Learning with Friends: Reflections on Episodes 6-8 Season 3 with Bruce Nayowith

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Episode 9 Season 3:  Learning with Friends: Reflections on Episodes 6-8 with Bruce Nayowith

Beth Tener 

Welcome back to the Living Love podcast. We are coming to the end of season three, and the theme of this season has been “belonging and what it means to feel at home here”. This episode is called Learning with Friends. Every three or four episodes, I invite along a friend and we reflect on what we learned over the last several episodes.

I’m really grateful today to have my friend Bruce Nayowith with me, who is part of the opening episode and the other Learning with Friends with Nancy Gabriel a little earlier in this season. Bruce, welcome.

Bruce Nayowith

Thank you. Good to be here again.

Beth Tener 

Bruce has done a lot of work and thinking about how you build spaces for human connection, that are healing spaces, that are spaces of deep connection. He has a background as an ER doctor. Bruce, you’ve explored a lot on your own about these topics. Would you like to share any background about what draws your interest in this?

Bruce Nayowith
I’m really interested in what helps bring things to life and what supports life. And sometimes those are very personal practices. Sometimes they’re relational practices, and some of are about how groups to design groups to actually support us. Maybe that’s the short version.

Beth Tener 

I’ve been thinking lately about what creates collective vitality. In the first part of this season, we talked with people who are creating intentional “pockets” where people are trying different ways of working together and interacting, where people feel at home.

We interviewed facilitators and people who do conflict transformation and small group work, and Emily Daniels working in classrooms and schools. I’ll recap where we went in the next three episodes of this season, taking this theme of “belonging and what it means to feel at home here” into different other contexts.

Episode 6 was called “Communities Where Everyone Has a Home”.  We had Janne Flisrand and Andrea Pickett. Janne is someone who’s done a lot of work in the city of Minneapolis looking at the city-wide scale of how do we create cities where everyone has housing. Right now, that lack of affordable housing and homelessness are a real issue in many cities and communities around the country. Janne shared with us a case study of what they did in the city of Minneapolis to get broad citizen engagement with her group Neighbors for More Neighbors. We’ll talk more about it, but a really wonderful story about how they were able to change the policies in that community to allow more housing to be built. And we also had Andrea Pickett, who’s someone who is from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she has lived experience going through the housing insecurity experience and is now working with the Housing Authority in Portsmouth. She is a great translator, making sure the people who’ve lived it are informing the policies around how housing is developed.

Then in Episode Seven, we were talking about a conference called SeaCHANGE. It’s creating a space where everyone can feel at home, particularly artists and creators. That was a conference all about the arts, healing and social change. I had with me two different artists, Diannely Antigua, who is a poet, and she was involved in that conference the last couple years. And then Najee Brown, who is one of the creators of it, who’s a playwright and an artistic producer and a photographer. They were both reflecting on what kind of space works to create opportunities for artists to develop their skills and to feel at home and feel a sense of belonging. So some wonderful conversations there.

In Episode Eight, we got into the discussion of, “how do we feel at home with nature”? My guest was Four Arrows, who also is named Donald Trent Jacobs. We were looking at the kinship worldview. So he’s someone who’s spent decades of his life working and living with, learning and writing about indigenous communities. He focuses on the commonalities of how they interact with the earth and each other, in particular, how there is more focus on community connection. They don’t view nature as utilitarian (to be used by humans,) but as actually a live, living presence to be interacted with and have a sense of belonging with. So that too was just a great conversation, thinking about how we are at home with the earth.

These were several different angles on this question of feeling at home. And maybe we’ll start by reflecting on that first episode. Bruce, what did you appreciate in the story that Janne shared about Minneapolis, in terms of how they, as a community, went about tackling the challenge of getting more affordable housing for people?

Bruce Nayowith
Yeah, I’ll start with Andrea, just because it was really nice to be reminded of what it’s like to have someone in the system who experiences the situation and has lived experience with the problem from the inside, not just from the outside. The Catch-22 and the rules about “we want to see initiative before you have support, and then we’ll give you support,” but developmentally, you know, children need a mother before they need a father, in a way, right? And so actually, support comes before initiative, but that’s not the policy. So I just wanted to kind of appreciate that piece. Also Janne’s awareness, of “not everybody even has this level of basic support”, like with the children.

