Intimacy with the world

A conversation with the former chief editor of Esquire magazine, who abandoned all that outer success to become a ful-time yogi. He is now a renovned meditation teacher and author.

This is some of what we speak about:

• Phillip tells us how in his early life he was both a work aholic as an entrepreneur, but at the same time he never put aside his interest in his inner life, which back then was expressed in his yoga practice.
• his big concern was always what gives meaning to life
• Phillip tells us how he took over Esquire magazine and converted the failing magazine into a success. And how then... in the middle of a meeting, he had a revelation flow through him: he had to follow a different path.
• These revelations that have come to Philip regularly, he calls intuition.
• He says, we must trust our body, feel ourselves embodied, that will lead to intuition
• How challenges are more fun than just managing success
• How it is so easy to become complacent in your life, when you are successful and life is easy
• We talk about how each of us needs to find our path of wellbeing, which means finding authenticity, meaning, continuity and coherence in our life - and how this is a continuous path... you never arrive... because of the radical impermanence
• Phillip talks about the basic conditions of this human realm, and how it is not a mistake, that there is suffering in this realm, but also, that we can work with this suffering...
• we speak about the causes of suffering...
• living a values-based life, based on wise view and vise intention - in each step living your values.
• having a life of integrity and dignity is a satisfaction in itself
• The nature of this realm is difficult
• when you don't accept the basic reality as it is, you are more likely to create more suffering and unskilful actions
• staying positive doesn't mean that you don't deeply accept suffering
• There are two types of suffering, neurotic suffering and necessary suffering.
• When we are in that reactive state we have bad judgment, and can't see clearly, we can't even see the happiness that is possible in life
• The nature of this realm is desire, so we do need to work skillfully with them - it is the grasping and attachment to the outcomes of those desires which can easily become unwholesome
• If you have a desirous mind, it is always going to be in that kind of state, no matter how much it achieves and gets.
• The jungian notion of the second half of life, where we move away from building up the ego, and start seeing more clearly the reality of how things really are
• There is nothing wrong with ambition, but what are the motives behind that ambition?
• Life is always dancing around us, and we can participate in that dance in a skillful and joyful way. We can learn to be a good dance partner... We always have some choice to realign, to adjust our course.
• It is not skillful to collapse or become bitter under all the suffering in the world, then we just add to the suffering.
• So much of living is an art, where information must become knowledge.
• We add to the suffering of the world when we resist reality
• Phillip explains the four noble truths and how they truly are ennobling
• Mindfulness without intention doesn't have direction, and intention without mindfulness forgets itself...

Anne Cushman tells us how she came to meditation when at university, because this world-religions class was the only class that would allow her to sleep in, as it started at 11 o'clock. Then, of course she found that she loved the class, and all its existential issues. And she ended up getting her major in religion, focusing particularly on Buddhism and Hinduism.

However, reading all these books about buddhism and Hinduism, it became clear to her, that this couldn't be just theoretical, that she would have to start practicing meditation and yoga to truly understand the texts.

We are compelled to continue practicing meditation because there is pain and suffering in our lives, and in meditation and yoga, we find a way through that pain and hardship - a learning to be with life as it is.

The overarching theme of Anne's book, The mama sutra, is the path to awakening through motherhood

I ask Anne if having children isn't an impediment to awakening?

Anne tells us how the teachings were mostly passed down through monastics, who didn't

In any case, practice happens where the intention of our wise heart meets the reality of our lives, and that is so whether you are in a monastery or rocking a baby

Motherhood also makes you meet your edges, motherhood can me very hard...

Motherhood is so good at showing us where we are stuck, where we need to grow

Thich nah Han when asked, said that monastic and lay practice is exactly the same, only that lay practice is harder and more challenging

What Anne really wants to do in the mama sutra is depict the reality of motherhood. At how hard it actually is...

When things are harmonious, its great to practice, but always knowing, that things will change...

The fundamental teaching of mindfulness is, that you always start right where you are, so you can never rely only on your past practice, it is always here and now.

Children are unpredictable, immediate and authentic, so they call forth those qualities in us.

I ask Anne about how her years of prior practice supported her through the loss of a child, and then a year later the birth of her second child, who was very demanding as a baby.

Anne tells us how one of the effects of her meditation practice going through all that was the tremendous softening of her heart and being, instead of a hardening, which is also a possibility when life gets really difficult.

We are attached to life as primal as the umbilical cord, thick and coiled and throbbing with blood

We talk about words like the observer in mindfulness, or witnessing, or meeting experience...

How we can train our capacity to hold our experience with more loving kindness

We speak about "who" or "what" this observer or witness in mindfulness is...

How you can connect deeper to your life through writing, and how sometimes new wisdom you didn't know you had, can emerge through your fingers.

Journaling gives us a place to put things, to put aspects of our lives and our character

when we are writing we are always connecting to the larger humanity, to something larger than just ourselves

We talk about the sacred feminine, or about how some experiences that women have can be qualitatively different. An honouring of the relational, the intuitive, the embodied, the connection to the earth...

