Enlightened Perspectives: Anu Gupta on Breaking Bias

As a gay Indian-born immigrant with Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu roots, American lawyer, scientist, and meditation teacher Anu Gupta, J.D., knows all too well what it feels like to be othered. He’s parlayed this firsthand knowledge into an impactful career focused on equity, healing, and belonging. The crux of his teachings? Bias is learned and can be unlearned through mindfulness and compassion. The founder of BE MORE (Beyond Equality Movement of Opportunities Rising for Everyone) with Anu, he has worked with more than 300 organizations and 100,000 professionals to dismantle bias. In Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come from—and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, he suggests a process for dismantling homophobia, racism, classism, and sexism using his comprehensive tool kit. Here, he shares with contributing editor Karen Brailsford his hopeful, more-critical-than-ever message.

Karen Brailsford: What drew you to this subject? 

Anu Gupta: In 2014, I was working as a lawyer on issues of racial equity and gender equality. We have great policies on the books, but massive disparities still exist. Black teenagers were sentenced to five years in prison for petty infractions like low-level marijuana possession while some lawyers at prestigious firms were doing controlled substances. I could tell that many judges and prosecutors were people of conscience and faith. They were doing amazing things in the community. But something prevented them from seeing the humanity of those the Bible calls “the least of these.” This is the nature of bias, particularly unconscious bias. I realized that unless we shift hearts and minds, we will not advance movement around justice, equality, and equity.

I then took a break from my legal career to begin to identify the root causes of bias and discover how we unlearn it. In 2020, I was invited to be in conversation with Oprah Winfrey and Isabel Wilkerson around Isabel’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. Isabel said radical empathy is a solution to ending racism and the caste system. I was already training people in empathy and compassion tools, so a seed was planted. Then four months later, January 6 happened. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. That’s when I knew I had to write this book. 

KB: How do you break bias?  

AG: It’s shifting our consciousness from exclusion to inclusion, from hatred and separation to cooperation and unity. It’s decolonizing our minds at the neural level.   

KB: Bias nearly killed you. Can you recount the story for us? 

AG: Experiences with racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia led me to want to take my life. In 2009, right before my 24th birthday, I found myself at the ledge of my 18th-floor window, about to jump. It was the beginning of my second year of law school. The first year had been intense, as it’s supposed to be. But I’d come from an uplifting global and interactive environment. I’d gotten a master’s degree in international development at Cambridge. There, I learned to think systemically, but also interpersonally and individually. In law school’s pressure-cooker environment, we weren’t able to talk about bias. We were reading about criminal law, civil procedures, and civil rights, which are all about racism, sexism, and homophobia, but we couldn’t share our personal experiences. 

And when you did share, you were gaslit. Someone would say “Namaste” to me out of the blue or ask, “Where are you from?” I’d tell them, and they’d go, “No, where are you really from?” “Brooklyn” was never sufficient. That’s where the nature of othering really begins. When I said this was hurtful or annoying, I was told, “You’re making too much of it.” I’d already experienced quite a bit growing up in the United States. After 9/11, strangers on the street would call me Osama bin Laden. After college, I worked in South Korea and Myanmar, and I studied in the United Kingdom. In hindsight, I was running away from the United States because of experiences around bias.  

KB: What kept you from jumping? 

AG: There was a moment of grace where instead of falling forward, I fell backward into my apartment. I called a friend who happened to be walking down my block and showed up in my apartment within a couple of minutes. The next day, I started my healing, breaking-bias journey. I began therapy and I returned to practices I had been raised with—meditation and yoga. I’m a Kriya Yogi in the Self-Realization Fellowship [founded by Paramahansa Yogananda]. My second summer in law school, I went to Taiwan, shaved my head, and joined the monastic order. I wanted to understand my mind, so I went deeper into understanding the nature of bias and the lies that I believed about myself.

