Sources of Connected Strength with Greta Bro

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

SPEAKERS

Beth Tener and Greta Bro

Beth Tener 

I’m talking today about the title Sources of Connected Strength. And I’ll start with just a little recap of the first two episodes because the story builds here. So the first episode was called Answering the Call to Change. In that story, I was in my late 20s and working as a corporate consultant traveling all the time.

I felt this call to make a change in my life. My life was so busy at work that I had to kind of fit in everything else I cared about around the edges. And so I took a leap and I co-founded a sustainability nonprofit working more locally, trying to eat local food and build community.

We moved to episode 2. Well, what happened? Did that all work out? That one was called Disrupting Patterns of Burnout through Community. The story continued. I became an entrepreneur and, with my colleagues, was working really hard to grow this nonprofit and also doing some consulting to pay the bills. And even though I had some great intentions of living more simply, I still fell back into these patterns of overwork and burnout. I had a wake up call while driving over my laptop when I was so frazzled.

So I reached out, and I created a life balance peer support group. I spent more time in nature, but there was still a lot of cycling through these patterns of over work. And I really started realizing I had to look at what was happening within me because I was my own boss at this point.

In today’s episode, I’m going to continue that story. I decided to do is reach out to find a healer – someone beyond me that can help me figure out how could I get out of this cycle of too much overwork, getting totally exhausted, burning out, starting again. This was also my doorway into the spiritual path.

Today I am grateful to welcome Greta Bro, who is actually the healer I got connected to via my friend Nancy Gabriel, who you all know on this podcast. So Greta is a psycho spiritual mentor. I also call her a soul guide. She’s also a singer songwriter and a poet and a social change activist who works blending in the arts to her activism in the world. Just beautiful. So she’s actually a big part of some of the stories in this episode today. So it’s such a pleasure to have you with us Greta. So maybe you might want to introduce yourself and how you are drawn to this topic.

Greta Bro
Basically my work is helping people get more in connection with their essential nature themselves. And you came to me and it was so clear what a beautiful being you are with so many gifts and so on fire with so many ideas. And I felt, oh, so all she needs is a little dose of the deep feminine. That will help her round into stillness into knowing you’re enough into a new level of self worth.

So, and I’ve been teaching women’s spirituality since the Seventies and really looking at how imbalanced our world is without feminine wisdom and feminine ways of being. We can’t just do action. We have to have stillness. We can’t just be always talking. We have to listen. You have to find ways to restore and regenerate.

You just took to it.

Beth Tener
I sure did. Well, I think I’ll start with the story of when I met you. Someone else had recommended an energy healer to me who I had gone to, who was Russian. And it was fascinating. It was like this whole other embodied practice. It was so beyond me. And then Nancy’s said, well, I have a healer.

I’m said, let me try yours. I remember I was so worn out and I decided to book a session with you. I remember that day I came to see you. I had to drive across town and it was full of traffic. And I thought I was going to be late and I’m all stressed. Then I get to your office. I remember you opened the door and you have this big wide smile and this beautiful blue eyes and long hair.

These elegant clothes and you’re just like, come in and have a seat on this big, cushy white chair with a blanket. And then you sat down and gave me your full attention and gently asking different questions about me. And I was just telling you about my busy life. And I felt like you were just like an old friend, you know, right off the bat and your face was just reacting like with empathy and emotion.

You were just so with me and I wrote it down what you said in my journal. I have it here. You said, I can feel how worn out you are. And I felt, “Yes, I am.” Like I was even more tired. Somehow you saying it, let me feel it. Then you said something like, “my dear, you have to remember that your body is the earth, and you are working so hard to protect the earth, yet you’re not caring for your own body. Think about it like a forest has times of growth, and then it’s dormant. And we can’t be in growth all the time. That’s just not how nature works.”

And then you went into talking about the yin and yang of Chinese medicine and how I’m all yang speaking and teaching and in the world, and I’ve never introverted or not doing.You said, “think how still water feels like the yin of floating in water and no pushing or moving.”