It reminds me of something that I heard at I think a workshop that Rosa [Zubizarreta], who was a guest earlier, was facilitating, which is, you can’t feel your privilege. You can only feel when you lack privilege. So people with privilege need people without it to point it out. You heard Janne say, “Oh, I didn’t even realize, wow, these kids are moving around because they don’t even have a house”. I can pause there. There’s a lot more. Structurally, there’s a lot of integrity in what was done. But I just wanted to start there.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, and I might build on that.

When we think about what it means to feel at home and feel a sense of belonging, which is such a fundamental human need, we could design for that. Part of that is that you have voice, and you have agency over decisions that affect you, and that when you have voice, people actually listen and take into account what you need. I think one of the challenges with so many of our bigger systems, the way we make decisions, like at a city council level, or even in a school system, is that the people who are closest to the work… like the teachers with Emily Daniels, or the renters who aren’t even able to get into your community because everything’s priced out… they never have voice. That’s what Janne was pointing out, the renters or people of color don’t have voice.

She talked about how the city went and reached out to the Somali business community, saying, “What do you need”? They made a point to go to the street festivals where you could interview and get input from of a lot of people who aren’t the ones who would come down to the city hall council meeting and have the confidence or the time or the resources to come to a long evening meeting. They might not have childcare or transportation or they’re working second jobs.

Andrea also talked about how it can be intimidating to attending a meeting with people who’ve actually tried to close you out of that place. There was a lot to learn in that episode about how they gathered the input and listened so that people felt like their voice was heard, and it actually changed policy, right?

Bruce Nayowith
They talked about the vocal minority who go and complain at public meetings. It creates almost skewed information. And so instead, they changed the information gathering system. That was what was fascinating. I was thinking about what sequence of events or steps were required.

So there was the 2040, plan, right? Which was a city plan. And then you had the bloggers and the Mapping Prejudice. I think they were helping to make the invisible visible. We’re going to show you privilege. Look, this is privilege, how it was written into the laws back then, and seeing how discriminatory it was, right? And the Neighbors for More Neighbors and people coming out. I mean, this is really from the top down. It also is in the SeaCHANGE Conference, right? From the top down, there was integrity and clear intention, like investing and planning, having good people, getting all the voices.

It’s a lovely quote: failure to plan is planning to fail. And this was not a failure to plan. This was money invested in the right planning. Like she said, not let’s talk about zoning when you’re not an expert. No, no, that’s not the question. Asking visioning questions.

Beth Tener 

And to recap on the Mapping Prejudice – this was another group in the community that did a big citizen engagement effort where people could volunteer and participate. They had all the real estate records of all the houses in the city as digitized records on line. You could go back into the historical documents and find all these covenants where it said these people cannot buy this house. It was really making it real. We know we’ve inherited all this bias from the past. Here you could tell that that has started to change people’s consciousness and people’s sense of, “oh, yeah, we have to set this right”.

We are in a time where we need to be the generation that starts to change these patterns and set it on a different course. Many things contributed to the ability of the community to start to have a different conversation and make different policy choices.

Bruce Nayowith
I mean, there was the 2040 plan that was trying to get all the voices. There were the bloggers. There’s this Mapping Prejudice and the role of artists, right? This is creative activism. It wasn’t just using one modality, using one half of the brain. There’s a lot of breadth and a lot of integrity and that’s really what impressed me. It’s like, oh, wow, that’s what it looks like when it’s done right, when it’s done well.

Beth Tener 

One more thing in the story of what they were able to do in Minneapolis: They were able to get such public input and agreement to the broad principles in the city-wide plan that they helped shift the debate beyond project-by-project fights. Certainly, in my community, every week I’m seeing, a great looking project for a lot of units of housing being shot down because the neighbors don’t like this or the local city board didn’t want to give a variance on that zoning bit. And at the same time, you’re seeing headlines of the next house selling for 15 million and 17 million. So, there’s a need for us to start to really think about what level are we going to have our debates, and how can we start to get agreement on the broad principles and not fight everyone project by project?

Let’s move on to the next one, which was talking about spaces where creators feel at home, and you were mentioning the arts. They used arts in the city of Minneapolis example. Three organizations collaborated to put on the SeaCHANGE conference, and it’s a three day event. Najee Brown, who is with Theater for the People and me with Kinship, and Robert Sapiro and some others at Green Acre Baha’i Learning Center.

