Rachel Naomi Remen - COVID-19 and the Rebirth of Humanity

[Music] good morning Vietnam as Robin William said you know here we are in a time that looks a lot like what can I say it looks Bill Gates said the other day it's like a world war but we're all on the same side and so here we all are in the middle of this extraordinary experience and I'm here with my beloved friend and colleague Rachel Naomi Remen Rachel do you want to say hi to everybody [Laughter] h 'l i'm i'm not going to even try to introduce you completely so this will be a a personal introduction we met about I want to say 35 36 years ago common we all had at that moment collapsed and I'd had to lay off the entire staff including myself and I was consulting in order to make a living with a wonderful eccentric dentist who wanted to do a program at the University of California San Francisco and you and I were came together with this group that was consulting with him and we were sitting in a cafe in where was it oh it was in San Francisco or New Market Street near Market Street yeah and so everybody was talking and then you and I began talking and we looked up an hour later and everybody else had left and I began to share with you my thought my hope of creating a retreat program for cancer patients and I'm trying to remember exactly what you said but you listened for a while and I think you said something like well let's do it something like that remember what you said yeah I do right I was working on a houseboat my office was a storage closet in Sausalito and I was seeing people with cancer and their families and the reason I were seeing them is most doctors didn't felt they had nothing worked that they could offer them because they had run out of therapy and so there was nothing they could say or do to help and they get very uncomfortable in these patients and these are the people I want to talk to so I had this whole practice with dogs and cats and stuffed animals and the boats and the seagulls and all this stuff and I had all these people so we could have done it tomorrow something like this you ask me we could work together in this mission sure and then you said but first we have you decide how we're going yeah and so Rachel Naomi Remen is the medical director of the commonweal cancer help program and has been for the last 34 years we did many of the early retreats co-directing them together we did the Bill Moyers healing on the mind retreat together and Bill Moyers book and as PBS series featured the cancer help program your box kitchen table wisdom and my grandfather's blessings have been translated in what is it a hundred languages or languages your course which started at commonweal the healers art course which has taught at UCSF now that is in something like a hundred medical schools around the United States medical students have completed this course right twenty seven years very active at San Francisco and so we've had this long and wonderful friendship and I celebrate the fact that we're both still here so Rachel I wondered here we are in this extraordinary period of time and I wondered if if you would just start with a few reflections on how you're holding this period of time this is a time of great discovery for everybody the country our perceptions all have radically and rapidly changed L and our behaviors and our daily experience has radically changed as well and you know I talk to people and the G is a very interesting one I myself find myself at LAN and look at my house I mean my house is just so I'm so lucky to have this house and I did not know that and all my relationships with other people have changed my whole idea the American Way of being independent and never leading anything from anybody you need something for somebody losing them all of them that's rule just the way in this experience of being taking filter taking shelter and the interesting thing is never you'll be taking shelter in homes we're taking shelter in each other and what an unamerican thing and you know we're supposed to be independent and that's what we need you stand on your own two feet and somehow or other people are giving many things I mean I had a funny experience like my cousin is a nurse practitioner and then what person isn't very important to position any kind of Oakland and they ran out talk papers well if she lives near me and she she went to the Safeway and she's like she's going to work ties and she's running for the the Safeway and a man comes at was shopping hundred with four large packages and thinking to solve time yet her Saint say sometimes she says to him oh oh great where did mere words that Mister he says oh it's all gone and she stops and he keeps on going and she says oh my god well and so she turns around and starts walking back to her car and she just pushes the car she hears unless someone calling lady lady lady and she turns around and it's this gun and he's running across the parking lot carrying a big batch of toilet paper in his arm said he's history has it that he says this is for you and then he turns and runs back to his car and gets it in and rajala now that sounds like a really you know cruising it's not funny happening but that is such a radical change and way then we deal with one another we see this difference and it's a difference in a certain direction and I know this whole thing started that we were here together and I began talking to missile in my thoughts as to what this thing represents and I'd like to just share some of that with you again and with others you know my grandfather was the north of us ran by his mystic and I'm a mystic I'm a mistake by nature I think and his ideas about things were very different and I remember him talking to me about than the Sun now when you see Messiah in her world culture one thinks of the Christ and the the embodiment of the Messiah being a human being a person but my grandfather was less concrete than that and in Judaism you're the Messiah ISM is a person listen it's a man of the Messiah and here's a bear and his idea could be an event it could be a happening that affected every single human being and that it would cause a shift in people's perception in their behavior in their sense of purpose that nobody was exempt from that there was being shift and it would move life it is a correction it's like a reset button then if the human race was moving in a certain direction that was not life affirming that values for by which people live the way they related to themselves