Attuned | Global Social Witnessing
Attuned | Global Social Witnessing
War isn’t new; violent conflict is an ancient, disrelational habit familiar to nearly all human societies. What is new about war and other mass-traumatization events in the twenty-first century is the presence of the internet and social media, namely the ease and power of so many to upload images and videos from the battlefield in real time.
For the first time in human history, wherever we are and no matter how far away, we can witness and react to what’s happening in active conflict zones or disaster scenes a world away. Even if we choose to avoid social media and online or television news, it can be difficult for most people to miss what’s happening around us. Bad news, like gossip, is pervasive—and it spreads: an adaptive evolutionary strategy that promotes survival, though if prolonged, it promotes social dysfunction and breakdown. Despite the unprecedented access to information now available, we are often not so much well informed as we are overwhelmed. And if not overwhelmed, we’re likely desensitized, numb, cynical, or shut down.
Modern media sensationalizes news of violence, threat, and danger, profiting off human fear and furthering societal polarization. The massive onslaught of polarizing data we consume is not immediately digestible. In fact, unfettered access to information about active trauma may create what researchers have called secondhand or vicarious traumatization, especially for the highly empathetic person. At the very least, constant news of human struggle, violence, and adversity can result in burnout and compassion fatigue. Yet, the more anesthetized we become to the suffering of others, the less capable we are of responding with discernment and wise action to help end or prevent further suffering in the world. Without knowing it, we may become complicit in the ongoing repetition of humanity’s darkest cultural traumas through unconscious activation of the hidden energies that make trauma possible in the first place.
What would trauma-informed media look like?
Sensational news headlines and divisive online engagement activate trauma patterns within the collective unconscious, amplifying apathy and indifference at one end and heightening emotional disruption at the other. News media websites and social media apps are coded for “increased engagement,” because more clicks mean more dollars for shareholders. To support this unwieldy and unethical financial model, artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to push ever more extreme controversy, fear, and antagonism, thereby privileging “incendiary content, [and] setting up a stimulus–response loop that promotes outrage expression.”
The end result has been increased social polarization and conflict, poor mental health outcomes, and further extremes in economic inequity. Is it any wonder that depression, anxiety, addiction, and self-harm are exploding among young people?
What would trauma-informed media look like? It’s a question that deserves critical research. What’s clear is that contemporary societies need to focus as much or more attention on healing and health as they do on increasing gross domestic product. Imagine a new media and economic landscape that is grounded, professional, and ethical, whose leaders value human health above personal profit. Imagine global news media that engenders wider understanding and compassion as it informs us.
You see, collective trauma is not an academic abstraction or even a sociological concept. In the most real sense, it is the mass of unmetabolized energy that exists within and all around us as a result of toxic stress, adversity, shock, and trauma. Even if we don’t know it’s there, the energy of mass trauma affects us. All of us. It shapes our lives and alters our relationships, our communities, and the natural world around us.
There is nothing left untouched by collective trauma. In fact, its nature is so ubiquitous and its effects so insidious that we have come to consider it “normal.” This is just how things are. Just how families are. Just how people are. Just how the world is. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Integration allows us to harvest the frozen, disclaimed energies of the past and use them to illumine our perspective in the present. As the great German writer, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed, “Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us.”
By opening ourselves to the exploration of trauma’s effects within and around us, we come to know more of ourselves, the world, and one another. After all, only what we acknowledge can be integrated—and the integration of trauma becomes post-traumatic learning. Integration allows us to harvest the frozen, disclaimed energies of the past and use them to illumine our perspective in the present.
What’s more, healing the ethical transgressions of the past develops our ethical understanding today. This wisdom is vital if we wish to meet contemporary ethical challenges: from questions about artificial intelligence, nano tech, genetic engineering, cyberwarfare, new weapons of mass destruction, and other evolutionary concerns. Perhaps one day, a mandate to reckon with and heal historical and collective trauma will be written into the constitutions of nations.
To begin to address the phenomenon of collective trauma at its source, I developed an awareness-based practice called Global Social Witnessing (GSW). GSW is a social mindfulness practice that shows us the limits of our capacity to be a present witness to events—including and especially to traumatic events—that are reported within society.
Through sustained practice of GSW, we begin to see into the gaps, the places where we may intellectually understand the facts of the news stories we consume, but where we become emotionally or even physically stressed and overwhelmed by the contents or where we alternately shut down and numb, potentially unaware that relation has been lost. When this occurs, we are no longer in witness. The gap itself represents the distance (or incongruence) between one’s interior and exterior and contains the unprocessed collective trauma we carry within. We practice GSW to help make the collective trauma field more visible so that step by step, we can begin to integrate the internal fragmentation we all carry.
In its simplest form, GSW is the act of consciously presencing, witnessing, sensing, and feeling into the dense energies of adverse current events—whether the stream of alarming news stories pouring across your daily newsfeed or the sudden outbreak of war in Eastern Europe. Global Social Witnessing can be initiated as an individual practice or facilitated in a group context, even with very large groups. And it is meant to be used in a titrated fashion; as practitioners, we take on one adverse current event at a time.
To address trauma, we must meet it at the root. We must engage in a practice of making conscious that which is unconscious. We must choose to notice, feel, and digest the energies we otherwise instinctively resist, suppress, avoid, disown, and deny. Global Social Witnessing is a practice for being with the difficult energies of the large-scale traumatic events occurring in the world around us: ongoing wars in nations like Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, and elsewhere; the mounting cartel violence in South and Central America; continuing civil unrest, armed violence, and human rights abuses in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Myanmar, Republic of Congo, and beyond; the oppression and genocide of the Uyghur people of China; and the many other human and planetary wounds that call out for our care and attention. Without our care and attention, these compounding traumas will continue unabated. Human rights can only be honored and preserved through genuine relatedness. It is the lack of relatedness that makes the violation of human rights possible.
Global Social Witnessing is a form of dialogic inquiry—defined by one scholar as “the tool kit of discourse in the activity of learning”— in which together we presence the collective field so as to mindfully attend to global events with embodied awareness. In practice, GSW is a model that allows us to make visible the invisible forces that influence our lives in order that we may apprehend and transform them.
Practice | Global Social Witnessing
Search for a disquieting piece of news about current events—a headline or news article, for example—to bring into your practice. It should be information that’s difficult or upsetting, without being too overwhelming.
The story you choose could be about a school shooting, a local act of violence, or a story about climate change— whatever feels important to focus on.
Now sit down, and as you read the news headline, check in with your body, noticing any sensations, feelings, images, or impressions that arise. Are you reading the headline intellectually but feeling emotionally or physically numb or disconnected? Do you experience an activation of fear, stress, or upset? Or do you notice a sense of felt connection to the event?
The point of the practice is not to be able to feel or sense the event; the point is to see our limitations. We practice GSW in order to become aware of our “edge,” where the capacity for being an embodied witness stops. The end of your ability to sense and feel marks the beginning of the collective unconscious, or collective absence. The overwhelming nature of the information reduces the function of collective witnessing, or presence, so that the energy of these events doesn’t get processed or reconciled and must therefore repeat.
Widespread use of the internet and mobile devices makes us think of ourselves as super informed, yet numbness, absence, and overwhelm are all too common. These responses to collective trauma prevent us from fully metabolizing the information we experience. However, we can all be more mindful about how we consume the news and engage in the Three-Sync Practice as we do so.
A GSW practice can also be powerful in groups, where members of the group share their inner experience with others who bring their attunement, presence, and witness to the whole.
Global Social Witnessing invites us to align our individual interiors within a wider collective and intersubjective container. When we practice, it is our shared intention to tune into self and other—and to the interior and exterior worlds at the same time. The practice of GSW strengthens our capacity to host the Other within, to embrace the Other with a shared heart. Through the GSW practice, we become more mature global citizens, better equipped to co-create new ideas and approaches for transforming the dense energies of disruption into the vitality of future innovation.
As global citizens, it is incumbent upon us to express global citizenship. We must also recognize the fundamental human responsibility we share, which is to practice making conscious the dark energies of human suffering so that those energies can be digested, integrated, and returned to the life flow of future potential.
Whole states must address the social wounds created by war, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, gender violence, and environmental degradation. When done in earnest, this work restores the flow of light, or conscious awareness, to the collective body and makes healthier and more sustainable societies possible.
Gus Speth, the American environmental lawyer and former US senior advisor on climate change, has said, “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.”
Speth is right, of course, though it’s important to note that the selfishness, greed, and apathy he mentions are in truth only symptoms of the larger problem, which is our unaddressed collective shadow and unhealed collective trauma. It is our willingness to awaken to, experience, and transform these root causes that creates the cultural and spiritual transformation Speth prescribes.
We can think of the global immune system as a refined resonance capacity. It represents the most essential, ancient, and evolutionary wisdom for dealing with the reactive mental, emotional, and psychosocial aspects that arise within us in response to the traumatic residue and accelerating disruption all around us.
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egardless of how far removed we may be physically from unfolding unrest or atrocities—in Ukraine, Yemen, Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar, Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere—we are no less affected by them. And it is precisely because we are touched by these events that we have the power to help shift them. Collective healing starts with the immune reaction, the experiences that come up inside us when we’re faced with the realities on the ground or in media reports and images shared during active conflict. Even as distant observers, we can feel disturbed and activated by these events, which can show up in many forms: fear, terror, anger, outrage, numbness, or shutting down.
Yet it’s our power to simultaneously feel and witness our feelings and reactions that allows us to digest and integrate some measure of the overall trauma energy. This is the collective immune response in its most conscious and participatory state. And it is vitally urgent that we learn to engage in collective self-healing. The global immune system is the organ through which we become activated by disturbance in the field, but it’s also the instrument through which we may more consciously attune to the world around us in order to integrate that disturbance and restore balance to the living system.
Only a small number of us—a critical mass if you will—is required to engage before a new level of collective coherence becomes established in sympathetic resonance, ringing like a tuning fork across the field, inviting the entire world to join.
Excerpted from Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma―and Our World by Thomas Hubl. Sounds True, September 2023. Reprinted with permission.
First There Must Be an End
First There Must Be an End
Featured image | David McMillan: Growth and Decay
The following is an excerpt from Dougald Hine‘s new book At Work in the Ruins (Chelsea Green Publishing February 2023) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
Here are two claims I have found that I can steer by.
