EP 202: Gabriel Kram | Enhancing the Power of Connection

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 and colleague who describes himself as a connection phenomenologist and a neural cartographer. 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 as it's important 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. I'm really thrilled to be here with my longtime friend and colleague Gabriel Cram on the day where we're focused on relational and social self care and the whole realm of social connection. And I can't think of anybody I'd rather talk about this with than my friend Gabriel. So welcome, Gabriel. Fleet.

Thank you so much for having me. It's pleasure to be with you.

Well, it's a pleasure to be with you today. And if nothing else, I. I get to be part of that beautiful setting that you have there, and I'm really. I'm getting to be out in nature. I'm here in my. In my underground studio, and you're out there in that beautiful setting, so I get to enjoy that vicariously. So I'm going to share a bit of your background and we'll jump right into the conversation.

Okay, sounds good.

Gabriel Crammed is a connection phenomenologist and a neural cartographer. He is the principal content architect and co convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance. He is also the founder and CEO of Applied Mindfulness, Inc. Gabriel is the host, director and executive producer of the Restorative Practices film series, which is his visual dissertation in connection phenomenology. He is the author of the recently published book Restorative Practices of well Being, which is almost an encyclopedic offering of wonderful restorative practices. So here we are on this day focused on the social relational dimension of self care. It's hard to even extract self care from that dimension. I mean, we can talk about things we can do individually, and there are all these different dimensions of self care, but we're our social beings, right? So we're always operating Whether we know it or not, within some nested set of the social networks that we're part of, because even our sense of self really exists within that net of social interactions.

And sometimes self care can get a bit of a bad rap as being self indulgent or selfish, or maybe men think it's the soft stuff or it's related to commercialized as a spa lifestyle or something. Right. But for us, I think we felt more important than ever at this time in our lives with everything we have going on in the world, that the ground of self care is so important. And it's really just about living smart and working smart. I just had a wonderful conversation with Professor Richard Boyatsis about self care in a workplace. And he said he feels, and he's one of the really world renowned leadership trainers, the author of Primal Leadership, and he feels that genuine workplace workforce transformation begins with self care. He feels that's where it begins. So we really feel it's foundational and just by living smart and working smart. And I want to talk with you today about the aspect of connection and how the role that plays in our life, which is so critical. And you call yourself a connection phenomenologist and a neurocartographer, and I know your work is a lot about integrating ancestral wisdom and current science, current neuroscience, but maybe if you could even just start by telling us a little bit about what it means to be a connection phenomenologist and we'll see where it rolls from there.

Sure, yeah, I'm happy to do that. It's a term that most people are not yet familiar with. So it was a, it was a term that I came to actually I learned it from a deep nature mentor of ours. And, and I had spent, when I began calling myself a connection phenomenologist, I'd already spent 20 plus years working in neuroscience, working in mindfulness, working in well being practices, and it sort of knit together for me the common denominator of all of the things that I had been focused on through these different disciplinary lenses. So, you know, we've done a lot of work on trauma healing, we've done a lot of work on bringing mindful awareness into different contexts. And I realized that the thing that we were always trying to do was turn on people's physiology of connection. Really. We look at it really deeply through this autonomic nervous system lens and these kind of circuits, the neural circuits that activate when we feel safe enough to sort of open our hearts.

Right.

And this brings us pretty quickly into the language of the Polyvagal theory. Our mentor, Dr. Stephen Porges, work in this area. So connection phenomenology, it's the art, it's the science, it's the practice of turning on that what we think of as the connection system. And so that's really the through line in our work is how do we help people move out of these kind of neural platforms of distress, trauma, toxic, chronic stress, and into these platforms of safety and connection where we can really turn on the root drivers of well being.

And you and I have both worked separately and together in systems of disconnection or places where disconnection really exacerbated the criminal justice system and the juvenile justice system and so forth. And so.

I'd love to talk today about, you know, everything we can learn about self care in terms of how we can create greater social connectedness, whether it's with our spouses, our family members, our close friends, our neighborhood, our community, co workers in a workplace. But also I want to be sure to address some of the areas that you've really gone into in terms of the larger landscape of well being, that if we're going to have that connectedness, we're going to, we got to really honor our ancestors and honor ancestral wisdom and connect with the voices of indigenous peoples. And we need to deal with diversity and equity and inclusion and bring together people of all backgrounds. And so weaving together how we do this social connectedness really for our own benefit, really even our own survival on some level, but in a way that we're not only creating connection with those closest to us, but finding ways to increase the fabric of connectedness, to include everyone. And so we can go wherever we want, wherever we want to begin in that. But maybe just a little more with that.

We have Stephen Porges in most of our summits and very gratefully in this one as well. But maybe you could talk just a little bit about that neurobiology or the physiology of connection versus disconnection.

Yeah, well, so let me do that, but let me ease into it a little bit by speaking to sort of this distinction that you're making or that maybe is not commonly made but seems to be important in this conversation. So.

You started out by sort of speaking about how often when people are talking about self care, you know, that sort of term has within.

Gets heard in a lot of ways. Right. It lands in a lot of ways.

And it could almost be just like it implies turning away from connection almost in a sense to ourselves. Right.

Well, I think that, you know, the language of it is interesting, right? Because when we say self care, we hear the word self. And I think one of the fundamental frames of relevance here, and it's something that you alluded to early on, is the difference between orientation towards self and orientation toward relationships.

Right.

And I think, you know, if I look at sort of the critical nexus in our work is this awareness that, you know, we're well in relationship, right. And if we look at, you know, what moves us out of well being, it's. It's this retrenchment into isolation. It's separation, it's disconnection. Right. And so I don't have a particular problem with the word self care, except that I want us to hold this bigger vision of community care. I think there's this relational, this social layer of it that is instantiated. And I'll respond to your earlier question about physiology. It's instantiated in the earliest interactions, hopefully between a caregiver and an infant. Right. And, you know, the beauty of these systems is that we have this really deeply hardwired and innate neurobiology that's tuned to connection and relationship. And I think, you know, for any of your audience that is adult that's had an opportunity to be around an infant, there's this fascinating thing with really, really little ones, which is that before they're verbal, right. Before that they can articulate their needs through the voice. We still need to be able to see into the interior of them. They need to be able to express that interiority for us to be able to care for them, to meet their needs, to keep them alive. Right? Because, you know, as social mammals, we're born helpless. And so there's this extraordinarily beautiful architecture that's innately hardwired. And it's this architecture that ties together the neural regulation of the face, the voice, the tuning of the middle ear.

