Anna interviews Ashnie

Anna Grace (Ghosh), a dear friend and colleague, interviews another dear friend and colleague, Ashnie Butler, in this blog (link to the original post on LinkedIn). Anna offers Conflict navigation, training, facilitation, and a smart communications strategy that makes more possible. Ashnie Butler, founder of Inner Work. Outer Play and the creator of The Art of Mindful Inquiry.

I met Ashnie Butler through my friend and collaborator Bridget Bertrand, M.A. Ashnie is a consultant, facilitator, mediator, and coach who works with individuals, groups, and organizations using mindfulness and trauma-informed approaches to support deeper human connection. She is the founder of Inner Work. Outer Play and the creator of The Art of Mindful Inquiry, a reflective practice for clear communication, deeper self-awareness, and authentic connection – my favorite things!

In this interview, I not only got to learn Ashnie’s story of how she got where she is and what Mindful Inquiry is all about, but I got a taste of Mindful Inquiry in action. Even though our mini Mindful Inquiry session was only 5 minutes, I experienced how powerful it is to slow down, listen inwardly, and ask more intentional questions of myself. A condensed version of Ashnie’s wisdom from our interview follows.

The Essentials

- Presencing means slowing down enough to understand what is happening inside you before responding to what is happening around you.

- Curiosity is what makes deep listening possible. When we are truly curious, we listen for what is being offered instead of preparing our reply.

- Before asking a question, we can surface our honest intentions by asking ourselves, “Why do I want to know this?”

- Telling the truth cleanly means staying aligned with your values without abandoning yourself, collapsing into blame, or losing sight of your impact.

- Having strong agreements in place for group discussions provides an opening to say what we’re really thinking and feeling, and listen without immediately judging.

How to Presence Yourself

Until recently, I described myself as a DEI consultant, facilitator, and coach. But “DEI” isn’t resonating in the same way, so I guess I’m the question lady now.

I’ve developed a program called The Art of Mindful Inquiry, which is about understanding how to presence yourself so you can get to the answers you need, become a more receptive listener, and build a relationship based on the quality of your questions.

Presencing ourselves is about taking a pause to gain awareness of what’s going on in our bodies. When we’re in conversation with someone else, in a group, or in a meeting, a lot of the time we’re external. We’re paying attention to what’s happening around us or what’s happening with the person in front of us, but we’re not paying as much attention to what’s happening within us. And what’s happening within us drives what comes out of our mouths.

Someone may say something that is triggering, and when we get triggered, we offer a reactive response rather than one based on awareness of why we were triggered in the first place. Or we placate. Or we stuff down what’s going on for us.

Presencing ourselves means noticing: Do I have a visceral feeling about that? Did that not sit well with me? Do I feel unsafe in this situation? Am I uncomfortable, and do I need a moment before I respond?

When you come from a place of understanding what’s happening within you — the physical sensation, the emotional state of your being — it allows you to say, “I need a moment to process that,” or “Can you say more about what you mean by that?” Or even, “I’m feeling a little uncomfortable right now, and I’m trying to understand what’s happening for me before I respond.” That sounds simple, but it takes a lot of practice.

The Pause Matters

A teacher I had in my 30s with lineage going back to India talked about the mind can only exist in the past and the future. Any thoughts or story that is mind creates is not in this present moment and pulls us away from ourselves. That understanding shaped how I navigated things for a long time.

Then I met Rev. angel Kyodo williams, who wrote Being Black and co-authothed Radical Dharma. Reverend angel refined my understanding of how to return to myself.

In returning to myself, I have access to awareness of my habitual patters, toward myself and situations in a given moment. I get the opportunity to notice and transform my behavior that is not only affecting my life but the lives of others. That moment of returning to myself, I include a pause before responding.

That pause matters. It creates the possibility of responding more honestly and transparently. It builds confidence and trust in ourselves and invites a deeper connection with others.

From Belonging to Becoming

When I first moved to the United States, I was on a culinary path. I went to school and worked in New York City, then moved to Los Angeles and continued that work for a while.

There have been many pivotal moments in my life, as significant one occurred after the the verdict came down from the Rodney King trial, and everything exploded in Los Angeles. At that time, I didn’t yet have the depth of understanding about where I fit into racialization in the United States.

I was doing what I did many days of the week: go to the gym and then to Trader Joe’s in Redondo Beach. I was going about my business with confidence and a sense of belonging when I passed two older white women, and they pulled their carts away from me because their purses were in the carts. In that moment I thought, "Oh. Okay. How I see myself and how they see me are very different."

It wasn’t until my 30s, when I return to school in the Bay area to earn my bachelor’s degree and met African American history professor Walter Turner, that I started to learn about the real history of the United States, including the civil right movement. I learned that not everyone saw me as belonging. I also learned that it was because of the civil rights movement and the fight of Black Americans that I could ever expect others to accept my belonging. It took me some time to learn that belonging is an inside job, and it is mine to do. I had to claim it for myself.

My learning continued to unfold over the years, as did my understanding of who I am and what was happening around me. I fought for economic rights by working as a union organizer, then moved into studying social justice. I trained in facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed and other forms of experiential practices. I was pulled toward them as tools for my own learning and to support others, which eventually led me into the DEI world.

I later moved to Portland to work for a nonprofit that seemed designed for me: a single mom making it in the world. Then the 2016 election result occurred, and again my belonging was threatened. I became quite vocal and challenging to the establishment run by white folks, and I lost my job. That was very traumatizing and led me to launch my business, Inner Work, Outer Play.