Anne tells us how online retreats have been such a blessing for many women with children, and how real life reality can then be held in the support of a retreat.

If we are paying attention, one of the things we feel as we become a mother, is this intimate connection to the web of life, this cycle of life that sustains us all. Motherhood as a portal to loving all of life.

Trudy Goodman tells us how she came to meditation because although she had done everything right in life, exactly as was expected of a young woman, she still felt that something wasn't quite right, and she didn't understand why.

A conversation about meditation in different Buddhist traditions, especially the Theravada, where western mindfulness has its roots, and the quite different Tibetan vajrayana tradition.

These are some of the topics we speak about:

• The power of having a lot of silent time in nature with your own heart and mind, how this connects you to yourself and how being with your own pain, opens your heart
• She wrote her undergraduate thesis on meditation and ADHD
• Why meditation has become so mainstream at this point in time, that it might also be because of all the scientific research shoving the benefits. This and all the challenges of our time, climate change, pandemics, anxiety, depression, insomnia.
• We speak about what it means when we take the spirituality out of mindfulness, also with respect to cultural appropriation.
• How Buddhism has always moved around into different cultures at different times, and it is interesting how it is adapting in our secularised cultures
• What are the benefits of having a spiritual dimension to your meditation practice
• The importance of becoming clear about our motivations for practising.
• Buddha taught freedom from suffering - that is a radical promise!
• How often unexpected things happen when you start meditating, and your practice and motivations might change
• How going too deep too fast can be risky and even damaging
• We speak about the differences between early Buddhism, the Theravada tradition and the Tibetan, vajrayana buddhist tradition.
• The wildness of vajrayana buddhism
• How the Theravada buddhism adapts better to a secular society.
• How vajrayana buddhism is quite shamanic, mystical and magical, and actually takes some kind of devotion.
• There is something in the human soul that longs for mysticism and devotion.
• The sacredness of the world is missing today, and that might be at the root of our problems.
• All indigenous traditions have this notion of the divine and the mystical
• We speak about westerners teaching Tibetan, vajrayana buddhism
• We speak about the progression from early buddhism to Mahayana and then vajrayana in Tibet
• Devons thoughts about how we in the west have to be very respectful of the traditional and deeply culturally rooted practises of Tibetan buddhism, and how she is hesitant about our western way of appropriating these old practices, without perhaps always being ready for them.
• I ask Devon if it is not a pulling back from life and society when she goes on these long retreats.
• We speak about the danger of just wanting to escape from the world, when we go on long retreats
• Retreat practice is such fertile ground for growing compassion, wisdom and equanimity, and when you come out of retreat you have so much energy and resourcefulness to engage with the communities, and how one also often develops much more creative responses to our challenges.
• Does Devon think that deep meditative practice influence and contributes positively to the collective consciousness?
• How intimacy with the world also means not turning away from the difficulty, for example climate change.
• How retreat practice grows this feeling of deep belonging to nature, and how this intimacy fosters a different view, where we don't want to plunder natures resources.
• Most things that are worth doing are difficult, and how sitting for long periods of time with your mind is messy and difficult, but its worth while to grow our hearts and minds.

• Home is not a stable concept, we are continually engaged in placemaking. Our perception of stability is just an illusion
• We live in a processual, relational universe that is constantly emerging and open ended in its becoming
• To solve the problems humanity is facing at the moment, we need to move beyond modernity and postmodernity, beyond just critiquing - we need something energetically different
• Our work is not to contain this chaotic flow of reality, where everything radically interacts in ways beyond our understanding. Our work is to account for the ways we show up in the world, so that we might meet and engage with other spaces of power
• How the world works, and where it goes, is not entirely up to us. Agency can not be seen as a matter of anthropocentric, human centred approaches. It is not just left to us to save the day, we need a broader understanding of what constitutes reality.
• When we try to solve climate-change, we are still trying to solve it within a instrumentalist, hierarchical, patriarchal paradigm. As if we can in one phallic move fix the issues. This is extremely human framed.
• Another move, is to notice, that we are climate-change - all of us, the whole world.
• There is nothing that is old, that is not new, and there is nothing that is new that is not old.
• It is not that all was fine and dandy in the past…
• Is it even possible to correlate agency and power with skill?
• It is interesting to behold, that the virus that is now upsetting the human world so greatly, that the sum of those covid-viruses that have inflicted havoc on us, would fit into a tea-spoon.
• The invitation is to stay with the trouble and with the smallness, maybe that is all we need
• It is not about not doing anything, it is about disturbing the assumptions in which we frame actions and solutions.
• It seems that when we apply grand solutions to our problems, they mostly seem to create new problems.
• Maybe we need to slow down, we need to dismantle our known ways, and let new ways come to us.
• There is a lot more happening than we are able to detect. There is the molar and the molecular. The molecular is hardly perceivable, but it is happening, it is small but not insignificant in any way.
• In these difficult times, It is a matter of shape shifting, and that doesn’t mean moving towards a harmonious, utopia. Its about opening ourselves to new problems, new critiques, all the different kinds of shadows as well as new ways of potentially being in the world.
• Even when I come to an understanding, that not all that much is up to me, I will still find myself trying to control life and the world.
• 32:00 We are not individuals, we are all part of a larger flow of becomings… we are more spread out than we think we are - and this can be quite liberating
• There is something emancipating about seeing agency as not human based, but ecological…
• Maybe we humans aren’t as exceptional as we tend to think
• This is about us noticing, that we are indebted with the world around us. An invitation to find new coalitions to act within.
• There are cultures that have the capacity to engage with the remarkable complexities and paradoxes of the world.
• The past is part of the thick now…
• It is possible that there is a field of resonance, that feelings are volatile and atmospheric…
• The pandemic can be seen as an opening, as a portal. What we need, is to get lost - not the salvation!
• The difference between home-making and home-coming
• Even place is a practice - it is not a static container

