EP 119: Part 3: Integral theory and "the new normal" | 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. In this episode of the Radical Responsibility podcast, I'm having my third in a series of three conversations with the extraordinary Zen teacher and integral theorist, Diane Mushel Hamilton. Diane is an extraordinary practitioner of integral work, an award winning mediator, and a major thought leader in the integration of integral work, Zen spiritual practice, and really human evolution. So in this episode we talked about how to manage the new normal that we find ourselves in with this extreme polarization and divisiveness, the degradation of our civil conduct, and how even in the midst of all that, there is still hope. We talked about the false sense of safety that we experience in separateness and how actually commonality and belonging are soothing to the nervous system. We also spoke about how cultivating the right kind of meaning making and having a sense of purpose in our lives can make us more resilient. So another extraordinary conversation with my good friend, Diane Musho Hamilton. Have a listen.

And how are you, Diane?

I'm really good, thank you, Fleet.

I'm really happy to be here with you.

Oh, it's great to have you here. And I love your background. Between being a Zen teacher and an incredible mediator and also being.

A practitioner and teacher of integral theory is such a nice sweet spot for having this, this discussion. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio with our audience and then we'll get started, okay?

Okay, sounds good.

So Diane was the first director of the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution for the Utah Judiciary, where she established mediation programs throughout the court system. She has mediated a broad range of disputes and transactions, including divorces, probate employment contracts, multiparty negotiations. She works with consummates in a variety of settings, including private industry, governmental agencies, and nonprofit, and of course, with individuals. She is well known as an innovator in dialogues, especially conversations about culture, religion, race and gender relations. She is a recipient of several prestigious awards for her work in this area, including the Peter W. Billings Award from the Utah State Bar, the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeper Award, the Judicial Administration Award, and Friend of the Court, and Most recently, the 2016 Peacemaker Award from Brigham Young University center for Conflict Resolution. Diane has been a practitioner of meditation for over 35 years. Diane began her studies at Naropa University in 1983 with Chogyam Fungkhramshe and became a Zen student in 1997. In 2003, she received ordination as a Zen monk with her husband, Michael Zimmerman, and received Dharma transmission from Gempo Roshi in 2006. For her, Zen practice is a fundamental commitment to experiencing reality as it is beautiful, ungraspable, and seamless. Diane facilitates Big Mind, Big Heart, a process developed to help elicit the insights of Zen in Western audiences. Diane is considered a pioneer in articulating and applying the insights of an integral life practice based on the work of ken Wilber. Since 2004, she has worked with Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute in Denver, Colorado. Dan co founded Two Arrows, a center for Sen study and practice in Salt Lake City and Torrey, Utah, with her husband, Michael Mugaku Zimmerman. She is executive director of Two Hours Zen and co founder of the Integral Facilitator, a training program oriented to personal development and advanced facilitator skills. Diane is the author of Everything is Workable, A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution, and the Zen of you and Me, A Guide to Getting Along With Just About Anyone. Her next book, or no, your book that's now out is.

Compassionate Conversations, how to Speak and Listen from the Heart. And that is. That is out already. Right. And that was authored with Gabriel Wilson and Kimberly Lowe.

Good friends and good colleagues.

Okay, well, let's dive into the conversation.

So.

Once again, we've been having these conversations for a while, and it's been a challenging time for a while now. Once again, this has been a very challenging year. I think just in the past year, we saw both the delta variant arise and now Omicron. Right. With the pandemic. And we all kind of hope this is going to be the final way, but who knows? But it's been a very challenging year on so many fronts. Just, you know, things seem to be in dissolution on so many fronts and so much divisiveness and polarization and conflict and just been a tough year for a lot of us. And I know you've had some losses in your life, and I'm just curious, to begin with, what's the year been like for you and your community? And what are you discovering? What are you learning? How are you surviving? What's going on for you? Diane?

Yeah, well, the pandemic is the main feature for me of this year and then also the previous year. I would say the novelty of the pandemic last year was part of it, where the fatigue is more present this year. And I was telling you a few minutes ago that my mother.

Who was 85, she had long Hauler syndrome and eventually died of cardiac arrest, which I think was due to her having Covid, because quite a few people who have long haulers have inflammation around the heart. So losing her was part of the pandemic for me. And then my nephew, who had been clean and then relapsed, he was a heroin addict.

Because he got Covid. And so they put him in a special place out of the recovery center where he was. And then he just didn't transition well out of that. So then he probably OD'd from fentanyl use. So that's another feature of our culture. We're concerned, of course, with all the implications of the pandemic, but we also have this incredible substance abuse problem in the background, and not just the number of overdoses, but we're always also seeing such an uptick in suicides. Generally, there's a mental health issue that's caused by the pandemic but exacerbated by the pandemic, but I think is also something we have to be concerned with as well. There's a lot to be concerned with. And like everyone, I feel like I'm.

Doing my best to find ways to.

I mean, for me, it has a lot to do with practice, spiritual practice, with teaching, and also just applying so much of what I feel like I've been gifted and receiving over the last 40 years of my life, originally from my parents, but then in the Buddhist tradition, which you and I share. And so how to apply this incredible amount of teaching and wisdom that I've received and finding that, in fact, it is really supportive to what's happening, at least for me personally, and also, I think, to my sangha and our students, we give each other a lot of support through the practice.

And how is your community doing in general? How do you. Do you feel? There's a. That obviously it's a community that's organized around practice, meditation, and Zen practice. So is that giving it a certain resilience to come through this time?

Yes, I think so. I think that there's a. There's a kind of a. You know, there's a.

This image that we use a lot of a pillar, the three pillars of Zen pillar, the sense of something really sturdy that can kind of hold us up. And so the sense of the practice is actually giving us tremendous. Well, we use the language of refuge or sanctuary as well. So I think that it has been working in that way. And within that, we have people who.

