EP 117: Part 1: Integral theory and the pandemic | Diane Musho Hamilton

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. In this episode of the Radical Responsibility podcast, I'm going to speak with my longtime friend and colleague, Diane Musho Hamilton. This will be the first in a series of three episodes with Diane, who is an amazing Zen teacher, the co founder of Two Arrow Zen, and also a leader in the integral movement and a teacher of integral theory and integral practice. She's also an award winning mediation professional and just an extraordinary human being. So in this episode, the first of three, we'll talk about how meditation and mediation share the same purpose. To bring what is divided or in dispute into harmony. How working with our differences while discovering our fundamental unity and therefore being able to hold different multiple perspectives in crisis is the ultimate test why remaining in our chosen silos endangers the opportunity for cultural evolution and how crises may ultimately create a basis for a better human condition. So if you've ever been interested in integral theory or would like to learn more about this really big map approach that really honors every dimension of humanity, human thought, human experience, as well as consciousness and life altogether in A Theory of Everything, then jump right in and give this one a listen. Great to see you, Diane.

Great to see you too, Fleet. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's our pleasure. Thank you for taking time. I know we're all really busy and struggling to figure out how to continue our work in this crazy environment. So thank you very much for giving your time to this.

My pleasure.

I'd just like to say a little. Many of you are probably familiar with Diana and her work. Diane is a really innovative and award winning mediator and has a whole model called Integral Facilitation or Integral Facilitation. And also, I guess you do integral mediation probably as well, right? Yeah. And also a Zen teacher and has. Is it 10 directions Zen Center?

No, it's actually two arrows.

Two arrows.

Two arrows, 10 directions houses the facilitator program. And two arrows is my Zen center.

Okay, I was a little confused about that and I was looking at website, I thought I remembered something about two arrows and I saw 10 directions. Okay. And you, you have a center in Salt Lake and then you have a place out. Is it southwestern or southeastern Utah?

It's in south central Utah. It's sort of if you know the national parks.

It's the Red Rocks area.

Yeah. In between Zion to The west and Arches to the east is Little, the smallest national park, Capitol Reef, and I'm right there.

Really, really amazing. I've been to Zion and I was pretty blown away. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really something.

Yeah. And, Diane, your work as a Zen teacher and also you've been very involved in the integral movement and with integral spirituality and worked a lot with Ken Wilbur and also a facilitator of Gempo Roche. Big mind, big heart process.

I've been in the trenches.

Yeah, you've been in the trenches for a long time. And so we have some mutual connections. We're both Zen teachers. I've had a lifelong interest in integral work as well. And so I'm hopeful we can have a. Quite sure we can have a good conversation.

And we both studied in the Tibetan tradition originally, and Trungpa Rinpoche was.

That's right. You were at Naropa in, I think, 1984. Right?

Correct.

Yeah. So we share a lot of context. And here we are in the middle of this incredible situation. And, you know, the.

One of the favorite expressions I've been hearing from a lot of folks about this big mess we're in is like, it's really quite a shit show.

It certainly is that, but I don't.

Know why I find that relieving.

Well, you know, there's some humor in it and breaks through our seriousness and our use of language and so forth. I mean, actually, this is such an incredible. I've been. I watch CNN usually where I get some of my news anyway, and.

Yeah.

And even they've been loosening up there because they're so lost, their heads are spinning. And I've been expecting Anderson Cooper to.

Say shit show any day, any minute that's coming.

But any rate, nonetheless, I think that does the situation we're in a little bit of a disservice, or. It's certainly not the whole view because at the same time, we're going through a profoundly spiritual experience which could be a completely complete reordering of how we make meaning of our lives. And hopefully it's a huge wake up call. And of course, you know, those of us who have more privilege have the opportunity to reflect on this, and hopefully we are getting the wake up call and that we can really begin to write our relationship with the Earth and with each other and our fellow species and just really think about what are we doing here on this planet in new and different, more transformational, deeper ways.

Yes.