A conversation with psychologist and meditation teacher nico hase, whose life revolves around long retreats and deep practice. Among other things, we speak about identity, the self, the differences between western psychology and eastern meditation practices, and to what purpose each of them serve.

• How already at 14 - 15 years old there was distressing stuff going on in nico’s family, and how he was impacted by that. He didn’t know how to deal with all that anger and internal distress. Then he came across a book by meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, and that turned everything around…
• Joseph’s book, Insight Meditation, spoke about suffering being an inevitable part of life - AND about the path out of suffering.
• nico tells us about the experiences of his first meditation retreat, both the difficulties, but also a small opening, and with that a realisation that this could actually lead to peace of mind.
• Only 18 years old he did a moth long retreat. At 19 a 5 months retreat, and shortly after that he became a zen-monk and moved into a zen-monastery.
• nico says he feels that meditation saved him, and he tells us about the intense practice at the zen-centre.
• How nico has practiced intensely both in the zen tradition, the insight tradition and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
• Good zen books to read: Shunryu Suzuki: “Zen-mind beginners mind” and “Enlightenment unfolds” by teachers at San Fransisco zen-centre.
• How meeting his future wife, Devon, while still at the zen-centre also introduced him to Tibetan Buddhism.
• How meeting Mingyur Rinpoche, a renowned Tibetan teacher, made him go fully into Tibetan Buddhism.
• How looking back at the suffering he experienced when he was very young, is interesting, because now, he can hardly recognise that person.
• How his meditation training has made him able to work constructively with his mind when he gets thrown or upset.
• nico’s thoughts on comparison between western psychology (he has a phd in psychology) and meditation practice, and how the ultimate goal of the two practices is very different.
• How to bring your mind into a more peaceful state with meditation.
• How to break the grip that your thoughts normally have on you, and how you can then look at your mind, and see your mind clearly, and how from there you can slowly learn to let go.
• How the goal in psycho therapy is to get people who are in distress back to normal, whereas in Buddhist practice, it is assumed that you are already pretty healthy when you start, and your seeking is more existential, and the goal is enlightenment.
• How it came about that nico not so long ago changed his name
• How intense meditation practice does bring about big changes in our inner self, and how ingrained patterns can fall away.
• We talk about how identity is more of a process and less of a fixed, defined, static and reliable entity.
• How not having to defend this fixed personality is liberating.
• We talk about how to be with and support someone who is feeling a lot of distress: to just be with them, and let them know that all these feelings are normal and okay
• How it doesn’t work to give somebody advise who didn’t ask for it.

Marine biologist Helen Scales passion for the ocean, all its creatures and its whole otherworldliness is truly fascinating - it shows us how to keep intact our curiosity, our awe and our respect for all life and all places, also the ones we cannot see.

• Why did she become a marine biologist - a nature-kid with a tiny little stone cottage by the sea in Cornwall
• The sensation of breathing under water - the closest she could get to being a fish, and the first time she saw a fish under water
• The sensation of putting herself into an other world - wanting to se what is in the hidden worlds
• And how when you are really paying attention, you can see the most wondrous really small creatures
• The ocean is a huge mass of life, and all that life is interdependently connected
• How the ocean pulls out half of all the carbon dioxide that the planet pulls down
• How the ocean feeds the earth, and vice versa.
• How we can so easily disrupt these networks. And how changing one thing, has consequences for other things
• how the ocean absorbs both excess heat and CO2, and how that co2 absorption creates ocean acidity
• The coral reefs are both being impacted by the heating of the ocean and the acidity
• 1/4 of all the life in the ocean lives around coral reefs
• We speak about the deep sea coral reefs growing on seamounts
• How the Greenland shark lives for 500 years
• How we need each other to survive
• Where does one life begin and another one begin, when many living beings live in such deep symbiosis
• How life goes absolutely everywhere, and just adapt
• Chemo-synthesis on hydrothermal vents, full of toxic chemicals, and lots of animals are adapted to that environment
• How chemo-synthesis is a wholly different kind of all life than life as we know it, which is dependent on photosynthesis.
• deep sea mining for our green revolution like electric car batteries
• The paradigm of just keep extracting from the earth, without giving back
• Thinking about regeneration
• There is an increasing interest in nature and our connection to nature
• Important to start individually to make changes
• What kind of world do we want to live in?
• Can we make the mental shift and keep exploring the world, but not having to extract what we find.
• We talk about the possibility of life on other planets
• NASA is looking closely at life in the deep oceans
• How life on the planet perhaps started in the deep oceans
• What is life actually, and how energy needs to be generated for life to arise

An inspiring conversation with the authors of the book "Full Ecology" about humans, animals, trees and even conciousness!