Are struggling as parents, who work in the health care system and are struggling because of the overwhelm in the healthcare system, people who are working on the environmental crisis, and because of that, some of the flooding that happened in Vancouver, I have quite a number of students there and just very real in relationship to the destabilization of the climate. So there's just. Everybody's dealing with a heightened sense of.

Stress, I would say, certain kind of pressure, maybe uncertainty around what the future is actually going to bring and finding some refuge in the practice and in the community.

Yeah, you know, we discussed. We've discussed this before, but if you kind of look into any of the great contemplative traditions and whether it's in Buddhism, different branches of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and a lot of traditions have, you know, deep as well as indigenous traditions, you know, and you find these great yogis, great teachers, avatars, shamans, so forth. You know, most of them have done dealt with tremendous adversity in their lives and they almost always point to that, you know, this is what we're practicing for. And actually it's only in those times that you can really, in some ways, really, really evolve deeply. And I think it's easy to forget that we kind of want things to just be okay. Right. And things, maybe things seem okay for a while, you get kind of used to that and, you know, and then we have this sense of entitlement that the world's not going to be, you know, in total breakdown.

Yeah, but, you know, these are the times that all the great visionaries point to that we were practicing to show up in.

Yeah, that's right. I was just telling you about the documentary I watched about Quincy Jones and just how growing up on the south side of Chicago, very intense, violent gang atmosphere, and then having a mother who was unstable and he was actually taken away when he was very young. And then walking into a. Into a church and seeing a piano and sitting down at the piano and literally having the overwhelming sensation that the piano would save his life. And.

Now when I listen to him after, you know, just, you know, every single era of music, you know, that he's moved through, I think he's in his 90s now and just. Just talking about, you know, the having this love and having this incredible creative power and then just it all culminates in and helping young artists, like the way he helped Michael Jackson and supporting the rappers to get along with each other and then working for, you know, world peace, like he just has the whole big picture that any, any benefit that we receive is to be used whatever time we happen to be in for the benefit of others. And, you know, that's one of the things that our traditions really help us see is that, you know, anything we've received that's a value to somehow find.

A way to share it.

Yeah, it's so helpful to have something that's basically like a North Star in our life, you know, whatever that is. A value of principle or meditation practice, our spiritual tradition, for Quincy Jones, the music, whatever it might be incredibly important. I think it's. It may be really challenging for. For people to discover that these days and young people, because so many of our institutions are in breakdown and a lot of the traditional sources of finding that. So it's kind of like everybody really has to find it on their own these days, almost.

Yeah, that's right.

And I also feel that there's a gap. You know, there's a. There's a gap in that a lot of traditional religion has, you know, been supplanted by kind of a secular, materialist view worldview, which has its own. Own set of values and, you know, fairness and equity and treating people well and, you know, giving everyone the vote. Those kinds of things are super important. But unfortunately, I think the ethical training that we received in our tradition and that the. The religious world has largely been responsible for teaching us about ethics, about compassion, about a deeper connectedness to life, connecting to something bigger. And I sometimes worry that the secular world only leaves us with a vision of a certain kind of success. And so it will fall short in times like these, where we need a deeper, more durable, indestructible relationship to being itself, you might say. And then, you know, how do we comport ourselves? How do we treat others? How do we. What is it we offer in a time when we look around and don't find the kind of stability and possibility in some ways that we've experienced in the past? So I do have a concern about that. Just that that transition from maybe traditional culture through a kind of secular modernism. We're left a little bit without that kind of ethical training, in some ways.

Absolutely. And I want to circle back to that point in just a minute, for sure.

First, I'd like to continue just setting the context for our conversation and kind of what's happening right now for all of us. The unifying factor, which is the pandemic, is one of the main ones, but we really have no idea where this is going. We're all hoping that Omicron is the final wave, but we don't really know. And, And. But you hear a lot of talk about A new normal, if that becomes an endemic. And then how severe? Is it like the flu or is it more serious than the flu? But still we're kind of learning to live with it and do masks. Are we always going to be wearing masks? In some places. But there's so many other things going on in society that we're incredibly adaptive as human beings and we just kind of get used to stuff and tolerate stuff. Adaptive more in a negative sense almost. I mean, it can be positive, but. So, you know, I wonder if that I. If you see some kind of new normal emerging or if that term even resonates with you. We hear that a lot. And you know, for better or worse, whether that's good or bad, you know, you know, sometimes I feel like we're continually lowering our expectations for what's, what's possible. And even in terms of, you know, having some kind of relatively cohesive society that we all feel we're part of. Even.

So I'm just curious of what you think about that. Whether you see some sense of a new normal arising that we're going to have to deal with rather than wishing we could go back to something that was before or whether you see this as more of a transition or. I'm just curious where you think we are.

Well.

I mean, it depends on, of course, what part of my experience and the culture that I'm looking at. But I think the thing that maybe troubled by is that, you know, the degradation in kind of our civil conduct and the polarization that you talk about, the ways in which we seem to be further and further apart. And I do tend to believe that a lot of that is substantiated and fed by the Internet because it used to be that we have a memory of being able to turn on the Evening news channels 2, 4, 5, and getting something of a consistent message around what was happening in the world. That's not to say that it wasn't distorted or it didn't have, you know, its own self interest, but there was some way in which we, we seem to be.

More oriented towards a third person empiric perspective. Whereas now all of our news channels are in a certain way, you could say they're so informed by an agenda and.

You know, and all these subcultures find each other. And so now there's that, you're right, there just isn't a coherent discourse. And it's, it's. But I mean, I think in terms of politics, I sort of feel more that we kind of grew our way into this. This is an expression that Steve McIntosh uses. He says we grew our way into it and we'll grow our way out of it. It's almost like the.

Postmodern deconstruction of all the modernist assumptions that we used to be able to agree on. Those are kind of all being fragmented, but I believe we'll find our way through over time. But I think that the pressures on the system itself, on the Earth itself, and the population growth and changes we're seeing in the climate and extreme storms, that probably is a bigger source of concern for me. What do you think?

