Jon Young (Stage 3 - Nurturing the Soil)

[Music] hello coming down to earth an online coffee transformation semi to explore pathways towards regenerative cultures in a divided world my name is Luna de Silva I'm here with my colleague Ben Roberts who is also hosting the summit and we have today the privilege of having John yang with us welcome John thank you it's nice to be here it's really nice that you accepted to be with us each time John is an amazing an amazing person I've been following a bit of his work of your work and and now that I get to know you're got even more enthusiastic about your work you've been working as a nature connection mentor naturalist you do something that I'm actually definitely going to be exploring which is wildlife tracking you've been working as a peacemaker and you're an author workshop leader a consultant you've been searched by many people to do public speaking and and you have also gift of storytelling and you've been working on this nature based community building for over 30 years and something really interesting you've been researching into the impact and significance of nature on human intelligence and development you've trained many people you've been trained also by famous people in the tracking fields including not so famous but amazing elders from indigenous backgrounds indigenous leaders from different parts of the world people from Kalahari deserts it's really really awesome ways to figure out how to be deeply in touch with the with the land and you've been authoring several seminal works on nature connection including I'm going just to name a few of them how birds reveal the secrets of the natural world and the Coyotes guide to connecting to nature you receive the prize in 2016 as champion of environmental education award for your innovative work and you've co-founded eight shields institutes and holding media and you've been establishing an international network of consultants and trainers working to cultivate effective nature connection and mentoring programs in communities and organizations many many wonderful things to talk about and perhaps you know better than to read from paper what do you what is your life about is actually to really start by inviting you John - yeah share a bit readers of how you how you enter this journey and that kind of brings this different aspects of but I think with the strong emphasis on our deep connection with nature so can you tell us a bit like what in your journey led you to be where you are at today well I I really I think you thank you I was wondering why I was feeling tired when you read that list of things that I've done I was like oh my goodness no I need a rest my turn II really honestly begins with the wonderful influence of my grandmother's mainly they raised me close to nature you know we had this extended family kind of household that my mom and dad worked so the grandmas took care of my my sister and I and cousins back and forth you know so they really built this foundation in connection with nature with us children because in those days it wasn't there wasn't much to do indoors you know so we spent a lot of time outdoors but they happen to be good at cultivating something and I would call that cultivation the heart of my work you know we go out and play as children and when we come back in its what the culture does for us that either makes or breaks that connection makes it real or doesn't ground it you know there's all this research that speaks of interpersonal neurobiology dan Siegel and so on but we all have longings as children we go and explore and play and we want to come back and tell our story to somebody and we're hoping that what we did was relevant maybe we brought berries and grandma makes a pie right so my grandmother one was from Poland and one was was from Ireland so they they both grew up you know as farmer families and close to the land so they were they had a lot of innovative techniques this grandma's you know they were full of wonderful tricks to keep the kids engaged and that built a foundation under me and I noticed that the other children in my neighborhood in a suburban area of New Jersey outside of New York City there's woods and fields and ponds and creeks around the neighborhood you know and the different children had different relationships or levels of relationship with that and of course I didn't know that at the time you know I'm looking back on that as a researcher and saying you know what was important about my childhood that led me to where I am now and when I began to really do deep research into anthropology to understand why some people get really connected to nature and why some people don't I began to realize the role that especially the grandmothers and the culture had to play when children were young that built a foundation but that I also worked with a lot of adults and realized if grandma didn't do that for them when they were children there's still a checklist in the back of their consciousness that's waiting to be filled in right so it's never too late to restore your your root connection you know and our nervous system is longing for it quite literally it's like a form of starvation in modern times and a lot of people but he goes back very quickly because there's such a thirst in the in our beings for this root level of connection that it will fill in quickly if it's if it's facilitated in a helpful way when I was 10 years old I was totally hungry for nature connection I didn't know it you know I just I just you know I'm looking at it now and saying that if you asked me at 10 I wouldn't have been able to tell you that but that's clearly what was going on for me all the other older children were going off into sports and I was feeling like wait we're not finished with this nature thing yet like come on there's got to be one more thing I can feel it there's something else is supposed to happen here and that's when I met my mentor Tom Brown jr. in 1971 and he was quite literally looking for someone to pass on the mentoring legacy that he had received from his elder well who is an Apache elder that he calls grandfather and he was literally told by grandfather you got to find someone to pass this down to so you'll know imbibe the sign that he carries you know so when when he met me I happened to be standing on a street corner with a snapping turtle on a string and he saw that his mother earth on a stream and he asked me what I had caught and I told him it was a common Eastern snapping turtle and then he's like aha so he's got the cognitive thing going but where is the hard connection no does he understand the symbolism of the turtle as representation of the mother earth so he kind of tested my passion really he started asking me a bunch of questions and came back to my house and went through my nature music stadium with me and then I asked my dad if I could go to his nature museum and and I was my mind was blown the moment I walked into this guy's nature museum I was like holy this is my neighbor oh my god I'm gonna spend all my time like a tick I like to say like a tick stuck in his hide and I'm gonna just learn everything I can from him which was wonderful because he actually was looking for someone who had that passion so he you could say he initiated me then in the wildlife tracking and and the ancestral arts his survival and the basket-making in the you know cordage and fire and shelter and edible wild planets I mean it basically raised me with a lot of indigenous knowledge of my place though I was the only child in the neighborhood who was being raised that way but he had such a comfortable way of doing it it didn't seem like I kind of figured there must be a guy like this in every household that's doing that for every child you know so when I got to college I