or others the way they saw themselves was not never life-affirming way that a a global event could happen that would reset that those values that would reset those values and that this is a messianic event and I finished up remembering this and thinking that this is this we thought of it in just that way what's been happening that it is messianic that every single person is touched by a change by it in many perceptions and many experiences many behaviors that even though they're new they feel natural they feel in some way or thinking authentic and that we've been freed and beliefs and perceptions and roles that have crippled us and it's almost like there's a if you see if the human race is a mighty river and it's flowing in its riverbed and in torques there's been other men that has shifted the flow into a new riverbed and a new direction and the question that I have in my mind is is this permanent change and I think in some ways that maybe people seem very surprised to discover something that they always knew was true I've got a lot of you know zoom conferences where you're actually talking to certain people doing like a finding meaning in medicine group online and people are talking about things that they have discovered that they already knew but never lived by never I never embodied and you know what the question is people ask yes you know has this ever happened before this is unique it's not unique it's anything in your own history I mean there's the black clay you know there's all that sort of thing and by the way our response to this coronavirus is exactly the response that they had in the 13th century you quarantine you wear masks it's stripped us of our science even and we just have this simple human response before there was something else in order to say oh yeah yeah more about this this change in behavior like wearing masks wearing masks this source is bollocks you think you'd be hiding your face here you're wearing a mask that's just the one we're wearing them we've been told over and over we're not protecting ourselves we're not hiding ourselves we are there to protect others we're wearing this mask because we can harm other people and I see your one go outside everybody's wearing this we can harm other people and you know that realization that you have the power to kill somebody else emotionally physically right and you take responsibility for not lighting the life of another person that realization alone is enormous as a cultural musician and when I see all these people I can the safe remember the fun and I know that this is because of me I've been where you live and I find where someone comes close to me you know I'll go back back back back thing but I'm not even there protecting myself when I do that I'm thinking about protecting them you're back to that you're too close you're too close so I have a sense of my advocacy my power which is very realistic and my wish to use that hammer in a way that does not like the life of the other person if the entire culture operates on just that principle we have a huge change in the world you huge because when you do that you see the other person no matter what color they were how old they are they are another though human being and you are responsible for their lives in the same way they're responsible for huge huge symbolic thing let me just say a few things now first of all wonderful questions and comments I'm just going to read from Peter White House our friend Rachel do you see parallels with other shifts the Renaissance I and others are calling the emerging Eric Koz modernity we are emerging from modernity through post-modernism to the cosmos coming back into our lives the Rhian Chapman so that's a beautiful line I I want to say a few things that I've been thinking about coming into this the first thing I want to say is I there are images and one image for me is the lines of cars or people waiting for food banks and farmers plowing crops back into the ground or spilling thousands of gallons of milk into the river or in other words there's this radical disconnect between the the physical need for food in the United States of the millions of people thrown out of work and we can't get them the food that's being plowed back into the ground or the milk or the hogs that are being euthanized we can't and so the radical discontinuity between the need for this and the inability to get it to the people who need it because it's not mediated through the restaurants and so on so that's one image another image of comes from the global South just a friend of mine was telling me about a film on French television about poor people in India in the slums of Indian cities who are trying to get back to their villages and being beaten by the police and so forth and setting forth on journeys of a hundred kilometers or two hundred kilometers to their villages with no food or water and the interviewer asked them do you think you'll make it and this young man calmly says I don't know if I'll make it or not you know I may die on the journey and so there's this global experience you've been talking about the experience in the United States but there's this global experience where probably millions of people will die and and but not of cobia in addition to all those who will die of it they will die of hunger or other diseases and they will die because in our effort to protect ourselves who have the privilege of protecting ourselves we've closed down the global economy and closing down the global economy is going to cause a lot of people to die so so I'm holding that dimension of this event a second thing that really has come to me frequently it's a line from aura Bindo who you and I both know his extraordinary work he was a contemporary of Gandhi while Gandhi became political Aurobindo who spent time in prison for politics in his youth but he became a spiritual teacher and founded or oval and it's this line the future if there is to be a future must wear a crown of feminine design and you know that line deeply speaks to me and you know the New York Times this morning I had I've got it here with me and it had a it had a toriel that said in a crisis true leaders stand out and there were three global leaders that they picked Metta Frederickson of Denmark Angela Merkel of Germany and Jacinda art Dern of New Zealand all three are women and so I just have a deep sense I've actually had this sense as you know for a long time that however we describe this event whether