• The fullness of ecology is bringing together the wisdom about and in nature with the wisdom about and in humans
• The superpowers in nature which have evolved for millions of years, have also found their place in human beings because we are nature
• Nature is not something out there that we are going to save
• Can we nudge a perceptual shift in our perception of nature and of ourselves and move towards less separation between the two
• Can we move towards the truth of who we are, that we are as much nature as anything else, and can again occupy our right size in the world. Not as rulers and dominators, but as an integral part of nature and in respectful kinship with each other and nature
• We can’t live with out the protection of the billions of natural microbes on our skins and inside our bodies, our melatonin levels are set by millions of years of interacting with the sun, and we can’t live with out all these intricate settings from the natural world.
• How sensing Kinship with the land and bonding with our natural environment benefits us immensely in our wellbeing
• We explore what implications the agricultural revolution 10.000 years ago had on how humans view on nature, how they perhaps lost the notion of embeddednes in nature and the notion of reverence for the environment.
• Maybe our separation from nature started with the agricultural revolution
• This initial separation lead to the Cartesian notions of objectifying everything and divorcing every thing from every other thing
• Is our mind still evolving? Is there a quickening in the evolution of our consciousness happening at this time? Separation
• Diversity is the number one predictor of health and resiliency in nature
• In wolf packs, elephant herds or lion-herds, there will always be a great diversity of “personalities”.
• We have to stop believing that we are better than people of other nationality, culture or colour - that brings resiliency and wellbeing for all.
• How the wolfs were exterminated from Yellowstone national Park, and how the wholeness of that ecosystem was disrupted. And how the health of that ecosystem regenerated when the wolfs were introduced to Yellowstone again.
• How more and more people are questioning whether the small ego is always telling us the truth.
• Can we move towards the mind and the ego being in service of the heart instead of the other way around.
• The heart thrives in kinship and relationship, and life on earth is completely dependant on healthy relationships.
• Why we need to just STOP and not just act all the time. To really be in touch with ourselves and our environments
• To take a moment, and just listen to the peace, and from there start looking at what is actually going on here?
• How improvisation is critical for us to be of true service to whatever is arising moment by moment
• How it is much easier to just stop and be, when you are in nature, and from there we can then bring it into our normal lives, and see what happens.
• What does it look like to bring our beautiful experiences that we have in nature, into our daily day lives.
• From stopping we have the opportunity of getting a good sense of what actions are the most appropriate.
• How regenerative agriculture is surging around the world, and how it supports the diversity of the land.
• Acknowledging how life really works on this planet, is vital to be able to support regeneration.
• Do we really stop by the edge of our skins? Do I end where my skin ends?

How many of us come to the practice of meditation through suffering.

How reading her first book about Buddhism, Celeste just knew that what she read, was true. Reading that it is normal for life to be difficult, but also that there is a way out or through that suffering, awakened a deep aspiration in her to practice mindfulness.

We talk about the practice of long silent retreats, whether they are about removing ourselves from reality, or about actually coming closer to reality.

How on retreat we remove ourselves from our habitual patterns, and can see things more as they really are

How we can learn to rest in our own beingness when we spend time in silent retreat.

In retreat we learn to be with everything, also the unpleasant, with kindness.

The mind and heart transform when we spend time in silence and in retreat. We can then come back to our daily day life and engage in it with more wisdom

How Insight arises in our own direct experience when we meditate.

Classically these insights are described as liberating, and they arise when we practice mindfulness and get very intimate with our direct experience, with reality.

The arising of insight is universal if we learn to practice mindfulness

Classically there are three main insights in mindfulness: the insight of impermanence. The insight of seeing that suffering is part of any human life, and seeing that there is no inherent self.

How there is a great difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it from your own deep experience, knowing it in your bones.

And how seeing the inherent unease of being human, can open your heart in deep compassion towards all living beings

How it is key to know the causes of suffering, and the causes of true lasting happiness.

Mindfulness encourages us to know all experiences, both the vast spacious mind-states as well as the contracted suffering states, and this is where we can become curious about the causes and conditions that cause one or the other.

How humility is so key in our practice

We talk about renunciation!!! Not perhaps the most sexy and popular practice in our culture

What renunciation really means, is a letting go of what binds us to our suffering

Renunciating our craving, as craving and grasping will ultimately lead to unease

Renunciation is about renunciating some of our unskillful habits and patterns

How the reactive mind is a rollercoaster, and learning to just sit with, and be with all our experiences without needing to fix every unsatisfactory experience, leads to a greater peace of mind in all circumstances.

To really know our unskillful habits, and working with that edge with mindfulness and compassion.

