Alight

Whether you believe our world is healing or floundering toward disaster depends on which evidence you notice. 

In this episode, hear me discuss the views of the climate experts I recently heard advocating for perspectives of hopelessness.

This episode helps you consider whether you want to wilt or stand tall in the face of all that’s occurring in our world. Tune in to hear the two options, then explore suggestions of how you can make the choice you feel is wisest and most helpful.

You'll then hear why I think it's crucial right now to distinguish between 20th c. sustainability viewpoints that are now outmoded and  21st. c. regenerative viewpoints that are deeper, more inclusive, and have the potential to transform life on this planet into tremendous flourishing.

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In this episode, hear inspiring 'good news' stories from around the world and how courage is contagious in the best way.

Hear whose courage has lit my path.

Then join me in reflecting on whose courage influences you, and how you want your acts of courage and regeneration to spread beneficially to others as we care for one another and our planet.

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Paul Moss is co-founder and executive director of The Plant Initiative https://plantinitiative.org  a nonprofit organization started in 2020 that works collaboratively with others to advance respectful treatment of plants. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota in the department of Geography, Environment and Society, where he is focusing on the relationship between people and plants. He has an undergraduate degree in biology, and masters' degrees in agronomy and marketing.

Paul speaks about: 

• His life-long connection with plants and respect for their sophistication.
• Plants as intelligent, responsive, and sentient beings, not objects, and the ethical issues these discoveries raise for human treatment of plants.
• The need for more people and organizations to advocate for the respectful treatment of plants, including in agriculture and the human diet.
• When we harm plants we harm ourselves, and when we help them, we help ourselves.
• How new scientific discoveries are leading us beyond our tendency to objectify and devalue plants, and books and talks to explore if you want to know more.
• Intuitive communication with plants.
• How cultural assumptions are way behind our actual scientific and intuitive insights about plants’ complexity and intelligence.
• Practical ways we can treat plants with respect, care, reciprocity, and gratitude and work toward creating a “worldwide democracy of all beings.”

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In this sequel to Episode 44, Regenerative Collaboration in Science & Spirituality, I talk about how we can see the story of Regenerative Collaboration gaining strength in today’s world. 

Tune in to:

Consider 4 Principles of Regenerative Collaboration.

Learn 3 ways to participate: there are many things you can do if you want to help humanity move more into Regenerative Collaboration.

Hear how you can help others see that living in collaboration with other people and with the natural world brings flourishing, not loss.

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• What does it mean to you to contribute to regeneration for people and planet?
• Are you contributing in the ways you want to?
• And are you thriving at the level you desire?
• How can you translate what our podcast speakers say into your own life so that you and Earth both benefit?

In this episode, I talk about the importance of letting go of the blocks that prevent us from making the contributions we desire to make in the world. I share some of what I’ve learned about how resolving trauma and claiming your authenticity affect your readiness to offer your talents or compassion to the world.

This matters because your individual transformations impact planetary healing.

Your transition beyond what’s blocking you can be a collaboration with global transformations occurring for humanity and the natural world.

Your healing or upleveling is part of humanity’s healing and upleveling.

I also talk about the new Guide to Healing: Resources for Self-Empowerment now available on the Humans & Earth website.

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Do you feel discouraged about our future on Earth but want to feel optimistic?

Listen to hear good news about people around the world who are supporting one another and restoring Earth. Experience how your outlook changes when you're informed about signs of well-being and regeneration.

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Reverend Rhetta Morgan is an interfaith minister, facilitator, artist and healer.  Her work encompasses the intersections of spirituality, creativity and activism, all rooted in an intention to work and live in a more just world. She currently facilitates Anti-Bias work for the Anti-Defamation League, leads The Ecclesia Fortify Circle, a group that supports activists to develop spiritual practices, and recently returned from South Africa working as facilitator and healer with Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity. Find her at www.reverendrhetta.com 

If you want to be in service to love on this planet at this time, what can that look like? 

In this interview, Rhetta Morgan discusses how to do  the inner work needed so you can face domination in a potent way:

In this tough time in our culture, it’s easy to lose touch with our vision for what we desire instead. Touching on awe can be regenerative for those who are feeling exhausted. “There is a way in which we can infuse the most difficult circumstances with a sense of power, awe, and sacredness.”

We can face exactly where we are and how we feel, yet also take an empowered, compassionate, and visionary stance. This involves working with all of our identities, from victim to awe-maker, change-maker, and community nurturer.