I love being in the woods. So I got that, but it was nothing like the normal frenetic pace of my life. So we talked for about half an hour and then you do this energy work where I just lie on cushions and you, I just ended up feeling so much more relaxed.

I remember driving home thinking how your advice was so opposite to my experience in the business and nonprofit world. You rarely took time to rest or reflect. If you finished a big project, you turned around and got the next thing going right away. I know you work with all kinds of people working in different corporate jobs or activism. Is this pretty common that people come in out of balance?

Greta Bro
Oh, absolutely. It’s the U S. When I go to restore, I go to Brazil. Sometimes I go to Vermont, but you know what I’m saying, or by the ocean where I live. The imbalance is we’re very Yang or masculine culture. It’s all about drive and productivity and other cultures are much more balanced. around the world and also have a greater Indigenous piece that is live and integrated, which we could desperately use hearing more from our Native communities around the country.

Working with people is very much helping them come into presence. You know, physicians, as well as corporate people and CEOs. How do I just stop?  I teach them how to stop – to really stop energetically. It’s a form of Qigong that actually I awaken to. I just I think it’s a very natural thing to know how to work with.

Of course, I’ve studied too, to work with the flow of energetics in our body. If we’re always in action, we never settle down and rejoin the earth and ground. So learning how to just stop, be still, listen, and have an awareness that’s taking in the beauty or the whatever’s going on around you.

You know, the expression of Ram Dass – Be here now, or Eckhart Tolle, the power of now. This is like, how do you get here? Then from there, people begin to feel, which is a lot of the reason people are overactive, because they don’t want to feel. There’s a lot of feeling phobia because we don’t have enough feminine, which is an understanding that we just have to be with emotions from time to time.

We have to work through multigenerational trauma, which pretty much everybody’s carrying to some degree or another. For me, it starts with getting people to stop and they’re like, Whoa, what’s that? Yeah, it’s foreign. And also then they realize that all creativity and all new ideas come from that state or get enhanced and come from that state of non doing, of being.

Beth Tener
That’s a good segway, Greta, to the next part of my story. That part about the discomfort, the staying chronically busy because you’re afraid to feel like that. You so named it. I ended up becoming a regular visitor to your office.

And before we go into that, I actually just wanted to also ask you since the theme of the season is about the kinship through life transitions, you can get all kinds of apps to meditate on your phone, right? But what happens between you and the person like in that space? I could walk into your office and you already were holding an ability to be still. And then I could meld into that. I could access it more because you were embodying it and I could see you. That’s a different thing. We don’t always point out, right?

Greta Bro
Yes.

Beth Tener
When one person is in overwhelm, like the feelings are too much for me. If I come to you as a healer, that allows me to hold the emotion because you can hold some of it too. How would you put that in your own words?

Greta Bro
Good question. To me, we’re always operating from feminine and masculine, right? So we said that a moment ago, yin yang. So as a healer, and this is true for psychotherapists and doctors and all different kinds of healers, you receive the person. I mean, this is actually what’s wrong with medical model. There’s not enough receiving going on.

And I would also say I’m an empath. That’s a word taken from Star Trek, which means – I take you in, I take you in and I hold you and you feel me in that state of interbeing, drinking you in and receiving you.

It helps you receive yourself. Then you feel me doing it with no judgment with just like, “Oh, this is hard.”

Now you have modeling to do that for yourself. And, it becomes this really wonderful and contagious –   building a way of receiving yourself and not shaming yourself for being overwhelmed.

Beth Tener
Yes. I feel like when I first started going to you, I was pretty disconnected from my feelings because I was so in my head. I remember that exact reaction, when you would react and say, “Oh my dear, that’s so hard.” I would go, “Oh, I guess it is hard.” I would go back to that sometimes, where I was having a hard time. I would picture you being like, “Oh that’s hard.” Well, Greta said it’s hard!

I could be that way with myself. So I’ll continue the story. In addition to going to you regularly, I started to get into yoga and meditation, as a way to get into out of my head into my body and try to find that pathway through to stillness. Yoga is amazing to help us to calm down.