had all this knowledge of bird language and tracking that my professors didn't have and I thought that was strange because I held them up in high regard for their deep knowledge and understanding of nature and I'd learned a lot from those two elders but they didn't believe me that I could you know or communicate with bird language in the way that I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to know like I had no idea that everyone didn't know this it was so obvious you know so that was formative for me and once my professors caught on to the fact that I really was doing that bird language and tracking they actually asked me to teach during field ecology classes they would turn it over me for 20 minute segments here and there with with the other students and I was really confused why doesn't anybody know this it seems like everybody should know this I don't even know how I know it like I I had was not aware because tom was such a clever mentor he just fast listened to my stories and asked me really cool questions which may go out and look deeper you know and that was that happens everyday you don't notice right so I started to think about this disparity between those who had the facilitation of a healthy culture drawing nature connection through the individual and those who didn't and I thought isn't there a way we could research and pull up these cultural elements that actually can make or break nature connection in a community and then somehow universalize them and incorporate them into modern programs practices organizations families and that's what I've been doing for 40 years now to great effect you know the stuff works you know I didn't come up with it I'm just researching and pulling it together I like to think of myself as someone who carries a basket around the world and visits with different traditional cultures and kind of looks at what they're doing with their children what are they doing with their teenagers what are they doing with their young adults how is that preparing them to move and gathering those tools and putting them in a basket bringing them back to the laboratory and studying them and finding out how is this accessible and really a reflection of the human nervous system and not a specific reflection of a cultural language or a particular oral tradition or a particular belief pattern but it can adapt you know and then I go to different communities I say here's my basket these are really cool toys do you want to play and people pull what they like out of the basket and then they apply it and they find it it works and they come back and they want me to bring my basket back again you know soon some communities I'm dumping the whole basket on the floor and we're picking through these tools you know one one for instance would be you know it occurred to me that these cultures that I really don't have this consistency that everybody in the whole village was raised to be super connected to the natural world and not surprisingly those are the people who come from very challenging ecosystems like the Kalahari as you mentioned the Bushmen if you don't raise your children to be ultra aware and completely connected to lions and poisonous snakes and things like that survive exactly and then it's also a marginal landscape where you have to be able to see the subtlest tiny little brown stick that you barely would even notice and know that you know 2 feet deep underneath the sand is this root that comes out that this big that you can scrape and squeeze water into your mouth during the times of year when there's you know dryness which is often in the Kalahari so they had to raise them with extreme awareness in connection so I was super fascinated by the fact that that the way their culture functions they make sugar everybody's connected you know everyone that no one is left out and they're so egalitarian and they're so loving and open accepting I'm like wow there's lessons in this that apply to any and every family enemy in every community because I noticed that other indigenous groups they would identify children who seemed to have a specific acumen for nature connection and they would raise them almost like priestly class you know and then they'd have all this pressure on them to regenerate those over here everybody yeah exactly and I thought it was interesting that the San Bushmen were know everybody gets to be raised that way and then that to me became a reflection because what they're one of the oldest cultures on the planet and they are related to the ancestor of all human beings you know so we all you know we've all left Africa left the Kalahari went all over the world but these are our most ancient ancestors reflecting back to us our most ancient nervous system so that's that's been my research you know and and there's so many benefits that that come from that everybody needs it in the same way that we all need water and then we all need good food we all need good nature connection it's if we are literally like physically designed for that and when we get it it's very nurturing and very grounding it helps us to become more resilient happy empathetic loving you know all the things that I think are really important you know effort for times now one of the threads that that I think somehow connects with that lineage of keeping keeping the connection with nature with your ecosystem alive is something you touched about because obviously Tom had a strong impact in your life have the possibility to have him as a as a mentor particularly in the way he he came about in your life and I was think I was hearing and seeking them and I didn't have that chance and I think there's a lot of so there's a lot of people these days that don't have that chance and I think that's particularly critical for men and and that was even thinking about another thing it just came to me while I was hearing you is that actually these days in the last couple of generations particularly mine in the new generations that are coming somewhere between 18 years old and and third 40 or more you don't have children to take care of so you're not responsible for for children or have children around many of us nephews and stuff and you don't have elders around so you have this kind of stage of a lot of apparently freedom to do whatever you want but not having those connections with the generation that is just coming and the generation that is you know on on on on a whale already kind of living but have as a mission in that space also a lot of roles to do and that I find that really interesting and maybe it's a segue to what what is it in your research what are the elements that you've identified for this cultural health let's say in perhaps we could also explore them what it means for personal on a personal level but I'm curious to see like what have you discovered in being in touch with these different cultures and making research on what can make a community can support a community in being grounded in their place and health healthy to deal with the challenges of life hmm we are embarking on a project called the 512 project which identifies you know if you look at you were you were talking about the intergenerational thing right if you kind of average out stages of life to eight stages you know roughly ten years each sort of thing right there's different elements for different stages right it gets even more refined obviously you do something different with infants than you do with toddlers that you do with the preschooler that you do with a young child an older child right so it's a little bit more refined at the youngest stages right but once we kind of get into adulthood you know the stage is widen but there are still markers as you were saying you know that intergenerational you know the elders before me and the young