How we need to create space for creativity to arise, and that often means that we need some solitude

The importance of solitude also for our relationships

How we so often long for connection and for deep relationships, but are not capable because we are too distracted and scattered.

The quality of our awareness is what gives us that sense of deep intimacy with the world and belonging to life

The difference between aloneness and solitude

How feeling deeply connected gives us this feeling of relatedness to life and ultimately deep belonging and the opposite of alienation.

How coming close to the earth by practicing mindfulness, feels like a homecoming, that visceral feeling of an exchange with life.

How life is always teaching us if we are available for it.

The importance of having an understanding of the body as an equal to the mind in our sense of who we are, and of experiencing our body as a source of deep wisdom and grounding to the earth.

• The body as and integral part of the mind - the body-mind
• The sacred feminine and its emphasis on the body, and on movement like dance
• The importance of the connection with the earth through our bodies and
• grounding ourselves, to feel more safe and less confused
• How to work with the psyche through the body and by working with different chakras depending on what is going on for us
• How everyone with practice and patience can begin to really feel all parts of the body
• Our modern societies promote disconnection from the body
• How sensing the central axis of the body will also centre our mind
• How our deepest aliveness is experienced in the body, and how we have often forgotten about this sensual body-knowledge
• As children we live in that full aliveness of the body, and how we kill that sensibility by telling children to be quiet and to stop moving
• How emotional energies can get stuck in some part of the body and how conscious movement can help us unblock these energies
• About finding what kind of bodily movement most speaks to you, is it running, climbing, yoga, chi-gong, dance, svimming…
• The beauty of good love-making and asking our body: “what do you want?”
• About resting our busy mind in the grounded peace in our bodies
• Our mind not being located in our brain, the mind is located al through the body
• How our brain is also part of the body, and how we can physically relax this often contracted and stressed organ - the brain.
• About release, how we can use the body to release and to open up organically so that there is more space
• And how you need to feel very safe to even be able to let go, and that is where amongst other things, the rooting and grounding can play an important component
• Working with surrender and faith and how is the opposite of our normal need for control
• The importance of daily practice, if you want growth tohappen
• Cristina talks about how she through her sensitivity in the body, received a message from her dying brother
• Surrender lives in the chest, I the union of the lower and the higher chakras
• How true strength has nothing to do with effort, and how flexibility is much stronger than rigidity

I speak with Jonathan Foust, a mindfulness and meditation teacher, with a speciality in body centred inquiry, which we also touch upon in our conversation.

Jonathan was born and raised on a Pennsylvania farm by quakers, and one day as a young child sitting under a tree, he had a strong mystical experience, which really set the course for the rest of his life. For example he lived at the Kripalu Yoga and meditation centre for 24 years.

Today Jonathan lives in Washington DC with his wife Tara Brach. Jonathan leads retreats, he teaches meditation teachers to be. And he basically works with all things to do with mindfulness and meditation.

• The power of questions
• Seeing what is present and asking it how it wants you to be with it
• Pausing and savouring what we have
• The challenge of a busy life and remembering to come back to presence
• Somatic Inquiry
• Listening to our bodily energy as much as to our mind
• We become more wise through our suffering - and through deep love
• The four noble truths and personality types
• The importance of a path
• Your personal path is what you can't not do
• Inner Freedom
• Impermanence and how meditative practice can give you steadyness in the midst of change
• How do we develop more intuition
• Bowing to all our life obstacles - that's where the growth is
• The unhelpful power of craving and grasping
• The dangers and benefits of always seeking self-improvement and optimization in our lives
• How do you use your energy and the 4 cuadrant model
• Holw opening to nature can shift our awareness and consciousness
• finding balance in our life and filling our cup

Wild and soft adventurer Sarah Outen rowed solo across the planets big oceans and cycled across the continents. She tells us what the oceans taught her, and how the ocean is such a good metaphor for life. Those big waves that throw you around and sometimes crush you, but how, if you just let them move through, and trust the process, good weather will come back…

Sarah tells the back story to how she came to row across the Indian ocean, and how the grief over the sudden death of her father was a key factor to her deciding to row solo. And how that first journey lead to a quest to seek out more oceans and continents

In this conversation with David Loy, we speak about the intertwinig and connection between the current ecological crisis and our personal existential feeling of lack of wholeness. A lack created by consumerism, todays dominating religion acording to David Loy.

These are some of the themes of our conversation:

Already early on in her life Geneen had a relationship and appreciation of the natural beauty, and she also often slept outside, and would be transfixed by the starry night sky and the milky way.

Geneen became a systems engineer in Silicon Valley. But seeing the stress at work, just seemed meaningless to her, and she realised that she couldn't stay, and instead went for a bit of a walk about to wild places.

She then lived in a tipi for a year and worked as a river-guide in Jackson Hole, by The Yellowstone National Park, and she felt like she really came alive there. She realised that we can live with so much less. And she loved the experience of getting close to the cold, the other creatures and the night sky.

We speak about how she observed how every animal and being has its place and its purpose in nature, and that everything fits in perfectly in this web of reciprocity, so she wondered what our human role would be in this eco system? what is unique about the human in the eco-system?