At the end of my class, we would learn meditation and we go a little longer every class. I started getting motivated to do it myself in the mornings and go for longer and longer. And I worked up to 45 minutes sit at times and I noticed off in the last 10 or 15 minutes things would really settle and it was actually amazing.

I thought, I’m really kind of curious if I went for longer than 45 minutes and I saw some article about a woman who did a nine day silent retreat. I thought, I’m kind of intrigued with that. So I asked my teacher, “I’m thinking I might try it and just jump in or is that like trying to run a marathon and I’m a beginner?”

And God bless him, he just looked at me. He goes, “I think you will take to this like a duck to water.” That was very sweet. And so I did, I jumped in and I went for a seven day silent retreat at the Buddhist Insight Meditation Society out in Western Massachusetts.

In this experience, 100 people are in this beautiful retreat center, and it’s structured with little bells that ring for meditation. You have 45 minutes sitting meditation, a bell rings, then you go outside and or inside and do walking silently, just feeling your feet meditation, then back to a sitting meditation, focusing on your breath, and you have a meal. So the whole place is quiet. You get some meditation instruction and some talks by teachers in the evening.

I’ve never been in this kind of quiet before. And so it was a pretty radical thing to do. The first few days were really hard. I really started to see how frustrated I was, how chronically impatient I was. My foot was falling asleep And I really saw how much my mind was constantly critiquing myself.

Like, you’re doing it wrong. You should be breathing deeper. Why aren’t you breathing? You should be taking a yoga class because your breath is way too short. And my body’s like, I’ve been breathing my whole life before you started paying attention, would you just shut up? This relentless inner critic that was so judgmental and I wasn’t even conscious of it before the retreat.

I saw it as like this ugly little troll inside of me, pointing out my shortcomings. So what was also beautiful in that space is they offered us this loving kindness meta meditation. Each day we would do this practice of repeating phrases: may I be happy, may I be peaceful.

So they were very aware how common that critical voice is. How we cultivate, not only in the moment to moment awareness and feeling the emotions and letting them move through, but trying to create that warm, forgiving, welcoming, like you said, nonjudgmental environment inside. If you have the judgmental environment, it’s just kind of miserable. I welcome your thoughts on that experience.

Greta Bro
That’s gorgeous. To me, what you were experiencing was: what does it mean to accept yourself completely, in all different dimensions of yourself and different stages of evolution and consciousness. And I think this is where Jungian traditions and inner family systems can be really helpful – in  understanding that we are complex and we’re holding all different levels of unprocessed things.

We’re conditioned, like you were saying to go, go, go, go, go. So for me, understanding who we are as a whole being requires just being patient, loving, kind. welcoming. Otherwise, we will never gain self knowledge or be intimate with ourselves if we can’t first get that soft heart in responding to ourselves.

It’s a soft heart. It’s just like, “Oh, well, didn’t do it that time. Okay. Well, that’s all right. Let’s try again.” So it becomes kind of sweet inner dialogue. Well, and you know, your breath was deeper. That was good. It is. You’re just gently cheering yourself on to the next. Even if you’re hard on yourself. For me, it’s not getting rid of the troll.

It’s transforming it because it’s carrying multi-generational conditioning, right? Got to do it well, got to do it quick. As opposed to, no, it’s all learning curve, everything in life. So, but you then have moments of epiphany where you’re like, when I get there, that place of peace, I’m interested in that. So how do I get there?

So it’s holding all those parts and. It’s peace, well being, a sense of trusting life, opening, expanding into the classroom that is in front of you, trusting it. I mean, this is spiritual journey of life, the living experiment of life that we each are. We’re trying to see everything is somehow connected to us.
We are not separate from anything.

Beth Tener
You mentioned the multi generational conditioning. That was an experience on the retreat because I remember I came from a very like self improvement oriented family, particularly my father. So the first day I went out after lunch and I walked a three mile loop. While I was walking, I thought in my mind, I’m going to do that every day.

I remember coming back in the meditation center and being like, I worked out today. And I had an air of superiority. And thought “Ooh, what was that about? I don’t like that at all.” I remember by the end of the week, I thought “Today I’m not going to do my, what my person on Monday wanted me to do. I’m going to take a nap after lunch because I’m tired.” That was so unheard of, and I could hear my family voices going, but it’s beautiful and sunny outside, why aren’t you out walking?