we call it messianic or something else I think that if there is to be a future worth having it must wear a crown of feminine design and so to me it's the rise of the Divine Mother the divine the other divine feminine mother Mary Kuan Yin Mother Earth and a sense of that that that that is a core dimension of this resetting that is taking place so what you're saying I think is so profound it's all about reopening or humanity in this time when we feel vulnerable because we're human also Rio the strength of humanity yes you know another another our friend another there are all these different images so our friend Toby Symington it was a very capable astrologer and I talked to with him yesterday and I said what's going on and he said it's a saturn pluto conjunction a dark night of the soul an initiatory journey leaving one world and entering another an encounter with the shadow possibility of deep structural change but then he said this was so interesting the saturn pluto conjunction took place at the beginning of world war 1 at the beginning of World War two and when the United States invaded Iraq so I guess my thought is I I may be less sure than you are that of the singularity of the event in other words it seems to me there have been other events these world wars and so forth that were similarly powerful what is new what is unique is the complete wiring of the whole world into a single financial economic cultural communication system and with this virus being a pandemic it elicits profoundly dysfunctional responses and it lays bare all of the profound contradictions of our whole global system and so it seems to me what is new is not the power of the event but the power of the the global system and its dysfunction as it struggles to figure out how to deal with this I'm with ya exactly it's the issue exactly how do we live everybody and the answer to that is not theoretical no yesterday that is very very close to our daily experience in our community and by the way the system you know a lot of people say this is never happened before on this level not even the black players but it certainly has happened before but not in modern times when I first met you I remember having conversation with you about images and you told me there was an image that was very very valuable she misses a little boy and that was the image of Noah's Ark that's right right that's one of those times that it happened before yeah I mean just bringing that up for a moment when I was a little boy I would I knew the flood was coming and I began to build an ark and the in the garage of our house and outside Southampton and I collected some turtles from a nearby pond and put them in a little thing and my mother says aren't building the Ark I only got as far as building one window but the point is I've had the sense all of my life that the flood was coming and here the flood seems to have arrived and you have been doing and I've been building arks a window yeah right your entire work isn't on and you know I'm thinking about the flood when you read about it you know the earth was covered in water and there was the sense that we would have to if we survive this we have to begin again we'd have to be laughter we repopulate the world this is where the messianic image comes this profound shift and and no took the animals the innocence the life right the people who weren't involved in what was evil or Darfur off off message shall we say in the room and he puts them into a place and he nurtured them and fed them and gave them what they needed so that when the waters went down again which they always will we could start again and this for me has been central to my understanding ago something of the situation here there's something like this I think just thinking of the values that most people live by they fall far short of our reach our family was for function we were able to live in ways they're far more life-affirming satisfying what just holy if you will right and each of us in this process are discovering qualities in our lungs like that man in them with the toilet papering in the parking lot I bet he didn't know he was that generous I mean he's discovered a natural generalist City a natural sense of wanting to meet the need of another person right and these discoveries of certain qualities on wish have not been the qualities we may have nurtured in ourselves and in the postmodern world qualities like service and compassion and Brotherhood and the value of every human life qualities like courage and unselfishness and truthfulness and love ruining us by this experience they're being ruining us so if each one of us is a narc hmm I love God and these qualities are our pairs of intimacy and one of the things we can do is to become more aware of them to inhabit them even more fully and we're doing now more consciously to nurture them so that when it's time to repopulate the world it isn't the same world you know Rachel Redwing just sent us a note really beautiful today May 1 is the holy day in ancient traditions when the veils between the worlds are thin and we have access to other levels of understanding no coincidence that Rachel's mysticism is opening us today nor is it that it's also a holiday of the workers of the world May Day blessings to all no actually um [Music] access to what did she say that was beautiful access today rain forest is a holy day in ancient traditions when the veils between worlds are thin and we have access to other levels of understanding understanding and we're not talking about mental understanding right cognitive non cognitive I think our cognition with all that it does about projecting into the future and telling us who we are and whether people are is actually it's not necessarily a strength and in a situation like this where every life in this world and as a lovely note from John booth when things are stripped away the light shines more clearly on what's broken and what's healing the man with the toilet paper could perhaps more clearly see what his choices were what kind of world he wants to live in and how one simple action in the present moment can help build that world exactly once action in the present and then another and these actions don't come from well I think it's smarted me to do this right well this makes sense you know or something like this it comes from something within us that is profoundly new and profoundly connected and to me that is the embodiment of the feminine principle you know that every