So I think that's the territory I'd like to explore with you. And if you wanted to bring it, you know, that the, the integral perspective, that big map four quadrant and multiple lines. First of all, that's really very helpful. I've been thinking about this in terms of my own personal experience. I've been trying to identify with others, thinking of this collective metacultural journey we're on. And then, you know, sometimes I'm even trying to kind of situate, as I watch the news, I'm trying to situate myself in the system, feeling all that breakdown, you know?

Yes, absolutely.

So just anywhere you'd like to go with that, we'll just kick it off and we'll go back and forth a little.

Alright, Fleet, well, let me respond to two things. First, I want to respond to, you know, not only is this a very challenging and disruptive time, which is more disturbing because of the illness and the.

Mortality rates and just what we know that people are experiencing in their families related to sickness and to death and to the attempt to care.

So it is challenging and disruptive and because it's global, because something like half of the people on the planet right now are in some sort of quarantine or lockdown and their movements are limited and they're in a certain way we're being forced and asked to turn inward. And so what do we mean by spiritual? I think is an important thing to kind of establish first of all that is that, you know, one of the way that Ken Wilber talks about spiritual and he says if you really examine spiritual literature, there's at least 14 different definitions in terms of what we mean. But one way to think about it is just what you said, which is matters of ultimate concern. What is it that we really most fundamentally care about and what is the purpose of our lives on this planet and how do we orient to ourselves, to each other and to our situation? And particularly if you have a view that there's something that transcends or.

Permeates, if you will, our relative condition, something that's not limited to the highs and lows, to illness and death, to whether we're making money or we're not making money, but there is a way in which our deepest nature is beyond those things. And so there is an opportunity from a spiritual perspective to use this in the service of that. And so the ability to turn inward and to do our practices, to engage communities of practice right now online around issues of ultimate concern and also resilience, which is what you're doing. And then I think another thing that we could add, and maybe I'm saying This slightly differently than you. You said, you know, what's our relationship to the environment, but maybe even just a challenge to our over reliance on the material and our impulse towards greed. I think human beings have actually seen the problem of aggression. We've seen the problem of war and fighting. It's not to say that everybody is in the same place about that, But a lot of the stability that the European continent enjoys came precisely because they endured the first and second World Wars. And they just know better than to keep doing that.

And there's a certain way that from a spiritual and a humanistic perspective, that that same challenge needs to be placed on the table in relationship to the way we amass and accrue wealth and materiality and how, as we know, just how unfair it is across the planet. So I guess that's another thing that I would put in that basket around a spiritual inquiry that we all can. Can take more seriously because we're quarantined or because we're in shelter, in place or lockdown, depending. My brother flies for FedEx. He's a pilot who's going back and forth to China. It's totally voluntary at this point. But he flew into China, was tested by the Chinese. One of his crew actually came up.

Positive for the virus. So they were immediately put in quarantine in China, retested. Again, it was ambiguous because the person who had tested positive then tested negative. And they were in this kind of bardo or they were in this limbo state in China as pilots. And they FedEx just decided to skip all that and basically flew a plane in and they came home without even going through immigration. And now he is literally in quarantine in a hotel, not able to leave his room right now. So what we mean by that, there can be a broad range, but for some people, they're literally limited to being able to go outside the door. So it's important to notice that and that that gives us a lot of time to contemplate and a lot of time to look inward and a lot of time to really evaluate where our deepest. What the matter of ultimate concern really is to us. So I really agree with you about that potential. And it's helpful to have online communities and then I'll talk about integral in a minute, but that was a mouthful, so let me take a break.

Okay. Well, your brother situation gives you a real personal window into it. And more and more, as this spreads, more and more of us, there are people we know that are being impacted really directly. Last night I was watching A special about the hospital ICUs. They literally spent a couple hours in an ICU and you hear the COVID nines going off and code reds and so forth. And I mean it was heartbreaking. It's such a charm ground and it's really.