Greta Bro
Yeah, that is challenging that conditioning so that you can be in accord with yourself, your body, and your knowing, your inspiration and insight. If you’re listening to conditioning, you don’t have a true rudder.

Beth Tener
Absolutely.

Greta Bro
You have a self. That’s rudder enough. I tell everybody we can model for each other and stimulate things, but actually you have it all within you. It’s just a matter of excavating and awakening it and finding those different pieces.

Beth Tener
Yes and practices.

Greta Bro
Absolutely. Practices are essential.

Beth Tener
I remember hearing a teacher say that the answers are within. I was scratching my head because most of my conditioning was the answers are outside. They are in books are in libraries, they are in master’s degrees and in the media.

So this is so different, At this time in my life, the Buddhist path was so beautiful they way it said – this is what others who’ve meditated found. Sit on the cushion and see if you find your mind to do these things. And yes, they did.

And, there was a part of that practice that was a little too alone for me. So I felt like meeting you and all of the feminine and the group experiences and the joy of just being outside in nature and there’s a whole lot that you held that I wasn’t fully getting sitting on the cushion by myself.

Greta Bro
That’s the other side of what connection brings – the modeling that comes with others is essential. It’s just so important. So it can be just a small thing. Like I remember when I was in my twenties and I was in Nova Scotia. I’m working at an art music camp up there. We were at a fiddle fest and this woman, her child dumped her ice cream all down her white dress.

The woman went, “whoops. Oh, well, you know, no big deal. Let’s just get another ice cream cone here.” She was so sweet and patient. And I had not seen that kind of parenting in that exact way. You know, it was no big deal. It was like, it’s your dress. You can mess it up and you’re going to make mistakes.

This was just a moment’s experience, but it redirected my life to accepting everything. So the teacher is, is around us all the time and all these interesting and beautiful moments.

Beth Tener
Yeah. I honor that story. It’s so beautiful that one moment could change you. You realized – oh, you could be that kind.

Greta Bro
I resonated with it. I was working with kids at the time at the camp and I didn’t want to be so fussy. My instinct was, is that, no, try that, that’s cool. So it shifted me completely. Also for being with myself,  recognizing that wherever we are, we’re working through something.

I’ve seen so much miraculous transformation in my life with the people I’ve worked with in my groups and in myself, including healing a very life threatening illness. It was happening in my thirties. I believe anything is possible. I believe that a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza is possible right now.

If enough people just can hold that, imagine that possibility, real peace could come. It takes imagination and it takes tasting some other field of awareness, some other field of being where you feel peace. Peace is not sort of an intellectual thing. Peace is an all encompassing state of being masculine and feminine come together in a beautiful way.

You know, it’s insight, which is awareness, which could be more masculine. It’s a state of fullness, quiet, contentment, I’m ready to listen. I want to hear and it’s love.

Beth Tener
That might be a good segue because we are going to cut in some samples of Greta’s music. And I’m thinking of Love’s Song. Would you like to say a little bit about that song?

Greta Bro
I wrote it during a time of conflict between Israel and Gaza or Hamas. It’s Love’s Song. So love apostrophe S song, meaning giving love a feminine quality. I wrote it because creativity is such a beautiful way to deal with traumatic events.

You know, to express them with a poem, with a song, with a drawing, with a dancing, group dancing. It came out of my sorrow.

Beth Tener
We’ll play a sample now.

Greta Bro
The ‘isms’ that now divide, will all be left behind, they’ll fade away.

And in their place you’ll find, full hearts
Love’s hands no longer tied.

She’ll have her day.

Beth Tener
So another story, Greta, that relates to another of your songs that I love is from that retreat. There was a moment where I awakened into poetry because I had never really connected to it.

I think because I was so in my head, but those retreats really moved me into my heart. Poetry is the language of the heart. Someone read the poem Wild Geese, which is a poem by Mary Oliver. I had never heard it and the first part is says “you do not have to be good right. You do not have to be good. You don’t have to walk a thousand miles on your knees.”

