White & Awakening

This program is relevant to healthcare professionals who seek to enhance cultural competence and provide equitable care. By engaging in structured self-reflection and evidence-based mindfulness practices, clinicians strengthen their ability to recognize and address biases, reduce microaggressions, and repair interpersonal ruptures. Participation supports clinician well-being (by offering strategies to regulate difficult emotions that arise in conversations about race) and client well-being (through compassionate, culturally responsive approaches to cross-cultural interactions). These skills align with multicultural guidelines and directly support clinical effectiveness in diverse professional contexts. The course integrates frameworks drawn from Buddhist psychology—such as compassion, impermanence, and ethical reflection—presented in clinically accessible language, providing additional tools for fostering empathy, mindfulness, and inclusivity in professional practice.

Teachings are appropriate for health care professionals as well as the general public.

Learning Objectives for participating health care professionals-

At the end of the program, you will be better able to:

• Describe whiteness as a socially constructed and conditioned identity and explain how intersecting factors such as gender, class, and ability influence perception, relational dynamics, and the therapeutic relationship.
• Apply mindfulness-based awareness and compassion practices to regulate shame, guilt, defensiveness, and other difficult emotions that arise in racial dialogues, in order to maintain therapeutic effectiveness and ethical presence.
• Demonstrate culturally responsive and mindful communication approaches that foster cultural humility, emphasize active listening, and strengthen alliance across diverse clients and professional contexts.
• Analyze the ethical implications of racial bias and microaggressions within clinical or organizational settings and implement mindfulness-informed strategies for acknowledgment, repair, and prevention.
• Discuss how systemic racism and historical conditioning contribute to psychological distress, alienation, and health inequities, and identify mindfulness-informed ways clinicians can address these dynamics within their professional scope.
• List and utilize mindfulness-consistent strategies—such as embodied awareness, pause-relax-open, and mindful repair—that parallel evidence-supported rupture-and-repair and microintervention practices.
• Describe mindfulness-based approaches for engaging other White individuals or colleagues in reflective conversations that interrupt racial harm and support inclusion within clinical, educational, and organizational settings.
• Identify and compile ethically grounded, scope-consistent individual, interpersonal, and systems-level actions that integrate awareness, compassion, and accountability to reduce racism’s impact within healthcare and community care environments.

Continuing Education Content level: Introductory

Note:

• For full Provider information and additional CE information, including attendance requirements, cancellation, and grievance policies, please visit our Continuing Education Credit information page.
• For those with a different license than listed above, or with a license from a different board or association than listed on our CE info page, please contact your licensing board or association directly to request pre-approval/acceptance of CE credits offered at Spirit Rock. Spirit Rock does not confirm the applicability of credit for those with licenses other than those listed.
• Continuing Education is sponsored by Mindful CECs. 
• Mindful CECs is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Mindful CECs maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
• Co-sponsor Mindful CECs is a provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, Provider Number CEP17985 for 10 contact hours.
• Potential Conflict of Interest Statement: This instructor may have authored publications relevant to the subjects covered in this course. The instructor might reference these publications during the course, and they may receive financial compensation if these publications are purchased.
• Attendance is demonstrated through a comprehensive assessment at the end of the course, with a passing criterion of at least a 75% percent score. The assessment may be repeated if necessary.