EP 197: Gabriel Kram | Crisis, Connection, and Collective Healing

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. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. In this episode, I'm going to be joined by Gabriel Cram, a longtime friend and colleague who describes himself as a connection phenomenologist and a neurocartographer. That's quite a handle and it's an incredibly interesting conversation. I don't know anyone who has a deeper understanding about human connectedness. It's important for our own health and well being as well, that it's important for our own, for our collective health and well being. So give this a listen because with Gabriel, it's always a deep dive into what it means to be human. And I'm really happy to be here today with my longtime friend and colleague, Gabriel Cram. How are you, Gabriel?

I'm great, Fleet. Nice to see you. Thank you for the opportunity.

It's great to see you with that beautiful backdrop. And we're going to hear about this new property you're developing out there for your work. So it looks really beautiful. So I want to share your a little of your bio with our audience so they're familiar with you and your work, and then we'll get right into the conversation.

Okay, sounds great.

Great. So Gabriel Cram is a connection phenomenologist and neural cartographer. He is the principal content architect and co convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance. He is the founder and CEO of Applied Mindfulness, Inc. He is the host, director and executive producer of the Restorative Practices film series, which is his visual dissertation in connection phenomenology. His book Restorative Practices of well Being arrives in hardcover in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and Australia. March of 2022. And we'll talk more about that. And I hope you have a copy or book there, which is a reflection of the work you've been doing in gathering together all these incredible restorative practices and making it available in some really smart ways. So we'll explore all that.

But first, I just want to check in with you, Gabriel. We've been through another tough year with multiple waves of the pandemic and.

Feels like the zeitgeist of this time is really dissolution, instability, disruption, you know, incredible divisiveness and polarization across the cultural and political landscape. You know, just so much uncertainty about our future. And the, you know, the already having arrived climate emergency that we're in the midst of and all of that. So it has not been an easy year. And, you know, some of us are privileged to have a somewhat workable situation where we can ride this out and some of us less so. But I'm curious what it's been like for you, your family and your community.

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a good place to start. I'm here with, I almost want to say, my new partner. My new partner in this work, which is this place that we're stewarding. And we've had the just extraordinary good fortune to be able to be out here working on this land for about 18 months. And it's been, for me, a really foundational part of my experience this past year and, like, a deep source of sanity and relationship, you know. So I think it would be. I would be in a very different place, probably physiologically and mentally, if I didn't have this. This place to be in daily contact with the living world, you know. So our work, you know, thankfully has continued to grow and develop this last year. I had a point a couple of months ago where I think it was like, when Omicron sort of came on the scene, where I went through a process of realizing that I basically spent the last two years waiting for the pandemic to go away and that it didn't necessarily seem like it was going to do that. And I definitely went through a pretty intense process, which I'm happy to excavate with you if it's useful to your listeners. But I realized that I don't know if it's going away. And therefore, how can we leverage the full capabilities of our community, of the tools we've been developing? What does it look like to really lean into that crisis, which is also, in Chinese, that very word means dangerous opportunity. And it's like we're definitely in the. The. The heart of a dangerous opportunity. Right.

Yeah. So I'll parry that back as a place to start and, you know, maybe we can drop in from there.

Absolutely. Well, you know, your bio references you as a connection phenomenologist and neurochartographer, and that says a lot about your work. Your work is all about connectedness, and you're also very much integrating ancestral wisdom and modern neuroscience and so forth. And, you know, it seems in these times.

In one way, our connectedness, our interdependence is more obvious than it's ever been. This is a global experience. We're all going through Nobody's escaping this. We're all going through this pandemic together.

Many people and many of our indigenous brothers and sisters point to that there's a great teaching here that we're, you know, being the natural world is, in a sense, almost forcing us to wake up and, you know, change our posture and way of being with each other and with the earth. So there's an obvious interdependence and interconnectedness, and then at the same time, it's driving us apart, you know, just to protect ourselves. And the mask wearing and the isolation, the lockdowns and the physical or social distancing.

And then how today, in our very divisive political landscape, things like vaccinations and mask wearing are all politicized and weaponized, creating further divisions. And so we seem to be in this weird world in terms of connection, where it's a time of tremendous disconnection with obvious interdependence. So I'm just curious how, how you're working with that, because I know it really runs at the heart of your work.

Yeah, I think it's really beautiful kind of how you've mapped that out. And I do see certainly these, they're kind of twin strands of it that I perceive in our work. So let me just start with connection phenomenologists, because it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue necessarily.

I stumbled a couple times.

It's a term that I was introduced to by a nature awareness teacher named John Young. And I was attending a bird language workshop of his in Duval, Washington, at this very beautiful place. But I was at this training and he said this term, and I had this moment where my whole sort of frame of reference recognized it. Because I spent the last 25 years studying a range of disciplines. My work has always been transdisciplinary, and we've focused really deeply on mindfulness, on autonomic physiology, nature connection, social justice, linguistics, and indigenous lifeways. And I had this kind of light bulb moment when he said that, where I realized everything we've been doing has been about connection to ourselves, others, the living world, and how do you remove what gets in the way? It was the first descriptor I'd heard that made sense to me as kind of catch all for the multiple strands that we've been trying to unite in our work. And I think they're strands that ancestrally were united anyway, but we've really siloed, I think, knowledge in the modern world. And so for me, it's been this reweaving, and I Think we've spent a lot of time thinking and working with a lot of mentors and guides and a lot of disciplines about this. So if I could kind of boil it down for your audience. There are two quotes that I think stand at the heart of what you just said. So we think about this moment, we think about connection, and we think about also the amplification of disconnection. So one of our mentors is a guy named John Stokes. He's been part of your summit in the past. And he had a teacher in Hawaii.

Harley Hanakaoli, who said that what we don't talk to, we don't understand. What we don't understand, we fear. What we fear, we destroy.

Right?

And it comes down to talking, which is a way of saying relationship. What we don't have a relationship with, we don't understand, right? And this is true of, you know, the living world. If I don't have a relationship with a place, if I don't have a relationship with the non human occupants of that place, I don't understand them, I can become fearful and then I destroy. We have this impulse to destroy what we don't understand. And I think in one way, that's the story of the modern world. So you have on the one hand this side of it, which is in a way a negation, and it says what we don't talk to. On the other side of it, you have what John Young says, which is what we're connected to. We have a relationship with what we have a relationship with. We value what we value, we take care of. And I think if we look at our lives, this is the way it works. We establish connection with things, that builds a relationship. Through the relationship, we come to value something. And when we value it, we take care of it. And it's true in our relationships with others. It's true in our relationships with all our own internal experience. It's true in our relationships with the living world. So I think there's always this question, these twin questions, like how do we build connection? And then how do we dismantle disconnection? And I think what we're experiencing now, humanity, the world, is that we're in a period of intensification where the consequences of the way that we've been living, which is so deviated from the reciprocal relationship with life, it's gotten so advanced that the consequences, they're no longer in the future, they're just showing up right now. The ecological crisis, it's not in the future, it's now. The coronavirus and many of our indigenous mentors have been saying this all along. It's a reflection of nature relating to us in real time. And we've had indigenous mentors, including Larry and Merkulia I know you've interviewed, who just said the elders are saying to him, the pandemic will get better when we get better, if we get better. Right.

