Creating Space for Grace: As Anti-Racist Practice
An essential ritual.
There is a practice I return to again and again — not because it is easy, but because it is essential. It is the practice of creating space. Space in my body, space in my breath, space in the charged moments when embodied racial tension rises up and tries to run the show.
I have come to understand that the work of racial healing — real, root-level racial healing — cannot happen at the level of the intellect alone. It cannot happen through more analysis, more terminology, more frameworks, though these have their place. It must happen in the body. Because that is where the wound lives. And space is essential to the unwinding of tight things.
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The Wound in the Body
Embodied racial tension, what I call ERT, is the accumulated racial conditioning that each of us carries — not just as ideas or beliefs, but as physical tension held in our tissues, our nervous system, our gut. It was not chosen. It was inherited, absorbed, and socialized. It is passed down through ancestral and genetic lines as surely as any trait. And it operates largely below the level of our conscious awareness.
This is why conversations about race can feel so threatening to white folks. Not because the content is actually dangerous, but because the charge in the moment activates something significant and ancestral that is tightly wound within the body. The clenching in the gut. The constriction in the throat. The flood of shame or the surge of defensiveness. These are not personality flaws. They are the felt sense of ERT being activated.
What I call a pocket of potential — a moment of racial charge — is precisely the moment when ERT tightens its grip and squeezes out our presence. We become less conscious exactly when we need to be more conscious. We retreat into our previously conditioned default tendencies of reactivity and recoil, of fight or flight, of freeze or appease. In that tightened state, we cannot truly listen. We cannot receive, rewire, or respond.
The solutions to the moment cannot come from the level at which the problem was created.
What Grace Has to Do With It
Years ago, when reading an esoteric book called The Sophia Code, by Kaia Ra, something crystallized for me. The text speaks of personal practice — yoga, meditation, breath, Qi Gong — as medicine that “will significantly upgrade our relationship with life.” These are the practices that quiet the busy mind, turn us within, and make space for grace to move through us.
And I understood: this is also what anti-racist practice requires.
If ERT is the wound — held tight in the body, humming beneath consciousness, erupting in moments of racial charge — then grace is the medicine. Not grace as a spiritual luxury or a bypass of the real work. Grace as the actual field we need access to in order to respond rather than react. Grace as the expanded state that makes true listening possible. Grace as the antidote to the squeeze of racial conditioning.
I am going to briefly introduce the systems analysis I call the Wedge and the Field. To put it very simply for the purposes of this piece, let’s describe the Wedge as the domain of dominion – white supremacy, linear thinking, patriarchy, non-contextual intelligence. The wedge is not all negative, it is the realm of the sympathetic nervous system, and the biochemistry of fight or flight, freeze or appease. These states are important when under threat, just as linear thinking is a practical skill. The danger arises when we think the Wedge is superior and that this realm is all there is. When our body-mind-spirit complex gets stuck in the Wedge, we experience and perpetuate harm and dis-ease. The Field is the realm of expansion, liberation, presence, contextual and multi-prismatic intelligence, broader perspective and our solutionary selves. The Field is the realm of our parasympathetic nervous system and the biochemistry or rest and digest. The Field is the realm of healing.
Einstein said that problems cannot be solved at the level at which they were created. Racism, white supremacy, the internalized architecture of ERT — these are wedge-state problems. They were created from fear, urgency, constriction, the mythical norm’s narrow definition of what is acceptable and who belongs - the Wedge. They cannot be undone from within that same terrain. We need access to something wider. Something more spacious. This is the Field — and creating space for grace is how we get there.
The Practice Is the Portal
We need practices that give us access to the Field. We need practices that become portals from Wedge states to Field states, from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic. Personal practices of internal cultivation are not afterthoughts to this work. They are the foundation of it. Without them, we will enter every charged conversation already tightened, already primed for reactivity or recoil. Without them, we will bring our wounding and winding into the room. Turns out, our reactivity is never graceful. For white folks — because of the socialized power and privilege that we carry — our unconscious embodied racial tension never stays private. It becomes a burden handed to everyone around us. For BIPOC – because of internalized racism and the tension of racial conditioning – staying the Wedge within moments of racial charge will cause a furthering of said emotional burden.
With practice, something very different becomes possible.
When we meditate, we are training ourselves to notice. To pause. To feel what is happening in our body without immediately acting from it. We need this level of interoceptive practice to transfer to moments of racial charge and meet the severity of ingrained, unconscious, default tendencies to react, recoil, and become defensive. With these practices creating space for grace, we rewire the nervous system out of its habituated stress responses. And build the capacity to be present in moments that have previously denied us that access. We both need to prepare for these moments by fortifying our practices and, most importantly, applying them when things get tough.
This is what I mean by creating space for grace. It happens through interoceptive practice. We pause. We breathe. We notice. We locate the constriction — where is it living? The chest? The jaw? The solar plexus? We place a hand there. We witness it without trying to argue it away or perform our way past it. With practiced awareness and return to a Field state, we begin to unwind the wound.