Well, that's, you're going, you're getting right into the heart of my concerns. Today our focus on the summit is on systems and how do we create resilient systems. And it seems that many of our systems on many levels are really in breakdown. The pandemic showed how non resilient or unresilient our medical system was with no backup. I mean, things are within a for profit system, things are optimized for efficiency and it's not efficient to spend a lot of money on backup. Right. So we saw how that, how quickly we're at the edge of our or beyond our capacities and resources. But you know, you were pointing to this, this breakdown in our information ecology and it was a time like you turn on the evening news and you could get some ed. Now of course it was within a bandwidth of what's acceptable in the mainstream, but it wasn't spun the way it's spun today. Right. I mean it was, it was, sure there were some distortions and, but it wasn't just this completely politicized thing that we have today. And you know, now we're in the area of the post truth era, the emergence of Donald Trump and that whole thing and fake news and you know, it's just like information has just become so politicized and weaponized you don't know what to believe. And there's whole huge swaths of the population that stay in a particular bubble where they're getting really patently distorted, manipulated information and believing it. Right. And then a lot of us, we don't know where to go for our sources of information. And to me, the real danger of this, I mean it would be one thing if it's just the political scene is crazy and it's divisive and you could just kind of ignore it. But we have some real issues we need to address. The climate emergency paramount among them, but also just all that. The other side effects of that are social breakdown, which leads to, you know, political breakdown and could lead to even civil wars and so forth. I mean, we, we've, we've enjoyed a bubble of relative stability in the west for so long. We don't realize how there's other countries in the world where things are changing on a dime and coup d' etats and civil wars and chaos. Right. And, and you know, I, I, I won't be, remember her name, I don't think. But there's, there's someone, there's a scholar who's done a lot of research, a woman who's done a lot of research on, all over the world on civil wars in current, you know, real time, like what are the antecedents of a civil war? And she says all the conditions are there for one here, which seems kind of alarmist and a bit hard even for me, a bit of a stretch. But certainly I don't think we can depend on the stability we've had in the past. So there's so many alarming signs. But to me, what really brings home the urgency is if we don't find some way to come together and find the social cohesion and political will to act on climate change, all the science is saying we're going to, we're going to drift through this window of time when we have something to do about it without getting anything done. And so, you know, that's why I have a particular concern of how, how can we find.

Some, you know, you're familiar with Daniel Smockenberger's work, the work of the Consilience project and others are trying to develop a more trustworthy signal or something and develop some way of doing that in kind of an open, open system, open source kind of with a lot of people contributing to it. And it's not, you can't manipulate it and it's not driven by profit and hopefully get, you know, but that's a long project. I'm not sure where they are with it, but, but we need some kind of signal that we can, or something we can start grab, gathering some swath of the population around that wants to remain reasonable and wants to remain connected and wants to be able to do something about our situation on this planet. And how do we do that? Do you have any ideas about how we might make progress there? Because right now it just seems like the extremes, I mean, even you were mentioning, you know, what's happening with the breakdown of our traditional religions and so forth. And I listened to.

One of our friend and colleague Ellie Byner and his David Fuller, that they do rebel Wisdom and they had a really interesting piece just recently about.

These kind of pseudo religious movements arising. And you know, Ali was pointing out he thinks we're in a new age of religion. I don't know if I quite agree with that. I tend to think we're in the throes of the final death throes and stages of postmodernity that's leading in us into this kind of nihilistic materialism where there isn't really anything anybody had on. So of course you're seeing these more cult like things arising like Qanon on the right and you know, some of the extremes of wokeism is pretty pseudo religious like as well. And so, you know, how do we bring enough people back to some reasonability and find a way forward? Do you have any ideas? It's a small project.

Let me, let me.

I need to just, you know, presence my, myself and my role because I'm, I'm not, I mean I'm informed by sociology and I'm informed by, you know, the current kind of commentary on what's happening in our world and I'm informed by philosophy. But fundamentally I'm a practitioner. I'm a practitioner of meditation and I've been a practitioner of the Buddhist view for many, many years. And I think that my home base is really there. So for me it's trusting to some degree that you know, in basic goodness, if you could say, and also in the history of sanity and that there is a tremendous amount of sanity in the world even now as we speak. And that you know, in some ways we are experiencing stress and change and certain kinds of pressure that we may not come back from. But the beautiful thing about being a practitioner is that the practice is the practice regardless of the conditions. You know, in the sense for us, you know, discovering what we might kind are, might call our indestructible nature or Buddha nature, basic goodness. You know, maybe it's Christ consciousness if you're Christian. You know, I don't know what's at the heart of it all, but the cultivation of that is, you know, is possible in all conditions. I was always very moved by stories of the rabbis, you know, during the Holocaust who continued to teach ethics in the camps. You know, I remember the story of one person saying that they came out of, they looked around and saw what hate can do, could do and it can, and they committed to love. And I think that that's a really, really simple, very immediate and straightforward way to relate to our challenges and that the human heart is the most indestructible thing we have. And so how can we cultivate the heart and how do we use it to strengthen the systems? You and I both have quite a lot of experience in the justice system. I was more in the domain of alternative dispute resolution and working with lawyers and judges around how to minimize the adversarial experience and the cost of the judiciary and do our own problem solving. And you've worked far more in criminal justice. But I mean, I used to just, when I was working in the system, just kind of be touched that every single day those guys were showing up, those judges and prosecutors and probation officers. You know, we can stand back and criticize the system, but it's one of the most evolved legal systems on the planet, has tremendous shortcomings. There's tremendous amount of work to be done, but there's also an incredible amount of good intention that goes on there every day. And so for me, it has to do with recognizing the basic goodness in my own interior and then seeing the ways in which, even in this moment, there's a tremendous amount of goodness going on and supporting that and just continuing to work towards it. Regardless of how bad things get, it doesn't change. I kind of come from that practitioner perspective.