From a very young age, I was a seeker. When I was 5 years old in Delhi, there was a calendar on our wall with the words to the Gayatri Mantra. Something inside told me, You need to memorize this. I went to college right after 9/11 and I wanted to understand why there was so much bigotry toward Muslims and why I, a non-Muslim, was on the receiving end of Islamophobia. This led me to return to India to study Islam. In it I found the profound beauty, love, and compassion of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and many other wisdom traditions.

After my suicide attempt, I went deep into Buddhism, but I also found community at New York’s Middle Collegiate Church. The ministers preached a message of love, peace, and justice, calling all humans regardless of sexuality or background “children of God.” In this all-embracing environment, Jesus pulled me out of the closet! I began to see in Jesus the love I had for Krishna. It’s a full circle. We’re here to realize our fuller selves and the deep divinity within us. That’s really important for any of us who are marginalized because of our identities.  

KB: How does your PRISM tool kit help people conquer bias? 

AG: The science said implicit bias was the reason for disparities in racial equity and gender equality, and the research was showing that mindfulness tools mitigate them. That’s where the idea behind the tool kit really began. PRISM is an acronym for Perspective-Taking, pRosocial Behavior, Individuation, Stereotype Replacement, and Mindfulness. You begin the practice with M and move up to P. 

Mindfulness is becoming aware of the concepts, thoughts, and stereotypes that arise in our minds along with the feelings or somatic experience. Then we move to stereotype replacement. When I think of a leader, I can think of Malala Yousafzai. When I think of a construction worker, I can think of a woman or a trans woman. Individuation is about investigation. After stereotypes arise and we replace them, we become curious as to where we learned them. If I’m talking to a Black woman who wears locs, there are ideas in my mind about people with that hairstyle. With mindfulness, we notice those ideas and don’t let them determine our words or actions toward people.  

Then we move to heart practices—prosocial behaviors, the active cultivation of compassion, empathy, joy, and altruism. In the Buddhist tradition, they’re known as the divine abodes because these states are where God lives. For two years after I started my healing journey, I did loving-kindness for myself.  

Finally, perspective-taking is imagining what it’s like to walk in the shoes of another. Actors do it really well. Creative agencies do it when they’re thinking about their users and clients and create advertising and marketing. They’re actively using empathy mapping. This is a capacity we all have, but there are skills we have to build. Science shows it takes as little as 18 days to build a new habit.  

KB: How empowering! But what about those who don’t believe bias exists? I read a comment that said racism is real because people won’t stop talking about it. 

AG: It’s important to acknowledge where we are. In Kriya Yoga, we meditate quite a bit, but we’re not meditating just for peace of mind. We’re meditating to gain insight. One insight is that whatever we’re experiencing when it comes to bias is a consequence of many different causes and conditions. So in order for us to change the consequences—we want more equity, more kindness, more love in the world—we have to shift. Pull out the weeds and plant new trees! Every spiritual teacher of the past has said, “Love is not only the destination—it is also the way.” To get to that destination, we have to practice what we preach. 

KB: You write that people who are biased have this pull to be good.  

AG: As someone who has come close to not being here, I extend grace to everyone. Hurt people hurt people. We are to remind them of the good they are doing. People are often manipulated by these bigger systems. Disinformation campaigns are very deliberate. They’re manipulating people’s biology. It’s been shown that lies laced with hatred and anger spread a hundred times faster than truth. This is what we’re really up against. Algorithms are the dragons of our times.  

KB: Your father’s bias helped you understand bias.  

AG: Mindfulness practice got me to that point. For a long time, I shut him down. I heard a lot of bigotry in my household. I asked him, “Why do you think all poor people are genetically deficient?” I learned that a teacher whom he respected and who had encouraged him to become a doctor taught him bigoted views based in eugenics. It was important for me to understand he learned it from this one person and that he had held onto those views, not because of their veracity, but because of how he felt about that person.  

KB: You write that bias “infects,” implying that bias is a disease. Does one kind of bias infect more readily than another? 