And at that moment, I was in sitting there on the cushion, just beating myself up that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to. It went in so deeply. I was just in tears. And then the last line was “you just have to find your place in the family of things.”

Like your moment with the child, I took it as a calling, that it’s not about being good. It’s about remembering how we’re part of the earth and nature and part of something bigger. That is a more relational feminine way of being. I hadn’t even realized how floating and disconnected I felt. I realized I had a longing to feel that.

It has kept me going. And I found much more of that feeling in the years since the story, but I thought that your song, Let Go, has a similar feeling to that poem to me. Do you want to speak about that?

Greta Bro
It’s an interesting song. I had been talking to one of my nieces, Kate, and she was struggling with -am I enough?- and leaving university. She was at University of Pennsylvania, getting her first job.

I wrote that song saying – you don’t have to strive so much. You’re just perfect. – And so many people have told me that became their anthem at one point or another in their life, because, it’s self acceptance is the refrain in the middle: You’re enough, don’t let them fool you. Nothing else can take your place.”

That’s so true. I love it. It holds an energy. And as we unfold something difficult or something beautiful, as we make it through a challenge, we don’t know how it reverberates in the quantum field that connects us all and helps other people break through.

It’s beautiful to do podcasts and videos, and of course, these are important and very far reaching, but so is the individual work that others don’t witness. It ripples out. It helps. It really does. The song was about Let go, just be yourself.

Beth Tener
We’ll play some of it now.

Lyrics from Let Go song
You don’t have to crawl on your knees. You don’t have to beg them to see. You don’t have to try hard to please. Just let go. You don’t have to act like a star. You don’t have to drive a big car. You don’t have to prove who you are. Just let go. Cause you’re enough. Don’t let them fool you. No one else can take your place. There’s a light just shining through you, shining for the human race.

Beth Tener
We’ll put in the show notes how you can get Greta’s whole CD if you want to hear the whole thing. It’s amazing.

I’m going to continue the story at the meditation retreat. So after about four days, I entered a totally different state of mind and it was this place beyond words.

It was incredible. The retreat center had these big gardens full of flowers. It was in August and these hummingbirds and bees would buzz in and out of these bee balm flowers and daisies. I went to the garden in the morning and looked at the dew on the lawn. I would be in tears because it was so beautiful.

There were no words or worrying thought. It was completely present. I was waiting to talk to a teacher and I sat there watching an ant climb up the stairs for, I don’t know, like 20 minutes, totally enthralled and not bored. And I wasn’t on drugs. It was this rapture feeling.

I was feeling so much and so easily move to tears. I recognize that this whole world of words- they can actually come between us in the direct experience. The thinking and the mental commentary, they take up so much inner space. I remember thinking at the time, okay, I put all this energy in my life into trying to be happy and all the complexities and the juggling of the stress that come with “the pursuit of happiness” right? That’s what our country, the U.S. is all about.

Now here I am on this week silent retreat with a routine as simple as you can get, just sit and watch your breath or walk. And I’m the most happy I’ve ever been. What a revelation! How could that be possible? Any thoughts you have on that?

Greta Bro
I’m so glad you’re sharing this peak experience. I’ve been blessed to have many of them over my whole life. First one started around five. These peak experiences opened doorways of perception. I had a very powerful experience at a meditation when I was 16 where Edgar Cayce Foundation, it was their youth week.

All of a sudden we’re meditating and I went into this deep state and my body. It was almost like I was in the Wizard of Oz, I was in a cyclone. My body was spinning, spinning, and then it stopped. Just complete stillness and a door opened out and in simultaneously.

Then I was a funnel of light in the up into the universe and down into the earth. And I thought, holy shit, you know, I’m 16. I’m like, what’s this? And everyone else was leaving. I wasn’t even any more present in the room. I was in samhadi, which is the Hindu term for it. So my feeling is that helped me understand that I was here as a conduit.