The first comes from the closing lines of a manifesto that a friend and I wrote, nearly fifteen years ago now: The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Unless we can inhabit that distinction, we will end up defending the world as we have known it at all costs, no matter how monstrous those costs turn out to be. Think of the desperate schemes for geoengineering already being drawn up. Think of the walls being built to defend against those already displaced by changing patterns of sea, rain and heat. How we name what is at stake will determine what we are prepared to do.
The second claim came out of the conversation started by that manifesto: The end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. When a world ends, its systems and stories come apart, even the largest of them: the stories that promised to explain everything, the systems that organised all that could be said to be real. It’s not that those stories had no truth in them; it’s not that there was no reality in the description of the world those systems offered. It’s that they couldn’t hold. The things they valued betrayed them; the things they left out came back to haunt them.
One name for the world as we have known it is modernity; one name for its way of knowing the world is science. So [my book, in part, is] about navigating the end-times of modernity and what happens to science as its world ends.
***
Here’s one more story from the Covid spring. I remember this post like a message in a bottle, thrown into the storm of social media, back in those first weeks. It was lost in the tide of memes and takes, I don’t know how to find it, but the author was a climate scientist. Already the lines were being drawn and there was a take going round that went like this: ‘Has anyone noticed how the people refusing to follow the Covid science are the same ones who refuse to accept the climate science?’ Hang on a minute, this climate scientist said, it’s taken decades of careful work to be able to say with confidence the things that my colleagues and I can tell you about climate change. Please don’t treat that as equivalent to what it’s possible to say about a virus that was only identified a few weeks ago.
The iterative nature of the work of science means that the state of knowledge will vary from field to field. With a new object of study, it’s hardly surprising if what the researchers think they know turns out to change from week to week, in contrast to the well-grounded consensus that can emerge in a mature field. But the political rhetoric of ‘following the science’ disregards these differences, casting a singular authority over whatever is said in the name of science, so that the first provisional findings about a new disease are presented as though they were established certainties.
Science in general – and climate science in particular – is not well served by this ideological conflation. Yet, this is a problem that runs deep because the multitude of methods and practices that make up the work of science have been entangled for centuries with a singular story that grants this way of approaching the world a monopoly on telling us what is real. It places a burden on the scientists’ shoulders that was always going to prove unsustainable, but we are living through an intensification of this logic that will push it to breaking point.
One of the questions running through this book is how far, and in what shape, the work of science might survive the end of the world in which the story of science took shape. I might as well say now that I don’t have an answer; it’s not the kind of question that can be answered with a book, but what a book can do is make an invitation to the kinds of conversations and encounters that might be called for, that might help us find some paths into the unknown world that lies ahead.
***
‘In these times, all we can do is be a sign,’ a father tells his daughter in Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist. ‘We have to help to bring about the end of the world.’ We must do this, he goes on, so that a new beginning can come. ‘But first there must be an end.’1
It matters which world we think is ending, and it matters what we tell each other is worth doing in such a time. Among the people we’ll meet in the story I tell, are those who have dedicated their lives to the study of climate science, those taking desperate measures as activists to break the trance they see around them and those inside existing institutions who have been shaken to the core by what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about the trouble in which we find ourselves. There can be a danger in allowing that trouble to be defined solely in terms of climate change, but I’m convinced of the importance of each of these roles in these times. I’m also convinced that other roles need playing and other kinds of action are called for. There’s a lot to be unfolded along the way, but let’s have some leads to get us started, taken from a few of those who have helped to shape my thinking.
First there must be an end – but many kinds of end are possible. My friend Vanessa Machado de Oliveira wrote a book called Hospicing Modernity.2 The title invites us to a kind of work in which the focus is not on saving modernity, or bringing it down, or rushing to build what comes afterwards, but doing what we can to give it a good ending. To let it hand on its gifts and teach the lessons that may only become apparent as the end approaches.
‘It may seem like this book is trying to kill or destroy modernity by announcing its death,’ she writes, but this is ‘something no book can do.’ It’s a warning that applies here, too.
No one I’ve met has more to offer by way of tools for the work of hospicing, but the way Vanessa tells it, this must be accompanied by a work of midwifery: assisting with the birth of something new, unfamiliar and possibly (but not necessarily) wiser, and avoiding suffocating this new world with our projections.
The philosopher Federico Campagna speaks about living at the end of a world.3 In such a time, he suggests, the work is no longer to concern ourselves with making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, but to leave good ruins, clues and starting points for those who come after, that they may use in building a world that is – as Vanessa would say – ‘presently unimaginable’.
They may be here already, the builders of that world. Some of them may have been here all along, inhabiting the ruins made by the world of the powerful. The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote a book called The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.4 That could be a role to take in times like these, to go looking for possibilities of life among the ruins around and ahead of us.
I don’t write to announce the end of the world or to change the minds of those who are convinced that the world as we have known it can be saved or made sustainable. I write for anyone who has found themselves, as I have, needing to make sense of what is ending, how we can talk about it and what tasks are worth taking on in whatever time it turns out that we have.
Something is coming over the horizon: a humbling from which none of us will be spared, that will not be managed or controlled, but will leave us changed.
Before it is over, I suspect, we will need to learn again what it means to take seriously things that are larger or smaller than were allowed to be real or significant, according to the scales and systems of modernity. We will need to dance again with the rhythms of cosmology, to be carried by the kind of stories and images in whose company – as the mythographer Martin Shaw would say – a universe becomes a cosmos. We will need to remember that we are not alone and never were, that we are part of a world of many worlds, only some of which are human. And we will need to rediscover that any world worth living for centres not on the vast systems we built to secure the future, but on those encounters that are proportioned to the kind of creatures we are, the places where we meet, the acts of friendship and the acts of hospitality in which we offer shelter and kindness to the stranger at the door. In this way, even now, there may be time to find our place within the vastly larger and older story of which we always were a part.
footnotes
1 Ben Okri, The Freedom Artist (Brooklyn: Akashic Books, 2020), 211.
2 Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2021).
3 Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
4Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Searching for a more beautiful world, with Charles Eisenstein
Searching for a more beautiful world, with Charles Eisenstein
featured image | Alex Grichenko
This interview first appeared at Tam’s blog on Medium, where you can read it in full: HERE
From a young age, Charles Eisenstein has felt something was fundamentally wrong with our world or, more specifically, with the social and political realities we have built. My intuitions — my heart- and gut-based modes of understanding — have been cultivated by Eisenstein’s work. Yet, his work is not anti-rational. He has a strong background in analytical methods, mathematics and philosophy. We conducted the following interview by email.
Tam | Let’s start with your background and motivations for your work. You went to Yale for your undergraduate studies and focused on mathematics and philosophy. Your first major book (2007) was The Ascent of Humanity, which you suggest in that book itself was a work that took a decade or more to research and write. What inspired this effort? Who are the major thinkers you looked to in forming your ideas?
Charles | That book embodies at least a decade of study and thought, but I was actively writing it for just four years. Some key influences were Wendell Berry, Ilya Prigogine, Lewis Mumford, Marshall Sahlins, David Bohm, Helena Nordberg-Hodge, Lynn Margulis… I could name some others, but really this is not primarily a scholarly book, and the list of influences won’t help much to understand it.
Tam | You write in the introduction to your 2013 book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible that you are an ordinary person and if you, an ordinary person, can seek and achieve these insights and these practices in your life, then almost anyone should be able to. I don’t wish to detract from your efforts to paint yourself as an ordinary guy but it seems pretty clear that you have spent an extraordinary amount of time reading, researching and writing about a vast number of topics, from spirituality, to economics, to science, to climate, to currencies, to political movements. Doesn’t the effort you’ve expended in itself make you at least a little extraordinary?
Charles | Sure, why not. My point, though, is that the insights didn’t come from a dramatic life story or unusual discipline. They are quite close at hand for ordinary people, because really what I am doing is to give voice to a new mythology that is rising in the collective consciousness.
Tam | How would you sum up the key points of your work? Despite the breadth of issues you’ve written and spoken about, there is a theme that runs through your work. You write very accessibly and your target audience seems to be anyone who wishes to listen (rather than writing for a niche field of professionals, for example). Why have you chosen to write for the “everyperson” rather than more niche audiences?
Charles | The overarching theme of all my work is the transition in civilization’s defining mythology, from a story of separation to a story of interbeing. This transition plays out in all the fields I write about, and provides a way to identify common patterns across those fields. Because I am what you might call a “generalist,” my work is accessible to laypeople. I am myself a layperson, albeit highly educated in certain fields.
Tam | You moved to Taiwan in your 20s, studied Chinese, and worked as a translator for some years. What caused your life to take this particular turn? Are you still conversant in Mandarin?
Charles | Yes, I am still fluent in Mandarin, although I seldom have opportunity to speak and have forgotten a lot in the 25 years since I lived there. I went to Taiwan right out of college, because I felt like such an alien in my home country, and I couldn’t make myself get with the program. I had no ambition whatever to become a success, build my resume, go to graduate school, or anything like that. Furthermore, living abroad gave me the opportunity to discover who I was apart from the reinforcing circumstances of my home culture.
Tam | How much does your fluency in another language and culture, quite different than US culture, influence your thinking and willingness to propose ideas that are radically different than the mainstream?
Charles | Well, there are certainly plenty of multilingual people around, and not all of them are creative thinkers. But I think in my case, immersing in a radically different language and culture prevented my intellectual programming from calcifying. I was introduced to entirely new categories of thought before the old ones had fully formed.
I also have to credit psychedelic medicines for exposing the narrowness and artificiality of what I’d until then accepted as real. They helped open my mind to different ways of conceiving and perceiving the world that local traditions of Buddhism and Taoism offered. I never studied either deeply, but they suffused the cultural atmosphere and influenced me profoundly, particularly Taoism.