So, you know, this conversation really happens in the context of tremendous pain and grief. And of course, you know, those of us who, as I said before, we have the privilege of being able to, you know, shut down at home and stay safe and try to add value online and do the things we're doing and hopefully, and a lot of people don't have that privilege, hopefully those of us who do are really doing the reflection that's going to shift something where we can contribute because a lot of us with more privilege also have more impact in terms of the way we've been using resources, the systems we've been participating in and so forth. So hopefully this is a really big wake up call. And I'm just curious what you think about the nature of. Obviously that's going to be an individual, collective, cultural, systemic phenomena. To whatever extent we do wake up or to whatever extent there's some kind of reactive mess that happens out of this. Interesting. You brought up the stability post world wars in Europe, maybe we learned something. But you know, those world wars happened after they'd been through the hundred years.

They've been through hell. Absolutely.

Whether we learn or not seems, you know, there's not certainty around that. But maybe you could talk about that big map perspective of what we're going to, where it could lead, what might be the leverage points that we could contribute to a movement that would be more transformed, healing and transformative.

Well, one of the things, one of the ways in which I was so. So I have been a practitioner of meditation and I've been a professional mediator for many, many years. And I always remind people that they're fundamentally the same activity, that meditation is really both the process of, you could say, bringing body, speech and mind into wholeness with one's environment, or discovering the inherent continuity of oneself to all things that's already there that we don't have to do anything about. Mediation is really the same thing. You know, we take disputing parties or people who have differences and then we look for their underlying commonalities and then we try to bring their awareness and attention into coherence with an agreement. There was a certain point in my upbringing, my upbringing, that's a funny thing to say. I guess it's my spiritual upbringing.

Yeah.

When I met Ken Wilbur and one of the things that Ken really helped me understand, I mean, he has a basic view of the way in which we do spiritual practice and also how we do our work in the world. And he said one of the things that we fail to do is we fail to really take advantage of the vast body of research that's been done on human developmental psychology, adult development. We tend to think in terms of child development, but we don't really think in terms of human development. And maybe more importantly, not just the development of the individual, but the development of the culture. Culture and how a culture evolves. So the issue that I think you're pointing to is in the same way that the Second World War gave rise, if you will, to a much greater sense of at least let me speak at least in the Western world, because that's where I'm located and that's what I tend to be more familiar with, is that there was suddenly a sense of the kind of boundarylessness of, you know, you could say the Second World War in some ways gave rise to the European Union.

Eventually a more world centric view and.

A more world centric view. And we also found that in that the civil rights movement in the States actually, you know, there had been Jim Crow and all the obstacles to true equality, and there was new breath in the civil rights movement, that the feminist movement emerged after the Second World War, that there was a great flowering of this aspiration towards equality that really needed to be met with a challenge to the ways in which we hold biases on our interior. But that calamity actually gave rise to some of the more recent movements in human culture to try to actually create more equity and more fairness around the globe and to represent everyone. The UN doesn't have much of a budget and it certainly doesn't have a military, so enforcement is really difficult. This is the first time humans really ever came together in that kind of way where there was a larger body than simply nation states and prior to that, kingdoms and fiefdoms and all of that. So I think what you're getting to is that while this may be difficult, and while there are certainly challenges to the economy, it may also create a basis for a greater flowering in terms of what's possible in the human experience, because that's what crisis does in the individual. Lots of us evolve until we're in our mid-20s and we have the same beliefs and we wear the clothes we did and we speak the lang that we did, and we are not terribly interested in that which is different or challenging to our worldview. And then suddenly a crisis hits. We get a divorce, we have an automobile accident, we're not able to compete in sports because we get an injury, one of our businesses fail and we're no longer able to do that. And we suddenly start contemplating these deeper questions and then all of a sudden there's another period of growth. So crisis and growth, we know in the Chinese the hexagram for crisis and opportunity is very similar. So I think you're just pointing us to the potential. If we engage our practice and one another in the way that has the most integrity and virtue, we may really see something come out of this that's good for the whole of humankind.

