Racial prejudice.

Social injustice.

White privilege.

These are the focuses of this tsunami of a revolution breaking over us in waves of anger, grief, blame, shame, and guilt. I feel them all at times.

I grieve for us humans—even as I rejoice that these layers of division and separation are up for review in our collective consciousness. Asking my inner guidance how best to support this clearing and healing, I hear, “Look at your own programming. Within your experience, there is understanding and answers.” 

By being born in America, I was programmed by my country, whose basic belief was specific: “The white man is superior, chosen by God to rule all other humans and the world.”

With this belief, a group of white men we call our “founding fathers” claimed this land as their own. They justified the genocide of the indigenous peoples who’d lived here, protecting and cultivating this land for thousands of years. They enslaved the peoples of color, from this land and others. Ownership and servitude of the female “lesser sex” they brought with them from the “Old Country.”

Over time, laws were passed, freeing the natives, the black, brown, and yellow people, and the women. These laws state that all are equal citizens of this country that brags of being “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Yet the programming in the subconscious minds of the people has not been addressed, acknowledged, or changed much. Which means our external reality hasn’t changed much either. My subconscious mind was programmed to believe I was inferior to men, teachers, government officials, and lawmakers, and superior to children and people of color.

Thus the hierarchy of “better than/less than” was established here on this soil, and in me. Of course, it has a much longer history than that, but I am now speaking to the direct programming of my subconscious mind from my surroundings. 

On a conscious level, I didn’t know any of this until I was an adult. I went to public school for the first time at the age of 14, and learned that the word “n*gger” was intended as an insult and racial slur. Until then, I had just thought it was a word in the nursery rhyme “Eeny meeny miny mo; catch a n*gger by his toe; if he hollers, let him go…”

We had kids of all colors in my private Christian school and at church. My best friend Miranda was Egyptian, and I spent many Sundays at her house enjoying her family’s customary yell-talking in Arabic. At 15, my gorgeous boyfriend John came to pick me up for his senior prom in a white stretch limo with his best friends, the prom king and queen. I thought it the most perfect night of my life.

But I noticed that some members of my family didn’t see his beautiful black face the same way I did. The black girls at school did not take kindly to a white girl dating one of “their boys.” In that one semester, I experienced racial prejudice from both sides for the first time. I was confused, angered, and saddened by this new strange thing. 

Another layer of programming I received was by the Christian church. I was programmed to believe I was less than men, preachers, teachers, and most of all God, for whom I would have to work hard my entire life to prove myself to be “worthy” of “his” love and approval, and to absolve my “sins” of being human, and a female. Even then I would never be quite good enough, and I definitely couldn’t trust my heart or inner knowing.

Only the “men of God” who preach his “word” knew the truth.  Alongside that came the missionary program—needing to save those less fortunate than me—”those” being children and people of color around the world.

I didn’t know I had a choice whether to believe all of this, or even that all this had been programmed inside of me, until I was 23 and my inner self began crying out to be heard. I had left the church the minute I could, with the natural rebellion of being 17, and moved out of my childhood house. Not knowing I carried the roots of injustice and dysfunction deep within me.

Then there was the direct programming in my household through sexual, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse. I was programmed to fear men, fear God, fear hell, fear anything I didn’t understand, fear just about everything really. Oh, and pretend I am perfect, all the while believing I am worthless.

The programming of women tells us we must submit to and obey the words of a man, especially a white one. We must work harder to prove ourselves because we are the inferior gender. I didn’t know until I was 18 that I could say no to a man touching me in a sexual way. 

Growing up in a broken home, I spent many hours over a span of years alongside all the other broken and poor families of all colors at the Department of Social Services, the courthouse, and standing in line for food commodities so my mother could feed and shelter the five of us.

I began babysitting at the age of 11 for money to buy my own clothes at the thrift store, and not have to wear the hand-me-downs of three older sisters anymore. Those felt like new clothes to me! If someone would have tried to explain to me my “white privilege” during any of those years, I would probably have laughed in their face. Or punched them. 

Nowadays, I absolutely see what people are talking about. Having outgrown my relatively colorless Colorado container of upbringing, I’ve witnessed the racial divide and prejudice in many places. I’ve felt it on both sides.