The heartbeat, the breathing into this synchrony that when it's online, when it's evoked, really provides the neurobiological ballast, the stability for bringing us into safety and connection. Dr. Porges, beautiful work, really identified the neural architecture of those systems for us. But you don't have to understand physiology to know that when you're holding a baby and you're relating to it, the relating to the little one through the eyes, through the face, through the voice, there's something very special that happens. And that circuitry is a circuitry of relationship, right? And the access point to that is feeling safe enough in our bodies to allow that to come online. And, you know, I think it's fascinating because you'll see even, you know, like, I don't have a particularly deep voice, but you watch like a big dude with a deep voice get around a baby and their voices come up, you know, oh, it's a baby, right? We talk to animals like this, our cat, our dog. Because there's this innate awareness that when we're in that kind of rapport, there's a way that we want to speak into that relationship so that it lands, right? If you lean into a baby and you go, oh, it's a baby, it's going to freak the baby out. Because that deep voice is going to trigger a sense of danger. And so we speak in a way that's tuned in, right? We soften into that relationship. And you know, right there you have this image that is at the heart of what it means to create that connection, reciprocity. And unfortunately, a lot of the way that the modern civilization has evolved is that it's moved us away from, from that safety and connection and into defense, into defensive platforms. And you know, there are a lot of reasons that people have had to defend themselves. You know, we take this very kind of, you know, broad lens on this because we live in a world that's filled with threats, right? And it's those threats are also differential.

They're gender, they're, you know, they're differentiated based on race. There's all of these ways that you have.

Systems of threat, right? One of the things that's been so powerful about the last two years is that we've been presented with the pandemic with a universal threat. All of humanity has been.

Facing that. And in our work, we work with people around the world, we see a degradation of mental health. I think like many people are aware of at scale globally because of that constant presence of threat. And so it really, you know, redounds on what you were saying earlier, this importance of taking care of the self, taking care of our connection systems, nourishing that well being in these times. Because so much of what's coming in is not that.

Absolutely. And this pandemic has been a double or triple whammy because, you know, our threat systems are on high alert on a continual basis. Because literally I remember in the early days of the pandemic, it hasn't completely gone away. I had these visions of being in an ambulance on the way to an ICU somewhere to be on a ventilator, right? You know, and so, you know, our threat systems are on high alert. And then one of our real sources for well being and Self care and resilience is our social connectedness and that's been limited by physical distancing, mask wearing and all the rest of it in the isolation of the pandemic. So and you know, there is real data out there showing that there is going to, is already and going to be an ongoing mental health impact of this. That's going to have some legs for a while and that we really do need to think about taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other at scale because of the results of what we all been through together. And hopefully the fact that we've all been through this together will have some, you know, sometimes they call them peace dividends. Right. You know, it will have some, some silver linings and dividends down the road. I'd like to for a moment handle this self issue. Right.

You know, so generally we use the word self with a small S to reference the sense of me or I. And you know, that can just be a common way of referring to ourselves in our body. And then it can go into selfishness and all the way and disconnection and isolation as you were saying. But another way of understanding self, we have Dick Swartz on this summit, the founder of Internal Family Systems. So like some other current psychological models, there's the idea of many voices, many eyes, many beings, many parts, as they say in Internal Family System that we think we're this one I, this one me, but we're actually a multiplicity of parts, subpersonalities, voices, right? And so a lot of that work is recognizing the unattended to parts, recognizing the disowned parts, recognizing that, bringing it all back into acknowledgement and love and integration. So there's that same work that we do internally and is the same work that we need to do externally, right? And, and we know actually that no matter how isolated we are, our sense of self, if we really reflect and think about it and maybe even sort of really look at, doesn't live inside this skin encapsulated body or in this skull encapsulated brain. It exists within, within our social networks. And that's why when we experience a loss, I've had some really tough ones in my life. You know, the process of grieving, it can be so, so challenging and it has its own rhythm and you can't force it. And it's because what's going on there is our sense of self has literally been torn apart. You know, the fabric of our sense of self and being and our meaning of our everything, it's been torn and it takes a while to reweave that, okay, who am I and where do I belong and what you know. So in some ways, this idea of a self that is separate from relationship is illusory to begin with.

Right?

That's illusory. So in internal family systems work.

Dick Swartz, they talk about self with a capital S because they say the more you kind of work with the parts and bring the parts into awareness, you connect. Well, who is doing that? What is this thing that's able to include all these parts and heal the parts and include the parts? Well, that's some other self. It's not the small self, but they call it the self with a capital S. It's some kind of awareness and its qualities are courage, compassion and connection. The eight Cs, I can't remember them all, but it's not about selfishness at all. So maybe when we think of self care, we could talk, talking about self care with a capital S, which. Where caring for ourselves and caring for each other and caring for the planet would all be just this synonymous, inseparable matrix. Right. So I'm advocating for self care with a capital S here.

Yeah, I love that language. I love that language of, you know, this weaving of relationship.

Right.

And it reminds me, the Hawaiian, there's a mentor of mine shared with me that the Hawaiian word for to care for is malama, and then the word for enlightenment in Hawaiian is malama, Lama.

Right.

And it's this awareness that like, it's that extension of caring. Right. The capital S of caring. Extension of caring. The relationships with all of these things. And.

Yeah, there's a. I don't know if it's a parallel process exactly, but there is certainly mirroring, you know, between the ability internally to integrate, to allow, to make space for these parts, to find harmony between them and then to extend that graciousness outward.

Right.

The, the, the people who we can't connect with outside of ourselves, who. There's a mirroring function where that's also the parts of ourselves that we're not able to be present with internally.

Right, precisely.

But this is also, I think you're speaking to us and it's very important, but it's also, it's not really in the English language, you know, And I think it's also, if you know, knowing a bit of your background and your training and some of the mind training that you've been part of for many decades, these are not awarenesses that are part of the sort of European canonical educational framework. Right. We don't have words for that kind of relationship, really in English, you know, there's a nagunibantu word that a lot of people know, ubuntu, which means I am, because we are. And there's a lot of these words in indigenous languages that reflect this, you know, what thich nhat hanh would have called inter being. Right. But we don't really have that awareness in the kind of European traditions. And so I think it's, you know, it's beautiful what you're speaking to. And it's also important for people to realize that that's a. That's an awareness that comes from a more indigenous, a more ancestral, a more eastern frame. I think it's a remembrance.