Yeah. Extremely helpful. I think it's really important to remember at all times that there's a tremendous amount of good going on in the world and a lot of sanity. And, you know, I like Steven Pinker's work in that way. And there's been some others pointing, if you really look, you know, we've made a lot of progress. We are making a lot of progress, and we still have really challenging. We have huge challenges.

Yes.

But with this kind of. It feels like we need some kind of. Absolutely, you're right. There's a lot of sanity. There's a lot of progressive thinking. There's a lot of good people doing good work. You know, the mainstream mindfulness movement has brought, you know, a lot of the benefits of meditation and mindfulness from various spiritual traditions into the mainstream. So there's a lot of good things going on. And it seems like what we're lacking.

And maybe that's not possible, but some kind of vehicle or some commons to be an expression of that. So all those people with this, you know, shared sense of sanity have some sense of belonging to something or to, you know, that maybe it was particular dominant religion in a particular country before it was this or that or. Or even America. I think in our country, us, even apart from religion, had a shared sense of being an American before, which is almost completely gone. Right. And so, you know, there, I think there is a huge swath of people in this country and around the world. But speaking of our direct experience here in the US And North America of people, a lot of sanity, a lot of good work being done, but, but it's hard to feel like we're part of an identifiable movement or a commons or something and all the noise is coming from the extreme. So.

And you know, it would seem like the, the modern alternative is the Internet, but the Internet doesn't, you know, serve that purpose. It's exactly the opposite. Right, right.

Not yet. Yeah, well, we, you know, as a, as a, both within my Zen study and practice in the domain of meditation, but also in conflict resolution. You know, I really, one of the first things I do when I teach and work with mediators is teach them about the experience of sameness when we feel the same. You talked about commonality. We feel the same as.

We belong.

What happens in the nervous system and how soothing it is to the nervous system to feel like you belong, which is part of the reason that we cling so tightly sometimes to ideology, is because we need that sensation that we belong, that we're a part of.

I think that the Internet, the press, postmodernism, the difference is exciting to the nervous system. So as soon as we experience some kind of a difference, let's say it's a difference of opinion, all of a sudden we become slightly more elevated. And as soon as that difference starts to register in the body as a threat, then we literally move into fight or flight. So one of the things that we know is that stories that talk about conflict or difference are much more compelling to our attention than ones that talk about harmony and togetherness. It just is one of the built in problems that we have to deal with because excitement will catch our attention, because we're much more hardwired to pick up threat. Even though we love the sensation of belonging and comfort and connectedness and ultimately oneness, that's much more soothing to us. We're on the lookout for anything that threatens us. So part of the challenge becomes to, you know, how is it that we can help people understand that we need to cultivate our belonging and togetherness as much as we need to identify our differences and talk about those and the problem of those. So from my perspective, there's way over fascination right now with difference and a downplaying of what we have in common.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. You're referencing.

Oh, in the book, my son has down syndrome and he has my. He is particularly fascinated by what we have in common. And so he'll constantly make. He'll say, like you and.

Tony, who's my ex husband, both love the Wicked.

Witch of the West.

That's what you have in common. Or he'll say, uncle Rick and so. And so love to golf. That's what they have in common. Like he pays attention to it all the time and he talks about it. And it's interesting to me that he's the one person I know that really pays attention to what we have in common. And I think that's part of the problem. So we don't notice and pay attention to what we haven't come. It's almost like it's cliched or sentimental or tried or so obvious it's not worth paying attention to.

Absolutely. And I think you're really honing in on something here and how we can somehow reanimate that and take it to scale and provide vehicles for it and take it to scale. I mean, I find myself, I think I've always had that predilection to move towards the common and appreciate that and see that. And yet I found myself in the last few years being pulled into my own sense of difference and separation.

With everyone. And you were talking about the criminal justice system.

I do a lot of work with corrections, probation and parole and law enforcement and other first responders. And throughout the period of the demonstrations and other disturbances following the George Floyd murder and the whole upsurge with the Black Lives Matter movement and all of that, I'm on weekly calls with law enforcement as they're going through that and they're going through all the stresses of the pandemic.

And these are really good, well intentioned, courageous people showing up and putting their own lives at risk day after day after day. And of course there are problems in law enforcement and there's problems in law enforcement culture and there's a lot of law enforcement leaders trying to change that. But, but you know, we lose sight of the fact that, that the vast majority of people out there in the world are getting up every day and showing up and taking care of their families and doing their jobs and taking care of things and, and somehow we just keep losing sight of that and, and somehow how we can come back to seeing, you know, our shared humanity and the commonality and beginning to believe in that again. I mean, in the past we've depended on, you know, there's been times when some great leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II and, you know, Martin Luther King and some other leaders have been able to kind of pull us together. I don't know if that's possible anymore. I don't think we can necessarily depend on that. And maybe we have to think more grassroots in terms of how each of us in our own spheres can begin to try to.

Name this commonality and help others appreciate it so that we actually don't lose sight of that. And at least so we don't lose sight of the commonality that's actually there and alive and vibrant, even though we tend not to be focused on it because we're pulled to all this divisiveness.

Yeah, that's right. And that was really the Buddha's fundamental insight is that where there is separation, there's suffering. Right. And so the whole. The whole seeking for, one could say awakening or for nirvana is really that experience of utter belonging, complete oneness with all things, and yet we get completely fascinated by separation because we want to protect ourselves against the threat. And that's part of the problem. And in a certain way, those great leaders always grow up within a particular time, in a particular context in which their genius is able to have a place. And it still could happen. I think.

The.

You know, we really do have far more in common than we don't. Than we don't. But we don't know how to right now. We don't know how to articulate it in a way that really brings people together. People are finding more security in their small groups than they're finding security in the holes, as you were saying in America, certainly. And I mean, I'm like all of the people on the call, you know, I have brothers who are military trained who I really respect. And I mean, I think about my brothers. There's nobody I'd rather be on a desert island with than my brothers. They're the most capable people on the planet. But I talked to him about the vaccine mandates, and they're just, you know, they're just, you know, insanely. I mean, my brother literally said to me he was in Nevada and he said he went into a bar in Nevada and everybody was smoking. But, you know, he really didn't like the cigarette smoke, but he was just happy they were free to do it. And I was talking like, like, free to give themselves lung cancer. Yeah, totally. Okay, buddy. You know.