people below me that I'm that I'm helping you know because one day I'll be that elder right if I'm lucky you know so there's there's this you know we call it succession right when we're thinking about organizations succession planning you know I'm gonna move out of this role into this next role and I have to make sure I replace myself in that role you know life in the village is a succession journey right our nervous system is set up for it there's certain markers and expectations so we kind of average them out into eight bands you know representing getting older and older okay but there's ages and stages of life when we look at in modern times without the initiation that I think you're referring to you know you know that what Tom Brown did for me was he initiated me into a kind of depth of connection with my place but also deaths of connection with myself you know and that initiation is really critical but in modern times a lot of people don't get to experience that so they could be stuck in kind of a you know even a pre adolescent or adolescent stage of life but their body keeps getting older so you know in the ideal cultural scene you're as you age you also stage and they're sort of moving together right but in modern times what happens is we stage and we kind of self initiate and it kind of goes a little wonky but we keep aging you know so we we may stay in a developmental place in some parts of our psyches you know kind of stuck and that's the part that I was referring to earlier that there's parts of us that are waiting there's checklist waiting in our nervous system that are saying please check these boxes because I'm waiting so we basically looked at these eight stages and then when we looked at kind of eight areas of interest you know like within traditional villages there's you know the hunter there's the medicine woman or the medicine man that's working with the plant medicine there's the basket makers there's the shelter builders there's the tool makers you know so there's you might we might call them demographics now right areas of interest yeah so we again we put them into eight categories and then and then we looked at the different pathways of learning and experiencing and we we found eight pathways and we deliberately based it on eight because there's these eight archetypal responses inside of us that you know one of them responds to sunrise you know we've all for a million years humanity has experienced sunrise it always comes from the east and it always has a very particular feeling and our nervous system actually recognizes sunrise as a feeling and look we can call sunrise at the beginning right the beginning of the day and if you can feel what sunrise feels like in yourself and you know how it's pregnant with possibility and you go out in that early morning the sky is so blue and the birds are moving and singing and there's this feeling anything is possible you know when you when you go out and to sunrise and you just allow yourself to connect to it so when you're welcoming someone into a new experience you can emulate the sunrise feeling by looking at the cultural elements that are related to the beginning and these would be things that are for the beginning of a life these are the things that you do with young children which is is the sunrise of life you can do it with your well coming guests into your workshop so this is the sunrise for the people walking into your workshop space so we use archetypal modeling you know based on the eight times of day and we started with just four but then we found out that there was too many things in the four categories so we we went from you know sunrise noon sunset midnight to sunrise 9 a.m. noon 3:00 p.m. sunset and we've discovered these eight different energetics and we organized everything according to that and this was the wisdom of a particular elder who's passed on in 2005 his name was ingwe and he'd been raised by the Bushmen and the accom in Africa he was the British ancestry but grew up in Africa he's born in 1914 and he was on a similar quest to might you know he because his parents were some of the first settlers in Kenya he had nobody else to play with but the ax combo children so he was adopted by them and raised in that village and part of that family but when he went into adulthood and entered the modern world he realized that there was a lot of things that the Akama had nourished him with that modern people were missing so he found ways to generalize them and help people with these things so he joined me in 1983 and we started the first project together now I had organized everything according to Roman numerals you know you know Roman numeral one letter A ABCD you know and I had like 15 categories of things that I had found that were elements that all of these traditional cultures had in common that were missing in modern times right and he looked at and he said you can't use those Roman numerals he said because the Romans are the ones who got us into the problem in the first place John you know and he said we must organize using the the directions you know we should use sunrise and sunset and midday and midnight and spring and summer and winter and faul this is the way we should organize everything you know so we we then basically went around to children in New Jersey and then you can appreciate this we went into classrooms and we just said the children what a sunrise for you like you know and they told us what if I like then we said what does it feel like at noon you know and what does it feel like it's sundown you know we just we got children to tell us the feelings of these times of day because we wanted to come from a really innocent place and because we were looking for something that transcended cultural specifics you know it wanted we wanted to relate it to something very accessible and that was a lovely way to start and once we organized my 15 categories into these eight categories instead then we graded them based on what stage of life they would be aimed at or who would wield them this is a cultural element that only the elders would use this is a cultural element that the teenagers use quite intuitively you know and then we put them on this 8 by 8 by 8 spreadsheet you know and it's called 5 12 because that's 8 times 8 times 8 so what I've been doing is audio and video recording these 512 categories and 64 of them are done and we we prioritize these 64 social agreement topics that can really enhance community functioning you know and also awaken the community to nature connection and yeah that's 512 project comm you can have a look at that but it's an interesting project and I just did live audience presentations on 64 of these cultural elements this sunrise of all of them is the greeting custom you know have you ever showed up in an event and nobody greet you yeah and you never quite at land you never feel safe and you don't therefore pay attention because you're feeling a little bit off the whole time you know so the people are presenting information and everyone's talking over each other and it never really comes together and you kind of leave there being like what was that I don't know if I just spent my time productively or not you might be looking at your watch you know I was just thinking like I had I had many so people just get on that sense that of today of let's get on with business you know this let's get started with things and then I had the occasion of being for instance in New Zealand with Maori and having an opening that takes the whole day and you can see like the pensions of of Westerners like well let's get on with the business you know but then you can I've kind of had for me was a blessing to have the chance to go through those processes because I could really start to get tuned into the importance