00:04:13.960And what that was, was the early version of what is now called the work that reconnects.
00:04:19.580Reconnects. So in 1990, I had an opportunity to go to a workshop with Joanna Macy, who is,
00:04:30.000we consider her the root teacher of the work that reconnects. At that time, she was offering a
00:04:36.460workshop in something called Nuclear Guardianship. And because I came from Los Alamos, I felt a
00:04:43.320karmic connection to dealing with all the nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and the whole nuclear
00:04:51.340issue. So I went to the workshop and fell in love with Joanna and said, I've got to do this.
00:04:57.980I've got to be with her. So I was involved in the nuclear guardianship project for two or three
00:05:05.620years. And then, let's see, I guess it was somewhere in the mid-1990s, I had started
00:05:14.140doing workshops with Joanna. So that's how I got involved. In 1995, more or less, Joanna asked me
00:05:23.800to do a new version of a book she'd published in the 70s, which was called Despair and Personal
00:05:31.520power in the nuclear age. And the publisher, New Society Publishers, wanted an update on it.
00:05:38.840So that was what we started out to do, was just update that book. But it came clear very soon
00:05:46.180that we needed a new book, a whole new book. And the title came Coming Back to Life.
00:05:53.600and reconnecting our lives in our world was the subtitle. While we were working on that book,
00:06:02.340we were trying to find a new name for it because at that time it was called
00:06:06.300Deep Ecology Work, which was not terribly descriptive. And there was this wonderful
00:06:13.440moment when Fran Macy, Joanna's husband, was talking with us and we were saying,
00:06:20.120well, we were trying to think of a new name. And he said, well, what does the work do?
00:06:26.880And Joanna said, it reconnects. So there was the work that reconnects. And that's how that
00:06:35.860name came about. And that's what it's been called ever since.
00:06:41.480It's just incredible how far reaching the work that reconnects has reached and, you know,
00:06:48.240internationally, definitely in the framework that I was brought up in as a young activist,
00:06:55.440met so many of my dearest friends through the work that reconnects. And it's still transforming
00:07:01.800and growing. And maybe you could speak a little bit to where you are now with the work and how
00:07:09.240you're shepherding it. Yeah, certainly, certainly. It's very exciting. We just had the work that
00:07:15.780Reconnects Network just had a couple of weeks ago something called a Gaian Gathering, which
00:07:22.680was a five-day online gathering with all kinds of little mini workshops and keynote speakers.
00:07:33.120And what was exciting about it was how international it was, because there was a time when the
00:07:42.240work that reconnects was mostly in the United States, in Canada, and some European countries.
00:07:49.960But it now has spread to, we have people in China, we have people in Hong Kong, we have people in
00:07:57.480Malaysia, we have people in South Africa, Egypt, several people from India that are now facilitators
00:08:06.840and adapting the work to their own cultures, which is part of the importance of it is that
00:08:13.260it's highly adaptable. There's sort of a central framework, which I can describe, but then it can
00:08:20.580be adapted to many different situations and cultures. It was very, very inspiring.
00:08:28.820Yeah, it is inspiring how much it's grown and how it touches people in really different ways and different cultures and it still has a through line.
00:08:42.780And I think to me, part of that, the connection I felt was on mentorship and guidance.
00:08:50.340And it seems like the value behind rooted generational wisdom is really ignored in this
00:09:12.780I think of the aspect of the work called Deep Time, which is the idea that not only are we interconnected to all living beings that are alive with us right now, but we are also connected to ancestors, human ancestors and more than human ancestors.
00:09:41.420as well as future beings, because everything we do today, it will affect what happens
00:09:50.020tomorrow. And again, not just humans, certainly humans, but also other species and ecosystems and
00:10:00.220rivers and mountains and everything. So we're connected through deep time. And somehow that
00:10:08.620reflects on the relationship of young people and elders in the present time. Because if I'm about
00:10:19.440to become an ancestor, I might have something I want to share before I do that. So mentorship.