This is certainly the first time in modern history that the whole world or most of the world's been all focused on one thing and a common enemy, so to speak. In a sense, I mean I've often kind of, I don't know, joked, but amused I guess, that in the Middle east, if we're ever going to solve that problem, somebody, an outside portion coming in, attack and then maybe they would join together against a common enemy and get over their differences. Right? Yeah, because it's so embedded there. But you know, the whole world has this situation right now and you know, the only other times you can with modern media, we're actually experiencing it together. The only other ways this happens is huge sporting events, you know, or you know, in the west, the Oscars or something, you know. But here, here we're going through something which is really stress testing us at every possible level and we're going through it together. So how do we capitalize on that? I really enjoyed Rebel Wisdom's event yesterday and your presentation and Jamie Wheel's presentation. And I threw a question in the chat line that didn't get answered, but it was something. Well, how do we capitalize on this global experience we're having which could shift us to a more world centric because there's a danger getting pushed back in disruptions and collapse to a more ethnocentric view.

Yeah. How do we under stress that happens?

Yeah, to shift into a moral centric view and also then to move us in the direction of a shared resilient response rather than we get triggered in all the fear and survival based reactivity and the manipulation of demagogues and so forth. I mean what, what is it that's going to allow us to capitalize this and do it? Where, where are the leverage points, do you think?

Well, one of the things, let me just speak in Again in a. The form of integral theory. And I'll just point to four leverage points that I think are very important. So the first leverage point is how we work with our own awareness. And as you said, how do we cultivate individual resilience and responsiveness and how do we collectively create more antifragility, which is a kind of an important word at this point as well. So how are we working with our own mind, our own individual mind and are we engaging in meditation practice? Are we working with our emotional states? What exactly is our relationship to our own body and mind in this time? So that's an enormous leverage point because resilience, the human body is massively resilient. We have a very, very long history of dealing with humans are. It's in our hard drive to deal with difficulty. And so how are we relating with ourselves? The second thing would be just what sorts of practices and behaviors are we actually engaging in? So being aware of our own mind and our own system and taking a perspective on it and then engaging practices that are supportive. I even notice in myself right now the two practices that are most critical to me in terms of my own individual body are sitting meditation and exercise. It's just, they're just absolutely needed because I need to be able to move my body, maintain my energy levels. And.

The hormones and the positive hormones that result from exercise just create more ease in the system altogether then sitting meditation. I'm able to release and differentiate from my thoughts and become present to what's actually in the here and now. And there's always what we call self fulfilling joy available in a deep sitting practice. So those two are massively important now when I think about my relationship to others. And so we can talk about now the collective. There are two dimensions to the collective that we want to pay attention to. One is the cultural context that we're in. So there's a large cultural context of the globe. And as you pointed out, not only is this one of the first experiences that's worldwide in that way, we also have the Internet which actually allows us to communicate about the experience. So that is quite amazing. We're having a similar experience and we're also communicating about it in real time. That is incredible. So there's a global, global culture. Then we have kind of the national culture that we oriented to and our local cultures. You're on the east coast. I don't know what the impact of the virus is in your locale. You may not know what it is in mine, but we actually have access to that what's most important in my mind in terms of culture right now is that we tune in on those larger levels, but we make a very hard and fast decision around where we're receiving guidance and whose maturity levels actually, and truth telling actually appeal to us. So I'm on this call with you because I know your history, I know your practice, and I know your intention, and I know that the community that you're working with is a very deep and rigorous community that's oriented to awakening and also to service. So for me, that's what's going to happen is that's a leverage point. What choices are we making around who and how we receive guidance and the culture that we're actually embedding ourselves in for our fundamental viewpoint? Because you can find any viewpoint online, you can find any way to work with this, and you have to be yourself. It's a good thing to tune into other perspectives, but one needs to know where one's own heart and mind is. So that feels very important to me. And then the fourth area really has to do with these larger systems and how we're participating in these larger systems and how they're evolving and changing. And the first system that comes to my mind right now is healthcare. And you know, for a country as wealthy as ours not to be in able to. I mean, we're big and we're complex and they're, you know, we're polarized. So there are all those issues. But, you know, health care is like a big deal. So what is our commitment around health care and helping it evolve in a way that everybody benefits from it? What are the economic systems and how are they operating? Is it a time where we should be looking at universal income? Is it a time where we should be supporting businesses in order to stay in business and keep people employed? Like, what is our actual relationship to the economics and what are the ways in which we can contribute to more fairness in the culture at large? I know that you do a lot of work with the prisons and now I understand with probation and parole and court, the court system, which I have a lot of experience there as well. I haven't made myself available to any of that yet because I'm still looking for how to offer. So what are the big systems and what are the ways that we can contribute to transformation in those domains? And what do we really think about that? And are we taking the time to educate ourselves so that we can have a view that will help society move in a direction that's good for the whole and not Good for certain constituents and not for others. So our own interior awareness practice, our own behaviors and practices, our leverage points, the cultures in which we give our time, our energy, and our money to. And what are the big systems change that we want to see happening? And are we also supporting organizations who are committed to the kind of change that we have in mind? So those would be the four territories, I think, of leverage that are important.

