Your guidebook for healing division in a polarized world.
Imagine a world beyond bias
At a time marked by polarization, bigotry, and growing divides, it’s easy to forget that biases are not inherent—they are learned, and they can be unlearned. What we need are tools to heal and bring people together.
Breaking Bias is an award-winning, best-selling book that blends neuroscience and meditation to help us restore connection and heal the divides that fracture our families, colleges, communities, and workplaces.
Breaking Bias is blessed with a Foreword by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, global advocate for compassion, and co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute
“I identify myself with his approach… and commend the author.”
His words remind us that rooting this work in compassion and shared humanity is both timely and timeless.
Awards, Press & Praise for Breaking Bias
Breaking Bias has been recognized for its contribution to business leadership, bridging divides, and social healing.
Breaking Bias has received the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Axiom Business Book Award, Non-Obvious Book Award, and the International Book Award, and has been recognized by the Next Big Idea Club and Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper.
Breaking Bias and its unique approach have been featured in leading media worldwide
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Breaking Bias was written for you—and for these urgent times
Whether you identify as Black or white, male or female, straight or gay, Christian or Atheist—or in ways beyond those labels—this book invites you on a journey to heal your relationship with yourself and with anyone the world tells you is “different.”
The need for this work has never been more urgent. Polarization, disinformation, and division are tearing at the fabric of our families, college campuses, workplaces, and nations. Yet within this turbulence lies a profound opportunity: to understand how our brains created these patterns—and how they can also free us from them.
Breaking Bias blends ancient wisdom with modern neuroscience to offer practical, somatically informed tools for unlearning bias. It will train you to recognize how separation is learned, to heal from its wounds, and to heal the polarization, division, and biases that fracture our families, colleges, universities, workplaces, and communities today.
Order Breaking Bias
My award-winning, best-selling book, Breaking Bias, is available in the USA, UK, Australia, and India, wherever books are sold.
Praise for Breaking Bias
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His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama
The highest spiritual leader and head of Tibetan Buddhism
“I commend the author and hope this book will help people to come closer to one another through breaking biases on the basis of secondary differences like race, religion, rich or poor that divide us.”
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Dan Harris
New York Times best-selling Author of 10% Happier and host of the Ten Percent Happier Podcast
“Your biases can hurt other people, but they can also hurt you. They can damage your relationships and degrade your decision-making. But the good news is: they’re not your fault, and they can be addressed. Anu is the perfect guide to transform all biases in the modern world.”
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Valarie Kaur
Best-selling author of See No Stranger and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project
“Masterful, practical, and wise, Breaking Bias is essential reading….Learn how to dismantle systems of oppression, embrace the worth of all beings, and build a world of belonging...This book will inspire you to a life of Revolutionary Love. Anu Gupta is a guiding light, and this book is his radiant offering.”
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Tara Brach, PhD
Best-selling author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge
“Evolving beyond the biases that separate us is the core task of humanity if we are to meet the existential challenges that face us…Breaking Bias offers a powerful set of mindfulness-based tools to help us dismantle conscious and unconscious bias and repair the horrific harms it has caused. This timely book is a beacon of hope in our precious, hurting world.”
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Jack Kornfield
Author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
“Learning to see and understand bias is deeply important for our world, especially now. Breaking Bias is a valuable and illuminating curriculum that will help not only with understanding bias, but also ending it.”
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Sharon Salzberg
Best-selling author of Lovingkindness and Real Life
“Compassionate, vulnerable, and mind-expanding, Breaking Bias is a powerful guidebook to deepen our understanding of bias and how to break the cycle…Anu sparks individual awakening for collective change. This book is an invitation to join the movement towards a world celebrating our diversity and honoring our inherent belonging.”
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Rev. Jacqui Lewis, PhD
Senior Minister for Public Theology and Transformation at Middle Collegiate Church and author of Fierce Love
“Breaking Bias uniquely captured me and would not let me go…Anu's kindness accompanies the reader on a journey informed by the depth and breadth of his experience, research, wisdom, compassion and hope…A must read for all who yearn for a more just society.”
Attend an Event with Anu
Step into an immersive experience designed to help us break bias and heal divides.
Whether in person or virtually, each gathering offers practical tools, guided practices, and space for connection. I look forward to sharing this journey with you.
You need tools.
Breaking Bias has them.
I wrote my award-winning, best-selling book after decades of research revealed that strengthening mindfulness is the key to addressing many of today’s most urgent crises—from inequality, polarization, and bigotry to burnout, loneliness, and even climate change.
Blending ancient spiritual wisdom with modern science, Breaking Bias shares practical, neuroscience-backed, somatically informed contemplative tools to heal division, reduce bias, and cultivate greater connection in our colleges, workplaces, communities, and daily lives.
130+
unique activities, reflection prompts, and exercises!