00:10:30.780Actually, that's a term that I found myself using for my own work. Being a mentor means
00:10:37.400coaxing out of the person you're working with what needs to be coaxed out.
00:10:47.140Their wisdom that they don't even know they have, their perspectives on the world,
00:10:56.000and their callings. What is it that they are really called to do? Not what they think they
00:11:03.940should do, but what are they really called to do on behalf of life? So it's a coaxing and a
00:11:14.100listening as much as it is pronouncing. And I think elders are particularly good at that,
00:11:22.460or can be because of life experience. Yeah, I've really trusted the mentorship and
00:11:33.500specifically your guidance because what you bring to the table is like a type of realism.
00:11:42.860Everything, of course, has so much meaning, but also there's a lightness to it because
00:11:47.600life is ephemeral. And it's hard to find the words of that combination of taking things
00:11:54.800seriously, but also letting things go because ultimately everything's all going. And so how
00:12:04.840do we get into that rhythm where we honor and value, but we also realize that time is short
00:12:13.460and we can't hold on. Yeah. I mean, I would love to hear you riff on that and maybe even
00:12:19.740tie in the psychosynthesis practice into that way of thinking.
00:12:25.000One of the main things that I learned in psychosynthesis is called disidentification,
00:12:31.480which is a great big mouthful, but it means being able to say, okay, I'm feeling this feeling.
00:12:38.760And it's not to deny the feeling. It's not to repress it or make it go away.
00:12:43.460but just recognize, okay, I have this feeling and I'm more than this feeling. There's more to me
00:12:50.220than this feeling. So I'm not lost in it. And in the process, I can actually look at it and
00:12:56.620examine it and experience it and see what it's here to teach me, but it's not my whole reality.
00:13:05.480So it's really interesting because it's kind of almost paradoxical that the more you,
00:13:11.100I can disidentify from a feeling, the more I can experience it because I'm not so afraid of it,
00:13:20.700especially if it's an unpleasant feeling. It's not just disidentifying from feelings, but also from
00:13:28.400perspectives, thoughts, worldviews. So I have very strong worldviews and I
00:13:37.100treasure them. I feel like they're very useful. But I know that they're not complete. Nothing
00:13:44.100that I think can be the whole story. Never. So I can disidentify from my thoughts as well
00:13:53.700and say, yeah, oh, that's a great insight. That's really a cool way of looking at it.
00:14:00.300But knowing that it's not the whole story, it's not the whole reality. You can never know the
00:14:06.500whole reality. No way. There's a kind of humility involved in that as well.
00:14:12.560Yeah. Humility and relief that we don't know, we'll never know. And then what kind of life
00:14:21.500can we live from that place where we're not in control and we're not dominant and
00:14:28.200the all-knowing human that can figure it out? And if we can figure it out, therefore we can
00:14:34.280save it. And if we can save it, then we can control it. And so on and so forth. It's like
00:14:38.880this self-fulfilling loop that keeps us in, I think, kind of a hell. At least for me, it's been
00:14:45.540torturous. And so to learn how to release, but not release out of apathy, almost release out of
00:14:54.800reverence. Yeah. I just continue to try to practice that. But going back to the psychosynthesis for a
00:15:02.500on the What Matters Conversations podcast, you discussed your interest in understanding
00:15:08.080psychology of peace. And so often we turn to psychology to explain what's wrong with the
00:15:15.340world or to make sense of the troubling aspects of the human condition. But there seems to be
00:15:22.480a flip side to this in the psychology of the good. So I'm wondering how might psychosynthesis
00:15:29.540also point to our powers for peace and justice? Thank you. I like that question.
00:15:38.480Well, in psychosynthesis, there is a notion of something we call the superconscious,
00:15:44.680that the unconscious has kind of three fields that, of course, it's all just one.
00:15:51.820There's no such thing as separation here. But just for the purposes of thinking about it,
00:15:57.120we talk about the lower unconscious, the middle unconscious, and the higher unconscious.