One influence I can say that Chinese has had on my later work is that it helped me work more comfortably with paradox. It is in many ways a less precise language than English; the same is true of the various Taoist sciences. You don’t start with basic definitions and first principles and work your way up from those. Taoism applies a more holistic logic and employs more teleological thinking. To some extent, this is embodied in the Chinese language too. Grammar is more fluid, words can morph from one part of speech to another, and the “atoms” of the language are semantic and not alphabetic. Aphabetic languages offer a model of reality in which meaning is an illusion. Just as meaningful words are composed of meaningless letters, so also is the meaningful world composed of meaningless protons, neutrons, and electrons. Chinese is not like that: meaning in Chinese is elemental. Perhaps these feature of the Chinese language primed me to explore non-reductionistic thinking and the relationship between story and reality in my later work.
Tam | Were you always comfortable with being considered a radical? In my own experience studying various fields and finding myself coming to very different conclusions than the mainstream I’ve realized that there must be significant other factors than logic or evidence influencing whatever ideas or theories are most prominent — because so many of them just don’t make sense under scrutiny. I’ve thus found myself comfortable with being in many ways “on the fringe” but it’s not something I sought out. Have you experienced a similar dynamic in your intellectual meanderings?
Charles | I have long and frequently felt a bit of an alien here. Until recently, that has mostly meant being ignored and dismissed, a mostly benign neglect outside the corner of the culture that comprises my readers. That has changed with the pandemic, when ideas that I’ve written about for years all of a sudden attracted much more attention, much of it hostile. For example, in The Ascent of Humanity there is a section titled “The War on Germs,” in which I located conventional medicine within larger paradigms of conquest and offered quite specific critique of certain medical practices. But it was only in the last two years that such views drew public denunciation and cancelation — including by the very publisher who now carries that book. If I may flatter myself to say that my views are true, I can only hope that they exemplify Schopenhauer’s adage: “All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Tam | You describe in your work how you’ve had a feeling of discontent and of fundamental wrongness with modern society from an early age. When did these feelings and realizations first happen to you?
Charles | It began very early on in grade school. I couldn’t have articulated the feeling at the time, but I just couldn’t accept my situation as good and right, sitting in rows in the classroom, forced to do things I didn’t care about, filling out worksheet after worksheet, watching the clock tick slowly toward recess. I was quite timid, but I remember secretly siding with the “bad” kids and glorying in their insubordination.
As a teenager, I began encountering books that fueled my latent indignation. I read Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, and so forth. I knew then that I wasn’t crazy for believing something was fundamentally wrong in the world. I also began to suspect that the origin of the wrongness was much deeper than anyone knew. That is how I became a radical.
Tam | Shifting to less personal questions, how do you respond to the Pinkerian argument that the Enlightenment has improved the world in countless ways? Pinker has argued in two hefty books (The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now) that the Enlightenment way of thinking, led by science and reason, has indeed led to a vastly better world in numerous quantifiable ways. He presents data in dozens of categories showing that the world is far better off in terms of declining violence, longer lifespans, better standard of living, access to health care, declining child death and death of mothers during birth, etc. You of course paint a very different picture in your work, of a world on a fundamentally wrong track. So what does Pinker get wrong or leave out?
Charles | I could answer by pointing you to an essay I wrote in response to Pinker: Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development. It is not possible to rebut his thesis in a few short paragraphs, when such a rebuttal requires overturning deeply held assumptions. His book was so readily celebrated by powerful people in the establishment because it feels so commonsensical to them, drawing on assumptions they take for granted.
That said, I can point to several lines of critique. First, the chosen measures of well-being are loaded with the values and assumptions of the very culture (ours) that is assessing progress and naming itself as the most advanced. So for example, Pinker talks a lot about life expectancy, but what about quality of life in those longer years? Is it any improvement to have to manage chronic disease or live in a nursing home, lonely and depressed? Other authors have also questioned Pinker’s metrics on their own terms: Is society actually less violent than it was in Medieval or pre-historic times? Or has the form of violence merely shifted? Thirdly, I and many other people who have spent time in less “developed” places on earth have witnessed levels of well-being and happiness seldom seen in modern society.
We have more and more of everything we measure, as the immeasurable, the qualitative, ebbs out of modern life. We then seek yet more of the quantitative in futile compensation for its loss.
One very concrete way this plays out is in the mania for safety that I first noticed in the wave of litigiousness in the 1980s, that accelerated after 9/11 into a national obsession, and then reached hysterical proportions in the Covid era. Each security measure makes us safer. You can measure it. Keeping kids indoors in front of screens, making borders “secure,” locking down all of society. And what does safety compensate for? A life of meaning and purpose. Cut off from that, there is nothing left but to stay alive.
Tam | You write in The Ascent of Humanity about the commodification and monetization of the world through a steady reduction of services provided by friends, family and community in favor of companies providing these services for a fee. For example, childcare, birthing, and laundry used to be performed by families and friends but now in the case of many modern families are done by paid third parties. You warn about the loss of community and family ties because of this vast commodification and monetization of the world. What practical ways do we have to reverse this trend?
Charles | I’ll answer this question on a personal and political level. On the personal level, we can look at our lives and ask what part we can reclaim from money, what we can bring back into the realm of community, self-sufficiency, or gift? Or you could approach it as a shift of dependency away from markets toward people we actually know. Some things may not make sense right now to change, but maybe you’ll recognize that the time is ripe to plant a garden, or start a homeschool co-op or babysitting co-op or play group, or to replace on-screen entertainment with regular musical gatherings with friends.
On the political level, we can reverse policies that destroy community. In many cases, because of licensing requirements, building codes, and so forth, it is actually illegal to do things we once did for each other. Regulations that protect us from unscrupulous big corporations also make it difficult for small, family-run farms and businesses to operate. Furthermore, any policy that shifts economic activity from a local to a global scale will damage community, because even when money is used to facilitate local transactions, something else happens along with money exchange.
People interact with each other locally — more at the small food co-op than at the Wal-Mart grocery story, and more at the Wal-Mart than if they order groceries online. Our system has all kinds of hidden subsidies that promote delocalization and expansion of scale. We can shift those subsidies to support localism.
Tam | Why do you focus on beauty as such an important aspect of life, and of what’s missing in our modern world, with its “uglification” and industrialization of so much around us?
Charles | Beauty is one of those things we cannot quantify, and therefore which fits poorly into conventional economic thinking. Money logic is good at maximizing efficiency, which is actually maximizing something measurable. For example, it produces large buildings cheaply.
I focus on beauty a lot because it offers such a clear example of our poverty. The beauty lens makes it obvious that financial thinking, and quantitative thinking generally, is incapable of producing certain things that the human soul requires. What does the world need most right now? Is it more?
Tam | Is it practical to suggest that performing mundane acts like laundry, yard work, or changing diapers should be viewed as sacred tasks, as ways of creating a more beautiful world, as you suggest in your work?
Charles | Well, our society little celebrates such activities, and our economy hardly rewards them. Yet, they require a lot of patience and humility. We need people to do such things with care and devotion, at least as much as we need people to invent new machines and build new organizations. Neither is more sacred than the other. However, I’m not suggesting that some people should spend their whole lives changing diapers and doing laundry. Calling such activities “sacred” is not a way to justify an unfair, exploitative division of labor. It is rather the opposite. If we as a society hold those activities as worthy, then no one will believe themselves to be above such things.
Ultimately, I am advocating a reversal of an age-old prejudice, which values the abstract over the concrete, the spirit over the flesh, and the spiritual over the material. This anti-materialism has caused tremendous harm to materiality; that is, to nature. Part of recovering from the spell of money (which is itself an abstraction of value) is to re-value the material, the soil, the flesh, the living, and the human.
Tam | Do you ever tear up at witnessing a particularly beautiful sight or moment or idea?
Charles | Yes. What affects me the most is to witness generosity, kindness, and selflessness. Like when a small child shares with another.
Tam | You mention in The More Beautiful World… how a lot of people have seemed for some time to somewhat perversely be looking forward to normal life and society breaking down, in whatever manner comes along, like an alcoholic needs to truly bottom out before seeking help, or like the necessary flames before the rebirth of the phoenix from the ashes. I wonder how much of this notion affected your attempts to discern your personal response to the pandemic and lockdowns in those early months of 2020 before you wrote the Coronation essay and established yourself as more of a Covid skeptic, at least in terms of seeing the world’s seeming over-reactions to the virus as part of a very long historic arc toward power seeking more power and control?
Charles | I think that the public’s willingness to accept lockdowns and in general the break in normal life is that they wanted liberation from normality. A lot of people in modern society feel trapped in their lives, and here was deliverance. Or so it seemed.
In fact, the hoped-for freedom did not materialize. The regime of control only intensified.
Tam | Klaus Schwab, author of The Great Reset and founder of the World Economic Forum, has a new book out called The Great Narrative, a compilation of many different authors’ ideas about how our global civilization should arise from the ashes of the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, it present a rather different “great narrative” than the Story of Interbeing that you have offered for a new Age of Reunion. Have you considered engaging with these kinds of leaders in order to seed fresh thinking, from a perspective of Reunion rather than Separation? If Schwab invited you to speak at Davos would you attend?
Charles | I have not read the book, but from what I’ve seen of the Great Reset, I think it is a mix of good and bad ideas, or at least some of the ideas come from a good motivation. For example, the idea that “you will own nothing and be happy” is actually a reference to the leasing economy, where instead of buying a washing machine you buy the use of the machine, which gives manufacturers an incentive to make it durable and reparable. The main problem in the kind of ideas that come out of the World Economic Forum is that they invariably put more power in the hands of centralized institutions and the elites that run them. Many of the ideas would be quite good if they could be liberated from that. For example, a universal basic income would be great if it didn’t come with dependency on a government that could take it away if, for example, you espouse subversive ideas.
In any case, if I were invited to speak to them I certainly would. I don’t think we should ever write someone off as irredeemably evil. On some level, these elites long for the same thing we all do, subject to their own particular blinders. I would speak to the part of them that also seeks a more beautiful world.
Tam | If you had the resources of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos what would you do?
Charles | If I had those resources, neither I nor the world would be as they are right now. I would have to be someone I am not. Or, the world that would put such resources in my hands would uphold different values than it does now. In the former case, I would probably do not much different than those two do. In the latter case, I wouldn’t need those resources to begin with.
Tam | Making it more concrete, what if one of these men (or someone similarly wealthy) was so inspired by your ideas that they decided to give you access to $1 billion and hired a team of people to work under your guidance to implement your vision?