So we were just talking about, how do you create pockets – these places where people can show up and really experience feeling at home and feeling like they can make friends and get connected to people. We really outreached so that there were a lot more people of color at this event, and this is in New Hampshire and Maine, which is a fairly white community. What stories in that episode did you appreciate in terms of how we created this environment of warmth and a sense of home at the conference?

Bruce Nayowith
There was a lot that was moving in there. If it’s okay, I’ll go backwards a little bit here, which is just the personal stories were really fascinating because they really contrasted two environments of creativity. Somebody said the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, that’s Tony Cade Bambara.

Bruce Nayowith

Najee talked about the Black church in this. I had no idea. I didn’t realize any of what he said. He grew up in this really rich environment of sharing, mentoring, expertise, freedom, learning and community and then when he went up to New Hampshire, it’s like, this is different.

Beth Tener 

He said he’d never been lonely before he moved up there, right?

Bruce Nayowith

So he had this incredibly fertile soil. And then Diannely talked about her experience initially was a very constricted space of freedom, and this creative writing and journaling came through it. It’s almost like this beautiful plant that grows up through a little crack in the sidewalk, and just the contrast between the two different artist pathways. I was thinking of, in a way, art as salvation. Salvation from constricted lifestyle and from a tight religion. Very powerful. Art is a lifesaver, actually. The two of them shared from their places.

Beth Tener 

In Najee’s story of the Black church, there’s art and creativity as expression, joyous expression, and that you could feel the sense of music and spirit in the community and mentorship in beautiful ways. And then in Diannely’s story, in a place where her expression was so controlled, the poetry, for her, was the lifeline. That was where she could express and get clear within herself and find her way out of that pathway.

Bruce Nayowith

Yes, and the arts kind of likewise opening into this different esthetic, a different way of relating to the world, and the other way, right? It’s another way to feel at home, like more of one’s being has a place.

Beth Tener 

Knowing both in my community, They’re both talents, like creative talents, but also two young people, (younger than me,) that have a lot of creative confidence, I would say. It’s just been beautiful to become friends with them and see their paths. Najee is working at the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge now. He does such a great job producing other artists, and when they come to his center, he treats them with such dignity and opens the door for them to have the artwork show of their painting and do the photo shoot, so they get really good photos of their work and get the word out. I think you can see in him this way, that he creates a feeling of home and welcome and encouragement around other creators. It’s just a beautiful way to walk through the world.

Bruce Nayowith

So going into almost like the elements of what happened. I mean, it’s interesting. You had two highly talented, potent people who then came into a highly potent design, right? So, it’s not just personal.

There’s a quote I remember now. Somebody said, “in a dysfunctional system, the only people who seem to have made it are the ones we call heroes. In a functional system, everybody’s buoyed up.” So I mean, here you had two really talented people, and then this design with all of these elements, like the land, the Green Acre founder that you mentioned, her dedication, the spiritual community and their mission, they’re not doing this for profit or for commercial gain or even for any glory, except for, I guess, the greater glory of life.

And so great place, great design, right? You help with the design, coming up with the questions and ways, and the open space and the focus and the community building, the sequence of the questions. So, people were being held, and there was a space for emergence, and you had a very supportive, intentional container. And then you, pardon my choice of words, you allow psychoactive material, such as Diannely sharing. There you have somebody who offers something like that, and in that space…

Beth Tener 

What can happen in spaces with creators is that we take the most talented and they get the stage, and the rest of us are the audience, and we’re like, “wow, look at their talent”. And we’re all quiet, and then we go home, right?

I have a friend, Catherine Stewart, who is a playwright. In her view when you put on a play and everybody watches it and is moved, but then they walk out the door and no one actually talks together about it, she says that’s a big waste.

I think what I think is so exciting about the SeaCHANGE Conference design, model and other ones like it, is we do put some wonderful people on a panel, but the panels actually sit as part of the big circle. They’re not high above us on a stage. They are fire starters, and they start the conversation, but everybody’s in the conversation on the same question. There’s a way it equalizes things: everyone in this room might have answers or part of the answer. And so it becomes a big group conversation.