Yeah.

And then I, you know, I have.

A little streak of that of me, but it's, it's been tempered over the years quite a bit.

Yeah, totally. I mean, and you Know, he's. He was all upset because, you know, Neil Young and Joe Rogan are having their big, big problem, and Joni Mitchell jumped on board and he wrote to me and said, how can I, you know, how can I keep listening to Joni Mitchell? How can I listen to Coyote now that Joni Mitchell is down on Joe Rogan? And I said, oh, just listen to all three of them. Just listen to them all. Come on. Yeah, he doesn't write me back. Yeah.

It's interesting. We are in an era where, like, our favorite musicians, if their politics and our politics don't agree, we can't go.

To sporting events anymore, you know, because, you know, if people are either for people taking a knee or not, you know, for and against is the art of the day right now. Ultimate dualism.

Well, it would seem that you and I both been studying integral theory, and our work's been informed by integral theory for a long time. Ken Wilber's work and that of others. You were mentioning Steve McIntosh before. I think he talks a lot about post postmodernism, and for me, that's a very hopeful view.

Yes.

So thinking about some of the, you know, structures with integral theory, which allows us to take that big map view, right, and we have the four quadrants, we can look at different lines of development, stages of development, and you can even get into states and traits and things like that. But these big map views, you know, looking through that lens for a minute, where do you see that could be helpful in helping us understand where we are and maybe find our way back to some kind of sense of our commonality in some way forward?

Yeah. Well, I think. Yes. So integral theory is really.

One of the biggest meta perspectives that we can take. And I think there are two very important operating assumptions. One assumption is that we are in an evolutionary process, that where there is time, there is evolution. That is not to say that everything evolves. A lot of things don't evolve, and some things are much slower to evolve than other things. But we are in a process of evolution, including our consciousness, that our ability, for instance, to take perspectives evolves. We move from our own perspective to taking ours and the perspective of another to the perspective of a group, to the abstraction of a court of law, to a perspective through time, past and future. And really being able to see more and more and more perspectives is a hallmark of our development or of our evolution. That's one assumption. Another assumption is that our basic nature is a spiritual one and that a spiritual quest is really, really involved in issues of ultimate concern. And that most of the great traditions lead us in the direction of something innate to who we are, that is beyond conditions, beyond time, beyond space. So you have evolution on the one hand that's bound by time and then you have our basic goodness or our essential nature, if you will, which is not time bound and is unconditioned, but is utterly refreshing. And also I said use the word indestructible. So those are operating assumptions. We're in this really wonderful paradox of being and becoming that we already are complete. And we're also, as Suzuki Roshi said, could use a little work. Because I always like that. Somebody asked him if he was, I think it was him or maybe it was my Zimmy Rushi. Somebody said, are you, you know, are you enlightened? And he said, I'm enlightened enough for you.

A good answer.

Yeah, don't worry about it, you know, so, so then, you know, integral also provides us with. So if we talk about resilience, if you talked to mention the four quadrants, there's the interior and there's the exterior. So we can become resilient in terms of our thoughts, so that they're more positive, they're more healthy, they are.

We maybe we can cultivate the right kind of meaning making and a sense of purpose on our own interior. It's something that we have to do ourselves. Nobody else can do it for us. But in terms of the interior of the community and of the relationships that we're involved in, we can choose people to be with who are actually supportive to who we are, supported to who we want to be. My conversation with you right now, you know, watching the Quincy Jones documentary and being inspired by just the breadth of depth of his heart and his creativity and surrounding yourself with people who have a very uplifted view that's important in the upper right, of course, that's the exteriors. We have the body. And one of the things we know about resilience is taking care of the body is just front and center. You can trust the body. If you can relax into the body like an animal. You can learn how to throw off anxiety and tension and restore and recalibrate the nervous system. Our body is an absolute marvel of evolution. Everything about it is trustable, if you will, in the sense that we can become aware of how to work with it. And then been talking about in this conversation the structures of resilience, you know, so integral theory actually gives us a way to look at the whole situation without being stuck that it's all up to me or that, you know, like I'm talking about the structures of the judiciary and fairness. I'm talking about the structures of the church and ethics and dependability of certain kinds of teachings, you know, and Quincy Jones. It's the structure of music. It's the participation in playing instruments and writing music and that very concrete act. Integral gives us a way to consider all of that and not get stuck in one view. Other things that are important are actually looking carefully at human development and how we evolve. Looking at state training, how to work with emotions, altered states, awakened states.

In the Integral view, we also look at type.

Types are important. I've been thinking about the enneagram quite a bit as a typology and helping us to see generalized patterns that can help us move towards health and away from certain fragility by watching our patterns and seeing what works for us. The map is incredible. Ken has changed my life. I'm a mental person who. My job working for Integral Institute was to help people experience Ken's theory. So ultimately has to work for me. It has to be practical. And I found it to be really practical and helpful in my own life. So that's just kind of high level. There's much more nuance to it all. Some people are real Integralists. I'm just a cheat.

Cheap drop, cheap drunk.

I think you're selling yourself short there.

Yeah, I found it incredibly helpful for me. I mean, I started reading in my 20s and then when I found myself incarcerated. People are familiar with my backstory. I spent quite a time in prison on drugs between 85 and 99. And during that period I read all of Ken's books. And he was coming out with a lot of books during that period. So I read them all cover to cover. And I found it these. I find these maps incredibly helpful to me. I mean, maps are just maps, they're not reality. But I still a way to organize one's thinking and to try to understand things and appreciate things. And even just the idea, you know, that there's these different lines of development that we develop where I have our cognitive development, artistic develop, kinesthetic develop, and then there's these stages of. And it's not all synchronous. So, you know, sometimes you see people that are incredibly developed in one area of life and incredibly undeveloped in another area of life. Not to be pejorative or judgmental, but it's pretty obvious we've all witnessed that. And how do you make sense of that? I could never understand that until I read these Integral. And I. Oh, I get it. I see that's possible individually and collectively. So it's always been incredibly helpful to me. And I'm wondering, even in terms of these, this big map of the poor quadrants, being able to look at the, the interior, the exterior and individual and the collective.