of this entry point to establish the container or the the quality of the space that is going to that is going to unfold when you do it in such a way that's exactly it you know and you're using the word container because we use that word a lot to you know if we go back to the sunrise feeling right we arrived and we park in the parking lot we're in the sunrise of that event and sunrise should be greeted properly you know the greeting custom is is the transition into the container you know and for us you know if we go through the motions of greeting people and welcoming them but we're not truly present then it doesn't feel authentic to them and they feel a little weird and we feel a little weird so there's even like a role that we as individuals who are welcoming and greeting need to play which is for us to land in our bodies and to be fully present you know take a good deep breath to listen with our senses our ears and look out and appreciate the beauty of nature around us and the nature inside of our home and our lovely pet that's over there sleeping and just remember we love our children and our families and to get that feeling in our body so that when people start to arrive into our workshop we show up and greet them you know the power of presence as dan Siegel talks about you know so much emphasis in people's minds today is like well my children are going to need this and this and this to succeed in the world so I'm going to keep my kids moving on that but he emphasizes the needs for parents to actually just be present and to literally welcome their children and to be fully listening to them and engaging with them and he's pointing at interpersonal neurobiology the expectations of the nervous system that children will not feel safe they will not connect and they won't excel if they don't and that NGO that holds you know now I'm pointing at children because they're the east of the life journey you know they're the sunrise of the life journey it's so deep in our nervous system you know so these cultural elements are really attentive to customs and practices that become agreement fields in traditional societies like you know as you said the Maori they to do this very long full-day welcoming and greeting and with the son Bushmen if you go out with them in the morning you'll meet them you know just after breakfast will gather with them and go over and greet them in their place on the land and they'll greet us for forty five minutes every single person needs to greet every single person you know so they take the time they hold your hand they talk to you in their language you have no idea what they're saying and you know we've been told if they fully expect us to talk in our language to them while they're talking to us in their language while we're holding hands with each other and looking in each other's eyes and a lot of body language a lot of nodding you know and person after the next step to the next and it takes 45 minutes and then we get down to business if you will whatever that might be we might go out and gather some truffles from under the soil or we might be harvesting marimba beans or whatever we're doing and then we'll build a fire and we'll all sit and we'll share the food together and talk story around the fire and then it gets really hot and they want to go rest to siesta you know so the off they go and off we go back to our space and we kind of rest and wait for the heat of the day to pass and now we're back with them in the afternoon they greet us all over again as if we didn't do that same thing in the morning and 45 minutes greeting them in the end at 4 o'clock in the afternoon you know and it's it's you know but that that's if that's an agreement field that that culture holds right but the thing that everybody who we bring from the Western world to visit this community they noticed that within a day or two of being with them the nervous system of all the people that we brought from Australia Europe you know the US Canada when we bring them to this place after two or three days of this beautiful greeting custom people find themselves dropping in in a way that they just have don't need remember dropping in that deeply into themselves and feeling really safe and really loved and they get really emotional and all this stuff starts moving you know because uh you know in modern times if the nervous system expects it doesn't get it and then stops believing that there's even a village possible or that love is even possible you know we begin to become cynical and it's all on the unconscious level right now so that that's one example the greeting custom is a wonderful example because it's it's one cultural element that can fit into a workshop I mean you can actually take ten minutes and greet people what's the big deal it'll go so much better if you do you know and there's three components to a good greeting there's three elements to a good greeting you know one is welcoming another element is called wiping off the road dust you know you've traveled a long way you got lost trying to find the place you're showing up you can see people show up like this you know their body language is like ah you know they've got this look about him right so hey you got some road dust let's hear your story which oh my god the taxi ride was crazy you know it was an uber driver I'm sorry and he just was talking and he missed the turn and now I'm late and I was like I can't believe this guy won't stop talking and you know people need to tell their road dust stories they need to release that and if you'd let him do it and you actually listen to them and ask him questions about it they'll you'll see them go from frenetic to present and they'll be like wow thank you for listening right all of a sudden you've got them even closer to arriving right and then the third part is always gratitude we always shared gratitude with each other you know hey what what are you feeling really grateful for today or what are you happy about today you know just let everybody share that you know in a circle and a round robin style it everybody just goes and you can literally feel in your body this shift into depth and presence and attentiveness if you don't take 15-20 minutes to do that then you're fighting against the road dust frenetic thing you're fighting against the I don't feel safe thing you know and then you go straight into the information and you know you might as well not bother because no one's gonna remember it anyway they're just gonna wonder why they spent their day to fill in that you know what one thing I'm little and it's just in close applied but we call that applied cultural mention I'm going to end over to to Benny I think here's something to to to share or to ask you but what I'm feeling that's really interesting because I'm really into the conversation and I guess some of the people that might be listening to the to interview might be asking like but this is a conflict a conflict transformation summit so where is the conflict in it and yeah I'm feeling like there's a lot of things from what we already touched that that are deeply meaningful to to come to the space of looking a bit in our lenses to conflict so I just wanted to notice that and then you have something to to offer yeah I want to pick up on that question right I mean what I'm hearing is that if you are grounded in these ways whether it's you know your your awareness and your connection to nature in place or you know a clear understanding of the stages of the day and the stages of life and these different roles that fit together then conflict is a very different experience because it's happening inside of a container that can hold it and so that's sort of how I see the direct connection I also there's a particular domain of conflict that started when you