human being no matter what their perceptions are profoundly connected at the most fundamental levels that's what we're experiencing and only two months so that this thing this reality or some close to the surface that a month and a half of living in your own house and and and people bringing you food and understanding the interdependence right we are able to make these kinds of changes well if I as a therapist if I could help somebody make that kind of a change after four years of work I would say gee I'm doing great work and this event is messianic in that sense when the Messiah comes you see what it means to be a human being and what your pants as a human being your honorable path that will fulfill you really is really was it's true Gretchen sure they are friend from harmony Hill wrote I have been experiencing the veils being thin dreams awareness those past and not yet born seemed to flow freely in these times I wanted to I wanted to bring in that my sense in these moments is there is the potential to move toward light and wholeness there's also the potential to move toward darkness by darkness I don't mean dark darkness can be creative and but in the metaphor we're using right now or to not even use light dark we can move toward inhabiting our our better selves but we can also move in at the right point and it seems to me the question is very very open as to which of those directions we will take you know it's often true in catastrophes that at first there's a coming together but as as time wears on as people get desperate it doesn't always hold and so it seems to me we need to be careful even as we envision what is possible to also be aware that we're just at the beginning of this and that though there are so many different ways it can unfold I actually believe it's not either/or I believe that in different places with different people it will unfold in different ways and I believe that we will see both immense callousness and cruelty and at the same time immense compassion and I do believe that there will be an enormous upwelling of of commitment to to a better world I really believe that to be true but I believe it will be a contest between that up Welling and an equal upwelling of callousness and selfishness and all of those things well yes there's treasonable right yeah well trust at a very different level but you know everything I country is very interesting country and we've accepted this without a reflection the one of the first things that happened when this week it became apparent what was going on is that the sales of ammunition way up but first they ran to buy toilet paper then they rented my bullets you know and those are the two dimensions of things here here oh I'm old enough to remember World War two I was live hero heater said they had interviewed him at one point and said well how come he never attacked a nerve but it was ramen in their capacity useless how come they never attacked the Marigny so we would never want to bring the battle to the American homeland there's a gun behind every blade of grass there interesting yes we're shooting up kids in the schools i mean we've gotten to this level i mean and yes it is a moment of a decision but the thing that is so interesting is that we have a different experience to throw into that mix it's not a theoretical decision we had to had a different experience as a human race I mean everybody has very clear how many people died today yeah one of the mystical additions that you and I have both studied in our long friendship you had studied it far earlier than I had because it was background to your deep engagement with psycho synthesis is the esoteric work of Alice Bailey the so called Bailey work and there's a piece of that that's been coming up there are many pieces of that that I don't agree with but the piece that comes up for me at a time when people are trying to divide us as a strategy for whatever they are trying to achieve is her sense that in every community around the world there are worlds servers there are people everywhere who are devoted to service to life and I really hold that to be true I really hold that in every tradition in every culture no matter how estranged we may be from its exoteric values of presentation there is a core in every culture and I would say in every human being but in every culture where there are some people who are simply devoted to the evolution of humanity and in whatever way a small local ways but and it seems to me that in these times of crisis that what is elicited as in our time not only the Divine Feminine but also that impulse within us to be of service to be of service to that which is greater than we are and so I just sort of bring that forward because it seems very aligned with well you know these are it smells like either new her eyes are saying it's going to be a different better rule really what we're saying is that there is a universal experience that is profoundly for almost every human being unlike today and it changes your eyes it changes the way you see everything I have been honed by how much I have taken for granted and how much gratitude I have for my life and for this this computer and for these two camps where are my companions on the ark by the way your cats have been visiting during that it's not a webinar until the cat shows up but you do their fundamental they're there they eat they sleep they need to be close they need to know that they're loved and you know I'm not so different I'm not abducted I'm not different at all I just have several layers of other stuff that has gotten between me and their honesty hmm their honesty no no I was talking to a group of doctors and I'd like to just talk about medicine to a little bit just because everyone's work has changed everyone's perception of their work and the value of their work and all of that has changed the medical thing is is phenomenal but I was sitting here and suddenly I realized there was a cat sitting next to me and as I turned to her she just took her her nose and put it on my cheek and you know I said you know that's what it's about that's what it's about you know really you do a lot of work with physicians and other health care professionals and let me start with a broader point and then come into that one one thing this virus does is it it shifts our relationship with death for almost any thoughtful human being because you know usually we think well maybe we will develop some chronic illness or we have one but we