Yeah. It may be more obvious there, you know, our mutual friend El Erian Merculiev, who's an Unangan elder, and he uses the expression. It's obviously translated from his Unangan language, but in English. And his wife, partner, Yael, is always saying, hello, my other self. Hello, my other self. Right. And it's kind of speaking to that, you know, I don't know. In our Western, in our Western world, we have certainly, you know, famously we talk about, you know, the influence of Descartes and, you know, I think therefore I am, as in the split of duality and kind of going in the other towards the world of disconnection. But I think you can also look at threads from, you know, the classical era in Greece and Rome and through various eras in the west and European where there is a consciousness around this. And certainly the Western psychologies from Freud onward have talked about parts and the collective unconscious and the need for this integration and the shadow work. And we now know that from current neuroscience that the same neural circuitry that allows us to integrate internally, to heal internally, to heal the parts, acknowledge the parts, integrate it all, integrate the shadow. When those neural networks are really activated and we become more embodied and more whole in our own skin and our own being. Those very same neural networks are the ones that we use to create connection and intimacy with others. The ones that. Where we invite others to have their social engagement system on and polyvagal language. So I think there is a real deep connection between us. So I think I agree with you. I think it's more. More obvious in the language from indigenous cultures. It's also very obvious from some of the Asian, Vedic and Buddhist cultures where there is the context of non duality, which is non separate. That's basically seeing the illusory nature of separateness. But even in our Western tradition, some of the mystical parts of Christianity, certain, the mystics, all discovered that non dual dimension. They had to be careful how they talked about it, or they could be accused of being a heretic sometimes, at least back in the 15th century or the 14th century. But you know, I think there is a thread within Western culture as well of that recognition that we need to remember. But certainly it seems to be more obvious sometimes within ancestral culture. You and I both had conversations about language with Chilkas and Ghost Tours, Right. And how fundamentally dualistic English can be or other Western languages are as a language versus how non dualistic some of the indigenous languages are, even the way their grammar and their syntax is set up.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So.

Why don't you talk a little bit about, you know, the thread of your work, because it really has all been about connection and you're connecting lots of different communities and people. And I know you're really, you know, honoring connection in your own life and your own family, within your own community. You're building this, you're out on this beautiful property where you're establishing kind of a home for this work. And it's really. We used the word weaving before. I really think of you as maybe a connection phenomenologist, but also a connection Weaver. So maybe if you could talk about what inspires that for you and how does that really work in terms of your own self care, in terms of even what works for you in terms of within your being with your home and family, and then how that weaving of connections supports your self care overall and the work you do, or how you see that playing out in the worlds in which you operate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I'm happy to speak into that. So I think it's useful to talk a little about the genesis. So the genesis of the model that we've been working on, and part of the lineage history here is that.

Probably.

10 years ago, nine or 10 years ago.

We were set up as a consulting firm and we started being asked to do a lot of trainings with frontline providers around burnout, resiliency trainers, resiliency trainings supporting, you know, frontline clinicians, mental health staff, physicians who were experiencing really intense vicarious or secondary traumatic stress from the acuity of patients to maintain their own well being. And you know, I was teaching a lot of mindfulness at the time, and we'd go out and we were working with different groups. And.

I think one of the things that we started to realize was that.

When people are stressed out, it really doesn't matter how many tools you have in your toolbox, because when you're in a stress response, you can't access them. Right. That's a sort of foundational awareness. So you can have all kinds of resources. But when you're really in that moment of being stressed out, the parts of the prefrontal cortex that hold that information simply aren't available. And so one of the things we found ourselves doing was kind of realizing that people knew how to take care of themselves often anyway, and had just sort of gotten disconnected from that. And so a lot of our trainings, we would do a few things at the very beginning that were pretty simple. We would try to train people outside.

And I'm here in Northern California. You can't do this all the time or every place. But we discovered pretty quickly that if we could find a beautiful setting in nature and just have a training, maybe it was by a lake or in a park or something, we needed an indoor space often. But just the moment you got people outside, it sort of broke that trance of disconnection a little bit, just to be able to watch the wind moving across a tree. There's something about that that we're hardwired to respond to. And we realized pretty quickly also that if we got people talking to one another just a little bit socially right at the beginning of the training, that that sort of caused a shift. And then we realized pretty quickly that if we got people moving, you know, and you've touched on this embodiment component, right, and it didn't have to be a formal practice. You know, it could be that we were stretching or we were doing a little bit of tai chi, or even just kind of allowing the body to move. And when those three things came together, people pretty quickly started to realize they were exhausted.

And it's funny, because we were working with providers who are kind of moving to their lives at a certain velocity. And I see this in myself. We get this momentum going. It's very easy to be busy. And then you kind of reconnect a little bit with nature, and you get the body moving. You go, oh, my gosh, I'm really drained. And so in these trainings, we would do those three things. People would realize they were tired, and we would just sort of create a context for them to rest. And, you know, after resting for 45, 60 minutes, you could kind of see people come back into a social engagement place. And we know this because people would start, you know, doing things like going and getting a coffee, and they would be drinking or they'd be eating, they'd be talking, they'd be doing things that were social in nature. And so in the afternoons, once people were kind of back with themselves, we just started asking people, like, okay, now that you're feeling more like yourself, what are things that you're already doing in your life to take care of yourself? And I think I must have done 700 trainings with different wellness professionals, groups of six to 200 people. I was never in a room where people had less than 40 or 50 ideas about this. And the thing we started doing was just writing down whatever they said. And at the end of the day, I would type it up. Someone would say, well, I come home from the clinic, I take off my clinic clothes, I take a hot shower, and I put on my house clothes and my slippers. And that's when I feel relaxed. And we just write that down. Somebody else would say, I come home, my kids know, don't even talk to me until I walk the dog, I put the keys in the bowl, get the dog, I go out on the trail. About 15 minutes later, I feel the stress coming off. I come back, you know, my kids talk to me, we make dinner, we just write it down. And, you know, I did this hundreds and hundreds of times. There was a period of time I had these flip charts just rolled up in my closet. And it got to a point where I just sort of knew it didn't matter what the group was. Somebody in the group was going to say that they did something related to mindfulness. You know, somebody would have a meditation practice or, you know, a tai chi practice. Somebody would be doing something that was very explicitly mindful. Somebody would have a movement practice. It could be dance. It could be, you know, kepware. It could be anything. Somebody would be doing something creative. Somebody would be doing something in nature. Somebody would have, like, a relationship practice with. With someone. And we just started to see that there was, like, a fundamental architecture. We started thinking of it as restorative practices, and that there was kind of like a fundamental intrinsic architecture of this. And I think it's an infinite set of practices. And the joy of our work, in part, has been learning these with mentors from cultures around the world. But we just started mapping this at a certain point. And I call myself at times a neural cartographer because we've been mapping these things for years. I can show you if you'd like to see one of these maps that we built. That's kind of behind the learning platform we developed, if that would be Useful or interesting to your audience?