first were talking John about going you know with your basket collecting all these indigenous you know traditions I immediately had this you know red flags or wrong word but had this curiosity around the challenge of cultural appropriation is this cardinal seat of the Western colonizer and and you know now the sort of woke liberal sort of trying to feel good by you know adopting things that that have caused deep pain and injury to people whose traditions they feel have been stolen and abused and and clearly that is not where you come from you've spent you know deep time with okay so I was sort of had but but I think there's a source of conflict particularly you know in our activist realms we're just part of the context for this gathering this question comes up I had an experience in it in a group I was facilitating where I invited us to use it talking and I was told no you know you that's not right find some other way to manage the process and I was surprised and I thought that was you know it didn't create a lot of conflict but I think there are you know this is one of the tension points around how we navigate this though so that happened in early in the conversation I'm going to tell this sort of a short little story that tracks a few things because it's just so interesting to me how stuff shows up in sequence so then you're as I was thinking about that I was also thinking about a contrast to that with the the Houghton nashoni Thanksgiving address and this was way before you're now talking about greeting but this is a greeting process right that the peoples of the Uruguayan Confederacy will will go through this process thanking every element of nature and humanity and and it can take quite a long time maybe not quite 45 minutes I haven't seen it they've done in his traditional mode this long and I learned about it while I was reading Robin multimers book braiding sweetgrass where she tells this lovely story of engaging with Oren Lyons the indigenous elder around this and actually approaching him and saying is it okay if I use this and hen Lyons responses are you kidding we've been waiting 400 years for people to start adopting this practice please take it and use it right so I reading this just as I'm getting ready to open the network Global Gathering that that's one of the things that I do and and we open the the October November edition of it with this practice in two rounds and it was just so delicious so so here's the other thing that's so amusing right how we're the universe is as I'm thinking all this and listening to you my phone rings and I look over a caller ID and it's lions now what's an ordinance do I think I need to mention this and talk about it and so you know and I just I just love what you're saying about the power of greeting and the importance of that and those three stages and I guess I just want to bring it back to what first came up in my mind and this sort of question around you know how do we reclaim our our roots and our grounded us in these practices in ways that that you know that we can be comfortable are not going to fall into this trap of cultural appropriation do you have any suggestions any wisdom any learnings for people you know and and if you're in that kind of space if that's a source of conflict do you have any thoughts around how to navigate those kinds of dynamics or the broader question of you know this whole tension between the developed and colonial mindset and the indigenous one we had an interview yesterday where money was the terrain of that conflict why is it that the North has all the money in the south you know is having to beg for it and so these these these tensions run through I think that you know that's a microcosm of this larger set of tensions that were grappling with and a source of course of enormous conflict so with that I'll turn it back over to you I'm just so enjoying listening to you I feel like you embody so much of what you're naming - I just thank you Ben these are all really important questions and as you said you know the you know that the innocent example of wanting a talking stick to get something started I I work with David Vander Hoek who's Wampanoag elder from nan P which is Martha's Vineyard and he's addressing the the what he calls the mammoth in the room not the elephant in the room that everything that we do with aid shields is really by definition a giant form of cultural appropriation and at the same time his family has benefited greatly from the practices that we've brought forward with the 5/12 map because what we're doing essentially and you know it's not limited to indigenous people in North America you know we've I've done deep research into Ireland and de Poland I looked into all my ancestral roots in Europe as well as the little threat of indigenous from North America brutes that I have from Canada in my family mine and then also you know looked all and on every continent where humans have been look for a long time to say well what is universal to all of this right because as I said you know we're using the eight directions as an organizing principle but we quite literally used the XYZ axis to organize our material you know the the X north-south east-west and then the Z being the the one that makes it three-dimensional which goes from ground to sky so we quite literally used that as our basis for organization and then when we added the northwest-southeast you know our Hawaiian friends in on Ahola who were helping us solve this problem how can we create a universal matrix that all cultures can communicate through right so they basically said well what's missing from your map is past present and future you know thinking of ancestry thinking of us in the current times and then thinking of the future generations but we collaborated a lot with the tree of peace society between 1990 and 1999 where they helped us to integrate peacemaking concepts and that was a Jake swamp and his wife Judy Jake's an ancestor now but their aqua Szczesny Connie and Gahagan Mohawk people from up there on the born of borderlands and Oren Lyons was involved some too because as he said you know they've been waiting for us to wake up to the things that are missing from the Western culture that would make us much better neighbors and much better partners and caring for the world right so one of the ways that we've worked with the you know the cultural appropriation challenge is that one acknowledge that all of he all human beings need a healthy culture and that some some lineages of humanity have lost a sense of what that means and without it you know they're impoverished so then looking at what does culture actually do as a function as opposed to an artifact you know because oftentimes when we talk about culture we speak of a specific language or specific practices within a you know lineage of people that come from a place right the safest thing is to not not to go into those realms you know because that's very specific to that lineage to that family to that region and we don't need to go there I mean that you know maybe the talking stick comes from a particular place and that pain you know as David himself said when he came to an art of mentoring and and when people uh you know white European descendants in Vermont were smudging him and his family he was highly offended by that because his own grandfather got arrested for having for practicing his ways in Martha's Vineyard and that just being aware that the pain of that history is real and that we need to be in an open dialogue with our traditional indigenous neighbors wherever we are on the planet to just know that those histories exist and to understand where the pain comes from but then to be an open dialogue as David would say you know let's look in each other's eyes and build the relationship