You know, this, this kind of slippery slope thing that, that I think really gets in the way politically and even academically. Like, you know, I think in academia, a lot of this research on resilience is all about systemic resilience. And they don't want to hear anything about individual resilience. And I don't just mean, you know, grit, which I realize grit is. You're lucky to be born with some kind of. But. But the individual resilience we can cultivate through all kinds of means. We have a lot of neuroscience pointing to all the things this amazing body you talked about and how we can become more physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually resilient through, through our efforts. But they don't want to hear about that because they feel like, well, if you focus on that, you're just telling people to deal with it and they shouldn't have to deal with it. The system's horrible, it's corrupt, it's unjust, and they shouldn't even have to deal with this stuff. They should be in a world that takes care of their needs, right? And so they don't want to, you know, and. Or if you get over sometimes there'll be people like myself that tend to focus on individual resilience, you know, and say, well, you know, you got to train people just to deal with this life as it is, right? And so often the two sides don't want to talk, right? And we see that in every aspect of our political divisiveness today. So how to. You know, in some ways, I've been saying for quite a while, I think the great hope for humanity is that enough people grok integral theory, to use an old 60s term. But I don't know if we can wait for that or the tipping point into that. But it would be helpful for more and more people to have a little bigger map view to understand why we all kind of get crazy with each other just to kind of understand, oh, I get why we're all pissed off at each other. I get why, you know, just to have that understanding could be so helpful.

Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, it's certainly been really, really helpful for me. But I think that, you know, one of the challenges that the Integral movement has always faced is that it is a mental map, you know, and that there, and particularly to read Ken or other integralist work requires a real. You're a power reader. I mean, I can tell from looking at the shelves behind you that, you know, I liked what you said. You must have done a lot of reading when you're in prison. That must have been amazing.

A lot of reading.

Wow. It's like a 12 year retreat, you know, study and practice. And not everybody, not everybody can make use of those maps, you know, they can't. The cognition doesn't quite help them. But I do think that once we can find explanations that are easy enough for people to understand without becoming super abstract, that they're going to become more useful even to say, traditional culture, modern culture, postmodern culture, and for people to start to see how different those cultures really are even within the United States. And in some ways you could say imperial culture, like Trump, which is kind of more gangster. Then you've got your traditionalist, you know, religious and conventional and conformist and that all works. And then you've got your modernist and your business people and merit and success and how do we measure? And then you've got postmodern, which is, you know, really in some ways addressing kind of the problems of modernism, sensitivity, abuse, power abuse, exploitation on the planet, those kinds of things. And really being able to see each of those cultures as having their own unique, literally set of values and imperatives that they're all extremely different in a certain way that could become useful. But not everybody wants to tune in that way. So it's almost like we need integral leaders who can convey integral values but don't necessarily have to get people to use the map themselves is sort of how I feel.

Yeah, I think so. How to communicate that people that can communicate that. Because a lot of people are just allergic to that kind of cognitive mapping. And, you know, that's just, oh, you know, or they'll think, oh, that's very masculine, it's not feminine, or this or that, you know, it's like, you know.

And so it's not feeling, it's not functional.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, even that dynamic is very understandable within the mapping of integral theory. If we look, if we actually look at that, you know, and I do think it's helped. It can be helpful to understand, just to understand what's going on culturally, socially, politically, that, you know, in terms of this evolutionary model, spiral dynamics and integral theory, that we're going through these, these waves and then the dominant waves now are traditionalism. Which most people can identify. Traditional religious values, traditional political values, conservatism and so forth, modernity, the whole world of science and progress in business. And then postmodernity, which is, as you said, has dealt with a lot of the problems we have and all the liberation movements and so forth. And at the same time, it's Achilles heel seems to be that its methodology is deconstructionism. And it doesn't. There's no breaks built into that. It just deconstructs all the way. It's not unlike in the contemplative traditions, at least the deconstructive side of the meditative traditions is about deconstructing down to some ultimate ground that is a ground of Buddha, nature, Christ, nature, some kind of benevolent, enlightened reality of some kind. Whereas postmodern, it just deconstructs into nihilistic materialism. There's no breaks on it. It just goes. It just keeps going that way. So it does seem for there to be some hope beyond it, but there do seem to be some exemplars, and I'm just trying to get a thread here of some hopeful way that this could get communicated out into the world without getting people to buy into learning about these cognitive maps. I interviewed.

An indigenous leader, amazing Indigenous leader Laura Yawanawa, whose husband, Tosca, is chief of the Yawanawa people, who live in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest in Acre, Brazil, a state in Brazil that borders with Peru, So very remote central part of the Amazonian rainforest. And I've interviewed her husband separately, actually, for last year's Global Resilience Summit. And her message, and I found this true of a lot of indigenous elders. Her, even though she's, you know, she's been an activist for indigenous rights and land rights and the environment, you know, for her whole adult life. She actually, she's from Mexico, originally from the Zapotec people in the Oaxaca area, and then met her husband and now lives in Brazil. But her message is such a Gandhian, Martin Luther King kind of message. It is so inclusive and so grounded in love. And she actually has an organization she started called the Indigenous and Non Indigenous Alliance. Right. And she sees all the solutions into bringing us together, bringing people together, not beating up on each other and blaming and shaming each other. Right. And. And so there are these exemplars. I interviewed Michael Beckwith for.