00:16:03.460And the lower unconscious is like our basic biological functioning. We don't have to be
00:16:10.080conscious of every breath we take or every heartbeat, thank goodness. And it's also
00:16:15.240things we've forgotten or things that have even become repressed. So the middle unconscious,
00:16:23.440just like what I had for breakfast this morning, and I'm not thinking about it right now. So it's
00:16:28.280not in my conscious mind, but I can easily retrieve it. Then the higher unconscious is
00:16:34.480what you're talking about, our capacities for love and beauty and compassion and service and
00:16:45.980And creativity, all the really most beautiful aspects of human beings are kind of there in the higher unconscious for us to tap into when we need to.
00:17:00.600And in fact, in this conversation, I feel like there's a little bit of that happening because I don't know what you're going to ask me.
00:17:10.200And when you ask me a question, I have to kind of go, hmm, what about that?
00:17:14.860and it feels like part of what I do is tap into the higher unconscious in that time.
00:17:21.520So that's a psychosynthesis concept I have found very useful. It's like, you know, people say,
00:17:28.120well, it's human nature to be competitive or whatever. And well, it's also human nature to
00:17:36.220be loving. So it's all available to us. And we do have the power of choice to some extent as to
00:17:45.540what we bring forth in our lives. Yeah, that's such a good reminder. It can
00:17:54.760get really messy out there and in our heads. And sometimes it's hard to remember that
00:18:02.020we have agency over the way we react or behave towards others or the earth. And I'm wondering
00:18:12.300if we can also connect this to ecological rootedness and eco-psychology. On your website,
00:18:19.240you describe eco-psychology as, quote, a developing field of psychology that explores
00:18:24.920the relationship between humans and our natural environment from two perspectives.
00:18:28.700one how the natural world shapes and sustains us on all levels physical emotional mental and
00:18:35.160spiritual and two how we can heal the industrial growth societies in a strange relationship to the
00:18:42.960natural world restoring a deep knowing of our interconnectedness with all life end quote so
00:18:50.200yeah if you could riff on eco psychology and maybe how that weaves into psychosynthesis or
00:18:56.540or the work that reconnects, or just your ideology in general?
00:19:02.500Sure. I thought I made the term eco-psychology up. Oh, we ought to have an eco-psychology.
00:19:11.340But apparently it was one of those ideas or words that kind of occurs to a whole lot of people at
00:19:18.160the same time. Because Theodore Roszak, he came up with that term when he wrote that book.
00:19:25.920and the whole idea of eco-psychology came into being.
00:19:30.440And then it was, for a while, there were conferences being held,
00:19:34.840some of which I attended, and it was a very exciting field.
00:19:41.500It was, the quotation you read from my website,
00:19:53.200So it's also eco-psychology is how come we do the, and I say we, I'm talking about members of our human species, you know, do such destructive things.
00:20:19.660What is it about our estranged relationship that has allowed that to happen and to take place?
00:20:29.260I want to also explore psychosynthesis just a bit more because I think it's really fascinating.
00:20:35.960And you also write on your website, quote, psychosynthesis models are oriented toward
00:20:42.520health and potential rather than pathology. They point to the nature of I or personal self,
00:20:49.660the will, the multidimensional unconscious, the personality structure, and our spiritual source,
00:20:55.920self. They explicate the relationship of the various personality functions to one another
00:21:02.020and to I, and the relationship of I to self, of individual to universal, end quote.
00:21:10.280Yeah, so I'd love if you could dissect this a bit and maybe even share about your personal
00:21:16.200intellectual journey with eco-psychology and understanding the role of the self
00:21:21.660within the world more broadly. So my sense of, quote, capital S self has really changed. And
00:21:30.400it's partly through the work that reconnects, because initially it was, everyone has,
00:21:37.360it was called higher self, actually. And the idea was that this was your kind of spiritual self,
00:21:44.440your soul. And then the I, the personal I is more of a psychological thing of I'm happy or I'm sad
00:21:52.320or I'm going to the store being what's that I, you know, that sense of entity that's it. It's a
00:22:00.160little different than ego, but it's kind of connected or related to the ego. So self is this
00:22:07.520more expansive spiritual field, if you will, in which we all live. And one of the ideas about
00:22:17.220self is that it's universal. It's both individual and universal. So yourself and myself, maybe,
00:22:27.480are they the same self? Or are they just in close communication with each other? I'm not sure.