That's really interesting idea, that the pandemic will get better when we get better. Yeah, I love that. You know, my first spiritual teacher, the Tibetan master Chogam Chungpram Shea.

Kind of used a metaphor of spiritual warriorship a lot. One of his best known books, Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior. And by that he meant spiritual warriorship, spiritual bravery. And one of the definitions he gave. He gave many definitions for that kind of. Of spiritual warriorship. But one definition he gave was letting go of anything that separates ourselves from others, like proactively letting go of anything that's separating ourselves from others. He also said things like never giving up on anyone.

And these kind of things. So representing that, that. That connectedness, and it is so easy to move away from that. And, and, and I just really appreciate that you're taking such a deep view of that, and I'd like to explore for. Just to give our audience a fuller background of your work. So I know you've been building a library, an online library, a database of restorative practices that do integrate ancestral wisdom and modern neuroscience and modern psychology.

And organizing this in a really smart way with artificial intelligence and so forth. So it's a searchable database, and people can find exactly what they need based on their life situation, perhaps their age, perhaps their gender, the amount of time they have to devote to something.

And this can be made universally available in support of people, whether they're clients of counselors or psychotherapists or involved with hospital systems or just the general public. But these are practice. These are healing practices, restorative practices. And so you've been building that for quite some time. And I know it's really. I don't think anything like it exists anywhere that I'm aware of. And now you've published at least part of that into a book that's just come out. And so I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what that path has been like for you, kind of what inspired you to go in that direction to build this phenomenal resource. And then.

Where you're at in terms of really getting this out in the world, making it available to people, both through the database and your in your book.

Yeah, sure, thanks. Thanks for that question. I think, you know, an important kind of place to backstory this is that, you know, we started interacting, gosh, I think it was 15 years ago through an organization called the Mind Body Awareness Project, an organization that was, you know, chartered to teach mindfulness and social emotional learning to incarcerated youth. And I had the good fortune initially to teach for that organization. And then I was the executive director from 2006 to 2009. And at the time, you were one of the advisors of the organization.

We had this incredible experience of having a great deal of success supporting the wellness of young people who are incarcerated. And I don't know.

For listeners who may not have a sense of both the challenge and the opportunity of that space.

One of the things that we were really working deeply investigating was what we kind of think of as trauma, sensitive mindfulness. Right. Like, there's no way to find yourself incarcerated that's not traumatizing. Like, even if you came into that system with no insult to your system, getting incarcerated is traumatizing.

Right.

And so we had these young people that we're working with who had, you know, probably more than just that trauma coming in. And we had this incredibly beautiful multicultural instructor body. It was the first organization that I had the privilege of working in that was really multicultural. And we got really good at connecting with these kids. We had some remarkable training directors in Vinnie Ferraro and Pam Dunn. And we got to really see at a certain point that the kids were healing. It was very beautiful. And when we started to see that that was happening consistently, we got interested in researching the model. And so.

We contacted a number of researchers and we worked with a particular set of instruments. And we were coming in thinking that we were doing mindfulness. So we were measuring mindfulness, we were measuring perceived stress, measuring anger, all of these indicators of well being. And when the results from the first really organized studies came back, I thought there was an error in the results because what we saw was that the kids mindfulness scores hadn't changed at all. And I want to kind of let that sink in for the audience. We thought of ourselves as a mindfulness organization. The kids were clearly getting better. We work with them for 10 weeks. We do pre and post intervention testing. We did it in a structured manner. Ten weeks later, their mindfulness scores hadn't changed at all. And yet they were better measurably, obviously, to themselves, to people watching them. And so for several years, I found myself asking, like, what's going on? Like, what is the agency of healing here if it's not the mindfulness. And the reason their mindfulness scores weren't changing was because they weren't meditating outside of class. They would come in with us and with some of our instructors, there was a safety that was created, that was deep enough that they could meditate and go inward in a way that was useful, but on their own, they just simply weren't doing it because the practice itself didn't meet the needs of their nervous system in the moment. And so we found ourselves with this kind of paradox, which is like, well, what then is causing them to heal? And I spent several years thinking about this, and it was a number of years later encountering the work of Dr. Darshan Arvaez, who is a transdisciplinary psychologist who looks at connection as the foundation of well being. She looks at small ban hunter, gatherer tribes and she looks at the way that connection is woven into the fabric of everything about those cultures. And I kind of light bulb went on for me because I went, wow, that was the agency of healing is that they got connected. They were in a group that was facilitated in such a way that it created emotional safety. May have been the first time they'd had that experience. They were able to resolve conflicts with peers in a structured manner. They were able to investigate, you know, their inner landscapes, all of these things that reconnected them. And I say reconnected, I don't think it's, you know, I think of our work as restorative. It restores something that's maybe already there's this potentiality. And so we saw this and then we started thinking of our work more in terms of connection. This was around 2013, 2014. By this point, I had left MBA to move the work more into medicine and mental health. And we had gotten this call to serve more frontline medical and mental health providers, folks dealing with vicarious trauma whose resilience was challenged just by the acuity of the clients they were seeing. And so we started going out in 2013, 2014. I probably did 700 trainings with wellness providers of various kinds. Many of them were mental health clinicians and kind of various social services roles. And we were really trying to support.

Their ability to turn on their own kind of intrinsic well being. And after doing this a couple hundred times, we learned pretty quickly, like, if we can start these trainings outside in a place that's beautiful, like it already accelerates our trajectory towards well being. If we can get people in conversation with one another and socially engaged, it already Accelerates. If we can get them doing some kind of movement, it already accelerates. Right? Those are three things we learned pretty fast. If people were doing those three things, generally what they realized was they were exhausted.

It was just, like, obvious. You got those three things in motion. And then people came back to their nervous systems enough to go like, oh, wow, I'm really depleted. And so then we would just let them rest. We would socially sanction a place to rest. We'd have them on mats or blankets. We would tell the most senior person in the room if it was a hierarchical system. Listen, at 10:30, we're going to do a meditation. If you lay down, the people who are your supervisees will feel comfortable doing that themselves. If you don't, they won't. So we built this context where people could really rest. And then after doing that, you'd see them, like, 45 minutes, 75 minutes later, you'd see them get up and somebody would start doing some weird stretch. That was not cognition. It was like the body reorganizing itself. Somebody would be in the back of the room doing this thing with their arms. Or you'd see people in small groups chatting. Somebody would be journaling, Somebody would go take a walk, they would fall back into themselves.