Yeah, that's, that's a really helpful mapping and because it just, you know, unless we, you know, maps are just maps or they're conceptual, but they can be very helpful to us in kind of organizing our thinking and how to approach them, because otherwise it just seems so, so overwhelming.

Another integral perspective is that of lines of development. And the spiral dynamics model has been integrated into the integral world. And, and, you know, as we know, we've been in these culture wars for quite some time here in the west, especially in the U.S. we're in this modernist landscape of the modern individual and corporate progress in science and the battle between traditionalists on the one side and the postmodernists on the other side. And, you know, Ken's book, I think I'm always astounded more and more how prescient his book the Mean Green Mean was, because in my world, some people may be dealing with the mean traditionalists. I deal with the mean green meme all the time.

Yeah. Does your audience know what that means? Fleet, do you want to explain just in case anybody's new?

Yeah. You know, there's these, these waves of mimetic value and spiral dynamics that we move through individually, culturally, collectively, historically, over great vast spans of time and also in our individual lives. And, and they go from the individual to the collective. And it went from kind of subsistence level into, into tribal context, into, you know, kind of warring states, everyone for himself. The birth of ego, then back, you know, kind of nationalism brought some order back, and that's traditionalism. And then you had the birth of individual liberty and progress and pursuit of happiness again, which is modernism. And then the postmodern says, no, that's getting too individualistic. We need to focus on the inclusive. And, and the problem is each one of these mimetic values tends to feel they are right. Right. And so the, the, the banner of the green meme is inclusivity, except for those who don't agree with you. Agree.

Correct.

But the important thing is that's all considered first tier thinking. And it's not demon. It's not bad. It's just evolutionary states. And there's wisdom in all of it. But when you can make the shift into what's called second tier thinking and truly have an integral perspective and see the best in all of that and begin to brighten up the means to bring the best forward in each meme to a bigger perspective. So from that perspective, there is an opportunity here, possibly, I don't know, to shift more people into that second tier thinking, integral view, which personally I think is the major hope for humanity generally. So any thoughts you have about that?

Well, that was a very, if I can use the expression, kind of a down and dirty explanation of the evolution of human culture.

Mostly down and dirty.