Charles | I still question whether this would be the best use of my time; however, I’ll play along with your game. I have a vision called The Institute for Technologies of Reunion. It funds and develops various technologies that draw from and contribute to a new story. Some of them are quite mundane; for example, regenerative agriculture and ecological restoration practices. So I might fund young farmers who want to transition to regenerative farming. There are already organizations doing that, such as the Agrarian Trust. Other technologies are social, for example various kinds of conflict resolution practices. Then there is the realm of physical and emotional healing, using modalities that don’t fit into current medical paradigms or medical funding systems. Beyond that, I would host R&D on unconventional methods of energy production, mind-body technologies, and esoteric practices.
Tam | Getting a little more into the weeds, I want to ask whether you’ve considered the merits of panpsychism (see Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West, Griffin’s Unsnarling the World-knot, or Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind) as an alternative to the return to animism you sometimes suggest in your work could/should be the basis for a new story of interbeing, a story in which all parts of the world have some degree of consciousness? Whereas animism seems to return us to a kind of prerational/romantic state, would you agree that panpsychism offers us a scientifically and philosophically defensible foundational philosophy that may perform the same spiritual function you hope for animism to achieve (I’ve argued this in my book, Mind, World, God)? Panpsychism does indeed seem to be catching on in philosophical and scientific circles in the last couple of decades.
Charles | I would say that I am a panpsychist, yes. I articulated that position quite early in my career in my first book, The Ascent of Humanity. I believe that the distinction between panpsychism and animism is mostly academic, and that the views of ancient and indigenous philosophers were and are a lot more sophisticated than we may give them credit for. I also reject the Spiral Dynamics thinking that locates our own civilization at a higher point of evolution than other cultures, and fancies itself to have “included and transcended” them. Along a certain axis of development this may be true, but it applies a cultural blindness to the many ways that a society can evolve and advance. To call animistic cultures pre-rational or romantic is a modern conceit. I suggest reading Graeber & Wengrow’s description in The Dawn of Everything of how modern notions of a liberal society such as liberty and equality originated in the critiques of North American philosophers such as Kandiaronk, who profoundly influenced Jesuit missionaries and other colonizers, and whose critiques found their way into the writings of philosophers like John Locke, Rousseau, and so forth. Anyway, I don’t think animism is essentially different from panpsychism. The latter is more a translation of animism into modern conceptual idiom.
Tam | You paint a nuanced view of technology, highlighting its ability (already realized in so many ways) to make problems worse through unwise “technofixes,” but also suggesting that there may indeed be “technologies of Reunion” that may bring us more quickly into the Age of Reunion you call for. Can you offer some rules of thumb on how to make this key kind of discernment about the role of new technologies in our lives?
Charles | The key differentiating principle is that Technologies of Reunion are not based on control. What we call technology today is a system for applying force to matter with ever greater precision. The dream is that if we could only control every atom in the world, in our own bodies and brains, etc., if we could only quantify and manipulate everything in the material and social world, we could engineer paradise. Well, no matter how far we develop our ability to control the world, paradise remains on the horizon, as far away as ever. (The same is true on the personal level when we try to control other people in our lives.)
In contrast, Technologies of Reunion draw on an understanding that the world is alive, that there are intelligences beyond the human, and that by participating in these intelligences we can co-achieve miraculous results. For example, technologies of control try to perfect agricultural yields by precisely controlling every component of the soil, eliminating weeds and pests, and so forth. Technologies of Reunion seek to support the aliveness of the soil, listening and observing it as a living being, asking what it needs, trusting that its thriving is connected to our own.
Tam | You have a rare talent of provoking reconsideration of seemingly bedrock aspects of one’s worldview. Reading your work has provoked a lot of soul-searching in me and many of your readers. I and my academic colleagues recently developed a framework that could in theory lead to the quantification of consciousness (a “psychometer”) in whatever physical structures are being considered (animals, plants, robots, stars, etc.) There are some pretty obvious benefits of having this kind of technology but also potential downsides. Would you say that having a more or less reliable psychometer would fall in the “technology of reunion” category, or not so much?
Charles | Such devices can be fun and illuminating, but we must approach them with humility. A key precept of the modern world and its scientific view is that, in principle, everything that is real can be quantified, measured and counted. According to that precept, if consciousness is real it can be measured too. (Also, whatever can be measured may also be controlled; we have subsumed it within our own system of numbers and categories; we have domesticated it.) Humility suggests that there are real things that will always escape quantification. We can work with them, we can understand them, but we can never pin them down or reduce them to number (which is a fundamental form of conquest). So whatever you are measuring with your psychometer, please understand that it won’t include everything that consciousness is. Be aware as well that whatever it leaves out may correspond to social and ecological prejudices and power relationships.
Tam | Are psychedelics a “technology of reunion”?
Charles | Yes and no. Just because something is a technology of reunion doesn’t mean that we know how to properly use it. We must learn. These technologies are powerful. In a sense, the technology is not the substance itself, it is the set of practices that includes it. By itself, a psychedelic is no more a technology than is a microchip in a hole in the ground. The word technology means a “logos of crafts.”
Tam | You argue in Climate: A New Story that even shifting to a fully renewable energy economy, while offering obvious benefits over our current mostly fossil-fueled economy, would still entail numerous ills because simply changing our power sources won’t fix the growing separation we all feel. As someone who has spent his primary career focused on the green energy transition, I’ve been guilty of advocating for this particular techno fix for some time and we are indeed on the verge of realizing a fully renewable energy economy in two to three decades in the US and globally (I make this argument in my book, Solar: Why Our Energy Future Is So Bright). That said, I find myself agreeing with you that this is far from a “mission accomplished” moment, as much as I would like to take some much-needed time off from advocacy. You seem in your work a bit torn about the merits and effects of a fully green energy economy. Would you agree that transitioning away from fossil fuels is highly desirable for many reasons, but that this alone is only one part of the overall changes we need to make in how we live?
Charles | Yes, transitioning away from fossil fuels is highly desirable for many reasons — depending on what we transition into. That is actually more important than what we transition out of. In the book I say that even if global warming is not a problem, I still want to end fracking, oil spills, tar sands excavation, and all the other ruin that accompanies fossil fuel extraction. However, I don’t want to replace it with the ruin that accompanies the electric economy, which at least at this stage requires a vast expansion of ecologically ruinous mining for silver, coltan, lithium, rare earths, etc. The ecological damage from hydro power, biofuel plantations, and nukes is also horrendous.
In my view, by far the most important transition is to see earth as alive, precious, and sacred. And then to implement this understanding with a complete moratorium on further “development” of remaining undamaged ecosystems. No more deforestation of the Amazon and Congo, no more draining wetlands, etc. Equally important is restoration of damaged ecosystems, soil, and marine environments. We should for example put at least half the oceans under marine preserves. That will give the world’s navies something useful to do.
When the organs of Gaia are strong, she will be resilient to changing levels of greenhouse gases and other challenges. If the organs (forests, wetlands, oceans, etc.) are weak, then the climate will spiral into derangement even if we cut carbon emissions to zero.
Tam | A major techno fix that is increasingly likely is space colonization, including the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system. While we won’t be seeing millions of people living in space in the next decade or two, it seems likely that by 2050 or so we probably will be. In terms of all of the many environmental, social, and spiritual ills you highlight in your work, how much, if any, of these problems will be ameliorated as we become a multiplanetary species and find untold abundance in other planets and eventually other star systems? Is your philosophy suited for a space-faring civilization?
Charles | I disagree. Space colonization is much harder than the optimists think. It will require technologies that aren’t really on the radar right now. It will in fact require the kinds of technologies that are inaccessible to the consciousness that wants to escape responsibility for earth.
Tam | I see a clear progression in your last four books with each more or less leading naturally to the next. But I can’t discern what your next one will be. Maybe a foreign policy based on love? Is it in the works already?
Charles | I’m not sure if I will write more books. Events are happening so quickly that it doesn’t make sense to spend a year or two writing a book, which is then published the year after that. Instead I can publish piecemeal on Substack.
Experimental images generated using AI application, DALL-E
Deep Adaptation | A Quartet of Videos
Deep Adaptation | A Quartet of Videos
What is Deep Adaptation?
Deep Adaptation refers to a set of ideas put forth in an academic paper written in 2018 by Professor Jem Bendell, and later expanded on with Katie Carr and others. The paper explores the personal and collective changes that help (and have helped) people to prepare for – and live with – societal disruption and collapse.
The term social or societal collapse is used here to refer to the uneven ending to our current means of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning. Others may prefer the term societal breakdown when referring to the same process. Deep Adaptation refers to certain responses, based on compassion, curiosity, and respect, to this predicament – which different people may view as likely, inevitable, or already unfolding.
There are two broad paths within Deep Adaptation:
- Inner adaptation: exploring the emotional, psychological, and spiritual implications of living in a time when societal disruption/collapse is likely, inevitable, or already happening.
- Outer adaptation: working on practical measures to support well-being and reduce harm, ahead of and during collapse (e.g. regenerative living, community-building, policy activism).
Many people spend time processing the emotional implications of the coming collapse before looking outwards to find roles on the local and global levels. Others, in the wake of their grief, turn inward and learn to trust their own hearts and emotions, which can be an invitation to others to do the same.
The Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) offers free events and online platforms for people who are seeking and building supportive communities to face the reality of the climate crisis.
The following four films were curated by the Deep Adaptation Quarterly, Issue 12, November 2022.
Don’t Tell Me to Just Breathe
– Mental health in the context of growth-dependency and climate breakdown
A short-film animation by Swarm Dynamics in collaboration with CUSP and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance
Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last six decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world.
Yet, the economic system to which we are in thrall throws us out of balance. According to recent NHS statistics, one in four adults and one in 10 children experience mental illness, and many more of us know and care for people who do. By failing to meet our most essential needs the growth-based economy is doomed to immiserate and, ultimately, sicken us.
This timely short-film animation speaks to the spiralling levels of anxiety and depression that so many people in the UK and in other rich nations are experiencing by revealing the often silenced links between these mental health crises and the current economic system, including not only the increasing pressures upon people’s basic needs, but also the ‘capitalist realism’ that allows climate breakdown to unfold before our very eyes.