And so then what happened typically was we would have lunch in the afternoon. I would get a flip chart, I would bring it to the front of the room, and I'd say, okay, now that you're feeling a little bit more like yourself, what are things you already are doing in your life to come home to yourself? It was a very simple question. And we worked with groups ranging from like, six to 200 people. I never encountered a group that had less than like, 40 things they were already doing. You know, people already had tools. And so we would just write everything they said down. At the end of the day, we would, like, email it back to them in a list. We would say, print this out, put it in your desk, because when you're stressed out, you're not going to remember that list. Because the physiology of stress is such that when you're in a defensive state, the part of your brain that remembers that stuff isn't online. Right? We know this. So I had done this probably five or six hundred times. I got to a point where I had a whole stack of these in my closet rolled up on flip charts. And I had this thing where I was going into trainings. And I pretty much knew that every training we went into, there would be somebody who would talk about doing something that was Mindfulness based. There would be somebody that would talk about doing a form of movement. It could be that they like to dance. Somebody would always go out dancing. Or they did Sunday morning five rhythms, or they did tai chi, or they did yoga. There's some kind of movement. There's always somebody doing something with their hands. You know, whether it was ceramics, like they were making sculpture, you know, they're making, like pots, or they were, you know, fixing things, or they were painting or they were gardening. There was always somebody doing something in their hands. And, you know, somebody was doing something in nature. Like we just got to see there were fundamental patterns. And so I like to make maps. And so I started mapping this out and I became fascinated by what we were seeing, because there was this deep architecture to the way that people were already taking care of themselves. In a way, it was like we didn't discover it. We evoked it from working with 5,000 people over seven years, and then we just mapped it out. That became the foundation of the database that you're talking about. I think the beauty of it to me is that.

And I found this teaching mindfulness, like when we were teaching mindfulness to youth, or even in these groups.

Awareness is so powerful. And people's nervous systems, they shape based on how it is internally, whether you feel safe or not. They shape what you need attentionally to feel well. And there's this paradox where somebody might feel very relaxed and safe in a group based on their position in the group or their gender or their ethnicity, somebody might feel less safe. And you can say the same thing to those two people. And depending on who you are and who they are and where your nervous system is and where their nervous system is, that may land in two totally different things. And one person's well being may require that they bring their attention inward to feel themselves from the inside. While for another person, it may be more useful to bring attention out into the external environment. And how do you do that in a group that has all these different needs? And so the whole idea of the database was how do we find the specific practice that's gonna be both neurophysiologically relevant, polyvagally relevant to somebody, and then that's actually useful to them and interesting because we remember stuff, because it's relevant to us. And I'll finish this with a little anecdote. I had the good fortune yesterday to be out here on the land with a colleague of ours who happens to be visiting. He's from Illinois. We're working on a pilot project with him in a medical school. He's an African American man, a beautiful person. He's a fire captain. And he came to our platform and the first practice he found, he was looking at these filters and going like, well, I have only five minutes and I want something that's about communication. And the beauty of the platform is that the practice that it presented to him was a spoken word practice. And in this practice, our friends Jehan Kaligi and Imani Will are speaking this incredibly beautiful poem. It's like almost rap. It's at the edge of rap. That was where he entered because he did this filtering and that's where the database took him. But that's completely different than another colleague of ours whose patient is dealing with anxiety and is looking for a kind of particular set of experience, has a, you know, a certain amount of time and ends up coming through a completely different doorway. But I think if we do the job right, and this is kind of the union of this data science, you know, the mapping, the modeling, then it's going to find, it's going to help us find what is the practice, what is a gateway into this body of work that's relevant for the particular person who's coming, you know, and if it's relevant to my life, I will remember it and I'm likely to do it again. You can teach me mindfulness, but if that doesn't fit into my worldview and if it's not important to me, it's unlikely, just like the kids we were working with, that they're going to do it on their own. It doesn't fit what they need. And so we have to identify the practice that skillfully meets somebody, where they are, where their nervous system is and meets their interests. And thankfully, there's an infinite number of these practices. And the more we can tap into the wisdom of these different ancestral cultures around the world, the more we find these very refined medicines. They're medicines, you know, they're technologies of awareness that have been around for so long. And we can direct people, hopefully to cultural practitioners that are the lineage holders of those practices in a way that sends them resources and brings medicine to people who need it in a specific way. That's the goal.

Wow. Well, you really laid out that journey in such a beautiful way. And there's so much in there that's so important. You know, as you know, we do similar work. And I've had my own humbling moments along the way of realizing many of the things you were talking about. And, you know, I'm an Intervention, creator, innovator. And you know, in that world, there's, there's kind of two ways there's happened. There's what we call community practitioners like ourselves who are out there in the world doing things and creating programs, trying to help people. And, you know, we come upon different modalities. We try things, we experiment, we come up with interventions and things and programs. And then there's the ones that come more theoretically. Academia, somebody creates a theory, then they create a program to prove the theory and that sort of thing. But in my study, I was also realizing that mindfulness is a strong focus of our work, and some people pick it up. And the science shows that people do mindfulness regularly. It has a profound impact. But a lot of people don't pick it up and are picking up, but as you said, it doesn't fit into their lives that well, at least at that point in their life in a formal way.

But we were always saying that we're getting tremendous results, tremendous change from our program. Well, what's it coming from? And so my own study of the literature, I found actually in the social sciences literature, that looking at vast numbers of change programs across huge scale, seeing that the actual intervention was pretty far down on the list of impact, the highest thing was the relationship between the two highest things were that the provider, the facilitator, the teacher, the program, whoever was delivering the program actually believed in change and transformation because they had been through it themselves. Right. And so they, they, they lived it, they communicated. It was their reality. And then the relationship they created with the, with the participants and then the level of participant engagement. So, I mean, that's well known science these days. And, and also, even though there, there may be lots of beautiful interventions, beautiful tools, practices, medicine as you described it.