00:22:35.440But in the work that Reconnects, I've become accustomed to this idea of the ecological self.
00:22:44.620And that is that as a self, I'm way, way more than just this body and this personality and this set of life experiences.
00:22:58.280because every breath I take brings in oxygen from the trees around me. And every breath I
00:23:08.900let out sends carbon dioxide to the trees nearby. So I'm constantly exchanging life
00:23:17.800with life around me. Always, every moment, every microsecond. So how can I say I'm separate? I'm
00:23:26.980separate self. And that's the idea of the ecological self, is that we're all part of
00:23:34.660this larger whole of life and constantly exchanging with that larger life.
00:23:43.300Mm-hmm. Hearing you say that, it sounds so rational and simple and like we should just
00:23:50.820know that and live by that knowledge. And yet we've been so bamboozled by the overculture and
00:23:59.720so many of us can't see that or feel that or practice that knowledge, that awareness.
00:24:07.440Just even thinking about how some of us choose to poison the water we drink, it doesn't make sense.
00:24:14.880Why would we do that? We know that we are connected to the earth body. They are
00:24:19.780one of the same and what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. Maybe it goes back to that
00:24:26.420idea that we can dominate, we can control, we can somehow escape the body and get into the mind.
00:24:35.700And maybe that's even where science and data allows us to feel that much more powerful over
00:24:41.400the body that we can kind of outrun it in some way. And yeah, it's really strange and we can't.
00:24:48.440And that cycle of thinking that I'm in right now reminds me of a word that you mentioned
00:24:52.960in preparing for this interview, and the word is polycrisis.
00:24:57.300And I would love if you could give us a bit of perspective on what it is to experience
00:25:02.860polycrisis and to be aware of what's happening in the world in such a way.
00:25:08.980The idea is that all these crises that we know about and some we don't know about
00:25:15.060are all interconnected and all affecting one another. Some of the worst cases of that,
00:25:22.960one of them is in Alberta, where the tar sands extraction is totally destroying this amazing,
00:25:31.540beautiful, rich boreal forest and the native lands and waters of the native people living there.
00:25:40.660Now, that crisis is totally about racism and about a belief that certain groups of people are somehow not as important or not what happens to them doesn't matter because we need this oil to make the profits for the people that really do matter, which are the rich capitalists or whoever they are.
00:26:10.660are. So that's what I mean by polycrisis. They're all interconnected. Racism and oppression and
00:26:19.920income equality and all those things are totally connected to what is happening to the earth,
00:26:27.520the rape of the earth. And it all stems, I think, from a belief that we're separate,
00:26:36.300that my well-being is completely independent of yours or only slightly influenced perhaps
00:26:45.820and that I can look out for my old number one without worrying about what happens to anyone
00:26:54.780else. So the polycrisis are, I think, based in one origin, which is the sense of separation.
00:27:06.580And where that came from in history, there's a lot of theories about that. Lila June Johnson
00:27:13.840talks about that from some of the traumas that happened in Europe, because it does seem to be a
00:27:21.480European phenomenon, that sense of separation, which is, of course, now spread all over the world.
00:28:17.620I feel like we can question that our entire lives. And part of me, when I first started the podcast,
00:28:27.160I was so obsessed with that question. And I researched the advent of farming. I thought,
00:28:35.640okay, that's where it started when people started to farm and the carrying capacity and the cedars
00:28:41.540of Lebanon and the Fertile Crescent and how time and time again, our separation from our
00:28:48.860relationship to the earth led to farming, which led to slavery, which led to dot, dot, dot, dot,
00:28:53.740dot. But I've become almost less interested in trying to understand where it came from because
00:29:00.820I feel like I keep getting debunked in some way. I'll really believe it's one story, but then
00:29:06.820there'll be this outlier story somewhere else on an island far away. And I think, oh, okay,
00:29:13.460interesting. So it was happening there too at some other time. Okay. And I think what it does
00:29:20.520is it just continues to remind me that I don't know, and I'm not going to know, and I'm probably
00:29:27.920not going to figure it out by reading books or by listening to theories. And can I be okay with that?