Through the eyes of a young care sector worker, the film creatively explores the interplay between the inner and outer dimensions of system change and of mental health. The second half introduces the key pillars of a Wellbeing Economy as solution set, pointing out that collective mental health can only be secured by a system that respects the boundaries of people’s wellbeing, and of nature, and where the Future is no longer sacrificed on the altar of eternal economic growth. MORE
Out of Ashes
Is THIS civilisation finished? Will it end badly, or well?
Out of Ashes is written by ecological philosopher, Rupert Read, and the writer/director of climate blockbuster The Age of Stupid, Franny Armstrong.
With animation by Martyn Pick, this impactful short film challenges us to face the unravelling of our civilisation head on and to choose a transformational future. If we dare. For more info, check out Moderate Flank, a UK-based incubator “designed to inform, identify, connect, and fund initiatives that are strategically placed to ‘tip’ our complex social system towards climate action.”
Living in the Time of Dying
– Meeting the truth of the climate crisis | a film by Michael Shaw
Living in The Time of Dying is an unflinching look at what it means to be living in the midst of climate catastrophe and finding purpose and meaning within it. Recognising the magnitude of the climate crisis we are facing, independent filmmaker Michael Shaw, sells his house to travel around the world looking for answers. Pretty soon we begin to see how deep the predicament goes along with the systems and ways of thinking that brought us here. Stan Rushworth, a Native American Elder, brings an especially enlightening viewpoint to these questions. It becomes clear that climate change is going to ruin our way of life but this then opens up a whole new set of questions: How did we get here? How do we choose to live and what actions make sense at this time? The people interviewed in the documentary, all highly regarded and well known spokespeople on the issue, argue it’s too late to stop catastrophic climate change but in no way too late to regain a renewed life giving relationship with our world.
Last Day on Earth
Award-winning short film | featuring Alan Watts
Writer/Director – Christian Eisenbarth
An old man lives alone in the depths of a Washington forest, unknowingly experiencing his last day on earth. He embarks through an enchanted forest, only to find he’s not alone. In his last moments, he discovers the meaning of his life.
Devolution and the Supreme Court
Devolution and the Supreme Court
I see the sacred destiny of the United States as becoming an increasingly inclusive, multicultural nation. It is not united by sameness, which is how fascist dictatorships operate, but through unity in diversity. Overall, I remain optimistic that: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” as the 19th century transcendentalist Theodore Parker said (and Martin Luther King and Barack Obama liked to reiterate). However, there have always been periodic times of backlash against progress, what I called in my book Original Politics “devolution.” In these times, it appears that the nation is going backwards. This is definitely one of those times.
The Supreme Court are not the cause of all that ails the United States. However, they reveal the American shadow.
The Court is acting in a dangerously arrogant way, for the first time stripping away rights rather than granting further rights. Alito couched his opinion in legal mumbo jumbo, saying he was returning proper authority to the states. This was done one day after wresting authority away from NY State for daring to regulate the legality of carrying concealed firearms. The hypocrisy is profound. Then, the very next day the Court blatantly disregarded a bedrock principle of separation of church and state by allowing a teacher to lead his students in prayer in school. The sum total of these rulings is a dangerous slide toward becoming a Christian theocracy under the false pretenses of defending religious freedom and state’s rights. Returning a hot button issue like abortion to individual states is reminiscent of slavery pre-Civil War. This poorly thought out action will have the effect of further dividing the nation and destabilizing the union. It could lead to even more civil strife.
One simple fact any reasonable person should be able to agree upon is that the issue of abortion is viewed differently by different people and by differing religions and schools of thought. Jews, for instance, believe that the health of the mother is paramount in any decision about pregnancy. To impose a Christian, or a Catholic (with a capital C) way of viewing is to move in the direction of a Christian theocracy. The other obvious fact we should all be able to agree upon is that we are all born from a woman’s body. And it is undeniably her body. This is the primary reason why Roe was decided the way it was, from the standpoint of a privacy issue as outlined in the 14th Amendment. It was a woman’s right to choose whether or not she carried a pregnancy to term and gave birth. The choice of whether or not to bear a child is obviously a profound one. This Supreme Court claims it is returning the decision from the courts to the people, but under Roe, the decision was already with the pregnant woman and now it’s with the state (and different depending upon which state one lives in).
Frankly, I would have had more respect for the Alito opinion if he had just come out and said the majority of Justices thought that life began at conception and abortion was murder. I am not saying I agree with that point of view; I have a more nuanced view I will get to in a moment. But I would have at least respected it. Instead, they claimed to be removing the Court from the decision when they were doing anything but. They chose to overturn precedent upon precedent for no legally justifiable reason at all. The majority opinion is justified by asserting that abortion was not rooted in the nation’s history from the start. Well, neither were any rights for women, including the right to participate in any part of the political process. Nor were there any rights for African-Americans, who were deemed to be three-fifths of a person under the Constitution, with many enslaved as property. Women did not receive the right to vote across the nation until 1920; Native Americans did not receive citizenship until 1924; interracial marriage was not deemed legal until 1967 with Loving vs Virginia case, abortion became legal in 1973 in Roe v Wade; and same sex marriage became legal in 2015 in Obergfell vs Hodges.
The concept of “originalism” is deeply and transparently flawed. I say this as the author of a book called Original Thinking in which I state that being original has a dual meaning, as in both old and new. In my view, tradition and precedent should have a role in interpreting modern law; however, to interpret modern laws solely based on archaic concepts is nonsensical. Values, mores, and beliefs change over time. The Supreme Court should reflect the will of the people and changing social mores over time, and not try to impose its will, or the imagined views of the founders, upon the people at any time.
What Happens to the Soul when an Abortion Occurs?
My own sense of what happens when an abortion occurs is that a soul that intended to be born has its path blocked, but then reincarnates with another host. To me that helps dissolve the dichotomy in which people tend to argue about the issue. I realize that a belief in reincarnation is relatively rare in the West, although much of the world believes in it. I have reason to believe in reincarnation, and I don’t need to go into the full details of why here—but if you are open-minded to the subject, I would point to Matlock’s Signs of Reincarnation with Foreword by Jeffrey Mishlove for more on that.
Even if you believe abortion is a form of ‘killing’ – it is cessation of life within one’s own physical body. I have news for some people. Every time you ingest antibiotics (the very word means “anti-life”), you are killing millions upon millions of bacteria you depend upon to live. Every time we eat we are either taking the life of an animal or a living plant, bird, fish, and so forth. The act of living involves and includes death within its processes. This happens to be one of the reasons I believe in reincarnation. I see death as a reorganization of energetic force. As Einstein realized, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. Death is nature’s way of transforming and supporting new life.
What Can Be Done?
I feel for the women of America today. The entire society depends so much on women to make this a better world. It is not just that women make babies and nurture them; the feminine power of creation has her footprints upon everything that makes this world a beautiful place to live. It is not a coincidence that women’s knowledge was considered the wisest, foremost knowledge among many Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) from which much of our nation’s egalitarian ideals were selectively appropriated. Among the Haudenosaunee, it was the Clan Mothers who made the most important decisions: to sign treaties, go to war, and to nominate the male chief, while also retaining the power to call a Grand Council and weigh in with their guidance if a course correction was needed. The Clan Mothers also retained the right to remove the male chief if he committed acts of malfeasance, including acts of disrespect toward women.
So what can be done about the recent Supreme Court decisions, particularly around abortion?
Fifty years ago, Betty Friedan organized The Women’s Strike for Equality in the United States. At that time, the organizers stated three goals: abortion on demand, equal opportunity in the workplace, and free childcare. The first goal was met fairly quickly in 1973. The second and third goals continue to lag behind.
I also remember that 40 years ago, in Iceland, the women of Iceland went on strike for a day. They refused to work, cook, and look after children for a day. I imagine they also refused to have sex that day (a la the Greek play Lysistrata) although I have never read that. Well, maybe US women should do the same thing, and for a longer period if necessary. The one-day strike of Iceland resulted in entire industries shut down and an immediate awareness of the fact that women were pillars of the society at least as equally as men. While things went “back to normal” the next day, within a short time, the society was transformed. Women began receiving paid maternal leave, which led to the nation welcoming their first female prime minister (something the United States has yet to do for our president).
I stand with all women who want to do something similar in the United States that will draw attention to their vital importance in society, and undo the damage that been done by this Supreme Court. I believe that this is a temporary backlash against women’s rights, a last stand from the old guard of masculine dominance, and that feminine power will continue to emerge and rise in prominence, just as has been foretold in Mayan and other prophecies of this age. I pray for and welcome that day where equal justice under the law prevails for all.
Dusty and Me
Dusty and Me
Warning: This article includes content related to the topic of suicide. If you or a loved one may be at risk, please click HERE.
My son Dusty was twenty and I was forty-six when I realized I was not, and had never been, the straight female that I presented to the world. The cultural fabric of South Dakota, where I grew up, was hostile to the very essence of my secret identity as male – so secret that I kept that identity from my conscious mind. I would not emerge as a gay male until I moved to the socially liberal California coast. Shortly thereafter, I began the therapy and hormone treatment that would wholly transform me into an exterior match of my inner identity.
I transformed, but Dusty could not follow. He remained in South Dakota, a twenty-two-year-old cisgender male, embedded in the same conservative culture I had rejected. I can only guess at his bewilderment when his California mom showed up in South Dakota as a gay man. Yes, I had tried to prepare him, had sent photos to my parents, had spoken with him. But nothing could prepare him for the reality. I sported a beard; I spoke with a male voice; I dressed, acted, and presented as I’d always unconsciously identified—as a male.
I remember how we awkwardly faced each other in front of my parents’ rural, ranch-style home, the spring air sweet with the scent of my dad’s treasured Tropicana and Peace roses. My brilliant, quirky son puffed silently on his Pall Mall menthol, never meeting my eyes. “I don’t want you in my life,” he said, grinding out the cigarette with his boot. I stood stunned, not able to reckon the damage that quiet assertion would wreak on his life and mine.