In the first year, one of the panelists, who was a younger people of color, said, “I feel regal in this environment, the way I’m seen and treated”… it’s rare for them. He said, “it’s really dope, this quality of nobility, (seeing the nobility of all people is a principle of the Baha’is.) He called it “dope-ability.” The spirit of that environment is that you’re seen to be worthy of having space, and invited into the conversation. I just love the spirit of that and how people rise to it. They really feel the difference.

Bruce Nayowith

There’s that milieu of dignity and worth and real connection. It’s not transactional, like they said, not competitive. I like fire starters. I guess that’s probably a little nicer than saying psychoactive material. Your panelists… they put something into the space, and then they step back. They don’t stay in the front. So, what they have to offer, yeah, it starts something, and then it’s allowed to continue to develop in the group, right?

Beth Tener 

Yes. We invite all the stories in the room to interact with the question and each other, and then we go back to the panel again. It is trusting emergence, this idea of something new: new knowledge, new connections, new collective understandings can emerge because we’re not just saying current knowledge into the room. We’re actually inviting forward something around the questions that we were exploring together.

 

One of the other things I loved in that episode was the part where we were talking about how friendships could form, as Diannely shared.  The Surgeon General, in the US has said that we’re in an epidemic of loneliness, or that the levels of social isolation and also racial segregation, class segregation, by not interacting, because communities are physically laid out to divide us.

I think about how we are good at analyzing those problems. But how do we run things the other way? How do we create the fertile ground for friendships and authentic social connection and trust to grow?

SeaCHANGE is an example of creating that kind of space by design. Diannely said this quote in the conversation: she just found friendships there that were life changing. And she’s said, I wouldn’t have been able to facilitate those connections on my own, or know where to find these people, but because we created this conference, and the invitations, and the spirit of it, people were drawn to it. She can make connections because the environment is ripe for genuine connection, and not that kind of phony, manufactured connection. I don’t like calling them icebreakers. I like calling them fire starters.

Bruce Nayowith

I think Najee used the term creative marriages, where people actually find kindred spirits, for at least some aspect of what they’re doing, friendship or collaboration.

One of the things that happens when people do really good work is that a lot of the design is invisible. I’m glad you mentioned a lot of the design, so it’s not so invisible. So the actual place, and the spirit of the place, and the spirit of the founders, this whole thing of bringing in good people, the spirit of dignity, the other piece was this bringing in the diversity of people who would probably like each other, but normally couldn’t have found each other… that’s another huge thing that was also done by whoever did the outreach. You know those of you who did and I’m sure you’re one of them. You know how and whom to bring in and people inviting people, that networking space. Otherwise it wouldn’t have existed. It’s like, without that, a lot of this wouldn’t have happened either. So wanting to point to some of the qualities, and when they all come together, it’s so smooth that it’s just like, “oh, this is cool”. It’s a very intentional design.

Beth Tener 

Yeah. That’s one of the things I love doing. And I think there’s methods you can learn that make that easier. I was just having coffee with someone today talking about this kind of thing. When we design conferences, we can invite people as they register to say topics they’re interested in, and then we find the hubs of those and make a topic table at lunch, like anyone interested in this topic, go sit at that table. It doesn’t take much, but then you’ve allowed them to find their people, and then you trust that the connections will go where they go, right?

But if you don’t pay attention to that, you may have all these amazing people in the room, but you don’t know how to find your people. You or I could have 10 things in common or that we should talk about, but unless we have a lot of hours to sit together, how do we actually surface those things.

Bruce Nayowith

It’s so simple. Like you said, it could be a topic table. You even could just have sheets of paper up on the side in the room of people wanting to offer something, people who have a request of people, or, you know, whatever. It’s just like, pausing and making space for this, rather than presentations only.

Beth Tener 

… and just packing a lot of content into everyone’s brains. I have 52 slides. I know I only have 20 minutes, but I want to get through all these right? You’re like, “Oh, God!”

Bruce Nayowith

Yeah, exactly. Those can be useful. If the person did the 50 slides and then there was another hour of processing in groups for what they heard. You’re putting in active material, fire starting material, something with energy, and then you want to let it grow in the mind, body system of people, but you got to make spaces for that individually, and then the people to find each other. Like you said, I think this is one of the principles.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, I think so. There’s a great poem. I’ll put this in the show notes. So it’s a called “Fire” by Judy Brown, and she writes about how when you’re building a fire, you put the logs on, but you also want to leave space between the logs, because the air and the movement and all the combustion that comes… you don’t want to pack on too many logs. You need space. And so that is a beautiful principle because the space and the structure, but enough space for actually things to ignite and burn and generate some warmth, right? And if you pack it too much, you won’t get fire.