AG: Bias is a disease of the mind. Our consciousness has been infected with it. So it depends on the person. If someone who’s been raised in an isolated, misogynistic environment is made to think that men are better than women and that gender-queer people don’t exist, those become the habits of mind. It might be more difficult not to make those associations. I experienced this when nonbinary people asked me to use they/them pronouns. Because I had learned there were two pronouns, adding a third was difficult. But with practice, it became second nature. It’s a willingness to grow and shift.

KB: You’re addressing people who know that bias exists and want to do something about it. You’re not trying to convince anyone of anything. 

AG: Margaret Mead said that it takes a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. I want to reach those individuals. After January 6, I saw that a lot of people wanted to address bias but felt paralyzed. I asked myself, How can we bring this conversation to them in a compassionate, shame-free, trauma-informed way so that they can heal, grow, and invite others to this movement? It’s about building that critical mass. I believe it’s going to happen. It happened with gay marriage. We got to the tipping point.  

People said, “If my mom, my auntie, and my neighbor are okay with it, then I’m listening to them.” That’s how consciousness shifts.  

When I started this work in 2014, people said, “You’re taking on the impossible.” I thought, Well, within 20 years we connected the entire globe through Facebook and Instagram and other tools. If people can imagine colonizing Mars, why can’t we imagine living on Earth without bias? It’s about giving ourselves permission to imagine what’s possible and going for it. One hundred years ago, many people couldn’t imagine a country that wasn’t segregated or the end of colonialism. But a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens did.  

KB: At the end of Breaking Bias, you reveal your own biases. Can you elaborate? 

AG: I spent the first 10 years of my life in India, which was still under the colonial hangover where they believe what’s European and American is better than what’s Indian. If you didn’t speak impeccable English and had an accent, you were somehow lesser than. That’s where the self-loathing began. When those feelings would arise, I would dismiss them. But on this breaking bias journey, I realized, This is inside of me! This is why I went by the name Andy and didn’t tell people that I was Hindu and had a pantheon of deities I deeply revered. I was afraid of what they would think of me. I’ve seen this happen quite often in subordinated communities. An African colleague who isn’t Christian or Muslim but animist, as were most Africans before colonialism, feels incredibly alone in Black spaces when he talks about his faith. That’s the nature of neuro-colonization, which is pervasive around the world. 

KB: I’m still thinking on what you said about being gaslit. I went to get my blood drawn recently, and as I approached the line, a white woman asked, “Are we waiting for you?”  

AG: Wow. 

KB: I said, “I don’t think so.” She assumed I was the technician. Then she left, I think from shame. Later, a friend questioned my interpretation.   

AG: First of all, I’m sorry that happened to you. Those types of experiences led me to my ledge. I learned the way I look at this now from the Buddhist tradition. When someone says something harmful, think of them as giving you presents—then think of not accepting those presents: It’s an invitation, if it triggers me, to heal that wound. There’s something inside me that believes that I’m less than. There’s little I can do to change people, but I can change how I respond. It becomes, Oh, that person doesn’t want to do their work. That’s on them.

KB: I’m reminded of an image I saw after the presidential election of Black women atop a roof sipping tea and watching the world burn. 

AG: They’re saying, “You take care of this! I’m living my life.” At this moment, I believe the antidote is self-compassion. Those subjected to implicit bias need to double down on loving-kindness for the person inside who continues to feel harmed. This is where stereotype replacement is also really helpful. Build up mental models of humans who did this successfully, like Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Saint Francis. These are small tests for what I think of as keeping our eyes on the prize, which is liberation: Creating a world where all of us belong in the fullness of our being. For now, let’s start with being right here. 

KB: Well, I’m glad you’re right here and didn’t fall forward. 

AG: Me too! Life has been real fun since then. All the things I would have missed!    

Anu Gupta, J.D., is an educator, human rights lawyer, scientist, meditation teacher, and the founder and CEO of BE MORE with Anu, an online learning company that trains professionals to advance inclusion and wellness by breaking bias. He is the author of the 2024 book Breaking Bias. Visit bemorewithanu.com.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health^®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.