Dusty’s father Ed and I married in our early 20s, an ostensibly “normal” South Dakota couple. I was seeking to fit into the South Dakota mold in a way that I never would. Marriage was my desperate attempt to prove to myself I was worthy of belonging. I can only guess at Ed’s motives. I did not suspect, until it was too late, that he harbored an extreme need to control everyone and everything around him.
Soon after we married, he shook and shoved me when I refused to dust the furniture. He choked me after I complained that our dog was barking outside and would wake the neighbors. I walked on eggshells for nine years until a kind counselor woke me up enough to get me to leave. Ed coerced me into granting him full custody of the kids. I was too naïve to realize that removing myself from the equation would not stop the abuse. At that time, Dusty was only five and would become the prime target of Ed’s control and abuse. I drove five hours from Minneapolis every month for visits, but didn’t suspect, until Dusty was a teen, that he harbored deep pain.
Two days before his high school graduation, Dusty sustained critical injuries in a car accident involving several classmates. He was not driving, but was riding shotgun, sans seatbelt, with his feet perched on the dashboard. The other car t-boned his on the passenger side. He was air-lifted to McKennen Hospital in Sioux Falls. When I rushed from California to his bedside, I found him in ICU attached to a respirator and multiple chirping instruments. Among other injuries, he’d broken his back at Lumbar #3. I visited him daily and Dusty, in his need and vulnerability, accepted my nurturing. Just months before my shift to male, I got to be his mom.
Dusty recovered the use of his legs, but the accident had forever killed his dream of entering the Air Force and becoming an officer. It killed his hope too. I don’t know when Dusty began to drink, but I suspect it started during those teenage years. And after he cut me from his life at age 22, I knew little about his day-to-day world.
I do know that Dusty did not transform his toxic view of masculinity while he was alive. I think that rigidity contributed greatly to his depression. He was a sensitive, caring man, but equated that sensitivity with weakness. So he built up walls that made him appear invulnerable and unfeeling. I conjecture that his most vicious criticism of “imperfect masculinity” was aimed at himself. He didn’t travel, so he didn’t realize other healthier models of maleness existed in other locations.
Dusty has one sibling, a younger sister. My daughter has handled a difficult childhood in a totally different way than Dusty. She and I are on good terms. She is a paramedic and has adopted (with her husband) two preadolescent siblings who also came from severe trauma. I believe she works through her trauma by helping them with theirs.
In Dusty’s last year of life, I learned that he had fallen in love, entered alcohol treatment, and seemed destined to transform. I dreamed of the day when I might offer him the hard-won fruits of my own journey toward wholeness. I dreamed that his marriage and detox would help us accomplish the miracle of reconciliation that our thirteen years of separation had not.
I dreamed that Dusty would accept, at last, that I could be a man and remain a loving parent.
But Dusty’s life had its own trajectory. A parent inevitably blames themselves for their child’s death by suicide. I felt such guilt about leaving Dusty in Ed’s care, about transitioning to male, and thus challenging his core beliefs. However, four year’s perspective, therapy, and a wonderful SOS (Survivors of Suicide) group have supported me as I evolved a new viewpoint: I can now grant Dusty the dignity of his own experience, his own meaning. He lived and walked on this planet in ways that both helped and hurt others. Just like the rest of us. His life held intrinsic, indelible meaning. It belonged to him alone, to his struggle, to his choices, including his views about masculinity – his own and mine.
The Moment | Alan Watts and the Eternal Now
The Moment | Alan Watts and the Eternal Now
Video Transcript
for the original full text, see 1.1.12. – Limits of Language – Pt. 2 | April 16, 2019 | Essential Lectures, Alan Watts Organization, https://alanwatts.org/
So, when we say to ourselves, “You must go on,” the reason is, you see, that we are not living in the eternal now, where reality is. We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later. Don’t kid yourself. Only suckers put hope in the future. There really isn’t much of a future. You are going to die.
So therefore, this hope for the future is a hoax, it’s a perfect hoax. Because you are not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be…Look, supposing I ask you, “What did you do yesterday?” Mostly we say, “Well, let me see now; I got up at 7:30 and I brushed my teeth, and I read the newspaper over a cup of coffee, and then I looked at the clock and dressed, and got in the car and drove downtown. I did this and that in the office and so on.” You go on and on and suddenly you discover that what you have described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened.
You have described a fleshless list of abstractions whereas, if you were actually aware of what went on, you could never describe it. Because nature is multidimensional, language is linear, language is scrawny. And therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the way the world is described, it is as if you were trying to eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers. A lot of people eat numbers. People play the stock market and they are doing nothing but eating numbers. They are always unhappy, absolutely miserable, because they never get anything. So therefore, they always hope more is coming because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills eventually something satisfactory will happen. So eating the abstractions all the time…we want more and more and more time.
Confucius very wisely said, “A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.” Because when you understand, you do not put your hope in time, time will not solve a thing. And the Christian word for “sinning” (in Greek is amatanene), which means “to miss the point.” And the point is eternal life which is here and now.
But until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand – eternal life, that is to say, eternal now.
But then when you are fully aware and not thinking, you will notice some amazing absences: there is no past. Can you hear anything past incidentally? Can you hear anything future? They are just not there to the plain sense of ones ears.
Well, I remember in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus said a lot of things about this. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” And if God so clothed the grass or the field which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you faithless ones?” Wow.
So do not worry about tomorrow saying, ‘What shall we eat? What shall we drink? Or how shall we clothe ourselves?’ All the rabble seek after these things. “Sufficient to the day is the worry of it.” Nobody ever preaches a sermon on that text, never. I have heard lots of sermons but never one on that, because people say, “Look, that’s all very well because Jesus was the boss’s son, and he knew that he was really in charge of the universe and had nothing to worry about. But we have to be practical.”
Oh? What do you suppose the Gospel was? The good news – you know it never got out. You, too, are the boss’s son: that was the gospel.
Lots of people in India know that perfectly well…when you get to be a certain age, and after you have studied long enough with a certain guru, then and only then may you realize this. You have put in the time and they finally let you in. Here you have to wait, until you are dead.
The only place to begin is now, because here is where we are. So why put it off? A lot of people say, “Well, I am not ready.” What do you mean you are not ready? What do you have to do to be ready? Well, “I am not good enough, I am perhaps not old enough, not mature enough for such knowledge. I am still frightened of pain. I am still dependent on material things. I have to eat a lot, drink a lot, and I think I had better get all that under control first.”
Oh? You want to be able to congratulate yourself for having gone through the discipline which is rewarded with realization. That is trying to quench fire with fire. Wouldn’t it be great to have no fear, no attachments, no hang-ups, to be as free as the air? Wouldn’t it be crazy to have that courage? But if you look into yourself honestly you will find that inside you are actually a quaking mess of sensitivity, running away from the quaking mess, escaping. You never can.
There is nothing you can actually do to transform your own nature into unattached selflessness because you have a selfish reason for wanting to do it. What does it mean that you cannot do anything about it? It is singing loud and clear: The reason you cannot do anything about it is that you do not exist. “You” as you conceive yourself to be, that is your ego, your image of yourself is not there, it does not exist. It is an abstraction.
When you understand that, you are liberated.
There is the happening, the suchness, yes, sure – you bet, but it is not pushing you around because there is no you to be pushed around. This illusion of the persecuted ego who is pushed around by fate has altogether disappeared. And so in likewise the illusion of the ego who pushes fate around has also disappeared.
There is a happening. By dying to yourself, by having become completely incompetent and found that you do not exist, you are reborn, you become everything.
In the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, “Forgoing self, the universe grows I.”
Trauma and Regeneration
Trauma and Regeneration
Soul Shivers launched at the Stoa in February and March of 2021. We held a series of four dialogues framed around earth regeneration, breaking the conversations down into four critical themes which were ancestry, trauma, connection to place, and peace. You can view the series here. And the first dialogue in Kosmos, here.
Soul Shivers captures seldom heard stories from women around the world working on earth regeneration in different ways. Our dialogues are intimate, translocally interconnected, and impactful. In a special collaboration with Kosmos, we are offering edited transcripts of these conversations.
Luea Ritter:
Welcome everyone. Today we dive into the field of personal, intergenerational, and collective trauma. Before we begin our dialogue, we’d like to read a short poem.
Freya Yost:
The poem is called Every Morning by Mary Oliver.
I read the papers,
I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
The way the red mortars, in photographs,
arc down into the neighborhoods
like stars, the way death
combs everything into gray rubble before
the camera moves on. What
dark part of my soul
shivers: you don’t want to know more
about this. And then: you don’t know anything
unless you do. How the sleepers
wake and run to the cellars,
how the children scream, their tongues
trying to swim away–
how the morning itself appears
like a slow white rose
while the figures climb over the bubbled thresholds,
move among the smashed cars, the streets
where the clanging ambulances won’t
stop all day–death and death, messy death–
death is history, death is habit–
how sometimes the camera pauses while a family
counts itself, and all of them are alive,
their mouths dry caves of wordlessness
in the smudged moons of their faces,
a craziness we have so far no name for–
all this I read in the papers,
in the sunlight,
I read with my cold, sharp eyes.
Luea Ritter:
Thank you, Freya. I mentioned intergenerational trauma, meaning from within our family lineages and handed down, informing future generations, and then there is also the collective trauma of tribes, communities, whole cultures, and societies. We strongly believe that no matter where we are on this planet, and no matter what tribe or culture we belong to, we are all informed by trauma dynamics.
Even if we have not experienced big traumas in our lifetime, such as war or famine, we all are descendants of people who have. Not to compare them with each other, of course, but just to acknowledge this. We live in cultures and societies that are built on trauma-informed structures.
Peter Levine defines trauma as something that happens to us faster than we can process it. So in a way we become traumatized when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some ways overwhelmed. Everyone reacts differently to trauma, even in shared traumatic events. One person may be fine while the other one gets trapped in a cycle of anxiety. It’s very important to know when we approach healing that it’s actually something to work through in our bodies.
Knowing that trauma is a physiological reaction, we can approach regeneration as something that is the collaboration between the energetic, social, and ecological layers of life. We could say that regeneration is needed as a response to how we have lived with century-old trauma-informed dynamics and systems. Humanity itself has to create the preconditions for working through the trauma layers and unfreeze the stuck energy that is in our systems and societies.