Absolutely.

Joey. Speaking of that I was thinking of, you introduced me to Chris Brookfield, who does really interesting work within what he First Edge community, very unresourced communities and very impoverished areas, the altiplano in Peru, in Bolivia, where I've lived for a time, you know, very unresourced communities in India and other places. And by immersing himself in the community, he would discover there was all kinds of. Even what other people might look as this really impoverished community with all kinds of problems, and it's very unresourced and we need to come in and save them with some stuff. He would immerse himself in there and find, no, it's all there already. You know, they have all this indigenous knowledge of what works, and then how do you just support that and how do you. So I love the approach that you took. Rather than working with all these different groups you work with, rather than trying to deliver them, your preconceived set of, you know, wellness strategies that you were able to drop in and let them surface what they already had. And then you're mapping that, because then that's very helpful, right? Because I may have three or four strategies, but other people have more than that. You know, maybe I can broaden my palate by connecting with this kind of map you've created. Created. So. But I just love the way that you're drawing it out of. Out of what we already have. Because, you know, there isn't a human being on the pan who isn't doing amazing, courageous things every day just to deal with being alive as a human being on this planet. You know, it's no small thing to be a human being and get out from under the covers every day or get out there and take care of ourselves, our kids, our family and work and deal with everything we have to deal with. And so we all have incredible skills and lots of emotional intelligence. And so I think. I love the way that you're empowering that and surfacing and recognizing that. Because if anything, what we all need more than anything else is to be seen and heard and valued.

I think it's really important for people to recognize that it's already there, like you're saying, right. And that.

If we're talking about doing things that are restorative, if we're talking about taking care of ourselves, it has to be something that we find both relevant to us and enjoyable.

Right.

And, you know, this kind of like, oh, I'm going to tell you what you should be doing to Take care of yourself. Like, I just don't find, you know, if we're really suffering. And there have been times in my life where I've had to do certain, let's say exercises or rehabilitative practices when I was recovering that have certainly helped me. But once I felt better, I didn't want to keep doing them because I did not like them. Right. So if you find something that is deeply relevant to you, if it's meaningful, if you enjoy it, you're gonna pursue it and it's gonna fit into your world. And I think it's that. And it's this awareness also that we're resourceful. All of us innately just have a body. It's already resourceful. You know, I found myself the last couple weeks.

I was passed through a period of this very stressful. And I discovered that my eyes kept doing this thing in certain conversations with people where I would just sort of look away. You know, it was like the intensity was so big already in my life. My eyes just sort of wanted to look away. They look at something and I realized, like, that's a kind of intelligence. That's not my cognition at all. It's just my eyes knowing that, like in order to be able to be present, I'm going to look away and there's a settling that happens. And I don't think that that's something that, you know, came as a decision. I think my body just sort of did that thing.

Right.

But there was a wisdom in it and in noticing it, I guess is the thing. So we're just trying to notice these things that people are already doing that already work. And then to figure out when is it that a particular practice is going to meet somebody's needs.

Right.

What is the situation in their lives? What is the situation in their nervous system? What is going on that would incline them in a particular direction that's going to be useful to them.

Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. I just love that. And for me, it's been such a joy to, you know, every next level I'm able to go to personally with embodiment work, it's just discovering again and again and at deeper levels how miraculous the human body is even. And you know, that it has such powerful innate capacities for self healing. And of course, you know, the whole all of life is that way. Right. And you know, if we can get back in a right relationship with the earth, this whole ecosystem that we're part of will find a way to heal itself. Right. And you know, there's an expression that I Love that. I thought of when you were speaking. You know, one of the things I've taught many.

Or shared in many kind of training contexts are these model different levels of listening. So, you know, there's a level of listening that really isn't listening, called listening from within the cocoon, where we're so lost in our own self, we're not even aware somebody's trying to get our attention. So you really can't even call that listening. And then there's listening at the edge of the cocoon, where we know somebody wants our attention, but we kind of haven't decided whether we want to give it to them or not. You know, it's kind of yes, maybe no. And then there's outside, okay, now I'm listening, but it's businessly. I'm harvesting information. There's no relationship. And then you get beyond that to active listening, which is what clinicians are trained in. And if I'm doing good active listening with you, you will feel listened to. It's good quality listening. But it may not be empathic listening. Right. Because I'm not really allowing myself to be touched, to be in the relationship as I'm listening. And so then empathic listening is even further. And sometimes we thought, well, that's the ultimate stage, empathic listening. But then another stage was added. I don't even remember where this source from, but the idea was being able to listen someone into their own wisdom. In other words, you're holding such a safe space of empathic listening for someone that allows them to source their own innate wisdom and their own innate experience and to remember. And, you know, it's that idea that we could actually hold space or listen others into their own innate wisdom. Right. And what a gift that is.

I love that. And I always. It made me think about something, which is that I think there's a similar process somatically that I've observed. You know, I'll share a brief anecdote with your audience here, which is that, you know, when we did these trainings that I was describing a few minutes ago, and we would have, you know, people outside and then moving, and then, you know, they kind of come into rest. And we noticed this thing, which is that our whole focus was on creating a space that was safe enough for people to really rest, often we were dealing with systems that were fairly hierarchical. And so, you know, just in candor, sometimes we had a call. If it was a medical system, we had to call, like, the chief medical officer, whoever was the most senior person. We have to Say to them the night before, listen, we're going to do this meditation at like 10:30 in the morning. There's going to be mats and blankets. When we start to do this, everybody's going to look at you and see whether you lay down or not, you know. And so because it's like 10:30 on a workday morning, right? It was like, okay, if you lay down, people are going to feel like it's safe, it's okay socially to do that. And you know, so we had this phenomenon where like we would guide a kind of meditation. We'd say to people, just follow if it's useful or follow whatever is the source of the greatest sense of regulation for you. And then, you know, you'd look out, 45 minutes into this, some people will be fast asleep, you know, drooling. But there's, there would be somebody in the corner like, you know, kind of like doing something with their neck. I don't know if you've seen this happen in training. And it was like watching a bird or something, you know, this movement pattern that they would be doing. And you could tell it was not their conscious sense of self that was driving, but that this deeper, you know, one of our mentors uses this term organic intelligence had taken over and the body knew exactly what it needed to do to unwind. And it was just, it had suddenly enough permission to do that.

Right.