Geneen is fascinated by our human capacity to imagine what doesn’t exist. Other forms of life don’t imagine things that have no relation to anything they haven’t experienced. We furthermore have this capacity to create the things we imagine. This imagination is both our gift and our place of unconsciousness, says Geneen.

She also believes that something is happening to our consciousness at this moment in time. There is a way in which the intelligence of this planet is trying to reach us through our generative human imagination, she says, and it seems to be expressing through poetry and other creative arts. F.ex. like Thomas Berry’s book The dream of the earth or James Hillman’s: A psyche the size of earth.

She also speaks about how earth based people have an understanding that everything is cyclical, but that we now understand that there is also a linear development going on. This idea also comes from Brian Swimme, cosmologist, who says that one of the dynamics is chaos and disruption, but there is also another principle of greater and greater coherence.

Geneen also mentions Teilhard de Chardin in speaking about how the greater the complexity, the greater the consciousness or the more encompassing it can become. And she sees the psychedelic renaissance in plant medicines as a sign of changes to the collective consciousness.

Geneen also speaks about how having access to our imagination, being able to imagine the possibility that everything is alive, and has its own longings and awareness, that this opens a gateway in our consciousness, it enlarges it. And she says that the other than human world responds to our appreciation.

She says that our ancestors knew that we have to give gratitude and offerings to the natural world, and we can recover that mind and enact as if our world is holy and sacred, and this is something for each and everyone of us to do - it changes us, and it changes our community

She mentions Howard Thurman, and how he says: do not ask what the world needs, but what brings you alive, because that is what the world wants - your aliveness

You can find Geneen Marie Haugens offerings here: www.animas.org 

Buddhist teacher Catherine McGee tells us about soulmaking and soulfulness in a buddhist context. This is about being able to see and sense in more soulful ways, to be able to see and sense ourselves and others and the world with more beauty and sacredness.

We start of by exploring what comes alive when exploring the word soul. Then we explore soulfulness in relation to ending suffering, which is at the core of the buddhist teachings.

Catherine tells us that the dharma opened her up to a mythic journey with so much sensibility, and the richness of that sensibility of body mind and feelings is very soulful. In essence this also touches upon presence, that when one stops - Presence can emerge, the senses feel more clear - there is more richness.

Soulfulness is not however directly equatable with heartfulness - it would include heartfulness, but there is even more to soulfulness.

When one is not soulful, there is poverty of soul, one can still have heartfuness, but feel a poverty of soul.

The goal of soulfulness and dharma is also to be able to train the heart and the mind to se more beauty and sacredness. To learn how to unbind, to loosen the bind of our sense of self and our patterns, as there is suffering in this binding of self other and the world

Soulmaking then, is to haven seen the binds, and then being able to loosen the binds. Leading us to being able to engage in a sense of perception in a soft and elastic way, in a way that nourishes soulfulness.

soulmaking is premised on already being able to loosen these binds a little bit.

There are different degrees of loosening, and then recognising that I can loosen more, but I might choose not to, to stay in my sense of myself and engage fully with my experience.

What sacredness can offer is a placeholder, for there being more than just what we perceive. More than what we have been told about the earth f.ex.

That more than, can inspire the heart and inspire the desire to light up, and it can open access to more dimensions of sacredness. A skilful relationship to desire, can also open up for more richness.

Our limited materialistic view of the world limits the soul, limits us in seeing more dimensionality and richness, limits the beauty of fantasy and story making.

We can speak about two types of sacredness, the one that is not about you, that is out there, and the other in soulmaking dharma, which is personal to you.

Eros is a kind of desire, but it doesn’t have to be sexual. It is a wanting to come closer to the beloved, what ever it is. The question is: What are we putting our eros in service of?

Eros can gaze upon the beloved without grasping nor rejection, and then the image can open, can flower, and you don’t actually need to possess it. You can never really have a thing anyway. And this desire isn’t just mine, it also belongs to the dive.

We can let eros open the body, the mind, the imagination and the intellect.

Whatever we do, we need our embodiment for sanity!

In soulmaking dharma, we open our imagination, and for it to be legitimate and helpful, we need to have our body, so as not to spin into all directions and just spiralling out. To be grounded in our body, so as not to spin into unskillful mindlessness. We want the imagination to be in service of something skilful.

Kate Rawles is a philosophising activist adventurer with a special love for cycling and sea kayaking for exploring the environment and biodiversity, and she says she is relieved that she can not be fit into any one classifiable box. And that the main reason she left academia, to become more of an environmental activist, was exactly that unwillingness to be put into any one box.

In 2006 she cycled through the whole Rocky Mountains, from Texas to Alaska, to see what climate change meant in the belly of the oil-beast under George W. Bush.

She likes combining adventure and environmental activism to reach more people with her message. And in 2017 she quit her job to ride the whole length of South America, along the spine of the Andes mountains.

She cycled 8300 miles, or 13.340 kilometres on a bamboo bike that she herself had built. His name is woody!