One of our summits, and very similarly, he's an African American spiritual leader who was very involved in the civil rights movement and actually involved with the Black Panthers back probably in the 60s, 1960s. And he tells the story. He was sitting in one of their organizing meetings, right, with, you know, and. And he really believed in that work. And he still believes that. He still believes in the cause and all the reasons for it. But he's sitting in this meeting with a bunch of his fellow activists and he's looking around the room and he suddenly saw everyone's pathology, including his own. He saw that person just constantly has to dominate that person, you know, and he just. And he said, you know, if we won and took over, nothing would change. He had just insight because we haven't dealt with our stuff, even though we may think we have the right view, if we wanted to over, things wouldn't change. And he left the meeting and never went back. And he went back to school and started educating himself and studied psychology and lots of other things and became the powerful spiritual leader that he is today with the international agape ministry and so forth. But he just has this naturally very inclusive.

View, right? And so there are exemplars of that. And somehow I'm just. I'm trying to come up with some threads here of how we generalize or enroll interest more people in that less polarized view without, you know, sending them to integral re education camps.

Which is.

Anathema to me because that's what I often think the left would do to everybody if they ever got complete and troll. They'd send us to some kind of re education campus.

Right? Yes, well, it makes sense to me, but I also feel that.

You know, as you say, there are quite a lot of exemplars out there, but it's a big world and everybody's on, or so many different people are on media. It's interesting to me that Joe Rogan has the. The biggest broadcast in the. Or the most, Most most popular podcast in the world. Right? Because. So, you know, Joe Rogan and maybe Joe Rogan doesn't like the anti vax. I mean, he has an anti vax bias. But mostly I just see Joe Rogan as shooting the shit. You know, he just. He doesn't seem to be prescribing what people should do as much as he's just having back backs and force with people. And, and so my kind of view is that holding these questions, you know, how do we do this? How do we carry this? You know, you could call it this enlightenment project forward. Whether it's the enlightenment of the east, which is an interior enlightenment, or the enlightenment of the west, which is a social enlightenment, how do we carry this Enlightenment, torch forward. And the most important thing to me is to keep that question alive, you know, because I think if the question is alive and the commitment is alive, then the means and the opportunities will present themselves and we can continue to act. You think about somebody like Thich Nhat Hanh who just died, you know, who basically was, you know, a Zen trained Vietnamese monk, and he took a very powerful anti war position such that he was even, you know, exiled from Vietnam because he was, you know, wouldn't take a for or against position on the war and spend most of his adult life in France, but teaching the dharma, bringing mindfulness to the west, you know, promoting peace. He passed away at 95 a couple of days ago. Well, that project isn't over, but that doesn't mean that his life wasn't utterly worthwhile, you know, so I think for me, the fact that you're, you know, you're holding that very powerful question with tremendous amount of authenticity and care and that you're pulling people together to talk about it, and you're continuing to inquire and do what you can to contribute through all the different things you do, whether it's your online podcast work, whether it's leading retreat, whether it's working with the prisons, whether it's working with the peacekeepers. I mean, it's just day in, day out, one foot in front of the other. I mean, my father was one of the most resilient people I ever knew. He. When he was.

He lost an infant brother and an older brother. Then he lost his mother when he was 10. His father died when he was 12. He went to live with his oldest sister when he was 13, and she died having her tonsils out. So at 13, he basically was orphaned and was on his own after that. So just tremendous amount of loss and uncertainty in his early life. And, you know, he had such a.

Friendly relationship to the world and he. I would say if he. He just simply. He just had a knack for putting one foot in front of the other every single day. No bitterness, recrimination, not terribly angry, get mad, you know, periodically, but let it go. And so I saw in him, you know, kind of a willingness to deal with reality on its terms instead of trying, trying always to get reality to fit what we think it should be. You know, of course we need to work towards all this, but, you know, it's a big world that has its own. Its own rules and imperatives. But I think Thich Nhat Hanh's life is still, is just, again, an example of Tremendous devotion to that. To that question.

Yeah, that's really, I think what you just said is really helpful. Always keep in mind that we live in a big world that has its own imperatives, its own, you know, even geological time kind of agenda. You know, sometimes we have a little hubris. I think we have a lot more influence than we, than we do. But yeah, Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, his book Peace in Every Step was one of those books that while I was in prison, the binding fell apart and everything, you know, because.

Because you read it so much.

A real go to book. And you know, what you said about bringing together these great projects of the inner enlightenment of the east, the social enlightenment, perhaps of the West. And, you know, we had this whole movement in the 20th century of what was often called engaged Buddhism, socially engaged Buddhism coined the term engaged Buddhism, and figures like Sulak Chi Vraksa in Thailand, Mahagav Sananda in Cambodia, the Dalai Lama, who's still with us, fortunately, and ATI Aratne and Sri Lanka and so forth. And, you know, in the west, early days of Buddhism in the west, and certainly in the early deep ecology movement, environmental movement, you know, with Bernie was in peacemakers and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And that whole marriage of a contemplative approach to social change seems to have.

Fell out of favor a little bit here. And we're back in this polarization or it's either spirituality or it's kind of a very, kind of outer level social justice imperative. And I guess it just. We have to. That's going to have to find its way to reweave again at some point.

Although I would say you and I are both completely socially engaged Buddhists, right?

Well, absolutely. And it's not that I don't think that that's dead. I think the threads are still there, but I think that that is not what's really kind of driving. I mean, we're hearing a lot and you know, within, you know, a lot of this recent social unrest and some of the activism around the Black Lives Matter movement and so forth. Well, you know, the Gandhian Kingian view, that's too hard. It's too old school or it's this, you know, and, you know, I think somehow we need to reawaken that lineage of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh. And I know there are a lot of us will always keep that torch burning bright. And maybe it's just that we have these conversations and hopefully people will listen to them.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well.

I Think somebody I was listening.

To, I can't remember who it was.