There are these moments of grace where doors open into us and just expand our nature. Another beautiful story would be driving home after working with clients at an office in Cambridge and I’m driving through Davis Square and it is rush hour. I’ve been opening during the day, working with people, doing energy work, sound healing. And then all of a sudden I opened completely and everyone was perfect. It didn’t matter if they were smoking a cigarette, if they were a construction worker, a professor, it didn’t matter. There was no judgment. They were all excellent. It’s just like you in the end, like a universe opened up, I started crying because it was so beautiful.

I call it the soul lens, but this lens is available to us. So this doing the retreat that you talked about, you have to step out of that go, go, go, go, go, especially in the U S and you have to get places where you can open into these other states of being and taste a different reality that actually holds all of us. All the parts of us, intellect, heart, body,  instinctual wisdom, all the aspects of being. This holds all of humanity, all of the earth. I mean, this is a very profound, this is the big field. So what you were tapping was something very beautiful and you were in presence.You were just there.

Beth Tener
Yes. It was remarkable. The simplicity of it. When you give yourself permission to stop and have support that it’s right there and that it’s available to any of us. It’s pretty remarkable.

Greta Bro
It is. It’s everyone’s right as a soul.

Beth Tener
It means putting down the phone, putting down the book. Seriously, I remember when I started meditating, I had the idea – I think I want to go read about this. And I realized, no, don’t read about it. Do it.

Greta Bro
There you go. Go into being.

Beth Tener
It’s not a path anyone ever encouraged me to go down.

When I got through that retreat, I from there up to Vermont, where my mother and grandmother were.  My grandmother was in her nineties. I had a few days there before I had to go back to work, which was a real gift. I remember just walking these long country roads and going over it in my mind of thinking how, what you said earlier about this go, go, go is partly because we’re afraid to feel.

I had long enough and I had some practices and tools to realize, Oh, I can feel that sadness or I can stay with it and feel that, Oh, that’s fear underneath that irritability or that impatience – stay with it. Stay with it. What’s underneath? and then you feel that and then it moves through and you are okay. And you keep going.

I realized – I have been running from this inner place. When I got to the place I was at the end of the week, my reaction was –  I should have been running towards it.

Greta Bro
No should. You got there at exactly the right moment.

Beth Tener
Well, I discovered that. At that point, the core of my work was about how do we get underneath this massive materialistic consumerism of our culture? That’s just buying so much stuff, gobbling up ever bigger homes, putting in more highways. I could feel that underneath that is this chronic dissatisfaction. We seek outside through the stuff or the busyness, the next book, or media or whatever. When we can come to peace, by working with the emotions and having the support as we need, from practices like this or healers… we can find calmness as opposed to needing the world to constantly feed our dissatisfaction.

Greta Bro
Right. Or stimulate us. We’re peeling an onion or it’s the lotus. You’re unfolding your state of being, your state of consciousness. You have practices and tools so that you are not running away. You’re not feeling phobic, but it’s also doing the things you love. You know, cultivating a wholeness, so you’re not caught up in survival fear.

Oof course we have to be practical.You have to have a home, we have to eat. But a lot of rampant consumerism comes out of spiritual impoverishment. We need to reconnect to this essential self, this essential identity. From that reconnection, we connect to everything in the universe.

All beings, we go into these profound states when you’re looking through the soul lens. Everything’s so gorgeous. You don’t need to buy anything. In my neighborhood, we all go down and put our chairs out at sunset. Go watch the sunset. That’s the high.It’s less is more. You’re present, you’re receiving the vibration of all the living color, you’re receiving the connection with somebody, the love that’s exchanged between you, your animals, the animals around you, you’re hearing the birdsong.

I think the answer is honoring who you are, truly who you are. Are you a teacher? Are you a changemaker? Are you a poet? Are you a scientist? Are you a chemist? Yeah, solve problems. You know, we need that. And also, we all have to be peacemakers. We all have to learn basic tools of how to be with someone who’s different than us and how we don’t have to be, I call it narcissistic culture.

We need to flip the pyramid into a circle. We cannot be having any more rating of better, best, – us versus them. They’re the pedigree. You’re the base. No, everything is valuable, equally valuable. We just have to get into that circle consciousness, which is everybody. And, know the we’re all evolving all the time.