And in that unwinding, something opens even further. The Field becomes even more accessible. The parasympathetic nervous system comes online. We move from Wedge to Field — from reaction to response, from wounding to wholeness.
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Wholeness Is the Work
Wholeness is not a spiritual abstraction. It is a felt state. A practical state. It is the state from which we can actually hear what a colleague is saying when they offer us feedback about something we did that caused harm. It is the state from which we can say, I hear you. I am listening.
That pause — that one revolutionary pause — is the practice made visible. In that moment, we are not performing accountability. We are embodying it. We are locating ourselves in our bodies, breathing into the constriction, choosing presence over self-protection.
Wounding is tight and constricted. Movement from wounding is reactive, rushed, and damaging. Liberation is expansive and fluid. Movement from liberation is responsive, spacious, healing. Our wholeness does not live in the intellect. It lives in the body. And the body holds not only the wound but, more importantly, the capacity for wholeness.
This matters especially for white folks, and it matters because of power. When white people react from wounding in moments of racial charge — with fragility, with anger, with tears, with the need to explain our intentions — the burden of our unprocessed ERT is handed directly to the BIPOC people in the room. It doubles their burden. It is, at its root, an act of irresponsibility. And it perpetuates exactly what we say we are working to end.
Responsibility is our ability to respond. And the switch gets flipped in the body, not the intellect. Like my husband, Maketa Born says, “you cannot change the mind with the mind, only the breath can do that”. And the breath happens in the body. Change your breath, change your state of being.
An Upgrade We Cannot Afford to Skip
White supremacy culture is designed to keep white folks comfortable. This means that discomfort — the particular discomfort that arises in moments of racial charge — is actually a sign that something is moving. The shadow of our conditioning is showing itself. The ERT has surfaced. And that is not a threat. It is an invitation.
What if we got excited about that discomfort? What if we trained ourselves to turn toward it rather than away from it — not to wallow, but to witness? This is the alchemy of the practice. The wound itself becomes the teacher. The constriction itself becomes the portal.
Science tells us we are more space than matter. At the quantum level, the immense space between particles is where things shift most rapidly. When we increase our awareness of the space within us, we begin to participate at that level — the level where change becomes possible, even effortless. Where the solution is no longer being ground out through the thick mud of reactivity, but blooming from the intelligence of the whole system.
I want you to know that the Wedge and the Field is not an either/or situation. It is a both/and. What I didn’t mention about the Field is that it contains the Wedge. It is not a binary systems model. Let me explain this in a practical way by describing how this shows up in the body. When the ERT within me is activated by a moment of racial charge, when someone generous enough to offer me racialized feedback does so, I feel the tension right away, I feel a constriction, and I also feel the strong pull towards a reactionary action, like defensiveness, or anger, or shame. In one second, I feel all of this. I am in a Wedge state. The pause, the breath, are exactly what is needed to move my system from the Wedge to Field. But once I feel the expansion of the Field, the Wedge is still there, the constriction is there, the chemistry of the sympathetic is still there. They are still in my body. That tension can still be there and yet, I can access a different state simultaneously. This ability has been curated through personal practice over time.
We are all capable with practice, of this kind of multiprismatic intelligence. What I am doing is expanding into the places that are not constricted and giving them more attention, more breath, more space. This is the realm of my responsibility, my ability to respond. This moment I am in, this pocket of potential is asking something of me. It is asking me to be better. And what that means will only be revealed to me from within the Field. The Field is the realm of my contextual intelligence, my wisdom, and the place the ERT within me heals. From this place, I can take action and respond to the moment with authenticity rather than a default tendency, or trained reaction that comes directly from my own racial conditioning. Moving from the Field will ensure that my words, actions, choice making in this moment will not amplify the racial charge, will not fortify my own ERT, and will not perpetuate the harm.
“Extend your utmost emptiness as far as you can and do your best to preserve your tranquility.” - Li Shi
The practice of creating space for grace — of meditation, breath, internal cultivation, and body-centered presence — is not soft work. It is the most rigorous thing I know. It is the practice that transforms pockets of potential from moments of harm into moments of healing. If your more spiritual practices do not hold up in these moments where the deepest shadow of humanity shows itself, then they are useless. It is how we use our practices in the hardest moments that matters most. Not when we are alone, on a cushion, with a candle and lovely music, although this is preparatory, but it’s when things get really hard within our relationships with real people in real time that they matter most. Creating space for grace within a racial charge will bring consciousness to and heal the deepest wounds within ourselves, and stop the perpetuation of racialized harm that happens unconsciously through us.
Humanity, as it shows up in our relationships and communities, is ready for the spaciousness of grace. Grace, as an inherent aspect of our own Field state, knows how to forgive what feels unforgivable. Grace knows how to listen when every conditioned part of us is screaming to defend. Grace knows how to love across the distances that racial conditioning has manufactured between us.