And I think, you know, one of the things about this modern context is that we're like socialized to within an inch of our lives and people don't feel this permission often to trust that innate wisdom of the body. But it's always, you know, sending up these regulatory cues. And we see this with kids so often we're like a child in a classroom. You know, they'll be tapping or something, tapping their foot. And unfortunately, often that.

Is suppressed. Teacher goes, stop tapping, stop tapping your pencil. But that's a self regulatory response. That's the genius of the body. Regulated. And so there's this much more interesting question that we can ask into that, which is like, oh, I notice you're tapping, let's say. I bet there's something about that that feels nice to you. What is it about that that's enjoyable? Can you feel that sensation? Right? And then we start to enter into this relationship with the wisdom of that kind of an innate movement. I think it's corresponds to what you're saying about listening for somebody's innate wisdom. This is listening for the innate wisdom of the body itself, which kind of knows what it wants to do if we can get out of the way a little bit.

Right? Yeah. That's really beautiful. Unfortunately, we're kind of socialized into conformity, which can be very oppressive. Now, of course, you know, like everything in life, there is a balance. You go too far in any direction. Like, so there's some balance between order and chaos. Right. There's a pretty wide sweet spot in there where we could give everyone a lot more permission to follow their inner wisdom and follow that instinctual organic intelligence. Right. But I think this is so much, so important, you know, and, you know, I always feel a little hesitant. I feel that we're at risk of sometimes, you know, demonizing the cognitive mind, the thinking mind, because it's one of our amazing capacities as human beings. But it does seem to continually get in the way of beingness and connecting with our organic intelligence. So, I mean, I think if we can just know that and say, you know, our cognitive mind, it's amazing, it has its place, but we can't let it drive the show all the time because it does seem like it can really prevent us from dropping into being this and accessing these restorative dimensions of our own being, our capacities for self healing. That organic intelligence you were talking about, I mean, a lot of the world's great contemplative traditions have strategies through mind training, meditation, getting out in nature, fasting, ecstatic dance, whatever it might be, to somehow get out of the cognitive mind and into this greater depth of being. Right. And so I feel like I'm constantly sort of preaching this, but I don't want to be like giving people the impression that thinking's bad. And the cognitive. If you just got rid of that, you know. No, you'd be like, you'd be an automaton or something. So, you know, but finding that balance because we've created a culture where it is so driven by the cognitive mind. Right. To our own disservice, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is very.

Important. You know, Larry, and you're talking about Larry and is a good friend of ours and he says, you know.

This is.

And I think this is a sort of well understood indigenous frame here, is that this has become the upside down society. Right. Like the heart should be telling the mind what to do. I mean, it's kind of like that. Right, right. The mind is this incredible instrument, but if it's not in service of the heart, if it's telling the heart what to do, we've got a problem. And there's a physiological layer to this, which is really deep because Stephen, Dr. Porters points out, and you can see this in the physiology very clearly. The vagal system is primarily an afferent system. It's upward flowing. So 70% of the fibers in the vagal system are upward flowing. Right. What the vagal system is designed to do is it's designed to take the awareness of the body and send it up to the brain through the heart, basically. And when we're in that, you know, connection system that, that's online that we're talking about, then you have this sort of regulatory field created by the heart that's being passed up into the brain. It's literally creating the, the wave function of the brain activity.

And that's the integrated state that we want to be operating from. And when we start to feel unsafe, there's literally a pressure threshold in the body. When our neural detection of threat hits a certain threshold where the direction of information flow reverses and the brain starts to try to run the body. And it, it's not capable of doing that. It can't regulate the body. Right. And so you see this directional reversal and then the mind tries to tell the body and the heart what to do, but the mind doesn't know how to entrain the organs. It doesn't know how to harmonize those systems. And you can see it in an HRV trace, a heart rate variability trace. When somebody's brain, that cognition takes over in a defensive response and it just goes completely chaotic. And unfortunately, you know, we have a modern system that's basically been assembled from that. Right. And so, no, of course, the mind is not the problem.

It's putting it in its proper place. Right.

Yeah. I love what you said about, you know, we've gotten where we're upside down and. Right. And we've gotten our culture upside down. And actually somebody interviewed a while back, they talked about, for them personally, they developed the path of recognizing when they're upside down, like they're out of sorts. And oh, wow, I've got myself upside down, I got to get myself right side up. And they have some go to skills for getting themselves right side up again. Right. The kind of skills you've been talking about. And I also think we need to maybe the same way we unpacked and maybe enlarged how we're using the word self and self care. I think maybe we need to do the same thing for mind. Right. Because with the cognitive mind, this incredible cognitive capacity, you know, it has a lot to do with the speed of our processor in the Brain and so forth. There's that skull encapsulated brain. But we know today there are neural networks in the biome, quite extensive. There are neural networks in the heart. And you know, like Dan, our colleague Dan Siegel, he talks about mind as being a flow of energy and information within and between. So, you know, enlarges mind to be, you know, much greater than. And so, and then we have this expression from. I think you have it in roots in indigenous traditions as well. And from the Buddhist tradition, the idea of heart mind, which in Sanskrit is citta C I T T a in Japanese it's shin. And you know, when you do, in the Buddhist tradition, you do a lot of stuff that, where you reference body, speech and mind. And even when you're doing prostrations, you know, so you go body here and then speech and then mind. So mind is always here in those contemplative traditions. And we talk about the heart mind. And bodhicitta means awakened heart mind. Right. So I think that idea of expanding how we use the term mind and the heart mind, that we can learn to live our lives grounded in the heart mind, where we still have complete access to all the amazing abilities of that computer in our skull. And. But we're also connected because the heart mind is the locus of connection.

Yeah, that's really clearly and well said. Amen to that.

So.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit further about just your experience of weaving networks of connection, the work you're doing and the community you're building. I mean, you're building your company in a really interesting way, in a much less top down, more decentralized, more relational way. You're really honoring the contributions of indigenous mentors in your work. And.

I just really see you doing some very innovative work and how to succeed and do something that has high impact in the world and using all the economic engines and everything we have to do to do that and current technologies. But you're really kind of turning things right side up and working very hard to do that. So I wonder if you could talk about how that's actually playing out on the ground in terms of the people that are showing up and getting involved in your work and what you're getting involved in and what's kind of moving the direction of your work and community by centering connection. Instead of centering whatever else we might center efficiency or centering profit, or centering my own ego gratification, but instead I really feel like you're centering connection in your work. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that's actually working. How's that playing out?

I'm glad you asked. It's a big question. And, you know, it's something that I.

Think the kind of counterculture, Right? It's pretty counterculture to the. Yeah, well, yeah.

And, you know, we're talking about.

It's counter to the modern culture.