as human beings let's figure out how to move forward because these reconnection practices are really really important for all of humanity right now it's very in a time when some of you on the plan but are so disconnected from nature from them so what can we do to restore connection but let's keep let's keep the let's keep it on the table here let's be really open and honest and be really respectful and listen to each other because what does the Talking Stick actually solve there's a nervous system problem you know you were you were having the instinct then what we need to do is all feel safe we all need to be heard we all need to be present with one another because if we aren't feeling that way the interpersonal nervous system is not kicking in we're not going to get anywhere so we're gonna already start with conflicts because we didn't address another elephant in the room which is that we're not showing up in a present and connected way so what's the point of talking about conflict if we can't first connect you know I like to think of it the priority on connection first you know I everything down to that you know connection first so that's the best the problem we're solving and applied cultural elements but we don't have to use a talking stick or we don't have to use you know a particular specific thing that could cause harm or offence from our indigenous friends and neighbors so the question is what problem are we solving by using a talking stick and is there another way to solve that problem which is what you addressed you know and we teach when we're working with annual guilt you'll hear from my colleague Debra who has been working with the peacebuilding and relational modeling side of what we do as village builders we call it the village builder pathway you know we're constantly bringing people's awareness to the potential pain from cultural appropriation perception and to be really aware that when we're doing cultural restoration or cultural repair work what we're really doing is is trying to get the wiring back into the system but that there's more than one way to do that you know it's there's a specific circuit that's been broken but we don't have to use smudging or an eagle feather to fix that you know there's other ways to do it so we try to give three four examples from multiple parts of the world whenever we introduce something like this we talk about the principle that it's addressing we talk about the problem that it solves in modern times and then we talk about modern hacks you know how's it being done in the hip-hop community for instance where it's completely cool and totally fine for them to do it in that way but then in kindergarten this teacher came up with a really innovative way to innovative way to do that with young children and doing it in a very unique and creative way so just being highly aware that there's more than one way to solve a any particular problem when it comes to connection and that you can learn from the different ways of it being modeled but then ultimately you have to be inventive and also really aware of who's in the room you know what is the you know in permaculture you know the zone the zone one right what is right around me and looking at the other people in the room as information we need to know who are you where you come from and coming from what is your fears what is your history what do you what are you concerned about and to get an inventory of all that before you actually apply any cultural element because if you don't do your homework then you'll end up in a situation like you bumped into there been and I've been there you know because I've innocently done the same you know having spent a lot of time with indigenous people and having spent nine years with the trapeze Society working we always started at everything with the before all else the the Thanksgiving greetings which are just so beautiful to experience but ultimately what we're trying to do is they said let's not talk about anything important until you remember that we're human beings and that were part of an interconnected sphere of life and if we have all of that in our minds and hearts then we can actually have an important conversation because then we'll consider all the things that are needed you know so there's real reasons for that kind of greeting custom to be incorporated in modern times because so often nature doesn't show up on the agenda at all you know it's barely in our hearts let alone our minds so yeah I hope that addressed what you're asking Ben but I we have an advisory council of indigenous people working with H shields and we've created a trust to hold the intellectual property and we have a fund and our foundation to if there's any revenue and there's never hardly any revenue but if there is revenue then it will flow into that fund to make sure that it can benefit indigenous projects as well so we're trying to be very conscious of that you know because this is universal knowledge that seems to reflect all of humanity but there have been specific consultants from many traditional cultures around the world that have contributed freely mainly because we're doing a kind of globally crowd-sourced you know how do we apply connection and modern times in a way that could really help heal lots of people and help you know help with con we call a conflict prevention because if if you if you have connection first then conflict is much easier to navigate later you know and if you come into conflict without connection it can be really messy you know so I've found that the connection first approach has really helped with a lot of our peacemaking and problem you know conflict resolutions work that we've been doing globally so yeah so there's a couple of things coming up for me one is that I worked a lot on intercultural learning and I think one of the things that that this conversation kind of really opens up for me is that we are always going to run into trouble it's like there's no chance to no get in the place of saying I get all the things sorted I can enter into this space and and everything I'm going to be protected from everything as long as we kind of are are really open to engage with the world in that in a way being present we're going to run into trouble what I think absolutely really important you're saying John is that we need to be connecting with our intention and I remember there's this question on on formal or nonviolent communication as do you want to be right or do you want to be connected you know like and then that is a very powerful question because if you want to be connected if we want to be in a place of respect to each other we're always going to try to understand in what ways you you're this field makes you feel bad so that I can I can then tune in and and learn with that experience so I've what I figure out is if you go in that space of deep respect and opening up to understand then you will always the troubles you've run into we will sort sorted themselves out yeah and now you mention these things because you notice we start to enter into a bit of the space of concrete and I'm curious to see like from your work with nature and communities what have you been discovering that could really help people in this work on one side being themselves prepared to be in difficult situations to be in that space that you can go and know that maybe I'm going to run into trouble but I'm willing to do so and open to hold that and we already give some into it you know with proper creation of the container to have those difficult conversations or to be in a place of connection in presence I wonder what what are the relevance what other things you've been figuring you've been discovering that are relevant for individuals and groups to be able to meet conflict in a way that can