She tells us the story of the local resistance in Colombia against Anglogold Ashanti, who have a terrible human rights record, and how this gold corporation was going to devastate the environment in an agricultural area in Colombia where they wanted to open a gold mine, called La Colossa.

Kate Rawles says, that If we are going to tackle climate change or the loss of biodiversity, we need big systemic changes of how the economy operates, how corporations are allowed to operate, and the whole consumerism paradigm.

We also need to rethinking our relationship to nature, and the separation we perceive between us and the natural world, perceiving us as superior to nature.

Another thing we need to rethink, is who we are in terms of what makes us happy, and what actually gives us self esteem and respect, and what counts as progress. In our current model consumerism plays a big role. We are all indoctrinated to think that stuff and money gives us worth and happiness, but it turns out that this consumerism actually makes us unhappy.

We then speak about the hedonic treadmill, and Kate thinks, that happiness is partly jumping off it - then I can just be who I am. More important are connections to our near community, but also to the more than human community - that separation that we feel is part of our pain.

We also talk about Lifeforce deficit that can come with modern lifestyle.

We will need this spirit of the adventurer to embrace the challenges ahead, in this human dominating era, the anthropocene era. Kate says.

There are lots of uncertainties in what lies ahead, and to achieve sustanability we need the spirit of adventure, which evokes a much more positive mindset.

Adventure has a certain magic about it. Kate says. You have to take that step into the unknown, and then things start happening. There is power in embracing the challenge.

Extinction rebellion and the young people are speaking up, they want a future, and they are starting to claim it - claim the needed system change, and that is hopeful. Things are however never as simple as they seem, f.ex. all our electric cars use lithium in the car batteries, and that then needs to be dug out of the ground.

Next, Kate would like to look at rewilding projects. Rewilding as a conservation strategy, but also as interesting philosophically, as it is about us relinquishing control.

We also talk about the carbon footprint we leave when we fly as compared to sailing.

Kate herself is on a flight ration, she only flies once every 3 years.

We also touch upon Bill Plotkins book Soulcraft, where he writes about meaning lying where our passion meets the hunger or need of the world.

And ofcourse, we speak about true toughness, what it is, and what it isn’t.

Kate Rawles website:

We put emotions into some different, special category of the human soul - like we don’t need those, or those are silly or those are dangerous

The way we have learned to work with emotions, is as if they are something very different from sensations or thoughts - Karla McLaren says they are actually not that different.

She tells us how she grew up in a spiritual new age community where they hated emotions - and how horrible that was

They could only function with happiness and joy, nothing else was allowed. And how self-soothing became what they turned to - sports, herbal remedies, distractions of all sorts in a constant flow, so as not to feel all the unwanted feelings.

We explore a concrete experience of how to work with shame when it arises

There are no bad emotions, all our emotions have something to tell us, and we should listen. Yes its painful, but its okay to feel pain if there is a purpose to it and a meaning in it

Sometimes, however, says Karla, we need to resist, for example when there is injustice. And sometimes we even need to resist being normal.

We explore the messages from anger: what do I value, and what needs to be protected and restored.

We also touch upon the difference between having shame about who you are and to feel shame about a particular thing.

Karlas practice for emotions is called: Empathic mindfulness practice

She herself grew up with a lot of self hatred, and thinking something was wrong with her, and she had to learn how to remove this toxic messaging

And we can not think our way out of these things, because emotions are much more powerful than thoughts.

Your emotions are trying to protect you, Listen to your emotions, is Karlas message

Emotions are always true, but they are not always right, because they don’t always have all the information.

Emotions are the voice of the soul, because they remember everything.

So much in our daily life is very shallow, but the emotions know the depth of things. And our emotions can hold us to a higher standard.

Sometimes however, we need to gently retrain our emotions. But there is always a genius underlying the emotions.

We explore the difference between sadness and grief, and talk about the need for grief rituals

There is a gift in depression, and if you know the gifts, then you change your whole relation to depression.

Depression tells you to not move forward the way you have been. So it pulls the energy away from you, so you can not move forward in the same way. There is always a reason for depression to arise. Depression is like a reality check, and it can be painful to take a really honest look at our life, at what is actually not working.

Karla says we pathologise emotions. It is however okay to sometimes distract yourself into a different feeling, but we cant do it all the time. Intentional distractions are okay.

Become an ally and a friend to your emotions, protect them as they protect you

These ar Karlas four pillars for a whole life: art, practice, ritual, community

People don’t really understand what emotions are, they are a fundamental part of cognition, she says. And they are befriending an important part of your soul.

And In the shadow is where the power and the freedom lyes, we conclude.

www.karlamclaren.com

Joanna Macy begins by telling us about the possibility of experiencing the earth as our larger body, as our mother, as our grandmother as our source of everything, and how this sometimes manifests very intimately and sometimes as being held by the earth itself.

Our conversation soon goes to Georgia in the former Soviet Union, and Joanna tells us about being stuck in an hotel room with a great big samovar emitting eucalyptus steam and a Russian orthodox religious man trying to guide her into being less of a monkey person and to rather become more of a kitten person - this was his metaphor for the great surrender that he think she needed in order to heal.