Let’s move on to the third episode, which was about being at home with nature. I had this wonderful chance to travel with Four Arrows, who’s quite a remarkable human being. He’s someone who has looked at the commonality across a lot of indigenous cultures and comparing that to Western culture. Einstein once said, “we’re not going to solve the problem at the level of consciousness or thinking that it was created in” or Audre Lorde, who said, “You’re not going to take down the master’s house using the master’s tools.

This idea that we need to get beyond the standard tools and assumptions of the culture we’re in if we want to discover all these solutions and possibilities to the problems that ail us. And so to me, I think a lot of what is in the book that Four Arrows has just written with his colleague, Darcia Narvaez, really starts to map all these other ways that we can be looking at that are based in the kinship world view, which is held by many different indigenous cultures. It means recognizing, “oh, we are just part of a much bigger universe, and we can have a real deep sense of place and connection to nature around us, and have different ways of kind of coming together as communities”. Bruce, what moved you in that episode?

Bruce Nayowith

That one was lovely. I happen to like charts and graphics. So when he had that beautiful thing of the two paradigms to contrast them, I just thought it’s nice to see it all together, not just one thing but 28. And some of the things he talked about, like, which life forms have intrinsic value? Which do we focus on? And this kind of relationship with, I’m going to say, sentience, addressing, you know, grandfather, son, grandmother, Moon, you know, addressing the animals and more than that, as if they actually have a quality of sentience, which, when you address them that way they do.

The other thing I really liked, he said it flat out, people say right brain, left brain. He just said trance based learning. It’s like, “yes, thank you”. You know, it’s a different frequency where something else is available, as an addition to our linear, beautifully logical, cognitive consciousness. There’s a great quote in the book, Interconnected by Daniel Siegel, he says, “we have three parallel distributing processing centers”. I think that’s the term for what the brain does. He said, “one in the head, one in the heart and one in the gut, and once we get old enough to develop language, the one in the head says, I am the brain. So it identifies itself as the brain, and then we start to believe it”.

Beth Tener 

The trance based learning… I want to unpack that a little bit. We were talking about using meditation, ritual, where we’re inviting us individually or as a group, to move into a different consciousness. It was reminding me of that other quote that you and I have used before about how to tackle a problem. What was that one, Bruce?

Bruce Nayowith

You have three ways to solve a problem. You can wear it out. You can get to the heart of the matter, or you can bring a higher energy to a lower energy. This was from Dharma Jim, my friend, named Bruce Gibbs, who was a Dharma teacher.

Beth Tener 

And that last one is so interesting. It relates to a lot of what we’ve talked about this season with belonging. When you think of Emily and her classrooms, where she’s helping the teachers create an environment where everybody’s nervous system is calm and regulated, where their thinking-learning brain can come online, instead of being dysregulated, burned out, checked out or totally distracted. So there’s something in that doorway.

Do you tackle a problem just with problem solving, or, with the kind of approach that Four Arrows was talking about? Do you go on a vision quest with your challenge, and take time in silence, out in nature, and invite a different quality of connectedness to inform what you’re going to do? He also talked about experiencing a vibrational frequency when you feel part of a healthy, happy community that’s connected with the land, and that that often is missing in a lot of places? We’re pretty disconnected.

Bruce Nayowith

It soothes something and it helps align something – we’re oriented to it. It’s like the particle-wave duality and physics. We can lean toward one or toward the other, but sometimes we kind of forget we have a wave nature. If you actually experience it in your mind and body through different processes, or just by being around other people who live that way, then we pick it up by our social engagement circuitry.

I liked a lot of what he said. I was really touched when he talked about “crying for a vision”. A kind of a prayer, and that something’s going to come in, and it’s probably going to come in through some alternate frequency, this call and response with the universe, where there’s this ongoing conversation, dialogue with other people and other life forms. I really enjoyed that. It was just very nourishing to hear him talk about that.

Beth Tener 

Yes, how are we in love with all of life in this very narrow, human, centered world that has evolved?