The name comes from the experiential learning of Theatre of the Oppressed: using outer play while the inner work is happening.

The Ruthless Truth Teller

There’s a high probability that conflict will happen anytime you talk about systemic oppression, racism, or to any system or practice that push folks to the margins and questions their belonging. For a long time, I saw myself as a ruthless truth teller. I chose confrontation to challenge harmful patterns of behavior without having the awareness to presense myself with intention. This created conflict and blocked connection. My intention may have been fine, but I didn’t have enough awareness of how my words were landing.

Over time, I learned to be in the truth while staying aligned with my values around connection by taking more care with how I communicated. I am not responsible for how everyone responds, but I do want the communication to be clean.

Often in DEI work, there was a lot of finger-pointing. When folks feel accused or blamed for things they believe they had no part in, they shut down.

So I started looking for ways to speak about hard things that allow everyone to see themselves in the room and feel into their belonging. In a multiracial space, people who are historically marginalized need to feel heard. And people who tend to fall on the side of the oppressor need to lean how to listen and build capacity to reflect on the gaps they have regarding their impact on folks who are pushed to the margins.

That starts with strong agreements. Agreements that help us slow down, say what we’re really thinking and feeling, and listen without immediately judging.

How to Listen

A big part of listening is developing curiosity. If you’re curious about something, you’re more motivated to listen to what’s being offered.

In The Art of Mindful Inquiry, the opportunity to explore awareness, curiosity, listening, reflection, and action, takes folks on a journey of learning how to interact in a manner that builds connections. With the key focus on understanding what is occurring within yourself in a given moment.

We lack the skill of true listening. We’re often actually thinking about how we want to respond. Or, if someone says something that sparks a thought in us, we immediately want to share our experience with them. That pattern often breaks connection and shifts the focus away from the person trying to express themself, and a deeper connection is lost.

There are tools that help you practice listening, such as paying full attention to what someone is saying, then asking a question like, “Can you say more about that?” to give the other person enough space to fully express themself.

Unfortunately, most of us have not learned that skill and tend to bring the focus back to ourselves, and often don’t notice that it’s had an impact on the person we are in conversation with.

The gap occurs because we have not learned how to listen to ourselves and by that I mean, we don’t recognize the needs and expectation we are holding when we engage with another person. We haven’t learn how to practice self-inquiry. To understand that our perspective is shaped by our lived experience and our history lives in our body and shapes how we enter every conversation. When we practice mindful self-inquiry our interaction and communication have the opportunity to rich and deepen our connection with others and grows our internal and external sense of belonging.

Curiosity, Attention, Intention

One of the tools of mindful inquiry is the ability cultivate curiosity with ourselves and with what another person is offering. It invites us to examine our intentions and hold awareness of our impact.

We sometimes use curiosity in ways that are not genuine; we are not in touch with why we want to know more. Sometimes it’s to prove our point, make the other person wrong, or fuel our insecurities, which is a self destructive pattern we may not be aware of that creates division. We might want to show how smart we are. When we are genuinely curious, we are in service to building stronger connections, which moves us away from right and wrong and into understanding perspectives.

The mindfulness support circle for activists offered for free by myself and Bridget Bertrand creates a space for folks to be kind and loving and work toward self-acceptance of what they have the capacity to do in these challenging times, and in doing so, cultivate compassion towards others.

The Vulnerability of Not Knowing

What gets in the way of curiosity? We live in a shame-based society. We feel shame for not knowing something, so we pretend we know it. Capitalism contributes to that. Masculinity contributes to that. All the layers of our society contribute to the idea that we should already know and if we don’t we are less than.

Not engaging curiosity often comes from a need to protect ourselves, and to protect ourselves means to know the thing already. But curiosity requires vulnerability.

That’s part of the struggle right now. As we watch our county struggle and fail the most vulnerable members of our society, we get scared. We don’t know what’s going to happen, we just know we have to take action. So we want to fight, react, push back. And sometimes, we just really want to cry. How do we give ourselves that? How do we create space for our vulnerability?

I think the worry is that if we allow vulnerability, we’ll become immobilized. But within vulnerability is our strength. We have to trust that we’re not going to get swallowed up by being vulnerable.

No Blueprint, Just Practice

In my work, I stay really present. I engage silence.

There are guidelines and sometimes predetermined questions, but the real questions come from what is happening in the moment within ourselves. There isn’t a blueprint just practice.

The practice is to return to awareness, cultivate curiosity, listen deeply, reflect on what’s happening, and then take action from a holistic, informed place. Action might mean responding. It might mean changing a practice. It might mean making a decision differently. But whatever the action is, it comes after the pause.

That pause is where we return to ourselves. That pause is where we notice our intention. That pause is where another possibility can enter the room.

What I’m carrying into my practice: The reminder that the quality of my questions depends on the quality of my presence. On the surface, conflict work seems to be very outward-facing. I ask my parties: What are your goals? What are your needs? What needs to be repaired, decided, named, or changed? Ashnie’s practice invites me to also look inward: What is happening inside of me right now? Why do I want to know? Am I asking from curiosity, fear, righteousness, or expediency? That pause does not take me away from action. It helps me move toward action from a more honest, centered, and creative place. Learn more about my practice, Relate Together, here.

Get in touch with Ashnie:

https://www.innerworkouterplay.com/, email Ashnie @ innerworkouterplay@gmail.com,

Get in touch with Anna:

Anna Grace (Ghosh)

Conflict Navigator|Communications Consultant
415-562-6328

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