So I'm about an hour north of Silicon Valley, and we have this work that we call it a company. I had a conversation with Dee Hawk, who founded Visa, because he was somewhat of a mentor of ours, and he said to me, what's the difference between a company and a community? And I said, I'm not sure. And he said, a community, it doesn't monetize all exchange of value, you know, And I. I liked that idea because it's very obvious to me. Like, you know, I talk to my friends all the time. I listen to them, hopefully, you know, in that way that you were talking about, beyond even empathic listening. But I don't then send them a bill for it.

Right.

Like, I. It wouldn't occur to me to do that. And there's this sort of bound. There's this edge of, like, you know, what is the community. What is the edge of where a community begins? Right. And you mentioned Chris Brookfield's work, and he's somebody that we've been talking to about this a lot because there's this whole sort of movement around impact investing and this awareness that we really need to change these systems in profound ways. But one of the things that I've been. I'll just be very honestly negotiating for myself recently is this awareness that as our work develops, as it grows, all of the paradigms of.

Growth, of success, in quotes, they're set up around domination models. And I'm finding this just very much like, in my interactions with people out here.

Who are financiers or whatever that might be, where there's an energy of. Of fight. There's an energy of, like, let's win. Which is very different than the energy of gardening. Right. Like, this is an energy of garden. This is where our work comes from. And so the thing that I'm really trying to do is bring the energy of gardening, which is an energy of weaving. It's an energy of building relationships, of mutuality, you know, into these.

These conversations and these frames. You know, I think Creator has a very, very good sense of humor, because the idea that I would be running a software company is somewhat hilarious to me still. Like, my idea of technology is a plant. I just, you know, we have the good fortune to know some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, but I've never met anyone who developed anything as anywhere near as beautiful as a leaf.

Right.

Like, if we're honest about this, you know, the architecture of like any beetle that flies in here is orders of magnitude more complex than anything humans have invented. So like all of the architecture is right here. Like, this is the technology.

Right.

Really? And so then like, how do we create an organism? Because I don't think it's a company, I think it's an organism. How do we create an organism on a pretty much like mycorrhizal model? Like one of my teachers out here is the fungal network. So a lot of the economic modeling that we've been looking at is like mycorzel. You know, it's the way that the fungus knits together the root systems of trees to create, you know, exchange. Right. But you know, honestly, like, it has not been an easy thing to do. We just were finalizing the designation of the organization as a social purpose corporation because, you know, in the United States.

For your listeners who may not know this, as a for profit corporation, if you don't maximize revenue, you can be sued by your shareholders.

And so we've spent the last three years studying corporate structures because we didn't want to be forced to maximize or optimize revenue. We wanted to optimize well being. And there are times when, you know, those two things would correspond and there's times when they don't. And we needed the liberty to be able to say, look, in this particular situation, if we're working with the United nations, if we're working with this global social movement, the objective is not to maximize revenue, it's to maximize well being. It's to maximize the, you know, the impacts that we're making. And so I can't say it's been easy. I feel like there should be, and it probably is more support out and we're finding colleagues and allies in these strategies. But just for myself, I've noticed so much that the energy of what we think of as success, and I really try to question this, but that energy is very much framed in terms of a win. And the moment that you have a win, it implies.

Someone lost. Right? It's already implying that domination frame. And I've talked with Chiokasian about this a lot because there in Lakota there isn't even a word, there's no word for domination. He's very clear about this. Right. It's not part of the paradigm. And so when these domination frameworks get applied, you know, our indigenous friends and mentors, it's like, well, why would you do that? I know that I've heard Tyson Yunkaporta, who wrote Santok, says anything that needs to scale is evil.

If it's of nature, it'll just grow. You don't need to scale it. So I'm standing in some of the paradox of these things, which is that we don't really have.

Very good language yet in this area.

But I think the commitment is to really stand in the values of the work because that's where it came from and that's what it needs to stay in integrity to if it's going to.

Do the work it came to do. I consider myself a steward of it. It's not mine.

Well, I'm really glad that you're courageously willing to lean into this world of technology. And I think it is important, even though clearly there are systems and structures which are fear and threat based and are damaging and oppressive.

And at the same time, I think understanding systems and the nature of systems is very important. I mean, you referenced Dee Hawk who founded Visa. Now, most people wouldn't think of Visa as a credit card company, but actually it was built around an understanding of chaos theory and the chaotic principle. And he wrote a whole book about that. Right. And so understanding those principles at a very deep level, even getting into things like quantum physics and understanding how energy works. Right. And Chris Brookfield, who does this amazing work in the world, is immersing into these edge communities and then surfacing the organic intelligence of systems there. He learned about systems by working with the cell phone industry and networks and understanding how you create networks. So it's not like we have to demonize part of it, it's just we need to learn how to call things back to that harmony. And maybe instead of optimizing for profit or optimizing wins, we start optimizing for flow and connection and things like that. And you know, I mean, not that maybe that maybe the sense of winning or success are fundamentally flawed, but may, but you know, if we can rehabilitate them all, maybe some measure of success or winning is the extent of flow and how inclusive that flow is. Right. And how less it's at the expense of somebody else's flow or other systems. The more flow, the more integration. That's what success looks like.

I'm enjoying our conversation. And I think one of the themes that keeps reemerging is redefining words. I'M finding that interesting because we've done this now with, you know, a variety of terms.

And so I think, you know, there's this question for me also about, like, well, what is wealth? You know, And I know that there's some very tangible level where if we do not have enough material resource, it's a problem. I don't want to in any way, you know, negate the reality that having material poverty, like, it's very stressful. But there's this fascinating thing, which is that empirically, the research suggests that if we have too much money, it also creates a whole lot of mental challenge. And there seems to be like a sweet spot somewhere in between, right? And I think there's this thing where modern civilization, it's really lost the concept of enough.

Right? And I think we talk about self care with this big S. Like, we talk about reclaiming flow. You know, there's a question for me that's a really deep question about, like.

Something about wealth for me is being able to spend time on things that are meaningful, right? Like, that's a big part of it. It's having relationships that are healthy. You know, it's being part of communities where I feel seen that is, you know, wealth.

And.

And I want to just even double down on this in the sense that as we face the increasing ecological consequences of.

The deviation from these ancestral modes of living.

A lot of the infrastructures that we've created are not going to maintain themselves. And when and if that's happening, your wealth really is the trust you have in others and a community. And this is a very ancestral awareness, right? Like, if we go back and we look at the San people in the Kalahari, the oldest traditional culture, there's this kind of, like, confoundment that people living that really old way have around why you'd want to have more than someone else, right? It's confounding to them because inevitably if you do, then it's gonna create conflict. And their whole society is organized around connection. And you can see this. So it's like.