To discover them rather than theoretically or even through our own insights, but to actually to draw them from the field and the way you were doing. Right. You know, indigenous to that group of people. I don't mean to use the word indigenous and, you know, generalize it, but it's to that group of people, you know, you're drawing it from their experiences. You know, you say, okay, what are the. Some of the things you're doing to return to yourself, to be yourself, to work for you. Right. And then you're, and then you started mapping that out. So it's such a different way of approaching it and such a beautiful way of approaching it that leaves us with something that is really a set of things that so many different people are going to have some access into. And that really work in their lives. And you mentioned relevance several times. And I think that's the key. People want something that's relevant. I remember for a long time we'd been trying to create a program for people coming out of prison. And really hard, because unless you have huge resources because people come up and they spread out all over the place. So where do you do the program? Right, but you know, we were working in Providence, Rhode island at the time and in that state system, most people released into a couple of neighborhoods and probably, oh, there, here's a really great opportunity. And we even started working with some organizations that were already there on the ground providing services. So people were coming there anyway. But, you know, and we did some good work. But what we quickly realized was, you know, most of the folks coming out of incarceration and back into the community, they were at survival, they were just trying to survive. They were reconnecting with their community, with their families, they were trying to avoid the potholes, they were trying to get a job, they were trying to, you know, feed their kids. They were living in survival. And they, you know, if you even think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they weren't at that place where they were going to start doing any kind of self actualization work, you know, so we had to really figure out how do you meet people where they are, Right? And it sounds like that's your approach and you're doing it in such a beautiful way. I want to read a quote that I got from your website that I really love and I would like to invite you to reflect on further. We've kind of been discussing this already a little bit, but it's humanity is facing an unprecedented meta crisis of our own creation as a result of deviation from the original instructions to live in respectful reciprocal relationship with ourselves, one another and the living world. The mindsets, knowledge systems, governance and exchange mechanisms that engendered this deviation are not equipped to repair it. So, you know, the first statement is really at the core purpose of this comp, this summit. This is why we're convening these conversations, right? To address that meta crisis of our own making. And then the second one really reminds me of the famous Einstein quote, right? That you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created it, same mindset that created it. So, you know, based on that.

How do we approach? Because, you know, we're in a world today where we've got some pretty serious challenges on so many different levels and none of us are going to solve them. Overnight. But how do we start at least, you know, moving in the right direction rather than continuing along the way? That's creating the problem, you know, but how do we find that direction? I want. I know you're relying a lot on ancestral wisdom, and you have a lot of indigenous advisors from various indigenous elders and communities, and you're also relying on current science and so forth. But. So how do we make sure that we're not still kind of in the same box in one way or another, and if we won't, even with the best of intentions, be still recreating the same paradigm in some way?

That's a great. That's a deep question. It's a great question.

I think I want to answer it in kind of several different layers. And I'll start with. I don't know if it's the simplest, but the one that's maybe closest to home for me. So.

I think a lot about the circle as a technology.

It's like the logo in our work. And all of our classrooms are circular.

You know, when we design a classroom, we always design it in a circle. And there's something really beautiful. I may have said this to you before. In one of our conversations, there was a point where I got very interested. I've always been very interested in words because we hear these things like quotes from the Buddha or from Jesus or something, and it's like, no, they never said that stuff because they don't speak the language. The source language in which they spoke, which also contained, you know, a worldview and thought forms, is so different than the language that we're speaking. How do we know that we're getting, like, a source translation? And so there was a point where I was looking up a translation of this Aramaic word for sacred. And the word is translated from the Aramaic, and the word is kadash. It gets translated as holy. And there's Kadash has two roots in Aramaic, and one of them, it's Kud and ash. Kud means.

The center point of the circle. And then ash is like a radiance of heat and light coming from that center point, right? And so the sacred, the source is the center point and the radiance in a circle from it, right? And so I think about this ancestral circle, I think about the oldest human cultures coming down.

200,000 years ago, the Kalahari coming out of the trees, proto hominids, onto the savanna, where all of a sudden, instead of being able to hide in the trees, we're living out there with the lions and these predators. And the vulnerability of this humans are not. Compared to many of the animals. We're not endowed with, you know, extraordinary, like, physical strength or, you know, we don't have talons, right? Like, we're pretty much at the mercy of these predators. And so there's a technology that emerges very early on when fire is requisitioned by humans where there's a fireplace that the village is constituted around, and then there's a circle at night of people sitting around the fireplace. You, like, feel this kind of, like, ancestral pattern where people are attending the children and they're telling stories, but there's also, like, this profound technology because when we're sitting at the fireplace, I can't see what's behind me. And what's behind me is, like, deepest night, right? And predators potentially. And so the person who's watching my back, literally is the person who's farthest across the fireplace from me. The person who's on the opposite side of that center point sees what's behind me and my. My blind spot, right? And I think there's such a deep teaching about diversity in this. You know, it's a teaching that it just reminds us, like, what we can't see is obvious to the person who's different from us. You know, the stranger, as it were. And we can track, like in Western civilization, this relationship. One of our mentors, Pete Jackson, talks about this attitude to the stranger, you know, and this kind of, like, this formalization in the 4th century. This is a little esoteric, but, like, there's a Latin word xenodochia, for this moment. It's the same root as xenophobia, which is like, the fear of the stranger, the fear of the foreigner, right? Where the Catholic Church formalizes.

Putting strangers in a village into a hospital or like a. What's the word for a hostel, right? They create a space to put the strangers in rather than integrating them into the community, whereas previously they would get integrated into the community. And this is. I think, if we're looking at these moments of deviation from an ancestral baseline, this is one of those moments where we formalized a system of keeping others out, right? There's this deeper wisdom that's like, no, you welcome the stranger because that also represents the parts that are unknown to yourself. And the more we can relate to that which is different, the more we can find our true nature. Which includes. Right, it includes, you know, I think it was Maya Angelou says, you know, some version of, like, anything within the human experience is part of. Is part of who we are. That was not well quoted. I do apologize. But, you know, this awareness that, like everything in the domain of the human experience is part of our potentiality, can I open to that? Right? Can I allow the person who's the most different gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, can I allow their perspective to be as real and as valued as mine? And can we integrate that wisdom into the directionality we take? How do we create structures, organisms, organizations that actually can respect all the different points of view around the circle? And I think that's part of the answer. The question that you're posing. How do we not recreate the box? We open it in such a way that it's not a box, it's a circle, and that we're valuing input from all of the places around that circle. Because what we've done in modernity very systematically is we've prioritized, privileged and centered certain perspectives.

And it's very hard, I think, for those perspectives to see their way out, whereas communities that have historically been marginalized can see those structures very, very clearly.

So I think that's one level of response, and I'll pause there, because there was a lot.