can be generative and more healthy because I would say most of the spaces we are in the ways we've been dealing with conflict are not healthy for that individual so mmm this might feel like I just connect but please bear with me everybody on this one over the years I've had the opportunity to mentor people you know 5 10 15 you know I have relationships that go back 40 years and Tom Brown is still in my life you know so many years later here 50 years later you know we're communicating every day so I've seen people go on journeys you know and I've watched them you know people that I've worked with from the nonviolent communication communities or a different conflict resolution fields I don't only work with naturalist right there they're a rare breed but I I've brought my work out into community building settings all over the place through our village building network and I've gotten to watch people progress you know on their own developmental journeys and I've heard a story again and again that I think really we should listen to very carefully and that is that the people who first start to go out by themselves into nature and maybe just sit under that same pine tree every day and I encourage this you know we've call it a core routine we call it a sit spot literally you know and it you don't have to sit on the ground you know if that's if that's a problem for you just put a chair outside your door quite literally you know I mean literally just outside your door put a chair and go and sit there and you know in the morning the mountain Bluebird flew up and Gus here and we were able to interact with this beautiful bird and then off he went and he came back again with it later and he sang and then the female Tanager she came in and we looked at her and I've been hearing her through my friends phone calls when she says sitting there I can hear that bird in the background you know and now I met it in person you know and I feel the relationships of my friend Sara to this place where she lives and she sits every day multiple times outside just for a minute or two what happens when we do that as we start to make relationships with the trees that the dead elm that the birds like to sit on and sing from and this living Elm that provides shade and nesting for the for the finches and we start to make as the Bushmen would say we started to have threads with these things around us and they become strings and then they become chords and then they become ropes and we start to feel empathy with these beings around us be them be it a moth a Venus last night as the Sun was setting just looking at this beautiful planet you know shining through the the evening sky the feeling of connectedness to the natural world what does that do for me as a man you know or for Sara as a woman we become a different version of ourselves we are able to hold more space because we have more ropes to the natural world around us so when people are on this journey you know in the beginning they come at it from their heads you know oh I like plants I want to identify plants I want to look at the leaf type and I want to look at how many you know petals are in each flower and they learn these big technical terms or the birders you know oh there's a new bird and check on my list check on my list you know we start up here in mental framing you know however we approach nature but when we start to spend time and we let those threads of connection form into relationships where we start to feel them as family I become a different version of myself so I watch people go on this journey you know and they start out in their heads and they're very focused and kind of intense about what they're learning and what they're proud of learning and all that but if they spend enough time sitting in nature they start to soften and they start to open and then they start to notice things when they walk into a room for instance in the past they didn't really want to have deep conversations with strangers but now that they've been spending so much time and sitting and letting their nervous system open and letting those ropes form the way they feel in themselves they start to become a walking version of nature and when they walk into people that are not having that experience they find people gravitating to them instinctively drawn to them and telling them their stories you know this one woman Jen she grew up very intellectuals by from a very intellectual family in the in East Bay in the city and Oakland she said I couldn't care less I don't want I don't know anything about people's personal lives like keep that away for me you know like I have a cognitive journey that amount and she would say you know but you said the more time she spent at her sit spot she'd come back into the into the community house in Oakland and people would start coming up to her and just telling her like these super deep personal things and Jen's like whoa this is really weird why I don't I didn't ask for you to tell me that well you are such a good listener I feel that you are listening deeper than anyone ever has listened to me so I feel really safe and letting things out of myself so you know Jen said in the beginning she completely avoided human interaction because you didn't want those uncomfortable conversations but being in nature increased her nervous system capacity to the point where Sun suddenly she was able to absorb and ground and hold space in a way that was really helpful to community conflict and all of a sudden she was the peacemaker in her shared household whereas before or she used to be part of the conflict team you know her insistence on things being a particular way and wanting certain controls like all of that eased and she began to be much more open and absorptive you know so over the years I've seen hundreds of people go on this journey and all of them have become really beautiful piece makers I mean you know they will again back to Oren Lyons and Jake swamp dirty swamp the Haudenosaunee people they say the great law of peace came from nature itself you know and if we want to be true peacemakers we have to remember that connection with the plants and the animals and the birds and the trees because then we have the capacity as human beings to be fully present and fully able to hold and be empathetic and you know to have that connective field that contributes to the well-being of the group and I think you know that certain people walk into a room and all of a sudden everything feels better you know that's not what's coming from here it's the space that they're holding it's a felt sense that we get from them and nature connection can really give that to us you know we can increase the capacity of our community to hold by building relationships with the plants and animals and birds and trees and wind and Sun nimma that's just true that's just what our nervous system is designed for so when we nurture our nervous system then we have more resilient to capacity we have more creativity you know we have more sensitivity we're more aware we're paying attention on many levels and we get out of our heads you know as Brad Keaney says you know we go from the small room inside of our head that bucks that we get ourselves in and our room becomes much bigger and then there's more room for others in that book yeah I was thinking definitely they must be an experience you feel and people going through those processes that actually when you are fully present in that way to nature nature also it's not only the people that come to tell you the story is also the play starts to tell you our stories and the nature started to really to reveal much more right that's that's it yes absolutely we are getting close to the to the end a hard time but I mean we didn't talk a bit about some of the things we wanted