Now I would love to open with a question. How have you as an individual, and you with your community or your peers, danced with these trauma-informed dynamics and what is the first story that comes up when you hear that word?
Alexandra Gavilano:
The first image that comes to mind is soil. How intensely managed soil is traumatized and it needs to recuperate. A lot of people say we’re destroying our planet. We’re not destroying the planet because the planet will be here long after us. We are really destroying the environment that is good for our species and many others. I feel we need to expand the trauma dimensions to the more than human.
Amber Tamm:
Growing up I didn’t understand that some of the things I was enduring were traumatic and that they were informed by a collective trauma. I really had no clue. But I easily realized that trauma is a superpower once I went through something very massive, as in my father murdering my mom, and then I was able to see how years of this can lead to more of it.
Going through my own personal trauma brought me back to soil and honoring, like Alexandra just said, the trauma of the soil, but through people first. I think I had to really recognize what land I was on, how my ancestors were brought here, what the land is holding people-wise, bones-wise, fertilizer-wise, trauma-wise, and then getting to a Mama Earth perspective. I have always felt like trauma is some weird sort of sight. It helps you understand others. It helps you understand interconnectedness as a whole.
Jane Ruka:
Because I’m older than you, I always hesitate to speak first. From my vantage, intergenerational trauma is very close, and it can come in the form of anything that disturbs your community, and that intergenerational trauma could come from another nation, superimposing themselves onto you or taking you from your community and replanting you somewhere else as a totally different self-image that you had or your ancestors had for you.
I think it’s the destruction that the original trauma intergenerationally is condoned in some manner by the communities who can’t retaliate to it, and if they do, huge consequences are exerted on ancestral people, and Amber represents that end line. Alexandra to some extent as well. Naomi is walking through it at this present time in Kenya. Luea and Freya, just because I don’t mention you, you are included in this for your ancestral traumas because we all know the history of Europe, and it has consequences from the original trauma down to personally my generation of grandchildren.
You do not ever revert back to where you were and your ancestors were originally. You must regenerate yourself in the place where you are. If that involves changing your country or community, then you are honor-bound to do that for your next generations. Your next generation of children, whoever is in your lineage of blood, will see that you’ve done it. Being an example is very important. People need to see that you can achieve, and intergenerational trauma includes trauma to the surroundings land.
Every being and sentient creature has a right to be there and then suddenly you’re all devastated and nobody has a right except the people coming to utilize all the areas that they can in order to increase financial gain. You need to first regain your own balance, and then you must look at your surroundings.
The whole picture of regeneration is so important, but it begins with you and your understanding. I’m not saying that we can dismiss our intergenerational traumas. I’m saying that we need to view them in all honesty as to how you can improve them existing where you are.
I am a very loud activist. I oppose everything that I know from my long travel through life as not appropriate to the people growing up that belong to my ewe, my people. We all have personal traumas and some of them are more devastating. You cannot get more trauma than being the child of a mother whose father has caused her life to end, and I do send out my heartfelt grief of your situation that you have so bravely come out of, Amber.
I send to you my best wishes, dear, for your ceasing the generational trauma so that your children don’t receive what you’re living through. God bless you in the form of blessing of my culture. I send that to you, Amber, so that your children do not get traumatized. Give them the life of hope, my dear.
Freya Yost:
I’ve come to feel that one of the most powerful forms of ‘activism’ happens at a family scale. I’ve also had certain experiences in nature that are hard to name but that over time I have come to understand as bringing me closer to my wholeness or higher self. These experiences imply to me that one of the great traumas is our separation from the land. It feels right, therefore, that regeneration involves entering back into a relationship with each other, with the land. As I began to think along those lines, I noticed myself becoming more sensitive to the world. As I opened up to the possibility of more relationships around me, I became increasingly receptive to the immeasurable beauty that was accessible to me at any moment. On the other hand, I couldn’t read the newspaper anymore without falling into depression. How do you experience this tension, that increased connection with life leads to more beauty but also more pain?
Amber Tamm:
This is something I am still figuring out. For so long I just was going every day. And now I’m recognizing that I should have slowed down a long time ago. I should have been looking into these crevices within myself, but instead I was like, “I need to save money for my siblings, and I need to focus on my career,” and it’s only now that I realize that I chose a career over myself. I chose regenerative agriculture over regenerative Amber. If you don’t choose yourself you can’t be helpful. One thing me and my partner say to each other is we can’t fight a food apartheid and be malnourished people.
Luea Ritter:
I’m curious to hear what are the community resources we draw upon when these dynamics show up?
Jane Ruka:
I hear you all saying you go to nature, you go to the trees, you go to the soil when these tensions and pressures are upon you. Our belief system is that we are related to everything that has life. They are elder brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers. Some of them are centuries old, our trees. Now, in those centuries, there are methods of surviving, but because we’ve lived 60, 70, 52 years, we totally are unaware, most of us, that we have seniority growing in our own gardens.
In order to access those beautiful brothers and sisters, ancient as they are, all we have to do is let them know we are traumatized. Go to them. Tell them your anxieties. If you have a bird flying through into your property and you are heart-bound with trauma, it’s a life force that’s learned through its generational genealogy how to survive. It’s your best friend at the time.
Everything belongs to me that belongs to nature. It’s my given right as the youngest child on this planet to ask for help from them. I don’t just sit and do silent help. I tell them my traumas. I cry to them, and the moment I’ve cried for my heartfelt trauma, I know that I’m relieved because they’ve picked it up. All those root systems are going to hear my cry to my elders.
It’s not going to be very long before your relief is felt because your elder brothers and sisters are taking it, and remember, when it’s their turn to have trauma, you stand up and be the biggest and loudest activists for their protection, not because they require it, but because your heartfelt knowledge tells you they save humans and what are some parts of the humanity destroying them for?
Go out and tell nature, “This is my saddest trauma. I need you to help me,” and they respond because they have senses just as we do. I give you that coded law from my culture is speaking and gifting of words, and I hope it helps you because you already all touch it. Multiply us by the thousands of people who get relief. We’ve got a force that can defend our brothers and sisters because they defend us if we talk to them. Speaking in your mind is all right, but verbalizing it means the ones in the distance catch it on the wind, and they can hear it.
So, it’s not just the few that you’re talking to as you’re walking. It’s to the brothers and sisters that have been caught by the god of the winds. Tāwhirimātea is the god of winds and takes your sorrow and gives it to the brothers and sisters who are older than us. So, thank you.
Amber Tamm, USA
Every farmer has an origin story of how their journey to the land began. For some it builds over time and others it happens in a day. For Amber, it was a single moment when her father murdered her mother. At the age of 18, she lost both parents and along with them she lost her housing, income, food and healing. Little did she know farming would provide her with all of these things. For months Amber mourned, devastated in silence. And then there came a day when she felt called to get outside, into nature. “As I laid my mother’s body into the earth, the earth literally became my mother.”
Jane Ruka, New Zealand
Jane Mihingarangi Ruka is the Chairwoman of the Waitaha Executive Grandmothers Council. The Grandmothers represent the Nation of Waitaha in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jane is the Kaiwhakahaere of the Waitaha Claim Wai 1940 lodged with the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand. Jane and the Grandmothers practice care for the environment, peace, and promote the wisdom of women.
Alexandra Gavilano, Switzerland
Alexandra Gavilano is a Swiss-Peruvian environmental scientist and activist for social transformation and planet protection. Her passion is to reflect, observe and learn from inner/individual and inner/collective processes and manifestations of those in the outside world to envision a way towards the new era of humanity and all beings on our planet earth.
Luea Ritter, Switzerland/Greece
Luea is a process steward, action researcher, coach and systemic constellation facilitator. Her work internationally and across diverse sectors, weaves transformative change processes, trauma and healing work, leadership, and earth-based wisdom traditions.
Through a diverse medley of fields she has developed a high sensitivity for context-based cultural and social dynamics. She is co-founder and creative steward of Collective Transitions, an action-learning and research organization dedicated to building shared capacity for fostering and maintaining transformational shifts, as well as co-founder and steering team member of the Nile Journeys, a platform for transboundary dialogue and regenerative collaboration in the Nile Basin.
She is part of collaboration helvetica, an initiative that catalyses systemic change towards the societal transformation of Switzerland by cultivating a cross-sectoral innovation ecosystem, running different capacity-building programs and open knowledge sharing. In her cutting-edge research-to-innovation PhD Process for Holistic Development with the Geneva-based TRANS4M Center for Integral Development, she focuses on social fields and the building and maintaining of coherence.
Freya Yost, Italy
Freya is an artist and sustainability strategist based in Italy. She studied Art History at the American University of Rome (B.A., 2010) and Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute (M.S., 2015). She is also trained as a botanical artist.
Freya helped create and served as COO of Common Earth, the regenerative development partner of the Commonwealth of Nations for four years through her work with Cloudburst Foundation. She was influential in organizing and facilitating several high-level convenings at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London between 2017 and 2019.
In addition, she has at institutions around the world including the United Nations, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and A Growing Culture. Freya’s work has been featured in Vogue and she has authored articles in peer-review journals such as Weave, IK: Other Ways of Knowing, and IFLA.
Amber Tamm:
This is incredibly important because with Black History Month in America right now, the media is filled with depictions of the civil rights era or these dark horror genre movies about black Americans today, but they’re back in slavery. America will applaud a seer like Harriet Tubman for her ability to utilize nature to get to freedom, and when I hear that, it makes me almost sob because I’m envisioning a bunch of my ancestors venturing through nature but doing their best to be quiet, to blend in, climbing a tree for the sake of safety, doing bird sounds for the sake of communicating.
The reality is for me and my community that we’ve never went into nature for joy and we never went into nature comfortable. We never went into nature with conversation. Nature was a portal to freedom, and that’s all it ever was. So by time you got from the American South to the American North, yes, you had experienced nature, but it was for safety. It was to literally wade in the water, but the water wasn’t your friend because you enjoyed it. It was your friend because it got you to freedom.
So, I do think a big part for those of us who are black American is to revitalize the relationship with nature through conversation beyond it being a safe haven, but through conversation solely.
