebook. His song says that people aren’t born hating others; it’s something we learn.

After a lot of journaling on this question I decided it was too big for me to tackle, at least for now. But what I can take on is a look at my own life. I can share with you the experiences that led me to have a more open mind and heart. The experiences that have helped me embrace differences rather than be scared of them. The experiences that have contributed towards me seeing all human beings as coming from one same family of God.

I am not saying I am perfect or never have xenophobic thoughts or don’t leverage my privilege. But I’m proud of my life situations that have led friends to recently describe me as accepting, compassionate, and a worldly woman.

I hand my adventures to you in hopes they will help you consider how many times you’ve truly tried to understand people different than you, put yourself in situations where you are the minority, given up your need to be right, or allowed yourself to be curious instead of afraid or judgmental.

Buckle up and enjoy the chronological ride of Sara.

My First Experience Of Racism

During my elementary school years, I lived in the city of Green in Ohio. It was a mostly white community, but two houses down from me lived a black family with a girl my age named Shenequa. All the children of our neighborhood played together, including Shenequa and her siblings. I have fond memories of haunted houses in our basement and catching toads in the sewer gutters. I remember thinking that Shenequa’s hair smelled different than mine. This was because she and her siblings used a special product for their textured hair. Besides that, her family was very much like mine.

At one point a vandalism with hateful words was done to Shenequa’s house. I asked my parents about it, not understanding why someone would do something so horrible to my friend’s home. Because their skin color was black? I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Being The Minority

When I was in fifth grade, we moved to a small town in the middle of the corn fields in Minnesota. It was precious and I had a wonderful childhood there, but my hometown is not at all diverse. I could name all the non-white families in our town on one hand. So it was fortunate that in ninth grade I got to accompany our speech team to a national tournament on the Harvard campus.

One night our chaperones rounded up our team to visit the Hard Rock Café for dinner. As we waited for the train to bring our all-white group to downtown Boston, a group of young black men entered the station.

“Oh my God, I’ve never seen so many crackers in my life!” they laughed, not trying to be quiet about it at all. I felt like I was on display, like an animal at the zoo. I wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go to. Instead I stepped closer to my other white friends where I could blend in and feel more comfortable.

Later in high school, I dabbled in drugs seeking a cure for my adolescent boredom and need for belonging. While I hope my own children do not find the need to experiment the way I did, those experiences taught me something important. It wasn’t the “bad” kids or the non-athletes or the kids with pierced noses that were doing drugs. It wasn’t the non-church goers or the young single adults or the kids of divorced families. It was all walks of life: all ages and genders, moms and dads, believers of God and atheists. I learned that we can’t put a label on people and know how they are going to act. Everyone was susceptible to the lure of drugs, rebellion, and addiction.

Cross Dressing And Bar Hopping

While attending college at UMD, I took a psychology course called Topics in Human Sexuality. We learned how to have better orgasms (no kidding) and how to engage in dialogue with our partners that would lead to more enjoyable sex. We had several guest speakers on LGBT issues, including one of the college’s teachers who was a transgender herself.

In this course, we were offered an opportunity for extra credit: to cross dress and go bar hopping as a group. It sounds silly and looking back I wonder if we put too much humor around a sensitive issue, but I learned from this experience as well.

Dressed like a man, with my hair hidden in a stocking cap, I walked into Grandma’s Sports Garden next to a linebacker on the college football team. He was clad in a dress, heels, blonde wig, and make-up.

At Grandma’s, where college students put on their finest attire to drink $5 pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas, hit the dance floor, and spy on their crushes, we got a lot of looks, laughs, and eye rolls. No matter what we did, people stared at us, whispered, and followed our every move. It was uncomfortable. We had one drink and left.

We drove across the Blatnik bridge and walked into a gay bar. Immediately we were accepted. There was no need to explain that we were dressing up for a college course or hide among ourselves in the corner of the bar. We were welcomed. We were celebrated. We danced. We laughed. We didn’t want to leave. (This experience prompted me to write a feature article on heterosexual privilege for one of my writing courses, which I plan to share with you in the future.)