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Janet Dewart Bell, PhD
Professor, Racial Justice Advocate, and author of Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement and Blackbirds Singing
“Breaking Bias is a landmark achievement…Building on his incredibly diverse lived experience, Anu Gupta has given us a wonderful book, full of passion, hope, and, yes, love—backed by meticulous research and searing analyses. A timely book, but also one for the ages.”
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Joseph Goldstein
Co-founder of Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
“In Breaking Bias, Anu Gupta's clarity and open-heartedness invite us to reflect on the great suffering caused by racial, gender, and all forms of stereotypes, to understand more fully their religious, social and economic underpinnings, and to explore ways of freeing ourselves from these deeply conditioned patterns…Highly recommended!”
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Danielle Conway
Dean and Law Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law and Executive Director of Antiracist Development Institute (ADI)
“Anu Gupta's Breaking Bias is a major contribution in its focus on locating the roots of identity-based biases and the inequities that flow from them...Through this book, readers will be engaged in a process of co-creation of a more inclusive, more just, and more fair society through organic, positive paradigm shifts in culture and community.”
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Jorge Fontanez
CEO, B Lab U.S. & Canada
“This book will equip you with the necessary insights to lead with compassion and integrity. It serves as an urgent call to introspection and bold leadership aimed at forging a more just and equitable society…Breaking Bias marks an achievement in the work of antiracism and a world without bias, and I see it as a vital text for anyone wanting to interrogate bias and lead with greater compassion, love and courage.”
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Sebene Selassie
Diversity & Meditation Expert ant author of You Belong
“In Breaking Bias, Anu Gupta offers us a powerful and accessible overview of both the roots of our species' prejudices and the actions we must take to free ourselves from them once and for all…Anu's relatable stories of his own journey makes this sometimes challenging material a joy to read. This book provides a comprehensive and systematic pathway for breaking bias, and Anu is an expert guide through this vital journey.”
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Manoj Dias
Author of Still Together and co-founder of OPEN
“In a time where the world feels more divided than ever before, Breaking Bias is an urgent antidote to the confusion and suffering of modern life. Offering wisdom rooted in science and contemplative practice I genuinely believe this book can transform those that come into contact with its message.”
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Kaira Jewel Lingo
Meditation Teacher and author of We Were Made for These Times and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation
“This is the best articulation that I have read of what bias is, how it comes to be and how it can be ended. Practicing this now is essential…so we can bring about lasting freedom and wellbeing for ourselves and our world. This is required reading for all of us!”
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Koshin Paley Ellison
Zen teacher, co-founder of Zen Center for Contemplative Care and author of Untangled
“Anu Gupta's Breaking Bias is a rigorous and expansive investigation of a human tangle and illness—assumption and bias. I am grateful for Anu's innovative antidote of PRISM, a pragmatic and heartening medicine to confront and transform the root causes of bias. Let's take the medicine together.”
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Cheryl Dorsey
President of Echoing Green, the leading network of social entrepreneurs globally
“Whether you're a seasoned social entrepreneur or an aspiring changemaker, this book offers invaluable wisdom and inspiration to navigate the complexities of bias and social impact work. Let Anu's insights empower you to drive positive change in your communities and beyond, transforming bias into opportunity and paving the way for a more equitable and just world.”
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Douglas Abrams
Co-author of international bestseller The Book of Joy and executive producer of Mission Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times
“Anu shares a profound journey to breaking bias that we deeply need to free ourselves and our society from the ancient neural reflexes of our tribal past. This inner and outer journey is one that could not be more timely and more important for creating the world we carry in our hearts.”
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Ananta Ripa Ajmera
Award-winning, best-selling author of The Way of the Goddess and The Ayurveda Way and founder of The Ancient Way
“Breaking Bias is a powerful invitation to examine our subconscious attitudes, beliefs and conditioning, and to finally rewrite the stories we have told about ourselves and others, to embrace a more inclusive and loving world that comes about when we become the change we seek.”
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Shakil Choudhury
Author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Racial Justice
“Anu Gupta has written a wonderfully accessible book that marries his personal journey with Buddhism and bias-busting. It’s moving, practical and filled with useful strategies. Highly recommended!”
Breaking Bias is your step-by-step guide, your toolkit, and your notepad for making change…all in one book.
Hi! I’m Anu, and I wrote Breaking Bias as the book I always wished I had—a practical guidebook for unlearning bias, fostering connection, and healing from experiences of exclusion and othering.
Unlike most books that simply examine the history of bias, Breaking Bias goes further: it offers practical, mindfulness-based training to help people actually unlearn bias. And it is the only book written from my perspective—shaped not only by decades of scholarship, but also by lived experience. As a gay, brown immigrant with Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu roots, an American lawyer, scientist, and lifelong meditation practitioner, I know both the pain of exclusion—including struggles with depression, anxiety, and even suicidality—and the possibility of healing.
My journey across cultures and continents, combined with my research and practice, gives me both the science and the story to guide this urgent work.