to talk in the beginning like yeah so storytelling so I wonder what what we could still touch a bit before we close for me Julia I can I get just to just to get a bit of a sense to people that yeah this practice of having a moment of the day for yourself particularly in a place that is not just unto the team words but actually just observing what's around you at your door or other three sounds really very wise and great tip and as multiple effects on ants and and then that can really help us ground those kind of practices on a sustained way can help us be grounded and have the nervous system in a place that can be meet in a from a better place the difficulties of conflicts and tensions that naturally occur in our lives there's may be other things you want to say so let's let's try to kind of close with the last thing is you feel really eager to share John yeah I would wrap it up in a very you know roll it all up into these three concepts okay one the nervous system is hungry for certain kinds of inputs so give your nervous system or will ache in your senses when you're sitting outside or even inside you use your ears eyes nose skin tactile sense emotional sense try to use it all the time don't just get locked in your thoughts or just your visual sense you know bring in your ears in your eyes at the same time we call this awakening the senses if we go outside and we have an experience and we awaken our senses it's like undeveloped film maybe some of you remember that you know you take pictures and you take the film out you might not even believe this is true some of your younger people but you actually take this thing out called a film canister and then you put it in the drawer but you never see your pictures unless you send it off to be developed well our nervous system has a version of that if we go out and have an experience with the Western the mountain Bluebird and and then we don't go inside and tell my grandmother about it then it doesn't get stored into long-term memory and the census don't get integrated so we can awake in the census but we need to integrate them which is done through storytelling sharing our story they're living our experience with as much sensory memory as possible so the one awake in the sentence is to integrate them through sharing stories with this by reliving experiences with as many senses as possible and then the third thing is to realize that we will not feel safe to tell our story and therefore we won't integrate unless we have a good connective container so it goes you know it ties everything that we just talked about today right we're we're attentive to our own personal relationship through our nervous system to the plants and animals and wind and Sun and rain and insects that nurtures us we deepen that nurturing by sharing those stories with others but unless those others are welcoming and willing in other words there's a container of welcoming then you know those three need each other is what I'm saying it's a virtuous cycle it's a whole system's approach right they don't exist without each other that's how I would wrap it up but we need to tell our stories it's super important that means we need to have people to catch our stories who actually listen and love and make us feel safe and sometimes it's as simple as saying hey noonah would you be willing to catch my story you know yes John what does that mean well let's let's give thanks each other let's take a minute to wipe the road dust off and give thanks and be present with each other when we feel ready then I'll share my story with you it'll only take 10 minutes you know but - just remember to ask permission if you're gonna want to share your story so often we come in full of excitement to share a story and we just lay it on the first victim that we pump into they may not be able to catch our story you know and it's not their fault you know so just to remember to invite it I know in a way it's a drama from our times like you cross people on the street and they ask you how you are but they don't really want to know go to the next meeting so that's something I found out in Africa really amazing that people if they ask you how you are they are they are willing to listen to your story and they takes no matter what time it takes even if you have a meeting that is already if you are already 20 minutes late and I that that really triggered my own understanding of time when you have you have something to share before we close right yeah it's kind of a short story again coming out of this conversation that I think connects with what you were just describing about the importance of of those grounding stories and an experience but but this is kind of the reverse it was it was triggered first week you had that incredible metaphor of saying when you met Tom Brown and you were so entranced with him that you attached yourself to him like a tick Duncan is Hyde and you know I live in Connecticut where a Lyme disease was discovered and just this morning I pulled a very tiny probably deer tick off of my wife's clavicle and wasn't even sure I got the whole thing out and we were worried about that and I think about what's happening now with Kovan right and you know even before that the the stories that children were being told by their grandparents you know was nature is terrifying it is dangerous we need to protect it there's all kinds of things in it we should be killing as best we can and getting rid oh they serve no function that you know and and now with the virus that's just happening in space all right so these stories these these powerful stories of danger and disconnection you know that are that are seeping through things and you know and yet here you are talking about a tick all things as a model as something you want to emulate and learn from so I just feel like there's something beautiful and transformational in that perspective but I'm also just leaving with this you know being in touch with my my sadness and my concern for how what you are offering and what you what you've learned and what you see is is so you know is so precious and unusual and then feel scarce in the dominant narratives that were surrounded by it's not by check yeah go John please I was going to say thank you been really wonderful to hear that reflected appreciate that yeah and that was just it was just making me think man like it's not by accident that eighty percent of what is kind of pristine forest in nature around the world is is there because there was there's people still alive these days doing this this maintaining this the stories that keep the threads going with in relationship with the land I do think and just as a word of hope in a time of hopelessness is that I think this although we're ignore it is of separation in the code reads that the the virus is an enemy an alien being I hear more and more people talking about it in a different place from a place of maybe it's a messenger is a good friend is a dark angel that is is is here to to help us in this moment to to transit to go to go through the pains of birthing another path another possible way so I just wanna I want to leave us with that and John thank you thank you so much for this time was wonderful it made me feel really longing for more conversations and sitting on the porch looking at the nature together so I hope I get to do that someday yeah I hope I hope to thank you Thank You Ben for being here with that with me and thank you John [Music]

Channel: TransitionTowns

Views: 313

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Transition, Transition Network, Transition Movement, the emergence network, coming down to earth, summit, online, conflict, conflict transformation

Id: 2isd5cBHgMw

Length: 64min 19sec (3859 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020