Immersion Into Different Culture

After college, I lived and volunteered in Brazil for 13 weeks and was completely immersed in the Afro-Brazilian culture that dominates the city of Salvador. People looked different than me, but they were striving for the same things in life that I was at the time: laughter, love, cute heels that didn’t rip my feet, and a good Caipiroska.

Salvador has more churches per capita than any other Brazilian state capital, over 300 in the city! I learned that churches were made of gold and marble and other luxuries, and when built were first and foremost a symbol of wealth, rather than a place to bring community together to worship. As the dominant religion in Brazil is Roman Catholicism, I began to question the intention of the religion I had been raised in. I started to realize that there are many ways to worship God if one religion doesn’t speak to you.

A Crash Course On Diversity In A Microcosm Of The World

Shortly after Brazil, I moved to New York City. Somehow, I knew I needed exposure to something different from the sheltered white, Christian upbringing I’d had. Please don’t get me wrong. I adore my family and friends where I grew up. I miss their big hearts and open arms. But I longed for diversity and new learning experiences, and knew I could get that in New York.

My first job in the city was at an associate’s degree-granting technology college. Most of the attendees were first-generation college students who were children of immigrants. I was one of a handful of white employees and once embarrassed myself by telling my co-workers that there were no “colored people” in my home town.

My four department colleagues (who were Chinese, Trinidadian, Nicaraguan, and Philippine) almost lost their jaws on the floor when I made that comment. I spent an uncomfortable car ride with them through the what-felt-slower-than-usual New York City traffic as they explained why my comment was offensive. I never made that mistake again.

More Eye-Opening Travel And People In My Life

For our honeymoon, Mike and I went to Vietnam. We like to take the path less traveled. It was the furthest I had ever been away from home, but once we landed I had very little fear. I could feel the heartbreak of a country destroyed by war. But even more so I could feel a graciousness from the Vietnamese. Americans had ruined much of their country, but they treated us well and with respect. They showed us how to get where we needed to go without asking for a dime in return. I never felt unsafe.

I am also exposed to diversity at the company I currently work for that’s headquartered in New York. There are many women in management roles (though it’s far from 50 percent – we still have some work to do). There are many ethnic backgrounds represented across our teams, and many of my co-workers are Jewish. It sounds funny for me to even say this now, as I know so many people who are Jewish, but the closest synagogue to the town I grew up in is 62 miles away!

Yoga Teacher Training, aka Group Therapy

In 2010, I participated in my first of many 200-hour yoga teacher trainings at Bala Vinyasa Yoga, now called Green Monkey. We spent a lot of time learning the postures and physical practice of yoga. But we spent just as many hours in circle time, or what I call group therapy. We assessed how we were showing up in our lives and in front of our students. We dug deep to pull away layers of in-authenticity and gain confidence in being ourselves. We looked at the experiences of our past that have greatly shaped how we interact with all the people in our lives.

What I found during this circle time of group sharing is that we all have the same universal needs:  to be loved, accepted, and to belong. To be seen and respected. To know that we are good enough.

And we are. We are all good. We all come from love. Sometimes fear gets in the way and we forget the things that bring us together and focus instead on what pushes us apart. If we don’t course correct that divide gets bigger and bigger, which we are seeing today.

I ask you now to close the gap. To dive deep into your soul and get curious about your beliefs. To bring to light your fears and investigate where they come from. I ask you now to create space for understanding. To look for similarities amidst the differences that make our world so beautiful. To commit to standing up for equality and love, rather than choosing the easy seat of silence and business as usual.

The divide can begin to close right here, right now, and it starts with you.

Now your turn. What experiences have led you to be more open and accepting of others? Where can you add curiosity and space to places in your life where you are more closed? Please comment below.

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