Seeing the dividing line of black and white people from the “white side” in Gross Point, Michigan, was just as shocking as staying the night in Little Rock, Arkansas, and being the only two white people in the entire bar that my girlfriend and I played pool in that night. Being shown around the Taos Pueblo by the young boy who made a heart-shaped necklace for me, and hearing his stories of what really happened to his family there, broke my heart. 

Through these systems of programming—country, church, and home—many many more layers of division are programmed into all of us. None of us escape it, because it is happening on a global human scale. Every country and ethnicity carries the wounds of these divisions.

We are a race divided against ourselves. 

Laying this out on paper—my programming—it becomes abundantly clear to me the mechanisms of separating me from my true self, and me from you. In my opinion, that is really what all these inequalities and injustices are rooted in: keeping us separated and divided, which keeps us weak and controllable. As long as I fear or hate you, I am creating the separation between us from within. 

It is an ingenious plan, really, available to anyone who wants more power and control: use our external “differences” to amplify the programmed lie of “different, better than, less than, separate.”

As long as we believe this lie, it keeps us from the wholeness and power within our individual self, as well as our wholeness and power as a collective race. 

We forget we are one race: human. 

This programming has been strengthened through the epigenetic inheritance of our parents. Our bloodlines carry the unresolved emotions and beliefs they had, which were probably passed down to them by their parents, and so on, until we have the current environment of today’s world.

A woman of German descent can have subconscious guilt, passed down from her great-grandfather who fought for the Nazis, even though she was born in America. There can be hatred and fear of white people in the man of African descent, passed down from the great-grandmother who was ripped from her home in Papua New Guinea and forced into slavery here in America, even though he was born here.

A white woman may subconsciously fear and judge all people of color, passed down by her great-grandfather in Georgia who owned slaves and killed natives, even though she was born in California and raised to think all people are equal. 

These hand-me-down prejudices, privileges, fears, resentments, judgments, and guilt are the programs in our subconscious and psyche that we are reacting to and from, calling it our own thoughts and feelings. 

We can release them any time we want by looking at what programs are running in our own psyche, choosing to release them, and to align with what we want to believe.

What does our heart’s desire tell us? What is our deepest heart truth? 

We are being faced with the collective ugly of countless generations of programming through fear, hate, divisiveness, and separation. We may be male, female, black, white, brown, yellow, heterosexual, LGBTQ, and non-binary gender—but we are all human. And all of us are affected by this inside and outside.

Can we use our inherent human quality of bravery to look within and root out the lies we inherited? Can we look into our hearts and see what we truly want our world to be like and start to create from that instead of remaining puppets of our unconscious programming? 

I dare say we can. I believe I can, and so I am. When I look inside, I see that it is my own beliefs and emotions that either separate me or unite me with you. If I agree to the programmed lies that we are somehow different; or I am better than or less than; or that I should be afraid, angry, guilty, or resentful because of skin color, that is what I create my external reality to reflect.

But if I feel the commonalities of our shared human experience—the joys, the sorrows, the love, the angers, the connectedness of our fields, one human to another—that is what I create my external reality to reflect. 

Simply said, our inner beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create our outer reality. 

Today (in June), I went to the walk-up bank window to see my friend Marina. We met on the first day of the COVID shutdown in March when she was my bank teller. We connected deeply that day. We held hands across the counter.

She came around just to hug me, even as the “authorities” were telling us not to touch each other. Since then, I go by about once a week to say hi and share a strong hug.

She is black. I am white.

Today, she saw me and said, “I’ll be right there.” She came around, and we hugged extra long. We leaned into each other. Then she looked me deep in the eyes and said, “Are you okay?”

I said, “Yes. Are you?”

She said “Yes.”

We agreed we aren’t letting the emotions flowing around us, necessary as they are to release, to get in the way of our bond. We have chosen love—and that is all that matters.

We are in a time of extraordinary opportunity. A time when we can release thousands of years of programming—because it has been cracked wide open for all of us to clearly see.

Isn’t it time we stop making the “other” our enemy and try something different? If we want the larger world to reflect unity, love, and equality, we must look within to the roots, the very foundations from which we are constantly creating our personal world. And then we must re-align with that which we want in our hearts.

We transform our world by transforming ourselves. What could happen if we focus on learning how to love and value each other as every possible expression of being human? 

Remember we are one race: human.