00:29:35.420can I be okay not knowing where our separation came from? And I think why I was searching so
00:29:43.100madly for that is because maybe I thought if I could figure out where it came from,
00:29:48.100I could solve it. I could understand, well, it came from here and this is what happened.
00:29:52.900And we grew and grew and grew in this separation story. And now we're here and we can use all that
00:29:59.520knowledge so we don't do it again or we can heal from that place. But then I think, well,
00:30:05.660how can we heal without that historical knowing? Is that possible? Is it possible to move
00:30:12.220through it without having all this baseline data? And this kind of also makes me think about
00:30:22.960these two theories that I hear a lot in the work that reconnects, which is business as usual
00:30:28.940and the great unraveling. And there's something that the work that reconnects explains the three
00:30:35.440stories of our time, including the great unraveling saying, quote, the living systems of
00:30:40.620earth have been unraveling regionally for centuries. Under colonial expansion and rule,
00:30:46.120the extraction of resources from the land has always gone hand in hand with exploitation of
00:30:51.760people and their labor. Refineries, mines, and toxic waste disposal are cited in the near
00:30:58.060in and near their communities, end quotes. And then there's another thing I wanted to read
00:31:05.020from the five questions for humanity in The Great Unraveling. You and Richard Lamb write,
00:31:10.640quote, one of the three poisons in our collective sense-making bloodstream is delusion, spawned from
00:31:17.000greed and aversion, disconnecting humanity from true perception. The true value of ourselves
00:31:23.040within our shared environment becomes distorted, end quote. I just deeply appreciate how your work
00:31:29.440recognizes just how crazy making it can feel to live in a world that seemingly insists on business
00:31:37.180as usual when all it takes is a critical look to see how quickly we are unraveling. Maybe a question
00:31:45.220is, how can we build a culture that steers clear of this impulse towards delusion? And if we were
00:31:53.540to do that, how do we build a culture that steers clear of the impulse towards delusion?
00:32:00.000So obviously, there's no formula. There's no quick answer to that. But I do think there's
00:32:06.820some ingredients. And one is, in the one hand, to believe it's possible. And it's almost to choose
00:32:17.860to believe it's possible to have a world that isn't based on the insanity that our current
00:32:26.080economic system is based on, which is profit. I think for starters, we have to get away from
00:32:33.720profit as a central motivation in what we do. And that doesn't mean not being paid for your labor,
00:32:43.860but profit is something in addition to that. That's being paid for having money.
00:32:50.100You get paid because you have money and you invested in something and then there's a profit
00:32:57.600comes back. So you haven't done anything. You haven't labored. You've simply happened to have
00:33:05.820the good fortune of having some money that you can then make more money on. So the question is,
00:33:12.220how do we move beyond the delusion? Love. Love. That's what I get for an answer.
00:33:22.960feeling love experiencing love and loving life and loving trees and loving people and loving
00:33:35.220just loving that's a place to start that's one of the ingredients
00:33:40.900to me that seems like the place to start and to maybe not end but to continue on is love because
00:33:49.740I think when we are truly loving, it is all-encompassing. It is fulfilling to such an
00:33:57.580extent that we don't care about acquiring more and more and more because all of us is being
00:34:10.120cared for in that love. It's funny, it's so clear and yet it's so challenging
00:34:16.960because so many of us, I think, are so far from being able to experience liberated love or love
00:34:25.740that feels free of strings or attachments or troubles. And so there's part of me that just
00:34:33.020wants to be like, yes, love. And then I go, oh gosh, that's going to be a tough one for a lot
00:34:38.940of us, which I think is, again, why we do continue to find ourselves in the great unraveling because
00:34:46.860love and connection, although I think are such a natural part of us, it's almost like we have
00:34:54.900forgotten how to receive and give love and connection and belonging.