Yeah, down and dirty. So keep in mind, everybody, this is, this is a model of cultural development. It may be useful to you, it may not. But basically what Fleet is pointing to is that in the course of our collective evolution that we tend to move through certain sets of values and belief systems that are pretty consistent. And then conditions come along and we move out of those particular sets of values and into new ones. And if you think about your own life as a person who's listening right now, you can think for a moment about, you know, the part of you that's a bit of a warlord and doesn't particularly want to follow the rules and who doesn't want to be told what to do. And you're going to go ahead and take risks and drive your car when you're not supposed to and go out and do what you think is right, and you're just not going to be held by these larger kind of rules that are coming down on you. That's the, the sort of, call it red and spiral dynamics, or we can call it the raw power stage of human development. You're just going to do your own thing in spite of everybody else. And then human culture basically disciplines that and brings people because people need order and people need predictability and people need, you know, the churches emerged and this, this whole sense that we could do things in a coherent fashion and not just be warring and pushing each other around through raw power engagement. So then you get, you get the birth of the nation state, you get priests and leaders in hierarchical positions, you get the Ten Commandments, you get the Buddhist precepts, you get all this order coming into human culture about 5,000 years ago. And that traditional stabilizing force is probably still today the most stabilizing thing around the globe. The churches matter. Knowing who's coming to your weddings and funerals matters. Knowing what the rules are matters. And so from a traditional perspective if your governor or your local leader says to you, stay in your home, there's no doubt in your mind that that's what you're going to do, because that's the part of you that knows how to follow the rules. And then we have the modernist, you know, independence coming forward. The business community, we call it strive, drive from the spiral dynamics perspective, where basically we actually have the opportunity to see what we can accomplish and achieve without necessarily the. You could think about the scientists, think about the early Isaac Newton or think about Galileo. They had to break away from the tradition of the Church in order to develop science and to see things on their own terms. And that's precisely what happens in Modernism. Postmodernism is a reaction to those two earlier stages where all of a sudden subjectivity becomes important again, whereas objectivity is so important in Modernism. Subjectivity, we call it the sensitive self. All the marginalized voices need to be. Be brought to the table. The suffering of all beings needs to be acknowledged. Tremendous emphasis on inclusion, tremendous emphasis on healing, you could say feminine values of listening, receptivity, availability, not pushing through a goal, not trying to get to something the way we do at Modernism, but actually allowing for more inclusion. But as Fleet said, that particular view actually becomes oppressive in its own way, because anyone who doesn't see the world that way is not included. And so those. The reason those are described, as I understand it, as first tier, is because for each of those memes, the truth of that meme is exclusive. And what second tier thinking and second tier understanding is is the ability to see the true and partial nature of each one of those memes. And we use the expression in development of transcendence include. And so an integral perspective is actually one in which you can look at the warlord and think, you know, busting out is a great thing in just the right moment. You can look at traditionalism and say, coming together and remaining obedient, loyal and dutiful is really important, or Modernism. What does empiricism have to say about this? What is. What are the doctors telling us? What are the epidemiologists telling us? Can we just allow empiric truth and science to have its place and quit being political about it? And then also the sensitivity of pluralism, of the sensitive self. What is the actual impact on people of color? How is power and privilege being used at this time? Who needs to be heard that has not been listened to heretofore? What are the ways that we're not extending enough to undocumented workers or people who may be adversely affected because of their position in society. So you can see how all of these together create this enormous gestalt for a kind of responsiveness. But you have to be able to hold multiple perspectives. And that is actually a hallmark in human development. It doesn't come easily, it is hard fought. And you'll just check with yourself people who are listening. You know, you've probably been in lots of conversations and how many times have you allowed for there actually to be multiple truths coexisting at the same moment in an atmosphere of relaxation, listening. And that's the test for integralists. Can you actually allow these multiple points of view to coexist and then still privilege what's most important to you? So that was a long winded way of re saying what you already said.

Well, thank you for a much less down and dirty, much more nuanced, much more elegant description. I'm not sure about that, but very helpful. And you know, it's. Right now I would say it's probably in some ways these are broad generalizations, but it's the traditionalists that'll keep us, help us not lose faith in this situation.

Absolutely.

The modernists are going to save our butt with a vaccine or what?

And treatment. Treatment, vaccine. Absolutely.

And you know, it's a green meme that's going to build community and bring us together.

Yes.

But then the question is what do we do? Right. And so you know, that ability to transcend and include. So going back to that, the four quadrant map you referenced before and those leverage points, that of our interior individual, of our behaviors, the way we act, the way we show up in the world of our collective sense making and meticultural journey that we're on and then the system. So, you know, how can all of us or how can do our own work, but also engage in a world that we're inviting others to transcend and include at whatever level they're in, so that we all can just kind of brighten up the memes and move forward into a more, hopefully a more integral way of actually transforming from this crisis rather than devolving, which I think is certainly possible.