Yeah, well, it's really beautiful. And I think it's so helpful to have kind of simple distinctions like that, like the value of the circle. I mean, we're all in a circle all the time, and we're all at the same time. In my own spiritual tradition, the mandala principle runs through everything we do, and it's part of the whole worldview. And we're all at the center of a mandala all the time, and we're all part of mandalas and circles. And as you know, I think circle work has been a big part of my life with the way of council and the Zen peacemaker work. And one of the places that's interesting in terms of what you were saying, is when we do street retreats, where we actually go out on the streets for three, four, five days a week at a time with no money, no resources in major urban areas around the world, and we guide people out there, and it's really about kind of a plunge into a world you're totally unfamiliar with, which gets us out of conditioned mind. And it's a very powerful experience. And we wander about just trying to survive in that world. We sleep out of doors. We don't want to take space in the shelters, and we interact with people. And if people ask us what we're doing, we're also about. We don't pretend to be homeless, but we also just Try to blend in. And so three times a day, we come together and we form a circle, and we do a beautiful liturgy from the Zen tradition called Feeding the Hungry Spirits, which is that sense of hunger and poverty and unmet needs in all of us. Right. And the world of addiction and all of this. And so we come together and we form these. So sometimes it's literally on the sidewalks or it's in a park, or it can be anywhere in these big urban centers. And it's really interesting to see who shows up, because the circle always attracts people. Wow. It always attracts people, and we always have. I mean, our whole purpose is the circle is open, so people are welcome. And, you know, sometimes we'll have somebody in a business suit come by on our lunch break, and they'll sit down and join our circle for a while. Or sometimes we'll have, you know, someone who's, you know, off ship from a hospital or something, or. But, you know, we also have street people show up. And sometimes we have people clearly suffering with some. Some mental challenges, and we have people who are clearly inebriated or. Or intoxicated job. But, you know, we just don't. We just see and we work with the energy that's there. We don't see anything as being a disruption of the circle. And when we have something we're doing, you know, we try to get through our liturgy, but if somebody interrupts their liturgy, that becomes part of the practice, Right? So it's just really interesting to see how the circle attracts and then the process of feeling our own resistance, our own openness. You know, that's one thing I love about being out on the streets or when we go to Auschwitz every year and the various plunge practices that we do is I literally feel my heart opening and closing all the time. It's not about wishful thinking or any romanticism about how open I am. I can feel myself starting to shut down in a protective mode. But then, thankfully, I feel myself opening again. Right. And, you know, where the rubber meets the road. So, you know, the circle is just such a. It's both a metaphor and it's a real architecture for connection. Obviously.

It'S really profound. I have several layers of response to what you're saying. One of them is like.

I think you may have the good fortune to be in conversation with Chris Brookfield for this.

I know from conversations with him that a formative part of his own inquiry into deep systems transformation came from work heated with the homeless. And so that might be a very interesting place for you to explore together this awareness of standing in edge communities. And that transformation often comes from the edge. Even if I look at the forest, there's a boundary zone between the forest and the meadow. Often the greatest innovation is on those boundary zones. That's one layer of response to what you're saying.

I'm out here on this land, and I had this experience the other day where, you know, we have neighbors, right? So it's 10 acres, but there are neighbors on both sides. And I was teaching at the end of my class, the neighbor had walked onto the land and was, like, motioning at me, and I was like, I don't want this guy here, you know? So I had made a gate. I literally built a gate, and I put the gate up. And the moment I put the gate up on the land, and I want to just say, like, I've been out here for 18 months, and my practice here has been to build a relationship with this place, right? And to not do anything without its permission. And so I spent a year just feeling it, studying it, clearing out dead wood. And then there came this moment, you know, we started to put structures on it. We're very, you know, like, listening to the response from the land. Well, I put this gate up. The moment I close the gate, I start getting this really intense headache. And I go, that was weird. And I open the gate, and the headache goes away. And I was like, no, really. So I left the gate open that night. I come back the next day, I close the gate. Same exact thing happens. And I realized, like, okay, what's going on? I don't have permission. The land's like, I don't give you permission to close the gate. You may not close the gate. It's like this whole place is about opening to community. Why are you trying to close the gate? You know, like, it got. I don't know if it got mad at me, but I felt like I don't have permission to do that. And I think this next layer of answer response to your question is like, how do we change the systems? We stop thinking we know. We stop thinking we're in charge. And we recognize that if we're in relationship, because.

What'S happened is that we've.

At one level, like, we've created a very dissociative matrix. Modernity is like a dissociative matrix, right? And we could talk about this in so many ways. I mean, I can't tell you how many little children I've had conversations with where. And this may be a strange example, but, like.

You know, kids these days, they don't know that a burger comes from a cow.

I've had this happen, like, five or six times with the children, the friends of children, you know, the. The children of friends or kids. I know where there's a moment where they figure out, because they go to Whole Foods or they go to the grocery store, whatever, they go to the meat case, the burger is already in cellophane. They know they're delicious, right? They're like, I want a burger. And then they're also aware that there's this beautiful animal called a cow. And they've maybe connected with a cow, or they went out to this. The ranch and they met a cow or something. And there's this horrifying moment when they realize that the burger came from the cow. And they, like. I've seen them feel like their parents, like, betrayed them. It was like, there's a betrayal in that. Like, you didn't tell me that, you know, and it's because of this dissociation. Like, in a traditional culture, there's no way. A kid would never know that, because you would have raised the animal. You would have seen it get slaughtered. It would have been done in a ritual manner with respect. There would have been awareness along that pathway. And what we've created is these systems where the effect and the cause are completely divorced, right? I don't think anybody, like, gets in their car going, like, fuck you, atmosphere. Like, you know, let's. Let's really fuck up the CO2 levels. Like, I don't think that's what happens. I think, like, we're enmeshed in these systems that are profoundly dissociated, and we're trying to, like, pull out, you know, break the spell of these dissociative matrices. And I think part of, you know, one layer of that is, like, we don't know how to do this. You know, we don't, as modern culture, have an awareness of how to live anymore in a way that's not extractive. But there are cultures that have been doing this always, you know, that that awareness is held. It has been guarded in lineages that are ancestral, that are intact, that are indigenous since the dawn of time. And so I think, again, like, if we want to center perspectives, it's really important to center perspectives that have been marginalized because of. Because of the insights, you know, that those perspectives have and to center cultures that are actually living cultures. Like, what we've created is not a living culture. You could say it's an unculture or that it Never was alive. But now it's hit the biospheric boundaries. Capitalism as a structure, it's contingent upon this idea that there are infinite natural resources, which is not true. It was never true. For a long time. It didn't matter because they were practically infinite. Now it's quite obvious that they're not these fundamental systemic architectures. They just simply don't work. They never worked. We just didn't hit the boundary. Now we're hitting the boundaries.