00:35:02.980I think humans are very, very malleable. So there isn't any such thing as, quote,
00:35:10.820human nature. We are so affected by how the experiences we have as infants and even in utero
00:35:22.240and as infants and children and as adults. So it's a vicious circle, or it could be a benevolent
00:35:32.120circle. We have to have been loved, I think. I don't know if we can love without having been
00:35:40.220loved, having experienced it, having had that life experience. So it's not like we forget,
00:35:49.380we just kind of like, oh, well, I forgot. It's we've been traumatized. And then there's patterns
00:35:56.220of trauma that are passed from generation to generation. And there's a lot being done in
00:36:01.520that field. There's a lot being done about how to heal from trauma. So there is hope in that respect.
00:36:07.180So we are becoming collectively more aware of these things.
00:36:12.460That's really good to be reminded that it's not just like, oh, we'll just forget about love or somehow we're laissez-faire about it.
00:36:23.700It's important to remember, yeah, we've been traumatized out of our sense of belonging, our connection to each other, to the earth.
00:36:32.180and along with trauma, and I'm sure this is connected to it, but there's so much hate
00:36:37.480that is being fed in the world right now. And maybe it has for a really long time and
00:36:43.960it just feels bigger because there's more of us and there's more media and there's more ways to
00:36:49.020hate each other in person, behind a screen. People are becoming more frightened of each other,
00:36:56.820But maybe not more. I mean, that's another thing that I used to think, oh, this time is so much more intense and so much more apocalyptic than it used to be. But maybe that's not true. Maybe we are just as humans in these cycles of love and apocalypse and hatred and reconnection.
00:37:33.420Yeah, you talked about cycles of love and apocalypse.
00:37:39.700and I'm thinking yeah there's big cycles and there's little cycles like we might have a cycle
00:37:48.080in a day and and we can have a cycle in a in a generation and I've lived 81 years
00:37:57.200and God I have seen so many horrible horrible things and it is so much more visible now
00:38:07.260Now, my hope, and maybe this is my faith almost more than my hope, is that we are reaching a crescendo and the media is part of it because we are knowing about these things right when they're taking place and not days later or weeks later or months later.
00:38:29.480and consequently it could be reaching a point of bifurcation when there will be a
00:38:39.480some kind of a great awakening the great turning we talk about it in work that reconnects
00:38:46.420and it's happened in the past where things have gotten so bad that they just can't continue
00:38:54.280and something happens to change the direction.
00:40:21.740Well, maybe in that there's a question about honoring the pain because with media and seeing things in real time and really being bombarded with the news cycle, the grief can get so big and the pain can get so overwhelming that I think it can, of course, be debilitating.
00:40:49.760It can be desensitizing. And yeah, it seems that even when we are encouraged to look pain in the
00:40:59.840eye, we are then encouraged to move right onto the next thing, to continue with business as usual.
00:41:06.600And the social media algorithms especially encourage this. So I guess maybe to counter
00:41:12.460the push to just move on or accept these realities, how can honoring pain make space for grief?
00:41:19.140and pain that's not legible within capitalist systems of productivity.
00:41:44.500That's something that kind of evolved later.
00:41:47.760So the spiral is the idea that there's this movement in the work and that you open and start.
00:41:55.940Most of the time, there are exceptions, but most of the time you start with gratitude.
00:42:01.360And the reason for starting with gratitude is that it opens your heart.
00:42:06.260And of course, this is done like in workshops, either online or in person.
00:42:11.200So there's practices for coming from gratitude.
00:42:15.160You might have people introduce themselves and say one thing they love about life, for example.
00:42:23.320Or you might have people talk about someone who lifted them up and gave them courage, especially as a child or possibly as an adult.
00:42:35.120So you have people talk about things that they have been grateful for.
00:42:40.600We tend not to use the word grateful because of the thing that many of us may have experienced as children with an adult saying to us, a mother or a father or a teacher, you should be grateful.