I remember Bill McKibben, who’s an environmental writer. He wrote a book a while back about television, and this was probably before the internet. He wrote about how TV warps our sense of things, because mostly what is on TV was only stuff that could be filmed. So that warps our whole sense of history. TVs, phones, computers, literally, are a box that frames our view, and we’re narrowing our attention and our sense of who we are into this very narrow spot of narrow focus. And it’s also self-referential, so we can be oblivious to the earth and to all of nature and all of that life that we could be interacting with, let alone the invisible worlds and the sacred. If you’re constantly directing your attention in certain ways, it’s such a narrowing, right?

Bruce Nayowith

It’s like a little bit of a hall of mirrors that maybe we create alone, or we create with others who feel the same way. What other information and energy can come in to expand the frame? So if I’m working hard, and my question is, “oh, gosh, how can I make a living and do this” and everybody around me is reflecting and concentrating that. Actually, is what I’m doing healthy for me? Is this healthy for the planet?

I remember when I went to Mexico for the first time in 1984, it really affected me. I was around people they were making, $1 and $2 a day probably for their income. And they were at least as happy and connected. Something in me just was totally floored. Number one, I couldn’t comprehend it, but I also could feel that there was something there in this community, in southern Mexico, like there was a vibration, there was a something. How does this information come in? It can come in by being in communities. It can come in through visions, in some alternative way, dreams or some strong vision, but it’s something to break the self-referential narrow loop of this is what’s real, and nothing else exists, or nothing else matters.

Beth Tener 

That’s a beautiful story, that illustrates what he was referring to. One of the things he said is that community health requires a sacred relationship to Mother Earth. And he was talking about how indigenous spirituality is best defined as giving sacred significance to the other. Wasn’t that beautiful?

Bruce Nayowith

And not just human, right? To the others.

In 2014 when I was with the Great March for Climate Action for a month and walking across the country, we talked climate a lot. One of the things that really struck me and some of us was that we needed to have a felt experience of the earth and nature as alive, or we can call it this sacred relationship, right? Living presence. If we felt it as living, then we can relate to it in a way that’s not instrumental. It’s like that sacred dignity. So it goes with what you and he were saying.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, which brings us back towards SeaCHANGE, with that sense of being seen through the eyes, of giving sacred significance to the other, seeing the dignity in each person, not their role or their race or their identity or their age. But I love that, the connectedness of that and then if there’s whole communities who are living from that ethic and from that actual lived interaction of relationship. We also talk about in the brain, there’s instrumental brain and relational brain, as the sides of the brain. So if we’re just an instrumental brain where it’s like, “this is my real estate transaction, and this is my property, and I can dump any chemicals I want on the land, so my grass is green”, we’re not actually seeing that as the home of the squirrel and the home of the earthworm. It is just a very disconnected place where nothing’s actually alive. When it is alive, we just can’t feel it.

Bruce Nayowith

Yes, as you’re talking, I’m realizing, if you’re in a culture that just lives that way, like some of the indigenous cultures, it just happens naturally. And for me, in this culture, it’s like, “oh, this is another thing to look at in terms of design. Like, what eyes are we looking at each other with”, right? Like in SeaCHANGE, there were these eyes of respect and welcome and kind of the sacred significance of the person and not “Wow, how big of a poet are you and how great of an artist”, right? And likewise, how much of the time am I in some kind of appreciative, “sacred” kind of mode, and how much of the time I’m in the instrumental? And they both matter. But at least knowing when I’m in each one feels useful. It’s like, “oh, I’m being really instrumental here. I’m working with people in nature. Maybe I need to do something a little different”.

Beth Tener 

I think the Western culture is tremendously skilled at instrumental project management. Once you know what you want to do, we can execute and do it. I’m still early on in my journey of understanding the depth of wisdom and practices in indigenous cultures, but what I have come to understand is it also relates to the role of women or the feminine or the grandmothers. We hear these stories of, “oh, in that culture, it’s the circle of the grandmothers”. There may be the instrumental leader who gets things done, but, what we decide to do is always developed in circle or in community, or the choices are run by the grandmothers before you run forth and do things.