Well, you know, you point to something there. And I want to circle back in a moment and talk about this connection with ancestral wisdom and these indigenous cultures and lineages that are intact all the way back to the dawn of time and how you're integrating that with modern science and these different worldviews. But first, you referenced before, I think, some anthropological research that really points to the ideal human configuration being the hunter, gatherer band. And it's not like with the level of population that we have, that we can all return to living that way in the natural world. But, you know, in that setting, newborns are born into this nested set of social relationships, and they're always held, they're always attended to, and it gives you a foundation for life, you know, whereas. Whereas today, most of us are born into this world of disconnection and disassociation. Right. And so, you know, well, how do we shift that? And, you know, this is a place where I think mindfulness plays a role in whatever form it is. We don't have to talk about, quote, mindfulness, but reflective practices, something that wakes us up, some kind of awareness practices, because in order to allow things to continue the way they are, we have to be turning away. We have to be intentionally ignoring. We have to be numbing ourselves out. We have to be ignoring the evidence right in front of us. And that's, you know, it's getting harder and harder to do, thankfully. Right. But nonetheless, I think, you know, that's a lot of the work I've done to try to bring some kind of awareness practices into various systems and organizations is because I feel if enough people kind of begin to wake up within those organizations and systems, they will no longer tolerate the toxicity that's been institutionalized in many of those organizations and systems. They just won't tolerate anymore because they're. They're too awake. Right. They're too aware. So. So how do we kind of blend the fact that the world is coming in, knocking on and say, you better wake up. Right? You have to wake up. But, you know, we've We've been practicing numbing for a long time. So how do we also, you know, support people in that waking up? Because often the waking up is a shock. It's like. It's like that child. The betrayal the child experiences when they connect the burger to the cow, Right? And so. And people go through shock, and then they go through grieving and sadness and despair and hopelessness, and when people really become aware. So, you know, how do we support people in that, of moving into waking up, into awareness in a way that just doesn't, you know, undermine their confidence about their ability to live with integrity in this world?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's a hard thing. You know, there's a quote, and I don't know who this is attributed to, but I've heard it said a number of times, like, the origin of consciousness is a crime scene.

There's a shock. You know, I think. And I think, you know, with some of this stuff, we've seen this happen consistently enough and talked about it with enough colleagues and enough disciplines to see that there's a pattern. Right. People have often a crisis of some kind. Sometimes it's a psychological crisis, sometimes it's an illness, sometimes it's a natural disaster. There's often a precipitating, what our mentor, Mary Watkins, would call a rupture. There's some experience where all of a sudden the sort of fabric of the worldview they've brought with them up until that point is no longer adequate to hold them together. And there's a process of a rupture. And I think rather than try to soften it, maybe it's useful to be aware that that is actually a natural process. Mary Watkins.

Profound professor of ecopsychology, wrote a book called.

Towards Psychologies of Liberation with Helene Shulman, and more recently, a book called Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons. And she talks about. They talk about this process of this rupture, and then an entry into what is variously characterized as an underworld or a liminal kind of space, where all of a sudden the traditional way that the world has been organized, it's no longer adequate to encompass the new experience of reality someone's having. It's often very disorienting. And I think one of the things we can do is create communities of.

Restoration and resilience and support to kind of midwife these processes for people so that it's not so dislocating, but it is a dislocation. And I think it may be it's necessary that it's Dislocated, right, Because it requires that you sort of confront the fact that we've been fed a story that's just not, it's not really true.

Like there's a story, there's a narrative that, you know, take the mythology of America, for example, right? There's a, there's a branding, a mythology, a marketing of the American story that just doesn't, if you actually track the history, it just doesn't add up, you know, and there's a process, I think, where people begin to, for whatever reason, they have to begin unraveling that they've been sold, you know, a bill of goods that's just not real and that is dislocating. And some people are going to just double down, they're going to retrench in an ideology for comfort. And I think we're seeing that in the rise of nationalism, these kind of retrenchments into traditional ideologies. Politically with Bolsonaro in Brazil or Trump in the United States or these more authoritarian regimes, it's a retrenchment into, you know, kind of a locking down. And no, I won't, you know, open myself to this because it's so uncomfortable. And I don't know that we can stop people from doing that. I think it's unfortunate, but like, I think it's really important to put the energy towards the people who are willing to make the transformational effort, you know, because there are a lot of those people and to build the architectures, the infrastructures of the future that allow us to more adequately express these more heartfelt yearnings through structure. Because that's another thing that doesn't exist very much. Right. Like in our own work, we've spent a lot of time thinking about how do you structure an organism? I don't say a company anymore, but like an alliance, an organization, an organism that aligns with these deeper kind of intuitions and aspirations. Because a lot of the models that we've been using are like 17th century models. We have to update the infrastructures, we have to update all of these things. There's plenty of work to do to create the infrastructures of the future that allow us to express these more heart based awarenesses through structure. I think if we put our energy there, some of the rest takes care of itself.

I love what you said about this kind of inevitable disruption or dislocation as part of the awakening process and really the human journey. And it really points to the hero's journey that was so beautifully mapped out by Joseph Campbell and others. And in some Ways you could say, we're all going through this collective hero's journey together. And, you know, I do agree with you that that that can create a retrenchment for some people. And I. And there may be no way to prevent that. At the same time, sometimes, even though, you know, we're trying to create open, inclusive, awake communities, sometimes those can begin to have their own. They can become closed circles instead of open circles, and even subtly, so unintentionally so, which can create a kind of. Kind of reactivity. So how do we. How do we keep all the doors open, even to the people that seem to be really reacting and retrenching in ways that seem, you know, the antithesis of where we hope we can all go as humanity? How. How do we keep the door? How do we keep our circles? It's challenging, right? It can be very challenging. But. But I think that's one of the great challenges in our work. I want to make sure today, with our time that we have. I want to mention your book. I'd love to see your book. It's a great collection of these restorative practices. And so I think I want to make sure people know about that. This is. Yeah. Restorative practice. It's a big book. It's a big, thick book. Yeah, exactly. And it really represents all these tools, this medicine. Yeah. That you've been collecting and. And mapping out for decades now. So I think it's a fabulous resource and one people need to know about. And then I'd like to invite you to talk even a little bit more about that property you're developing there. You know, it's kind of weird today. We're so much in this virtual world today, you know, and years ago, I mean, I've had the experience in my own spiritual community that we've always had these land centers. We have several major land centers in North America and in Europe. And I just have always felt that it was important to have this connection to the land, to have place, to have home. And my first spiritual teacher, Chogam Chungkramche, was very much about that. And with my Zen teacher at one point, who was kind of into this whole virtual thing, he had kind of. He'd lost his spouse, and he was just wandering. And then, you know, so much became available to do online. He kind of got fascinated with that. And, you know, he didn't want to be in a bricks and mortar business anymore or anything like that. You're like, no, no, you have to have land, you have to have property. And this beautiful property that had been a previous commune that had been at the heart of the anti nuclear movement not far from where I live now in Massachusetts, had fallen into disuse. And I became aware of it and I convinced him and they took it on and were able to begin to develop that place. And I didn't live in this area then. Now I find myself living very nearby. And we have our own land center here. And.