Wholeness and oneness are the lenses she finds most powerful: “It’s not about winning. The ‘right side’ is the ‘whole side,’ as healthy as we can get it.”

It's time to believe in the legitimacy of your sense of mission or calling. “You’ve got to have a declaration: I am here to support this time! I am here to do what I can in this time.” Our ancestors and the planet require it. We must ask, “Who do I need to become so that I can answer that heart call?”

“I like to imagine the electromagnetic field of Earth claiming me so that as I move, I move in service to her.”

“I like to live as if it is possible for justice to be the way of the world…I am in the ‘yes’ of what is possible…We are called to stand before the ways culture works now and offer a different way.”

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Deborah Eden Tull is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk  and has been living in sustainable communities for over 25 years. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is the author of Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown and other books. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

 If you’re an activist or a spiritual person, do you need ‘endarkenment’ as much as ‘enlightenment’? Hear Eden Tull explain in this interview why her answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

In this conversation, Eden and I discuss:

• Why our ‘outer work’ of activism or contribution needs to be supported by ‘inner work’ that feeds compassion, resilience, and purpose. We are wildly creative beings who are meant to experience darkness “as the field of absolute rest and regeneration” that inspires our creativity.
• A ‘dark time’ can be a personal experience or an experience a people or culture are going through. It can be ‘dark’ as in ‘unpleasant,’ or ‘dark’ as in ‘mysterious, uncertain or visionary.’
• It’s counter-cultural to embrace darkness. But darkness includes beautiful halves of our reality such as the night, sleep, rest, interiority, sadness, wisdom, crisis, and fertile soil. 
• Ignoring darkness within and without can be a mistake because suppressing or ignoring our grief or horror at the world’s suffering prevents us from acting in healing ways.
• Darkness can be a fertile space where we listen and discover creative solutions that are based in fierce compassion. “It’s in metabolizing our grief that we’re freed up to act in more constructive and creative ways.”
• How her book offers a structure for going into ‘dark’ spaces—whether meditation, open inquiry, or grief for a planet in crisis—and letting them be fertile instead of without life. Endarkenment can be a process of transmuting pain into vision and vitality.
• “We need to wake up more fully to our partnership with nature”—not by seeing ourselves as separate, but “by recognizing our innate oneness with the more than human world and Gaia consciousness…when we do this, we receive guidance and information.” 

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Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and  ecological challenges, revealing a regenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today.  Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy, peaceful, and equitable world for all. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, orientation, and more to create conditions for mutual learning and leadership development.  She is the author of Nature, Culture, & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, and of Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart.

Hear Nina discuss:

• “We are in a paradigm shift from an ‘I’ culture to a ‘we’ culture.” “We are collectively co-creating a new world.”
• “The Earth needs us all to be leaders now.” And hierarchical models of leadership won’t provide the restoration that is needed.
• Her experience of redefining leadership as non-hierarchical and collaborative so that it became a role she could accept. What humans and Earth need is a “full-spectrum leadership” that departs from patriarchal values and instead values both feminine and masculine strengths and contributions. This leadership honors bodily and emotional wisdom as much as rational thought.
• We need to recognize that vital forms of leadership include parenting, art-making, teaching…”There are probably as many expressions of leadership as we are human beings.”
• “The most inspiring leaders I know are those that can show up with vulnerability and not knowing, turn to each other for help, and exercise what I call relational intelligence. They’re helping create a culture where transformation is possible.” We all become leaders by supporting these skills in ourselves and others.
• Our whole culture is up for review and renewal. We need to nurture this within models of regeneration, not depletion of self, others, and our planet. “It’s not really our power we’re reclaiming, it’s actually the power of life’s energy coming through us.”

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Hear David Nicol, Ph.D. eloquently describe the big picture of humanity's long journey of relationship with Earth and how we're now ready to create dynamic transformation to benefit all life.

David discusses how those of us alive today are undergoing the personal and collective initiation of releasing outmoded patterns of hierarchy and stepping into co-creating new ways of collaborating with one another and our planet. The inner soulful journey many are experiencing is mirrored by the social, political, and environmental transformations we are endeavoring to co-create.

He notes how this is an egalitarian, inclusive process of transformation that welcomes each person's or being's sovereignty, individuality, and unique insights and abilities. He also explains how he sees a consciousness of healing and peace growing world-wide.

This conversation originally aired on the NEO Network in 2022.

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