But they said, can't quite. I think, yeah, it was some. Some spiritual teacher saying, basically, we should stop relating to reality as a potential utopia. That's not what it is. That's not what we're here to do. You know, what we're here to do is to engage and to inhabit ourselves, inhabit this. This experience of being human. Human as fully as possible. And when we inhabit it in a full way, we find that it leads. All roads lead back to the human heart and that the world itself is all. It's a powerfully dualistic experience. I mean, we're born and we die. What in the world is more radical than that? That everything in our life, we're going.

To lose at one point.

It's all going, you know. And so in a certain way, Trump Rinpoche used to teach that, too. I remember him saying, but have we.

Considered the fact of death?

You know, because we kind of operate with this assumption that we should be able to get to a place where we've got everything kind of squared away and it's all working, but that. That in itself is an assumption that I think is kind of mistaken. That doesn't seem to be our purpose. It's like, how do we open the heart and contribute with wisdom and compassion in a situation that's, you know, really, really difficult? I mean, I'm. Another of my challenges during the pandemic, besides going through the loss, is that my down syndrome son developed psychosis.

He started hearing voices.

I don't know if I told you that.

I'm sorry. Yes, you did. You did mention that in a conversation we had a while back. Yeah, yeah.

And to just, you know, I mean, I had the experience of having to call the emergency room because he was on a certain antipsychotic that caused him to have, like, epileptic fits. And we had to get in the ambulance. And, you know, just the moment of the ambulance drivers giving him, you know, some sort of a sedative that stopped the convulsions and just experiencing the tenderness of their care and just how. Just how well trained and beautiful they were as young men. They were all men who came that day and just loading him up and assuring him. I was so touched, you know, And. Yeah, then we got to the emergency room, and we sat there for six hours while different people came in and out, and then basically weren't able to have a bed because of COVID and were sent home. So I saw both sides. I saw the pressure on the medical system and the way it didn't work for us. And I also saw the way that it did. And that's kind of the. That's kind of the dilemma that we live in. And in a certain way, we're always going to be between. Caught between the. The for and against. And, you know, can we find a way to actually inhabit our experience in a wholehearted way and be as kind and contribute to the version of reality we want while understanding that it isn't about an endpoint?

I don't think.

Wow. And I can. There you are. As a mom in the middle of that experience, I just. Oh, yeah, it's hard for me. Imagine the depth of what was going on for you there.

Yeah, it was big. I mean, it was interesting because I would get very. He was having these uncontrollable kinds of fits, and. And then I would get very solid and not allow my mind to move. And when my mind was still, he could focus his eyes on me and he could still his body. The minute his mind wandered, it started again, you know, So I worked with him for like, 45 minutes before they.

Finally came and.

Helped him out.

So I'm just, you know, I'm just a proponent for practice. I'm kind of terrible on these big subjects.

Thank goodness for our practice. Right. Thank goodness. I mean, just. Well, well, speaking of that, this has been a fabulous, wonderful, enriching conversation. I wonder if you would be willing to lead us in just a little brief practice, maybe just something three to five minutes or so to complete our time together here.

Yeah, I'd be honored. Thank you. So.

For those of you who are listening, maybe taking an upright posture, I.

Always like to begin by just allowing my pelvis to rock side to side.

On my sits bones, just to feel my attention.

Drop into the base of.

My body.

And back and forth.

And then.

And I like to just kind of give myself a chance to feel the buoyancy.

Yeah.

Quality of resilience coming to stillness.

Usually our ears were over our shoulders, and our shoulders are aligned with our hips.

And allowing gravity to make contact the sits bones to make contact with our seat. And then to experience the spine and the miracle of our upcoming brightness. To feel the uprightness moving, if you will, through the base of the body.

And up through the heart.

Through the neck and head and 4, 6 inches above your head just to feel that the eros, if you will.

Relaxing our face.

Softening.

The jaw.

Relaxing behind the eyes.

Now paying attention very lightly without interfering to the breath.

Feeling the Breath on the inhale.

As.

It cools the nostrils and fills the lungs.

And experiencing the exhale.

Warming the nostrils.

We understand that the relaxation response is connected to a little bit longer exhale.

Now allowing ourselves to identify with the open space of mind.

So body breath in this wide open space.

We use the analogy of the mind, the sky.

And thought or concepts memory like weather.

You could see how the movement of the mind.

Is always held within this broad open space that's still.

Unbounded.

Simply allowing yourself to rest with the openness and the stillness.

And the spaciousness of mind.

And maybe allowing for all the beautiful questions during this last hour just to see those questions.

Just resting this open space of mind.

Like clouds.

Giving them plenty of space.

Said that we have to live the questions.

And finally, just before we end, just to feel in the heart center the depth of our care.

How much we appreciate this life.

And how much our deepest wish is to flourish and to thrive.

And just to affirm what an incredible thing that we care so much.

And.

That we genuinely want the best for everyone.

Thank you everybody. Thank you, Fleet.

Thank you, Diane. That was beautiful. I'm good for the day now and I so enjoyed our conversation and I always enjoy our conversations. I end up in such a hopeful place.

I can tend to paint these kind of dark scenarios. But somehow you always managed to weave us back into a hopeful place. A realistic, not naively hopeful, but realistically hopeful, grounded in something that we can trust, which is our shared humanity and our experience of the heart that we have received so many beautiful teachings and practices on how to open to and. And it just radiates from you when we're in these conversations. So I really appreciate that a lot.

Thank you Fleet. I think of you as just one of my Dharma bros. So thank you so much for all your years of practice.

Be well.

Looking to get out there and feel the in your hair Chevy EV have you covered like the Blazer EV with bold style that's sure to you away and with Silverado EV towing is a breeze with the capability to hitch up and tow with ease. And Equinox EV helps you keep moving along like with confidence Chevrolet together. Let's drive. Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on jumbaccasino.com I looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing? They were also playing Chumba Casino. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino is home to hundreds of casino style games. That you can play for free, anytime, anywhere. So sign up now@chumbacasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's chumbacasino.com and live the Chumba life.

Sponsored by Chumba Casino.

No purchase necessary. VGW Group void where prohibited by law, 21/ terms and conditions apply.