have some sense of where we are in our trajectory and we usually have a sense of of time ahead at least theoretically being available here we are suddenly and any of us can be a week from dying a week from dying and not only a week from dying but a week from a very difficult death if we don't get the right medicines at the right time to help us ease our way out and so to me I mean this reminds me of when I had a heart opening as I call it a cardiac event about 14 years ago and other times when I felt close to death and and clearly you know this as well as I do there there is the potential for an opening intrinsic to that experience so all of a sudden we have the whole world experiencing this proximity of our own potential death and so that in itself is an enormous call to awakening or to asking ourselves what matters what is our sense of purpose so coming back to the physicians that you work with nowhere is that more acute than in all our friends you know my brother in Boston is an oncologist on the front lines well all our friends who daily are putting themselves and their families at acute risk what are you learning and hearing from them and what are your broader reflections on this encounter with the proximity of death well this is nothing new for doctors to be in the proximity of death but what is very very new to be in that situation at this level as also very many many doctors have literally stopped their usual doctoring life there are no elective surgeries happening there are no medical visits that aren't urgent happening many doctors are sitting at home you know just like it's like you and I are and we come finding meaning in medicine which is where we it's very similar to your healing circles I think you take a topic and people come and they tell stories about their experience of the topic in their world they talk it could be anything like honesty surprise or anything and we're doing these things on women and the course that's in all these medical schools has a director everyone every school has a director I know their names I've never seen their faces I women once when they came to training years well the screen is full of these little postage stamps are in there people from all the United States from Australia and Canada and Europe honestly and they're talking about doctoring in this situation and what they're seeing is extraordinary and you know they they develop it as their slings I see something like this I realize I'm sitting here at home I miss my colors you know that the hospital is usually known as a place a pretty competitive people competitive people ambitious people people you know putting themselves ahead people wearing masks we weren't masks all the time not to protect other people from ourselves but to project a person who we are not really if they're even and you know heroes I sit at home I realize when I have a meeting on my computer with people from my organizer I really so much I miss them how much I miss them and how much I actually lost and how I'm how much I love the work and how deeply I hope that they are saying and how important they are there's also this business of the hippocratic folks a lot of thinking about the Hippocratic oath and if I can share something about it and then what kind of thinking is the first thing that doctors say in the ten seconds after you get your degree and this is pretty much true all over the world all over the world you get your degree is conferred on you when you take your tassel and you're going like this and you move it to the other side of your hat and the degree of Doctor of Medicine is conferred upon you and this the combination of 1012 years of Advanced Study and then the very next thing that happens does the entire class says the Hippocratic oath or one of the other versions of it together hmm and I can remember this moment most doctors can oh um I was in New York City in a very large movie theater and there were thousand people in the audience and we that the degree was conferred and I was stunned by how a powerful moment this was and our Dean stood up and he said what every with the class please stand and we all stood and then he said would every doctor in this audience stand up and all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins and grandpas and grandmas stood up and we all said the O's together an incredible moment and you know I had a sense of purpose and of a commitment to purpose I was ready to commit my daily month to this purpose but I hadn't realized how deep that commitment goes and and thinking about this I remember something from my own family I had two uncles who were to Iwo Jima in which was in terrific battle I think I was something like 27 times in Japanese were killed 9,000 merican saw some huge and there was a battle than the more rare a battalion climbed a winch and they had gotten bad information and the enemy was across them and the enemy opened fire and kept alive fire going over the ground up that ridge that the battalion was on three feet above the debris me stuff and they kept it up for ten days and and they stayed there and my uncle's were doctors and they were they were at the bottom of the hill because the noise following things you didn't leave the army and the doctor said well they couldn't go up there because they were firing you know two to three feet above the ground from you they had weight and flesh that's burned but they didn't stop and look Bunco Joe was this kind of a little pot-bellied man anyone wire glasses and he was born under impressive man and he heard this conversation and then he realized that he was going and he crawled across that Ridge for two days tying up bleeders splitting legs taking messages for beloved ones collecting wedding roots and keeping records a blessing of dying as best as he could for two days so he came back and was a little flutter about it and then he came to see me and I was thrilled because I had to Tony my I was nervous timid and I said little pot-bellied build all the mirrors welcome uncle drew you must be the bravest person but you're not a free of anything and he laughed and said I mean of course but it would be free but brief people do it anyway mm-hmm yeah I think that point II know it never occurred to me I thought he went up there and did that because he and I was blown away because I was afraid of the dark at that and that I could be a brave person and afraid of the dark I mean it changed there he is changed my whole life is this one