We’re all surprising each other. If we’re in that circle consciousness and validated, everyone is welcome. No one’s outside the circle.

Beth Tener
Beautifully said. Thank you, Greta.

I have one more short story. Finishing up that time in Vermont, I was just present in a different way with my mother and her mother. I remember watching and my grandmother was sitting on the porch and my mom was saying, Okay, so we just finished breakfast, but let me think ahead to dinner. What do you want for dinner? And what should we do today?

I was watching. That’s my planning mind too. My grandmother was just enjoying the view, present.  I could see it, which I hadn’t appreciated before. She’s an artist and I’m asked her, what do you see? She’s explaining how she would paint the clouds and watching the clouds go by.

She was totally content in a way that I would not have realized. I was like, I just spent a week trying to get to the point that my Nana already is. I was usually like my mom, planning how are we going to fill the day?

I recalled a time where my mother had bought my grandmother a new push button phone because she still had the rotary phone. Remember the old ones with the dial that went around? My grandmother was still playing some rent fee for that old phone . So my mom bought her a big push button phone. My grandmother said “Oh, I don’t think I need this.”

My mom said “well with this one, you don’t have to wait when you dial an eight or nine for the dial to go all the way around. You just press the button. My grandmother said ” Eleanor, I have the time.”

Greta Bro
Oh, that’s cute. So great.

Beth Tener
Thank you, Greta. I have so enjoyed our time together and this discussion of what’s possible, particularly in these times that we’re in with so much of the spiraling negative, horrible patterns towards war and what thwarts life and kills life.

There’s a pattern of spiral towards life.  And that’s the work you do as a healer. That’s the space, both of us as people working on change in the world are about  – the inner. There’s a whole journey inside that we can each at any moment turn towards. I feel like our conversation today brought that forward.

Greta Bro
I feel like we’re healing multi generational trauma and we, all of us are, and we have to be patient with each other.

Beth Tener
I know you mentioned you might have a poem to share.

Greta Bro
It’s called Gaia’s Breath. And I wrote this while sitting on a family lake in northern Wisconsin. But I could write it about so many beautiful spots on this earth. In the quiet by this northern lake, Gaia sings to me and I am restored. Here where earth predominates, even city folks settle in and find their sacred sound.

Gaia rejects no one, no concept or vision. She collaborates with infinite generosity. She is a tolerant and generous mother who lays her vast resources at our feet. She patiently accepts our ubiquitous destruction due to modern minds fretfully torn from the wisdom whispered in our bodies. She awaits our return, calling us home with sunsets that explode crimson and purple over Evening skies and lavish waterfalls that spill gloriously through mountain fissures.

Finally, one day, a tiny frog slumbering in a petal of a favorite rose stops you, struck speechless by the tender sight. Gaia welcomes us home without interrogation or need for penance. She just slips her verdant matter around our weary souls and silently reweaves meaning into our careless dreams and aspirations.

She resuscitates our stunned hearts with forest sweet breath until our frantic minds grow quiet and all resistance melts away. She eagerly awaits our return as we glide quietly into the guileless bliss that is the embodied life.

Beth Tener
Is there any other offerings you have that you might like to share with this audience?

Greta Bro
Yeah, I would just mention some of the work at the border, VocesArtsAndHealing. org. Just working with a team of wonderful, expressive artists, psychologists, and trying to help mitigate some of the trauma, especially in children, using arts.

I have a big concert and doing work there after being away for a couple of years because of COVID in January. I have a YouTube channel with my, where I read my poetry from time to time. It’s called Greta’s Poetry Slam.

So I’m finishing a poetry book right now, and I’ve been writing a book about my idea of healing into the soul is called Passionate Wholeness and the subtitle is Reflections of a Mystic Activist on Embodying the Soul and Healing Our World. So hopefully this is the year or next 2024.

Beth Tener

Well, certainly I, I know a lot of people probably really valued hearing your mystic activism and your wisdom. So thanks again for helping me explore all these themes of connected strength today.

Greta Bro
Thank you so much for all you do Beth and offer and give, thank you for this podcast.