He got in a little over his head in that particular property and got into some financial trouble with it. I think he sometimes blamed me for a little bit. But it's still a beautiful place and others are using it well. And we've developed a property nearby where we have a beautiful retreat center. And so I really believe in the necessity to be connected with the earth and connected to land. And yet, you know, today with the pandemic and we have this beautiful space at our retreat center, it was built, the people that built it about 12 years before we became aware of it. And we, it worked out really well for them, for us to purchase it from them. And they're still our neighbors and friends. And anyway, it was built on the golden mean principle. And it's 64ft long, about 40ft wide, 18 foot ceilings, and it's just all beautiful wood. And it's a. You just walk. It feels like you're walking into a cathedral, right? And then there's beautiful. Surrounded by beautiful forests and woods and it's just sitting above the Connecticut river in this beautiful ecosystem.

But we haven't been able to use it much during the pandemic. We've only done a couple of things there. And this summer, the spring and summer, I hope to be doing things outside because we do. Like yourself, we're doing a lot. We do a lot of circles outside and so forth. So we're in this weird world right now where we've been doing all this work over Zoom. And you know, it's been in many ways a blessing because so many people have been able to access so many transformational technologies and wisdom and teachings that before couldn't afford to travel to a retreat center. And you know, now people are getting on the same Zoom call with some amazing transformational teacher. And they're from all over the world, right? They could never could have. And it's lowering the carbon footprint a lot because people aren't flying all over the world to, to access these things. And so there's a lot in that. And yet it still seems really important to come back and have that sense of place and I'm so happy you're doing it. So talk a bit about your inspiration and what you're developing there.

Thanks for asking. Yeah, I got emotional just feeling into this. You know, I. When I was really little, I grew up in a forest. I was very little in Walpole, New Hampshire, this little tiny town. And I was there until I was about 7 years old. And it was a place where I could walk out the front door and be in the forest in two or three minutes. And I kind of got to do that as a five and six year old. It's an experience that I don't think most modern American children have. In 1982, the economy collapsed and my father lost his job. And my parents, both of their families were from St. Louis, Missouri. And my mom's parents offered to help my. My family buy a house there. And so they moved back. And I experienced it, like, as being abducted. That's a strong word, but like my own family, like, from this place where I had really deep roots in place, in friendship, you know, community. And, you know, I think I spent 35 years trying to get back to the forest.

I can't even speak about this without crying.

In the summer of 2020, we went up to the Sierras for a couple of weeks. This was like the first part of the pandemic. And we had this opportunity to spend a couple of weeks.

On the land up there. And I just felt spending more and more time on a computer, it was pulling me into my eyes, into my head, away from the earth. And I had this awareness. I have to get my feet and my hands into the dirt, like into the soil much more deeply, or I'm not going to be able to stay balanced. We came back to the Bay Area where we live. I'm part of a Brazilian spiritual community, and we were looking for a temple site, and this property came onto our radar. It's in a very pristine valley. It's like 20 minutes from our house. I came out the first time to try to find it, and I couldn't. It was like I had a map. I was looking at the map, looking at the address, and it wasn't there. I drove by it this way, that way. I was like, I never found it. The first time I left. What's going on? The second time I came back out, I found the driveway. I walked onto the land, and I was like, oh, we don't have to build a temple. It's already here. It just felt like that. I've had that feeling about it ever since. We've been here. We didn't have any money really to buy land, but the real estate agent who was representing the owner said, well, he might lease it to you. And so we pursued a lease. And I spent the first year out here.

Just tending it. It was like, without getting particularly political about this, the California beavers were killed off in the 1830s and 1840s by Russian fur trappers. The beavers trap water on the land. And then, you know, 100 years of fire suppression and like, this hadn't been cared for for 100 years. Part of the reason we're having such intense wildfires is because of those. Those two things, right? And so I spent the first year out here, like just tending it, you know, clearing deadwood. That's all I did for like 12 months. It was like 3ft deep in deadwood and gradually getting to know this place. And after about a year, we sort of realized, like, well, we need a place to have shelter. So we started looking at building something and people were like, oh, you're never going to be able to build anything for less than $100,000. The permits are going to cost you $40,000, this and that and the other thing. And, you know, there's sort of like a series of fortuitous events where we discovered that if we created a structure that was 300 square feet, we could do it without a permit. And then we were able to declare the property because of the zoning nature preserve, which it is, and then the structure became accessory to that. And then I designed this structure around a set of windows that we found salvaged. And then I went on Craigslist one night to buy materials. And eight hours earlier, somebody in Santa Cruz had posted the structure I had imagined and had taken it apart and was selling it off for parts. And I call him and I go, hey, you know that ad you put up? And he goes, yeah. And I go, how much do you want for the whole building? And he goes, are you serious? And I go, yeah. He sold me the building for $3,000.

Wow.

Like, we went down with a 20 foot truck and picked it up. It was already disassembled. I mean, it was a little uncanny, right? I discovered that a 20 foot truck is only 19ft 6 inches. So we had to cut 6 inches off the rafters, you know, and then we built it and we got these, you know, two guys. This Mayan shaman turned out like I was driving down with the guy who would be told was the framer, and he turned out to be a Mayan shaman. We had an interesting six hour conversation. They framed it in two weeks. So I feel like we've been well assisted.

And it's just been a blessing to be out here. And I really feel like it's become a partner in the work. I wasn't joking about that. I know that may sound strange, but there's definitely a way that this relationship is feeding what we're doing. We've been salvaging wood. So they're coming through, clearing these trees for the power lines because they're above ground power lines and these systems are so disconnected. PGE has been clearing these old growth trees and then they're just paying to have them sent to the dump. And I want to just emphasize this is insane because this is old growth wood. And not only is it intrinsically valuable, I mean I. People check out wood prices. Like wood is not inexpensive. It's also extraordinarily beautiful. And they're literally like chipping it and throwing it away. And so we like said to the foreman, well, what if we, you know, could we take some of that and we'll just mill it ourselves? And so we were able to obtain, you know, this wood at no cost, right? And then there was a redwood tree that was, that was taken down up the road and I, I was going to bring it in and I happened to be up there when the formina was arriving to go like measure it. And I said, well, could I have a crew come take this to our land? And he was like, well, our truck is coming, why don't we deliver it to you? Right? So we had this like redwood tree delivered. It's just been very interesting, like how the whole thing has proceeded. Behind me there's this sculpture that we made out of these 12 foot sections of redwood. And the placement of it just sort of came together and I, I'll show you. I made a model of it. You know, this.

This is me exactly like all your other interviews.