statement in a funny way but I had thought he had gone up save her because she was a soldier it never occurred to me that it when I'm upset because she was a doctor that the Hippocratic oath is about committing your life and this has struck a lot of people and many people have been shocked by him and other people have realized that they really hadn't made that commitment without noticing that when we will stood up in that theater and and said these these older words we were committing our words and this has changed a great deal well how people say how doctors see each other how we feel about our frontline people how in a way we're there with them in the frontline people started praying for their fellow doctors I mean this is like a revolution in our Patricia yeah and now when I say doctors this is true for Christian nurses this is true all the all the health professions you know that's the beautiful story there's one one person wrote a question that I think is really important to try to respond to and and she said what advice do you have for people who feel alone isolated anxious and deeply afraid what what yeah how someone in who's feeling those very very human feeling well this a hard question because there isn't one size fits all right I do I'm not able to answer them because this two it's two rubs drunk yeah no that's fair that's fair I think I think there may be something akin a hint in your story about your Uncle Joe that I can say for myself that I can experience anxiety about this I can experience fear about it I loved life I want to stay alive but I just somehow I'm able to choose not to let that be my predominant response you know it's it's that somehow finding in myself the ability to move toward this in some fundamental way and I think partly for me it's that and I know people are very different about this but I am not afraid to die my concern is the given that this moves very quickly I am concerned not only for myself but for millions of other people that they won't if if we are to die that we won't get the medicines we need to make that a death with compassion and dignity that is a tremendous concern for me and I must say the whole focus on you know do we have enough ventilators the truth of the matter is that an awful lot of people who are that sick and go on ventilators are not going to make it so again we come back to our own encounter with death and and we both know from the cancer health program and you know all the retreats we've done there that many people are less afraid of death and they are of sort of intractable suffering of one kind or another and there's my other piece of this is that many people are dying right yeah yeah and so I find myself not only in deep reflection but in deep reflection on a civilization which in the efforts to safeguard us from ourselves has made it almost impossible to get the medicines that one would need in a timely way because this thing moves so fast you know so anyway I'm just I'm sitting with these different questions but it's not the proximity of my death that is cause as my fear it's not knowing whether I would get the medicines that I would need to die and the way I would choose to do long time ago I was asked a meeting who's our friend Marian and we bring together to have you know I it was a small intimate meeting 400 people with the Dalai Lama and he said something to us at lunch which I thought was remarkable he said I sit at the table of Unknowing and I invite you as well to me to join me there and Marian in her wisdom has found that a very always and you're usually we deny that were there and right now we are as as the air as the people back in the 13th century they don't live the same that they dealt with it in quarantine which is the 40 days that sailors ought to stay on ship before they can come on land because they might have to play or whatever wait we're dealing with it without our slaves that's another interesting dimension of this our way of giving the death is that we're going to control it and we're going to put it as far away from us as we can and the reality is living with death and as a person with a significant chronic illness that I've lived with for 65 years there's nothing that can heighten your joy in life more than life mm-hmm and so I'm talking to someone who is afraid it's the opposite side of a coin and going deeper into the fears and what is it that you are afraid of losing and how do you celebrate the fact that you haven't lost it yet you know that that's how these these things have a tendency to flip that the depth of your anxiety is the depth of your valuing of life and if you were to step into that value and make that a part of your daily life that you woke up every morning and said oh I'm here how what and the profoundness of the anxiety is exactly equal to the profoundness of someone's love most people don't know they love yeah so there's so many interesting questions and comments somebody said repeat sitting at the table of what the table of Unknowing was what this whole and I mean uh Kathleen O'Day says it seems to be like moving with cancer the fear is profound and yet we rise every day and for that day choose life and hope and I'm just looking for other thinking about how deeply that commitment of physicians run I think about and pray for dr. Lorna Breen who was so overwhelmed by those couldn't save she took her own life rather than be unable to save anymore the vows we take her powerful and so I am also reminded of how important and powerful the Kol Nidre the renunciation of the vows we cannot keep it it releases us from what is not possible that's kind of lovely but you know in a funny way we go around some conscience that we release ourselves from what is possible yes it's just not the way the world works but we need to take hold of the things we do have fully I think one thing that really comes to me about this is you know one of my friends talks about how often in in healing work we we stay in the wound you know in other words we've done a lot of work both you and I with with wounds and how wounds are not only a wound but an opening and and all of that exploration but there's also sometimes a tendency to stay in the wound and not move forward into a sense of purpose that lies beyond the wound and or it may have been contained in the wound but in but somehow moving into purpose goes beyond it and and I just have a tremendous sense of the opportunities of this period of time that this is the time where