Yeah, it is possible. You know, I talked about my brother a moment ago and it was, it's kind of interesting because he, he basically is, you know, we don't want to sort of. This is a very loose description because everybody's unique and in some ways we can't really stereotype people. My brother's very world centric. He flies internationally all the time for FedEx and he was a United pilot before that, and he's militarily trained, so he has a deeply traditional core, but he also has this modernist sensibility and a lot of sophistication. And he's a global person. And coming back from China, I heard him say something that was a little us and them and kind of unusual, and he's just like, we just have to stop doing business with Chinese. You know, he just. I just felt his traditionalism kind of come up in a way that I never saw it before. And so I'm kind of said to him, tell me more about that. And is that really possible at this time? I mean, if we all sort of like, collapse back into the nation state, isn't that regressive? And how do we actually move forward? And I'm not a diplomat and I'm not a businessman, I'm not an executive, like at Nike, who's dealing with, you know, the Chinese government and Chinese sensibilities all the time. But I think that the challenge for people like you and me is to actually be able to hold practice and engagement. That includes questions that haven't been typically on our plate. So questions about health care, questions about the economy, questions about finance, like actually educating ourselves. You're on the rebel wisdom call. So that we can support people in different domains besides their interior, besides our local sanghas. But the big systems, I think, is where we start to be intimidated. And we have political views. You know, maybe there are people on the call that are in the state supporters of Bernie, or maybe they like the conservative and kindness of Biden, or maybe they just think, damn it, you know, I still want to. I want to try this thing with Trump out. But there's a way that we have to. We have to maybe, as leaders, start to be able to engage the bigger question of cultural evolution. And so we're going to have to educate ourselves, and we're going to have to be willing to be in conversations and in training and in education that maybe we formally didn't avail ourselves to. In other words, that's an integral move. Not to just be relegated to spiritual practice or relegated to social action, but to be able to engage in a bigger way than we have to date. I know I feel challenged by that, and I feel I have to be able to do that, that I no longer can remain in my silo and be comfortable there, that I have to start to participate in a bigger picture, and I feel challenged by it when I listen to Jamie. Jamie's so fluid. Jamie Wheal, he's so fluid. Or Daniel Schmachtenberger, when you listen to those people, or Ken, for that matter, and the other women, of course, who are engaged in these questions, I just feel a little inept in relationship to them. It's like, I know how to teach people to meditate and listen to each other, but do I really know what's best when it comes to the economy? Well, maybe it's time for me to learn. So that would be one thing I would say.

I think that's a great message, Diane, because I think we all need to take more responsibility. You know, we tend to focus in our area and abdicate a lot of authority and power to those people will take care of that big system stuff, right? And well, we see how that's working out, right. For better or worse. And you know, actually I was working on evolving a potential training that we might start offering here called Engaged Citizenship.

Great idea.

That's one thing where the green meme, I think, has a lot to offer in terms of, you know, act locally, get in community, become active and create community with others. But then I think, can we do that with more of an integral perspective and really think about these things? I mean, we are interestingly in a landscape where on the other side of this there could be one global superpower and it won't be the United States, it'll probably be China. So what would that look like? Is that inevitable as there are things our leaders could do more wisely to keep a more balanced geopolitical landscape or, you know, where are we with all that now? Most of us are going to have the opportunity to get up there in the decision making processes, but we can still be, you know, thinking about it or at least even in terms of having a greater voice in our healthcare systems and the rest of it. And you know, to get out and boat at the very least, you know, I meant the low numbers of people that actually go out and exercise this ability we have to boat, you know, so. So I think we have to re embrace our civic responsibility at a new level.

I absolutely agree with you about that. And I think to some degree my generation, because we lived in the affluence of the post Second World War in a certain way our civics classes didn't really take a hold very well. It's like in some ways I think maybe those of you on the many of you on the call feel like they did, but I don't. I was only working through the courts that I started contemplating how the systems of government actually really interact and Work with one another to the balance of power, what the respective responsibilities of the three branches are and how those things work. What the citizens, what does it mean to be civically engaged? And it could be a great course to have a jurist and a judge or to have someone who does grassroots organizing and political strategy and, you know, what can we do? How do we become more active citizens at this point? Because an integralist is a person whose spiritual life is not separate from them, from their engagement. You know, there's a long history of contemplatives who only contemplate and activists and people engaged in the world who are only engaged. And now that's just not satisfying. We just simply want to be able to do both. And it requires more of us, I feel, you know, sometimes it makes me want to go have a nap.