Ola (from the audience):
Thank you to you guys for everything you shared. I’m making connections between experiences in my life and the experiences that I’ve seen in other people’s lives around me. I live in Nigeria, and the trauma is so bad that we can’t have effective communication without shouting at each other. That is how we tend to communicate, and looking back at my own experience with my own mom and how she passed trauma onto me. I had to do a lot of work on myself without understanding the concept of trauma. Forgiving her for not knowing and still seeing how she is still reeling in that trauma and not being able to help.
It bothers me seeing how it’s also transferring to my own sisters, and I’m looking at it from a perspective of how long Nigeria is going to be Nigeria if we continue to operate this way. When Jane said that you should be willing to change your environment so that the next generation can have a better experience, I have noticed that my friends who live abroad still have traces of this trauma in them even though they changed their environment. So, I’m trying to make connections to where the regeneration would come from. Is it going to be from within, like from self or a shared understanding of what trauma is? This conversation really hits home for me, and I was really close to tears. So, thank you guys.
Jane Ruka:
I really am heartfelt for all these sins of colonization. We are still in our colonization in my country. By moving out of your environment, you first must, as you have done, recognize your trauma, personal or community trauma, by changing environments. I’m talking about your mental environment, your physical environment, and your running-away environment.
For those who can stand still, trauma is persistent, and the possibility that you are standing still means that you think you are strong enough to change your personal, mental environment and stand upright, still protesting about what has traumatized you. If you are still standing in that trauma, then you must be prepared to give your life for it in circumstances that everybody else would run away from, and I wish you well on finding your balance.
If whatever activity you choose to take needs your action, the trauma has presented itself to you. You have taken it into your heart and body and your mind, your surroundings. It belongs to you. Then your mind responds. Your waitaha responds. Your waitaha is your mana. Your mana is your spirit and your essential being and traumatized people respond only how their essential being or mana is able to cope with it. If running away keeps you alive and you’re able to develop into a stronger person, then that’s what you need to do. Nobody can tell you how you can respond. Your essential being knows what’s good for it and what isn’t good for it, and if it requires you to run away, then you must do that because you’re no good standing up in front of the trauma if you already know that you need to move from it.
If you’re one of these people who can stand there and decide, no, I’m not going to go anywhere, then that’s your decision to deal with your life trauma in that place and neither has any consequence to anybody else but to you, and your mana needs to accept that. Your essential being is a mana, and if you accept that, then that’s your learning from that particular trauma. We’re switching from community trauma down to personal trauma, and you’re the only person who knows how to deal with that. I wish you well, Ola.
Amber Tamm:
When I think of my journey, I was the perfect student and the perfect black girl from the hood. I was a great example of an African American doing what’s right, and that was really because whatever an adult was telling me to do I was doing.
I was on the right track, and I think once my trauma came and knocked me onto a different track, I had autonomy. I didn’t have grandparents or parents. That autonomy is abundance, but it can feel like such a burden. I feel like I need someone to tell me what to do, but the reality is that people will tell you, but it won’t fit. So, for me, I did run away. I went to Hawaii.
I think that leaving enabled me to just focus on me, but coming back, I had focused on me enough to then focus on the community. That process of self observation is super healthy, and I want to “normalize” that, but I think the other side, and this is something I’ve said to black community several times is, I love my people enough to leave them sometimes.
Inhale Exhale
Inhale Exhale
Editor’s note: This is dedicated to our friends in India, suffering from the effects of Covid.
Inhale Exhale - Jahnavi Pandya
Song Credits
Lyrics by Pallav Pandya
Composed by Jahnavi and Pallav Pandya
Music arranged by Candida Maria Lobo
Sung by Jahnavi Pandya
Backing vocals by Candida Maria Lobo, Varenyam Pandya, Pallav Pandya
Translated by Candice D’souza
Translation excerpt:
Beautiful is the peace that is within,
It is bereft of the illusions of the world (casteism, racism, inequalities)
It is beyond happiness and sadness
Oh can you imagine where would you find such a beautiful experience?
ONLY WITHIN
Inhale.. Exhale..
The inner world of your consciousness is so peaceful and calm
Peace is the nature of the soul
Expectations are the root of all disappointment
Over-analysis destroys peace and happiness
Inhale.. Exhale..
Feel the joy of your breathing
Conscious coordinating of the rhythm of your breathing, is indeed an invaluable luxury
Inhale.. Exhale..
Sam Guarnaccia | Jahnavi, how does music inform your work as a psychologist? Or, how does the realm of psychology inform your music?
Jahnavi Pandya | Music activates certain parts of your brain which are also related to decision-making. Music helps you to be more creative, especially when you improvise. In India we have ragas. A raga is a discipline where you stick to certain notes, okay? But you also improvise with unique combinations of these notes. That kind of an improvisation helps you become more creative – to be within a limit but go beyond it. And I can use the same thing in psychology.
Music can be really powerful in influencing the way you think, in influencing your behavior and your actions – just like media. And in the same way as media, music can also be kind of dangerous if you’re not using it in the correct ways. Say if you’re already in depression, for example, and you’re listening to certain kinds of songs… But generally, music makes me creative and psychology makes me more wise on how to use my music.
Sam Guarnaccia | Your father was a big influence?
Jahnavi Pandya | Yes, I got exposure to a wide variety of music because of my father. Because he is global. He learned Arabic music from an Arab teacher. He went to an American teacher and learned jazz. So that kind of an influence also helped me.
Sam Guarnaccia | You embrace social issues in your music.
Jahnavi Pandya | We came up with a song for suicide prevention awareness, and this was made with team of doctors and psychologists. When I was in the ninth grade my brother was four years old and we sang the song. One version was also sung by my father and a renowned singer in India.
I would also post things on stress management, because I started reading books on psychology at a very young age. So whatever I would learn I would just make a video and put it up on YouTube, and 5, 10 people, 30 people would watch it. And then suddenly one day, I remember because I was in the first year in college, I woke up to see that one of my videos had 100,000 views overnight. And people stared commenting, “Can you tell us how to do this? Can you tell us how to do that?
And I learned that in India, rural kids don’t even know that there’s a subject called psychology. They don’t know that they can study something like this. So I just started putting videos on about my experiences, how I studied, how I got into college. It started as an effort for suicide prevention awareness because more than 250 children commit suicide every day in India. So it started off as that, but then it went beyond.
As soon as I learned something, I started putting it up on YouTube. I did not want them to go through the same struggles that I had to go through. How to apply for studying abroad and those kinds of things. So, such small things, I just started uploading videos and now I make videos on psychology and mental health awareness using music. I explain each concept of mental health – like fear – through a song, guilt through a song. I explain guilt and then I present a song to make it more easy and understandable .
Sam Guarnaccia | And it’s mostly youth of different ages?
Jahnavi Pandya | Largely the following is from 18 to 24.
Paula Guarnaccia | We know from our time with you in India that you have extraordinary compassion for the people of your country and I’m thinking about the night you went out to help the people who couldn’t get into the hospital. There were people who were very ill on the street in Mumbai outside the hospital, and you were using music to elevate their spirits – in the middle of the night basically.
Jahnavi Pandya | Yes, I want to use music as a tool to reach to the masses.
Because if you say something through music it just goes into the head, it just becomes a culture. As a psychologist I can’t just ‘make’ a culture – but I know that music influences the culture and obviously the culture influences music, And in that sense I want to continue making songs to explain difficult concepts in mental health, and take it to the people. I don’t want to be limited to one-on-one practice. I want to reach more people through social media or through other resources. And I know that the best way for me, from what I’ve found, is to do it through music.
Jahnavi on non-verbal communication
Storm
Come…
The storm is always with us now
And visibility is poor,
While the world loses color,
While the gray rain blurs the lines between us,
I would meet with you
For one heartfelt honest moment
To stand together
Here,
Beside the unpaved roads of tomorrow
And listen beyond our human voice
To the Earth
As she quietly turns away,
and know it is time for us
to listen and decide
I would tell you
In these vague
Unraveling days of aftermath,
I have heard the wind speaking in tongues,
A presence
As restless as fire,
As sad and certain as the sea
Trying to make contact,
Straining to invade my sleep,
Straining to pierce the glaze of small talk
And endless cups of coffee,
Pressing up against the tedious rooms of my daily life
Where I am busy and working and busy and tired…
And yet, and even then
It would still reach into my heart
With its troubled language
To summon me towards perception
As if to say…Observe!
Behold the momentums of your history!
Bleak with the ghostlands of cities and forests,
Bleak with the trillion bitter choices
That have left you here
In the scorched air
And rusted meadows
Where thinning creatures come to bathe
Amidst the dying light
Have you wrestled with this too?
And somehow known
It was time for massive change,
Time for us to empty our pockets
Of all the angry coins:
Revenge and war,
Politics and greed
And stand outside the storyline
That holds us hostage,
Free to jettison its toxic prizes
And frantic hardware,
Free to stand simply again
United, still,
To fathom the enormity
Of who we truly are
And what we may have lost
I would go with you then
Out beyond the
Graveyards of the lost cities
To pause with you,
Pause and look up,
Up past skylines and fitful air,
Up where the unfinished night
Twists against the sky,
Where stars, like dice, are hurled
Against the mystery
And miracles are born
And squandered
And know
It is time for all the world
To stand together and feel the universe
Unfolding all around
And hear the streaming fingertips
Of light calling out
From galaxies far away
For us to look!
And be aware
That the great curvature of forces
Stands poised in fragile balance
Awaiting our decision
To listen and decide
In this time of rain
When seasons seem disfigured
The wind is loud and unrelenting,
Come from mountains
Come from mystery
Spreading out
Through star-struck sleepless nights
To prowl against our hearts
To speak to us in dreams
And wake us from this deadly sleep
And know
That the long arc of consequence
Has finally arrived
And chosen us
To be the final word
The last defense
To kneel down beside this wounded miracle
To listen and befriend
For the Earth is turning,
Turning back
Towards the terrifying beauty of creation
Where she was born,
Where all is still
And she will turn away from us forever
Unless we can decide,
HERE!
NOW!
With our backs against the void,
To begin again
With courage and with love
To undo what has been done
So come…
Come as close as you dare
And let us go together
The storm is always with us now
And visibility is poor
This is the time for vision
And there are those
Who do not see.