fundamental choices will be made not individually only but also collectively about how this messianic movement moment will will turn out and I think I just feeling myself a kind of a deepening of the commitment that yeah here's how I would say it um I want to live this period of time uh the way I would like to live this period it's not I I want to be the person that I would like to be in this time I remember in the cancer health program there was this young mother with two very young children metastatic breast cancer and she was terrified of death and just grieving that her two babies would be left without a mother and in the evening we do on death and dying she was giving voice to this and I listened to her and I said you know I can't change that but ask yourself this how would you like your children to remember you during this period of time would you like them to remember you as grief-stricken and just you know afraid and and all of those things or would you like them to remember you as being so present and so you know loving for them and it's as if a switch shifted you know she just got it in a moment that this that that what she could give her children was this period of time however long it might be and so it seems to me that that all of us who feel anxiety or fear at some level that we have that choice before us that we don't know how long we'll be here particularly those of us who are older but none of us know you know one of the things that's happening with this virus as you well know is that the news about what the virus can do keeps getting worse I mean it you know first of all just seemed a lung condition and then it's inflamed heart it's kidney dysfunction it's all kinds of things that manifests in so many different ways and so that growing body of of knowledge about all the bad things that can do amps up the anxiety and the fear even further so the need to find a way in the face of the media and all the bad news to live as we would choose to live and to go beyond the wound and into a sense of purpose seems very deep to me the thing that I think is so extraordinary about this is that I believe is a natural process that to start from a place of fear and terror and protectiveness and you know let's lock the doors shut the windows right etc she's saying to yourself how do i how do I live and how do I make my life his personal is my signature and what really matters there's a really matter in which I mean how much money in heaven Bay or is something else that I've taken for granted much and this a natural process this is why I think of it as messianic is I don't think anyone some people have done this just a little bit some people have done this radically and remember we're not done yet there's gonna be more this is this is not gonna be over in June this is going to be over when it's over and I don't think any of us will be the same person whether we've made small decisions or a very large decisions we will discover what decisions what life really belongs to us and not living the life of parents meant for us the life our partner wishes us to have the life we thought we're supposed to have but living the life we've been given as a unique individual and you know I mean there's a certain amount of discussion going on this well let's just open up the boundaries and all my other people have died who needs them anyway they're not really contributing members of society right and why should the the benefit of these most vulnerable people beat the are consideration I mean we should sacrifice them and move forward there are all kinds of your various things coming for us but I think in the majority of people's Wantage if that's what they believe most of their life then you aren't thinking about that now for the first time and what they any news Redwing writes really told us love and death are the great gifts that are given to us mostly they are passed on unopened there's not a beautiful line yes people focus on the higher mortality of old people which is very real what they don't focus on trend told me the other day is that something like 60% of the people in hospital with serious illness our younger people and your people yeah and so and and then there are all kinds of things even if you survive that people end up quite compromised the other thing I want to mention because as you know I've been working for years on resilience questions and the thing about this virus is if we were to treat it as a one-off you know that we have this virus and we're all going to mobilize and we'll have a vaccine that will have medicines and we'll get back to normal we're not going back to normal whatever normal was and there's a way in which many of us who work on resilience in other words they're depending on how you count two different two dozen different global stressors that have created a bottleneck for all of biodiversity and human life and only a part of what we now have in the world is life and humanity is going to make it through this bottom line so there's a way in which the virus is a preview of coming attractions it is it is you know the global shocks keep getting closer together and they are more and more intertwined and so maybe we'll get fortunate and have a smooth sail for a while but we can't change the bottleneck that biodiversity is known to face we're only a portion of biodiversity we'll make it through and we know for a fact that since humanity is part of biodiversity only a portion of humanity is going to make it through so coming back to Noah's Ark the question is what are we hoping makes it through that bottleneck you know what are we intending because humanity I suspect humanity will survive in some form but what form you know will we have the awareness that our choice moves us toward a humanity and a biodiversity resurgent on the other side of the bottleneck that says yes we learned the lessons you know we came through this and learn the lessons mm-hmm so those thoughts come to me yeah you know they're saying to each other forever do you live in interesting times while we were here Peter white house Michael and Rachel you're optimistic commitment to life has been and will continue to be a blessing we need to think of the legacy of covet and the stories we will write about it such narratives will be an entry in the encyclopedia of the universe under the legacy of our species no I wonderful saying I put before you this is from Walter I prefer for you the choice between life and death the blessing