What I find so upsetting in our culture right now, is someone like an Elon Musk or some 20 year old who’s in Silicon Valley with no sense of connectedness, relationship, or concern for consequences, can invent things and just get them out there and make their millions, but there are no checks and balances. There’s no tuning into “is this going to help the whole or is this going to harm children”? We ignore this because we’re so focused on the individual and the instrumental…on getting our things accomplished, making an impact, making a profit.

Bruce Nayowith

I do want to say something a little bit cute here… which is that I realize one of the things I’ve been doing during our talk here is using my instrumental brain to try to identify design qualities that support the sacred. That feels like it’s the right use of the instrumental brain, like it’s in service to life unfolding, not in service of depersonalizing things. I’m very interested in: what are some of the elements that are important that to be aware of?

I’ll bring in one more actually. I think Four Arrows mentioned this when he talked about bringing our focus into the future generations. It’s another form of kind of expanding our consciousness to include past and future and not just present or short-term gain, or what’s going to help me this quarter or what’s going to help me over the next year. When we open that way as well, it creates something.

I won’t mention the person’s name because I don’t have permission, but somebody who does a lot of work with collective intelligence… it started when he had an experience during a focusing session, his first one ever.

Beth Tener 

And you want to explain focusing. What is focusing?

Bruce Nayowith

Focusing is a process of basically getting a felt sense of something in the body that has meaning but doesn’t quite have words. It’s not even clear yet. It’s like life is coming into the body, but it hasn’t expressed itself in a clear way. And so it’s a kind of light trance, though they might not want to say that. You’re still able to articulate, but you’re sensing.

So he was sensing into something. He felt this blobby feeling, and as he spent time with it, and this is not usually what happens in focusing, it actually took off with a life of its own. And said, “I am the next seven generations, and I’m going to show you what’s going to happen to the world if nothing changes”. It was almost like the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. And he actually had this experience. It was profound that he really dedicated himself toward trying to create a more just and equitable future. The fascinating story of actually feeling the future enter into his consciousness in a very felt way, and really be there as like an ongoing thing, not just, oh yeah, I remember the future every once in a while.

Beth Tener 

And I think that speaks to like an example of the “crying for a vision”, or these moments where, when we’re stuck in this certain cycle, we have to step towards these broader qualities of what we can experience as human beings in relationship, right?

Bruce Nayowith

Yes, these larger themes or energies. In this case, it felt like the vision was crying for him.

Beth Tener 

Coming back to the Four Arrows book, he has these pairs of qualities – from Western dominant culture, and what’s the indigenous version. I was on a trip with him in May to Ireland. He had cut each pair into a little strip of paper, and then he just would hand them out. We had quite a few hours on this van together, and he would give it to a couple of us and be like, “Here, talk about this, talk about this one”, and every one of them led you to such a rich conversation.

What I loved about the theme this season is that when we focus on “what creates belonging and a sense of being at home” and see all the different directions that the various guests are taking, these explorations feel expansive to me. By giving people the structure and the sense of belonging, we also open up more possibilities for being human together and finding our way. That’s what I heard across a lot of the episodes.

Bruce Nayowith

Your entire podcast this season is just one fire starter after another. It’s like “this is what it looks like here. This is what it looks like here.”

People were like, “oh, a lot of us knew the principles, but what the specifics look like”? I don’t have to do what Emily Daniels did, but knowing what she did there, or knowing what Janne did there, and Najee and they did in SeaCHANGE. Like, oh my gosh, it does something. It’s really helpful.

Your podcast is like a virtual networking space in a way, where people can hear these things and get sparked and do something with them. So, very rich that this is bringing a higher energy to a lower energy. That’s right, nicely done.

Beth Tener 

Hopefully I have not worn people out.

Bruce Nayowith

I don’t think so. The stories are so diverse and the examples are so diverse, and they’re so alive that it just feels like getting a boost of vitamins each time.

Beth Tener 

It’s really true.

Well, I think that’s probably a good point to end on Bruce. I want to thank you for being my friend along on the journey this season around these topics.

Bruce Nayowith

I’ve appreciated the vitamins. So yeah, very cool.

Beth Tener 

Very fortifying and nourishing, yes. And I want to thank the listeners as well for being here. And we will have in the show notes any of the links of things that we mentioned today, as well as a transcript. So I hope you’ll check those out and stay tuned for season four. We’ll be back to share what that’s about when that clarifies.