Yes, changing the metric, changing the way we define these things. And I think it's hard because we're in a society where technology, all these systems, they really want to define these things for you.

Right? The cult of celebrity and, you know, keeping up with the Joneses and whatever it is, these reflections that are external. But what does it really mean, you know, to feel like there's enough? What does it really mean, you know, to feel the meaningful quality of being able to spend your time Doing things that you care about, you know, and so, you know, there's something of self care where it's like, oh, okay, yes, you know, yoga, yes, you know, green drinks. But like the deeper level of like, can I design my life in such a way that at this time in history especially like I'm aligned with what's meaningful to me. That's a form of profound self care.

You know, I couldn't agree more. You know, I love to use the word design because I think there is an element always of personal agency. And then we go from personal agency into collective agency. But we do, as individuals have to take some agency around designing our lives for connection. And if we're not the kind of fear based threat system based survival kind of stuff in the world, those structures will design our life for disconnection. So, you know, I love that and can, you know, ultimately designing our life for connection and flow and, you know, what could be more important than that? And I love that we are looking at unpacking some of the language and the words and maybe redefining because language is so powerful and language and words are in a way, they're defined and even the connotations are so full of embedded assumptions and, and all kinds of things. And you know, maybe I some we may have an opportunity here because sometimes I often lament and complain about being in this kind of post truth era, so called with fake news and all the misinformation and it's so hard to trust anything and everything spin everywhere. And it seems like, you know, the cultural commons is being deconstructed because we can't trust anything we hear. How do you know? And you know, there's wonderful projects like the Consilience project that Daniel Smocktenberger and others are doing to try to, you know, Craig, I think a system kind of like you're working with your company to create different ways of nested hierarchies of collective engagement to rediscover a signal that's more trustworthy for information. But I think it's up to all of us to maybe redefine the language. We actually, you know, we've depended for years on institutions and systems that kind of got us through. And I don't want to demonize them because a lot of those traditional systems and institutions, they got us through centuries, right? And kept things relatively stable with all the problems we have. But you got to keep in mind, you know, evolution is a pretty brutal process, right? And so, you know, but most of those institutions are now failing to address the Problems that are around today. And we are, I think, all being thrown back on the need to take more agency, ourselves in concert with others to redefine the language to create new languages. You know, it's not. There is no them we can depend on anymore, which is kind of scary, but maybe it's a huge opportunity as well.

The book that we just put out in hardcover in March, Restorative Practices of well being. It's 300 practices of well being. And then we're working on a book now that's called Keywords, and it's an inquiry into language, and it's very much related to what you're saying. I think, you know, for me, one of the most poignant redefinings you did in this conversation was of mind. And, you know, I was socialized to think of the mind and the brain as being the same thing. And, you know, we're so. We have this incredible plasticity. Like, consciousness is so malleable. I don't know if it's possible to communicate. Like, we're. We're poured into this vessel of a body, and we're, like, structured neurologically, structured socially, structured civilizationally by the containers, the relationships that we're kind of poured into. And it's so flexible. And so to tell a kid that the mind is the brain, they start thinking and putting energy here, here, here, right? And it's so different than here.

This project of language. I think it's really deep. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, he says, like, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. And one of the things, you know, you introduced me to Chiocasi. And one of the things that's been so liberating about speaking to him and learning with him about Lakota, it's speaking from such a different place in consciousness. And I think the hope with this Keywords book is that it becomes sort of a bridge like that to invite people to take over that agency around language. The English language is categorically missing entire bodies of descriptors, and it's not coincidental. They're around relationship. They're around interiority. They're around the things that have been kind of like, invisibleized, taken off the menu. Some of that was done very intentionally in the evolution of the language to remove agency from people, you know, And I think it's a time where we have to really take that agency back. I think a lot about teaching sovereignty to people, you know, and reclaiming that right at a time when things will just hack your attention. Facebook just hacks people's attention. I mean, I'll just say it, right? Like we're in the presence of all these systems. I know Tristan Harris a little bit. I know these, these organizations that are sort of working. He came up inside Google, was an ethicist there. He was trained by a guy named BJ Fogg who ran a laboratory at Stanford University. It was called Captology. It was a dual appointment in psychology and computer science.

And they were looking at tiny habits. Author, right?

Yeah, they were looking at the automation of persuasion. And I think BJ is a very sincere person and I think he was really looking at how do you automate healthy habits. But he trained a generation of computer scientists and engineers that went on to embed in Instagram and Facebook and all of these places. And a lot of that work has turned into how do you hack human attention? And so I think in the midst of a system where this extractive mentality in the 19th, maybe 20th century was applied to mining, it was applied to the earth, now it's being applied to people's attention. Right. And so developing our own, you know, ability to detect that, you know, to repel it, to reclaim our own agency over our, our attention and our own sovereignty and build a language of relationship like this is important stuff. It's non trivial stuff.

Well, I love the use of the word sovereignty and generally we connect that word though with the sovereignty of nations. But people have been using that in terms of our individual sovereignty. And my colleague Ali Byner at Rebel Wisdom has a meditation, Sovereignty meditation, right. And it's all about how you do reclaim that personal sovereignty and so forth. And I think, you know, there's an expression I've heard from Silicon Valley, I think of people there recognizing the problem that today you either need to learn to program or be programmed. Right. And I, you know, so what does it mean to learn to program? I think it's taken this agency that we need to really be willing to do the work of understanding our own filters, our own assumptions, our own perceptions, how we're using language, how language is being used with us, how perhaps we are being hacked and exploited and not in a sense of warfare like there's some big enemy out there, but just understanding, you know, it seems that our human world, our life, and maybe the cosmos altogether has these sort of competing forces of connection and disconnection of life and flow versus fear and threat. And it is part of the whole thing. I don't think it's about right or wrong. It's just we're conscious beings and we've been given the incredible ability with this heart and our mind to recognize how to tap into the flow that's going towards connection. And maybe we wouldn't even be able to realize that or expand consciousness if we weren't in this tool tension between the two. So it's not so much about demonizing anything or finding the enemies or the conspiracy that's causing all this, but really allowing us all to wake us up. Right. Wow. We're in a world where connection is really, you know, dicey. It used to be it was pretty odd. Maybe on the stoop of your neighborhood, you just. It was obvious your neighbors, you were, you know, maybe, you know, maybe even a neighborhood in Brooklyn might have been closer to how the people in the. In the Kalahari Bushmen lived, you know, because it was that locality. But we're in a world today where we're born into disconnection. So. Wow, that. That's meant to wake us up, to evolve to a higher order of connectedness. Right. So I think we can have this positive view that we are being called to a greater level of self agency today to weave connection and to take care of ourselves. And the ground is again, self care. Because if we're not, you know, attending to ourselves in the context of being with others, we're not going to have be resourced enough to find our way to create this connectedness collectively. So it's a dance we all have to do together. I don't think we might imagine, well, I can go back in my room and get resilient. But in some ways we're always. We're never really alone. So I think it's, how do we do this together? How do we dance together?