Well, we have to do self care as well. You know, one thing I like about listening to Jamie Wheal on various podcasts and conversations, he's definitely about self sufficiency and doing, you know, being prepared if things get really bad. Right. And I think we all need to be thinking about that. I mean, my partner Sophie and I are doing a lot. We got a wood stove recently, we're going solar, we're putting in a garden. We're doing lots of things to become more self sufficient here. And that doesn't mean we can just withdraw into, you know, at the same time, I think we have to engage with each other and, and, you know, so the how, the how of that we'll each have to figure out. But I think, you know, you, you've given us a lot of ways to think about it and ways to imagine into it and maybe, you know, maybe that's something we could collaborate on in the future. Some kind of engaged citizenship.

I'd love that.

Something that would, that'd be great. That'd be beautiful. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. Absolutely.

Well, thank you. This has been wonderful. And I would like to invite you to lead us in a brief, you know, resilience enhancing practice or meditation practice of your choice.

I was, I was laughing with my assistant this morning because I was saying, help me think about what a good resilience practice is. And the first thing that came to my mind was just shaking your fist at the heavens.

Just shake your fist. I remember there was a time when I was. My son who has down syndrome was. I had taken him down to the mall and he was about 10 and his stepsister was about 10 and she, she had him at the mall for about an hour. So I went to pick him up because he was going somewhere and she was staying. And he was furious. He was just furious because the world was not. She, his stepsister was not meeting his desire and he wanted some fries and she wouldn't buy him any. And so he was just stomping his feet and furious. And I picked him up and just as I was pulling away, he leaned out the back window and like literally to his waist and he had his fist and he shook it at her and he said, you're gonna pay.

So a good fist shaking once in a while is a good resilience exercise. Yeah. So the other exercise that I think it would be really important.

Is an exercise of simple kind of feeling inclusiveness. And sometimes my experience in the context I work in is that people want to be able to feel and do feel, but there's some sort of sense that what we feel is wrong or incorrect because it's unpleasant and it feels like an obstacle in the body. So I'd like everybody just to take an upright posture for just a moment.

And I always like to just rock a little bit side to side on my sits bones and feel where the balance in my abdomen is and just a little bit of back and forth.

And if you'd like to make a circular motion with letting the breath move into the belly and just feel the buoyancy your form in this moment and then come to stillness.

Allow yourself to notice your breath without manipulating it.

And I'm going to invite you to let yourself feel very fully any sensation that is in your body right now. And we'll just take a moment to let you scan and feel sensation.

Perhaps you're noticing movement in the body.

There could be swirling sensations or heat.

There could be throbbing, there could be tension. Just whatever it is, allow yourself to feel and include all sensation.

Just breathe naturally and create a big open space for everything that is occurring in the feeling sensation, the feeling domain to be included.

We're going to just use cognition for a moment. If you could put one word on all these sensations, what is that one word?

I notice in myself that one is a little bit insufficient. So one or two.

So I am feeling.

I want you to ask the question now to yourself, what is right about this feeling?

What is true about this feeling?

And now as you continue to sit upright, breathing naturally.

Bring your attention from the feeling domain to awareness itself.

Identify as an open field of awareness.

Which is available.

Vast.

Non judging.

Open.

And very durable.

And allow whatever feeling is present to simply reside in this open, boundless space of awareness.

Your responses to the world are correct and can be worked with. And your true resilience is beyond self identity.

And is beyond all relative conditions.

Thank you for this opportunity to be on the call. You can open your eyes fleet. Thank you very much. And I really encourage everyone to practice. It's a time of practice. And I want to really thank you for letting me be here today.

Appreciate it so much, Diane. And I think the last thing you said is really the advice coming from a Zen teacher. This is, you know, practice is always the foundation of our resilience in our life and in this time, more so than ever. So any of us that have access to any kind of reflective practice, mindfulness practice, contemplative practice, any way of just being still and being present, I think it's really a time to give attention to that. So thank you so much. Really a pleasure to be with you today.

Thank you too. I hope we get to engage further.

Yeah. Bye. Bye.

Bye, everybody.

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