The topic of surrender brings us to Rilkes poetry and from there to covid, which Joanna also sees as part teacher to us all - teaching us to stop, to slow down and see the natural worlds beauty around us.

Joanna also shares how grateful she feels to be alive at this very time that is so precarious, how meaningful it feels, when every choice you make actually matters so greatly for the future of complex life on earth.

She also tells us that if we are going to save the planet, we need to do it with joy, wonder and gratitude, not by complaining. “We have to be glad to be here if we want to make any change for the better. Only the joy and gratitude can awaken the imagination to do this.” She says.

Joanna also takes great interest in my native Islands, The Faroe Islands, and in my childhood growing up there, and she tells us about her own childhood, both in Manhattan and on her grandfathers farm in upstate New York.

She said that on her grandfathers farm everything came alive, and how she discovered that all life had its own being and mystery.

We also speak about the late Norwegian philospher Arne Næs, who was a great inspiration to Joanna Macy with his deep ecology and his notion of the ecological self

We speak about working with despair and other difficult feelings about the devastation of the planet, and about how easy it is to just Numb out. Which is where The Work that Reconnects comes in. And she speaks about how we need to take this work beyond anthropocentrism by truly opening the heart and mind. And how in this spirit she, together with John Seed invented the Council of all Beings.

Joanna also tells us about her heartbreaking work at San Quentin prison. And we do ofcourse speak about her work with the Tibetan refugees and The Dalai Lama in India, and her time there with the peace core. And she tells us about the Khampagar monastery in Tibet and Tashi Jong monastery in Northern India.

She describes that what she saw in the Tibetan refugees in the sixties, was that they had a much vaster experience of self than she had seen before, and that that was the root to their happiness.

The tibetans taught her mindfulness practice, which she says has sreved her so well ever since. And she does tell us about the notion of no-self, of no separate self, but that we are more of a stream of experience, and how we can watch this process of being taking place. And she takes great joy in the buddhist teaching, that all we have to do, is just to see through the self. That is the greatest gift.

Joannas greatest message is for us to learn to open to everything, to the planet as our own larger body, and she says that life wants to live itself through us, taste itself through us. And she ends by telling us how much joy she takes in being breathed by mother earth, our larger body!

How can we come into wholeness with our body, mind and spirit? This is what we explore on todays episode of Intimacy with the world podcast.

Dr. Mario Martines says that he realised that any good science comes from frustration. He realised that psychology wasn’t going to explain everything, nor neuroscience, nor neuro-immunology nor anthropology - it had to be a convergence of disciplines, like a meta-paradigm to explain the complexity of who we are

We begin by speaking about how we humans always want to classify and put everything into defined boxes or categories, and just cant handle uncertainty. Mario says:

“Uncertainty is my best friend - I navigate uncertainty with chaos as my guide”

His speciality is bringing culture mind and body together, and he says that the brain is cultured and the immune system is cultured

We even speak about what a humanbeing actually is, which brings us to epigenetics, the importance of language, and how it defines our world, and the functioning of our brain and our immune system. We speak about the bio-symbols of culture and the bio-informational field, and how the same thing can mean different things in different cultures - like the menopause f.e.

THis brings us to psycho-immunology: How thoughts and emotions affect the nervous- immune- and endocrine system, and how Shame, f.e. causes inflammation in the body.

We speak about the meaning of words for menopause in different cultures like Japan and South America with the words “konenki” which translates as second spring, or “bochorno” which translates as shame.

We speak about Fibromyalgia and other auto-immune diseases, and how we can reprogram our body and mind

We touch upon how our immune system is actually a bio-ethical system, it loves meaning, purpose and pro-social behaviours like love, kindness, honour and gratitude.

Mario tells us about the difference between hedonic and eudaemonic behaviours.

Hedonism turns out not to be so healthy - it is bad for the immune system. And addiction is extreme hedonism.

Aristotle said that hedonism is not enough for a fulfilled life

Eudemonic implies meaning, purpose and finding pleasure in meaning and purpose

People who are eudemonic have better CTA markers (immune-response) than people who are hedonic.

So pleasure without meaning and purpose is not good for us

A human being needs to feel meaning and purpose to thrive and be healthy.

While exploring archetypes we even get around to speak about Steve Jobs, and how we need to know how to balance several of these archetypes according to different circumstances

You cant just live in one archetype, this is why Maslow said, you cant just live like a hammer, then you will just see nails everywhere

The Self is a conglomerate, it is a hologram that is in constant flow.

We have multiple archetypes to handle multiple situations - so there is no self as the Buddha pointed out. It is a process rather than an entity.

We explore how meaning and purpose have to be imbued with a sense of belonging, a sense of joy and of companionship. And what can we do when we actually don’t feel any meaning or purpose?

Mario suggests starting with these question to get to the roots of meaning and purpose:

Who am I?

What am I doing here?

Who cares?

And how you will build an incredilbe ressiience if you have these 3 questions sorted in a deep way.

We also talk about the universal ways that centenarians think and feel, and waht we can learn from them about longevity and living a joyfull life.