Yeah, I love it. I would love to, you know, maybe sort of move toward conclusion by talking just very practically about some of the practices that.

You know, not even that I engage, but that we're sort of noticing in our work are really useful right now around this, this, this process. And, you know, I think one of them that's very. That's very simple. Yeah. I was thinking about this the other day. If I had to recommend one practice, I would say that the most common symptom that we've seen over the last two years.

In the data of the way people are utilizing our work is anxiety. There was a point where we did an analytics.

Testing. So the fight or flight response is, I would say, generically equally likely to go one way or the other. When we get stressed out.

We go into defense at a biological level. It's Fairly equally likely that we go towards anxiety or aggression. But our experience with our learning platform is that over the last 18, 24 months, about 20 times the number of people have come to the platform looking for anxiety practices versus aggression practice. It's like, okay, well, what is that pointing to? Well, there's all this uncertainty, there's threat, and then people feel unsafe. And it's. And I think the most direct go to practice that I would recommend for people is take off your shoes.

Why am I saying that? What does that mean? It's like the bottom of your feet, they're filled with.

Sensory neural pathways. We know from.

Acupressure, acupuncture that there's a map of the human body in the hands and the feet. We would never, like, walk through the world with mittens on all the time, but what is a shoe? We wouldn't do that because we want to be able to touch things. And yet we've been, most of us, wearing these clunk and rubber things on our feet, which prevent you from feeling anything tactilely in the feet. And there's this fascinating thing with the flight response, which is that.

The flight response kicks into anxiety when we lose contact with the ground.

And I'll say that one more time for your audience because it's a very simple thing, but it's really important, which is that the flight response, it's an evasive response. It's like, I want to get out of here. And when that response comes, the neural innervation of the legs intensifies because we want to feel the legs so that we can run. And what often happens is that it becomes anxiety when we stop feeling that input from the ground. If you let yourself feel the ground and you let yourself move away, it just becomes a flight response, and it'll dissipate. But what often happens in our observation is that people, they don't feel the ground because they can't feel the ground. And then they stop breathing correctly, and they stop breathing at the diaphragm. And the breath gets here. It doesn't go down into the ground. And then it gets stuck in here, and they get more and more anxious. And there's this very simple antidote which is like, take your shoes off or, you know, wear barefoot shoes. There's all these incredible, you know, it's like very technical material kind of souls. A lot of people live in places where you can't walk barefoot because sharp stuff on the ground or whatever, glass, I don't know. But it's like this very profound shift At a sensory level.

I love that. It's beautiful and so simple. I took off my shoes and my. The hole from my soles of my feet all the way up through my legs is really enervated and alive and aware right now. And it reminded me a fellow trainer of mine used to tell in our workshops, you know, when. When you're feeling dysregulated or starting, you know, get into a bit of fight or flight or anxious. He said, just remember your feet. And you just think feet and boom, brings you right back into the body. You're connected to the Earth. And then I had a wilderness guy that we worked with for years when we took people out in the wilderness and doing solo retreats and some of our trainings. And he always wore moccasins. And I can't swear scientifically that it's true, but he felt that having that natural material, right, deer skin, moccasins on his feet didn't prevent the feet from connecting with the Earth. And that the Peter Chi receptors or prana receptors, right from then, you can draw the energy of the earth up through the feet in ways that are, you know, as you said, there's a map, you know, on the. On the feet of all our organs in the body. So there's that connecting with the Earth. It's just a beautiful thing and it's so simple. And if we would do that out where you are and take a walk in nature. Wow, now we're doubling down.

Yeah, it's really important. I can take you for a walk if you want.

That would be wonderful.

Yeah. So just to continue this conversation and the feed and the connection to the earth. In 2020.

I was running this software company and found myself having to spend a lot of time on a computer, which is. You just think about what part of your body is being activated.

Right.

It's the eyes, it's the head. It's very up at the top of the body. And I went to the Sierras for a few weeks and got to really connect with the Earth and went, wow, if I'm going to do this during a pandemic, I need to be able to get my hands in the. In the soil. And we were able to come back here and had the very good fortune to find this place. And I came back and one day, said to my wife, we rented a forest. And she looked at me like I had two heads. But it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

So this is the meadow in the forest. You know, we put these Paths down. They're very soft. Right. Sawdust.

And.

You know, this is where we built our office. It's a very humble space. It's 300 square feet.

So these are those redwoods. They look like redwood. And are they designed to be like some kind of totems or what is that?

So we're. We salvaged a bunch of wood out here. So this is a sculpture that we had fabricated.

And there's going to be a.

In the center of that, there will be a huge fireplace. That's the part of the village.

Proverbially speaking. I'll show you one other lovely spot here. This is an old growth Douglas fir forest I've encountered out here. I think now 16 species I haven't seen anywhere else in Northern California.

Going to show you one other vista.

Really. Such beauty. You know, before you were giving us a little view of the canopy there within the forest. And yesterday I was speaking with Mark Coleman and he talked about the very simple. The author of Awake in the Wild and the very simple practice of just laying down on the earth and looking up at the canopy, you know, and just bathing in the energy of the force in that way. Again, very simple restorative practice.

There's a whole, you know, Japanese forest bathing association.

Yeah.

Millions of numbers. Yeah.

Well, it's been incredibly rich. Gabriel, I really appreciate it. I appreciate your work so much and your dedication to kind of reinventing possibility through connection and relationship and that you really.

I sense a determination in you not to veer off.

For any motivation of convenience or efficiency or profit or fame or anything else. You just have this North Star that is connection and relationship. And so I'm really grateful to be in relationship with you and to have you be part of our summit fleet.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. And, you know, it's mutual respect and appreciation. Always enjoy being conversational with you. So thank you. And I hope this is useful. You know, that's my primary hope. It's useful.

I think it's going to be extraordinarily useful for our audience. And I am not like most of us, not traveling so much these days. But I hope I can get out to the Bay Area again one of these days. I love it. Northern California. And visit your beautiful. Yeah.

You're going to come?

Yeah. Okay. Be well, my friend.

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.

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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