and the curse therefore truth lights yes yeah and that isn't just choose comfort it's choose being alive and then is the choice that is available to everybody actually and now I know it doesn't matter how educated you are uneducated or you can choose to inhabit your life and the people in it as well yeah Rachel when we were talking last night you you have a quote from lots of Havel that's very lot when I do workshops or even turn this you file it's like that thank you and sometimes I'll just put my hand in there and pull out a piece of paper to see what's there and the piece of paper I pulled out was just isolated quite extraordinary I don't know what the actual title of this is but on my piece my copy of this there is a title and and what you see his name again I can't pronounce and score 20 love Howell Cobb Havel yeah who is he he is a playwright Czech statesman spent years in communist prisons under communism was then released and became the president of the Czech Republic was very renowned yes so I'm gonna read this thing and I'm gonna read twice because usually when you read something that's true it's like throwing cold water and somebody we go and then they haven't taken to do so I wouldn't read it and then I'm gonna stop I'm gonna read again is it cold and the thought for this day either we have Hope within us so we don't it is a dimension of the soul and not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world it is an orientation of the spirit an orientation the heart it transcends the world that is from immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well for a willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success but rather an ability to work for something because it is good not just because it stands a chance to succeed hope is definitely not the same thing is optimism it is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out it is hope above the law which gives us the strength to live and to continually try new things I thought for this day either we have hopefully dinner so we don't it's a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world it is an orientation of the spirit an orientation of the heart it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its origins hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or a willingness to invent invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success but rather the ability to work for something because it is good not just because it stands a chance to succeed hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism it is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out it is hope above all which gives the strength to live and continually try new things so beautiful Rachel I told you last night that I have a kind of a compact version of that which is kind of a condensation that Havel speaks of the distinction between optimism and hope and that optimism is the belief that everything will go right and hope by contrast is a deep orientation of the human soul that can be held in the darkest of time so he's such a great figure our friend and colleague Cynthia Lee wrote a really nice note healing in all dimensions physical emotional and spiritual has the same pattern order disorder reorder the question I have is after society emerges from the lockdown period how can we stay awakened my patients often tell me despairingly the change healing is slow and long I remind them that change is fast this period is a testament to that it's solidifying the change are staying awakened to the change is what takes time and daily conscious practice yeah well as we move into our last eight minutes together is there anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to reflect on a bit well how are we going to end this relationship is that whoever goes out first the other one speaks at their memorial service that's how we ended you know what I really hope we hope that our memorial services when they come are not virtual but they are in person even if there are people there somehow even if we need to maintain distance and who knows Rachel we're both mystics in different ways who knows whether this has been the only time we've been together and whether we're going to be together again I have no doubt this is such a wonderful thing that you're doing with the new school I think it's just it's a survivor for me and so it's so important to people it's just so and I know it's one of many things you do and I am so grateful for the things you do I really and I want to just mention to all 250 people who were on the call we're so grateful to those of you who were able to contribute to keep this going and I encourage you to consider contributing if you haven't we really appreciate a need your support and you know Rachel in closing I want to do something strange I did it at the beginning of the conversation with Francis Weller his talk was called when the bough breaks because was about you know about breaking and so I sang the lullaby ah and I want to sing it and closing yay it looks like this rock-a-bye baby on the treetop when the wind blows the cradle will rock when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby cradle and all you know Rachel I was reflecting what a strange lullaby to sing to a beloved child I wonder where sources are well I looked it up it's it's very ancient it's very old but isn't there the encounter between birth and death between life and death that you're singing to a baby who you love and you want to comfort them and you were saying you know the wind will rock you but when the bough breaks the cradle falls and down will come baby cradle and all what deep wisdom was contained in that ancient olive ah it is the strength and the universality of being human that's what I think we are discovering very slowly and painfully in this time the universality of being hmm well Rachel thank you again for being my friend my companion of almost 40 years and for doing this conversation with us and please thank your cats for their cameo appearances and to all of you tune in next Friday every Friday we're going to have some beautiful being with us and remember this is the time to live the way we choose to live listen some time to do that so thank you all blessings and love [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: NewSchoolCommonweal

Views: 5,346

Rating: 4.8441558 out of 5

Keywords: TNS

Id: izReF5jVzXI

Length: 83min 47sec (5027 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020