I modeled this out, these little things. And then we had this crew come and they cut these, only they're, you know, 12ft tall, right? And then we realized after we did it, like, well, what is this thing that we made? We realized like, well, this is where the fireplace is going to go at the heart of the village. So there's definitely this call and response that's been happening. It hasn't been pre planned. We've been learning how to work with this place and what it wants and it's very vocal about what it does and doesn't want. And again, I think just to come Full circle with this question you asked earlier. When we were designing the learning platform, we ended up having to build it ourselves, not because we wanted to, but because I couldn't find a learning platform company that could think in this way. I couldn't get them to understand that this thing was nonlinear, it was a map, it was a system. And I think part of what we have to do is evolve the way that we're thinking. We have to think in terms of systems and we have to teach people how to think in terms of systems because we're thinking in ways that are not connected to how living processes evolve. And if we want to design systems, we want to work within the parameters of things that are alive, we have to learn how to think in systems.

Again, my experience of that, which is limited is that it's very rare that we come in with a plan and can execute it from the outside. It's always like in my experience, call and response. And you're iterating to use a design thinking term as you go because you're learning. And if you let these elements come together and you let it be local and you let yourself listen as much as you talk, then something emerges that's unplanned and that's novel and that couldn't have been anticipated. And that's the beauty of it because that becomes a living thing. And then it's very exciting because you're learning all the time. Right. And it's in the present moment and it's mindful, it's emerging as you work on building it together.

Wow. Well, you're pointing in the direction of our, of our day that's going to be focused on resilience systems. One of our guests will be Otto Sharmer. And you're kind of almost describing his theory U model right there. And a really beautiful way to look at things. And you know, I think I so love what you're doing and because even in the simplest, most straightforward terms, I think probably the most powerful thing we can all do individually and as community society is reconnect with the living natural world. I mean, it's just, it's just the source of who we are and everything. And you know, reconnecting with the body reconnects us with the heart, reconnects us with the earth. We are earthlings. We're made of the earth. I just want to share one thing. I don't know if I've ever shared this publicly before, but I was doing a wilderness. We used to have a year long peacemaker training program that Involved a ten day capstone experience, a ten day wilderness retreat. And we took people to this place in Crestone, Colorado, really wild place in the Sangre de Cristo mountains and spent 10 days out there. And then there was a three day solo that was part of it. And so I would do my own solo. And I remember, I think it was the first year that I did a solo there. So I'm on this three day solo and you know, I really remember one night I had seen a mountain lion kill earlier that day. And that night I drew a protective circle. I got my little fire and I was like seeing everything in the of dark around me, you know, by myself. But like the next day I'm out wandering around, I'd go out wander a little bit. And I saw this boulder, this boulder that was, you know, maybe 3ft high, 4 or 5ft wide, you know, significant size boulder. And it had this little depression in it and I just felt this call to it. I just felt this. It was like this magnetic attraction and, and it just became quite. Now I knelt down in front of this boulder and I placed my forehead in that depression. It just perfectly fit, right? And the minute my forehead touched that depression touched the boulder, I just burst into tears. And I was just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and you know, and that just kind of went through me and I finally kind of kind of lifted my head up and like what, what, what was that? And you know, we all have grief and we touch into the grief of the world and our own grief. But I wasn't really connecting the dots with any present personal grief of mine about it, you know, and, and so I waited a bit and you know, I thought, well, that was weird. I put my head down again, boom, just starts sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. It just flows out of me. And you know, I was kind of unsettled by that experience, but it was very powerful. And I came back the next day and you know, I'm kind of a skeptic and I'm an experimental mind. So. All right, maybe I was in an altered state yesterday. I'm out here on this wilderness retreat. I'm in a pretty vulnerable place, you know, maybe I imagined it. So I went down, put my forehead again, just an explosion of grief comes forth, you know, so we live in a living world, you know, we do not live in an inanimate. There's nothing that's inanimate. I don't even think man made things are really essentially inanimate. It's all energy, it's all life, right? And I think that's really the pathway, and I just love that you're weaving in so many different streams of connection and now. And now finding a home to be the ground where you're really going to continue that journey. So it's very inspiring and very, very exciting. I'm just really inspired by our conversation today.

Right on, Fleet. Thanks. It's a beautiful affirmation. I love your story. You know, I think we've. We've done everything we can in the modern world to, like, keep at bay the degree to which it's an extraordinarily mysterious universe. It's all alive, you know, and this, like. May I just share a very brief anecdote inspired by your story as we come to conclusion?

I remember, you know, there was this moment where I was learning about the San people of the Kalahari. They have this.

Sort of understanding of building ropes with things in the living world, right? And the story goes that.

They have a teaching that the moment you recognize an individual animal, it could be like a bird. This is what I tried it with first. The moment you recognize an individual animal, there's an energetic thread that forms between the two of you.

Okay?

So I heard this, and I was like, it hadn't occurred to me up until that point in my life that you could recognize an individual bird. I was like, well, that's a ruby throated, you know, hummingbird. Like, I was operating at the species level, right? And I heard this. And then there was this day where my daughter and I were out. There's a little garden near our home. And there was. We were out. We were watching a hummingbird. It was a spring. And this hummingbird kept going off and coming back to the same branch. It was super territorial. There were a bunch of them around. And this one bird kept, like, coming back to the same branch. And I'm looking at it, and all of a sudden I realized there was, like, an asymmetry on the feathers on its neck. Like, one of the sides was missing a few feathers. And literally at the moment where I saw that, I felt it look at me, because I recognized it. Like, the next time it landed, I could tell it was the same bird, right? I knew it was coming back the same time. I felt that thing they were talking about, and I went like, holy shit. Like, this is real. This is not an idea. Like, it's real. And so what they say is, the moment that is established, you have an energetic thread with that creature. Every time you then recognize it again, that thread gets thicker, right? It's a Very beautiful way. It's not a metal beautiful. And they say like what it means to be san is to create these ropes with all the aspects of the creation. Well, when you do that, you start to be able to exchange information.

Right? Of course, when you love somebody, you know somebody, you start feeling with them.

Right.

And we have this idea like, oh, we cannot do that because it's not a human thing. That's just simply not true. We can't do it cognitively.

Right.

But again, like I've had Larian say to me, the difference between indigenous intelligence and western intelligence is that you think that intelligence comes from thinking. And he said to me, we know intelligence comes the moment thinking stops.

So you come into this space, you turn off thinking, you begin to build these relationships and all of a sudden, like, you know, you start to return to this sense of the animacy.

Of everything. Right. It's animate, it's alive, you know. And I've had so many stories I've heard now about like people being visited by a creature and it was like sent by someone to see them because they have a relationship with that creature.

Right.

And these stories sound like, oh, you know, that's esoteric or shamanic or something like that. No, like that's how it can be if we're able to cultivate these relationships.

Right, Absolutely. And those, those, those ropes of, of connection that is the matrix of our resilience. That's what really about this, is how do we weave the, this matrix of connectedness and resilience with each other and with the world. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. So I really appreciate your time today and thank you so much for the work you're doing.

Definitely. Thank you so much. It's my happiness to be with you as usual.

And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating meeting. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us.

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